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Wren imagines herself on the StairMaster at the gym, taking one even step after the other while never getting any higher. Brief tableau.
I can’t look at everything hard enough,
With electroreception, Lewis hoped to sense her, know her, and love her even thousands of miles away in the ocean. Nothing he read indicated that electroception extended further than a couple yards. But maybe, he thought, maybe if I practiced, I would never really have to say goodbye. When Lewis finally came to bed, he took sleeping Wren’s hand in his and closed his eyes, seeing if he could sense her electrical field. “What… What are you doing?” she asked groggily. “Just seeing what it’s like to love you when I can’t see you.”
I’ve had it wrong all along. If magic exists in a real way, it is not here to dazzle us with all that is unreal to the naked eye. What if magic is just mislabeled peace? A peace that says suffering doesn’t have a purpose or reason. A peace that says meaning is the medicine. A peace that says I don’t need to know how or why. But she’ll be all right. Wren will be okay.
She was looking forward to creating a quieter identity with fewer people interested in her success. She was also relieved; in college, away from home, she could finally get some rest.
When she was a girl, the pool distilled her identity to swimmer. Now that she was a woman, would pregnancy reduce her entire identity to mother? What a tragedy it is, being a woman, she thought with relief after another negative pregnancy test. I would rather be a million other things.
All the hours he spent theorizing about magic seemed so naive now. The main ingredient in transformation was not magic. It was pain.
“And how would I remind you?” “Maybe just tell me your name, and ask me to repeat it back. Once I hear myself say it, I’m sure I will remember.” “My name is Wren. Will you say my name? Like that?” “Exactly. Like that.”
An incessant desire for fish became louder than all the things Lewis treasured: the heartbeat of language, the idea of living in a tree, the universal within the poetic, and his soft way of loving her. Without near-constant feeding, Lewis became one with an irascible, symphonic rage. And this was the best of it.
“Maybe we need to know these things young, because maybe we’re the matter being rearranged. Maybe it’s us.” “You and me?” “I hope.”
Feelings fled under pressure; feelings did not light the darkness. What remained strong in the deep, the hard times, was love as an effort, a doing, a conscious act of will. Soulmates, like her and Lewis, were not theoretical and found. They were tangible, built.
Are we all just actors, performing some unbound art form for God, the audience of space? I wish I could have seen then what I know now. All along, I had the starring role.
He was an aimless kite in search of a string to ground him to the world, but instead, he’d found Wren, a great, strong wind who supported his exploration of the sky.
“You make everything better than when you found it, especially me. Thank you for a wonderful marriage. I would change nothing, not for anything. And you deserve much more than the idea of me. It would stifle your possibility. When Someone Else comes your way, you have my blessing, my absolute blessing, to begin again. You will be a wonderful mother and wife. … You are Wren, the woman of my daydreams. Wren, the time of my life.”
There is never a right time to say goodbye. Then, for the last time, Lewis lifted his head and kissed her mouth: flower-petal lips to sharp teeth. “I love you,” he said, and mouthed, Goodbye.
No one really mentions the sky at the Grand Canyon, but the more she studied the situation, the more she thought the upward realm might really be the main event. The canyons would not be impressive if they weren’t balanced by something infinitely vast.
Her identity was crystallized to these people, and once she allowed herself to become solid to other human beings, she would be seen. After being seen, Wren risked being known, and being known came with the risk of loss. Even this small interaction cost her too much.
I’m sorry I fell short. It should have been me, not you. Not you, who had so much to give the world.
Yet the symphony had been playing faintly all along, a barely discernible underscore amid the noise of her going, going, long-term-goaling, going, aiming, going, sweating, going, trying, going, failing, going, striving, going, working, going, going, hiding, going, going, moving, going, going, excelling, perfecting, succeeding, winning, compartmentalizing, going, going, going, going, going. But now the call toward life was loud, swelling, and triumphant— like a brass section with one hundred instruments, a musical theater ballad from a woman born to sing it, or a rock band full of young and
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The first wonderful thing about Wren was that, except for her dark chocolate eyes, she looked just like her mother.
leaving behind a cloud of gravel dust that only time and gravity could settle.
Marcos drew an outline of a person who was generous, wise, and kind, and Angela’s longing animated his image with life and color. This two-dimensional Marcos, the one she imagined, was never real.
Please, Angela. Just look at me. Don’t you see who I am? I love reptiles. I love them all.
It is the year they climb over Do Not Trespass signs and run through fields of sunflowers triple Wren’s height, look up to their drooping, dappled heads, and see not only the seeding part of the plant but also the many faces of a benevolent, adjusting God.
For example, the Big and Little Dippers were two kites flying next to each other. Angela and Wren pretended they held the kite strings, keeping the taut universe floating.
Her mother, who could grow a garden in an eggshell. Her mother, the kindest person she would ever know. Her mother, her mother, her mother, her mother, her mother. Her mother, an animal, whose eyes were filled with blood.
Lewis watched her flutter away, recalling the last time a woman left him alone in the ocean. Both times he was passive. Both times he felt euphoric and then promptly forlorn.
Exiled from the plane of conversation and things and doing and going and seeking and becoming, Lewis simply existed.
And without thoughts and memories, what was the man called Lewis Woodard? Nothing. But even nothing was something.
Lewis discovered a layer of sadness even deeper than his previous depression: a bleak, gorgeous fog so quiet and still it resembled peace.
Was it magic that saved my life? Lewis wondered as he devoured a sea lion with no remorse. Or was my suffering just an ordinary dip, a developmental phase that was always meant to pass with time?
his wife, his life who at times seemed like a character in a wonderful book, a static entity whose movements, while profound, would always be limited to a finite story.
I used to act write teach I wanted to be a Giant. But maybe I should have just been me.
Each day, Wren found herself saying internally that she couldn’t imagine a life without him, and yet here she was, living it.
It seemed nothing, not even the birds, was meant to stay beside her very long. It seemed she was just the sort of person who repelled lasting connection. It seemed loving someone was not enough to keep them still beside her.
Meanwhile, a chain of genetic material from each of the people Wren most loved swirled within the small being Wren would love most of all.
Joy is a little girl who has no qualms about taking the space she needs with her voice, physicality, and huge emotions. Wren realizes she has much to learn from her.
Late summer, Joy captures huge grasshoppers in her cupped palms, not to torture or dissect them but to briefly love them, as a friend, and set them free with a whisper, Fly home now. Fly home!
“Lewis, he would have loved— Lewis would love— all of this.”
Instead, she considers how life is like a spiraling trail up a mountain. Each circling lap represents a learning cycle, the same lesson at a slightly higher elevation. Wren realizes she likes to rest as much as she likes to climb. She begins to enjoy the view.
This love expands until it fills the entire room, house, neighborhood, city, nation, planet, and the universe, beyond. Afterward, Wren realizes she herself is the mountain she’s been climbing all along.
With her mother’s strength behind her, Joy glimpses her power, gliding through the water into an undiscovered frontier, at the helm of a whole wide world. Joy, with her ancestors residing within her like nesting dolls, is a brave, flaming heart, born to face the wound of the world, and one day she will be one among the wave to heal it.
The small hand who made her selfless; who taught her there were no guarantees in love; who showed her for every sleepless night, supermarket tantrum, and smear of mud on the carpet, there are a thousand other things:
The ocean cannot be contained; neither can love; neither can Joy. Wren loosens her grasp. It is so hard to let go.
