“Look! Here comes a bear.”
He started running. He took off down the stairs and into the woods. For such a little kid, he moved far faster than I thought he could, scrambling over logs and under branches, pushing through pine boughs so they whipped back against my chest. I was running after him in my socks. Paul was in his footed pajamas. I could barely keep up, though the wet leaves and mossy rocks were all familiar to me. Then the last branch fell away and the trees opened up and the shore was in front of us. I saw, to my shock, that a silvery crust of early ice had congealed over the water. Paul looked back at me once, his hair horn bent double. He yelled, “Oh no, a bear!” The next thing I knew, he was down on his belly, elbowing his way onto that thin sheet of ice, and I realized at last how cold it was, how the smell of snow thinned the air in my nostrils, how my fingertips were already going a little numb. “Paul!” I called out, taking a small step onto the ice, listening to it splinter under my weight, feeling the whole thing give way. My third step broke through to my ankles. As I stood in the bitter cold water, as I watched Paul drag himself across the ice by the elbows, pulling himself—snake-like—toward the center of the lake, it came to me finally that this was a dream.
Then it was dawn. Two gray triangles of sky shone through the big windows. Mist was rising off the lake, and I could just make out my parents’ cabin through the haze. Bit by bit, I took in the shadowy room around me. Paul’s light was off, Leo was snoring somewhere out of sight, and Patra was beside me on the couch, still sleeping. The sliding glass door was shut tight. Everything, everything was in its rightful place. I sat up more fully—and saw Drake pacing back and forth, back and forth, in front of Paul’s closed door.
From the corner of my eye, I spotted Leo’s manuscript on the easy chair. Unwilling to go back to sleep, but also unwilling to leave the couch, I leaned over and lifted the top page from the thick stack of papers. I was expecting a document about space, something about the misguided search for extraterrestrial life based on unexamined assumptions. I thought I had a feel for the way Leo would write. I expected jargon and equations mixed with deceptively simple questions. I hoped for diagrams.
Instead, the page on top was written in bland, square language. Once I had it in my hands, I noticed it used a different font than the manuscript beneath. I read the page twice through, first focusing on the typewritten words, and then on Patra’s edits in purple pen. She’d crossed out a few phrases and scrawled a note in skinny cursive at the bottom.
Here’s what Leo wrote:
Let me start by acknowledging the goodness that is the Church of Christ, Scientist and the inspired teachings of Mary Baker Eddy. I’ve written here of my son before but, today I want to give thanks for the omniscient, omnipotent grace of God, who shows Himself to the childlike nature in us all. My son, who has recently struggled with the belief of a stomachache, surprised me one night by asking me to read the Scientific Statement of Being instead of his favorite bedtime story. He is four years old, but his wisdom has long been a model to his mother and me. I read him the statement we all know so well, “There is no life, truth, intelligence, nor substance in matter …” After I finished, he asked me, “What is matter?” I was taken aback because he’d never asked this before. As a scientist, I thought of all the definitions my colleagues argue about and discuss, but as a Scientist, I was led to tell him, “Your stomachache and everything else that lies to you and tries to pretend it is real.” “Out of the mouths of babes.” He said to me then: “I’m not matter. I don’t lie.” So I saw that he knew better than I his own spiritual nature. By the morning after our conversation, my son’s stomachache was entirely gone and he was able to prepare for a weekend trip we’d planned as a family. His demonstration was complete. As Mary Baker Eddy says, “Become conscious for a single moment that Life and intelligence are purely spiritual,—neither in nor of matter,—and the body will then utter no complaints.” I’m so continually grateful to this church, which has sustained me and my family with the true teachings of Christ all these years.
Here’s what Patra had added at the bottom:
Maybe start with a little more description of Paul?