And then the vibration changed, and the sound lowered and began to take shape in her body. Her teeth felt like teeth again. She closed her mouth and eyes. Steadied her own breathing. She wasn’t dead. Or injured. That she could tell. Her hair fell lightly onto her shoulders.
The sound vibrations finally dropped into a kind of low bowl swirling in her skull and then pinpointed itself just between her right eye and ear. Like a fingertip of sound, touching her.
Then the sound had orchestral tune, and then the tune had operatic voice.
Slow and easy at first, the song rapidly grew wild in scope and thrill. Though it dealt with the world in ways that her dreams had already foretold—the same truths about the dying sun and erupted calderas, the same conflicts simmering ever toward war, the same kinds of people and places, like her own house and parents—the more the verses unraveled and sang, the more her body felt like the source of some larger-than-life vibration. She shook her head at one point, as if to say no. But the voices tenored on with grand scale and detail until the ballad was entirely epic, and her place within it, larger than the tree she so mysteriously found herself bound to.
At the end, the song seemed to pose a question. It felt completely right to speak aloud in answer. “But how can I possibly convince anyone of this?” she said. “I will be punished or worse. Doctors will come and tell my parents I’ve lost my mind. That happened, you know, to a neighbor boy. They said his dreams had taken his wits. He kept on digging holes in the ground. Eating the dirt. And, besides, I am scared.”
Math. Science. And music. The three made crossroads in her head. It wasn’t a voice making sentences, but forms and sound and light and song moving through her. Everything she was taking in connected to the ideas she had absorbed in her science classes in school, to the questions she had discovered and nurtured there. She recalled what she’d learned in school and recited it back to herself, almost like a bedtime story: “There may be layers of structure inside an electron, inside a quark, inside any particle you have heard of; these are like little tiny filaments. Like a tiny little string, that’s why it’s called string theory, and the little strings can vibrate in different patterns. There are strings to existence, and harmonies—cosmic harmonies—born of the strings.” Cosmic harmonies made of strings. Cosmic harmonies made of strings. She repeated it in her head until it made a rhythm. Thinking about it made her hold her breath and touch her tongue to her teeth. The crouch of dreams at her temples and fingertips.
Only when the surge had finished its song, all the way to an unimaginable ending, did the tree release its hold on her hand. The vibrations left her body, like a taut string suddenly released, and for a moment she felt lighter than human. Would she be lifted into the dull sky now? But when she looked down she saw her own feet, two brown worn leather short boots just standing, the feet of someone’s daughter just standing in a small wood near a river close to her home. And yet what was inside her now, under her skin between her right eye and ear, would change her forever: a blue light.
Leaving the twigs in the knothole of the evergreen, she ran all the way home. When she burst through the door, her startled mother, who had been standing in front of the screen watching a news report, lost her grip on a glass of water and splashed it straight onto the screen. The image popped and sizzled briefly. The newscaster’s face pixelated and his voice went wonky.
“Damn it!” her mother said, standing up and grabbing a rag from the kitchen. When she returned, she dabbed tentatively at the screen, a little afraid to touch it for fear of electric shock. When she stepped back from the screen and turned around, she gulped at the sight of Joan.
“What on earth is that on your head?”
Joan walked over to her mother, still panting from running. Her mother touched the glowing blue light between her right eye and her ear. “Sweetheart?” her mother whispered. “Honey, what . . .” She fingered Joan’s temple. “What happened to your head, here?”
She felt her mother’s finger in the place. Her mother’s eyes opened too wide, her brow knitting little lines in her forehead. With her mother’s finger in that spot, her entire body vibrated. Great heaves of reassuring song filled her skull. She began to sing. She closed her eyes and turned inward. Somewhere her mother’s voice, far away—Joan, Joan.
She was ten.
Chapter Six
Her brother dug his hands into the sand near the shore. A family vacation. Trying to create a bubble of bliss, away from things. A cabin by the sea near Normandy, France, before the Wars, before geocatastrophe, before nations and cities lost their shapes and names.
Behind her, their parents tended a wood fire. Her mother cooked a braised rabbit. Her father listened to Satie. She saw them through the vacation cabin’s window in the orange inner light. She saw her mother look up now and again toward where she and her brother begged to sit near the sea, at night, to watch the water move. To count stars. To smell ocean. Her mother tasted a wooden spoon, Joan brought her forearm to her lips and licked her arm and smiled at the salted skin.
She looked back toward the ocean and tilted her head to the side and wondered. At the surface of the water, she was sure she saw too-bright hues of blue and green making tendrils in the waves. Gleaming up from the water. Was it a trick of the eye? Or was the sea really glowing?
The crescendo and decrescendo of waves filled her ears.
“Do you see it?” Joan yelled over to her brother, who fashioned a crown from kelp.
He followed her finger pointing out toward the water. Then he picked up a palm-size flat beach rock and threw it toward the light. “A submarine!” he shouted. “A spy boat!”
Their father’s stories about this place flitted across her mind. Once, he’d told them, there were wars. Submarines. Gunboats. But now this was a coastline for vacationing families and tourists and boys who threw rocks. She laughed.