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Now
They are coming out of the woods when Mateo grabs one of Maggie’s wings and tugs, hard. This has long been his way of getting her attention and she has always let him do it, wanting to be a good mother, reminding herself that this is a phase, that he is only five years old, that little boys who do bad things are not destined to become bad men.
But now she wheels on him, the force of her movement yanking her wing from his grasp. “No!” she says, and he blinks and reels back. Two women are walking ahead of them with their children. At the sound of her voice, their heads flick back to watch. “You’re a big boy now,” Maggie says, her voice rising. “You can’t touch them anymore.” Out of the corner of her eye, she sees the women murmur to each other. Turning their smooth, wingless backs to her, they seize their children’s hands and hurry away. Maggie doesn’t care. Tears pool in Mateo’s eyes but she ignores them, stalking up the big, sweeping lawn toward the place where everyone parked their cars.
Further up the slope, the man who is not Trace walks quickly, gripping his daughter’s hand. On her arm is a bruise the size and shape of Mateo’s fist. As Maggie watches, the girl tugs her hand out of her father’s and takes off, her empty Easter basket bobbing in her grip. Her father calls out but she keeps running and Maggie urges her on, her heart pounding on the girl’s behalf, as her head says: faster, and her heart says: it will never be fast enough, and all the places where the Brothers took her apart pulse with remembered pain.
Ten minutes ago
The man who is not Trace kneels in front of his sobbing daughter and hushes her. Neither he nor Maggie was there to see what happened, but the girl has just told them that Mateo hit her when she wouldn’t give him an Easter egg she had found. Now her father says, “I’m sure he didn’t mean to hurt you.” He winks at Maggie; an invitation to a game she does not want to play. “You know boys.”
Maggie looks from her son to the bruised girl to the man who is not Trace but who is so much like him, and something flares within her that has been dead a long time.
“She has a right to her pain,” she says. “She has a right to it.”
“We’re going,” the man says, to no one in particular, and pulls his daughter away, his fingers wrapping around her hand and enveloping it completely.
Seventeen minutes ago
The Easter egg hunt takes place at the home of some friends of her husband’s, wealthy investor types who live in Marin County and own several acres of old-growth forest. Maggie hasn’t set foot in a forest like this in years, but her husband is out of town and the things that happened to her were such a long time ago and so she agrees to take Mateo.
The moment she gets under the trees, she knows she has made a mistake. She sees the bobbing lights, hears the Brothers’ laughter, remembers running until she couldn’t. Heart hammering, she grasps the trunk of a nearby redwood and inches her hands along its fibrous bark, noting its texture as her therapist has taught her. Gradually, her heart slows. The throbbing in her wing joints fades.
When she looks up, Mateo has disappeared.
Forty minutes ago
They are walking from their car up to the big house where they will collect their Easter baskets, and Mateo is angry because she would not let him have another juice box, not right after lunch. He grabs one of her wings and tugs, hard, and she lets him.
Two days ago
She is bathing Mateo and he is angry about this. He grabs one of her wings and tugs, hard, and she lets him.
Three months ago
Maggie loses Mateo at an outdoor shopping complex. For five minutes that feel like fifty, she runs up and down the cobblestone streets, the faux-colonial shopfronts, calling his name with increasing urgency. She finds him with his nose pressed to the window of a lingerie store, watching a winged mannequin rotate on a pedestal.
She seizes his arm. “You can’t run away like that! Do you know how worried I was? I was running around the whole mall looking for you.”
He looks up at her, confusion creasing his face. “Why didn’t you just fly?”
Two years ago
Mateo wanders through the garden of the old Italian villa where they are staying and falls into a fishpond. Maggie, up on the patio with her husband, is too far away to hear the plop of his body entering the water. Yet she is aware of the sudden absence of sound and knows, in her mother’s bones, what has happened. She runs down the lawn and throws herself into the water and pulls him out. When he wails, she is gladder than she has ever been. She is aware of some other bodily sensation and looks down; blood
