I learned a lot that night. For example, that part of being the magician's assistant means coming face-to-face with illusion. That invisibility is really just knotting your body in a certain way and letting the black curtain fall over you. That people don't vanish into thin air; that when you can't find someone, it's because you've been misdirected to look elsewhere.

When you're pregnant, you can think of nothing but having your own body to yourself again; yet after giving birth you realize that the biggest part of you is now somehow external, subject to all sorts of dangers and disappearance, so you spend the rest of your life trying to figure out how to keep her close enough for comfort. That's the strange thing about being a mother: Until you have a baby, you don't even realize how much you were missing one.

* * *

I could tell her from personal experience that when people we love make choices, we don't always understand them. But we can go on loving them, just the same. It isn't matter of comprehension. It's forgiveness.

* * *

Could it still really be that simple? Could romantic love and platonic love and parental love all be different facets of the same diamond - brilliant, no matter which face is turned up to the sun?
  
No, because I'm not Sophie's age. No, because I know what it is to hear a woman sigh off the cloak of this world the moment she drifts to sleep; no, because I have fallen into the meadow of her body. No, because puzzling through my sixth-grade math homework one day I realized that what Delia felt for Eric was not what Delia felt for me, and that this equation was not an equal sign, but a greater than.

I wonder if maybe Sophie knows me better than I know myself. I do hold the word Delia balanced lightly on my tongue, as if it is made up of butterflies. I would give her every last one of my french fries. I have kissed her, whenever the opportunity was socially acceptable. And even though it isn't fair, I haven't blamed her for not loving me. But here's where Sophie is wrong: It's not because I don't want to hurt Delia's feelings.

It's because when she is bruised, I'm the one who aches.


(Vanishing Acts - Jodi Picoult)