Second Sight  

IT

makes no sense, when Miriam thinks about it, that children are only children for a decade or two. That those pivotal years, the ones that will define them, are so brief, just a flicker of time in their lives before adulthood. She still likes to think of Devorah as that freckle-faced five-year-old, her little fingers clutched around Miriam’s pinky as they first walked into her kindergarten class.

That image is all tangled up with Devorah as a teenager, rolling her eyes at homework and on the phone until after midnight. With Devorah as a beautiful kallah, standing beside a grinning Elchonon, her face glowing. With Devorah as a mother herself, lounging beside Miriam at the park near Miriam’s house, watching her five children shrieking with joy on the swings.

But Devorah will always be that freckle-faced five-year-old to Miriam, even if that comment makes her sigh long-sufferingly over the phone. “I didn’t even have freckles, Ma. You’re remembering it wrong. Shani was the one with freckles.”

No, Devorah had kept those freckles until adolescence, strong in the summer and barely there in the winter, until they disappeared in her teenage years. Miriam remembers it perfectly.