Some time ago, somewhere else, the bear was a stuffed one, and her arm was wrapped around it.
The cobblestones held the day's heat. Late afternoon. The sun was low enough that the shadow of the cathedral spire reached across the square and divided it in two, and the boy in the blue suspenders was walking across the line of the shadow with one foot in light and one foot in dark and laughing because he had decided this was a game.
His mother held his hand on the side that was in light. She was carrying bags. Three of them. Paper, with twine handles. She had been carrying them for an hour and her wrist had begun to ache. The third bag held a stuffed bear that she had bought him because the bear had been in the window of a toy shop and the boy had stopped in front of the toy shop for so long that she had given up. The bear's head kept threatening to topple out of the bag. She kept pushing it back in.
The boy's curls were the colour of damp wheat. They escaped whatever had tried to tame them. He was five, perhaps, and his shoes were too clean for the day he had had.
Across the square, the man came through the crowd. His tie was slightly loose. His pager had begun to beep at his hip a few minutes earlier and he had not looked at it yet because his eye had found his wife and his son first and he had been moving toward them the way a man moves toward the only fixed point in his own day. He had a satchel over one shoulder and a small camera in the satchel that he had not used yet today and would never use again.
He kissed her on the side of her head when he reached her. He lifted the boy briefly. He set the boy down.
"Late?"
"A little."
He straightened his tie with his free hand.
"Is everything alright?"
"It's fine."
The pager beeped again.
He glanced toward the row of phone booths across the road. There were three of them. The middle one had been working last week.
"One moment."
She nodded.
He kissed her again, on the temple this time. He stepped off the kerb and into the road and crossed without hurrying, the way a man crosses a road he has crossed many times.
The mother bent to the boy's height to adjust the strap on his suspenders. The bag with the bear shifted on her wrist. She righted it. The bear's head came partly out. She pushed it back in.
The boy's eyes had moved.
They had found a balloon.
The balloon was red, on a string, drifting slowly across the road on a stray current of wind. It had escaped a child somewhere. It was sailing across the asphalt at the height of a small boy's hand.
She felt his hand twitch in hers.
"Stay."
He looked up at her with the look he gave her when he was about to disobey and she did not have time to stop him.
"Stay here."
He pulled.
She did not have a free hand. The bags were on her wrists. The bear was in the third bag. She had a wrist of bags and a hand on his hand and the other hand was occupied with the strap she had just adjusted and her body had not yet found the configuration for letting the bags fall.
He pulled again, harder.
He broke free.
Her bags fell from her wrists. The first burst on the cobblestones. The second tipped. The third — the bear — fell sideways and rolled. The bear spilled out and lay face-up on the stones with its arms open.
"No—"
She was running. She was three steps behind him. His small legs were faster than her wrists had let her be.
Across the road, at the phone booth, the man had picked up the receiver. He had been about to dial. The pager's number was on a slip of paper in his other hand. He turned because something in the air had changed, or because the woman's voice had reached him before her body had, or because some part of him had registered before the rest of him that the only fixed point in his day was no longer where he had left it.
He saw the boy in the road.
He saw the headlights.
He dropped the receiver. He dropped the slip.
"Stop!"
His voice came raw.
The boy was in the center of the road. The balloon was just beyond him, drifting. The boy reached for it. His hand closed on the string.
The boy had the balloon.
The headlights were on the boy.
The brakes screamed. Tyres. Stone. The smell of rubber against summer cobble.
The thud was the kind of thud that did not belong to the body it came from. The collective sound that goes through a square at a moment like this — the gasp, the silence — went through the square. Someone dropped something somewhere. A bird left a roof.
The boy was on the asphalt.
He was very still.
The balloon was still in his hand.
The string was still around his fist.
The mother reached him on her knees and the cobblestones tore through the cloth at her knees and she did not feel them. She gathered him to her. His head came against her shoulder. His small chest, against her chest, was not doing what her own chest was doing.
The man was running. The pager beeped. The receiver swung from its cord at the booth across the road, bouncing once against the glass.
He reached them.
He went down on his knees beside her.
He put his hand on the boy's head. The hair under his hand was the same hair he had kissed an hour earlier, and an hour before that, and the day before, and the year before, and the morning the boy had been born when a nurse had handed him a small wet weight and said *here is your son.*
The boy's hand was open now.
The string slipped from his fingers.
The balloon rose.
It rose slowly, the way balloons rise when nobody is holding them. It cleared the heads of the people around them. It cleared the rooftops. It cleared the spire of the cathedral. It went up into the late summer sky without urgency, until it became a small red point against the blue, and then a smaller point, and then the colour of the sky took it.
The man's hand stayed on the boy's hair.
The mother held the boy.
The stuffed bear lay face-up on the cobblestones, its arms open, where she had dropped it, and the wind moved its fur once and did not move it again.
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