These Granite Islands: A Novel

Chapter 3

C HAP T E R T H R E E LMay, [,obel How.,d turned thirty-,ix yea" old. She woke early to find the sun not yet risen and the house perfectly quiet. She lay motionless next to her husband, the deep silence revealing a jewel within her cache of memory. She had only to reach up and wrap her hands around the glad weight of it. Had it been there all this time? She'd been very young, only four or five, and had just been bounced from the back of a careening toboggan full of schoolchildren. Lying on her back on a slope of blue snow in bitter twilight, she squinted through her pain at the dry crystals pirouetting in the dissolving glint of day. The toboggan slid out of sight and downward over a hori- - 3 0 - These Granite Islands zon that could have been the end of the earth. The air had been knocked from her small chest, and the pain tore as she waited for breath to return. She knew instinctively not to move, and after a moment found that when she did stay still, the sting lessened. As the pain slowly ebbed, Isobel marveled at the stunning silence. She was suddenly aware of herself from all angles, feeling every fiber of her body, the smallness of her limbs, the soft shell of her skin, the solidity and bloodpumping wonder of it. The perfection. If she had been left, forgotten there, surely she would have been content to lie on her snowy bed for the night. Perhaps forever. Unmoving, with no breath to cloud her view, she took in the entire curve of a sky streaked with lavender and indigo shouldering in from the east. She was buoyed between snow and sky, weightless, held up by an earth that was turning for her and with her. She was a part of all that surrounded her, yet at the same time distinct. Acute. For an indelible moment she knew a plain serenity. After what had seemed like an hour - but could only have been a moment or two - the squealing of rubbersoled snow boots approached, and the distant shout, "There she is!" came to her as if through a sheet of ice. The earth throbbed beneath her, and a metal boot buckle jangled near her temple. The shadow of a figure bent low to obscure her vista. Gritty snow kicked up from a boot sprayed her cheek, and she shook her head, blinking her way back to the world. The sky, the air, the snow, and her breath - back now and pouring freely from her nostrils like dragon's steam were reduced to molecules along with the brief seconds of the already falling-away moment. Time compressed itself into a crystalline trinket, lodging on the highest shelf of Isabel's memory. A treasure. Kept there for her. -JI- Sarah Stonich As she lay next to Victor, her thoughts shifted to her own children, and she wondered if they experienced such instances, if they had stored similar moments of their own. It occurred to her that if they did, they would have no language to tell her, as she had possessed no language at age five to describe her fleeting but unforgettable sensation of awe and belonging. Of her three children, she supposed Thomas would be the one, with his guileless face and his hunger for awe, so like Victor in his belief that all things were for him. Thomas was an open well, his mouth always wide with laughter, pulling in the affections of all, even dogs and strangers. Yes, certainly Thomas. Louisa tentatively considered everything in her path, even gifts. Henry was somewhere else altogether, his serious mind obscured by some vapor floating just above the rest of the family. Isobel shook her head in wonderment for the hundredth time over the vast differences among her children. She swung her feet to the floor, padded to the window, and listened, waiting for some noise from outside to drift in and breach this new silence. What would it be this time? A delivery van, the wind, distant trains, first birds of the day? She looked out over the trees of the angled yard. Just beyond the vegetable garden and the narrow creek was a dense barrier of woods. Past the woods, several alleys of cheap houses sat apart, neatly sequestered from the rest...