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The floor had become a world of its own since Grace had discovered that she could cross it, broad and shining between the islands of furniture, changing beneath her palms from the faint softness of the rug to the cooler boards beyond. She moved with the imperfect purpose of someone who had only recently learned how to traverse, one knee following the other with varying success, sometimes carrying her neatly forward and sometimes sending her sideways until she stopped, reconsidered the matter, and began again.
Dana remained somewhere behind her, a familiar presence that required no checking every few seconds, although Grace did glance back once when the apartment made a small sound she knew, finding her mother exactly where she ought to be before returning immediately to the more important business ahead. The legs of the coffee table passed beside her, enormous and dark at this height, and a stripe of afternoon light warmed the back of one hand before she crawled out of it, her attention already caught by something purple lying beyond the rug.
Holly's trainer was on its side with the tongue half sunken and one loose lace curling across the boards, but to Grace there was nothing careless about its presence. It had simply appeared among the things she was now capable of reaching. Grace slowed as she came near it, settling back upon her diaper with an abrupt heaviness, a dignified way of sitting yet to be learned.
Then regarded the shoe with her mouth slightly open and her brows raised. The white edge of the sole came first beneath her fingers because it was nearest, firm beneath the pads of them, ridged where the rubber changed texture, and she rubbed at it until one tiny nail caught in a groove. Her hand withdrew, hovered, returned. The purple fabric above yielded when she pressed it, a wholly different answer from the rubber, and Grace's face sharpened with interest as she flattened her palm over it and pushed harder. The shoe shifted half an inch. She stopped at once, looking not frightened but astonished, her gaze moving from her own hand to the trainer and back again before she leaned forward to repeat the experiment.
The lace soon became more interesting than the side of the shoe because it moved so readily, lifting when she caught it and falling when she did not, teasing her fingers with a narrowness she could almost manage. Her first grasp missed altogether; the second trapped it briefly between thumb and finger, and when she pulled, the trainer scraped toward her with a dry little sound across the wood. Grace's eyes widened until the soft roundness of her face seemed organized entirely around them.
She released the lace, stared at the shoe where it had come to rest nearer her knee, then reached for it again with greater confidence, abandoning delicacy for a fistful of purple canvas near the heel. This time the whole trainer came with her. Its weight pulled unexpectedly against both wrists, turning the effort into something involving her shoulders and stomach as well as her hands, and for a moment she held it suspended before one arm gave way and the sole struck the floor with a thick wooden knock.
The sound transformed the discovery. Grace sat motionless for a beat, not because it had startled her badly but because nothing about the shoe had suggested that it could do that. Her chin dipped as she looked down at it, then rose slightly, as though perhaps the room had produced the noise rather than she had. Nothing else happened. Her hand tightened again around the heel, and this time she lifted it only a little before bringing it down.
The second knock was smaller but unmistakably hers. A slow brightness came into her face, first in the eyes and then at the corners of her mouth, and she tried again, raising the trainer with clumsy determination until the rubber met the boards at another angle and answered with a duller thump. That difference mattered. Grace repeated the motion, no longer merely hitting the floor but listening, although she could not have named what she was listening for, adjusting the trainer accidentally and then deliberately as the heel, side and sole each made their own slightly different sound.
The lace jumped at every impact, and soon she was watching that too, her body rocking with the effort, cheeks beginning to pink as she brought the shoe down harder than before and broke into a wide gummy smile when the floor gave her the deepest knock yet.
She lost her grip once and the trainer rolled away from her by several inches, which changed her expression immediately. The smile disappeared, her lips drawing together as she leaned after it with both hands and nearly folded herself over her own knees in the urgency of reclaiming it. The recovery became more important than balance. One palm caught the heel while the other landed uselessly on the upper, and for a moment she lay pitched forward with the trainer beneath her chest, her bottom high behind her and one leg kicking against the floor.
She did not cry. Instead she made the small, offended face of someone whose world had become unexpectedly inconvenient, pushed herself upright by degrees, and gathered the trainer into her lap. The annoyance vanished almost as soon as she had possession again. She rubbed her hand across the purple fabric as if reacquainting herself with it, found the rubber edge, pinched the loose tongue, then gave the shoe another experimental blow against the boards, though with less force now that the first excitement had begun to spend itself.
The apartment beyond it eventually returned to view. Grace turned her head and saw the open floor stretching away, the light farther on, the leg of a chair, all of it available if she simply continued, and she leaned forward into the familiar shape of crawling without considering that one hand remained occupied. Her free palm met the floor, one knee advanced, and then nothing followed. The trainer hung awkwardly from her other fist, too large to disappear into it and too important to release.
Grace rocked back onto her bottom and looked down, first at the shoe and then toward where she had meant to go. She tried again, placing the knuckles of the occupied hand against the floor while still gripping the heel, but the trainer got there first and rolled beneath the pressure, tipping her sideways until she caught herself with the other arm. A crease appeared between her brows. She dragged herself upright and shifted the shoe into the opposite hand with patient difficulty, apparently satisfied that the problem had therefore been corrected, only to find the same impossible arrangement waiting when she attempted to move again.
Her mouth tightened as she stared across the floor. There was no understanding in the adult sense of what had gone wrong, only an accumulating offense against expectation: she had gone wherever she pleased before, and she possessed the purple thing now, so the two facts ought to have existed together. She raised the trainer, looked at it, then looked again toward the bright patch ahead, her body pitching forward until one palm took her weight while the other stubbornly refused to surrender its prize.
The pause that followed held more feeling than noise. Grace's nose wrinkled, her lower lip pressing outward a fraction as she gave the shoe a small, impatient shake. Its lace swung past her wrist and distracted her just enough that she caught at it with the same hand already doing too much, but the trainer slipped lower in her grasp and bumped against her thigh, bringing the crease between her brows back more deeply than before.
Dana arrived within that moment without turning it into one. Grace became aware first of the change in the light near her knees and then of her mother's face lowering into the familiar distance where faces were easiest to read, close enough that the tension went out of Grace's mouth before Dana had said anything. Her attention moved immediately from the trainer to Dana, and the shoe remained caught in one small fist almost by accident while she studied the expression in front of her.
Dana's smile was soft and unhurried, interest rather than rescue written across it, and when she bent nearer the strands of her hair slipped forward beside her cheek. “Ohhh, what did you find, sweetie?” she cooed, letting the words stretch into the warm baby voice Grace knew as surely as she knew Dana's hands. “You got Auntie Holly's shoe? Look at that big purple shoe.”
Grace's whole face glowed at being understood, she raised the trainer toward Dana with such earnest effort that her arm trembled. The shoe climbed only as high as her shoulder before sagging again, Dana's eyebrows lifted as though Grace had presented something extraordinary. “Ooooh, yes you did,” she murmured. “You found it all by yourself.”
Grace looked down at the trainer again, her curiosity renewed by Dana's curiosity, and patted its side with her free hand before lifting it as high as she could manage and dropping it against the floor. The knock made Dana's eyes widen. “Oh! That's a noisy one, huh?” Grace stared at her for half a second, searching the face above her, then struck the trainer down again with more force and broke into another broad smile when Dana answered with an equally delighted little gasp. “Yeah, baby. Bang, bang. You found a good shoe.”
The frustration that had been gathering only moments before had nowhere left to settle. Grace turned the trainer over in her lap while Dana remained close, tracing the white edge again with one finger and then catching at the lace, every old detail made interesting once more because someone else was looking at it with her. She glanced repeatedly toward Dana as she explored, not asking for help so much as checking whether the marvel remained shared, and every time she found the same warm attention waiting. When the trainer slipped from her lap she did not lunge after it with the earlier urgency. Her eyes followed it to the floor, then drifted back to Dana, where they lingered as her mouth rounded into a small, pleased shape. Dana wrinkled her nose gently at her. Grace tried to imitate it, producing instead a solemn little tightening that dissolved almost at once when Dana smiled.
Dana offered one finger and Grace closed both hands around it, abandoning the trainer so completely that the purple shoe might have ceased to exist. Her grip was surprisingly firm, and she pulled with all the unquestioning confidence of someone who expected the larger person to move when requested. Dana yielded just enough to come nearer.
Grace pulled again and received the same result, delight brightening her face as she discovered another reliable mechanism in the world. She rubbed her thumb across Dana's knuckle, bent to inspect the nail, then looked back up at the face now only inches away. Dana made a soft kissing noise. Grace's lips rounded in answer, then she released the finger and tipped herself forward onto both hands.
With nothing in either fist, the old movement returned effortlessly. She crawled past Dana's knee and into the stripe of sunlight she had noticed before, her palms entering warmth one after the other until the change stopped her. She sat back and studied her own hand where it lay inside the brightness, lifting it once and placing it down again, then spreading her fingers so their shadows divided beneath them. The discovery absorbed her at once. She opened and closed her hand, watched darkness gather and separate between the fingers, then slapped her palm lightly against the warm boards and stared at the shape it made.
Dana stayed beside her without drawing the moment back toward herself. Behind Grace, Holly's purple trainer lay where it had fallen, lace twisted across the floor, its importance already spent.
Dana reached for it only when Grace had become wholly occupied with the sunlight, gathering the loose lace between two fingers and easing the shoe away from the path she was likely to take next while Grace remained intent upon the shadow of her own hand, opening her fingers wide and closing them again as though the room had quietly offered her another thing to discover.