Miranda Baker was a bundle of heaven sent down to a dreary house in the rain. Her mother, Cassandra, thought she was the most perfect thing ever to grace a cradle. As she grew from baby to toddler, her eyes and hair turned dark, and her skin mottled with the olive tone of her Mediterranean ancestors. Miranda looked like something made of glass, but her family was soon to discover she had a core of steel.
Because Miranda was smart. Not only smart, but she was almost eccentric in the extent to which she collected information. She soaked up trivia, read through books of facts, absorbed vocabulary in a way that only computers could really replicate. “Isn’t it funny,” she said to her mother at age 6, “that a banana is a fruit, and it’s something yellow, and it has the same shape as the moon? Which part is most important?” When her teachers gave her puzzles in which she had to determine which in a list of items was the odd man out, she could make a case for every single possibility.
To Miranda, the world of information was like a twisting jungle gym on which she could happily play for hours. She made lists, cross-referencing things she’d known a long time with things she’d just learned, and delighted in each connection. She always noticed when a phrase in one cheesy love song on the radio echoed a similar phrase in another ballad that had played a month ago. She got a delicious little tingle at each instance of deja vu. There was nothing she loved more than sorting, ordering, and then reshuffling things. It thrilled her to find a third and fourth way to get to an answer from a question. She baffled her teachers with her rambling logic sometimes.
So to Miranda, it was almost entirely natural what happened. She thought the connection between physical objects and the categories of thought we put them in, entirely intangibly, was a fascinating thing. She loved computers for that reason. At last, the physical object was draggable through fields of operations. She could seek out all images, all files that were bigger than a certain size, everything that began with the letter “A”… and then actually get her virtual hands on that object. It made no sense that she couldn’t do the same in real life.
In fact, it was almost a relief when she discovered she could.
That was an utter accident. She hadn’t even intended to call it. But she never called attention to what she’d achieved, and never really experimented with it. It was too natural a thing. Of course, if you had enough information about a thing, you should be able to grab on to that information with both hands and pull. After all, it worked in reverse. If you had a physical object in your hands and could look at it and study it, you could get lots of information about it. So why not the other way around?
This was in fifth grade, in math class. Of all the different kinds of information out there, Miranda had the most contempt for numbers. Numbers were one-dimensional creatures to her. Aside from the shape of the letters that represented them and the various Christmas presents they were assigned to in songs, numbers contained no distinguishing features but their magnitude. A banana was yellow and a fruit and crescent-shaped, but 3 was just… 3. It bored her, and so did math.
So she had taken out a set of colored pencils, each jagged and splintery and coated with bite marks. She chewed on pencils because otherwise she chewed on her lower lip, which had resulted in some painful chapping last winter. She liked to imagine that the pencils had different flavors, and she’d try to inhale a cherry scent with red, willing the pencil to become fragrant in her imagination. When she chewed on the blue pencil, she could always taste blueberry muffins in her mouth.
First she’d arranged them in the usual order, then switched over as the math teacher droned on and arranged them by length. Then by alphabetical order of the names that sank in bronze letters into the flesh of each stem. She pondered for a moment, trying to decide how to sort them next. The length of the word, she decided, which meant that the red pencil, currently sitting on the right side of her array, would have to be far to the left. She looked down, readying her hand to take it, to discover the pencil was already wedged between her fingers.
To Miranda it felt a little bit like finally solving a riddle she’s been turning over in her mind. She hurried to get the remaining colors in order. One by one, she watched with a tickle of amusement as each popped into her hand. She just grabbed them by the information and watched them disappear and reappear on her palm, like a switch flipping. She grinned and jumped a little bit in her seat, full of glee.
But Miranda was old enough by then to know that there were some things people did by themselves that they never showed other people. Like peeing in the shower, or picking your nose, or leaving the bathroom without washing your hands. This seemed to be the same thing. She’d never seen anyone do it. So she never showed it to anyone.
Miranda’s mother encouraged her unusual thinking process by reading to her tales of the wild and surreal, stories in which the usual order of things was turned upside down in clever wordplay and philosophical tangents. Alice in Wonderland. The Phantom Tollbooth. Miranda learned to never take a word at face value, to delight in homonyms and puns and unexpected reversals of meaning. She would sit on her mother’s bed, holding her baby brother in her arms, and giggle as Cassandra told her how Tock the Watchdog was named and how Humpty Dumpty felt about the meaning of words. It was there that her love of books was born, under a tiny skylight and beneath gray-green blankets. Listening to her mother’s wheezing get steadily worse.
Giving birth to Todd had taken the last bit of strength from Cassandra’s immune system. She was ever more frail now, having had a weak heart since childhood but stubbornly insisting that she live long enough to pass on her love of Shakespeare and rainstorms to children of her own. Miranda had even been named with the same care Cassandra gave her literary pursuits– the Iliad giving birth to the Tempest– but by the time Todd came along, she had run out of energy and acquiesced to her husband’s request to give him a “plain name, something he can use. He’s a boy, after all, Cassie.”
Jack Baker was like that. Rugged, impatient and unfailingly normal, he nevertheless was the epitome of manhood to the literarily inclined Cassandra. He called her Cassie and Miranda Randy, and he was like a splash of water to the dry refinement of mother and daughter. Cassandra adored him, and Miranda liked him well enough. Her mother was always Mother, never Mom, but Jack was Dad, and it gave her an awkward balance between elegance and practicality that manifested in her surprisingly adroit sense of humor. As junior high school approached, Miranda began to let fly some one-liners that stopped classmates and even her parents in their tracks. “Why do you call me Randy?” she challenged him during one impromptu summer barbeque. “Why not Randa? There’s no Dee in my name, Dad. And you don’t call Mother Sandry. Why aren’t I Mary? It doesn’t make sense, Dad. Explain!”
“The explanation,” Dad had said, “is that I’m Dad and you’re not.”
“Fine,” Miranda said. “But I’m right and you’re not.” And that was the end of that conversation.
As time went on, those jocular exchanges faded into the din of despair surrounding her mother’s worsening illness. There were nurses and hospitals and anxious, wakeful nights, and when Miranda was about to turn sixteen, her mother passed. She died as she had lived, in a quietly romantic summer evening. Her spirit passed on a breeze, touching Miranda’s hair and Todd’s bare toes, and flew up into the glittering constellations above.
Miranda didn’t cry during the funeral. Her mind had fixated around her mother’s wedding ring, and she spent the entirety of the ceremony and burial remembering everything she’d ever known about it. Where it came from, what the stones looked like dull and translucent and heavy on her mother’s long finger, what her mother had told her about the day she’d slipped it on and fallen in love. The ring wasn’t jewelry, it was a story, and it was one Miranda refused to give up. As the dirt started piling on the coffin with those sickening, sad thuds, Miranda reached out her hand. She left the cemetery with the ring clutched in her fist.
