Maud collapsed on the chaise longue in the sunroom. She was exhausted, completely exhausted, by the humidity. In the garden her zinnias drooped, unable to flounce their colour in this heavy air. Only yesterday the wind that had formerly moved the atmosphere around had abruptly stopped. Now Maud had the feeling that she was breathing the same air over and over, that it would never change, never go anywhere else. The thought oppressed her.

She had sent the child off with the housekeeper, unable to cope with another moment in his presence. Unable to listen any more to what he had to say, for now there was something new. He had begun to fill up the adults’ silences with a verbal description of their actions, as senselessly as Maud’s former naming of objects in her external environment. Back when she still wanted him to talk. Very soon, she decided, the child would reduce them all, not only to silence, but to paralysis as well.

Now you are climbing the stairs, he would say, struggling along after her. Now you have come to the top, now you are walking down the hall. Now you can’t remember what you came up here for. Now you are going into the parlour. Now you are picking up the mail from the tray. Now you are going back to the hall. Now you are walking back into the sunroom. Now you are in the sunroom.

“You must stop this senseless behaviour,” she would shout at him, “there’s no reason for it!”

“You must stop this senseless behaviour,” he would shout back, “there’s no reason for it!”

“Now you are looking straight at the boy,” he would continue, “and you are very angry at him.”

There were momentary interruptions in all this. The child had learned that language could be moulded into requests. But he hadn’t yet made use of the pronouns “I” or “me,” always referred to himself as “the boy.” “The boy is hungry, the boy is tired, the boy wants to go out into the garden.”

“What is your name?” Maud once asked him in desperation.

He had looked around behind him, as if to assure himself no one else was being addressed, then, “What is your name?” he had replied.

She was astonished by the extent of his vocabulary; even in a normal child of his age it would have been remarkable. But for one who had held onto silence for years, the variety of words was overwhelming. As though he had been storing verbal symbols in a special cerebral enclosure until it became so full it simply had to burst. He had drawn the world that circled him inwards, had hoarded snippets of discourse, and then all of this tumbled out of his mouth like a mountain waterfall after the ice on the heights has melted.

His talk about the man persisted. Maud was beginning to believe that the child might be referring to another side of himself, as recently he had combined the words “man” and “mine.” He would become agitated at these times, running from window to window, looking up and down Main Street, whispering the words “man” and “mine” over and over, or occasionally shouting them at Maud as if he expected her to do something, to perform some kind of anticipated miracle.

Maud knew the heavy air would eventually break… break into the true weather of this country, the safe cold when the river appeared to stop. Then there would be a pause, a time for ordinary funerals, when her little notebook could be stored in a dark drawer and the hall cupboard door closed.

Outside, a few of the maple’s leaves rustled unexpectedly and then were still. Through the open window Maud heard the child talking to a bird.

“Now you are going to fly away,” he said.