Here is something that I think about.
Let’s say your window’s open on a cold, damp, foggy day and a strange man happens to be walking down your street. He’s not even meaning to do anything, but he sees the sliver of open window and suddenly gets the idea, hey, there’s a nice little space to worm into. Why not. Let’s say he decides to open the window the rest of the way, then sucks in his stomach and slips inside. The house he’s slipped into is warm and cozy and he wants to see more of it. Let’s say he goes from the living room where there’s no one to the kitchen where it smells like bacon. A mom is there, cooking breakfast. She has her back to him and she can’t hear anything but the crackle of the bacon on the stove and the pan spitting hot grease on her hands that hurts in a way that she’s used to. She cooks this breakfast every Sunday. Let’s say her husband went out for bagels and her three kids are asleep in their rooms upstairs. They could sleep through a thunderstorm, or a 4.0 earthquake. (In fact, they have. They dream they’re on sailboats, carnival rides.) Let’s say the man is standing there in the kitchen, looking at this mom who has left the window open so carelessly, who has not “given sufficient attention or thought to avoiding harm.” The man thinks, Nobody ever cooked bacon for me. The man thinks, Well I’m here now, there’s a knife.
Let’s say it wasn’t actually the mom who left the window open. She isn’t a careless person, she is a mother, always shutting cabinet doors behind the dad who leaves them open for people to bang their heads on, always double-checking locks behind the kids who think locks are something the mom invented to nag them about, because none of their friends ever lock their doors. They live in Mill Valley, and most of them have never been anywhere else except for St. Barts and the Seychelles and Hong Kong and Vail, on vacation. They think, All the bad and interesting things happen in the East Bay or The City. Nothing happens here.
Let’s say it was the mom’s youngest kid, a girl. The girl was so small and meek and unspecial you’d never think she’d do anything that mattered. Let’s say the night before the man came, she was sitting by the open window, reading a poetry book. She liked to listen to the fog dripping through the trees, a sound that was softer than rain. She liked the fresh, minty smell of it—some of the trees were eucalyptus. On those nights with the fog in the valley everything outside smelled good, even the dirt on the ground. It smelled like things growing and she liked to be reminded of that, that even when the world was shit and she hated everyone in it, most of all herself, that there were still things growing, all the time, in the dirt beneath her feet. Let’s say she fell asleep with her book splayed open on her chest, then woke up hours later and stumbled to bed. Let’s say she left that window open, not all the way, but just enough.
When the mom is lying bloody on the kitchen floor and her bright insides are staining the linoleum, when the man has been hauled off to prison to spend his life thinking about something he hadn’t even known he’d do, when the dad has had to learn to shut the kitchen cabinets on his own, and when the kids have woken up on the third day without their mom, on the fourth and the fifth and the seventeenth day, the twenty-fifth and the thirty-seventh, and realized as if for the first time that she is never, never going to barge into their rooms to wake them up again—the question is, when all of this has happened and you’re looking for someone to blame, who is it going to be?
The point of this paper is: Jordan Baker is right. I hate careless people too.
Calista’s essay was not technically an essay. How could Molly impose on it a teacher’s judgment or brand it with a grade? It was a missive tossed over the transom, or a secret sent through a chink in the stone wall between them, like promises whispered by Pyramus and Thisbe. The girl was trying to reach someone; the someone was Molly.
From the first day, when she’d seen her reading poetry rather than paying attention, Molly had guessed that there was something special in Calista Broderick. She was gratified to be proven right. Now that she knew, she could help Calista, mold her talent and encourage her interests, bring her books from the library and train her to organize her ideas into paragraphs, papers. She’d once read a report in National Geographic about the largest caves on Earth, in China, each so large that it was like its own world. Maybe Calista’s mind—maybe Molly’s own—was like this. An immense space, at once apart from the world and embedded within it, a secret place that was strange and dark and vast enough to make its own weather.