Electric City: A Novel by Elizabeth Rosner Page B

of the Skywalkers.”
    “Back in the early 1900s in Canada there was a cantilever bridge designed to span the Saint Lawrence River. They needed to plant the support structures on tribal land and promised to hire men from the reservation to do some of the menial labor. Instead, the Mohawk started climbing all over the structure like it was something they’d been doing all their lives.”
    Martin’s black pen scratched across the white page, filling in the spaces. Lines back and forth, sometimes connected.
    “The bosses realized these Indians had amazing balance, better even than their most highly trained ironworkers. So your great-uncle Miles was up there, on steel girders way up high above the water.” Martin listened as though he could detect the sounds beyond the whispering of the tape: two huge sections of metal groaning apart, giving way to the pull of gravity. “Those pieces came tearing loose, bad bolts or who knows. And thirty-three Mohawk men died, all from that one reservation.”
    Lines back and forth across the white page, sometimes connected. Not a spiderweb at all. For a moment Martin saw his drawing through Sophie’s eyes, full of bodies falling and falling. Together they watched for the terrible splash.
    “After that, the Mohawk women vowed they would never allow so many men from one community to work on the same job,” Joseph said.
    If he started at the beginning, Martin knew that the story could go on forever. The time before there were human voices, only color and sound, birdsong and wind through trees. The rush of water, animals of all species calling to one another across great distances. The percussion of shale as it shifted, the music of ice creaking at the river’s edge.

H OW DO YOU decide where to draw the line? Sophie wanted to know. Somehow she had gone from seeing the fox to kissing Henry on a stone wall. “We should probably go,” she had said, uncertainly. For once, no one was telling her what to do, which made for a perplexing intersection of freedom and mystery. Her body had its own ideas, perhaps.
    After Henry dropped her off, Sophie entered the house and went straight to the kitchen for a glass of water. Simon’s car was in the driveway, but both his bedroom door and her parents’ door were closed, no light leaking from underneath.
    A stream of jittery sensations made her want to lie down on the back patio the way she had done on the night of the blackout, to calm herself by visiting with the constellations. She was about to go into the hall closet for a blanket to take outside when she noticed that the kitchen cabinet holding her grandmother’s medicine bottles was yawning open. Even mild headaches and stomach ailments seemed to inspire her mother’s eagerness to reach for these foreign drugs. Sophie had always made a point of shying away from them.
    “People save the wrong things sometimes,” Henry had said. For the first time, she wondered why her mother wanted to keep old medicine anyway. Didn’t that stuff have an expiration date? She selected one of the brown glass bottles, running her fingers across the fading inkyhandwriting on the label. It was in Dutch, so she couldn’t make out the words, but then she saw the signature with its European flourishes. Her grandmother’s name, Sonja Ansbach, MD, was written on each bottle, some of which contained only a few pills, or none at all. It was the handwriting she must have wanted to save , Sophie thought. The hand of my mother’s mother.
    She replaced the bottles in their lineup and closed the cabinet. In an American history class last spring one of the students had casually mentioned being related to President Garfield. On another day, when the teacher asked how many could trace their families all the way back to the Mayflower , a surprising number of hands had been raised into the air. Sophie simply blinked her eyes in private amazement. Why hadn’t Mrs. Nelson wanted to know how many in the room were first-generation