Diamond heart

The three of us walked together under the trees for a while in the shade. I looked over a few times and smiled at him. Left to my own devices, I find myself hurrying along with my head down, shoulders hunched, my hands grasped behind my back like Groucho Marx. But Sam beside me and the songs of unseen birds make me look up and around, make me notice the patches of blue sky between the dense branches. Maybe this is what grace is, the unseen sounds that make you look up. I think it's why we are here, to see as many tile chips of blue sky as we can bear. To find the diamond hearts within each other's meatballs. To notice flickers of the divine, like dust motes glimmering on sunbeams in your dusty kitchen. Without all the shade and shadows, you'd miss the beauty of the shadings, the interplay, the veil. Because the shadow is always there, and if you don't remember it, when it falls on you and your life again, you're plunged into darkness. Shadows make the light show. Without shadows, we'd only see what a friend of mine refers to as, "all that goddamn light."

He ran ahead of me again, picking up rocks as he went. Lily chased after him. It's like he creates a force field around him that nothing can breach, that comes out of the very center of him. Everything is concentrated on that torque. I watched him go. I've been watching him go since he learned how to crawl. Sometimes I didn't watch closely enough, and he got hurt -- he burned his hand badly once, and he split his eyebrow open on a coffee table, and he and his friends got drunk a few times last summer. I'm always afraid he'll end up like I did, stoned and drunk for many years, sick in the mornings. "Don't worry, Mom," he says, but that's what I used to say to my parents. I tell him what Chef in South Park said. "Children? There's a time and a place for doing drugs, and it's called college." He smiles, and like a hawk I watch him go, and I watch him go, watch him go.

Heartbreaking things have befallen some of the children we know, even when their parents kept their eyes open: cystic fibrosis, truancy, homelessness, alcohol and drugs. But mostly they have come through, scarred and still shaking their heads. Sometimes things were so awful for friends that I thought it was all over for them. And rocks came tumbling down on them, on their lives, but with a lot of help, they endured. In some cases, the rocks continue to fall, but even so, when it looked to the outside world like they were doomed, it turned out that something inside was slowly being fused back together. They found an underground, wiggly strength.

He stomped ahead of me to the top of the hill like a mountain goat, and waited for me. When I caught up with him, he stuck his branch out and I thought he was going to pull me up, but he pantomimed a sword fight, and poked me. "God," I said involuntarily, knowing it was an accident. "Can you cut me a little slack?"

"I'm sorry. My bad," he always says, like a baby Rastafarian. "My bad." He reached out and pulled me the last few steps to the top of the mountain. I walked until I came upon the view of a million fleecy trees, the foothills of Mt. Tam. I sat down.

"What if there is another 9/11?" he said.

"What made you think about that?" I asked.

He shrugged. "Is there any situation where you would kill Lily?"

"Of course not, unless she was very ill."

"What if there was another 9/11," he asked, "and we didn't have any food. You wouldn't kill Lily to feed me?"

"Sam," I said, laughing, but he was serious.

"OK, honey," I said, "I'll kill Lily."

"If there was nothing left, would you let me kill you and eat you?"

"Sure, honey."

"I wouldn't want you to die, necessarily. I might just cut off your arm to survive."

"Well. Help yourself."

"What if there is another attack, here?"

"Then we'll all band together and share what we have."

"Will we have to share with Uncle Steve and Jamie?" He gave me his trademark look, a long, slow sideways glance. He was suppressing a smile.

"Of course, he's my brother!"

"Yeah, but Steve and Jamie eat so much. And now with the baby? Too many mouths to feed!" He can always make me laugh. I know where he got his gallows humor. I can see myself so clearly in him, many of my worst traits, some of my goodness. I can also still see many of Sam's ages in him: New parents always grieve as their babies get bigger, because they cannot imagine the child will ever be so heartbreakingly cute and needy again. But Sam is a swirl of every age he's ever been, and all the new ones, like cotton candy, like the Milky Way. I can still see the stoned wonder of the toddler, the watchfulness of the young child, sopping stuff up, the busy purpose and workmanship of the 9-year-old. I see him and his oldest friend Jack outside working on an electric fence, taping 6-volt batteries to our fence, using endless duct tape and wires and switches. I see him making robots at the kitchen table with bits of junk, a glue gun, and a 9-volt battery. I see him at my desk, making a small electric fan that works. He can get most of his inventions to light up, or walk: He invents the same way I write -- Virginia Woolf said, "Arrange what pieces come your way." He creates things out of stuff that grabs his attention, bits of plastic, toys, cloth, balloon, fool's gold, mirrors, batteries.

Finally he came and stood beside me, silent. "What do you think about when you come here?"

"This is where I most feel the presence of God. Except for church."

He looked out at the mountainside, at a hawk, at turkey vultures circling, birds singing in the brush. "Can I sit in your yap?" he asked.

I was sitting cross-legged in the dirt, and he plopped down into my lap. He weighed a ton. I couldn't have gotten up if I'd wanted to. I held him loosely and smelled his neck. Sometimes when I dream about him, he's in danger, he's doing things that are too risky, but mostly he's either stomping around, or we're just hanging out together. Sometimes I dream about him when he was still young and I remember it with such sweetness that it wakes me.

This excerpt from "Plan B: Further Thoughts on Faith," to be published March 3, is reprinted by permission of Riverhead Books.

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