In many coming-of-age novels, parents are absent, literally or figuratively. But one of the many distinctions of Elizabeth Earley’s dazzling and incisive new novel, Like Wings, Your Hands, is the interconnectedness of the two central characters: fourteen-year-old Marko and his mother, Kalina. Despite this close connection, Kalina remains a mystery to Marko, a frustration that leads him to make transformative discoveries about her, himself, and a grandfather he’s never met.
The interconnectedness of Marko and his mother comes largely from necessity. Born with spina bifida, he is paralyzed from the waist down and therefore depends on Kalina for his care. Although physically limited, Marko has an adventuresome mind and spirit, and is deeply curious about the world and its workings. He is also highly sensitive, thoughtful, and observant–characteristics that seem to be amplified by the way he perceives things. Specifically, he associates numbers with certain colors, shapes, and textures, and also with emotions. (Happy, for instance, is seven, and sad is three.)
On the more troubling side, Marko is plagued by something he calls the dark body: “a part monster, part ghost … who floated inside him.” Whenever the dark body overtakes Marko, it makes him hit himself and, on occasion, other children at his school. These moments, which can be triggered by stress, are like blackouts: when Marko comes to, he can’t remember what just happened.
The novel takes place during a turning point in Marko’s life. Having recently started puberty due to growth hormones, he is beginning to experience desire and the need to explore his sexuality. These changes are a source of anxiety for Kalina, who wonders, “What kind of romantic life would he be able to have with no sensation in his pelvis–no sensation anywhere below his waist?” For Kalina, the challenge seems to be to strike a balance between being a loving and supportive parent to Marko while giving him the emotional space to work things out for himself.
At the same time, Kalina is trying to protect Marko from the resentment she sometimes feels about his dependence upon her. Furthermore, she is coping with difficulties beyond him: a fraught relationship with her mother, who is helping to coparent Marko “when she hadn’t even filled that role for Kalina as a child”; fallout from Kalina’s split with her ex-husband, who is no longer present in Marko’s life; and estrangement from her father, Todor, who remains in Bulgaria, where Kalina was born and lived for many years. Todor is chronically depressed and routinely threatens suicide, “to the extent that it no longer had any shock value left.” Shortly after leaving Bulgaria, Kalina stopped talking to him, “not wanting to bear the emotional burden of his pain.”
Many of the challenges Kalina is facing remain a mystery to Marko, who becomes frustrated by the walls she seems to have put around her innermost feelings. Early in the novel, he observes, “What he wanted was to know her–to know her 100 percent, or at least 80 percent. He knew her only 17 percent.” When he questions her to try to learn more about her, she provides minimal answers.
In an effort to discover more about Kalina, Marko looks through her room while she’s away, finding her journal; some letters his grandfather, Todor, sent to Kalina; and a copy of The Unbearable Lightness of Being, with an inscription from Todor to Kalina.
But in what may be Marko’s most life-changing experience, he discovers the powers of the coffin-like box that his mother keeps under her bed. Previously, Kalina told Marko that lying inside it helps calm her down. But after Marko climbs down from his wheelchair and enters the box from the side, via a hinged door, something far more dramatic occurs. At first, he loses his ability to make sense of the world through numbers and colors. Then, he seems to enter another world–and another body: that of a young man named Emil, who has sensation in his lower body and can walk, albeit with pain in his feet. It turns out that this other world is a gated diplomatic community in Thailand, in 1985, long before Marko’s birth.
Over the course of his time travels back to the diplomatic community, Marko-as-Emil meets a man he comes to think of as the Ambassador, who looks strangely familiar and who speaks with an accent like Kalina’s. The Ambassador pledges to help Emil obtain braces that will help him walk as if unencumbered by the pain in his feet. In addition to meeting with the Ambassador, Marko–through Emil’s body–has his first experiences with self-pleasuring and sexual intercourse. But there’s a dark side to time travel via the so-called dream bed, because it always ends in a troubling way, with the dark body taking over, returning Marko to his existence as he’d known it.
Marko’s experiences in the dream bed are revelatory–not just because they allow him to experience feeling beneath his waist, sexual and otherwise. In fact, his favorite part of using the dream bed is the time between worlds, when he is “free of his body” and exists as “pure essence.” This is just one of many instances in which the novel raises intriguing questions about the limitations of the body versus the mind and spirit, and suggests the deeper satisfactions that may result from freeing oneself from the corporeal.
Another revelatory aspect of the dream bed is the light it begins to shed on Todor, whom Marko has never met. It turns out that the Ambassador is Todor, during his term as a trade ambassador in Thailand. Through his time-travel meetings with the Ambassador and by reading Todor’s letters, Marko is able to get more of a picture of a man he never knew: a picture that seems more sympathetic than the one painted by his mother and grandmother. Collectively, Marko’s discoveries, as well as Todor’s letters and personal reflections, convey the reasons for Todor’s depression: lost or unrequited love being chief among them.
As the novel progresses, tensions between Marko and Kalina heighten, as Kalina continues to feel frustration and anxiety about Marko’s future and about his reliance on her, and as Marko confronts his biggest fear: “that his mom really wished she had a normal son who could walk and act normal.” At the same time, Kalina’s journal helps Marko become more understanding of her, giving him important insights into her own fears and her past, including resentments toward her parents that drove her to leave Bulgaria.
The journal also gives Marko insights into Kalina’s past explorations of her sexuality, revelations that come at a crucial juncture for Marko, who is in the middle of figuring out what sexual gratification might mean given his lack of sensation below his waist. Earley’s interweaving of Marko’s and Kalina’s reflections–here and throughout the novel–deepens our understanding of both characters and of the unspoken connections between them.
Eventually, Marko asks Kalina to take him to Bulgaria, saying he wishes to meet his grandfather. But that is only half of the truth. After Kalina destroys the dream bed, fearing its potential dangers to Marko, he becomes obsessed with a dream-bed-like “portal” that is said to exist under the stairs of her family’s home in Bulgaria. Marko hopes that by entering this portal, he will once again experience life as Emil and continue the unfinished story of Emil and the Ambassador, who during their last encounter was being led away by police.
Through Todor’s memories and reflections, we learn the end of this story, so much as it ever has an end for Todor, who remains haunted by it. What Marko discovers in Bulgaria–through Todor and through his experiences in the portal–relates to this story, but it is not at all what he had expected. The only thing I’ll reveal is that Marko finds himself becoming a living link between the present and his grandfather’s tragic past, and he gets insights into Todor’s sadness that were never fully available to Kalina. Here, Earley brings together the threads of Todor’s story, and their connections to Marko, masterfully and movingly.
Even more moving, to my mind, is a transformation in Marko and Kalina’s relationship that occurs during the trip to Bulgaria. I’ll just say that the power of the scene that portrays this transformation draws largely from the depth with which Earley has conveyed the private fears, desires, and struggles of both characters.
Finally, I was struck by Earley’s perceptive writing about disability, and about parenting a disabled child. Over the course of the novel, she thoughtfully portrays Kalina’s delicate, difficult balancing act: of being as practically and emotionally available as she can to Marko without constraining him, giving him room to discover himself and the world.
Would My Pick be Your Pick?
If you're interested in ________, the answer may be "Yes":▪ Coming-of-age stories
▪ Stories about parenting and the challenges involved
▪ Stories about family conflicts
▪ Magical realism
