Six

The little girl looked up at the mother. The woman sat across from her in the upstairs bedroom rocking away in the big rocking chair. She saw the mother rocking, rocking back and forth, she saw the mother rocking right out of the window behind the chair, past the trees, past the beach grasses and on into the lake. The mother's voice sounded wet and strangled and drowned as she told the little girl about the baby boy who had died. "He would have been ten," the mother said, when the little girl had asked her how old he would have been if he'd lived. The little girl was six. So she added it all up. She was pretty quick actually, she did the math and figured out that he died four years before they'd got her from the place. The little girl sat across from the mother on the end of the bed, perched tightly on the end of the bed, and she looked at the rocking mother, wanting the mother to hold her, wanting to climb up into her lap, but the mother rocked away and the little girl just stayed right where she was. Absolutely perched on the end of the bed, with the rocking mother right straight directly across from her so close. It was very quiet but then it really wasn't quiet because boat motors and lawn mowers were all mixed up with the breeze that was blowing from the window curtains behind the chair. The sounds and the rocking were all mixed up together and the little girl started getting dizzy with it and the mother's eyes were shining hot and bright as she looked right at the little girl, but those eyes were burning right through the little girl, and the father came in then and said "How about some ice cream?" He was very happy and the little girl suddenly became very happy too, and he picked the little girl up in his arms and they left the rocking mother there in the chair, and they went downstairs into the summer kitchen and the father put the little girl down and they had some ice cream, and then the two of them by themselves went down to the beach.