I gave the woman some money, sipped my drink, and watched children playing on the steep path. Somehow, through sign language, I asked the woman … my hostess, for it was her house where I sat on the porch … if the children were hers. Three, she replied, holding up three fingers and then pointing to the ones she meant. Then, somehow, again with sign language, she asked if I had children, and I too held up three fingers and we smiled at each other.
But I didn’t feel quite right about my answer. I had had four children, actually, and one had died just a few months before this encounter. Saying “I have three” didn’t yet feel comfortable to me (perhaps it never would, never has) and so I tried to explain … tiptoeing through the language barrier, using my hands … that once I had had four. To my amazement, she understood, and then replied, using her hands, that she too had once had four children. I cannot remember exactly how we conducted the resulting conversation. But we did, and we understood each other. She asked what had happened, and I pointed to the sky, describing with my hands the downward plunge, the explosion as it crashed, and that I had lost my son that way. She expressed sorrow, and told me her own tragedy: a child climbing, and falling from a high place in these hills; a head injury; the very difficult journey to the only hospital in Denpasar many miles away, the fact that the child could not be saved.
We sat there in silence for a while. She reached over, then, and touched my hand. We had not exchanged a single word that either of us could understand. But we had exchanged two lives with each other, and had crossed an enormous barrier. It’s a memory I treasure.
What is the strangest dream you have had?
I don’t know if this qualifies as “strange” but it’s interesting, and it’s a dream that I love. Again and again I have dreamed that I’ve bought, or rented, a new house and am moving into it when I discover that there is a door, sometimes a stairway, that I hadn’t known about. It leads to a whole wonderful room that I hadn’t known was there.
I suppose blue. The book of mine called Gathering Blue – which follows The Giver – centres around the colour blue. How it represents serenity and peace, and how difficult it is to find, but how important the search for it is. That reflects me, I think.
What is your favourite children’s book?
That’s a hard question to answer. There are so many wonderful books. I do love the book Sarah Plain and Tall by Patricia MacLachlan.
I love the solitude, the sitting at my desk, watching the words appear on my computer screen, hearing how they sound, the work of rearranging them, seeing them fall into the right order, the place where they have meaning and the right cadence.
What is the best piece of advice anyone has ever given you? In regard to writing:
“Start on the day that is different” is a piece of advice I have valued. It’s so simple but so effective. It has to do with how to begin a book or a story.
A good friend, some good food and some good books. I wouldn’t even care about being rescued.
If you could say anything to your readers what would it be?
I’d say thank you. Without readers, a writer is a useless sort of person!
Table of Contents
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Chapter Eleven
Chapter Twelve
Chapter Thirteen
Chapter Fourteen
Chapter Fifteen
Chapter Sixteen
Chapter Seventeen
Chapter Eighteen
Chapter Nineteen
Chapter Twenty
Chapter Twenty-One
Chapter Twenty-Two
Chapter Twenty-Three
MOTHER?”
There was no reply. She hadn’t expected one. Her mother had been dead now for four days, and Kira could tell that the last of the spirit was drifting away.
“Mother.” She said it again, quietly, to whatever was leaving. She thought that she could feel its leave-taking, the way one could feel a small whisper of breeze at night.
Now she was all alone. Kira felt the aloneness, the uncertainty, and a great sadness.
This had been her mother, the warm and vital woman whose name had been Katrina. Then after the brief and unexpected sickness, it had become the body of Katrina, still containing the lingering spirit. After four sunsets and sunrises, the spirit, too, was gone. It was simply a body. Diggers would come and sprinkle a layer of soil over the flesh, but even so it would be eaten by the clawing, hungry creatures that came at night. Then the bones would scatter, rot, and crumble to become part of the earth.
Kira wiped briefly at her eyes, which had filled suddenly with tears. She had loved her mother, and would miss her terribly. But it was time for her to go. She wedged her walking stick in the soft ground, leaned on it, and pulled herself up.
She looked around uncertainly. She was young still, and had not experienced death before, not in the small two-person family that she and her mother had been. Of course she had seen others go through the rituals. She could see some of them in the vast foul-smelling Field of Leaving, huddled beside the ones whose lingering spirits they tended. She knew