T H E    F A L S E    C H I L D

    It is funny how some insignificant thing you do – just getting up from a chair, say – can completely change your life. Imagine that you leave your bedroom and three seconds later you hear a crash. You look back and see that the whole ceiling has collapsed. Or imagine a less happy ending. You’re just about to leave your bedroom, but decide that you’ll go back to bed. The next minute, there you are, lying under a whole pile of plaster. Life is like that. One chance moment may change your life for better or for worse, and there is no way of knowing which one it is going to be.

    In Katie’s case, all she did was stand at the window one morning, like she always did.  And like she always did, she watched the children going to school. Only on that particular morning, one of the children she saw noticed her. He waved. She waved back.  A perfectly unremarkable boy, a perfectly unremarkable event on a perfectly unremarkable day – a day so much like all the days in Katie’s life.  But after this seemingly unremarkable event, nothing for Katie would ever be the same.

 

                               Katie at the Window

         Katie shoved the end of the broom into the corner she could never reach. She jabbed at the tangle of spider webs and dust that she could never manage to keep up with.  She was bored and tired and her nose itched from the dust, and the last thing she wanted to be doing was sweeping this same, tired old room.

     She’d already had a bad day and it wasn’t even nine o’clock!  Earlier, she’d been helping her mother weed in the garden – until she managed to put her foot down in a row of baby seedlings. 

       “Katie!” her mother said sharply, “If you can’t keep your feet out of the verbena, go and turn the compost pile.”

      Katie hated the compost pile.  It stank and it was filled with things like worms and rotting wood and vegetables. She picked up the garden fork and gave it a few pokes. She lifted a soggy forkful of compost and let it fall, then nudged the edge of a whitish mass and saw that it was teeming with worms.

     “Ewww!” she cried, letting the fork drop to the ground and managing to crack a flowerpot.

       Her mother saw it, of course. She saw everything.

      Wordlessly, she handed Katie the basket of mushrooms, and pointed with her chin towards the house. Katie took it and made her way to the shed.   This she didn’t mind so much – cleaning mushrooms wasn’t such a nasty chore – but unfortunately she didn’t see the rake on the round. 

     “Why don’t you go inside and sweep the floors again,” her mother said quietly once Katie had brushed herself off and they’d picked up all the mushrooms.

      So Katie went back inside, and that was where she was now, in the front room.  It was such an ugly, bare little room. There were no pictures on the walls, and the only furniture was the table where they ate all their meals. The only thing Katie liked about the room was the window – her window to the world. She made a few aimless swipes around the front door, then went and stood at the window. For the next ten minutes she leaned on her broom and watched the others on their way to school. 

     She always heard them first. Laughing as they splashed through puddles, having fun. Why wasn’t she out there with them? 

     “Because you don’t need school,” her mother always told her. “You can learn all you need to learn here.” When Katie asked why, the answer never varied: “Because we are different.”

        But Katie knew that it was really her mother who was different. The way she dressed, the way she looked. And even more, the way she acted. 

      “I’m not like her,” she thought to herself now, tapping on the windowpane. Then she said it out loud:  “I’m not like her – not one single bit.”

       The rain began to come down harder now. All the children were gone, anyway; they’d be at school now. Katie sighed and picked up her broom, ready to finish sweeping the room.

      And then she saw the boy. 

      He was hurrying along the street, his bright red raincoat pulled over his head. She watched him closely; she knew most of the children by sight, but she’d never seen him before. He was thin, a little taller than she was, and he looked angry and hassled, as though he too wished he were some other place.

     Suddenly, the boy stopped in his tracks and stared up at the window. Katie was so surprised, she gasped. Then he actually lifted his hand and waved. To her! Katie was momentarily taken aback, but to her amazement, she found her own hand moving up to wave back. For a moment they stood and stared at each other. Then the boy turned and ran off towards the school.

       “Have you recovered from your spell of clumsiness, Katie?” Katie jumped; her mother was standing in the doorway staring at her.

     “Sorry!” she said. “I’m almost done.”

     Her mother sighed. “What is that smell?” she suddenly asked, narrowing her eyes.

     Katie shook her head. “What smell?”

     But her mother didn’t answer; she walked over to the window and stared out of it.    

     “You cannot smell anything?” she asked. Katie shook her head.

     Her mother sighed again. “Very well. When you are finished, please join me in the garden.”

         Their garden was huge, easily the biggest in the neighborhood, and it was full of plants. Not the flowers and bushes and trees other people had: even the plants in their garden were different. They were there to be eaten, mainly, or to be made into various preparations, and they were not necessarily attractive.

   Katie put out a finger and stroked one of the odd thistles her mother grew with its sharply pointed purple spikes and disappointingly tiny flowers. Other people had pretty flowers in their garden, but not them. She stuck out a foot and nudged one of the old logs under which her mother grew mushrooms. They had mushrooms everywhere: in big wooden buckets, growing up the sides of tree trunks, in trays her mother kept in the shed.

Nobody else in the neighborhood grew mushrooms in their yards – or not on purpose, anyway.  Other people raked them off their grass and threw them away.

       Katie followed her mother to the potting shed, and they collected their baskets. It was raining, but Katie’s mother insisted that a little rain never hurt anyone. Silently, the rain falling steadily on their bent backs, they harvested.  Within an hour, they were both sopping wet, and Katie was so bored she could have cried.

      Katie sat back on her heels and wiped a strand of hair out of her face. She was cold, wet and miserable. She glanced over at her mother, who never seemed to feel the cold. “Mother?”

     “Yes?” murmured her mother, scarcely looking up from her work.

     “Whatever happened to Mr Briggs?”

     “He moved away,” said her mother brusquely. “I believe that he went to live with his son.”

      Katie had liked their elderly next-door neighbor, Mr Briggs, with his walking stick and his cheerful whistle. He’d always said hello to her, and one day he even gave her a present:  a small white stone, perfectly round and beautifully painted with swirling red stripes that met in the center, wrapped in thin paper as clear as window-glass.

     “Don’t just look at it – eat it!” Mr Briggs had laughed as she marveled at its perfect roundness.  But when she popped the stone in her mouth, he shook his head and laughed again.  “You have to unwrap it first!”

   So she had. And what a shock! Mr Briggs had laughed as she stood there, stunned, with that sharp-sweetness exploding in her mouth, shooting up her nose, making her eyes water.  Unfortunately, her mother had come along just then and made her spit it out. And Mr Briggs had been told never to give her another one.

       After that, she had seen Mr Briggs out in the garden again, but although he smiled and waved, he had never given her another stone.  Once, though, he had quarreled with her mother when they were gardening in the rain.

    “The child is soaking wet!” he had called over the fence. Her mother had made some reply – Katie could not remember what – then continued her work.  “That child will catch her death of cold!” Mr Briggs had thundered.  She and her mother had continued working, but Katie had asked, “What is catch your death?”  And her mother had answered that catching your death was something people like Mr Briggs worried about all the time.  Now Katie was older and her mother had told her what colds were. She sometimes wondered what it would be like to have one. Her mother said that colds weren’t pleasant, but then she said that about a lot of things. Like that round, smooth stone, for instance.

      Why did her mother seem to hate anything that was fun or interesting? Katie knew that other people lived differently.  For instance, they went into each other’s houses; they didn’t just stand at the doorstep and talk like her mother and the people who visited them.

   Not long after Mr Briggs had given her the magic stone, a woman had come just to see her. She asked Katie a lot of questions – about her mother, about the garden, and whether she had any friends.  Katie told her about her snails and pet turtles.   “Is Mr Briggs your friend?” the woman asked, and Katie told her about the magic stone. “You know,” the woman told her, “you must never accept things from strangers.” Katie hadn’t known that at all. “You certainly seem like a healthy little girl to me,” the woman told her, smiling. Then she’d chatted with her mother and left.

After the lady left, Katie asked her mother about the woman.  ‘Will she come and see me again?’ she wanted to know, but her mother had just smiled and gone back to work.

       Ever since that exciting day – the day of the woman who wanted to talk to her – every time someone knocked on the door Katie hoped that it might be for her.  She listened, straining her ears, hoping that maybe this time someone else was asking for her. But no one ever was.  People often came to see her mother, to talk to her and perhaps get one of her small packets of herbs or roots. But no one ever came to see Katie. None of the people who came to see her mother seemed to know that Katie existed.

       Katie’s mother peered into Katie’s basket.  “That is enough. We will rest.”  So Katie followed her mother back into the house.

       Later, Katie sat at the table and did her homework.  “Echinacea angustifolia., purple coneflower,” she wrote carefully  Then she began to draw.  Whenever she imagined what school must be like, she thought of this: drawing and copying words into her notebook. School was for learning and studying – her mother had told her that much.  So it must be like what she was doing now, but much nicer because you were with other people – sitting and drawing and doing what you wanted to do all day long.

     That night, Katie thought about the boy and wondered if he would be there tomorrow.  She got out of bed and went to the chest where she kept her notebooks.  In the bottom drawer she had a treasure her mother did not know about:  the piece of transparent paper which had been wrapped around the stone.  The delicious smell had long since disappeared, but the paper, though duller now from frequent handling, still shone.

    “I wish” she whispered, crinkling the paper in her hands,  “that I might see the boy tomorrow.”  She paused for a moment, her eyes closed.  As long as she was making one wish, she might as well make another. “And I wish that someday I could go to school.”