The Curious Case Of Benjamin Button -2008- Hdri... Page

Caroline, who had glimpsed the child only for a moment, died within the hour—not from birth, but from shock. Thomas, heartbroken and horrified, did what any man of his era might do: he wrapped the ancient infant in a shawl and carried him down the dark stairs of their Garden District mansion. He did not go to the hospital. He went to a boarding house on the fringe of the French Quarter, where a kind, exhausted woman named Queenie ran a home for the unwanted.

Daisy visited the clock on the anniversary of his death every year. She would stand beneath it, close her eyes, and listen. And if she listened closely enough, she could almost hear it ticking backward—a sound like footsteps retreating into the past, into the arms of a blind clockmaker's son, into a place where time was just a story we told ourselves to make the leaving bearable.

He grew younger, smaller, weaker. At five, he could no longer walk. At three, he could no longer speak. At one, he was a baby—a beautiful, perfect, normal baby—curled in Daisy's arms, blinking up at her with eyes that held no memory of tugboats or jazz or backward clocks.

"We're passing each other," she said one night, lying in bed, tracing the lines on his smooth face. "I'm going one way. You're going the other." The Curious Case of Benjamin Button -2008- HDRi...

Queenie unwrapped the shawl and did not scream. She had seen everything in her fifty years—yellow fever, stillborn twins, a girl with webbed feet. She looked at the tiny, wrinkled face, the clenched fists like bird claws, and said, "Well, Lord. You sure is ugly. But you is also a child of God." She named him Benjamin, after a quiet boarder who had died of a broken heart the week before.

He went for a walk that evening through the French Quarter. The streets were alive with jazz and the smell of gumbo. And then he saw her: Daisy Fuller, now twenty-six, a professional ballet dancer in New York, home for the holidays. She was standing outside a theater, smoking a cigarette, wearing a red dress that caught the gaslight like flame.

She died in 2010, at the age of ninety, holding a blue ribbon in her hand. The nurses said she was smiling. And somewhere, in the space between the ticks of a broken clock, a boy who was once an old man, and an old woman who was once a girl, finally met in the middle—and stayed there. Caroline, who had glimpsed the child only for

The other boarders were a circus of broken souls: a tattooed lady who had once been the star of a traveling show, a retired alligator wrestler with one arm, a pair of Siamese twins who spoke in unison and finished each other's meals. They taught Benjamin card tricks, how to spit watermelon seeds, and the difference between cheap gin and good whiskey. But no one could teach him why he felt so tired all the time, or why his bones ached when it rained.

They talked for three hours. She told him about Paris, about dancing until her feet bled, about a man named Walter who had proposed and then left her for a cellist. He told her about the tugboat, the dolphins, Elizabeth Abbott. He did not tell her who he was. Not yet.

But when she mentioned Queenie's boarding house, and the old man in the rocking chair who had spelled Mississippi, his eyes filled with tears. He went to a boarding house on the

"Are you a ghost?" she asked.

"We have a boy," the social worker said. "About seven years old. He doesn't speak much. But he keeps drawing a picture of a house on Elysian Fields Avenue. And he keeps spelling the word 'Mississippi' over and over."

"Then let's meet in the middle," he said.

She buried him under a live oak in the Garden District. The headstone read:

She took him home. She bathed him, fed him soup, read him The Wonderful Wizard of Oz . He fell asleep in her lap, and she stroked his hair, which was soft and brown and smelled of soap. She did not cry. She had done all her crying years ago.