“Once upon a time, but not so long ago, there lived the wise old toad queen who sat upon her log, watching over all that was her dominion. Each spring she watched as the fairy flies were born and then flew off to find their light. The toad queen did not eat the fairy flies, because, being wise, she knew that they were like bubbles: too beautiful to pop and too little to be of nutrition or taste. The toad queen preferred the black flies that were fat and buzzed around her constantly.”
Madison giggled at this; her eyes were wide and intent on the story. Hannah continued. “One spring, as all the other springs before, a group of fairy flies were born. But, as they all went off to find their light, one very tiny and very beautiful fairy fly did not. This particular fairy fly’s name was Lily. Lily watched as the others flittered this way and that, drying their newly formed wings and testing their new freedom of flight. But Lily did not dart as the others did. She was a timid fairy fly, not yet sure of her abilities.
Day after day, Lily tried. She would get her courage up and dart out from behind her hiding place to the light she thought was hers, only to find that once she had gotten to it, it belonged to someone else. She was afraid to fly farther than what seemed safe to find her light. One day, the toad queen noticed Lily who was hiding along the banks by the queen’s log. She said to the timid fairy fly, ‘Why haven’t you found your light?’ ‘I don’t think there is one for me.’ Lily said back, quietly, trying to keep the tiny tears from dropping onto her wings. ‘Of course you do,’ assured the toad queen, ‘all fairy flies have a light.’ ‘Then I can’t find mine.’ said a discouraged Lily. ‘For some fairy flies, any light nearby will do, but for special fairy flies, like yourself, you will need a special light. You will have to search long and far for yours, for your light will not be just any light.’ ‘But I am afraid of the swimming flashes!’ cried Lily. (“Those are the fish beneath the water” edited Hannah.) ‘And the long tongues.’ (“Frogs?” Meg guessed. Hannah smiled her assent.) ‘But most of all, I am afraid of those huge noisy metal monsters.’ Lily admitted very quietly, afraid to make one materialize just by mentioning it. (“Cars!” Chimed in a serious Madison, realizing how terrifying one might be to such a small creature.) ‘Don’t you fear, little fairy fly, because you are so special you have the strength inside of you that will protect you from all that you fear. Go now and bring me back your light, for this is something I especially want to see.’ Lily looked once more at the toad queen and then darted up and away from the bank of the river. She flew as high and as fast as she could, and she did not pause to look around. She headed straight ahead toward a place she had never been before. She flew past other fairy flies, who encouraged her on. She flew by swimming flashes and long tongues, too fast to be caught by either, she flew above the metallic monsters, immune to their smells and noise. Lily flew and flew until suddenly, there in front of her, was a shimmering light. She slowed her flight. This light was brighter and more colorful than any of the others she had seen. ‘It must be someone else’s light’ she thought, but kept flying closer and closer to it. Lily looked around. There were no other fairy flies here. When she got to the light, she found that it was as attracted to her as she was to it, and suddenly she felt herself begin to glow.”
“A lightning bug!” Madison realized. She and Hannah loved to watch the fireflies dance around their porch in the summer evening.
“Yes, Lily was a lightning bug, the prettiest firefly ever seen. As soon as she had her light, she flew back to the toad queen to show her. The toad queen was very proud of little Lily, and Lily was proud of herself. She wasn’t timid and she wasn’t afraid ever again.”
Hannah looked down at Madison, who had snuggled deep into her mother’s blankets on her large bed, and watched as Meg fell asleep. Hannah kissed her forehead, which did not feel nearly as warm. She pulled the thermometer out and gently, without waking her child, checked Madison’s temperature. It had dropped to 99 degrees, a less scary amount. Hannah went to turn out the light, a glow from the living room lamp leaving the room dimly lit. She then sat down in her recliner by the bed and fell fast asleep as well.
Hannah did not wake at first light, as usual. It took the chirping of the forest birds to wake her from her deep sleep. Disoriented, it took a minute to figure out just where she was. When she realized she was in her recliner, she sat up with a start and looked at her bed where her sick child had lain the night before. The bed was empty. Hannah called Meg’s name quietly, wondering if somehow the girl had gotten up in the night and put herself into her own bed. Hannah went to Meg’s room but she wasn’t there, the bed still a mess from the night before. The sight made Hannah gag and returned a fear to the pit of her stomach. Hannah looked in the bathroom (thinking somehow perhaps overnight the child had acquired an interest in using the big people’s toilet) then the living room. On the way to the kitchen Hannah noticed that the back door was open, the screen door letting in the sounds and breeze of the morning. Panicked, Hannah rushed to it. Madison had never let herself outside alone before, despite her inquisitiveness. At the door, before she opened it, she stopped. There was Madison, at the bottom of the patio stairs in her white nightgown. She had her arms thrown outwards and was spinning in the morning light, a wide smile on her face. Hannah watched, not alerting the child to her presence. Her little girl was enjoying life with an abandon, obviously feeling better from the night before. Madison stopped, having spied her mother in the doorway.
“Mommy, look, I am a fairy fly! I am the most special fairy fly in all the land!”
“You certainly are!” Hannah agreed, going outside a pulling her daughter in for a long hug. One of her stories had helped someone, and it turned out to be the person she cared most about in the whole world.
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
While Hannah’s previous novels had been successful from a marketing standpoint, the book she created after Madison’s birth and through the first four years of her life was her biggest success and in a different way. Hannah had written the first novel that was not about romance or the jet set, but about a woman standing on her own two feet amidst the problems around her. Sheila, at first, questioned Hannah’s change in genre when Hannah had pitched the idea to her, but then watched as Hannah threw herself into the project with her whole self.
As Madison grew older, she sat by her mother, who was typically typing away on her laptop, and created stories of her own. Madison’s first stories were picture drawings, but as she got older she began to put printed captions below the pictures, showing an interest in writing long before most children first learned to sing the alphabet song.
Sheila encouraged Hannah to put Madison in a preschool. Ben had been enrolled as soon as he was old enough and he loved it. He came home each day with some new project he had created, his clothes usually showing a good part of the process of the project. And he had friends, something that Sheila thought Madison would especially like.
“Madison doesn’t need preschool,” Hannah insisted. “She already can read and write better than most kindergartners, she knows how to count past one hundred, and she can do basic addition. Plus, she has the entire natural world in her back yard for science exploration. What more could they teach her?”
Sheila didn’t push it. It was true, Madison was already more than ready for school, and she seemed happy enough.
As the summer before Madison’s fifth birthday approached and Hannah hadn’t made mention of attending any open houses, Sheila began to push again.
“At least promise me you will enroll her in kindergarten. Give it a chance for one year. If she hates it, you can pull her out and home school her.”
Meg wouldn’t hate it though, and both Sheila and Hannah knew it. While Hannah shrank from most human to human interactions, Madison seemed to actively seek them out. She introduced herself to practically everyone she met, she found out the names of all the employees on the rare occasions that they went to a store, she held ongoing conversations with the boy that delivered their gro
ceries and to the mailman. And she kept asking Hannah when she could have a baby brother to play with. But what concerned Hannah most of all was that she was beginning to have imaginary friends. Only the night before, she had asked if her “best friend” could sleep over.
“You need to call Lily’s mother and tell her it is ok if she stays over,” Madison informed Hannah. Hannah wasn’t sure where she came up with most of the names of her ‘friends’, though Lily was obvious. Meg had quite a few others, as well. She kept them all straight, giving Hannah a hard time if she couldn’t remember that Koila was the one with long hair and Jole was the one who liked string beans.
Finally, Hannah conceded, and on a morning in early August, packed Madison into the car, along with her birth certificate and immunizations records and brought her to the local elementary school. She sat in the parking lot for a moment, watching other parents go into the school. She might have turned around and driven home if it weren’t for Madison, already unbuckling her safety system from her car seat in the back.
“Come on mom!” Meg encouraged.
Hannah knew that she no longer had a choice. She gathered her courage and allowed her daughter to lead her into the school, instinctively knowing which direction to go.
Hannah filled out the registration form, with Madison’s help, to the amusement of the parents sitting around her.
“She certainly is ready for school, isn’t she?” said the secretary, accepting the forms from Madison’s hands.
“I am almost five years old!” Madison beamed, knowing that this was her rite of passage.
“When is your birth date dear?” the secretary inquired.
“September twenty fifth.” Madison was proud of her birthday.
For one hopeful second, Hannah wondered what the cutoff date would be for Madison to be enrolled. She hadn’t even thought of it before now. But her hopes were dashed by the smiling woman behind the desk.
“Well, lucky for you, your birthday is five days before the cutoff for kindergarten, you have to turn five before the end of September…. though for you, we might have made an exception!”
Hannah, regrettably, thanked the woman, received a packet that contained a letter from the principal welcoming her kindergartner to Breckenridge Elementary School, a list of the supplies she would need, the calendar and school hours, and the rules of the school district, and then left. After she had secured Meg back into her seat, she sat for a moment in front, studying the list.
“You need a backpack, crayons, tissues, pencils….” The list went on and on with items she would need to purchase herself, as opposed to from the grocery store’s delivery list.
“And new school clothes and shoes!” Hannah added. She generally wasn’t a clothes horse, but she understood the importance of the adventure she was about to embark on.
“Perhaps we can wait and Aunt Sheila can take you.” It was spineless for Hannah to suggest it, but she thought Hannah might enjoy the time with her only ‘relative’.
“Mommy, you can take me. We will make a date out of it!”
Hannah cringed. She didn’t know where Meg had heard the word. It certainly wasn’t something she ever used. Hannah hadn’t had a ‘date’ since she had been with Daniel. She had, for years, kept herself from thinking of him, despite the likeness she saw nearly every time she looked at Madison. Hannah forced herself to smile as she looked at her little girl in the rear view mirror.
“We will make a day out of it!” Hannah gently changed the wording for her own sake. “Complete with ice cream!”
“Yay!” Madison cheered. “Tomorrow we will go school and ice cream shopping!”
Her excitement was almost catching to Hannah. Almost. But, as she had for over five years, she promised herself that she could and would do anything for the sake of her child.
The first day of kindergarten was usually a scary day for the child and a tormented day for the mother. In the case of Hannah and Madison it was both scary and tormenting for the prior and nothing but an adventure for the latter. Hannah stalled in the kitchen, trying to get Madison to agree to a real breakfast before going to school. Hannah would be driving her; she wasn’t ready to put her daughter on a bus yet. But this, of course, presented the problem of having to actually leave the house every day. This was a big deal for Hannah, one that Madison seemed to understand, so that she was unusually cooperative in having her hair brushed. But she flat refused anything more to eat than a bowl of cereal, without the milk, for breakfast.
As Madison was eating her dry cereal, Hannah stood in front of her bathroom mirror and meticulously applied her makeup, taking longer to get ready than usual. She heard a sound and saw Madison standing next to her, watching her do her daily routine. Hannah pushed her vanity stool in front of Madison and helped her climb up. She then placed her makeup bag on the counter between them and, as she finished putting on each part of her makeup, she placed the container down for Madison to investigate. Meg had never been interested in watching Hannah do her makeup before. Today, however, she opened and smelled each bottle or compact as they were placed in front of her. She put the foundation bottle back in the bag immediately, but was fascinated by the fluffy blush brush and imitated her mother’s methods as she put some on her tiny cheeks. The mascara wand and eyeliner stick seemed dangerous, but she used her own finger to pretend to brush her eyelashes, and used the brown eyebrow powder on her own tiny black eyebrows. Finally, she imitated putting on the pink lipstick and took a tissue to dab away the excess just as her mother had. Hannah closed up the makeup bag and she and Madison looked in the mirror. It was just like when Hannah and her own mother had put on makeup together when she was little. Hannah smiled at her child’s reflection in the mirror, and then turned and placed a lipstick kiss on Madison’s cheek. Meg did the same to her mother. Then Hannah took some makeup remover and gently wiped all the makeup from Meg’s face and kissed her again.
As the hour of the first school day approached, Madison ceremoniously gathered her backpack, which had been meticulously packed with her school supplies the night before, glanced around the house like it was the last time she would see it for a long time, and announced that it was time to go.
Hannah nearly forgot to pick her car keys up off the table before heading out the door. Frazzled, she looked around the house herself, wondering if she had forgotten anything else, then, with a beaten look, followed her daughter to the car.
“Breathe!” Hannah thought to herself, trying to keep the panic at bay. She hadn’t felt this overwhelmed in a very long time, and was desperate to remember what she used to do to calm herself. “Breathe!” she repeated, as if this reminder would actually cause her to do it.
The school grounds were teaming with children and families and faculty. Hannah and Meg had checked out where her classroom would be on the school map and, once they found a parking space in the nearly completely full lot, made their way straight for that end of the building. Hannah followed Madison who walked toward the school with pride and purpose. When they got close to the classroom, they found a circle of people around a small but assured woman – Mrs. B., the kindergarten teacher. Despite the crowd, Mrs. B. spied Hannah and Madison and made her way toward them.
“Welcome, you must be Madison.” She smiled down at Meg’s nodding face. “Welcome Mrs. Glen!” she said to Hannah.
“Call me Hannah,” Hannah managed, sticking out her hand to the woman, who stood shorter than she herself was.
“Welcome Hannah, we didn’t get to meet at any of the open houses. I wanted to let you know how happy we are to have Madison here.” Mrs. B.’s tone seemed to indicate that she knew something about Hannah, though Hannah didn’t know how that could be. Breckenridge was a small town, but she didn’t know that anyone really knew who she was.
“Call me Meg!” Madison’s voice broke into Hannah’s thoughts.
“Meg? Is that short for anything?” Mrs. B.’s attention was on her brightest new student.
“Madison Elizabe
th Glen!” Madison said with pride. “M.E.G.”
“Alright then, Meg, shall we go inside and meet the rest of the class?”
Mrs. B. was already leading Madison inside. Hannah began to follow but a gentle but firm look from Mrs. B. indicated that this wasn’t going to be allowed. Mrs. B. looked at all the families standing around still. Hannah saw that there were plenty of moms trying to hold a strong face in light of the situation.
“The bell rings at 3:25 and the children will be able to tell you all about their day then,” Mrs. B said with finality. Then, with a kind smile, she herded the last of the kindergartners inside and closed the door.
Hannah wandered back to her car, alone, watching other families go to theirs. Some women were openly crying, but Hannah wasn’t about to break down in front of strangers. When she was in her car, though, she realized that she was okay. She knew that Madison was where she belonged, and with less heaviness than she had felt an hour before, Hannah drove home.
Every morning after, the routine was the same, though Hannah began to allow Meg to walk to her class from the sidewalk alone. After dropping Madison off each day, Hannah would drive back home, and, for the first time in nearly six years, she began to go on runs again. The mountain was like an old friend to Hannah, though steeper than she remembered. After her run, Hannah would go home and work until it was time to go pick Madison up from school. This was her favorite time of day, as Meg would talk nonstop for the short drive home and long into dinner time with stories of the adventures of her day.
The month of September flew by without incident; until, one day, as Madison was getting into the car, she handed Hannah a note.
“What’s this?” Hannah asked, suspiciously taking the letter from Meg’s hand.
“Parent teacher conferences are next week. You haven’t signed up for a time yet, so Mrs. B. put you in for Tuesday night.” Madison’s tone was neutral.
On A Run Page 13