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"So she feels sad about it," he said. "Even guilty. How could she not? That seems appropriate. It'll teach her to be more careful."

David's sunny disposition could be annoying. Though on a day-to-day basis it was essential (he buoyed and steadied them, both life preserver and anchor), the way he glibly searched for the upside of all difficulties made Mariel insane. He was an overgrown Shirley Temple.

"She already knows she wasn't careful," Mariel said. "She's already got the hair shirt on. That's not the problem."

"Did we sign her up for T-ball again this year?" David asked. In an effort to socialize her and improve her coordination, David had pushed Finny into organized sports the summer before. Holding the bat or trying to catch the ball, she had looked miserable and ill suited to the game. Observing his daughter's wretched performance, David had cheered while Mariel writhed in the stands; poor Finny was rooted like a post out in left field, as if her arms and legs, her very body, were a reproach. It occurred now to Mariel that Finny had looked like that on the way home from school; she had climbed into the back seat of the car gingerly, treating her body like a weapon or a foreign thing.

"I see no reason to repeat painful mistakes," Mariel said.

"It wasn't painful. Finny's fine. You worry about her too much."

Mariel could hear him shuffling through a set of papers; she hated it when he multi-tasked her, working while he talked to her on the phone. "I think she's depressed, actually," she said. "I might make a phone call about our tickets."

The shuffling stopped. "What about them?"

"Well, I'm not sure we can waltz off and leave if this girl is still injured. I haven't talked to the parents. And maybe Finny should see a doctor."

"She isn't the one who hit her head."

"She isn't happy," Mariel said, wanting to cry. "I think any person her age deserves to be happy."

David sighed. Maybe, secretly, he detested her, Mariel thought. And why not? It probably showed good judgment; at such moments she detested herself. "Canceling our vacation isn't going to cheer Finny up," he said. "It'll do her good to get away. Think how much fun she had last year." This was the ultimate argument, of course; how could she deprive Finny of going? Imagine making her stay at home, making her think she was being punished.

"I'll go if we can drink a lot," Mariel said. "Starting earlier in the day than we did last year."

"We'll start on the plane," David said, "if that'll make you feel better."

"It might."

"Mariel," he said, "you know, different people are happy in different ways."

"Tell me about Finny's way, then."

David hesitated. "It's different from ours," he said. "I'll see you soon."

HE next morning Finny didn't want to go to school. Mariel had expected this -- the crumbling confidence, the tentativeness, the fear -- but now that it had arrived, her strategies for combating it seemed absurd. She felt listless and impotent, unable to resist the sight of Finny in her favorite dog pajamas, an inch of flesh showing where the top didn't meet the pants.

"One day," Mariel said. "You can stay home today, and that's all. Not tomorrow." Together they ate muffins in the kitchen in their pajamas, Mariel halfheartedly reading the paper, nothing but major and minor disasters everywhere, and pushing aside the dirty dishes from the night before. Finny ate half a muffin, dissecting it for raisins and nuts, and then slipped away from the table to start one of her peculiar games, putting Cheerios into a set of plastic cars and sending them on trips around the kitchen floor.

"Maybe Nan's home today too," Mariel said, without knowing she was going to say it. "Maybe you were right -- maybe you're both taking sick days."

Finny paused. She had her back to her mother, but Mariel saw her open the little door to a plastic car, take out the oat-flavored occupants, and eat them.

"We'll call her -- and then we'll call the hotel in Mexico and ask them how hot it is there today," she said, knowing that the newspaper in her hand listed international forecasts on the second page. "It'll be good to have hot weather for a change, won't it, Finny?"

The girl shrugged, her broad back a site of pathos. She drove her army of edible passengers out the door.

T noon Mariel took a break from several hours of indifferent progress on the computer and called a friend at Finny's school. The friend, Anna, was a teacher's aide, a woman who volunteered in her son's classroom to the extent that she might as well have been home-schooling him.

"Oh, I heard," Anna said. "Poor Finny. Poor Nan. This is one of those awful things that just happen."

Mariel said that she wasn't sure whatit was, or how to classify it, but she was hoping it was over, and had anyone at school talked to Nan's family? The girl wasn't back at school yet, was she?

There was a pause. "I think Dorothy, the social worker, talked to them," Anna said.

The tone of her voice gave Mariel the sensation that her stomach had suddenly been flooded with cold water. "What did the social worker say?"

"Well, I think she's still bleeding from the ear, which isn't good. But she did wake up a couple of times. She's still in the hospital."

"But I called them," Mariel said. "I talked to them on the phone. No one said anything about bleeding. Just yesterday they said she was home."

"That's probably a language issue," Anna said. "Two of the daughters -- and the mother, I think -- are nicknamed Nan. Their full names are really long. We always get them mixed up in the school records."

Mariel's eyes filled. "What does that mean, that she's bleeding from the ear?"

"I only heard this secondhand," Anna said. "Are you keeping Finny home?"

Mariel wondered if Anna was implying that Finny should be kept at home for her own safety. Would a playground vendetta form? "We're so sorry," Mariel whispered, speaking for herself as well as Finny, and also, she realized, addressing anyone who might hear about Nan and imagine that Finny was too young for remorse.

When Mariel hung up the phone, she saw Finny standing behind her in the hall. She was stock-still on the carpet, her body soft, listening.

"Nan's not home yet," Mariel said. It was all she could think of to say.

Finny nodded. "She might stay there for a long, long time." She looked like a round-faced oracle, a seer.

"Don't say that," Mariel said.

Finny sat down.

"What's in the car?" Mariel asked. "Are they little people?"

"Yes," Finny said. "But they don't know that that's what they are."

"What do they think they are?"

Finny paused. "They only think they're people when the door shuts behind them," she said. "Then they remember." Mariel watched her put a Cheerio behind the wheel of a blue Camaro. The door clicked shut. Finny looked up at Mariel, who smiled and tried not to shiver.

The cargo of doomed and ignorant passengers waited, helpless, on the floor.

HE next morning, Thursday, Finny didn't want to change into her school clothes or brush her hair. "You can't stay home forever," Mariel said, realizing that despite her dictum of the day before, Finny must have imagined doing just that: If one day, why not two? Why not four? This was an opportune moment for Daddy's cheerful demeanor, but of course Daddy wasn't home. "Up, up!" Mariel said, lifting Finny beneath the arms, but the effect was more violent than fun. It took her several minutes just to get a clean shirt over Finny's head. "Listen, Fiona," she finally said, "there's a saying about getting right back on a horse after you fall off it, and school is the horse in this instance, and Nan's accident is the fall, and you have to go back to school afterward. You can't stay home. I'd be a lousy parent if I let you stay home. You don't want me to be a lousy parent."

Finny stared down at her toes. She had short, flat feet, like little paddles. Sometimes Mariel thought that Finny had inherited the worst of her parents' characteristics. Mariel ended up dressing Finny entirely, pulling socks over the sweaty toes, pushing the arms into the sleeves of a pink sweater, brushing the fine, beloved, tangled brown hair. Clipping a duck-shaped barrette into position over one ear, she looked at Finny's sweet face and saw unmistakable dread. She felt she was dressing her only child for slaughter.

"It'll be all right," she said, considering and rejecting the idea of letting Finny stay home for a second day. How had she ended up with such a horribly sensitive child? She personally knew plenty of children who could have pushed a dozen playmates off the jungle gym (or even off the roof of the school building) and never batted an eye. The difference was that those other children's victims were always fine. Finny had had bad luck. And maybe that was part of the problem: Finny was beginning to believe herself unlucky. Mariel held her by the shoulders and looked into her speckled eyes. The world was full of horrifying things -- dead children turning up in the trunks of cars, bombs falling, cancer and other illness -- from which, despite misgivings, Mariel had tried to shield her daughter. But it hadn't worked: Finny sensed the existence of disaster, and was afraid. All children were fearful now and then, but Finny's kind of fear was different. She wasn't afraid of lightning or the dark. Mariel looked into Finny's eyes and saw that Finny was afraid of herself -- of her own body and the harm it could effect, of its awful dangers, of its secret, unintentional power.

HEN Finny was born, Mariel, more than David, had been terrified. He was the oldest in a big family and remembered carrying and feeding his brothers and sisters; calm and confident, he cradled seven-pound Finny in one arm and swooped her around the house, singing tunes from South Pacificand Oklahoma!Mariel tried to imitate his casual attitude but couldn't; she was convinced at every moment that something gruesome was about to happen. Finny would choke on a button, or swallow poison, or impale herself on a pencil while tumbling headlong down the stairs. Mariel's mind was an endless catalogue of accidents that could rear up like monsters in the lives of the unsuspecting. She was relieved when Finny turned three and then four and five; she seemed further from danger, sure on her feet, less liable to kill herself out of sheer ignorance.

But now that the obvious, dreaded physical dangers were past, and Finny could walk and ride a bike and swim and recognize a skull and crossbones and recite her address and phone number in case she found herself lost among helpful strangers, an entirely new set of hazards was revealed, and they were internal. No matter how vigilant Mariel was, no matter how carefully she stood guard, she couldn't interpose herself between Finny and Finny's imagination. She was doomed to pace outside the inner room and hope for the best, like an old-fashioned husband waiting for news of his child's birth.

And Mariel suffered doubts and anxieties of her own. Some days, reading the paper, she was convinced that the world would soon come crashing to an end -- and how much easier it would be, how much more bearable, if she weren't in the position of having to explain it all to innocent Finny. These are the things we've done wrong, here are our crimes, this is how we've fouled our nest and murdered one another, and now we hand this ugly, uninhabitable conglomeration on to you. She was beyond being able to speak about this fear, even to David. Especially to David. At times, horrified at her own train of thought, she almost wished that Finny hadn't been born.

Copyright © 1999 by The Atlantic Monthly Company. All rights reserved.
The Atlantic Monthly; November 1999; Passengers - 99.11 (Part Two); Volume 284, No. 5; page 92-102.