I thought about Blue Mountain and pictured him asleep somewhere in a house in the high peaks. I pictured him waking in the darkness of that house, maybe from a bad dream. Or maybe from a good dream. I conjured up a nightlight in a corner of his room, a nightlight shaped like a star. I conjured up glow-in-the-dark stars glued to the ceiling of his room. I pictured him counting stars, counting himself back into the land of sleep.
I thought about Asa, the day things broke between us. I thought about Eli, how he had laced his arms around his boy and guided him into the truck and driven him away. I thought of before that day, how Asa used to put his arm around me and hold my far hand and, if he thought I was cold, sneak it into the pocket of his jacket. How he alternated first one arm and one hand and then the other arm and the other hand, so that neither of my hands had a chance to get too cold. I thought about the baby I might have had with him, how he might have waved his hands in the air when he cried, searching for comfort. For someone to help him. Someone to feed him, change him, soothe him, rock him. Someone to take the hurt away.
If ever I made it to the contestant interview, maybe I would tell Trebek about the Adirondacks and the Green Mountains and the White Mountains, how even though they were low and old mountains, they were my favorites. Maybe we would talk about books, and the people who lived inside them. Maybe I would ask him which books he loved as a child.
Whatever questions came my way from now on, and however I chose to answer them, I would hold a night in my heart. I was four years old and my mother was a girl of twenty-two. She woke me in the middle of the night and took my hand and guided me downstairs and out onto the porch.
“Look up, Clara,” she said, and I looked up.
Red and yellow and green and blue, soundless and unearthly.
“It’s the northern lights,” she said. “The aurora borealis.”
The dark night sky had glimmered and pulsed with light. I hung on to my mother’s hand.
Now the four of us, in Chris’s big white car, rounded the final curve of Route 12. The valley spread out before us, shimmering with city lights like a sky fallen to earth. It came to me that my mother had staked her life not on travel, or adventure, or school, or work, or a man to love, but on me. I was the great gamble of my mother’s life, and she had not held back. She had bet it all.