The Cradle Read Online Free PDF Page A

the trip after Adam was gone. Her fear of flying would overwhelm her the week before.
    “You’ll get it,” Bill said. He patted Adam on the shoulder. “Next year, kiddo, you come, too. Try to have a wife with you,
     okay? Or at least a girlfriend?”
    “Yeah, right,” Adam said, smiling widely, and Renee looked at the smile and thought: you are a child.
    She turned away from them. Through the window she saw a mother pushing a stroller. She caught the slightest glimpse of a puffy
     blue hood ringed with fur inside and imagined the baby sitting upright, eyes open, taking in the cold and snow. Some little
     boy having his first taste of what it was like when the elements became disagreeable. The mother was dressed in brown fashionable
     clothes and had a black stocking cap on. She looked rich. Bill and Adam again dropped into their own conversation, and Renee
     scraped a piece of frosting from her fingernail. All she had to do was check in once in a while. She knew that. She was allowed
     her leeway. Adam could get donuts on Saturday morning and she could stare out the window while it happened. They all agreed
     that she would drift off here and there.
    And why shouldn’t I? she wondered. Here, here, I make this choice, good-bye. Then she could daydream. She could think about
     what she would write later on. She could form phrases, crack them apart, lock them back together. She could do whatever she
     wanted if they could do whatever they wanted.
    She looked at the plowed piles of snow up against the curb—there was one mound in particular that seemed to be almost a perfect
     pyramid, and someone had made the decision to place a snowball at the peak. She hoped it would snow again tonight, that they
     would all be able to sit together in the living room after supper and they would all be able to glance up, from time to time,
     through the windows and see the white dropping down, and that way, they would all know—that way, there would be one more thing.
     She imagined it: black-orange sky, white snow. Maybe even red fire in the living room. If she was allowed to make a memory,
     right here, today, that would be exactly it. If God reached down and handed her a sack with every single thing inside of it
     and told her she was allowed to make just one memory from the ingredients, whether or not it happened, whether or not it was
     real, that would be exactly it.
    It didn’t snow again. Instead of staying home, Adam decided to go bowling with his friends.
    It was Saturday night and he was leaving on Wednesday. He promised to come again tomorrow, watch football with his father,
     and afterward stay for dinner. Now Bill was on the couch, glasses low on his nose, engrossed in an episode of
Mystery!
She watched it with him for five minutes but decided to go to the office and look over her manuscript.
    She was on to structure—the poems were finished, nearly—it was just a matter of arranging them. She had set up a bulletin
     board on the wall with the title of every poem written on a white note card. This way she could stand in front of the whole
     thing and see it laid out all in one shot, and she could mix and match by theme, image, content. The only thing she felt sure
     of was that there would be two parts—so often the chapbooks were divided into thirds, as though all books of poetry were syllogisms.
     She was tired of that logic and wanted something else.
    Two parts felt right. It was something like: there is a before and there is an after. There is a yes and there is a no. There
     is a now and there is a then. The world is separated into two parts.
    Now and then was right because she’d not been a poet, not in her mind, for thirty-some years. Poetry started her writing,
     but she’d had access to something else when she was young, something elemental and angry and burning that faded out of her
     heart. By the time she met and married Bill, at thirty, it was gone. By then she’d already moved to children’s books and