"Are You What I Think You are...?"
Feb. 22nd, 2007 06:26 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
psalm_onethirtyoneAnna Maria, take three. Manon, Tom? Suggestions?
Anna Maria
"Anna Maria, you're home now. Smile for me, sweetie."
It's hard to smile. She's lonely. This bright multicoloured house, these happy people, are so different from the green place she has lived the last three years. Her mother tickles her and spreads a new dress out on the bed, one with silver drops along the collar that remind her of spilled milk in the morning, when the moon is the only light still dancing in the sky, and even the sun hasn't yet awoken.
It's a beautiful dress. She hasn't had anything beautiful in a long, long time. (Mordecai could not afford anything beautiful, and even if he had been able, they were so far from all people that there was no one from whom they could have bought things. For three years she only wore brown coarse cloth.)
She walks to the windows and looks out at the river. (There was a river where they lived, a long one that stretched off into the forest and out of sight. Along it things grew, silvery trees and brambly brush, little patches of mushrooms, little scatterings of flowers. Mordecai used to take her walking by the river.
He had a peculiar smile, warm as rabbit soup, soft as milkweed. She had trusted his smile. It meant that things were good. It meant that everything was right.)
The river outside her window goes out of sight, too. It's busy, full of boats of all shapes, crossed by bridges. The water is blue and rich, like an oil painting. Her mother comes up behind her and puts a hand on her shoulder, says, 'Isn't it like you remember? I used to stand here and wonder where you were. I used to pray that you were all right.'
(Mordecai prayed, too. He told her that his mother was Jewish, his father was Catholic. He said that when he prayed it was to the same God. He said that God is always that same; the difference is in what people call Him. 'Shiva or Jesus or the Great Spirit', he said, 'they're all God. We just worship Him in different ways and give him different names, because we different. We don't name the pieces of the world around us the same things, so why would we all name God the same thing?' Mordecai had Stars of David painted on the walls of his house, and Christus Rego, and many, many other symbols in different colours and shapes. 'They all mean God', he said. 'I like to be somewhere that speaks of God.'
He wore a prayer sash and carried a rosary, a Turkish eye, a Thor's hammer, rounded stones that he said were earth prayers. 'I am keeping my pockets holy', he said.
She asked him for something of her own to keep with her, and he gave her a string of prayer beads, green and gold and shining. She tied them around her wrist and never took them off. Mordecai smiled at that. In the dark of the evening, as they sat by the fire and he read from the Koran, she rubbed them and held them and thought of home--sometimes she wanted to be there, sometimes she wanted him to be there with her, and often she was content where she was.)
"Anna Maria, you're home now. Come and have breakfast with us. Waffles."
(They almost always had eggs. There were birds in the forest, and Mordecai always knew where the nests were. She doesn't try to tell her parents. She pours maple syrup on her waffles and is quiet. Maybe, her mother thinks, she cannot fit back into normal life as well as we hoped. Maybe she should see a therapist or a psychiatrist. Of course she should. We thought that it would be easy for her to come back to her family, but all those years with Him couldn't have had any other result. Maybe He did something to her that she didn't tell us. I'll make a phone call after breakfast, her mother thinks. Her mother always thinks of That Man in capitals.)
She walks down the sun-warmed street after breakfast, wearing the beautiful dress from her mother. her mother remembers after all this time how much she likes pretty, shining things. Anna Maria has almost forgotten it, herself. The skirts of the dress swirl around her ankles like long grass, but silkier, brushing and blowing.
The more she tries to let the blank, silent summer mute it until she can't feel it, the more she imagines Mordecai lifting her with his hands at her waist and twirling her in the sun. She imagines them dancing through the house to the sound of waltzes on his old LPs. She imagines them spilling out the door like light through a window, and standing on the doorstep looking out at the world. Look what God gave us to-day, Mordecai would say.
Then he would smile.
She wanders down to the playground and sits on a swing. All the children are in school. When they grow up, they go to college and get jobs. When they are grown up, they work. Finally they fade like flowers. Anna Maria is grown up, a grown up girl swinging by herself at the playground, not ready to go back to work, not ready to face the interviews and the resumes and the sense of drive and push that isn't there any more. All her friends have moved on after three years. They have lives that don't need Anna Maria in them. Who would call that wrong? Her mother was the only person who didn't believe she was dead. And now it's hard to reconnect, hard to touch, hard to make a phone call or take a hand, after three years and jobs and marriages and periods of mourning that ended and made everything seem so final.
(Sometimes she wonders how everything happened as quickly as it did. It took so long for her to be happy, and then she was happy for so long, and now as overnight as the first frost on the grass she is home.
It makes her insides dull. She should be happy, and part of her is happy. The rest is lonely and tired, still with weariness.)
The doctor who examined her when she first came home explained to her mother that she was perfectly healthy, that no doctor would suppose she had been living in captivity for the last three years. He said that she showed no signs of mental trauma. He said that she was perhaps even ready to enter again into normal society after a very short period of recovery.
She had smiled for the doctor, and answered his questions sometimes even truthfully. No one except the police pressed her hard. She had just come back to her loving family after years of what other people filled in with their heads; maybe atrocities unimaginable, maybe isolation and emotional deprivation. It wouldn't be right to ask too many questions, to expect too many answers. 'Be gentle with her', the doctor told her mother. 'Be gentle with her. Let her recover. Help her where she needs it, and if she seems too distant or depressed contact a psychiatric professional. But let her recover at her own pace, and please be gentle. It can only help.'
It does help. Anna Maria pushes the ground with her toes until her swing begins to sway, and then to glide, back and forth, high into the air like a kind of dance. No questions means no explanations, no answers. It keeps her safe.
"Anna Maria, you're home now," she whispers, swinging high towards the sun, towards the tops of the tress, towards weightlessness and a chance at flying. "Why don't you come down?"
(Because the first time she saw Mordecai, he was breaking out of prison. She only remembers the whirl and rush and noise of that first time, the people on the television narrating what it all meant. A fugitive, they said. A dangerous man, they said. 'He has escaped after twelve years in prison and he is doing a life sentence for murder and he has gone into hiding. Police are adamant that he will be found as soon as possible and returned to prison.' But I'm not part of that, Anna Maria thought. And the next day she went to the city to buy a new dress.
She was standing in front of a window looking at something beautiful when Mordecai took her shoulders gently. I'm sorry, he said. 'Please stand in front of me. They won't shoot you.' There was shouting and a sudden gunshot which might have hit her, but Mordecai moved her out of the way too quickly. He had taken her hostage. People don't ask her about it, but Anna Maria is not sure what she would say if they did. It didn't feel like hostage. It just felt strange and stilted, jerked, as though something smooth had been happening and then caught, like a record repeating the same thing over and over.)
(The rest of it is bits and pieces. She remembers travelling, so fast that she learned very little. Finally she remembers their finding the house where they lived those three years. Almost three years. Part of it was the travelling.
Finally she remembers that they began to talk.
Mordecai was always gentle of her, but he was even more gentle once he was no longer frightened and running. One night while they were sitting by the stove, she asked him where they were.
'My brother built it a long time ago,' he said. 'He built it for me so I could live here alone when I left prison.'
'Who did you kill?' asked Anna Maria.
'A man. I didn't do it in self-defence, and I had no good reason to kill him. All I know now is that it was evil to kill him, and I did not know that then.'
'Why did you--?'
'Because his position different from mine. Because he made me angry.' He smiled slightly at her, and it was a smile that was old and quiet. 'That's a terrible reason to hurt anyone. And it's been twelve years, and all I've done is been thinking. My brother made me this prayer shawl,' he showed her, 'and this rosary. God gets called lots of different names that all mean God, and killing gets lots of different excuses that are all there to hide something that's really either just stupid or evil. I realised that about God about the same time I realised I did an evil thing.'
'Then why did you break out of prison?'
'I used to have a house like this one out in the woods, and that's where I like it. I hate big crowds of people and things. There's too much noise and too much going on. And I would've stayed in prison as long as I was supposed to, because I know I deserve to be cut off from all people if I am evil towards any one of them, but I couldn't stand all the noise, and hearing the people around me being cruel or evil all day and all night. It wasn't just other prisoners. Some of the prisoners were like me, and so were some of the personnel, but some of them were just as evil as murderers. And I was afraid.' Mordecai's eyes seemed almost like an apology. 'I told my brother secretly to help me, and he did.'
Anna Maria nodded and looked around the house. 'So you won't hurt me.'
'No.')
And nobody would understand--would they? What it's like to be so far from Mordecai, not to know where he is. To feel sorry for him, to hope he always hides in good places, always runs further away from prison and the crowds. Always to pray for him to be safe and secret, and to have learned true things from a murderer. To have learned about good and grace and keeping from evil, to have learned about trust and kindness and love, to have learned about acceptance and respect from a murderer.
The only thing that makes me happy, Anna Maria thinks, is that he isn't caught yet. He's still somewhere. That's the happy ending.
And she walks home from the playground for lunch, because the time has already passed, just her and the swing and thinking have passed four long hours, and it's time to go home.
"Anna Maria, you're home now. Thank goodness, I thought we might have to look for you. We're having ham sandwiches."
(He mother is always frightened when she doesn't know where Anna Maria is. I shouldn't be, she thinks. I should trust her. My stomach shouldn't always twist. But I lost her for so long, and I always am afraid that when she's out of sight she won't come back again. No girl gets kidnapped twice. She's safe her. I shouldn't be always afraid.
But they haven't caught Him yet...)
(Mordecai kept them in food by hunting rabbits and squirrels, sometimes birds. Once a month his brother came with a carload of food and groceries, things they couldn't get out of the woods. He always looked askance at Anna Maria. He always asked Mordecai when he would take her home.
'I don't know,' said Mordecai. 'We're all right'.
'This isn't what I got you out of prison for. I didn't mean for you to keep this girl from her family for all this time. I didn't think you'd take a hostage at all.'
'They were shooting at me.'
'You should have let her go as soon as you got away.'
'I was frightened,' Mordecai said. 'It's no excuse. I know that, and I'm not trying to make one. It's only the explanation.'
'But you're safe now. Why's she still here?'
Anna Maria would listen, sometimes; part of the time she'd be running through the woods with vines in her hair. She had never felt freer.
Sometimes she thought she knew why Mordecai had never let her go. She had never asked to go, and the memory of home almost seemed to fade, to flow in and out of her consciousness like the river sometimes taking one path and sometimes another. It wasn't because she didn't love her home, or her family. It was just that it seemed so distant then. It wasn't anything Mordecai did or said. It was just that as they drove away from that city store window where she'd looked at the dress a part of that morning's life seemed to come away, like a lizard leaving its tail behind in the beak of a predator.
Then later the answer was simply because Mordecai loved her, and was afraid to let her go.)
Ham sandwiches remind her of something far away and muted, but good. The feeling of food in her stomach is good. Her mother and father exchange looks across the table, in turns loving, concerned, quiet, unsure.
Afterwards her father goes back to mind the store, and her mother tries to engage her in conversation. She answers questions distractedly for a while, and then goes away upstairs to sit on her bed and look out the window again. (Mordecai didn't have a second storey. It was just four rooms: the kitchen, the bathroom, two bedrooms. The bedrooms were filled with all kinds of books, but mostly art books full of paintings by dead artists. Some she naturally knew, like Monet and Titian, and some were unfamiliar to her, like Goya and Stubbins. In the evenings they would sometimes read through them together, looking at the pictures, and Mordecai would tell her that he had seen some of them and describe the museums and houses they'd been in. He was four years older than she was, thirty-five to her thirty-one then, but he'd been all over the world when he was a teenager.
'So at least you got to see a lot of things before--'
'That's true.' He smiled at her, his warm smile. 'Jacob and I went everywhere you can think of. Our parents died when I was just a little boy, and Jacob was afraid we'd be separated by foster parents, so he ran away with me. He worked, and I helped, and we went everywhere.'
Anna Maria tried to imagine what everywhere was like. She'd never been anywhere, never even gone out of the state. Except now, she suddenly realised.
'Where are we now?' she asked.
'I'm not sure,' he said, laughing.
'Are we out of state?'
'We're in North Dakota. We're about fifty miles from Jacob.'
'I've never been outside New York.'
'There's a lot to see in New York,' said Mordecai.
'I think it's more beautiful here. All the trees, and the river. I like living here.'
'Really? Are you happy here?'
For a moment, she really thought about it. Here--they were in her bedroom, lying on her mattress to read the book--far away from everything, surrounded by woods, watching the river flow out of sight. Only Mordecai, only Anna Maria, sometimes Jacob, hundreds of books.
'Yes,' she said. 'I'm happy.)
She sits by the window, watches the boats begin to travel, the water stir, the cars move across the bridges. Hears the faraway shouts, the noise of the motors and the boats churning through the water. Her mother calls up the stairs that the afternoon mail just came, and there's a letter for Anna Maria. She comes downstairs and takes it into the living room to read. There's no return address.
Anna Maria, it says, it's me. I've been praying for you. I pray you're well, that no one has accidentally hurt you with words or otherwise. I'm trying to be glad you're home, but I miss you so much. But God knows I should never have kept you so long. I pray you're well.
I'm all right. I'm afraid to tell you where I am. Maybe someone who shouldn't will read this letter, like in a detective story, and track me down with it. The postmark is as close as I can get you. I'm so sorry for leaving you. That should have been the first thing I said. I wanted to go back. Jacob wouldn't let me. I know he was afraid. Don't blame him. If you are angry, be angry with me. I shouldn't have left you. I pray they didn't ask you too many questions or do anything to hurt or scare you. I know they asked you where I am. I pray it didn't last too long. You should be safe. You're home now, Anna Maria.
I love you. I love you.
The postmark is from a town in Wyoming. I want to go to Wyoming, she thinks. Why is New York so far from Wyoming?
Her mother comes in to open the curtains. 'Was it a friend?' she asks.
'Yes,' says Anna Maria, softly. 'It was a friend.'
(When the police found her, she was making herself toast. Jacob had brought them a toaster the month before, and it was so nice to have toast again, toast crispy but also soft with butter. Mordecai was out hunting for a rabbit for supper. Jacob was due again that day, and sometimes he brought them meat, but he was all Jewish, instead of all everything, like Mordecai, and he didn't like putting meat in with the milk. 'I don't know why,' he said. 'It just feels funny. I know you two don't care. I don't even like having them in the same house together, let alone the same car. Besides, I'm a vegetarian, and I shouldn't enable you.' Mordecai always laughed.
So she was making toast, and then police knocked on the door. She thought it was Jacob, and went to open it, and that was when everything changed. Of course they recognised her. She was still on missing posters, her mother told her. And Mordecai was still wanted. They only found Anna Maria, though, and took her away with them.
As soon as she could, she called Jacob from a pay phone in a panic. He told her that he couldn't say much over the phone, but that someone had found out about Mordecai and called the police. He'd driven over and found Mordecai in the woods and convinced him that Anna Maria was all right by herself. They drove to Jacob's house, and Mordecai hid in the storm shelter dug deep into the ground in the barn, its door covered over with hay, until the police had finished questioning him. He hid there for a week, and then Jacob got him out of the state.
'Where?' asked Anna Maria.
'I can't tell you,' Jacob said. 'I can't tell you whether he'll contact you. And please don't call me. The police are still dropping in on me at random, and they keep questioning me. They're probably doing that to you, too, so you should know. They were suspicious of me when he escaped in New York, and now that I'm in such close proximity to your house, they're even more suspicious. I need you to leave me alone.'
'Okay', she whispered.)
"Anna Maria, you're home now." Her mother opens the curtains wide and light streams through. "Is there anything you want to do?"
'That's okay,' says Anna Maria, her letter folded up in her pocket.
The police don't question her as much now as they did at the beginning of the month, when she was always being asked to try to remember. Remember, they'd say. 'Did he ever say anything that might have given you a clue to his whereabouts now?' She always says she didn't know, because it was true. But sometimes they still ask.
There's a long time between after lunch and time to go to bed, so she goes into the television room and turns on the TV, flipping through the coloured blurs of channels, not sure whether she wants to take her mind off things or keep thinking. Maybe something will be so interesting she won't have to choose.
('Why did you kill him?'
Mordecai stopped in taking the bread down off the shelf. 'What?'
'Why would you kill somebody?' Anna Maria took out the jar of peanut butter and Mordecai handed her the bread. She began to spread peanut butter on it. Mordecai loved peanut butter. She folded the sandwich and handed it to him, touching his fingers as she did so. Warm hands, gentle hands, and a smile of thanks.
'I was robbing his house,' said Mordecai.
Anna Maria nodded.
'I misjudged things,' he continued. 'He was awake, and he caught me downstairs taking things that looked valuable and going through drawers. I said he was in a position different from mine: he was powerful and in control, and he was ready to call the police. I didn't know what would happen to me, or to Jacob--I was twenty-two, and old enough to know, but because of the way we lived, I don't think I understood. I think I was too afraid. I didn't wait, just took something near to me and hit him until I was sure he was dead, and then I tried to run. I wasn't hard to catch. I hadn't done it in self-defence; I'd done it while stealing from him. And I wasn't repentant, then. I was angry. I was angry because I'd killed him and I was still going to be separated from Jacob, and I did nothing to help my case.'
'So it was like when you took me. You did it because you were scared.'
'Yes.'
'I'm sorry.'
Mordecai shook his head. 'No. I'm sorry. I'm the one who took you away from your family.'
Sandwich in hand, she got up and went to the window, pressing her nose against the glass. 'This place is more beautiful than home.')
Something on the TV catches her eye, and she pauses for a moment, watching. It's an old soap opera she used to love. She hasn't watched it in so long--maybe her favourite characters are all dead, or different, or--but things seem mostly the same. She watches the episode to the end, and then goes back to flipping.
From the corner of her eye she can still see the banner hanging from the wall. It's a big one painted with the words, "Welcome Home, Anna Maria," from the party her parents had. Lots of the neighbourhood came. For a few hours, she almost seemed like a celebrity. Why? Why did people who didn't even know her well want to see this? All the folks she used to wave at when she drove to the post office. All the people from the workplace she hadn't been to in years. Even the mayor welcomed her back. Why? She hadn't done anything. She'd been taken away from a place that made her happy. That wasn't worth celebrating. Just wasn't.
She settles deeper into the couch and pulls the throw rug over her body. Maybe she can trap in warmth she doesn't need. It's summer, late summer. It isn't cold outside. Why isn't she happy to be home? Her parents are good parents, her friends were good, her job was good. Why hadn't she been happy before?
('Why weren't you happy before?'
'What?' She paused in reaching for the milk. She always drank milk out of the container. Mordecai would murmur something about spitback and lower his eyes so he couldn't see.
'You always tell me you're happy here. But you shouldn't be, should you? You're a kidnapped woman.'
'It doesn't feel that way.' She drank, and then put the carton back in the refrigerator. 'I just wasn't happy. It doesn't matter. It's just that everything here is so different from everything at home. I get enough sleep, and I don't worry about what I'm going to do. I don't stay up thinking I'll be doing the same thing that doesn't make me happy for the rest of my life. I used to wish that I'd get in a car accident and go into a coma, just so I wouldn't have to think about what was going to come next. This is like that, except I still think and I'm still alive, and it's beautiful, and it's interesting. And I love you.'
Mordecai just smiled at her for a moment, making her warm, and then said, 'If you really loved me, you wouldn't drink milk straight out of the carton.')
Anna Maria realises she's crying. How did she fall in love with a murderer who had better table manners than she did? How did anything happen? How was the earth created? Mordecai said God shaped it, and she said that scientific evidence disproved that.
('But it doesn't. Any explanation for the world could be true and come from God,' said Mordecai. 'I don't believe that science and religion can't be reconciled. God created the Big Bang. God created the celestial sphere. God created evolution. How do you even know that the Big Bang is the right answer? It could be one we've never heard of, one that isn't that or the Bible version. There are a thousand possibilities. I just believe that God is at the heart of whichever one is true.')
She turns off the TV and touches the banner, runs her fingers along the letters of her name. Welcome home, Anna Maria. She goes upstairs and reads for a while, but the way she always ends up filling the day is just thinking, thinking, sometimes doing. Sometimes she sleeps for a long time during the afternoons, and then takes a pill so she can sleep all night, too. This afternoon she won't sleep, maybe. It's already three o'clock, too much time spent watching TV and thinking, thinking, always thinking. But she doesn't think actively. She thinks dully. She thinks the way she used to think when she was little and being driven somewhere she didn't want to go. She would look out the window and be silent and still, her lips sticking together and her hands in her lap, not focusing on anything particularly, and letting the thoughts run through her head. This is how she thinks now.
The book is one she used to read a lot when she was younger. Virginia Woolf. She always loved stream of consciousness writing. Is this how she thinks now? In stream of consciousness? Things just flowing through and then going away, running on like the wind in the grass?
All her old artwork is pinned up on her walls, where her parents have kept it since she was a little girl. She remembers leaving this room to go to college, where her dorm walls were covered with posters. Some were of actors she liked, a couple were old Star Trek posters, and some actually had something to do with the things she studied. She'd sold them all to a roommate her second or third year for four dollars.
The third year was when she moved home again, out of strength. Why do the bad parts of her life always come at the ends of threes?
(Once she went along with Mordecai when he was rabbit hunting. After he had shot one or two, he showed her a secret place along the river where he'd built a small platform that a person could sit on. It was like a dock, but a tall dock, up in the trees. A fishing line hung over the edge and the red-and-white thingy (she'd never known what they were called) bobbed in the water.
'This is where I come to think,' he said.
'What kinds of things do you think about?'
'Everything.' He leaned back and looked up through the hemlock trees.
'Do you always think abstractly?'
'How do you think?'
She rubbed the boards of the platform, and flicked a tiny hemlock cone off into the forest. 'I don't really think think much. Mostly I just remember. Things go through my head, things that happened right away or a long time ago. They go back and forth and swim around. Like fish, I guess.'
'What's the first thing you remember?'
'Being born.' She laughed. 'No, I remember getting my first car. See, that's the first thing I remember. Then I slip back to earlier things, and then come forward again. My first car was a Gremlin. It was a terrible car. I crashed it when it was only three years old.')
They eat dinner at five-thirty, like most families in her part of the state. Eight o'clock dinners are only for fancy people. Normal people eat early. Her father always cooks. He likes it a lot better than her mother does, so it's his job. He makes pot roast with carrots and onions and potatoes, salads on the side. Her mother insists everyone drink milk, milk that's already poured. Anna Maria looks at her glass and at the refrigerator, and wonders what would happen if she drank milk out of the carton. Would her mother correct her, or would her mother be afraid to?
(Her mother is sometimes afraid even to say anything to her. What if it's the wrong thing? What if I upset some delicate balance? What does it mean when a mother can't even talk to her daughter? Maybe I'm doing something wrong. Maybe she needs more stimulation. Maybe I should talk more. But maybe I should talk less. I don't know how to do this right. I don't know what I should do. Will I ever stop being afraid?, her mother thinks. Will we ever be able to be a normal family again?)
('What does Jacob do, now that he lives here and takes care of us?'
'He designs shoes.' Mordecai peeled off his socks and threw them at the opposite wall while Anna Maria put on her nightgown. 'And he's dating a nice Jewish girl who would make my grandmother proud, if she still lived.'
'Would you make your grandmother proud?' she asked as she came over.
'I doubt it. Would you?'
'I don't know.' Anna Maria, sitting on the bed with a pillow held against her stomach, shifted a little, moving closer to him. 'I don't know what she'd think. I don't know what anyone would think.'
'What do you think?'
'I don't know. I love this house. I love the woods around us. I love waking up in the morning and knowing it's not a dream.'
'I love you,' Mordecai said, lifting one of her hands and resting it against his cheek.
'Maybe that's why it feels like this. It feels right. I love my family, but I'd rather be here.' She hesitated. 'Does that make me a bad person?'
'I don't know,' he said seriously. 'I believe that all love makes you a good person. But that's what I believe. What matters for you it what you believe.'
'In you,' she said. 'I believe in you.')
In the evening, she settles into bed early because there isn't anything really worth staying up for. (She and Mordecai always went to bed some time between early and late, so they could read together. They were always the right kind of tired when they got into their beds and turned out the lights that reminded her of fireflies in a bottle. In the winter they'd have the fire going in the stove in the kitchen, and she'd be able to hear the crack and popple sometimes from her room. She remembers snuggling deep into her quilt, a quilt that used to belong to Mordecai's grandmother, and listening to the silence of snow outside.)
Outside now things aren't silent, aren't still. The city is too close. She can hear cars and trucks going by outside, the horns, the tyres, the noises that all become one noise which is traffic.
But a little silver something is in her stomach now, a speckle that appeared and has been gathering layers like a pearl all day long, building up to a hope. There is a town in Wyoming. There is a letter in her pocket.
I love you. I love you. Maybe some day-- maybe he won't stop writing. Maybe he'll give her an address to write back to. Maybe she'll fly out, or drive out, or take the train-- Maybe her mother will let her without worrying too much. Maybe this silver stirring will wake her up again (she has been sleeping, it feels like a dull sleep, ever since the police found her), and she'll find a job, start life again. Like a car engine that has to warm up before it can work right. Maybe--
Suddenly she gets out of bed, goes to her dresser, and takes out the string of prayer beads hidden in the back, runs them through her fingers, presses them against her cheek. She closes her eyes. Maybe God is there. Maybe He's saying her name.
Anna Maria, you're home now.
Be brave.
Anna Maria
"Anna Maria, you're home now. Smile for me, sweetie."
It's hard to smile. She's lonely. This bright multicoloured house, these happy people, are so different from the green place she has lived the last three years. Her mother tickles her and spreads a new dress out on the bed, one with silver drops along the collar that remind her of spilled milk in the morning, when the moon is the only light still dancing in the sky, and even the sun hasn't yet awoken.
It's a beautiful dress. She hasn't had anything beautiful in a long, long time. (Mordecai could not afford anything beautiful, and even if he had been able, they were so far from all people that there was no one from whom they could have bought things. For three years she only wore brown coarse cloth.)
She walks to the windows and looks out at the river. (There was a river where they lived, a long one that stretched off into the forest and out of sight. Along it things grew, silvery trees and brambly brush, little patches of mushrooms, little scatterings of flowers. Mordecai used to take her walking by the river.
He had a peculiar smile, warm as rabbit soup, soft as milkweed. She had trusted his smile. It meant that things were good. It meant that everything was right.)
The river outside her window goes out of sight, too. It's busy, full of boats of all shapes, crossed by bridges. The water is blue and rich, like an oil painting. Her mother comes up behind her and puts a hand on her shoulder, says, 'Isn't it like you remember? I used to stand here and wonder where you were. I used to pray that you were all right.'
(Mordecai prayed, too. He told her that his mother was Jewish, his father was Catholic. He said that when he prayed it was to the same God. He said that God is always that same; the difference is in what people call Him. 'Shiva or Jesus or the Great Spirit', he said, 'they're all God. We just worship Him in different ways and give him different names, because we different. We don't name the pieces of the world around us the same things, so why would we all name God the same thing?' Mordecai had Stars of David painted on the walls of his house, and Christus Rego, and many, many other symbols in different colours and shapes. 'They all mean God', he said. 'I like to be somewhere that speaks of God.'
He wore a prayer sash and carried a rosary, a Turkish eye, a Thor's hammer, rounded stones that he said were earth prayers. 'I am keeping my pockets holy', he said.
She asked him for something of her own to keep with her, and he gave her a string of prayer beads, green and gold and shining. She tied them around her wrist and never took them off. Mordecai smiled at that. In the dark of the evening, as they sat by the fire and he read from the Koran, she rubbed them and held them and thought of home--sometimes she wanted to be there, sometimes she wanted him to be there with her, and often she was content where she was.)
"Anna Maria, you're home now. Come and have breakfast with us. Waffles."
(They almost always had eggs. There were birds in the forest, and Mordecai always knew where the nests were. She doesn't try to tell her parents. She pours maple syrup on her waffles and is quiet. Maybe, her mother thinks, she cannot fit back into normal life as well as we hoped. Maybe she should see a therapist or a psychiatrist. Of course she should. We thought that it would be easy for her to come back to her family, but all those years with Him couldn't have had any other result. Maybe He did something to her that she didn't tell us. I'll make a phone call after breakfast, her mother thinks. Her mother always thinks of That Man in capitals.)
She walks down the sun-warmed street after breakfast, wearing the beautiful dress from her mother. her mother remembers after all this time how much she likes pretty, shining things. Anna Maria has almost forgotten it, herself. The skirts of the dress swirl around her ankles like long grass, but silkier, brushing and blowing.
The more she tries to let the blank, silent summer mute it until she can't feel it, the more she imagines Mordecai lifting her with his hands at her waist and twirling her in the sun. She imagines them dancing through the house to the sound of waltzes on his old LPs. She imagines them spilling out the door like light through a window, and standing on the doorstep looking out at the world. Look what God gave us to-day, Mordecai would say.
Then he would smile.
She wanders down to the playground and sits on a swing. All the children are in school. When they grow up, they go to college and get jobs. When they are grown up, they work. Finally they fade like flowers. Anna Maria is grown up, a grown up girl swinging by herself at the playground, not ready to go back to work, not ready to face the interviews and the resumes and the sense of drive and push that isn't there any more. All her friends have moved on after three years. They have lives that don't need Anna Maria in them. Who would call that wrong? Her mother was the only person who didn't believe she was dead. And now it's hard to reconnect, hard to touch, hard to make a phone call or take a hand, after three years and jobs and marriages and periods of mourning that ended and made everything seem so final.
(Sometimes she wonders how everything happened as quickly as it did. It took so long for her to be happy, and then she was happy for so long, and now as overnight as the first frost on the grass she is home.
It makes her insides dull. She should be happy, and part of her is happy. The rest is lonely and tired, still with weariness.)
The doctor who examined her when she first came home explained to her mother that she was perfectly healthy, that no doctor would suppose she had been living in captivity for the last three years. He said that she showed no signs of mental trauma. He said that she was perhaps even ready to enter again into normal society after a very short period of recovery.
She had smiled for the doctor, and answered his questions sometimes even truthfully. No one except the police pressed her hard. She had just come back to her loving family after years of what other people filled in with their heads; maybe atrocities unimaginable, maybe isolation and emotional deprivation. It wouldn't be right to ask too many questions, to expect too many answers. 'Be gentle with her', the doctor told her mother. 'Be gentle with her. Let her recover. Help her where she needs it, and if she seems too distant or depressed contact a psychiatric professional. But let her recover at her own pace, and please be gentle. It can only help.'
It does help. Anna Maria pushes the ground with her toes until her swing begins to sway, and then to glide, back and forth, high into the air like a kind of dance. No questions means no explanations, no answers. It keeps her safe.
"Anna Maria, you're home now," she whispers, swinging high towards the sun, towards the tops of the tress, towards weightlessness and a chance at flying. "Why don't you come down?"
(Because the first time she saw Mordecai, he was breaking out of prison. She only remembers the whirl and rush and noise of that first time, the people on the television narrating what it all meant. A fugitive, they said. A dangerous man, they said. 'He has escaped after twelve years in prison and he is doing a life sentence for murder and he has gone into hiding. Police are adamant that he will be found as soon as possible and returned to prison.' But I'm not part of that, Anna Maria thought. And the next day she went to the city to buy a new dress.
She was standing in front of a window looking at something beautiful when Mordecai took her shoulders gently. I'm sorry, he said. 'Please stand in front of me. They won't shoot you.' There was shouting and a sudden gunshot which might have hit her, but Mordecai moved her out of the way too quickly. He had taken her hostage. People don't ask her about it, but Anna Maria is not sure what she would say if they did. It didn't feel like hostage. It just felt strange and stilted, jerked, as though something smooth had been happening and then caught, like a record repeating the same thing over and over.)
(The rest of it is bits and pieces. She remembers travelling, so fast that she learned very little. Finally she remembers their finding the house where they lived those three years. Almost three years. Part of it was the travelling.
Finally she remembers that they began to talk.
Mordecai was always gentle of her, but he was even more gentle once he was no longer frightened and running. One night while they were sitting by the stove, she asked him where they were.
'My brother built it a long time ago,' he said. 'He built it for me so I could live here alone when I left prison.'
'Who did you kill?' asked Anna Maria.
'A man. I didn't do it in self-defence, and I had no good reason to kill him. All I know now is that it was evil to kill him, and I did not know that then.'
'Why did you--?'
'Because his position different from mine. Because he made me angry.' He smiled slightly at her, and it was a smile that was old and quiet. 'That's a terrible reason to hurt anyone. And it's been twelve years, and all I've done is been thinking. My brother made me this prayer shawl,' he showed her, 'and this rosary. God gets called lots of different names that all mean God, and killing gets lots of different excuses that are all there to hide something that's really either just stupid or evil. I realised that about God about the same time I realised I did an evil thing.'
'Then why did you break out of prison?'
'I used to have a house like this one out in the woods, and that's where I like it. I hate big crowds of people and things. There's too much noise and too much going on. And I would've stayed in prison as long as I was supposed to, because I know I deserve to be cut off from all people if I am evil towards any one of them, but I couldn't stand all the noise, and hearing the people around me being cruel or evil all day and all night. It wasn't just other prisoners. Some of the prisoners were like me, and so were some of the personnel, but some of them were just as evil as murderers. And I was afraid.' Mordecai's eyes seemed almost like an apology. 'I told my brother secretly to help me, and he did.'
Anna Maria nodded and looked around the house. 'So you won't hurt me.'
'No.')
And nobody would understand--would they? What it's like to be so far from Mordecai, not to know where he is. To feel sorry for him, to hope he always hides in good places, always runs further away from prison and the crowds. Always to pray for him to be safe and secret, and to have learned true things from a murderer. To have learned about good and grace and keeping from evil, to have learned about trust and kindness and love, to have learned about acceptance and respect from a murderer.
The only thing that makes me happy, Anna Maria thinks, is that he isn't caught yet. He's still somewhere. That's the happy ending.
And she walks home from the playground for lunch, because the time has already passed, just her and the swing and thinking have passed four long hours, and it's time to go home.
"Anna Maria, you're home now. Thank goodness, I thought we might have to look for you. We're having ham sandwiches."
(He mother is always frightened when she doesn't know where Anna Maria is. I shouldn't be, she thinks. I should trust her. My stomach shouldn't always twist. But I lost her for so long, and I always am afraid that when she's out of sight she won't come back again. No girl gets kidnapped twice. She's safe her. I shouldn't be always afraid.
But they haven't caught Him yet...)
(Mordecai kept them in food by hunting rabbits and squirrels, sometimes birds. Once a month his brother came with a carload of food and groceries, things they couldn't get out of the woods. He always looked askance at Anna Maria. He always asked Mordecai when he would take her home.
'I don't know,' said Mordecai. 'We're all right'.
'This isn't what I got you out of prison for. I didn't mean for you to keep this girl from her family for all this time. I didn't think you'd take a hostage at all.'
'They were shooting at me.'
'You should have let her go as soon as you got away.'
'I was frightened,' Mordecai said. 'It's no excuse. I know that, and I'm not trying to make one. It's only the explanation.'
'But you're safe now. Why's she still here?'
Anna Maria would listen, sometimes; part of the time she'd be running through the woods with vines in her hair. She had never felt freer.
Sometimes she thought she knew why Mordecai had never let her go. She had never asked to go, and the memory of home almost seemed to fade, to flow in and out of her consciousness like the river sometimes taking one path and sometimes another. It wasn't because she didn't love her home, or her family. It was just that it seemed so distant then. It wasn't anything Mordecai did or said. It was just that as they drove away from that city store window where she'd looked at the dress a part of that morning's life seemed to come away, like a lizard leaving its tail behind in the beak of a predator.
Then later the answer was simply because Mordecai loved her, and was afraid to let her go.)
Ham sandwiches remind her of something far away and muted, but good. The feeling of food in her stomach is good. Her mother and father exchange looks across the table, in turns loving, concerned, quiet, unsure.
Afterwards her father goes back to mind the store, and her mother tries to engage her in conversation. She answers questions distractedly for a while, and then goes away upstairs to sit on her bed and look out the window again. (Mordecai didn't have a second storey. It was just four rooms: the kitchen, the bathroom, two bedrooms. The bedrooms were filled with all kinds of books, but mostly art books full of paintings by dead artists. Some she naturally knew, like Monet and Titian, and some were unfamiliar to her, like Goya and Stubbins. In the evenings they would sometimes read through them together, looking at the pictures, and Mordecai would tell her that he had seen some of them and describe the museums and houses they'd been in. He was four years older than she was, thirty-five to her thirty-one then, but he'd been all over the world when he was a teenager.
'So at least you got to see a lot of things before--'
'That's true.' He smiled at her, his warm smile. 'Jacob and I went everywhere you can think of. Our parents died when I was just a little boy, and Jacob was afraid we'd be separated by foster parents, so he ran away with me. He worked, and I helped, and we went everywhere.'
Anna Maria tried to imagine what everywhere was like. She'd never been anywhere, never even gone out of the state. Except now, she suddenly realised.
'Where are we now?' she asked.
'I'm not sure,' he said, laughing.
'Are we out of state?'
'We're in North Dakota. We're about fifty miles from Jacob.'
'I've never been outside New York.'
'There's a lot to see in New York,' said Mordecai.
'I think it's more beautiful here. All the trees, and the river. I like living here.'
'Really? Are you happy here?'
For a moment, she really thought about it. Here--they were in her bedroom, lying on her mattress to read the book--far away from everything, surrounded by woods, watching the river flow out of sight. Only Mordecai, only Anna Maria, sometimes Jacob, hundreds of books.
'Yes,' she said. 'I'm happy.)
She sits by the window, watches the boats begin to travel, the water stir, the cars move across the bridges. Hears the faraway shouts, the noise of the motors and the boats churning through the water. Her mother calls up the stairs that the afternoon mail just came, and there's a letter for Anna Maria. She comes downstairs and takes it into the living room to read. There's no return address.
Anna Maria, it says, it's me. I've been praying for you. I pray you're well, that no one has accidentally hurt you with words or otherwise. I'm trying to be glad you're home, but I miss you so much. But God knows I should never have kept you so long. I pray you're well.
I'm all right. I'm afraid to tell you where I am. Maybe someone who shouldn't will read this letter, like in a detective story, and track me down with it. The postmark is as close as I can get you. I'm so sorry for leaving you. That should have been the first thing I said. I wanted to go back. Jacob wouldn't let me. I know he was afraid. Don't blame him. If you are angry, be angry with me. I shouldn't have left you. I pray they didn't ask you too many questions or do anything to hurt or scare you. I know they asked you where I am. I pray it didn't last too long. You should be safe. You're home now, Anna Maria.
I love you. I love you.
The postmark is from a town in Wyoming. I want to go to Wyoming, she thinks. Why is New York so far from Wyoming?
Her mother comes in to open the curtains. 'Was it a friend?' she asks.
'Yes,' says Anna Maria, softly. 'It was a friend.'
(When the police found her, she was making herself toast. Jacob had brought them a toaster the month before, and it was so nice to have toast again, toast crispy but also soft with butter. Mordecai was out hunting for a rabbit for supper. Jacob was due again that day, and sometimes he brought them meat, but he was all Jewish, instead of all everything, like Mordecai, and he didn't like putting meat in with the milk. 'I don't know why,' he said. 'It just feels funny. I know you two don't care. I don't even like having them in the same house together, let alone the same car. Besides, I'm a vegetarian, and I shouldn't enable you.' Mordecai always laughed.
So she was making toast, and then police knocked on the door. She thought it was Jacob, and went to open it, and that was when everything changed. Of course they recognised her. She was still on missing posters, her mother told her. And Mordecai was still wanted. They only found Anna Maria, though, and took her away with them.
As soon as she could, she called Jacob from a pay phone in a panic. He told her that he couldn't say much over the phone, but that someone had found out about Mordecai and called the police. He'd driven over and found Mordecai in the woods and convinced him that Anna Maria was all right by herself. They drove to Jacob's house, and Mordecai hid in the storm shelter dug deep into the ground in the barn, its door covered over with hay, until the police had finished questioning him. He hid there for a week, and then Jacob got him out of the state.
'Where?' asked Anna Maria.
'I can't tell you,' Jacob said. 'I can't tell you whether he'll contact you. And please don't call me. The police are still dropping in on me at random, and they keep questioning me. They're probably doing that to you, too, so you should know. They were suspicious of me when he escaped in New York, and now that I'm in such close proximity to your house, they're even more suspicious. I need you to leave me alone.'
'Okay', she whispered.)
"Anna Maria, you're home now." Her mother opens the curtains wide and light streams through. "Is there anything you want to do?"
'That's okay,' says Anna Maria, her letter folded up in her pocket.
The police don't question her as much now as they did at the beginning of the month, when she was always being asked to try to remember. Remember, they'd say. 'Did he ever say anything that might have given you a clue to his whereabouts now?' She always says she didn't know, because it was true. But sometimes they still ask.
There's a long time between after lunch and time to go to bed, so she goes into the television room and turns on the TV, flipping through the coloured blurs of channels, not sure whether she wants to take her mind off things or keep thinking. Maybe something will be so interesting she won't have to choose.
('Why did you kill him?'
Mordecai stopped in taking the bread down off the shelf. 'What?'
'Why would you kill somebody?' Anna Maria took out the jar of peanut butter and Mordecai handed her the bread. She began to spread peanut butter on it. Mordecai loved peanut butter. She folded the sandwich and handed it to him, touching his fingers as she did so. Warm hands, gentle hands, and a smile of thanks.
'I was robbing his house,' said Mordecai.
Anna Maria nodded.
'I misjudged things,' he continued. 'He was awake, and he caught me downstairs taking things that looked valuable and going through drawers. I said he was in a position different from mine: he was powerful and in control, and he was ready to call the police. I didn't know what would happen to me, or to Jacob--I was twenty-two, and old enough to know, but because of the way we lived, I don't think I understood. I think I was too afraid. I didn't wait, just took something near to me and hit him until I was sure he was dead, and then I tried to run. I wasn't hard to catch. I hadn't done it in self-defence; I'd done it while stealing from him. And I wasn't repentant, then. I was angry. I was angry because I'd killed him and I was still going to be separated from Jacob, and I did nothing to help my case.'
'So it was like when you took me. You did it because you were scared.'
'Yes.'
'I'm sorry.'
Mordecai shook his head. 'No. I'm sorry. I'm the one who took you away from your family.'
Sandwich in hand, she got up and went to the window, pressing her nose against the glass. 'This place is more beautiful than home.')
Something on the TV catches her eye, and she pauses for a moment, watching. It's an old soap opera she used to love. She hasn't watched it in so long--maybe her favourite characters are all dead, or different, or--but things seem mostly the same. She watches the episode to the end, and then goes back to flipping.
From the corner of her eye she can still see the banner hanging from the wall. It's a big one painted with the words, "Welcome Home, Anna Maria," from the party her parents had. Lots of the neighbourhood came. For a few hours, she almost seemed like a celebrity. Why? Why did people who didn't even know her well want to see this? All the folks she used to wave at when she drove to the post office. All the people from the workplace she hadn't been to in years. Even the mayor welcomed her back. Why? She hadn't done anything. She'd been taken away from a place that made her happy. That wasn't worth celebrating. Just wasn't.
She settles deeper into the couch and pulls the throw rug over her body. Maybe she can trap in warmth she doesn't need. It's summer, late summer. It isn't cold outside. Why isn't she happy to be home? Her parents are good parents, her friends were good, her job was good. Why hadn't she been happy before?
('Why weren't you happy before?'
'What?' She paused in reaching for the milk. She always drank milk out of the container. Mordecai would murmur something about spitback and lower his eyes so he couldn't see.
'You always tell me you're happy here. But you shouldn't be, should you? You're a kidnapped woman.'
'It doesn't feel that way.' She drank, and then put the carton back in the refrigerator. 'I just wasn't happy. It doesn't matter. It's just that everything here is so different from everything at home. I get enough sleep, and I don't worry about what I'm going to do. I don't stay up thinking I'll be doing the same thing that doesn't make me happy for the rest of my life. I used to wish that I'd get in a car accident and go into a coma, just so I wouldn't have to think about what was going to come next. This is like that, except I still think and I'm still alive, and it's beautiful, and it's interesting. And I love you.'
Mordecai just smiled at her for a moment, making her warm, and then said, 'If you really loved me, you wouldn't drink milk straight out of the carton.')
Anna Maria realises she's crying. How did she fall in love with a murderer who had better table manners than she did? How did anything happen? How was the earth created? Mordecai said God shaped it, and she said that scientific evidence disproved that.
('But it doesn't. Any explanation for the world could be true and come from God,' said Mordecai. 'I don't believe that science and religion can't be reconciled. God created the Big Bang. God created the celestial sphere. God created evolution. How do you even know that the Big Bang is the right answer? It could be one we've never heard of, one that isn't that or the Bible version. There are a thousand possibilities. I just believe that God is at the heart of whichever one is true.')
She turns off the TV and touches the banner, runs her fingers along the letters of her name. Welcome home, Anna Maria. She goes upstairs and reads for a while, but the way she always ends up filling the day is just thinking, thinking, sometimes doing. Sometimes she sleeps for a long time during the afternoons, and then takes a pill so she can sleep all night, too. This afternoon she won't sleep, maybe. It's already three o'clock, too much time spent watching TV and thinking, thinking, always thinking. But she doesn't think actively. She thinks dully. She thinks the way she used to think when she was little and being driven somewhere she didn't want to go. She would look out the window and be silent and still, her lips sticking together and her hands in her lap, not focusing on anything particularly, and letting the thoughts run through her head. This is how she thinks now.
The book is one she used to read a lot when she was younger. Virginia Woolf. She always loved stream of consciousness writing. Is this how she thinks now? In stream of consciousness? Things just flowing through and then going away, running on like the wind in the grass?
All her old artwork is pinned up on her walls, where her parents have kept it since she was a little girl. She remembers leaving this room to go to college, where her dorm walls were covered with posters. Some were of actors she liked, a couple were old Star Trek posters, and some actually had something to do with the things she studied. She'd sold them all to a roommate her second or third year for four dollars.
The third year was when she moved home again, out of strength. Why do the bad parts of her life always come at the ends of threes?
(Once she went along with Mordecai when he was rabbit hunting. After he had shot one or two, he showed her a secret place along the river where he'd built a small platform that a person could sit on. It was like a dock, but a tall dock, up in the trees. A fishing line hung over the edge and the red-and-white thingy (she'd never known what they were called) bobbed in the water.
'This is where I come to think,' he said.
'What kinds of things do you think about?'
'Everything.' He leaned back and looked up through the hemlock trees.
'Do you always think abstractly?'
'How do you think?'
She rubbed the boards of the platform, and flicked a tiny hemlock cone off into the forest. 'I don't really think think much. Mostly I just remember. Things go through my head, things that happened right away or a long time ago. They go back and forth and swim around. Like fish, I guess.'
'What's the first thing you remember?'
'Being born.' She laughed. 'No, I remember getting my first car. See, that's the first thing I remember. Then I slip back to earlier things, and then come forward again. My first car was a Gremlin. It was a terrible car. I crashed it when it was only three years old.')
They eat dinner at five-thirty, like most families in her part of the state. Eight o'clock dinners are only for fancy people. Normal people eat early. Her father always cooks. He likes it a lot better than her mother does, so it's his job. He makes pot roast with carrots and onions and potatoes, salads on the side. Her mother insists everyone drink milk, milk that's already poured. Anna Maria looks at her glass and at the refrigerator, and wonders what would happen if she drank milk out of the carton. Would her mother correct her, or would her mother be afraid to?
(Her mother is sometimes afraid even to say anything to her. What if it's the wrong thing? What if I upset some delicate balance? What does it mean when a mother can't even talk to her daughter? Maybe I'm doing something wrong. Maybe she needs more stimulation. Maybe I should talk more. But maybe I should talk less. I don't know how to do this right. I don't know what I should do. Will I ever stop being afraid?, her mother thinks. Will we ever be able to be a normal family again?)
('What does Jacob do, now that he lives here and takes care of us?'
'He designs shoes.' Mordecai peeled off his socks and threw them at the opposite wall while Anna Maria put on her nightgown. 'And he's dating a nice Jewish girl who would make my grandmother proud, if she still lived.'
'Would you make your grandmother proud?' she asked as she came over.
'I doubt it. Would you?'
'I don't know.' Anna Maria, sitting on the bed with a pillow held against her stomach, shifted a little, moving closer to him. 'I don't know what she'd think. I don't know what anyone would think.'
'What do you think?'
'I don't know. I love this house. I love the woods around us. I love waking up in the morning and knowing it's not a dream.'
'I love you,' Mordecai said, lifting one of her hands and resting it against his cheek.
'Maybe that's why it feels like this. It feels right. I love my family, but I'd rather be here.' She hesitated. 'Does that make me a bad person?'
'I don't know,' he said seriously. 'I believe that all love makes you a good person. But that's what I believe. What matters for you it what you believe.'
'In you,' she said. 'I believe in you.')
In the evening, she settles into bed early because there isn't anything really worth staying up for. (She and Mordecai always went to bed some time between early and late, so they could read together. They were always the right kind of tired when they got into their beds and turned out the lights that reminded her of fireflies in a bottle. In the winter they'd have the fire going in the stove in the kitchen, and she'd be able to hear the crack and popple sometimes from her room. She remembers snuggling deep into her quilt, a quilt that used to belong to Mordecai's grandmother, and listening to the silence of snow outside.)
Outside now things aren't silent, aren't still. The city is too close. She can hear cars and trucks going by outside, the horns, the tyres, the noises that all become one noise which is traffic.
But a little silver something is in her stomach now, a speckle that appeared and has been gathering layers like a pearl all day long, building up to a hope. There is a town in Wyoming. There is a letter in her pocket.
I love you. I love you. Maybe some day-- maybe he won't stop writing. Maybe he'll give her an address to write back to. Maybe she'll fly out, or drive out, or take the train-- Maybe her mother will let her without worrying too much. Maybe this silver stirring will wake her up again (she has been sleeping, it feels like a dull sleep, ever since the police found her), and she'll find a job, start life again. Like a car engine that has to warm up before it can work right. Maybe--
Suddenly she gets out of bed, goes to her dresser, and takes out the string of prayer beads hidden in the back, runs them through her fingers, presses them against her cheek. She closes her eyes. Maybe God is there. Maybe He's saying her name.
Anna Maria, you're home now.
Be brave.
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(no subject)
Date: 2007-02-23 12:52 am (UTC)I really, really wish that there was someone even half as brilliant as you in my Fiction Workshop. If i could read this kind of thing for class, I would have no trouble getting my homework done. You're brilliant, love.
I really like the bit about the milk, and drinking it straight from the carton. That Mordecai casts his eyes down in embarassment when Anna Maria drinks from the carton is brilliant, and that she considers doing it in front of her mother is a very nice connection.
I'm not sure that the title works so well as "Anna Maria"... It's more about Home or God than about her, and something to do with one of those concepts may fit better; something about Home in particular.
Couple purely typographical issues that my insanity forces me to comment on: when Anna is first thinking of Mordecai's concept of god, you say "He said that when he prayed it was to the same God. He said that God is always that same;" i think that it should be "that same God" and "God is always the same" instead? And... There was something else... But it was, like, a letter left off of something, or something.
The bit about bad parts of her life coming at the ends of threes may work better if there are little foreshadowings to it earlier in the story, maybe? I'm not sure how you could do it, but i think it would be really nice if you made it that Mordecai kidnapped her two or four years after the last bad part began, as a little symbolism of it not being a bad part.
I still think her thoughts about his smile should come in the vicinity of someone smiling at her, rather than after the description of the river; it doesn't really fit the pattern of "event-memory" that the rest of the story has.
It's beautiful overall.
(no subject)
Date: 2007-02-23 01:00 am (UTC)Maybe "You're Home Now" or something that fits the recurring pattern of those words?
I need it to be 'when he prayed it was to the same God', because it's meant to imply it's the same God for both the Jewish mother and the Catholic father. However, you're right about the second--that's a typo, and I fixed it.
How about this for the smile: 'So at least you got to see a lot of things before--'
'That's true.' He smiled at her. He had a peculiar smile, warm as rabbit soup, soft as milkweed. She had trusted his smile. It meant that things were good. It meant that everything was right. 'Jacob and I went everywhere you can think of. Our parents died when I was just a little boy, and Jacob was afraid we'd be separated by foster parents, so he ran away with me. He worked, and I helped, and we went everywhere.'
And for the foreshadowing with the threes: ut I'm not part of that, Anna Maria thought. And the next day she went to the city to buy a new dress.
It was four years after she had dropped out of college. She was standing in front of a window looking at something beautiful when Mordecai took her shoulders gently.
Do either of those work? Also, if you find the typographical error you mentioned above, plz say!
♥ Thank you so, so much for taking all this trouble.
(no subject)
Date: 2007-02-23 01:14 am (UTC)Yeah, that sounds good! ^_^ but don't change it solely on my opinion. The title of a piece is like its eyes: you can look into them and see the soul of the piece, but it might not quite be an accurate window.
Ah! Well, i thought that it should be changed to "that" because as it stands, it doesn't specify the same god as what. But, i could very easily be misreading it ^^;
That's perfect for the smile.
So is the threes ^___^
It turns out that the typographical error was the "her"/"here" that you already caught, so, yeah.
Most anytime, darling.
(no subject)
Date: 2007-02-23 01:21 am (UTC)Okay! No, no, I think outside opinion is better, because the author sort of knows thing and forgets that everyone else doesn't know; so sometimes having someone who doesn't know all the secret inside things helps get things clearer. <33
Ohh! Okay, I'll make it clearer. Just a sec, look at this: He told her that his mother was Jewish, his father was Catholic. He said that when he prayed it was to the same God to whom they had separately prayed.?
Yay! and yay again!
Okay, but I still don't remember where it is. XD Where is it?
♥
(no subject)
Date: 2007-02-23 01:41 am (UTC)Well, I agree with that whole-heartedly, but just don't change the title for the opinion of one person ^^;;;
It does make it clearer, but it's a bit... long or something? ... No, on second (third?) read, it's quite good. *crazy, please ignore*
After Anna Maria comes back from the playground, it's in the paragraph after her mother says that they're having ham sandwiches. "No girl gets kidnapped twice. She's safe her. I shouldn't be always afraid."
<3
(no subject)
Date: 2007-02-23 01:54 am (UTC)Well, fine. XD I'll ask Manon, then.
Are you sure? *pokepoke*
Thanks! Okay, now it's fixed. XD
(no subject)
Date: 2007-02-23 01:59 am (UTC)Always get a second opinion on such integral parts!
... Not entirely? But i've no idea how it could be made better. Perhaps you need a second opinion for that, as well!
Yay ^___^
(no subject)
Date: 2007-02-23 02:08 am (UTC)Yes! Like with doctors!
It is kind of awkwardly phrased. I shall poke the Manon for that, too. XD She is the best writer in the world, so naturally I must plague her when I have worries.
(no subject)
Date: 2007-02-23 03:25 am (UTC)Yes! Story Doctors! (do we get those oversized shiny things to wear on our heads?)
perhaps it derives from the avoidance of a sentence-ending preposition...? If she's the best in the world, it must be flattering for her to help you with your work!
(no subject)
Date: 2007-02-23 01:48 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2007-02-23 01:55 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2007-02-23 01:04 am (UTC)