The Boy Read Free

conquer regions Anna had never even surveyed: the voice never raised, the complaint never dismissed, the extra hour spent in the service of some unsophisticated understanding, some low epiphany.
    “Eva, my most precious thing, this is called a road. In the old days, this is where people walked. Today, this is where cars run. Big cars. Fast cars. Can you see them, darling?” or, “Eva, sweetheart, this is a knife. It has a handle, see? You can hold it by the handle. But this? This part is called the blade and it’s sharp. It can cut you, see?” and on that occasion, with unaccountable acumen, he ran the little girl’s thumb ever so slightly over the processed steel edge, leaving her with a clear sense of sharpness without even the intimation of a cut. Anna witnessed several similar procedures—her breath caught in her throat, her hand extended in urgent, unarticulated plea—but not once had the little girl come away injured, or even remotely troubled. The implicit threat of passing vehicles, the unsympathetic nature of sharp objects, the deep danger of edges—curbs, embankments, balconies, shores—all acquired proper significance in Eva’s mind without a single yank, pull, or shout.
    But that had come later, much, much later. For the longest time, for what to Anna seemed an ice age, the evolving circuitry in Eva’s brain had a single, largely silent observer: her. The first months were by far the worst. At the end of a night she would remember as Hangman’s Night, a cry so fractured escaped her baby’s lips that Anna looked on the pale glow spreading over the garden below as if on the advance of cancer on a living body.
    The cry, so disconsolate, so deep, marked a turning point in Anna’s life, a moment in which absence, and not presence, laid greater claim to the marrow of things, and nothing—not the stirring of life among the leaves, not the faithful turning of the sun, not the punctual pandemonium of dawn on the equator—would ever be counted on to subvert that basic chemistry again. She’d been warned about postpartum depression, but when that implacable darkness hardened into a dumb malevolence, Anna found herself questioning the very existence of light.
    She put the nannies in charge and hit the road then, returning from a magazine assignment three weeks later to a baby she barely recognized. She bounded up the stairs and ran to the crib, crushing Eva into her arms, whispering, “Mamma’s back, my love, Mamma’s back,” only to have a howl of high-pitched protest split the night—and cleave her heart in two.
    Ten days later, she was gone again. There was no breathless return this time. She climbed the stairs slowly, wondering if Eva had sprouted hair in the month she’d been away. Mother and daughter studied each other silently, Eva sitting upright by that stage, a streak of ice in her blue eyes as Anna rummaged in her bag for a tambourine-like instrument plucked out of the steaming bowels of Congo. She handed it over with a queasy smile.
    “Here,” she said. “Shake it.” Eva closed her chubby fingers on the edge of the tambourine, held it suspiciously aloft, then brought it down with a clank onto her head. The scream that followed was operatic, nothing Anna was prepared for. Both nannies came rushing in. “What have you been feeding her?” Anna asked them before she left the room.
    Funny. Funny how quickly and efficiently Anna had buried those first years, how fact had turned into pure fiction. Out of those lost latitudes, a single shard of uncontaminated evidence kept surfacing with perverse regularity: a black-and-white photograph of Eva gazing down at a cake with two candles (one for good luck) taken by her father as Anna stood in a swirl of desert dust on the roof of some abandoned building, trying to place a call.
    “Why’d you bother having her?” Eva’s father said when she got back. Anna pulled the vodka out of the freezer.
    “I tried calling. No one picked up the