The Darkest Evening of the Year

I could learn.”
    The sloped brow, the inner epicanthic folds of the eyes, the ears set low on a head too small to be in correct proportion to the body are all signifiers of Down’s syndrome.
    “You think you could learn?” Moongirl asks.
    “Some, I think.”
    “To read and write?”
    “Maybe.”
    After a few weeks, Harrow had learned to see a gentleness in the daughter’s face, a sweetness that made her seem less alien than she had been to him at first.
    “How would you learn?”
    “School.”
    “Oh, baby,” Moongirl says with feigned sadness.
    “I’d try hard.”
    “But they don’t want you.”
    “I’d be good.”
    “Good but dumb, baby.”
    The child says nothing.
    “They don’t want dumb.”
    By the time she came into Harrow’s life with her mother, the child seemed to be past genuine tears. Her eyes are clear now.
    “It’s unfair, isn’t it?” says Moongirl.
    “Yeah.”
    “You didn’t ask to be dumb.”
    Sometimes, lately, Harrow sees in the child’s unfortunate face a quality that is not beauty but that is akin to it. The word that best defines this quality eludes him, so he thinks of it only as the Look.
    “Nobody asks to be dumb and ugly.”
    Ceaselessly, the child hems the doll’s dress, drawing white thread through white fabric, making a series of precise and identical stitches that brings into Harrow’s mind the word purity, though he doesn’t know why.
    He returns his attention to the girl’s face, but the word that would capture the essence of the Look is not purity.
    “Time to eat,” says Moongirl.
    “In a little while,” the child replies.
    “No, baby. Now.”
    Harrow is intrigued by this mother-daughter relationship because in it lie the answers with which he might unravel the tightest knots of Moongirl’s madness.
    In a tone suggesting the steel sheathed in her soft voice, she calls her daughter by the only name she has ever given her: “Piggy, it’s time to eat.”
    Reluctantly the child sets the doll aside, puts down the needle and thread, and pulls the tray in front of her.
    For the first time since they entered the room, Moongirl looks at Harrow. In her green gaze is something more intensely felt than mere triumph, something sharper than savage glee, and a far colder satisfaction than Harrow has ever seen in other eyes.
    When she is naked and riding him in the windowless room, this is perhaps the very gaze with which she favors him in absolute darkness.
    He meets her stare, confident that she will not read in him any attitude that will annoy or offend her.
    Virtue and vice are empty words. His well-considered philosophy has led him to deny such words authority over him; her insanity has brought her to the same rejection of all values, for in the chaos of existence, madness is a legitimate path to enlightenment.
    Actions are either taken or not taken, consequences incurred or not incurred, and no meaning can be found in any of it.
    Moongirl had accused him of pity.
    But he does not pity the child. He is merely intrigued by her perseverance, by the devices with which she endures her suffering.
    Piggy lifts the top slice of bread off her sandwich and lays it aside. She examines both sides of the lettuce leaf and places it on the bread.
    Smiling, Moongirl retrieves from the floor the doll that she displaced when she first sat in the chair beside the desk.
    Solemnly, Piggy examines the tomato, the ham, the cheese, and the bottom slice of bread, disassembling her sandwich and rebuilding it upside down.
    Sandwiches sometimes contain the unexpected. A rusty nail that gouges the gums. A live worm. A dead cockroach.
    The child does not know that Harrow made this ham-and-cheese delight. She must assume that her mother put it together.
    Finding nothing unwholesome, Piggy picks up her sandwich in both hands and takes a bite.
    Pretending to have no interest in her daughter’s meal, Moongirl examines the beautifully dressed doll that she retrieved from the floor.
    In spite of her intellectual limitations, Piggy is, at a modest level, an effective autodidact. She has some talent for art and has taught herself both to draw and to compose visually striking collages from pictures that she clips out of magazines.
    Among the crafts she’s taught herself are sewing and embroidery. When they moved into this place, Piggy found an elaborate sewing kit and hundreds of spools of thread left behind by the former owners. By painstaking trial and error, by what Harrow supposes