As newly discovered best friends, my daughter Audra and a ponytailed third-grade classmate were enjoying the instant intimacy of those who share the same aspirations—to possess a horse, pierced ears, and the ability to do a split. 

It was the first time Audra had been invited to visit, and as we were leaving, Linda and her mother invited us to admire a pair of mourning doves, which in the confines of a homemade coop in Linda’s backyard, had produced two perfect ivory eggs. The nesting birds seemed to be juveniles, so they were somewhat small, their gray and white feathers as soft as mink, their fragile bodies sleek and without substance. 

Built on a high shelf attached to the back of their house, the nest had been enclosed with three walls and a roof of chicken wire. The girls stood on cinderblocks to see into it. “Is it really all right for the two of them to be inside the enclosure?” I asked Linda’s mother. She was a science teacher, which made me feel devoid of practical skills and undereducated, but I hoped we might become friends. 

“Oh, sure,” Mrs. Hall replied, distracted. Her two-year-old son Jaimie was using a blue-flowered fistful of her skirt as a tether, weaving around her knees. He crashed into her legs periodically to entertain himself, then swung away again on an elliptical orbit. 

“Linda goes in there all the time. She’s so excited about having baby birds,” our hostess explained.

As we continued to watch the girls through the honeycomb of chicken wire, the doves became increasingly active, fluttering, and repositioning themselves. Linda jumped down from the cinderblocks with a soft thud and joined her mother outside the enclosure, doing a little dance in the spring grass, chatting away about what she planned to name the fledglings. Still in the enclosure, Audra continued to gaze into the nest, her forearms anchoring her precariously to the wooden shelf. Though she would never ask, I imagined she wished to adopt one of the birds when they hatched. I’d once had a similar longing. 

When I was five, searching for arrowheads along the pasture fence, I glimpsed a flash of Bermuda blue in the grass. I knelt, parting sticks and leaves to get a better look. A robin’s egg—as blue as a jay’s wing, as blue as the April sky.

With one finger, I touched the smooth turquoise surface. Warm. With mounting excitement, I nudged the delicate treasure to one side. Unbroken—still protecting the tiniest and most fragile of hearts. I picked it up and struck out for home, the rhythmic thrumming of my corduroy overalls resonating like someone blowing through paper pressed to a comb. 

Slipping in the backdoor, I ran upstairs and laid the egg in a bed of Kleenex which I then placed on a Thom McCann shoebox directly under the hall nightlight. The bulb emitted just enough heat to keep the egg warm, and I went in search of my overworked mother to assure her I’d be responsible for my impending offspring. That night I went to bed unable to stop talking (girl-joy, admit it, you still do that), imagining how great it would be when I taught my bird to ride on my shoulder and to speak. 

At daybreak, I hopped out of bed and padded down the hall on bare feet to check on the egg. To my horror, the nightlight had been turned off sometime after I’d gone to sleep. The egg was stone cold. That afternoon I buried my charge at the base of the play yard swing set, the only witness to my inability to protect a life for which I’d taken responsibility. 

I thanked Linda’s mom one last time and told Audra we had to go. Her little brother was waiting at home; I’d left a lasagna in the oven. As she retreated reluctantly from the nest, her worn tennis shoes slipped from the cinderblocks, and she was thrown off balance, grasping instinctively for the shelf as she fell. In slow motion, the entire arrangement broke away from the wall. The air was filled with beating wings; there was a crash, a child cried out. 

As the chaos settled, I scanned the wreckage. A yellow yolk was sliding down the side of the house, and Audra, frozen in remorse and embarrassment, was staring in horror at the toe of her shoe. The remaining egg lay broken in the canvas creases. 

Linda’s eyes met no one else’s as she reeled in closer to her mother. I tried to touch Audra through the wire wall separating us as apologies and absolutions were offered on the breeze. 

“Look, Linda,” said Mrs. Hall after a few excruciating moments.

“These eggs were never fertilized!” She was examining Audra’s shoe with a clinical eye. “They would never have hatched. Maybe next time.”

We’d be friends, all right. I already loved her.

Apologizing again, unable to do anything but carry our remorse with us, Audra and I walked to the sanctuary of our second-hand Volvo. She moved with deliberate dignity as if she could do penance for this disaster by never making another spontaneous movement. She was uncharacteristically polite and arranged herself with formality on the front seat. 

I was afraid to touch the fragile shell of her composure on the ride home. We spoke of practical matters, and finally, I told her about the lost robin’s egg that was as blue as her eyes and over which I had spun dreams. I wanted to take some of her disappointment from her by demonstrating I already had a place for it. 

We pulled into our gravel driveway. Getting carefully out of the car, my daughter informed me that she had some things she’d like to do in her room and climbed the stairs with the self-conscious posture of an 8-year-old penitent. 

Later that night, I checked on her on my way to bed. She was asleep, silky brown hair against her pillow, the white down comforter a rumpled heap that had fallen to the floor. 

I stood there imagining that love is a force field. That the ferocious, abiding love we feel for our children, and sometimes extend to each other, could ward off every hurt. But that’s not how it works, of course. Hurt is the heart’s tenderizer. And it’s necessary. How can you be moved to assuage someone else’s pain if you’ve never experienced your own?

I lifted the comforter from the floor and covered her then, still intent on nurturing something breathtakingly fragile that might one day take flight. 

Laura J. Oliver is an award-winning developmental book editor and writing coach, who has taught writing at the University of Maryland and St. John’s College. She is the author of The Story Within (Penguin Random House). Co-creator of The Writing Intensive at St. John’s College, she is the recipient of a Maryland State Arts Council Individual Artist Award in Fiction, an Anne Arundel County Arts Council Literary Arts Award winner, a two-time Glimmer Train Short Fiction finalist, and her work has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize. Her website can be found here.

The six of us gathered in a wide open field shouldered by forests—the brown of winter surrendering to spring’s tender green. On the staff of a regional magazine, I was accompanying a feature writer we’d hired on a hot air balloon flight over the patchwork of farms that comprise Maryland’s eastern shore. A new day blushed on the horizon. The balloon, Azure Mountains Majesty, was spread out on the ground uninflated but was already attached to the basket and burner, her crew getting her ready to rise. It looked safe enough. 

We were a small group, which included Bruce (our pilot), the writer, publisher, and chase car crew. The air carried the scent of magnolia blossoms from the south, but spring was in her infancy, and assuming it would be cooler aloft, I wore jeans, sneakers, and a rose-colored SPCA volunteer t-shirt beneath a gray sweater. 

A fan began blowing pristine morning air into the nylon envelope, inflating it above the tethered gondola until the balloon stood upright, magnificent in all her glory. A pattern of linked violet triangles in varying heights encircled her against a yellow and peach background –much like distant mountains at sunrise—much like stained glass. 

We climbed awkwardly into the wicker gondola, standing in closer proximity to each other than we might have otherwise, like strangers in an elevator. Our pilot, blond, cheerful, in his early forties, climbed aboard as well, fired the propane burner, ordered the crew to release the tethers, and we began our ascent. 

Sound is a pressure wave moving through a medium—in the case of an earthquake, earth– in this case, air. So, while our planet is a rich soundscape, as you travel up it gets quieter and quieter until in space, with only 10 atoms to be found in a cubic meter, sound disappears. 

We weren’t going that high, but as the balloon rose higher and higher, we spoke less and less. Eventually the few comments were only murmurs, whispers. Bisected by roads, miles of farmland lay beneath us waiting to become lush fields of corn, emerald soybeans, and golden wheat. 

At cruising altitude, we stopped speaking altogether. We had entered a church, a temple of air. Far, far below we could see the chase car, flying without sound along back country roads to keep up, and a fox, flowing plume of a tail, racing silently through the rows of corn stalks, but it was as if we had entered a cathedral, our silence the held breath of a congregation before the benediction. Maybe we embodied a benediction. In the face of perfection, the heart holds only goodwill. 

The pilot fired the burner from time to time to keep us aloft, the soft whoosh of flame periodically interrupting the silence. Movement without sound. It made me think of the month I watched Halley’s comet transit the earth, sailing in silence through the solar system. It made me think of falling stars. We traveled at the speed of the wind; therefore, we felt no wind.  Einstein was right, everything is relative. The speed of light, the speed of sound, the frequency of memory.

There is an anomaly, however, where silence unexpectedly imprisons the chaos of noise on the ground.  These places are called “sound shadows.” Places where sound being generated in plain sight is inaudible. It’s intriguing because our senses tell us that what we can see we should be able to hear, yet this isn’t always so. One sound shadow is in downtown Tulsa. Dubbed, “The Center of the Universe,” it is a small concrete circle set within a larger circle of bricks in a town square. Bizarrely, if you stand in the center and speak, or even shout, a distortion of your words echoes back to you, yet they are inaudible to people just yards outside the circle.

This same phenomenon caused the decimation of troops in multiple battles in the Civil War.  Gettysburg, Seven Pines, Five Forks, Perryville. Commanders relying on being able to hear nearby battles begin in order to time the sending of reinforcements, waited just out of sight, perhaps a mile away, in utter silence, oblivious to the fact that the raging battles were already underway. 

Witnesses looking just across the valley at the battle of Gaines’s Mill, for instance, could see the advance of the Confederate army, could watch 50,000 soldiers in bloody conflict for over two hours, and yet not hear a sound, as if they were watching through glass. 

On the shore the sun was rising, the air heating up, and Azure Mountains Majesty needed to descend. It was going well, the chase car close. “Hang on to something,” Bruce advised. “Sometimes things get a little rough.”  I reached for a strut just as we hit a thermal, dropped fast and seconds later slammed into the ground. The basket tipped, dragged another 20 yards, regained some buoyancy, still flying just feet above the earth, and hit hard again, like a stone skipped on a lake. When we finally came to rest, I was hurt but embarrassed and didn’t want to show it. Thrown off his feet, the writer’s body had crushed us both against the side of the gondola and I’d bitten my lip. I did what I always seem to do when I’m hurt. Thanked everyone. (I know, I know.) But my appreciation was genuine—we’d just left church. 

Although we were strangers, we’d just taken communion. 

Is gratitude the medium through which love travels? Or like light does it fill the cosmos because that’s all there is?  Maybe love can’t be diminished. Once experienced, it can only grow. 

I have a theory. The love of untold civilizations, the affection of hearts more numerous than stars in the sky, is a never-ending energy radiating up towards the heavens from this sound-filled planet.

Hold your breath. Listen closely. If I were to say I love you, could you hear me now?

Laura J. Oliver is an award-winning developmental book editor and writing coach, who has taught writing at the University of Maryland and St. John’s College. She is the author of The Story Within (Penguin Random House). Co-creator of The Writing Intensive at St. John’s College, she is the recipient of a Maryland State Arts Council Individual Artist Award in Fiction, an Anne Arundel County Arts Council Literary Arts Award winner, a two-time Glimmer Train Short Fiction finalist, and her work has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize. Her website can be found here.

 

Kaya stood in the upstairs hallway staring down the steps that lead to the living room like it was a black diamond run in Park City. At 12 years old, she was near the end for a Labrador retriever, and I’d been mourning her death since she had turned 11 and started showing signs of age—like being suddenly afraid to descend the stairs even though she was healthy and very much alive. I do this—prepare to cut my losses if I can see an end is inevitable.

Previously I’d found her on alert in the upstairs bathroom barking at the closed shower curtain and I’d thought she’d trapped a burglar in the house. “Good girl!” I whispered from the hallway. I then crept in and dashed the curtain aside as if that was the sensible thing to do had there been a fully clothed man standing in the tub. Kaya just blinked at the porcelain tiles and shampoo bottles and kept barking.

I realized then that she continually confused the doorway to the bathroom for the top of the stairs and by the time she realized her mistake, she couldn’t figure out how to turn around. I rescued her periodically, helping her back up like an 18-wheeler stuck on a dead-end street.

Because she was 12, I’d tried on for size in my imagination the pain of living without her loyal company and by loyal company I mean silky ears and the exuberant welcome home when I’d been gone 5 minutes. It was an effort to inoculate myself against inevitable loss by exposing myself to pain in low doses.

If you have ever loved someone you knew was destined to leave your life first—pet, parent, partner, lover, friend—you too, may have done this. It’s the opposite of looking forward to say, Thanksgiving with the family, or the annual vacation at the beach, this anticipatory grief.

And I’ve been doing this all my life not because someone I love is going to die but because I am.

It may be decades from now, but I’ve been careful not to love this life so much that I’ll regret or resist having to leave. It’s as if when I was born someone whispered, “You are going to love this world with all your heart, little baby, but don’t get too attached. The price of entry is the heartbreaking knowledge you can’t stay.”

A visceral awareness of my visitor’s status has permeated my entire life. It has made me acutely aware of the transitory nature of all things. The earth’s molten core will cool, the moon will escape her orbit, the sun will nova, and in a short one billion years, the planet will no longer sustain life. Oh, and relationships end, kids leave home, dogs die.

The heartbreaking reality is that everything you love is on loan.

Is it possible to live your whole life already gone? Only half here? Trying to avoid the grief of letting go? I may not be alone in this.

When we lived in New Zealand, my American friend Melinda and I visited a woman whose family owned one of the most successful businesses in the country. She too, was American, but she had married a Kiwi and made New Zealand her permanent home. Being that Melinda and I were both from the States, she asked each of us how long we planned to stay. Melinda said they’d moved to Auckland to raise their kids, they’d bought a house, and would be staying for the duration.

My family had come for an America’s Cup campaign, so my response was, “three years.” With total candor, this woman responded, “I ask because I’ve learned the hard way that I don’t want to become friends with someone who is going to leave.” I was deeply embarrassed. (Someone doesn’t want to be my friend! And she said so! Out loud!), but I was also impressed by her self-awareness. I was living the same way just covertly. I understood she and I would not be having coffee in the future, and therefore neither of us would regret my return to the States.

But the cost of my withholding was brought home to me by a tarot card reader. Hair in a beehive arrangement, glasses dangling on a chain, she spread the soft cottony cards on her kitchen table and studied them. Princesses fell on their heads from high towers, lightning bolts split hearts in two, and there was of course, at least one fool. Surveying my life in the cards with a practiced eye she took a puff on her cigarette and said, “Well, I don’t see any kickass joy.”

I was momentarily distracted from the truth of that statement by the term kickass. It sounded intense but belligerent. Joy as a bully. “Get out of the way people! Kickass joy coming through!”

But she was right. To allow kickass joy, I’d have to trust that what’s to come after each inevitable loss—after raising kids, after a career, after losing a soulmate, a love, after life itself—will be just as good as what is. I’d have to trust that loss itself is an illusion.

Seriously. Who does that? Can you?

I tried really hard to achieve this in 2006. Everything that could go wrong did go wrong that year. One of the kids became seriously ill, one decided to make her home overseas, my marriage hit an impasse, I quit a job I should have kept, and had a health scare of my own.

Looking back, it was the best year of my life.

Because that was the year I learned that those things were just circumstances and that circumstances change—it’s their nature– just as it is the nature of problems that they pass. So, I taught myself to source joy in something immutable, something unconditional. I unhinged joy from emotional attachment to people or situations. I loosened my grip. It took practice every minute of every day, but I became happy just because the universe exists. Anything beyond that was a bonus. And miraculously, in response, those circumstances improved.
But wait. An update.

You learn things, profound things, and then you forget! New circumstances blindside you, your heart breaks, and you have to learn not to be undone by grief all over again. When do lessons truly stick? When does momentarily insightful become permanently wise?

Maybe one of these days I’ll get it right. I’ll be all in. I’ll embrace the world fully even though I must let everything go. Even you.

If I’m ever that courageous I’ll tell kickass joy to come home.

Laura J. Oliver is an award-winning developmental book editor and writing coach, who has taught writing at the University of Maryland and St. John’s College. She is the author of The Story Within (Penguin Random House). Co-creator of The Writing Intensive at St. John’s College, she is the recipient of a Maryland State Arts Council Individual Artist Award in Fiction, an Anne Arundel County Arts Council Literary Arts Award winner, a two-time Glimmer Train Short Fiction finalist, and her work has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize. Her website can be found here. 

A therapist once put down her notebook, recrossed her legs and said to me, “You have an extraordinarily high tolerance for the intolerable,” and I thought, “I do? Cool! But wait! Is that a good thing?”

When I was 10, and my parents’ marriage was failing, they sent me to summer camp at River Valley Ranch. Horses, Jesus, and cowboys were the competing stars of this rodeo. A non-denominational Christian camp, I’m pretty sure my mother imagined it would be a wholesome environment while providing equestrian entertainment and she was right. For two weeks, we attended chapel in a rustic barn three times a day and rode horses every afternoon. The highlight of our experience was the trail ride and overnight campout where we sang about Jesus while roasting hotdogs on sticks around a campfire until they plumped, glistened, and split dripping into the flames. I was one of about forty-five 10-year-old girls livin’ the dream.

The day of the big campout we were riding single file, the winsome cowboy counselor with the dimples ahead of me by about 8 horses, when my horse, a chestnut mare, stopped in her tracks and without warning, went down on her side and rolled belly up! Right over the saddle.

Miraculously, I was able to step out of the stirrups before being crushed. I stood there in the purple chicory on the dusty side of the trail as she got her feet under her again and continued along the path.

I don’t think she looked at me as I scrambled back on but now, she was totally into it—like it was Fire Prevention Week and she was demonstrating stop, drop and roll. This went on for hours. It was my new norm. I said nothing. The riders behind me murmured quietly, their horses swaying along like a convoy of docile ships, rocked by a gentle current. I’d feel her start to lean, I’d slip my sneakers out of the stirrups and step off just as she crashed, crushed, and rolled. It was actually quite a coordinated ballet now that I think about it.

So, I did what I do, what a lot of us do who harbor a high tolerance for the intolerable. I normalized something unacceptable because I perceived the horse’s need, and the need of my fellow campers, was greater than my own.

Oh, and I didn’t write home about it. My mother had a lot on her mind. Her need too, was greater than mine.

I had done the same thing in second grade. Barbara, a scrappy classmate who was no bigger than I but who possessed the inexplicable motives of my horse, would slip up behind me just before the Pledge of Allegiance, wrap her little hands around my neck and do her best to choke the life out of me. I don’t know what went on in Barbara’s homelife, but I thought it would be impolite to resist since maybe Barbara needed to strangle me. Mrs. Ballman, our teacher, would hear the small scuffle, (me struggling for air), glance up from her lesson planner, and sigh, “Oh Barbara! Not again! Stop strangling Laura!” I mean those were her exact words! “Stop strangling Laura.” Who does that? I didn’t tell my mother. She had a lot on her mind, and yes, I’m starting to see a theme here.

Then there was Paige Williams, also at Lake Shore Elementary. Paige was a pale, thin redhead with a menacing spatter of freckles across her narrow face.

About twice a week Paige would sidle up to me as I bounced down the school bus steps in the morning and whisper, “I’m going to beat you up after school today.” No explanation as to why, what I’d done. Since I didn’t know her, we were not in the same grade, did not live in the same neighborhood, and were never on the playground at the same time, I don’t know to this day what inspired her.

I’m staring in the mirror right now. I don’t know. Maybe I can see it.

What I do know is I didn’t do anything about it. I hope I didn’t say, “Ok” but I might have. I did however, live in fear of how I was going to get safely to my bus every afternoon. Never mentioned it to Mom. You know why.

The thing is that because I wasn’t mad at Barbara, Paige, or my horse, it never crossed my mind that I could simply say, “Not okay.” I think maybe I had learned that you only set limits if you are angry when in fact you set limits because you’re whole. Yeah, I’m laughing too.

But I do see people around me who are capable of this and I’m in awe, intrigued and okay, a little squeamish when this is demonstrated in my presence.

I’ve noticed, however, that you can do for someone more vulnerable what you can’t do for yourself. I may have had to let Barbara strangle me because it would be rude to resist, but had she been strangling someone else, I know in my second-grade heart I would have thrown myself into the breach, spun it up, been a fierce little brave-heart. And had she mistreated a dog? Well.

The narrative at the ranch was that my fellow cowgirls and I were deeply flawed and in need of forgiveness—like major scale forgiveness—like divine from-the-sky-forgiveness and we had been from the get-go. As if we’d been born with some kernel of innate worth that we’d blown upon arrival.

The call to confess was contagious as we gathered every evening for chapel. The music made young hearts soar, dissolving boundaries. Our beguiling cowboy counselors gave testimony. I was so in need of a good father, a cowboy Jesus, I couldn’t resist. On the last night, at the last possible opportunity, I answered the altar call. I knelt among other bright-eyed, tender ten-year-olds. Looking back, I wonder if I thought Jesus’s need was greater than mine.

But deeply, intuitively, I couldn’t reconcile the narrative I was being offered with the memory I still had. Because I could remember what I was feeling and thinking shortly after said arrival–before I could verbalize thoughts. And I remember wanting to help, to serve, and only to love and be loved at the core of my two-year-old heart. Which must have been the same heart beating in my second-grade chest and behind my ten-year-old breastbone —and surely that heart beats in me now.

I know it beats in you.

So. A book I’m reading says try believing not that you must be forgiven, but that you did nothing wrong. What?? you ask, immediately resisting that notion. How arrogant, how in denial, how unaccountable! How lacking in humility. Any original innocence is a ship that’s sailed.

But stay in your curiosity for a minute—try it on for size if you can. You’re a storyteller. Tell yourself this story. Life is an unfolding plan. Let go of your need to discipline yourself and judge others. Let go of the notion of schoolhouse earth, of love and forgiveness as earned commodities, available upon request, or even as gifts freely given.

Imagine that in ways you cannot fully understand now, you did nothing wrong. Is there any way this could possibly be true?

What if there were no options on the menu? The only selection open to you was the best you could do at any one time, operating from the highest form of consciousness you had access to.

Matt Kahn, who threw this idea out there, and of course, it isn’t new, says take in that everyone in your life was doing the best they could do, from the highest point of awareness and growth they possessed at that time–even those who hurt you profoundly. And this was not without purpose.

“In order to be who I was born to become, life couldn’t have happened any other way,” he says.

So, I try that idea on, too, just to see how it feels. Alone in my office I look out over the white roses on my desk at the puffy clouds drifting over the brick house across the street and I whisper, “In order to be who I was born to become, life couldn’t have happened any other way.”

That’s not an excuse, it’s a thought experiment. It’s a way of looking back over the trail that led you here, reviewing the conflicts, the losses, each and every relationship, to say had even one thing been different, had even one person or experience been missed, including an altar call, you would not be the person you were born to become.

Healing the world you cherish with your stories.

Laura J. Oliver is an award-winning developmental book editor and writing coach, who has taught writing at the University of Maryland and St. John’s College. She is the author of The Story Within (Penguin Random House). Co-creator of The Writing Intensive at St. John’s College, she is the recipient of a Maryland State Arts Council Individual Artist Award in Fiction, an Anne Arundel County Arts Council Literary Arts Award winner, a two-time Glimmer Train Short Fiction finalist, and her work has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize. Her website can be found here.

It was 7:00 pm and we were late because Margaret was driving, and she was always late. Now she was flying down Route 2 like we were competitors in “The Amazing Race” while groping around behind her in the backseat to find her purse. 

“Here,” she said, dropping the bag in my lap, “write the check for me,” and with that, she slammed on the brakes. We abruptly stopped so close to the car in front of us that I could read the fine print on its bumper sticker: “What if the hokey pokey is what it’s all about?”

“If that’s true,” I said reading it aloud, “we’re in trouble.” We were late for our first lesson in Lindy-hop, a precursor to jitterbug. I had left my 16-year-old daughter Emily on her computer at home, visiting college websites, taking virtual tours. I felt a little guilty that I had had to rush dinner to go out on a weeknight. 

Our classmates were already on the floor when we arrived at Corky’s Hard Bean Café which had offered up space for these Tuesday night classes. We dropped our checks at the registration table and found places in a small group of women clustered behind Tina, the female instructor.

Tina was petite, about 30, with a dancer’s body and brown hair pulled back in a ponytail. The other women looked 35-45, friendly, self-depreciating. Their expressions were anxious, excited, determined; everyone had a faint flush of something else that looked like hope. Margaret, model-tall and just as beautiful, looked like hope, and it was her hope and determination that had brought us here.  

The group’s attention was riveted on Tina who had begun by demonstrating the basic “swingout.” This step was to be our ticket to proficiency she assured us. A good swingout would get us anywhere we wanted to go. I have since learned it is the single most difficult basic step in dance. And of course, it requires a partner.

Tina was wearing a short skirt that flared when she snapped around. I admired this maneuver immediately. I wanted to snap too, but I was in jeans. She wore a sleeveless white blouse as well although it was winter and soon, we knew why. Lindy-hop is quite a workout. I glanced over at Margaret. She was concentrating on Tina’s feet as if they might explode.

Margaret was living with a brain tumor—living in a state of urgency and grace—and in the limbo of not knowing what was next she had decided to dance. To keep her company, I followed her lead. I said yes in those days to any Margaret adventure. Yes, meant another day of not letting go.  

Exactly one year prior to this evening, we had been at Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Boston, in a prep room, watching students insert IV’s before Margaret’s surgery. She had insisted on being awake for it. The first time the tumor was removed, before it began growing again, she was under general anesthesia and awoke unable to speak. Her brain had had to rewire, to refile words in the right mental filing cabinets. It was three months before “thanks” stopped coming out “window,” and whether “help” or “hope” was the word intended, was anyone’s guess. 

As a group we repeatedly tried to duplicate Tina’s footwork. We learned steps with names, “The Texas Tommy,” “The Side-by-Side Charlestown.” Tina repeated herself patiently, as if we were exceptionally slow. Trust me, this was necessary. Next to us, the men who had shown up for this initiation were imitating George, the male instructor. He was also about 30 and a perfect complement to Tina. I could imagine their likenesses on top of a wedding cake. George had a headset mike. We heard the men practicing a step called the “Hard Bugger.” George and Tina made eye contact across the café, the scent of mocha beans in the air. “We’re ready,” she said.

The two groups merged awkwardly, sliding, shifting, trying to form two lines to stand opposite each other but there was an unequal number. More women than men. Those who had secured partners shrugged sympathetically at those still maneuvering but didn’t budge. Finally, we came to rest with one extra woman sitting out. It was not me and I felt terrible. On the verge of offering the lonely leftover my place, my partner grabbed my hand. 

He was, I discovered later, only pretending to be a beginner—he was actually in the intermediate class that met directly after ours and had come for review. Everyone wants to dance with someone slightly better, so I was in luck. “Stop pushing,” he exclaimed, when I anticipated the move he was a beat slow to deliver, then a bit put out, “You’re not letting me lead!” I was flustered and embarrassed. Deeply confused, Apparently, I’m a pushy leader. Didn’t know. Now I do. But if I am a leader, why am I so directionless?

I apologized, we held hands again and proceeded to learn a dance so intricately stylized it would never translate to partners who have not had the same class. So, I asked myself, am I here because of Margaret or Cecilia? 

Cecilia was the daughter of a friend. She was an exuberant six-year-old with a very round face, and a head that appeared too large for her sturdy body. We were at her ballet recital and the group performing before Cecilia’s was a gymnastics class of 4-year-olds. They scuttled onto stage, then tumbled, rolled, flipped and basically hopped up and down in place with enthusiasm. I glanced at Cecilia. She was rapt, transported. She had found her calling and it wasn’t ballet. 

As her group of little ballerinas was called forward, Cecilia blasted onto stage with a somersault and proceeded to imitate what she’d just seen—careening, cart-wheeling—bowling over the other ballerinas, now teary in their tutus as they shuffled clear of a flushed and triumphant Cecilia.

These nights have come to mind because I’m longing for Cecilia’s bold spontaneity and Margaret’s grace. I don’t know what’s next in my life and there’s no choreographer. I work all the time. I don’t know how to play, and I have been unable to craft a vision for the future. We are legion those of us in some kind of transition. I mean, isn’t that all of us? Isn’t that you?

Margaret’s uncertainty had a physical manifestation that was beyond her control. The rest of us are just people whose children have taken flight or are well-established now in lives of their own. People who are no longer partnered or needed or who no longer work 9 to 5. It’s time to dance our own dance.

When I got home that night, Emily was thinking about what she’d like to do with her life—maybe a career in photojournalism. She had examined the entire country for a state she’d like to live in—not this one, she said with certainty then glanced quickly at me with crystal-blue eyes, in case voicing her independence had hurt me. It had saddened me, but I laughed because I admired it. 

Emily is launched into her own life now and Margaret has died. 

Sometimes I dance alone in the kitchen or in front of the bathroom mirror. I “Shake it Off” with Taylor Swift. I get the “Shivers” with Ed Sheeran. I pretend I am awesome and that my moves are all cool when in fact, I don’t know my next step. 

What’s up with that, Tina? The basic swing out was supposed to get me anywhere I wanted to go. 

In all the years love was based on a connection or service to someone else, the only prayers I needed were, Thank you and Help. In that order. 

But if I’m going to dance alone—and we all have to eventually—I’d ask this: 

May Love herself be my partner. When I cling to those I need to release, to life as I know it, may she hold me in her arms. May she tell me it’s all right to let go.

Laura J. Oliver is an award-winning developmental book editor and writing coach, who has taught writing at the University of Maryland and St. John’s College. She is the author of The Story Within (Penguin Random House). Co-creator of The Writing Intensive at St. John’s College, she is the recipient of a Maryland State Arts Council Individual Artist Award in Fiction, an Anne Arundel County Arts Council Literary Arts Award winner, a two-time Glimmer Train Short Fiction finalist, and her work has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize. Her website can be found here. 

Things that hop, dart, scurry or slither, are okay outside the house, but inside the house their natures are entirely changed. Crickets. Mice. Spiders. Amphibians. Reptiles. A salamander once ran in the front door and straight into the hall closet where he hid behind the vacuum cleaner for hours. Presto-chango. Was cute. Now scary. And my mother once pulled a hot cranky snake out of our clothes dryer along with the sheets. 

Then there was this.     

The storm had been gathering all evening and bursts of lightning flashed brighter and brighter as the August sky darkened. The children’s father was in Western Australia on America’s Cup business. I was seven months pregnant and, for several weeks, the sole caretaker of our two small children. As I climbed the stairs to bed, I carried an oil lamp and matches with me in case we lost the electricity.  My uncharacteristic forethought made me feel self-sufficient, like the grownup in charge, and I liked knowing that Audra and Andrew were safely asleep in their beds as the rain and thunder finally began.

Setting the oil lamp on the bedside table, I slipped under the sheets comforted by the thought that there were many nearby trees taller than our house to deflect the lightning. As if to prove the point, a brilliant bolt of electricity slammed into a 48-foot maple in the front yard and in the aftermath of the explosion the hum of the clock and the air conditioner fell silent. With the wind knocked out of her the house was unable to take her next breath. 

As I lay in bed collecting my wits in the dark, a small form materialized by my side. My seven-year-old daughter wanted to join me until the storm was over. I threw back the sheet to welcome her, turning my back to the wind and rain now pounding at the window.  Wedging pillows under the weight of my pregnancy, I fell asleep grateful for the sweetness of her company. 

About 2 a.m., I awoke. Outside, the lightning and thunder had stalled directly overhead. Inside, the house was hot and unnaturally still. I rolled belly first out of bed, opened two bedroom windows, and a rain-freshened breeze immediately filled the room. Having built the house ourselves we still had no screens, so I vowed to close the windows as soon as the room cooled off.

I had been back asleep for only a few minutes when I sensed that someone or something had slipped into the room. Above the bed, a clicking sound had abruptly stopped then started again, this time closer. In my half-dreaming state, I imagined that a gigantic dragonfly had flown through the window. I considered going back to sleep in spite of the noise, but its strangeness compelled me to identify the intruder. Lighting the oil lamp, I turned to see what was making menacing shadows dip and sway against the wall.

A bat, its bony wings spread like a black cape, plunged towards my sleeping daughter, missing her face by inches, then careened toward the ceiling only to dive again. With a yelp, I shoved Audra off her side of the bed, grabbed her hand and a cotton robe, and together in the flickering light that made the peonies on the wallpaper dance, we made an awkward, weaving dash for the bedroom door. 

Bursting into the hall, I turned to see that I had left the flaming oil lamp burning next to the bed, and three bats were now strafing it like F-14’s in a dogfight. With no other choice, I took dipping, ducking steps back into the room, fending off the bats now flapping in a frenzied circle like moths in a jar. Lamp in hand, I made my way back to the hall and pulled the door closed again, worried that the wooden frame had swollen in the humidity, preventing it from closing securely.

With the bats contained at least until morning, Audra and I padded barefoot down the hall to sleep in the pink and white sanctuary of her room. I decided, with all the clarity of pregnancy-brain, to permanently seal off the master bedroom. Audra and I had each taken a twin bed in her room when a tight, high voice rang out. 

“Mommy—a bat’s flying down the hall.”

“No, Audra, just a shadow,” I assured her, as the baby inside gave my ribs a wallop. 

“No it’s not, Mommy! It’s here! In my room!”

We exited as if by osmosis, slamming the door almost before we were through it, and went to wake 5-year-old Andrew. Disappointed that he’d slept through the excitement, but impressed by our situation, he joined us, and we crept downstairs, the flaming lamp held high.

With its high ceilings, polished oak floors, and night-black windows reflecting the flames, the whole house had become a cavern in which shadows flew ominously over us. Instinctively, we reached for each other, seeking and offering protection in a single gesture. We moved like one body, each hanging on to some part of the other—an elbow, a hand, a ruffle of nightgown—taking comfort in a connection with one another we could feel but not see. In an ungainly procession, we bumped our way into the kitchen. 

By now it was 3 a.m., the storm still raging, I was heavy with pregnancy and exhausted. Two children were helpfully suggesting we call Daddy, who was 9,800 miles away, the electricity was off, and all my clothes were in a room filled with bats. The family cat, cross and bedraggled, appeared at the sliding glass doors, and we stared at her a minute, then lumbered over as one entity to let her in. No one was willing to function independently, even for a minute. Equally helpless, we felt braver as a unit.

With sudden inspiration, I picked up the phonebook and looked in the Yellow Pages under Exterminators. Unbelievably, there was a listing under the subhead “Bats” with a 24-hour emergency-service number. “You’ve got to help me,” I pleaded, explaining the crisis when a man answered. If he were nice to me, I knew I would cry. 

“Well now,” he theorized, “I’ll bet those bats rode the current in when you opened the windows. Bet you’ve got a dozen up there by now. If you wait until the storm ends, they’ll probably ride the breeze back out. I can come look for them in the morning, or you can save yourself $150 and look on your own, but be careful! A bat with an 18-inch wingspan folds up to the size of a mouse when he’s sleeping. They get behind picture frames, in folds of clothes hanging in your closet, just about anywhere.”

I hadn’t heard much after “rode the current in,” but he had more good news. “You think they’re gone, but they come out again when it gets dark. But they’re nothing to be afraid of,” he concluded with good cheer. “That’s a myth that they’re going to make a nest in your hair.”

I eyed the car keys and hung up. A short field trip, en masse, into the living room, procured sofa cushions and a blue and yellow afghan my grandmother had crocheted for me before I was in charge of small people. Dragging our provisions into the kitchen, we arranged ourselves on the floor like an intricate puzzle. The children were unusually kind to each other and if one of us moved, we all changed position to maintain our connection.

In the morning, with the electricity restored, I made coffee, told the children they could stay home from school, and called a friend. Armed with a broom and a cardboard box, she searched the house. The bats were gone she reported, swept back into the night on the breeze that brought them in. I wanted to believe her, but I poked all my sundresses with a hanger and kept a tennis racket by the bed for a week. 

The children’s father returned and six weeks later we welcomed another daughter into our family. Life returned to normal, but the children loved to tell the bat story to guests. They’d interrupt each other to embellish the details, gleefully recounting the invasion and our retreat, the delicious danger. They were now veterans with a war story they would tell for years to come, just as I am telling you now. 

It’s still easier to be brave as a unit. And I hope the instinct to be kind to each other in a crisis remains with us always. 

What happens to distress decades after the event that caused it? What of our life’s dramas falls away and what resides in our hearts forever? 

You tell me.

Because when we tell the bat story to visitors, we no longer remember we were afraid. We only recall we were comrades in arms, who served each other loyally, in the darkness of the night.

Laura J. Oliver is an award-winning developmental book editor and writing coach, who has taught writing at the University of Maryland and St. John’s College. She is the author of The Story Within (Penguin Random House). Co-creator of The Writing Intensive at St. John’s College, she is the recipient of a Maryland State Arts Council Individual Artist Award in Fiction, an Anne Arundel County Arts Council Literary Arts Award winner, a two-time Glimmer Train Short Fiction finalist, and her work has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize. Her website can be found here.