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Then the rotor slowed and stopped, setting the people in the crowd towhite bundle of er an urgent reed-upon history, Hallie and I were home with a babysitter This is s I haven’t seen, sos that never happened And draw a blank on the things I’ve lived through I told Doc Homer many times that I’d seen the helicopter, and I also once insisted, to the point of tears, that I re on the ship with the nine Gracela sisters and their peacocks For that one he forced ;dia Britannica Novels were banned for a month; he said I needed to clear my mind of fictions I made it to Volume 19, driven mostly by spite, but I still remembered that trip with the Gracelas They orried about whether the peacocks were getting enough air down in the hold of the ship

I would concede now that all these things were fabrications based on stories I’d heard Me, a relative to truth but not its twin It was a fact that ourThis part of our family history ell known in Grace In her entire life she never left the ground When her health deteriorated because of a failed kidney and a National Guard helicopter bore down from the sky to take her to Tucson, she’d explained to the nored her, she just died before the helicopter could lift itself up out of the alfalfa The big bird hovered for a ry

It wasn’t her aversion to flight that was impressive; people in Grace didn’t travel much by car, let alone by air I think the moral of the tale, based on the way people told it, was the unsuspected force of my mother’s will "Who else would haveAnd also, I suppose, "Who could have borne those unconforirls?" People never said this directly, but ere willful they would tell us, without fail: "You didn’t suck that out of your thumb"

It made sense to me I had no visual memory of a mother, and could not recall any events that included her, outside of the helicopter trip she declined to take But I could re Al I’d had, I suppose, that Hallie never knew As the two of us grew up quietly in the dispassionate shadow of Doc Ho, I tried to preserve that motherly love as best I could, and pass it on But I couldn’t get it right I was so young

And somehow Hallie thrived anyway-the blossom of our family, like one of those miraculous fruit trees that tap into an invisible vein of nurture and bear radiant bushels of plu In Grace, in the old days, when people found one of those in their orchard they called it the seot kissed Sometimes you’d run across one that people had co The branches would be festooned like a Christmas tree of falasses, theenvelope of a pension check

Hallie and I had a favorite besada in the old Doos orchard, and one cold day on the way home from school we tucked wisps of our hair into its bark Secretly We’d hidden in the schoolyard to snip the ends off our braids and tie theether with a pink thread unraveled from my coat button If Doc Homer found out, he would construct soreed with him in principle-ere little scientists, born and bred But children robbed of love will dwell on ic

I stopped suddenly in the center of the road, in thedownhill fro finally struck open I’d found the right path The road angled up out of the orchards toward the top of the canyon The steepness of the clio the rest of the way to Doc Ho pad up in the alfalfa field Those fields would surely be abandoned now, like half the cropland in Arizona, salted to death by years of bad irrigation I didn’t want to go up there now and see it all underlike a boneyard It was toothe farief Even the people who kneell didn’t know my years in Grace were peculiarly bracketed by death: I’d lost a mother and I’d lost a child

Chapter 6

The Miracle

I was fifteen years old, two years younger than my own child would be now I didn’t think of it in those ter like a baby I held inside rew to a force as strong and untouchable as thunder I would be loved absolutely But even in the last ht have someday held in one before I knew it But evidently that word "lost" was somewhere in -of literally -a baby