Harmony (26 page)

Imagine that your child is born with wings. It's a good thing, right? The freedom to step off the earth, to glide and soar and float. It represents not just flight, but the potential for flight. It works with all the metaphors of child-rearing.

You can see that there might be a downside; it makes things a little more complicated. She's going to get teased; some people will stare. And the onesies you've bought aren't going to fit, not without some alteration. There are plenty of things you could worry about, plenty of things you haven't planned for, but so what? She's your girl.

Her wings are small at first, like the rest of her. Feathered little nubs, lying folded against the skin of her back. They flutter against your arms while you're nursing her; you see them twitching while she sleeps. And even though you wouldn't say it in public, even though you gently remind strangers and friends alike that she's not a supernatural being but an ordinary flesh-and-blood human baby, you can't help but call her your angel once in a while.

When she learns to walk, you buy one of those child leashes. They have nice ones now, not horrible at all: the one you buy is a furry backpack that looks like a monkey, with an extra strap to secure it around her torso. As she zigzags down the street, three feet above the sidewalk, you keep a tight hold of the long tail.

Safety issues are different than they are with other children. She can't sit comfortably in a stroller or car seat without some jury-rigging. When visiting friends, the first thing you do is look around
for ceiling fans and open windows. You have to be extra-careful with breakable items and cleaning products and medications. Whenever you see the phrase “Keep out of the reach of children,” you feel like calling the company and not hanging up until you find the right person to talk to. You want to explain your situation; you want to talk until you can make someone understand why you're going to need alternate directions.

At the park, reactions are mixed. Other parents are kind and interested, or else they won't meet your eyes. “Watch her, please,” one mother says sharply when your daughter flits up and tries to land in the stroller that holds her new baby.

Your daughter wrenches a shovel away from a little boy in the sandbox, carrying it up as far as she can go on her tether. As you're handling the negotiations of sharing and apologizing, tugging gently to pull her back to earth, you see the moment when she realizes the paradox: she can keep the shovel away from the other children, but only if she never settles down in the sand to dig.

 • • • 

Your second child is born without wings. This is something that none of the parenting books cover. You find yourself loving this new child, this ordinary child, almost guiltily. Before you became a parent, this is what you'd imagined it would be like. This baby rolls on a blanket and finds tiny pieces of carpet fluff to put in her mouth. Baby-proofing takes place much lower to the ground. When you put her in her crib, you don't have to zip a mesh tent over her to keep her from gliding over the railings during the night.

Your older daughter is fascinated by the soft, smooth skin of her sister's back. One day, she asks when the baby's wings are going to grow in, and you begin a conversation that you'll probably be having for years. You tell her that the world is rich and varied; you tell her that we're all different, and we're all the same. Your task here is
clear, and it isn't really so different from anyone else's. Like every parent, you have to teach your girl to live a contradiction, to be exceptional and ordinary, all at the same time.

You figure out ways to make it work. You enlist her help in dusting high corners and painting over water spots on the ceiling. You divide your grocery list into high shelves and low ones, ripping the paper in half and giving each child a piece to carry around the store. You make up new verses for the Hokey-Pokey.

Eventually, the time comes when there's no way you can justify the leash. You set ground rules for flying: no flying at school, with a babysitter, or at a friend's house. No flying higher than Daddy's head. No flying across or above the street. No lifting anyone else to fly with you.

Clothes are an issue: as she grows, so do her wings. In the summer, in the early years, you generally let her go shirtless—let them
both
go shirtless, since it's hard to make it seem fair to a two-year-old that she has to wear a shirt and her sister doesn't. Your neighbors grow used to the sight of the two of them half naked in your front yard, making up elaborate games and mixing messy concoctions of mud and leaves. Sometimes when they're caught up in playing, you see your older girl begin to flap her wings in excitement, not remembering until she's a few feet off the ground that her sister doesn't like it when she flies away from her. Her wings are remarkably expressive. She folds them up tight when she's sad or hurt; when she's happy, she flutters them softly, without seeming to notice that she's doing it.

You remember being slightly horrified when a well-meaning aunt gave you a sewing machine at your bridal shower, but now you use it regularly. You cut long slits up the backs of your daughter's shirts, then stitch the edges so they won't fray. On cold mornings, it takes a while to work her wings through the different layers, and you're impatient with her when she won't stand still. Occasionally,
someone will ask you if you would change things if you could, but it's not a question that makes much sense. Your daughter has wings, and without them, she would not be your daughter. This is not the way you thought things would be, but it doesn't make you wish there were someone else sleeping in her bed.

Her wings are, in many ways, just another part of her body. You pour soapy water over them in the tub; you pat them dry with a bath towel. She asks you to scratch them when she has an itch, and you run your nails gently over the stretches of feathered muscle, the hollow bones jutting at unexpected angles. They seem to get more sensitive for a while when she's going through puberty; she complains that it hurts to lean back against the solid surface of a chair. It occurs to you once—one of those thoughts you wish you hadn't had, but there's not much you can do about it now—that perhaps someday they'll be an erogenous zone for her. That her husband or boyfriend or partner or whatever—well, that's as far as you want to take it, which is just as well, because that's the part that stops you every time. You hope. You hope she'll have everything she needs. Air and sky and, maybe one day, someone to fly beside
her.

My first thank-you, as always, goes to my extraordinary agent, Douglas Stewart, who has continually proven himself to be my best and shrewdest ally. I am also enormously grateful to my editor Pamela Dorman for her enthusiasm, support, and laser-sharp insight.

Thank you to the many wonderful people at Viking Penguin who helped bring this book into the world; I am especially grateful to Madeline McIntosh, Brian Tart, Andrea Schulz, Kate Stark, Lindsay Prevette, Rebecca Lang, Megan Gerrity, Mary Stone, Lydia Hirt, Jeramie Orton, and Emma Mohney. Thank you as well to the many fabulous readers in the sales department and beyond who provided such important early support for the book.

Thank you to Madeleine Clark, Taylor Bacques, Szilvia Molnar, and Danielle Bukowski at Sterling Lord Literistic; to Carole Welch, Nikki Barrow, Caitriona Horne, and Jenny Campbell at Sceptre; to Shari Smiley at the Gotham Group; and to Alison Callahan, who championed the book at its very earliest stages.

Thank you to the MacDowell Colony and the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, for providing me with much-needed time and space to write. (And a separate thank-you to the mysterious forces of the MacDowell Oracle, which told me in no uncertain terms that it was time to insert a werewolf into my current work.)

I have been extremely lucky to have a number of kind, talented, and hilarious friends who have made every part of this journey easier. Many, many thanks to Leslie Pietrzyk, Amy Stolls, and Paula
Whyman for their ongoing support, advice, and friendship. Thank you to Cathy Alter and Michelle Brafman for reading early drafts and providing invaluable suggestions, and thank you to Caitriona Palmer, Kimberly Stephens, Judith Warner, Alexandra Zapruder, and Mary Kay Zuravleff for lunches, laughter, and helping keep me sane. Thank you to the wonderful community at Writers Room DC, including the father-son super-duo of Charles and Alexander Karelis. And thank you to Tracey von Phul Christensen, who was so helpful in answering my questions about homeschooling.

I owe much love and gratitude to my family—especially my mother, Doreen C. Parkhurst, MD; my father, William Parkhurst; and my grandmother Claire T. Carney, to whom this book is dedicated—for a lifetime of inspiration and encouragement. Many thanks also to Molly Katz, to all of my Carney uncles and aunts and cousins, and to Julie Ross, Matthew and Margaret Rosser, and David and Lynette Rosser.

Thank you to my children Henry and Ellie, who continue to amaze me and to teach me new things every day. And infinite thanks to my husband Evan Rosser, for each year of adventure and comfort, joy, and support.

And finally: Thank you to special-education teachers, every single one. Thank you to occupational therapists, physical therapists, and speech therapists. Thank you to pediatric neurologists and educational consultants, IEP coordinators and psychopharmacologists. Thank you to classroom aides and the National Institutes of Health. Thank you to Temple Grandin and John Elder Robison, Andrew Solomon and Simon Baron-Cohen. Thank you to respite workers and babysitters, camp counselors and leaders of social skills groups. Kind neighbors and helpful strangers, overheard conversations and anecdotal evidence. Thanks to newspapers left on buses and the mysterious forces that dictate chance meetings. Thank you to the solace of the Internet, open all night, and to bright mornings that keep on arriving, no matter what.

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