He started to tick off all the ingredients for making a window, and their window specifically.
Jean raised her hand eagerly. “Ooh! Me! I have something!”
Nell snorted. “It’s not school, Jean.”
Jean ignored her. “It was cold to touch it, but that night — it turned warm.”
“Right!” he said. “Temperature. Good one, Jean!” She rewarded him with a grin.
Kate added the width of the sill, which she could climb on back home, and the way the shade was bent, having once been hit by an errant ball.
They talked about glass and wood, and the width and height of the window for so long that at last Max could really see it. And after a while, he thought about it so much, it was like a song in his head — glass and wood and height and width and cold-turned-warm — until the picture of the window hung behind his eyes.
And then the air hummed and thickened, and it was there.
The window hung in the sky just above Max’s head, vivid with the colors of the setting sun. Jean squealed with joy, and Kate rushed to it, jumping up to try to reach the glass. Nell stretched to lay her hand flat on the clear surface.
“It doesn’t give,” she said.
Susan circled the glass, and Max hoisted Nell onto his shoulders so she could press her face against it. But it was no use. They’d produced a window at last, and it looked exactly like the window back home. But it was just a window, nothing more.
They tried again, then again, then a fourth time. It didn’t matter. Windows hung, suspended from nothing, but they were only glass. They didn’t open to anywhere.
At last they stood among the aspens, staring in disappointment at the strange hanging windows they’d made, glass fading with the sunlight and beading, eventually, with the heat.
Max wondered what there was left to hope for.
The watchers had long climbed the mountain in ones and twos, as lonely in their way as the lost, if only for a time. Was it easier to move into darkness clothed in anger? The exile thought it must be, for they pushed on in eagerness, seeking the roads and the cities of men. If they sensed the presence of another upon the rise, they gave no sign. Nor did the exile seek them. Eyes of the valley, they called themselves. The exile knew them better as its arm of judgment and its punishing hand. Still, life calls to life, and brothers carry with them the scent of home. So watching from a distance, the exile marked their coming and knew when they departed.
Thus it was that their increase told its story. At the height of summer, beneath a waning moon, they came steadily, a stream of them crossing beneath the trees, making their way to the dark place beyond. What was it that drew them there? In years past, the wisest had begged that they go. Open arms to the afflicted, welcome home the lost, he had said. Why let fear forever bind you? For such counsel they had called him poison, called him fool. Anger burned in the valley, and his coaxing talk of strength and welcome went unheeded. Had those below heard it at last? No. There was nothing of forgiveness in the whispers of the travelers as they moved through the trees.
If there had ever been forgiveness in the valley, it was long dead.
The earliest story Max knew about himself was a story of struggle and surprise. He’d been born just minutes after Susan, and though she had come into the world mostly fine, it had been tougher for Max, whose lungs, at first, didn’t work. As a small boy, he had liked to examine the pictures his parents kept of that beginning time, amazed that the scrawny, very un-Max-like baby in the glass box, covered in tubes and wires, could be him.
At age five or six, studying pictures of his newborn self, he’d come up with a list of questions about the entire incident, chief of which was why his chest was caved in as if he were starving. Didn’t any of those tubes send food? His father had explained that he was trying to breathe, and though the doctors sent him oxygen through a tube, each day they’d send a little less, so he had to work at it, his lungs fighting to draw air.
“That’s the only way to make lungs grow,” his mother had told him. “If you didn’t fight for air, you’d have been stuck in that box forever.”
She said he’d fought so hard, he’d surprised them and come home early. Max had always been proud of that. He liked to think of his newborn self exceeding expectations.
Getting home again was now the focus of Max’s day and night, but no amount of twisting his brain into knots seemed to help.
They had made glass, windows even, but they were useless things, hanging in the wood to mock them. Susan tried to make them disappear, but one fell, shattering in the dirt. The shards of it glared up at them, iced with afternoon sun.
“We should clean it up,” she said. “It’s littering.”
Max sighed and told her they’d do it later. Watching the window fall had drained him, and he could see the others felt the same. Kate and Jean returned to a game they had devised with stones, Nell stretched out on the blanket and buried her head in her crossed arms. Max peeked to see if she was crying, but if she was, she made no sound, and after a while he could see by the way her back rose and fell that she was asleep. Susan collected bits of broken glass, but even she abandoned the project in the middle and sat looking at the way they caught the light.
“What are we doing wrong?” she asked him. “What’s a window beyond glass and wood?”
Max squinted up
