My father and I took a lot of walks both when I was a girl and the summer we returned from Europe. My memories of the good old days made him smile and shake his head slowly; the kind of smile you get when you're thinking back to something particularly foolish you did a long time ago. Particularly foolish, but you're glad you did it anyway.
One day he surprised me by touching my stomach gently and familiarly. «Soon you'll be swimming with your own, eh?»
I smiled and hugged him very hard. He reminded me of Danny in that neither of them showed their emotions much. We kissed when we said hello and good-bye, but that was about it. Sometimes I thought my growing-up had made him shy and uneasy around me. He could touch and kiss and jiggle me on his knee when I was small, but once I grew breasts and started talking to boys on the telephone, I became someone to love and continue to support – but at a distance.
But his operation, and both Danny's disaster and my pregnancy, had brought us closer together. The operation because he had been faced with his own mortality and how everything could disappear in a second; Danny's crushed knee and the coming child because . . . well, maybe because of the same thing. Everything _can_ disappear in a second, particularly happiness and structure, but the more you're able to face it square-on, or the more you might even be able to add to the earth that will remain after you've gone, the better. Besides. it would be my father's first grandchild, and I secretly prayed he would live long enough to walk by the sea with this child. Maybe not swim, which was Pop at his best, but at least poke at a few horseshoe crabs together.
Miraculously, Danny and I had landed safely again. I was unused to recoveries like that and it took almost all summer for me to get accustomed to the fact that we were going to be all right after all.
3
Rondua returned. Pepsi and I rode across uninterrupted plains, seated comfortably on the heads of the animals. There were salmon-colored pyramids in the distance which contrasted sharply with the still-black volcanic ground we passed over.
Felina the Wolf told us the story of her ancestors; of how they rose from the sea as red fish and gave their scales back once they had reached land. It turned out that all of the animals in Rondua had metamorphosed from one species to another when they came here. Clever Pepsi asked if we would have to change too, now that we were here. Mr. Tracy, his velvety hat glued to his bobbing head, said we already had.
Martio the Camel often acted as tour guide, pointing out blue pterodactyls that flew in the distance one morning, telling us to watch closely, another day as the sun began to split in half to mark the end of another Ronduan month.
Many of those early dreams were long, panoramic views of the countryside. There was conversation, but I often lost track of what was being said because I was more interested in what I was seeing. Also, I later realized I paid more attention to the countryside because I already knew many of the stories. Like jokes we hear and then forget until someone begins telling them again, I could have interrupted the animals many times and told my son what came next: how the mountains had learned to run, why only rabbits were allowed pencils, when the birds had decided to become all one color. This knowledge notwithstanding. I still hadn't a _clue_ of why we were in Rondua.
Our first summer back in America moved by with a genial smile on its face and despite New York's torturing heat and humidity, we got used to the pace and once-familiar way of life. It was nice to be able to go to the newest movies that were once again in a language we didn't have to battle to understand. There were bookstores and museum exhibits, and once a week my mother and I would sneak off for lunch at one of those expensive restaurants where all the waiters and waitresses were beautiful, but the food tasted the same whether it was supposed to be Turkish or Cantonese.
To my embarrassment, I grew bigger and bigger. I once asked Danny if it were possible to give birth to the Graf Zeppelin. He said it was more likely to be a fourteen-pound Hershey bar.
Sometimes, but only sometimes, I thought about the boy in my dreams and wondered if we would have a son. Then what would I do? Name him Pepsi James? No. We discussed names for the child and decided on «Walker» for a boy, «Mae» for a girl. Both of us liked old-fashioned names.
I bought five books on how to bring up a child and so many baby clothes that Danny thought I secretly knew I was due to give birth to triplets, but hadn't told him yet.
On the night of the birth, we watched television until about eleven and then went to bed. A few hours later I woke up, wet and uncomfortable. My water had broken, but both of us were calm and ready as we gathered my bags and headed for the hospital.
The doctor was nice, the labor horrible . . . and the baby came out wailing, red and looking like some kind of live ripe fruit. Mae James. They cleaned her up and put her in my arms for a little while. I was in that euphoria you feel just after a baby is born; right before the pain and exhaustion return in tidal waves. On first glance, she looked pretty tough and spry. Danny appeared out of nowhere and stood on the other side of the room, shy and beaming like a lightbulb.
«Come over here, Pop, and see your daughter.»
He started over, his long arms already stretching out for her. Suddenly I felt this tremendous «whoosh» of fatigue washing over me and I blacked out.
Danny later told me he looked at me at the last moment and luckily guessed I was a breath away from dropping our brand-new child on the floor. He lunged and caught her at the last second.
I woke up in Rondua, my head on Pepsi's lap.
«Mommy, you slept so _long_!»
In the dream I _knew_ I had just given birth, but I was dressed as before and my body felt fine and fit. I was ready to move on once again. I sat up and looked toward the mountains of Coin and Brick which, it we were lucky, we would be crossing in a few days. Beyond that, I didn't know where we were going. None of the animals were willing to talk about it.
Martio and Felina stood a few feet away, a giant camel and wolf calmly waiting for the sign from us to go. They were so large they blocked out a great deal of the sky from where I was sitting.
«All right, Cullen is awake. Now we can head for the mountains.» Mr. Tracy sat nearby, his soft eyes set on the faraway cliffs.
«Is it because of Mae, Mr. Tracy? Are we going over there because of the baby?»
«Cullen, you have three questions that you can ask. You've already asked two, and the answers weren't important. They weren't necessary. Your third question may be very helpful to Pepsi later, so be careful.»
He waited tor my reply, knowing I wouldn't waste this third, _my_ third question on something like this. It seemed like a question that would be answered in time once we got there, we'd know. I would have to think long and carefully before asking the third.
«Our shortest way is across the plains, but that's also the most dangerous. What should we do?»
The question was addressed to me, and three animals and a little boy waited for my answer.
I looked out across them and could barely make out, flat miles away, the dim but ominous shapes of the Forgotten Machines. Inventions from an age when anything mechanical was considered both positive and magical, they had once easily turned stone into steel; green plants into medicine, cloth, brown fuel. Abandoned later because of failed dreams or newer and better combinations, they had been left to stop and die. But they hadn't. Machines don't die . . . they wait. Like so many other things in Rondua, they had simply appeared there one day.