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Pram died just before she was born. It was a brutally hot
August, and the dogwood tree was parched. Its white blossoms had gone weary and brown without rain. The nurses pitied it. In fact, that was how Pram’s mother was discovered. A nurse filled up the janitor’s mop bucket with fresh water, and she went outside to water the dogwood tree, as unconventional as that might have been. Instead, the bucket fell at her feet, and the water spread around the parking lot, never quite reaching the grassy island that contained the tree. For there was a woman hanging by the only branch that looked sturdy enough to support her weight. She was almost too unreal to be a woman at all, if not for her pregnant stomach.
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In the next instant, there was a gurney and shears severing the rope, hands easing the woman down with great care as though she could be saved. Pram was inside her, already dead. But doctors aren’t put off by the finality of death. They believe it can be negotiated. If they can pull the right strings at the right time, they can make dead things breathe again. So Pram lived after all. Pram, orphaned right at the start of her life, was inherited by two very practical aunts. They ran the Halfway to Heaven Home for the Ageing out of their two-hundredyear-old colonial house. According to Pram’s books, “aging” was misspelled, and Pram noticed only when she first learned to read. She climbed on a chair and scratched the unwanted e from the sign with a black crayon and was promptly scolded. The crayon mark was scrubbed down to a dull scar. Pram wasn’t told the story of her birth. But even as a very small girl, she felt deep in her chest that she was alive and dead at the same time. Pram’s aunts had no idea what to do with a little girl, much less how to love one. They did give her the very best things they could think of: a name, for starters. Pram was short for Pragmatic, because after much deliberation, they agreed it was a sensible name for a young lady. It was also a trait her mother had lacked.
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They gave her a bedroom in the attic. It overlooked the pond where her mother had liked to swim, and had bright daisy wallpaper, and teddy bears that wore dust hats and dust sweaters. For dessert she was often permitted slices of cake with whole strawberries inside. They gave her a plaid jumper, and Aunt Dee ironed the pleats while Aunt Nan starched the white blouse that went under it. They shined the pennies in her loafers, and they gave her stacks of books to read. Sometimes the books had missing covers or torn pages because they had come secondhand from the charity store in the church or they had been left on the doorstep. It was a small town and everyone knew that Pram liked to read. Before she was six, she had reenacted the great works of Shakespeare with her buttoneyed dolls. She would recite Ophelia’s final words aloud and pretend to drown herself in the old claw-foot tub. It was all this reading that made Aunt Dee and Aunt Nan overlook Pram’s eccentricities. She was just imaginative. Plus, she entertained the elders. She performed for them, and always with a flair for the dramatic. The elders treated her as a sort of pet, asking her to sit with them and read, brushing her hair, offering her cough drops (as that was the closest thing they had to candy). They shared their watercolors with her during arts and crafts, and asked the aunts to tape her pictures on their bedroom walls.
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It wasn’t until the boy came around that the aunts began to suspect something was wrong. Pram first spoke about the boy during an evening bath. She was five at the time. Aunt Nan dumped a cup of water over Pram’s white hair, caramelizing it. “I’ve made a friend,” Pram said. “A boy named Felix.” “Have you?” Aunt Nan said, lathering Pram’s hair more roughly than Pram would have preferred. “A grandchild of one of the elders, then?” “I don’t think he is,” Pram said. “Where was he?” Aunt Nan asked. “In the pond,” Pram said. “In the pond?” “At first. Then the wind picked up a bit, and the light on the water changed, and he came out of it.” “Is this something you’ve read about in one of your books?” Aunt Nan asked. “No,” Pram said, scowling as her hair was scrubbed by her aunt’s chubby fingers. She could sense that she wasn’t going to be believed. “If you see this boy again,” Aunt Nan said, “tell him that pond’s not for swimming. It startles the fish.” “What is it for, then?” Pram asked. “Thought. Out of the tub with you now. It’s bedtime.”
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Pram dutifully performed her evening rituals and climbed into bed. The attic had one small, circular window that seemed to align with the moon on clear nights. The daisies on her wall had gone silver; the button eyes of her bears and dolls stared with astonishment as the shadows of trees bounced across them. There was something about trees that made Pram especially sad.