By Light We Knew Our Names Read online

  Jane and Travis laugh, and Ben pulls off the blindfold and grins. Sasha’s mom snaps a picture of the first attempt, and she readies her camera as the others spin Jane first, then Travis, Jane’s tail landing somewhere near the dinosaur’s elongated belly, Travis’s resting on its head like longhorns.

  There is so much laughter in the room that Sasha almost feels ready for her turn. But when her father places the blindfold soft against her eyes, she shuts them tight to blink back the possibility of tears, and with them, the slimmest of chances that she will find her way to the right spot.

  But when she moves her feet ahead, unsteady beneath the tail’s surprising weight, she walks only a few steps before her hands make contact with the wall. She feels for the cardboard, for the rough texture of the brown paint her father used to construct the dinosaur. She holds the tail above her head and presses it firmly against the board, and as soon as she does, the room erupts in claps and cheers.

  Sasha pulls the blindfold away from her eyes, and in front of her the tail aligns in perfect symmetry with the brontosaurus’s body. Her face breaks into a smile, and her friends crowd around and hug her while her mother takes pictures, and her father admires the tail she’s placed upon his unfinished game board, now complete, the dinosaur intact.

  Sasha’s mother puts on a short cartoon for them to watch while she and Sasha’s father prepare the cake in the other room. It is a birthday cartoon, Winnie-the-Pooh’s special celebration, and it is only when all four children are settled into the couch cushions, eyes rapt on the television, that Sasha feels all the tension inside her start to melt away, pooling into a puddle she can almost see. Ben looks over at her, and squeezes her on the shoulder and smiles, and it is then that Sasha sees his planets begin to spin, the crown of his head glowing as if it were the sun.

  Ben, your planets, Sasha whispers, and he looks over at her and smiles, I know.

  But my parents—she starts to say, until she looks at Jane and Travis, and sees Jane’s librarian peeking out of her shirt pocket, Travis’s fishbowl illuminated to reveal a chambered nautilus ambling through the water.

  But they’ll see! Sasha whispers, a little louder this time before she catches herself, peeks over the back of the couch at her parents in the kitchen, who are oblivious, cutting the daisy cake.

  But neither Ben, nor Jane, nor Travis respond at all. They only look at her and smile, knowing smiles that place her on the outside of what they collectively seem to know.

  Winnie-the-Pooh was created by A.A. Milne, after his own son’s boyhood, the librarian says, poking out of Jane’s shirt pocket, his voice muffled by the fabric.

  Sasha stares at the librarian. Where does he sleep at night? she can’t help but ask, despite his strange smallness, despite Travis’s fishbowl and the slow-moving nautilus and her parents just beyond the couch in the other room.

  On a coaster on my nightstand, Jane says. He curls up and sleeps near my head.

  Sasha looks at her paisley gift, sitting on the table like a silent watchman as they look past it to the television, to Christopher Robin lighting birthday candles. She doesn’t know why, but she wants to know, now, what lies inside purple ribbons, beneath paisley layers.

  Maybe you can open your present now, Ben says, almost as if he’s read her mind, as if the planets spinning around his head have pulled her own thoughts into their gravitational orbit.

  But my parents—Sasha says again before she stops herself short, as the lights in the kitchen dim, as over the couch she sees her parents approaching the living room, turning off lights as they go, the cake a glowing lantern in her mother’s hands.

  They begin to sing happy birthday, all of them, and Sasha watches as the fishbowl, the planets, the librarian all fail to disappear. Her parents are almost to the living room now, the cartoon muted as they all sing loudly, and Sasha finds herself tethered to the couch, unable to speak or move, terrified at what her parents will find when the few steps before them become none. Sasha stares at Ben’s planets, at the small, ice-dust ring that encircles his Saturn, and in that moment her father’s voice is the only one she can hear, the low baritone of it, the way it wavers slightly off key maneuvering over the notes.

  Sasha’s parents step into the room and lower the cake before her, and as the candles waver and bend beneath her quickened breath, and the song ends, and the room erupts in another round of claps, Sasha looks up to see that her friends’ magic has not left the room, and even so, her parents have not flinched once.

  Sasha looks from her parents to her friends, all of them staring at her wide-eyed, smiling. And though she doesn’t understand the quick release that their expressions afford her, the way she feels her rib cage melt into itself and relax, she bows her head toward the candles and blows, extinguishing all seven candles in one cathartic breath.

  Her mother begins to cut the cake, squaring off the corner piece just for Sasha, the one with the most frosting. Sasha looks at Ben’s planets, the librarian leaning far out of Jane’s pocket toward the cake, at a snail dragging its muscled foot across the glass of Travis’s belly, and she wonders if maybe her parents just can’t see them, until her father bends his face near Travis’s fishbowl and taps his finger against the snail.

  Big fellow there, Sasha’s dad says. Ever get any turtles in here?

  Sasha stares at her dad, then back at Travis. Her dad looks over at her and smiles, though he says nothing, only grabs the paisley present from the table and places it in her hands.

  There is a reason you stay too, Sasha, Travis says, his hands around his fishbowl like a watermelon. And it’s not because your mom and dad work late.

  Sasha isn’t entirely sure yet that she knows what he means, or even why he’s chosen this moment to say it. But her mom stops cutting the cake and gives Sasha the same smile that her father has, and it’s then that Sasha knows she’ll never again carry the fully wrapped package to bed, and that now is the time she must tear away the paisley paper.

  What is it? she can’t help asking, even though her fingers hover over the purple ribbons, even though she could tear away the paper this second and find out for herself.

  Her parents look at one another, exchange a glance Sasha can’t quite decipher.

  We don’t know, her mother finally says. It’s up to you, really.

  Sasha looks down at the gift, and before she can let herself question this any more, wonder what’s inside or even determine what her mother means, she rips away the ribbon and pulls back the paper, its give not like torn skin as she’d imagined but more like the give of cotton candy wisps, pulled lightly from cardboard sticks.

  What lies inside, curled in a small ball beneath the box’s tissue paper, is a baby giraffe, hooves dark, mouth open in a yawn, tongue outstretched and purple.

  Sasha looks up at her parents, who look back at her smiling still, their faces warm, her mother reaching across the coffee table to grab the camera for more pictures. The giraffe stands on shaky legs inside the box and blinks about the room, until its long-lashed eyes settle on the smaller presents her friends have brought, and it wobbles to the table and bites through the packaging. Sasha gasps, from embarrassment or shock, until she sees that the small packages contain apples, some carrots, small portions of oats for the giraffe to consume.

  We didn’t know what they’d be either, Ben says, gesturing toward the half-eaten packages, his planets nearly glowing across his forehead. They’re meant to help. You know, with whatever your gift ended up being.

  Sasha considers the mystery of this package, beyond its strange newness, and beyond what her parents and her friends already seem to know. She looks for a moment around the room, at what her friends’ secrets maybe say about them. Ben has always been good at solar sciences in her class, and Jane is her grade’s best reader. Sasha doesn’t know much about Travis, but thinks that he must love the ocean, all the creatures that float through its salty waters. Sasha looks at the baby giraffe jumping awkwardly around the room, licking her mother
’s hair and peering into Travis’s glass belly, and though she desperately wishes to know, she has no idea what this small creature says about her.

  But later that night, after her friends have given her hugs and gone home, after her parents have tucked her into bed and kissed her forehead and after she’s finally thrown away the paisley paper, the purple string sticking out of their kitchen trash can like confetti, Sasha falls asleep with her arms encircling the giraffe’s neck. The baby giraffe yawns and settles into its own separate sleep, and though Sasha still doesn’t understand her new gift, its size taking up almost her entire bed, she thinks its purple tongue feels like a lullaby on her nose, soft and warm, and its height, the tallest secret she’s ever wanted to keep.

  DEAR AMELIA

  We imagined you from the shore, our hands pulling in lobster traps, seared red by the rope. We first knew of you in proximity, all those miles of water we squinted across to glimpse the sheen of metal wings buoyed, weightless in flight. We waited always for the newspaper, our Maine coast remote and cast off from the regularity of radio waves, and felt the weight lift in our chests on the news of yours—your small fluttering heart, pounding hard above Newfoundland, tracking ceaselessly, endlessly, determinedly east.

  We followed your first transatlantic flight, how you derbied from California to Cleveland. We scanned the smudged headlines for you as the July sun threw its northern heat against our backs. We dreamed of you from the restless damp of summer-soaked sheets, a heat still calming as the cold threat of war blew through our windows, drifting slowly toward our coast from the trampled soil of other lands. And we thought of you from the quiet of the docks, where we heaved in trap after trap while our fathers cast themselves out to sea, and while our mothers watched us silently from the kitchen windows, placing dishes back in cupboards. We felt their gazes bore into us, as searing as summer sun, waiting for what was ursine within us to take its slow, lumbering shape.

  Our mothers sensed the war coming in the keen coil of their ears. They heard it in the low hum of easterly winds blown across our yards, rattling clotheslines, something minor and mournful, their ears pricked in animal instinct to danger, one of many secrets they kept. We saw the way they paused while passing salt shakers across the dinner table, a nearly imperceptible hiatus, and how they looked up sometimes while knitting as if they’d heard the call of a doorbell no one else detected. And then those brief lapses became long stretches of listening, disguised as daydreams so our fathers would never notice, so they’d remind our mothers only to get back to dishwashing, to stop their foolish reveries and resume the hardened pace of work.

  But we knew. We knew enough to keep quiet. We knew to never tell our fathers, though we barely knew anything ourselves, and to silence the growing gauntlet within us toward what we were, though none of us wanted to know. We continued to watch the headlines. At night we stirred, awake, forcing everything from our minds but monoplanes, the glint of your tail wing fading east. And during the day, while we pulled trap upon trap from the ocean, the only work we’d ever known, we tried not to look at each lobster, at the hardened exoskeletons of their bodies and how they summoned envy from our own. To sink into the sea, to appropriate their shells. To be everything they were, calm crustaceans, instead of the inevitability of what other animal we would become.

  Our mothers evaded explanation. They left truth to hearsay. We’d heard all our lives about a tribe of Maine black bears, a vicious clan hiding deep inside the woods. Part human, part ursine. Born of the same strands of American legend as the Jersey Devil, as Blackbeard’s ghost upon the shore. We’d told their tale to each other as children and scared ourselves to sleep while mirages of claws and fur whirled above our beds, the dreamed smoke of myth that dissipated at dawn. We’d heard of sightings at the misted tree line, of congregated furs so dark they appeared only as phantoms to those who’d seen them, to fishermen and hunters, to lone hikers trekking through wood.

  Our parents sandboxed our play to the corners of the yard. Their eyes scanned the shadowed edge of forest beyond our neighborhoods, we always thought for wolves or for moose. Our fathers thought so too, but not our mothers, we somehow knew. In the clarity of hindsight, we remember their glances, the way their eyes slid away. We remember how they packed up picnic dinners early, cleared sweating glasses of sun tea from the table, put away plates and forks as the sun splintered at the tree line and sank slowly into the woods. We remember our early bedtimes, being tucked in well before the hushed sky broke its own silence with stars. We remember how on the nights when we couldn’t sleep and crept down the hall for a glass of water, we saw our mothers standing at the windows watching the woods, their arms wrapped tightly across their chests as if to gate themselves inside.

  We first intuited what we were as we watched your first solo flight, your Lockheed Vega wavering through ice and wind toward the blinking lights of Paris. We held our breath as you took off from Newfoundland, 932 miles to our northeast according to our fathers’ nautical maps, and we felt the distance between our two coasts collapse, your pioneered path mirroring the shaken ground of our own. As your single-engine plane skyrocketed steadily over the ocean, we too charted new territory, a shuddering stretch beyond our bounds, a secret we guarded closer than blood.

  Our bodies were changing, in ways we never expected. We’d learned in middle school of breast growth, of height spurts, hormones that sprouted unwanted hair. We recognized the discarded wads in the girls’ bathroom, wrapped in toilet paper and stained darker than mud. We overheard our classmates’ quiet discussions outside the earshot of boys, of how their mothers had bought them training brassieres, how they knew not to wear white skirts to school. These were things we expected, changes we’d learned would come. But we didn’t anticipate the coarse brown hair growing steadily up our midline, across the once-smooth skin of our bellies and chests. We leveled ourselves confused in our own mirrors, sidled close to the reflection, and pried our lips open to inspect our growing teeth, sharp points we concealed in the school cafeteria by chewing with our mouths closed. We kept nail files in our backpacks, just like every other girl, but we concealed our hands beneath our desks and whittled away while our teachers spoke, at fingernails that grew into harsh, razored peaks no matter how vigorously we scraped. We rejoiced when our periods at last came, the mottled red of our panty lines a blemish to keep, some talisman to hold that we were normal like everyone else. But when they came only once and dried up, when we realized the following spring that an unexpected stain would blot our clothes just once each year, we locked the secret tight and lied in the locker room, laughed and complained with the other girls about unwanted spots and stockpiled rags. At home we shaved our chests in the privacy of the shower, hair that always grew back, and we never thought to ask our mothers why, our cheeks scarlet with a metronome pulse of shame.

  We watched you with hope, Amelia, that your journey somehow paralleled ours. That you set off for Paris and landed in Ireland, so far afield from what you’d imagined, a foreign terrain that must have looked strange to you when you at last stepped from the plane. We consumed the headlines, the small print detailing your unanticipated trajectory, and our chests pounded the solidarity of transference that in the end, your path still kept you safe.

  We followed your feats, your stunts and races. Our bodies drifted from middle school to high school, expanded into lockered corridors and musty classrooms, and all the while we kept ourselves guarded. We changed in gym class after other girls had left, trading tardiness to our next classes for unashamed solace, and some of us even took our nail files to teeth, tried to grind our incisors down to rounded stubs. We glued our gaze to the printed word of your flights from Honolulu to Oakland, from Los Angeles to Mexico City, landscapes we’d never see but imagined as sun-tinted and bright, a warm glow from the west that washed a calm over our coast. We considered what the ocean would look like at sunset and not sunrise, an orange disk sinking into the cool black rather than rising from hazed ash. We conti
nued to pull in lobsters after school, sometimes in the gray morning of before, and at times imagined our hands encircled not around braided rope, but around the thin curve of a steering wheel as our cockpit rose in flight.

  And then the headlines changed, as gradually as your ascents. We began to learn the terse details of your first around-the-world flight, smaller spots alongside larger stories of invasions and civil wars, those headlines blared in deeper black. Our mothers read alongside us, over coffee before we left for class, then over our shoulders after school when we took breaks from the docks, when we came inside for water and flipped through the papers still scattered across the table. They said nothing but we felt them waiting—for what, we didn’t know. But as we returned to the docks and pulled in more traps, we felt our hands leave the rope and slide wistfully over the shape of each lobster, the glean of hard backs so unlike our furred chests.

  And then that spring, snow still blanketing our town as the equinox came and went, your plane shuttled toward its first attempt around the world and ground-looped, immediately, in Pearl Harbor. We saw grained images of the plane spinning in tight circles, a cyclone across the runway before you ever took flight. The associated press speculated a blown tire, collapsed landing gear, possibly pilot error. We raged inside ourselves at the reporters, at the suggestion that you were at fault, that you, a pioneer, a lone diamond among shale, could err. We knew you as human, as fallible as any, but that there were no mistakes in windows slim as these, for you or for us. As your flight was called off, your plane shipped back to Burbank, we blistered our hands raw against the rough-worn rope. We sank traps back to sea, threw lobsters in bins, watched how their antennae mapped the shape of unfamiliar ground. Some of us even stopped shaving our chests over the span of days when your news no longer appeared, because what was the point, in the end, of ignoring an inevitability, a window closed.