Julie fiddles with the brilliantly lacquered black wig she has pulled down over her hair, and smiles. This, she says, was from the children’s production of Whose Baby Are You Now? that the Home put on when she was eight, but of course Duncan wouldn’t remember that. She takes Duncan’s hand as they walk among the gardens. The smells of late summer come and go with the winds that always seem at twisting motion upon the plains. At a bench they sit down and Julie lays her head against his chest and he stares at the fake tea-colored center part in the hair.
On the far side of the garden, toward the soccer pitch: the sound of children at play. The hoarse coughing of the prefix. They laugh as he shouts, and Duncan imagines his ineffectual attempts to control the children or whatever game they are playing. They listen for the names they know, the usual culprits and offenders.
I have to leave, he says. Julie pulls at a knot in her wig. She sighs.
My mother is coming to get me. You’ll get to meet her.
A Brother begins to shout at a boy, and Duncan laughs, expecting Julie to do so also, but she merely stares toward the sound.
I’m the only one who knew you were sleeping, she says. I’m the one that knew you’d woken up from a divine sleep. I’m the one that found you.
I know.
Your mother, she says, is she pretty? Is she a great actress?
I don’t know. I don’t think so. But Duncan does; in his mind he pictures the woman from his dream standing before the Festival of Lights Holiday Train as it glitters in fractured and failing illumination through the swirling snow, and he sees his mother’s bright, damp cheeks, and the fierce blue of her large, almond shaped eyes, and everything—the land, the storm, the train—is lost in her and subsumed by her: In his dream she is the center of the world.
Julie thinks about this for a moment and nods. She says: If your mother is going to leave you, she should be beautiful and rich and fantastic. Those things are important, more important than any child, don’t you think?
On the walkway a group of six girls are playing jump rope. On each end a girl swings two ropes, the rope on the left turning clockwise and the one on the right turning in a counterclockwise loop. They pass the two ropes from hand to hand and their arcs are parabolic, shifting orbits crossing and merging, crossing and merging in a hypnotic blur; and as the girls turn the ropes, and as the other girls skip, they sing.
Julie kicks her legs in time to the skipping song. Faintly: the slap and scrape of the jump rope upon the stone, the girls’ voices in song, unchanging despite the failing light.
Julie stops her legs and grasps at his shoulder with a thin hand. It doesn’t matter anyway, Duncan, she says. She’ll leave you again. She will. It’s what mothers do.