My father and the stranger, Harry Owen, are there as well, beaten back off the cliffs early by the cold. Nobody but the stranger looks up when I enter: I am not invisible to him as yet. Immediately he asks if he can measure me.
This peculiar request brings no reaction from my parents, my father intent on his newly collected rocks, my mother staring broodingly into the fire, as if she has lost something and thinks she might find it there, so, shrugging off my coat, I accede.
He measures me gently, with a piece of string. The circumference of my skull first; then the lengths of my arms, in separate measures: wrist to elbow; elbow to shoulder. Then my legs: ankle to knee, knee to hip. Measures each of my feet. My hands, each of my fingers. He is so clinical it is impossible to find anything improper in his touch, which is light and dry, like paper, though, too, I can feel his warmth, his tweediness, can smell his cinnamon and tobacco, can hear, even, the intimate, measured ticking of his pocket watch almost as if it is his heart tucked away safely beneath his waistcoat. Carefully he makes note of all my measures. He can rebuild me now, if he wants. Replication is possible.
He says, Remarkable!
This is because I am a giantess, not out of any other type of longing, or desire, or admiration.
Those belong to my mother, all of them, always. She is not sharing with me.
Indeed, it seems she will not allow me even this, for as if his remark has alerted her to my presence she emerges suddenly from her reverie, blinks, sees me, and says, Carlotta, run to the bake house and buy me a loaf.
And so I am out again, into the cold.
• • •
Outside I feel lighter, relieved of a burden. It was not just the heat from the fire, or the tightly packed, tensile warmth of my grandfather’s creatures pressed close around us, threatening to spring.
It was, is, something else altogether.
• • •
Weight of secrets, drawing us downward. Stones in our pockets. That is what I think, passing again, at my mother’s bidding, above the murmurous river.
• • •
In the night it snows. The stranger returns to his room at the Bird in Hand; but in the morning it clears, and so he returns, early, before it is light.
They will attempt their expedition again.
My mother says:
Take Carlotta with you.
I am both too surprised and too delighted to respond to this unexpected largesse; but then my father says, No, she can’t go out. It’s too icy.
My mother scowls and turns away. But really there is nowhere else for her to turn; there is only this one place, these people; so she turns back.
My Papa used to take me with him on all his adventures, she says.
But nonetheless: It’s dangerous. She could fall.
So I am left behind again. My mother and I watch, together, from the parlor window, as my father and Harry Owen emerge, heavy with gear, onto Bridge Street. It is a white morning, bright with ice, Harry Owen and my father black figures upon it, dark, moving hieroglyphs upon a stark field of white crosshatched with shadows.
The ice is bright from within, like hot glass emerging from my father’s furnace. Yet this light is confusing, because it has no clear source. I watch as my father and Harry Owen cross the bridge, grow distant. My mother says, yawning, It’s too early. I’m going back to bed. The moth’s wing of her gown brushes against me. She is a stranger again in the strange cold light, the ice light. Her face is altered. She isn’t really here. She has already boarded the Emerald Isle, awaits, impatiently, the moment of casting off.