"He didn't!" she said, knowing that he had. She put a bosky robe over her black negligee. In ways she was dressed as a soldier and as a witch and yet neither role seemed too germane. Mother Earth, Father sky, and her own wrath would do nothing to solve this situation. For five minutes she ran out of the trailer park and a block down the road but acting like a lunatic got her nothing but the split soul of a slipper. She swung a fist in the air and, as if she were a female version of Zeus, the lightning pierced the sky. Still, this did nothing for her. Would she act the maternal part of worrying, crying, and feeling angry and betrayed? Such a part was too ludicrous to conceive. "What if he gets lost? What if he gets hit by a car? What if he does?" she thought to herself. "I'm not linked to him forever. Even good mothers can't monitor a child's movements every second of the day. A child obeys his own self-centered little voice despite a guardian's best intentions. The world is a risky place. That's not my fault either. I've done nothing wrong." She locked all doors and windows but the window in her bedroom that she left half open. When he crawled through it like a thief hours later she gave him the spanking of his life. She was not sure if spanking was for the benefit of the child through negative reinforcement or to release the stress of a child's guardian. She couldn't see that it mattered. Chapter Twenty One As the first days of the school year came and went, Gabriele still vied for time through the sheer act of forgetting. Whatever apprehensions or misgivings she was experiencing about sending her child to school, they were such that she, nonchalant, would never claim them to be fears nor acknowledge any malaise about the inevitability of external influences on her son. And yet subliminal fears were pulling her away unaware like a sleeping motorist who gets towed away with the vehicle for the impounding. She simply forgot about the date for the school registration even though school buses were roaring about everywhere in the city. Hearing buses from a distance, she should have easily remembered failing to enroll him in kindergarten the previous year when he was five; but her denial was a thick opaque fog and what she didn't do last year slipped from her no differently than enrolling him into school this year. The higher authority of self remained her goddess; and it was keeping her wrapped in swaddling innocence. It was innocence consisting of a belief in the present moment that she had serendipitously fallen into the previous autumn.