One Cold Night

for that matter why he needed to understand so much about the human condition. You were born, you lived and you died, and it seemed to her that it was dangerous not to believe in something along the way. But she wouldn’t push her renewed faith on Dave because she knew that for their marriage to endure they would have to revive their old truce, their agreement to disagree. And she wouldn’t ask Lisa to wear the cross she had removed so quickly upon finding it around her neck when she woke up at the hospital. It didn’t matter. What did matter was the love, acceptance and forgiveness mother and daughter had established over the past few days. They had talked over everything. Susan had allowed Lisa to face her head-on, denying her not a grain of truth as the old party line was abandoned and their girlhoods were rewoven into the same fabric.
    And then, finally, Susan saw her birthday puzzle complete. A lost memory had emerged at the center of the blue background she and Lisa had worked their way through together, at the card table between the windows that faced the river, when they needed a break from talking. Lisa had had an old photograph of the two of them digitized and printed on a blank puzzle: five-year-old Lisa in her Spiderman costume stood grinning on Susan’s shoulders, with Lisa’s little arms stretched out for balance, a gesture the picture had translated into something that looked more like flight. They had been laughing and both had been about to topple over, but what the camera had caught was their unbridled glee.
    Susan squeezed Dave closer by pressing their linked arms tighter to her body. She realized for the first time that his familiar musky smell reminded her of the dried autumn leaves that swirled at their feet. A single leaf dropped into the grave, landing on Becky’s coffin. Susan saw that Lisa had also noticed the leaf and wondered what her beloved daughter was thinking.
    Over the summer, Lisa and Glory had attended an outdoor concert at Lincoln Center. A soprano stood on the stage, singing an aria from a Rimsky-Korsakov opera Lisa had never heard before but instantly fell in love with. Her voice reminded Lisa of butterscotch, rich butterscotch seeping over cold vanilla ice cream. She could taste the soprano’s voice on her tongue. That voice came back to her now, as she shivered by the grave of this girl whom, for long hours locked in the dark trunk, she had believed she herself could be-come — and she felt herself whirl into the crisp autumn air on the wings of the gorgeous aria. Becky had already forgiven death for taking her, Lisa decided; and Lisa would try to forgive life for giving her such a crappy father. Here she was, flesh and blood occupying space on this earth, a biological accident, really; in her case, a biological minefield, but she didn’t feel insane yet, and if she was lucky she might not have inherited a drop of her birth father’s crazy juice. She was trying not to dwell on the possibilities lurking in her blood. What would be the point? Why complicate things now when she was home — safe, sane and free?
    But just as she challenged herself not to worry about her own destiny, her mind began to tick. Well, she thought, maybe she couldn’t stop herself from thinking, and maybe she shouldn’t. Maybe it was justa sorry fact of the human condition to explore the unknown. Sometimes Lisa thought people were like ants, busily tackling urgent questions and mammoth projects, cursed with the intelligence to make too much out of the simple fact of being alive. So they built supertall buildings, and invented seventy-nine flavors of ice cream, and mastered languages, and made up stories, and craved music, and trusted their bodies to steel tubes that catapulted them at warp speed through the skies. People just loved looking at clouds from the wrong side. If they were dumb as ants, Lisa figured, they would probably all be much happier. But they weren’t ants, and happiness was a magic trick that caught you by surprise. Like Susan being her birth mother, Dave turning out to be a pretty cool guy, and the flood of e-mails Susan had sent her while she was gone. They were love letters, really, and if she never got another love letter in her life, at least she would have these.
    There were three things in her coat pocket today: lip balm, a quarter and the picture of her birth parents kissing. She ran her finger back and forth along the rough paper edge of the tiny photograph,