I step onto damp grass, looking for a face in the dark. I hadn't expected her to be back, but there she is: on the roof above the crape myrtle branches, looking down at me through the mist.

We first spotted her a week ago, sitting high on the half-moon windowsill, eight feet above the ground. We heard a faint scrabble and saw her from inside, settling against the window pane. A bitter wind had blown in that night and she must have been driven by cold to borrow warmth from the glass. We watched from inside, careful not to move and scare her away.

"Opossums are marsupials," I whispered to Graham.

"No they're not," he said. My husband is British, and can't really be expected to know much of anything about possums.

I ran for my Webster's Seventh Collegiate Dictionary. In 1969, when I was in fourth grade, my mother stole the new dictionary from my elementary school where she temped as a secretary. Everywhere she worked, Rose took things - not just the odd pen like everyone else, but cartons of staplers, desk lamps, electric typewriters, swivel chairs. She pocketed zucchinis at the A&P, Pepto-Bismol at the drugstore, and once she hotwired a yellow Volkswagen Beetle. She drove it all that spring, then went outside to find it had been stolen from her, which made her laugh until September.

Rose was an adept thief: never caught, and as far as I know, never suspected. She always offered me a share of her stolen goods, which I would refuse with averted face and crossed arms. She'd scoff at my disapproval, heap offerings on my bed, and I'd pick them up with two fingers and drop them in the rubbish without comment. But somehow I ended up with the pilfered dictionary, and had written my name and address in a girlish script on the title page, as if it really belonged to me.

"Here it is." I held my finger under the entry for opossum. "Any of various American marsupials; a common omnivorous largely nocturnal and arboreal mammal of the eastern U.S." I smiled with all of my teeth.

"I'm impressed you knew that," Graham said. My husband is an old-world sportsman, patting his opponent on the back even in the throes of defeat. It's only one of the many reasons I love him.

Her mottled fur pressed against the glass. Graham put his arm around me, both of us pleased to have a chilly possum share our fossil fuel on such a night. Before we went to bed we looked up at the window once more but she had gone.

I was born when it was still shocking to conceive a child without a discernible husband. Rose's parents gave her one hundred dollars, a bus ticket to Boston, and never spoke to her again. She gave birth alone on a winter afternoon in a one-room apartment ten steps from the Bunker Hill Monument. She cut off my umbilical cord with scissors stolen from the stationer's next door. She didn't explain the details of my conception to me until it was far too late to categorize the untidy facts into an etymology I could understand.

By the time I was seven, we had moved up-market to a run-down brownstone in Brighton, ten steps from screeching trolley tracks. Rose always had some vague secretarial job but never stayed long at any one place. She stole posters from a travel agency and papered our walls with royal blue images of tropical islands and alpine slopes, a relief from the dust-brown of our fourth floor walk-up. She always said she'd go to one of those travel poster destinations, but before she died she never got any closer to paradise than the fried clam shacks on Revere Beach, a subway ride away on hot summer nights.

The mist is heavy. Although it's fully dark, I can clearly see the possum's heart-shaped white face and black eyes watching me, waiting to see what I might do. Even in the dark I can detect a telltale marsupial bulge. I want to feel the warmth of that tiny pocket. I want to see the babies that she is foraging for, protecting, feeding with her own body. I must be careful because she may spring for me in a fit of maternal fury if I get too close.

Rose had wraithlike boyfriends whom I saw only at night. They'd sit on the sofa with her in the dark, smoke cigarettes, and go into her bedroom. They'd come back the next night, and the next, then Rose would blow smoke rings in the dark by herself. None of the men ever slapped or kissed me, so I didn't hate them with all of my soul. She never asked me to call them Uncle Whatever. In fact, she never asked anything of me, and so I was free to invent my own life.

I decided that my father, Dobie, my perky stepmother, Laura, and their two freckled twins, Bud and Scout, lived in a clipped suburb of wide streets and columned homes. I appeared at their front door with my blue Barbie suitcase. I sat at their red and white checked kitchen table with milk and homemade cookies in front of me, the twins weeping with joy at my return to the family fold. Laura crocheted me a lavender sweater while Dobie held me on his knee. Sparky, the rambunctious family spaniel, licked my hand as if he knew me. I was finally where I belonged, in this crayon-colored world, and I would never go back. I was thirteen when Rose decided to say, as if she were announcing we were low on milk, that she had no idea who my father was and would I just stop asking. She had loved so many boys and couldn't possibly remember which was which. I begged for details, but Uncle Whatever was waiting. Rose stole my invented life as easily as that yellow Volkswagen, and rode off without a thought. Laura and Dobie's homemade cookies dissolved into imaginary molecules of mere flour and water, scraped into the sink to wash down the drain and into the sewer. I didn't speak to her for an entire Autumn. I wrote notes on slips of paper if I needed a report card signed or extra money for a school lunch. She continued speaking to me and seemed unaware that I didn't respond, that she hadn't heard my voice since I'd entered puberty. Uncles came and went. Stolen goods appeared on my bed as usual. When I wasn't in school, I stayed locked in my room hosting a dreary pajama party with Robert Browning and Emily Dickinson, who wrote the following only for me:

Pain has an element of blank;
it cannot recollect
when it began, or if there were
a day when it was not.

One winter day, tired of my unnoticed exile, I spoke, but never again said anything to Rose that mattered.

The fog is getting denser. There aren't many cars out - the possum and I have the evening to ourselves. She is at the very edge of the roof, her hairless tail hanging down. I can see only the vague shape of her body, but I see her eyes clearly, watching me. She is a trespasser. She must forage in the garden of her enemies. She must steal warmth from their windowsills. Her whole family may have been killed by hunters or run over by cars, but she has no anger for past atrocities. She's simply waiting for me to go away, hoping I won't hurt her. I want to stay with her for as long as she'll allow.

Almost against my will, shortly after I started speaking to Rose again, I began to steal from the old Woolworth's in downtown Boston: purple canvas shoes, red corduroy bell-bottoms, tubes of pink Coty lipstick. I'd stroll through the store fingering things, my knapsack full of loot. Then I'd calmly buy some small item, walk out and take the subway home. I had one of those faces that looked like it paid. I was a criminal and I liked it. Of course, I didn't tell Rose I was stealing, and she never noticed that I suddenly had new clothing or pink lips. For the first time, I had an important secret from my mother, and for a whole year I knew what it was like to look down at her from above.

The possum lifts her pointed nose. She's sniffing for clues. I am master of the remote control in our house - I flick through channels so fast it must generate circuit overload at the cable company. I read half a dozen books at a time, throwing down one during a dull stretch and plucking up another to serve me better. I finish people's sentences. Luckily, my husband has a full helping of English patience, and never complains of my dervish-like qualities. For five minutes I have been doing nothing but stare into the face of a possum on my roof and for once, I do not ache to be somewhere else.

I met Graham at Boston University. He was a tweedy graduate student teaching Intro to Cultural Anthropology, and we began to meet for coffee after class. He tapped into my soul as we dreamt together of life in far-off lands. Rose was being treated for lung cancer and I was oscillating between majors when Graham began to love me tenderly, far more than I expected or deserved. When he accepted a graduate teaching post in Dallas, I couldn't quit school and marry him fast enough to put fifteen hundred miles between Rose and me. I have been knocking around in our rented house since we arrived a year ago, waiting for a baby or a scholarship or a job to materialize while I edit his dissertation, pick aphids off roses and pack our bags too soon for a delayed honeymoon in Antigua during his summer hiatus.

She looks away, opens her mouth wide and that way she won't be hurt by trusting too much. yawns. She wants to change the channel. I think about offering her a carrot, but I know I mustn't feed her, because she'll get used to it and come to trust humans. Then what happens if we move away? Maybe a shotgun owner will move in and kill her, and she'll feel mournful as she lies in the grass dying, peppered with buckshot, her pouch full of doomed babies, cursing me and my free carrots. It's better to let her fend for herself.

On my sixteenth birthday I took a pink button from a bin of sewing notions at Woolworth’s. It was the last thing I ever stole. As soon as I touched it, pinpricks shimmied up my arm as if it were electrified. I held the button tightly in my fist inside my pocket as I walked past the escalator, past racks of winter coats, past blank-eyed mannequins in flannel nightgowns, past glass-fronted displays of macaroons. Choking on fumes of buttered popcorn and rotating frankfurters, I rushed out of the boiling store into the shock of January, dropped the button into a dirty snowbank and along with it, my life of crime.

That night I noticed a sore on the palm of my hand. I covered it with a band-aid, but it wouldn't stay on. That night I awoke at 4:17 to see a speck of full moon spotlighting the round pink wound. My Woolworth's is gone now. A parking garage squats where the store used to be, and they've blocked off streets in the district, so shoppers don't have to look both ways when they need to pick up a little Armani or Wedgwood. Coty still makes that same shade of pink lipstick, and I hover over it in store displays, but I can't make myself buy a tube.

Even now, on full moon nights, I will awake at exactly 4:17, touch the round scar on my palm and float in a drowsy insomnia that hovers until daybreak. As I lie awake in the moonlight I imagine that my pink button is somewhere still, undecomposed, its story not finished, perhaps buried underground by a thousand snow plows, or trapped on a ledge in the sewer, yearning to be swept out to sea. I wish I could dig it up, or tip it over the edge, so it could begin a new life in a faraway land.

Graham should be back from his evening class any moment now and I want him to see her again. "Wait for him," I say. She moves her body, turning from me slightly, and I feel dread that she'll scamper off over the roof away from me, or scuttle down the crape myrtle into the junipers and down the street. I'll stay silent and let her go, because I have no choice, but I'm filled with sadness that she'll leave too soon.

A hairless baby no bigger than a thumb escapes from the pouch. It clings to its mother’s furry underside. She nudges it with her nose towards the pouch, tucks it back in, then looks down at me A rolling wave of heavy fog softens all edges and the possum dissolves in the dark. A shiver scales my body, and I fall upwards into the mist. I've been freed from my tether to the earth, released from the laws of gravity, and I lift, floating above the grass, above the crape myrtle branches and the possum on my roof looking up at me as I hover over her. Everything is rosy and indistinct beneath my feet. If I let go, I know I can soar past the fog, past the moon, past the edge of the universe, past all the rules that tie me to the Earth. In this slice of infinity I have one chance to let go.

The last time I saw Rose, just before we moved, I took her shopping at the A&P. She wandered off, and I wheeled her grocery cart up and down aisles until I finally spotted her, bald from chemotherapy, leaning on a cane, palming a paperback into her purse. Disgusted with her for the last time, I walked out and stranded her without a ride home. She died a month later, alone at her apartment, with only a volunteer nurse from the hospice to close her eyes. I flew back to Boston and paid for the cremation, but there was no ceremony, no testimonial, no brunch with all my Uncle Whatevers at her casseroled apartment. I packed up everything and gave it to the Salvation Army. I took down the faded travel posters and threw them in the rubbish, but just before I handed over her keys to the landlord, I plucked the posters back out.

I hover in mid-air, over the tops of the trees, and see a child's railroad town: balsawood houses, cottonball trees, mirror lakes. Our suburban neighborhood is a land in a travel poster, perfect and crayon-colored: my imaginary life, a toy world. I thought I wanted to let go, but I cannot risk giving up before it's over. My body floats back down as if it never happened, and the possum watches me descend to Earth, lifting her nose to sniff as my toes touch the damp grass again.

Rose is stowed in our attic, gray dust in a brown cardboard box, wrapped up like a gift in the salvaged travel posters, separated from the possum by a thin layer of reality: shingles and wood, nails and fiberglass. She waits in the dark above my head as I pay bills, fold laundry, impress Graham with my knowledge of marsupials, and live my crime-free life. Perhaps if I rub my callused spot into the hot sand of Antigua and wash it in the sea surrounded by my mother's ashes, it will dissolve. And I will sleep again on moonlit nights while she endlessly circles the earth in royal blue waters, finally at rest.

§ § §

Ellen's work has appeared in many fine zines, including Exquisite Corpse, In Posse Review, FRiGG and Literary Potpourri. She is currently working on her first novel. Ellen can be reached by email at ellen@crunchware.com

This piece was first published in INK POT #2 - 2003, a literary journal.

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