Janet McAdams

We didn’t know my mother was driving back to her childhood, with a ring of keys, a compass, and a tiger panting in the back seat. Soon enough the tiger was behind the wheel, circling. And each circle spun further and further away from us. When she calls, the tiger has parked the yellow-striped taxi on the highway’s rough shoulder. It’s time, she says, for this dream to be over. Time to go home, sleep in her own bed. If the compass ever worked, she’s forgotten how to read it, and the ring for the keys is broken, the keys melted down for their metal. If I would just call someone and tell him where she is. She has money — she can pay someone to drive her home. If only a road sign were in sight, but no, there’s only scattered chert and farmland and a man across the road who is not my father. Behind the wheel the hungry tiger’s yellow eyes are slightly open. Behind the wheel the tiger snacks on the summer of 1970 and the entire works of Iris Murdoch. Caught in his teeth are recipes for chocolate mousse and coq au vin, my brother’s first arrest, the one- room schoolroom where her mother taught. So who to call? The tiger, sated for the nonce, has started snoring. The quick drive by, today disguised as children. The tiger snores away.

I. The people who watch me hang my coat on a peg at the office don't even know about that other life, the life when there was you,it, however briefly. To them my body is a fact casual as the weather. I could tell them: That day it rained the way it rains in the New World. Leaves struck the window like daggers. I didn't think about God but the ones we used to worship the ones who want your heart still beating, who load you with gold and lure you to sleep deep in the cenote. II. A girl, he said, and I nodded though we couldn't have known. I would have left him then for ten thousand pesos. I don't know what world you inhabit, swimming there, baby, not-baby, part of my body, not me, swept aside like locks of hair or toenail parings. It's ten years today and you who were never alive pull a face in the leaves of jacaranda, the only tree that lives outside my window. It must be your voice whistling through the office window, though I can't understand your words. Comfort or accusation, I can't understand your words.

1 Late fall the white fur grew up your spine thick as the tail of a marten. You built up the fire, wrapped your legs with skins, but how that chill wind broke through sill and jamb. We stuffed paper in every crevice — an uncle’s will, the writ that changed your name, a certificate of Degree of Indian Blood and one that said O positive. Still we shivered, your eyes yellow in the lantern’s light. Always, they were out there, in a field of boulders the size of bears hunched over. O, you were silky with fur, with a sharp smell I could not get enough of. I fell into a dream of milk and skin, on the bed of pelts in the winter cabin. When I woke they had taken you or you had gone with them. And didn’t I, so green with sleep, track you the three days until new snow fell? 2 I packed flint and tinder and a compass whose face shines in the lowest light. I learned a song to map the way and one to call you back. I crouched over every footprint, sniffing. And here was a broken branch and here something like hair caught by a bramble. I followed and followed — all the yellow hours, until I came to untouched earth and waited in the clearing for the snow to come down white as the winter blanket you long had wanted. 3 In the spring when you come down hungry from that other mountain the space between one rib and the next deep enough to lay my finger — how much of you will remain or linger — bone or mouth or memory of the first sadness of humans? Will you dig from the crevices the paper where they wrote you down as this instead of that? Or startle at the clatter of plates? The creak of the wooden bed? Will your skin shake off its fur, your claws remember they were fingers? And the hands, meaty as paws, soften into what I once could stroke or suckle?

I. ADMIRAL Laid out on vellum, the past is a long wound. It unfolds five centuries later, beneath the heavy pens of scholars. The world shifts and spins as the Admiral's bronze astrolabe measures the paths between stars. The sky is written in the sea's uneasy mirror, and mermaids comb their hair in the distance. They are not, he writes,so beautiful as I have heard. He dreams of his own circuitous route to the Heavens. God and the Crown. Both want too much. II. GOVERNOR At Guanahani, they swam to the caravel bearing parrots and balls of cotton thread, these people so unlike him they could not not be saved. Too angry to sleep, the Governor haunts every room in his castle. The servants whisper in their own tongue. The severed hands of the Taino wave in clear salt water, in pink-tinted water. They wave as the gold mines dry up, as the Governor leaves Hispaniola in chains. Mermaids, dog-headed men and women with breastplates of copper— They draw their bows, and arrows cover the shore of Columbus's dream. No, not the Taino, whom he once called in dios. They touch his white skin. They have the faces of Christian angels.