Song of the Shaman by Annette Vendryes Leach Page B

this…” He twisted left and right. Water splashed all over her jeans. He stopped abruptly.
    “Mom! Are you crying?”
    She was just as surprised as he was. Why was she crying? He’d never asked about his father. Sheri had an answer ready, but the question never came. She wiped her eyes with wet fingers, water and tears streaming down her cheeks.
    “It’s okay. I already knew about Dad. It’s O-KAY!”
    Zig faced her squarely. She wanted to know more.
    “What happened next?”
    Zig spun around in the tub, his toys swirled around him.
    “Sibo said I could jump. So I held on to the string. It was a little scary, sliding down, down, down.”
    “You slid down a string…Where did you land?”
    “I went right through here, to here.” Zig quit spinning, reached over and touched the crown of Sheri’s head. He traced his finger down to her navel.
    “Wow, Zig, that’s…that’s…”
    She stared at him. He yawned, following a long blink. She wondered about the stories they were reading at school. Excelsior Prep was a prestigious private school in Brooklyn Heights, highly regarded and with no religious affiliations. She had him on the waiting list before he was born to get in there. Would they dare teach this kind of mystical stuff? She wracked her brain trying to remember if there was a memo in his backpack, something about a guest speaker or school trip, but if the topic were religion she would have remembered. There were no e-mail alerts, no announcements on Excelsior’s Web site. Where was this coming from?
    “Did you read a story like this at school?”
    “No.”
    “At the library with Leatrice?”
    Zig wrung water out of his washcloth.
    “It’s not a story.”
    Distant church bells rang nine times. Nine o’clock. He had been in the tub for an hour.
    “It’s late, sweetie. Let’s get you out of the tub or you’ll be Zig soup!”
    He climbed out and into his favorite towel with a huge Haring Radiant Baby in the middle. Sheri draped it over his head and shoulders like an Arabian cape. He tiptoed to reach her neck and hugged her tightly; his little pruned fingers pressed her skin. Lukewarm bathwater trickled down her sweater.
    “I’m glad you chose me, Z.”
    “There was nobody else but you, Mom.”
    Zig’s bedtime routine continued as usual. He stood in his bed and pulled on his flannel pajamas, singing a new nursery rhyme he’d learned at school. Sheri read his pop-up dinosaur book for the hundredth time. Even so, she felt different, as if something had shifted between her and Zig.
    When she turned out the lights, he said in a dreamy voice, “Do you remember when you were in heaven?”
    “No, Z. I don’t.”
    She could hear him thinking.
    “Do other people remember?”
    “I’m not sure. I’ve never asked anyone.”
    He drifted off. She sat beside him on his bed, watched his breath become slow and deep. A hush crept into the room, enveloping her like blanketed arms. She kissed him and got up to leave.
    “Mom, will you try to remember?”
    She looked over her shoulder. His eyes were closed.
    “I’ll try.”
    In the kitchen were groceries to unpack, food to store, boxes to flatten, a dishwasher to load and set. The alien-green power light on her laptop beamed from the granite counter. Glancing at it made her inbox fly open in her mind and thirty-five new e-mails lash out. If she didn’t take care of them now, by tomorrow they would metastasize like cancer. Next to her laptop stood a foot-high deck of bills, a credit card game waiting to be shuffled and dealt. She turned off the lights. A black hole swallowed the picture, creating an interior pause button. She pushed open a window in the living room and let the wintery air sweep over her drained face. It felt good. In the moonlight the treetops in the Brooklyn Botanic Gardens were like feathery fingers pointing at the night sky, waiting patiently for spring.
    I chose you.
    Those three little words stood out, solid and incorruptible. She