Sleeping in Flame

I had never asked if she wished she were an architect and not a visionary in miniature. You always come up with questions to ask when the person isn't around to answer. She believed in magic and she believed in God. But what did she think of heaven and hell? Did she want a boy or a girl for her first child? What things did I do that got on her nerves but she never told me about? What could I do to make it better?

There was a drawing for a clown museum in the form of a magician's hat, a villa by the sea shaped like a woman's hand opening toward the water.

Written below one drawing was the quote from the Jon Silkin poem I'd given her.

And I shall always fear

The death of those we love as

The hint of your death, Love.

Under another, a drawing of a church, was written "The opposite of love was always disappearance." Patricia Geary.

Both Maris and I were inveterate quotation collectors, but what did this one mean? I wanted to turn and ask, but she wasn't there. She wasn't there and never would be again in my life if I did what my father demanded.

How would he make me "die"? What would Maris do after that? Was he to be believed when he said she'd remain true to me for the rest of her life? At first the thought was comforting, but then I realized how utterly selfish it was to desire that. Did he think I would be at peace knowing the person I loved most was living out the rest of her days on "hold," believing there was no other possibility of fulfillment for her?

What a hateful, evil being he was.

I kept looking at the drawings until I got tired.

"One more."

That "one more" was so interesting that I looked at three more.

The fourth would have been the last, but the fourth was the fruit. The fruit that, once inhaled, gave off an answer the way an orange explodes from a color into a world of smells once you have punctured its skin.

It was a drawing of a city. A medieval city, or perhaps one much older. I have never been very good at history, but this city I knew. It was the Vie

"Another city. A city you have forgotten."

I knew the streets, the buildings. I knew the sounds in the air that were the city on any summer day. Her drawing was a series of lines and curves, pillars, statues, fountains, buildings. It was my city and where it had come from in Maris could only be attributed to love.

When you love someone deeply, you know secrets they haven't told you yet. Or secrets they aren't even aware of themselves. I had used no magic on Maris. Not that I knew how to use the meager powers I still unconsciously held. This I knew for sure. I'd not bewitched or bedazzled her into loving me. I'd only hoped and worked for her love, knowing that that is the hardest work in life. I loved her for what she was, I loved her for what she was becoming. I couldn't imagine a time in life together when I would turn and think "This is wrong. She isn't the person I loved. She isn't the person I hoped she was." Maris was the person I wanted to share my life with. She was also the person I wanted to share the trivia of my life with, because that too is part of the magic of concern: Whatever you live is important to them and they will help you through it.

Because I knew her so we'll, I was sure this was how she felt, too. The picture in front of me attested to this, and if our world hadn't already been so filled with equal measures of wonder and abomination, I would have been a very frightened man because of what I saw on the monitor. She had entered a part of my mind that even I owned no key or code word to.

The drawing took up almost the whole screen, but typed small in one corner were the words "Breathing you on your birthday, Walker. I love you." It was the city she'd meant to build for me as a birthday present. What she didn't know was she'd created the city where I had begun. Her love had taken over, however unconsciously, and showed me not only the city, but where to walk through it to find my father's name. My second father.

I had one more dream before I left Vie

My father had rented a villa on Lake Maggiore in northern Italy for the month of July. It was an old su

I'd discovered how fashionable a suntan was to the big kids. So since there wasn't much else to do, I sat a long time in the sun trying to dye my skin as brown as possible and look to see if I knew anybody on the boats whizzing by. We only had a month on the lake because Daddy had to be back at work the begi

Even though the weather was usually nice and su

The room was yellow. All the furniture was yellow, and I think even the lights were yellow. Daddy said the furniture was by Art Deco, but I didn't know who that was. The important thing was every chair in there was fat and round and friendly. You could fall into them from any position and be comfortable. My favorite I'd secretly named "Sinbad" and everyone knew it was my chair. People even got up and gave it to me when I came in. Sinbad and I were friends. When the storms were blowing and hissing like a monster, we'd leave the doors to the patio open because Daddy liked to watch the rain go sideways, not down, outside. The wind blew it in all kinds of crazy directions and sometimes I got scared, but not really.

The best part of the storms was when they got really bad, Daddy always came into the living room, and sitting down at the piano there, would begin playing along to the rain and thunder. He played the piano very beautifully and knew thousands of different songs and classical music. With every bang of thunder he banged out something nice on the piano. When the rain or the wind blew the curtains up high, he played music by a man named Delius who wrote music that sounded like the rain. Daddy said playing the piano like that was taming the storm, and I never had to be afraid of any storm he could play to.

Since I was always the biggest scaredy cat about the storms, I was always the first one in the living room with my comics or coloring book or whatever I was working on at the time. But sooner or later my brother Ingram, or Mommy, would come in too, and all three of us would listen to the rain and Daddy playing the piano, and it would be like living in heaven for me. There we all were – safe and protected and cozy in the middle of the storm, surrounded by yellow light and my Daddy's music. That was the best part of the summer.

"How long will you be gone?"

"I think only three days. It depends on the production. They told me three days."

She looked at me accusingly. "What if I have problems?"