Free Miss Jane by Brad Watson Page A

was like trying to imagine some very complex mushroom.
    â€œWhat you have on the inside is just as complex—I mean it is just as much a wonder of a miracle of the human body—as anyone else. But it didn’t get to finish putting itself all together, didn’t get to finish itself up and get everything right, before it was time for you to be born. Or maybe I should say at some point, for some reason, it just stopped making itself into what it was supposed to.” He paused, looked at her looking back at him, her brow bunched down. “That’s about as best I can explain it to you at your age, Janie. I hope that helps a little bit. It’s not anyone’s fault, certainly not yours, and it’s not anything to be ashamed of. It’s just a difference, is all. And the only thing is that it causes you to have to live your life in a special way. To have less freedom to go to school and such as that. But it does not mean that you are not a normal little girl. You’re just a little girl who has to deal with more things than most little girls. And that will make you strong. It already has.”
    â€œCan you fix it?”
    â€œI hope one day someone can. But right now I don’t know.Well, I know they will one day. I just don’t know when. I know they work at figuring these things out all the time.”
    Jane nodded, still trying to put together some kind of picture in her mind that made sense. She was coming up with something, although she had no idea if it was a fantastical idea or something close to what the doctor knew.
    SHE WOULD HOLD a mirror beneath herself and stare for a long time, studying herself there. She had seen her mother naked, and her sister Grace, too, but not really up close. It was not the kind of thing she could ask to examine , to use the doctor’s word.
    But she longed to do just that. If she could only look closely at Grace, and then again at herself, it would satisfy such a curiosity. So she got up her courage one day and asked Grace, bluntly, if she could see her down there.
    â€œI mean take a real good look,” she said. “An examination .”
    Grace looked offended, even baffled.
    â€œFind you some girl your own age, if you want to play doctor,” she said before heading off toward the barn and her smokes.
    Sometimes she was frightened, in a heightened way, briefly, as if some panic were about to take hold of her, and she would run, just run, until she outran it, or wore it out, and she would find herself way out in the middle of a pasture, with a curious, half-startled cow looking at her, stopped in its cud-chewing, like she was some kind of creature it had never seen before. Then she would notice the other cows, all turned to look at her, their chewing interrupted, some with long pieces of grass hanging from their mouths, their big brown eyes on her as if in wonder about how she’d suddenly appeared in their midst, a tiny creature fromsome other world. They’d wait to see what she would do. She would think in that moment she could do anything. She would move slowly to pluck a long piece of Johnson grass and chew on the sour end of it, let it hang from her mouth. The cows would take notice. She would stand very still. When she moved again they would startle, as if she had suddenly become human again.
    Then, calmed, she would walk in the woods by herself.
    She loved most being in the woods, with the diffused light and the quiet there. Such a stillness, with just the pecking of ground birds and forest animals, the flutter of wings, the occasional skittering of squirrels playing up and down a tree. The silent, imperceptible unfurling of spring buds into blossom. She felt comfortable there. As if nothing could be unnatural in that place, within but apart from the world.
    There were innumerable little faint trails her father said were game trails. Animal trails. Their faint presence like the lingering ghosts of the animals’ passing.