A Map of the World Read Online Free PDF Page A

around.”
    “I know,” Claire said. “I like pennies because they taste cold.”
    “Oh Christ,” I was about to say, but I remembered that Howard hadrecently given me a short talking to about swearing in front of the children. “Lizzy, where are you?” I bellowed. “Make a squeak noise.” We looked in the utility closet and the pantry, the bathroom and Howard’s office. We went upstairs. We peeked in the closets expecting her to be crouching with her hands at her face. It was only when we came back downstairs to the kitchen that I noticed the wide open screen door. I stopped because my feet suddenly felt like two flabby pink erasers. I knew what I had to do. If you are on an airplane you are supposed to give air to yourself and your own kind before you help someone else. “Do not move,” I said, turning on the TV, putting Claire directly in front of “The Frugal Gourmet.”
    “Do not leave this house,” I ordered. And then I was out the door and across the garden, down the wooded lane to the pond. I suspect that when animals, a deer or a fox, run from their predators, they are governed by a keen intelligence. They do not waste their movements, and because they know the depth of the woods, the breadth of a field, they flee anticipating the curve of the land, the perfectly situated thicket. I ran like a blind person, stumbling over my own heavy limbs.
    When I came to the clearing I couldn’t see past the single glaring point of sunlight, dancing on the water. I put my hand to my forehead, to make a visor, and still it took me a minute to find the pink seersucker bottom just beneath the surface, about fifteen feet from the beach.
    When I am forced to see those ten minutes as they actually were, when I look clearly, without the scrim of half-uttered prayers and fanciful endings, I am there, tall and gangly and clumsy and slow, crying out unintelligibly, splashing through the water to Lizzy. I had nothing of a hero’s elegance or pace. As I moved I was thinking, She’s fine! She’s fine! People don’t really drown in shallow places—that’s an old wives’ tale! She’s probably looking for minnows or stones or snails so far from the shore.
    I pulled her up and slung her over my shoulder, tripping through the water, screaming then, screaming for help. I didn’t know how to make enough noise, to be heard. I was shrieking with so much force I felt as if I might split, and yet all the world was placid, still. The leaves in the trees hung limp like palsied hands. I lay Lizzy on her back, that was right, and then I tilted her chin and put my ear to her cold chest, and tried to listen.It was impossible to hear anything but the noise of myself, panting and dripping, and the bamming of my own sturdy heart. Lizzy’s skin was rubbery, her face the gray of an old carp, her lips dark as blueberries. Her wide, unblinking eyes were the color of mud. I opened my mouth and screeched again. I’m sure I felt for her pulse before I tore her jump suit and began pumping wildly on her chest; if I was remembering, I couldn’t think, I did it just as if the twenty-four-pound two-year-old girl with a chest as insubstantial as a moth were a full-grown adult, although you were supposed to use one hand instead of two. You were to ventilate every—I didn’t know exactly. CPR was scientific and specific! They kept changing the rules because their understanding of the human body was growing more and more detailed and complete. I stopped pumping to give air to Lizzy. I am a licensed practitioner nurse, and I could not remember how to do CPR properly. I had never had to actually resuscitate a living or dead person and I had not had the refresher course since the year before. Children at school did not fall into sinks and drown; they did not have heart failure. Howard was at my side, his hand on my back for an instant. I kept my mouth to Lizzy’s mouth. I couldn’t recall the cycle and the numbers and yet my hands and my mouth were