I was born and raised in a suburb, and I still live in the house I grew up in. It’s like every other house in the neighborhood: same builder, same style, same narrow range of colors. The backyards are fairly deep, and there’s a stand of prairie grass at the rear of mine, where a fence would be if we had one. My mother planted the miniature prairie many years ago, before she died, and it reminds me of her more than anything else.
At night I can see into the houses behind me: the blue of the television screens flickering, neighbors moving from great room to kitchen and back, until one by one the lights go out. During the day the windows are black with the occasional reflection of green leaves.
I love my small prairie in all seasons, but most in the autumn months, when the tall grass begins to turn a white gold with ribbons of green, and the stems rustle against each other, and the sound of wind moving through the green world is like an ocean made of silk. I like to watch the motion of the stems as the wind weaves its way through the vegetation—a ghostlike presence.
When I was a small girl, my mother told me, I would stand outside on breezy days and react to the slightest shift in the wind’s velocity. I didn’t begin to speak until I was seven, but there are photos of me as a preschooler, standing outside with my head tilted and eyes wide in what could only be described as pure ecstasy. No one else seemed to react the way I did to the wind’s cadence and whispers and rustlings, its touch, the soft but sometimes furious way it moved the branches.
The prairie grass has always drawn things into its orbit. I’ve seen rabbits hide among the bluestem, and the occasional red fox, and after every storm there are objects that blow or float past and entangle themselves in the switchgrass and fescue: cups and beer cans and fast-food wrappers and twigs and mulberries and the occasional lawn chair. One spring a particularly heavy rain flooded part of the yard, creating a temporary pond, and a mallard made a nest in it.
Tonight, a windy September evening, a shiny new object has appeared in my yard, like a loose mylar balloon blown by the wind.
It is the anniversary of my mother’s death, always a strange day for me. Even inside the house the air feels staticky and sharp, with a strange but not unpleasant odor, something like the blue-ozone scent of lightning. I was ready for bed early. The dishes were washed and put away. I was looking out my kitchen window at the sun setting, the sky above my neighbor’s roof a brilliant blood-orange and purple, and so the arrival of the object was briefly upstaged by the spectacle of syrupy color. But then I noticed a shift in the light amid the grasses, a haze appearing. I initially thought something had happened to my eyes, a vitreous detachment or tear in the retina. But I realized the haze doesn’t follow my eye movements.
What I’m looking at is definitely an object, and too large, I see now, for something the wind might blow around. I grab a sweater, gather my courage, and walk outside and through the grass toward the apparition.
I planted prairie grass behind our house for my daughter. She laughed at how the blades trembled as she ran her hands through them. She twirled and danced and walked on her toes as a toddler, but she didn’t say a word until she was seven years old. This worried me. At first I cried often about her muteness and the fact that she didn’t respond to her name or point to things to draw my attention to them or look anyone in the eye, except accidentally. She looked at everything out of the corner of her eye instead, twisting her head to the side to see what was right in front of her. I grieved for my child and the life I’d imagined for her.
In the grocery store I would smile at other infants in strollers and find myself in awe of the way they smiled back and tracked me with their eyes, as though such awareness were an extraordinary gift. Sometimes these children’s response to human faces made me bitter and angry, though never with my own daughter. My daughter was an angel. My love for her was a strong, fundamental force, like gravity.
She had her own ways of communicating, and she taught them to me. My girl would take me by the hand and lead me to the pantry when she wanted a snack and to the refrigerator when she was thirsty. Sometimes she would use my fingers like a tool—to push a button on a toy or device. She taught me how to interpret her meaning. My daughter was tested for deafness, but her ears were fine. She was tested for eye defects, but her vision was fine. She was picky about food, smells, and textures, but she was often happy, deliriously so. She was a sweet child, though there were times when her expressions felt off, uncanny, not quite human. This frightened me a bit, I’ll admit. Still, I loved her beyond measure.
I was a math professor, and I made my home office into a play space for my daughter, decorating it with water-filled tubes that plastic fish swam inside, lit by color-changing lights. I filled bins with uncooked beans so she could sit inside and scoop them as though she were in a sandbox. A therapist had suggested this. I bought a large green pad that she could jump onto from the couch, and I bought her a small trampoline and a swinging cloth chair that I hung from the ceiling. My daughter would get inside the chair with her satin-lined blanket and whatever small toys she was fascinated with at the time, and I would swing her back and forth with one hand while I worked through equations with the other. I pushed the swing until the muscles in my arm ached.
As I approach, the object in the prairie grass turns from an indistinct haze to something more like a gel. The evening is growing darker, and the lights have started to come on in the houses all around. I can see what seems to be a light emanating from the object itself. Its surface appears transparent and reflective, like glass, but the light is not a reflection of the sunset. It is contained within.
The object is not aerodynamic enough to be a car or an aircraft and not human enough to be an angel or an alien. When I was younger, I prepared a business card in the event I ran into someone from another planet. For years I carried it with me. On it I’d drawn a hydrogen atom, an image of the hydrogen spectrum, and a mathematical formula. I was prepared for otherworldly conversation if it should happen. My mother, a math teacher, said I had made good choices. An alien conversation would be easier, I thought, than one that relied on facial expressions and tone and some sort of humming undertext that had nothing to do with words or symbols as I understood them.
The object is a long box, like a casket made of windows, only standing vertically. The thing it most resembles is one of the phone booths that have been disappearing from the world for decades.
I sit down on the old iron bench where my mother and I used to sit together. As the night grows darker, the light in the box glows brighter. The parts not made of glass—the mullions and midsection and domed roof—appear to be heavily varnished wood, like the hull of a boat. What makes it light up like that? Perhaps it is solar or, even more specifically, sunset powered. I look for wires stretching from the wooden telephone poles beyond the prairie grass. Cable television wires go from one of the poles to my house, though I no longer have cable, and old telephone lines go to nonworking outlets in almost every room. Sometimes they worry me, all these wires going nowhere, still snaking around with no voices to carry. Occasionally, during a storm, a transformer on one of the poles will explode, sending sparks high into the air and making the neighborhood go dark all at once.
I consider the possibility that the booth might be a place for linemen to seek shelter during storms. Perhaps I missed its installation by the power company. I picture myself putting on a yellow raincoat and bravely taking warm cookies to a utility worker who is using my booth (I suppose it is now mine) as protection from a shower of uncaged electrons. The linemen and I would become friends.
But there is no one inside the box, just that warm golden light, thick like honey.
I slowly began to understand how my daughter saw the world. Often she would hold her hand out from her face at eye level and look at things—trees usually—through her fingers. I copied her gesture and saw what it did to my perception. Instead of focusing on the hand or on the space between the fingers, I softened my gaze and watched as my fingers became outlines of flesh with transparent centers composed of leaves. I know that the things we see, like the cow at the far side of a field, are interpreted by our brains as their correct size no matter what our eyes tell us. Perhaps my daughter’s brain interprets images differently, though I’m not a biologist or a medical doctor and don’t know what this means any more than I know why I lived so many years without noticing that I could make a finger become transparent with a trick of vision.
She did finally start to speak around the age of seven. I also discovered that she could read. I had read to her often and had watched her look intently at the pages of the encyclopedia and the old King James Bible that had been in my family for generations. My daughter had seemed to react to the sound and texture of the almost transparent pages as she turned them. Her therapists had told me she was simply soothing herself, and I’d believed them. So it was a shock to hear a seven-year-old who hadn’t said a word until recently suddenly recite the first ten sentences of Genesis. Had we been religious, she might have been thrown into the lion’s den of some fundamentalist church as evidence of a miracle: the dumb girl who was cured and suddenly spoke in Bible verses.
And while it was a kind of miracle, I suppose, her doctor explained that she was just “hyperlexic,” that it was a symptom of her “illness,” and that her choice of reading material was entirely random. She could just as easily have chosen to recite the first paragraph of a science textbook. She probably didn’t know what the words meant, the doctor said, since at the time my daughter still could not engage in the back-and-forth of conversation. But I was convinced my daughter knew what the words meant. I believed her inner life was rich. It simply could not be communicated in language. Language is a shaky vessel anyway, and no mother ever really knows what’s going on inside her child’s mind.
My plan was to take care of her throughout her life. I offered my atheistic prayers that I would be able to carry this plan out. But once the doctor found the tumors in my body, I knew that wouldn’t happen. And because I was a single mother by then and an only child, there would be no one left to care for my daughter. At least she was eighteen. I would leave the unmortgaged house and the money from my insurance policies and my pension funds for her, placed in a trust. I arranged everything as best I could. What worried me most, before I left her, was the closing in of her world.
If given a choice, I would have grown up near a body of water. I would have learned to sail. I might have lived on a boat, or perhaps in a cottage by a river—waves of undulating roads and willows along the banks and, in a nearby field, a few horses with glistening eyes and soft, dewy lashes.
When I was a child, I loved the iridescence of soap bubbles and the colors of scarves and the way the world looked through green or blue or yellow plastic cups when you tipped the liquid toward your mouth. I loved the sparkles of quartz and mica in unpolished granite. I loved drifting cottonwood seeds. I loved the rainbows that glass prisms projected around a room, the colors hidden in the diamond on my mother’s wedding ring. I loved the blue in the lower depths of snow.
I feel pulled toward the light in the booth the way I was toward those other lights, as if it is a sign that I was born into a benevolent universe filled with beauty and a deep and mysterious order. Since the death of my mother, I’ve slowly grown to fear this isn’t true. I fear that the universe is instead a prison where we sit and watch the executioner strike down one person or creature after another, our own turn getting closer every year. Lately I count the number of people I’ve known who are now locked inside the earth: my grandparents and parents and others in my orbit, as small as that orbit is—like the gruesome suicide of a neighbor’s son, who had announced his exit on Instagram but whose body wasn’t found for days. I am curious about the how and the why of that, though it terrifies me. My mother never knew if I felt these exits, but I did feel them, as I feel everything, deeply. I just could not express it.
What I hate most, I think, is the total loss of people’s voices. It isn’t their words I miss, but the timbre, the pitch, the rhythm. Some of the voices of the dead I can still resurrect in my head, but most are gone, and those I can hear are not the ones that were important to me. In fact, the more I loved someone, the more that person’s voice has turned to smoke.
There she is now in her backyard, shivering in her cardigan, listening to the wind as she always did. I want to envelop her, to protect her with my body. I vowed to stay alive as long as she did, but I failed, as I had perhaps failed her in the womb. No, the doctors said I did absolutely nothing wrong. I simply needed to love her. And love her I did.
More than anything in the universe, I wanted to say I loved her and have her understand and reply in kind instead of with passages from books or movies. But I learned to feel love in the way my daughter now and then touched my face with almost the same amazement and joy she seemed to feel when she touched a leaf, or when the wind touched her.
It was math that finally allowed me to crack the code. That, and effort born of love: For my daughter. For patterns. It’s a love I believe she and I shared.
Toward the end of my life I studied turbulence: smoke rising, blood flow, clouds. One experiment involved surface turbulence in grass fires. It was complex and visible only in its effects. (Though van Gogh had psychotic episodes, he painted turbulence with mathematical accuracy.) It was possible, I thought, that turbulence could be described using fractal geometry, that it had something to do with spirals. Think galaxies, sunflowers, nautilus shells, pinecones, cacti, Pre-Raphaelite hair. Time.
I thought it should be possible, if my calculations were correct, to reach her after I died.
As the sun’s light is completely extinguished and the pink lights from the nearby mall parking lot tint the darkness, I stand up from the bench and circle the object, careful to look for broken glass, for roots or wires that might trip me. I push against the booth, to test if it will tip over, but it is solidly placed, snuggled into the earth as though it has grown from a seed.
The wind picks up. Did you know that grass is fertilized by wind, not by insects and birds? Did you know that you can train yourself to see four-leaf clovers by looking for square shapes in a mass of triangles? They’re not as rare as you might think. These are the types of things I think about.
I take the elastic band I keep around my wrist and tie my hair back from my face so it won’t blow over my eyes. Then I look for an entrance to the box, a door of some kind. Instead I find a button on the side, like the one to call an elevator. What would happen if I pressed it? Would the door open, or would the whole thing ascend as if in some invisible shaft? Is it a portal to somewhere? Portals are everywhere in TV shows and video games and books. They appear in closets and in wardrobes and in the secret back rooms of stores. Maybe the box is a doorway to another dimension or planet, or into the past or future. I don’t particularly want to visit any of those places. It has taken me years to become accustomed to this planet and this particular yard.
So I don’t push the button.
The air is chilly, and I hug myself, thankful for the cardigan I put on over my nightgown. The wind blows harder, and the light inside the booth goes out as if in response. At the same time, or perhaps a second before, a door appears in the booth and opens just a crack, as though someone were exiting, or inviting me in. The light must come on when the door is closed, then escape when it opens, like a bioluminescence of some type, a miasma. It could smother me, I suppose, if I went inside and closed the door and it came back on.
Without the light’s glare, I can see inside the booth. There is an ancient rotary phone on a round table in the corner.
I make the door open wider. My daughter wears a look of ecstasy I recognize from her childhood, when she experienced colors and light and wind and leaves and tree bark and animals and the sound of rivers and ocean waves—though we couldn’t live near water because she was drawn mystically toward it and quite likely would have been unable to distinguish between air and water, perhaps unable to care about the difference, and so would have drowned in her ecstasy if I weren’t there to stop her.
There is an even stronger gust, and the world becomes a mirror ball for a minute: fragmented and glittering and moving all at once. And as has been true all my life, my curiosity proves much stronger than my fear. I put one foot inside the booth.
The scent of the prairie grass is tealike, close to that aldehyde-green, call-for-help scent that bluegrass releases when it’s cut, warning other plants of the approaching mower. Plants speak to one another. If they had voice boxes, they might sing, mingling their sounds with the sounds of insects and predators. Instead they release a scent, a quiet shout.
I think about the white swirls in the deep-blue night sky of the poster my mother hung in my bedroom. It still hangs there. I think about the painting as I step all the way in and close the door. I remember that I am the only person I know who can instantly find a four-leaf clover in an entire field.
The voices come to me in a blaze of warm light. The sudden scent of roses and lavender. My mother’s scent. Her voice, whispering like the grasses.
