“Nah. It doesn’t feel like that.” Moses didn’t offer anything else and I let it go, accustomed to Moses’s quirks, to his abilities, accustomed to his reluctance to expound.
(End of Cassette)
Moses
“YOU SAW MY mother, Moses?” Millie asked me.
I nodded and then caught myself and answered out loud. “Yeah.”
“What did she look like?” Millie asked, and I heard more wistfulness than doubt.
“You. She looks like you. Dark hair, blue eyes, good bone structure. I knew who she was the moment she came through. But you and Henry were right there in front of me. It wasn’t hard to make the connection.”
Millie shook her head briskly like she needed to rearrange her thoughts, rearrange everything she thought she knew. It was always like this. It took people time to process the improbable.
“The book—the book about giants. What is that?” I asked, giving her something tangible to focus on while her head and her heart found compromise.
“I don’t know . . .” she stuttered, her hands fluttering to her cheeks.
“Giants playing hide and seek?” I prodded. The picture that filled my head was of a huge pair of feet sticking out from under a bed.
“Where do giants hide when playing hide and seek? I can’t think of any place that will cover up their feet,” Millie whispered.
“That’s it,” I said.
“They cannot wiggle under the bed, or cower in a closet. They cannot hide behind a tree or slip inside a pocket.” This time it was Georgia who recited the lines, and I looked at my wife in surprise.
“It’s called When Giants Hide. I used to read it to Eli. He loved it. We read it almost as often as we read Calico the Wonder Horse.”
I felt the same slice to my gut I always felt when I thought about my son. And then I felt the answering peace, the knowledge that love lives on.
“I forgot all about that book! Henry used to love it—my mom and I would read it to him, over and over. I memorized it, actually, and even when my sight started to go and then left me altogether, Henry would turn the pages and I would pretend to read.”
“They could hide behind a mountain, but climbing takes all day. They could hide beneath the ocean, but they might float away,” Georgia recited.
“They could stretch their arms and grab the moon—” Millie said.
“And hide behind the clouds—” Georgia supplied the next line.
“They could tiptoe up behind you, but giants are too loud,” Millie finished, smiling. “In the story, the giants are hiding in plain sight. They are everywhere you look, but they are camouflaged by trees and buildings. In one picture you think you’re looking at a boat dock, and then you realize that it’s a giant laying on the sand. In another picture the giant is shaped like a plane, laying on his back, his arm stretched out to form wings, his shoes pointing upward to make the tail. It’s a look and find book. You know, Where’s Waldo, but instead of tiny figures in red and white striped shirts, the giants are huge. But the artist drew them in such a way that they just blend in.”
“There is a place where giants hide, but I’m not about to tell. If you want to find the giants, you’ll have to search yourself,” Georgia inserted. She was smiling, but her smile was pained, and I reached out and grabbed her hand.
“When I went blind and started using the stick, Henry was only four. He thought I was looking for giants. He thought my stick was a giant finder. He’d walk around with his eyes closed, smacking things with it.”
“So why do you think your mom wanted me to see that book?” I asked, remembering her insistence. “She kept showing me the pages, the pictures. She wanted to tell me something.”
“My dad left,” Millie pondered, as if she wasn’t sure how to answer me, but was willing to explore the question out loud. “We stopped reading that book when my dad left. He played for San Francisco—so he was a ‘Giant.’” She shrugged like she was trying to convince herself that it hadn’t been that important. “We knew where every giant was hiding in the book. We’d found them hundreds of times. But we didn’t know where one giant was. That giant disappeared altogether. I remember hearing my mom read it to Henry once, right after he left. And she started to cry.”
I wanted to take it all back. I didn’t want to talk about this anymore. But Millie continued.
“Then Henry started having nightmares, and the hiding giants were no longer whimsical and harmless. They were scary. He was sure our beds were really giants in disguise and they would take us away while we slept. He thought the refrigerator door was a giant’s mouth, that the garbage truck was a loud, hungry giant who would eat everything in sight. It got ridiculous until my mom banned the book and that was it. The giants slowly became household appliances once again, and his bed was just a bed. He still doesn’t like garbage trucks though.” She smiled at that, and I chuckled. But it wasn’t very funny. None of this was.
“It’s strange,” Millie added. “Henry asked me about a month ago if I knew the story of David and Goliath. And even though I told him that I did, he felt it important to inform me that David had killed Goliath. He seemed especially thrilled that we had our very own giant slayer.”
Giant slayer or not, I wondered for the first time if Millie’s mother had been trying to communicate her distrust of Tag. Maybe she’d known he was going to run, just like her husband had. Maybe she knew her kids deserved better.