The Vigil

The work she'd brought to the table was still folded under her hand. She'd meant to do it after the child was settled. The child had settled and she hadn't done it. She'd put her elbow on the table and her head on her hand and she was watching the child read.

The lamp stood between them. The child sat on the far side of it in the small red dress, bent over the book, close to the page the way children are close to things, with no distance kept. The light was on the child's hair and on the round of the cheek and on the hand that lay flat beside the book holding nothing, having forgotten it was a hand.

She didn't know what the child was reading. The child couldn't read, not really, not yet. It could follow a line and sound the easy words and make up the rest from the pictures. So the child wasn't reading. The child was doing whatever the thing was that came before reading, the thing that looked the same from outside, the bent head and the still body and the eyes going along the line.

Whatever it was, the child was all the way inside it. That was the part she watched. The child had gone somewhere into the book and the book had taken all of her, and there was nothing held back, no part of the child standing off to the side keeping watch on the room. The child didn't know the room was there. The child didn't know she was there. She'd been like that once. She couldn't remember it. You couldn't remember it, because remembering was a thing you did from outside and the whole of it was that there'd been no outside. She watched the child have it and couldn't have it and couldn't even recall having had it, only knew that she must have, because everyone had, and then it went.

She wanted the child to look up.

It came on her quietly, the want, while she watched. If the child looked up the child would see her, and the seeing would be the thing she didn't have, the child surfacing out of the book to find her there and know her. She wanted it. She sat with her head on her hand and wanted the child to lift its eyes.

And the wanting was the one thing she couldn't act on, because to get it she'd have to call the child up out of the book, and the child being down in the book was the thing she was keeping watch over. The vigil was for the absorption. To break it for company would be to want the child for herself instead of wanting the child to have what the child had. She knew the difference. She kept her hand where it was and didn't speak.

The child stirred. Something on the page ended, or the child came up for air the way they do, and the head lifted a little, and the eyes came halfway up off the book toward the lamp, toward the dark beyond the lamp where she sat.

She held still. She didn't lean in or make the small sound that would've brought the child the rest of the way up. She let the moment stand open and didn't reach into it.

The child's eyes didn't finish coming up. Something on the page took the child again, the eyes went back down, the head bent, the body folded back into the book, and the child was gone again into the place she couldn't go, and hadn't seen her, and was right not to have.

She kept her head on her hand. The lamp burned between them. She moved it an inch toward the child, so the light fell better on the page, and put her hand back under her chin, and stayed where she was, on her side of it, in the dark, keeping it lit.