21
As the day warmed and brightened and the spirit world receded, drawn away on the tide of the darkness, the things that had kept her moving—anger at first, when she stepped out of the house, replaced by uncertainty as she looked for the turnoff to the longer route, and then fear as she picked her way through the ghost-ridden forest—turned to an uneasy mixture of eagerness and doubt. She was reasonably certain that she was only a few kilometers from Hyukk-Hyukk’s village, and for all she knew, he was still there, with his sweet, beautiful midnight eyes and his stupid laugh, and probably that same clattering car, held together with tape and wire, with a passenger door that he’d had to tie closed with a length of rope, knotted around the posts of two missing windows.
He had liked her, she’d known it. Although her sister Lawan, the flirt in the family, had squeezed into the middle, between her and Hyukk-Hyukk, he’d leaned past Lawan several times to talk to Hom, and, a few kilometers into the trip, he’d tilted the rearview mirror so they could see each other in it. When he did that, Lawan had pinched Hom’s thigh, hard. Hom had let out a little yip, and Hyukk-Hyukk had asked if something was wrong, and she’d said, no, no, it was just that he was such a good driver. She’d met his eyes in the mirror then, seeing that he’d gone scarlet and that Lawan was glaring straight through the windshield like some ancient queen being taken to the place where her head would be cut off. Hom had burst into laughter and heard the answering hyukk-hyukk, and then Lawan had begun to giggle, too, and for a few kilometers the world had been perfect. They were young, they were beautiful, they were free, and even that awful car, with its broken windows and the occasional bang it let out from the exhaust, as though it was practicing for a real explosion, was part of the story, a story that could have ended in any of a dozen ways, all of them happy.
Instead—she cut the thought short as though with a pair of shears, maybe the old but amazingly sharp ones their mother used when she made clothes. She was here, she had survived the forest, she was almost home, she had the world’s best baby.
And there it was, wasn’t it?
When she saw Hyukk-Hyukk and his midnight-black eyes again, if she saw him again, she’d be carrying a baby. That was, of course, a completely different story. Not so many possible endings, not so many of them happy. He could be married, she suddenly thought, surprised at the pang of regret that accompanied the notion. She’d barely known him. It had been years ago. She was married. She was carrying a baby.
She was in a new world, one with no clearly marked exit.
What had she done to her life?
This was, she supposed, what her mother had meant when she talked about growing up, that mysterious stage of life when she would have responsibilities, when people would depend upon her, when she could no longer claim not to know better. Now, she supposed, she knew better, and what she had learned was that some doors, when closed, could not be reopened, and that the doors that locked most permanently of all were the ones between you and the times when you were happiest. The surprise, it turned out, about knowing better was that it was mostly for the worst. Time only moved in one direction. It moved away from when you were happiest, and it dragged you with it.
So the boy might still be in the village, he might still have the world’s darkest eyes, but she was no longer someone who could catch those eyes in a rearview mirror and ask herself, even lightly, whether he was her future. The future was here, and in it she was a woman with a child and a husband and a mother-in-law. She was a woman who hadn’t laughed in months and who seemed to have lost the map to anyplace where she could laugh.
On the other hand, here was Miaow, this warm, shifting weight in her arms, with eyes that were seeing everything for the first time, dropped like a stone into a world that had no place set aside for her, that could roll over her and crush her and move on without slowing, this child she had caught as it fell into life, and whose diaper, she suddenly realized, stank to heaven and who, Hom knew, had the power to break her heart in whole new ways, ways she had never dreamed of before. And to whom she was, for the present, everything.
And so, in the end, when she saw the village, his village, she skirted it, head down like someone who had stolen something there long ago and was afraid she’d be recognized. Once she was safely on the other side, she drew the deepest breath of her life, kissed her smelly child’s forehead and struck out for home, whatever and wherever that was now.