Saving Fish from Drowning - Heal Burma

AMY TAN
When Heidi was settled in, Marlena borrowed her headlamp, say­
ing that Esmé was scared of the dark. Actually, Esmé was already
asleep.
“Don’t put the blanket fringe near your face,” Heidi warned. “The
fashion cops will get you. And you can keep the headlamp. I have an­
other one that’s smaller.”
Marlena aimed the light at the interior of the tree she shared
with her daughter. The more gnarled portions looked like arthritic
gnomes in agony, a bas relief created as a Lamaist version of an Ars
Moriendi.
And so they settled in for their first night, what they believed
would be the only one. Moff told Rupert to sleep with his shoes on,
in case he had to get up in the middle of the night. Esmé had Pup-
pup tucked under her arm. Bennie lay wide awake for hours, worried
because he was without his medications and the CPAP machine.
Marlena was trying to remember whether snakes were attracted to
body heat at night. But soon these thoughts gave way to reptilian
fantasies about Harry. She pictured his undulating tongue, snaking
along her neck, her breasts, her belly. Suddenly, she had pangs of
longing, of sadness, of fear that the two of them had missed their
opportunity. She knew what was meant by “star-crossed lovers.” The
black sky was filled with a billion stars, and some of them made an
eternal pattern for each destined set of lovers, a constellation for
them, which thus far she had failed to see. She had been too busy
looking down at the ground, searching for pitfalls. She fretted over
the years already gone by without great passion, the possibility that
what she had had with her ex-husband—those meager moments of
rapture, which she preferred to forget—would be all that she could
lay claim to as an approximation of ecstatic love for the rest of her
life. How sad that would be! And with those thoughts, she drifted
into fretful sleep.
Hours later, she jolted awake with a pounding heart. She had
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