BE CAREFUL WHAT YOU WISH FOR. I KNOW that for a fact. Wishes are
brutal, unforgiving things. They burn your tongue the moment they're
spoken and you can never take them back. They bruise and bake and come
back to haunt you. I've made far too many wishes in my lifetime, the
first when I was eight years old. Not the sort of wish for ice cream or
a party dress or long blond hair; no. The other sort, the kind that
rattles your bones, then sits in the back of your throat, a greedy red toad that chokes you until you say it
aloud. The kind that could change your life in an instant, before you
have time to wish you could take it back.
I was in the wrong place at the wrong time, but don't all stories
begin this way? The stranger who comes to town and wreaks havoc. The man
who stumbles off a cliff on his wedding day. The woman who goes to look
out the window when a bullet, or a piece of glass, or a blue-white
icicle pierces her breast. I was the child who stomped her feet and made
a single wish and in so doing ended the whole world—my world, at any
rate. The only thing that mattered. Of course I was self-centered, but
don't most eight-year-old girls think they're the queen of the universe?
Don't they command the stars and seas? Don't they control the weather?
When I closed my eyes to sleep at night, I imagined the rest of the
world stopped as well. What I wanted, I thought I should get. What I
wished for, I deserved.
I made my wish in January, the season of ice, when our house was cold
and the oil bill went unpaid. It happened on the sixteenth, my mother's
birthday. We had no father, my brother and I. Our father had run off,
leaving Ned and me our dark eyes and nothing more. We depended on our
mother. I especially didn't expect her to have a life of her own. I
pouted when anything took her away: the bills that needed paying, the
jobs that came and went, the dishes that needed washing, the piles of
laundry. Endless, endless. Never ever done. That night my mother was
going out with her two best friends to celebrate her birthday. I didn't
like it one bit. It sounded like fun. She was off to the Bluebird Diner,
a run-down place famous for its roast beef sandwiches and French fries
with gravy. It was only a few hours on her own. It was just a tiny
celebration.
I didn't care.
Maybe my father had been self-centered; maybe I'd inherited that from
him along with the color of my eyes. I wanted my mother to stay home and
braid my hair, which I wore long, to my waist. Loose, my hair knotted
when I slept, and I worried; my brother had told me that bats lived in
our roof. I was afraid they would fly into my room at night and make a
nest in my head. I didn't want to stay home with my brother, who paid no
attention to me and was interested more in science than in human beings.
We argued over everything, including the last cookie in the jar, which
we often grabbed at the same time. Let go! You first! Whatever we
held often broke in our grasp. Ned had no time for a little sister's
whims; he had to be bribed into reading to me. I'll do your chores.
I'll give you my lunch money. Just read.
My mother didn't listen to my complaints. She was preoccupied. She
was in a rush. She put on her raincoat and a blue scarf. Her hair was
pale. She'd cut it herself, straining to see the back of her head in the
mirror. She couldn't afford a real haircut at a salon; still she was
pretty. We didn't talk about being poor; we never discussed what we
didn't have. We ate macaroni three times a week and wore heavy sweaters
to bed; we made do. Did I realize that night was my mother's thirtieth
birthday, that she was young and beautiful and happy for once? To me,
she was my mother. Nothing less or more. Nothing that didn't include me.
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