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Show Moon - 57 Joy? Why had she allowed James to come between them? Why was his approval the focus of their lives? Anne began to slip into a lassitude of uncertainty. And so it was Joy, not Anne, who taught Caleb to stand for the first time, and she was the one who invented the choo-choo game to get him to eat from a spoon. Caleb was the tunnel. The spoon of pablum was the train. Joy started clear back at the other end of the kitchen, bounced toward him crying, "Choo choo. Here comes the train! Open the tunnel!" It worked when nothing else would. Anne resorted to it herself, though she felt silly when Joy giggled at the sight of her mother pretending to be a train. Joy seemed to have forgotten all about bloody heads. One night that summer James took a blanket to the backyard and invited Joy to lie down with him under the sky. She asked him about the stars: why they were there, how far away, how many. She wanted to know where God was and if He could see them. Looking at the stars made her feel as though she were trapped inside something too small for all the things she felt bursting in her chest. Only the enormous black curve of the sky could possibly hold the things that lived inside a person. She wanted to hack open her head and spill out the inside of herself on the ground. She wanted God to pick her up and twist her until the tightness went away. She wanted to grab her daddy and roll around and around, pulling at him and squeezing him with her legs. She wanted to make him real. He held her hand as they lay there and said, "You know why I love you?" |