Mavis — or Navis

There is a particular quality of light in a child’s room at bedtime. The world outside is still running full tilt into the future — still loud and unfinished — but in here something has shifted. The light falls softer and the quiet envelopes us with peace and safety. A father stands in the doorway, three little girls are in their beds, and for a while before sleep arrives, anything enchanting is possible.

Every evening, Mavis — a flying elephant of considerable grace and reliable courage — was waiting to carry us to that part of the world that most needed saving. Each of the girls wore a wristband phone, part walkie-talkie, part magic communicator, that could reach Mavis wherever he happened to be — usually somewhere remarkable, like a beach in Hawaii or a hammock in Tahiti, surrounded by people laughing and having a very fine time. Whenever the wristbands crackled to life and our heroes called, Mavis dropped everything and came immediately to pick them up for the ride. Katelyn, our youngest, always heard his name as Navis, and so he became both, answering to either, because what he loved was simply being in our company.

Before we could climb onto Mavis’s back, there was the question. Each daughter had to choose her superpower for the night. But the core powers were already known, already theirs, waiting like trusted tools on a belt.

Maggie’s core superpower was x-ray vision — she could see through walls, through clouds, through the elaborate disguises villains wore when they thought no one was looking. Annie’s core superpower was spinning and speed: she could dance circles around anything, a blur of motion and joy. Katelyn’s core superpower was the Bopper Ring — a magnificent ring on her right hand that, when deployed with a certain righteous flair, could bop a villain into the next week entirely. Any night, a girl could add something new to her core power, or invent one on the spot if the villain required it. The girls always rose to that.

“Maggie, what’s your power tonight?”

Maggie approached the question with the seriousness of a firstborn child — x-ray vision to see what the villain was hiding, or the ability to speak to every creature on earth, or to speed up time so bad things passed faster than they otherwise would.

Annie came at it sideways, the way she came at everything, with a twinkle in her eye that meant she had already been thinking about this for longer than anyone knew. Her powers tended toward the surprising — turning darkness into something you could eat that tasted like strawberries, or the talent for understanding what was wrong with someone before they said a word.

Katelyn, the youngest, invariably chose something that made us all quiet for a moment. She often picked love — pure and enormous — and the ability to send it outward like a wave you could feel in your chest even when you couldn’t see it. Or she chose courage for other people, the gift of giving it away freely to anyone who was afraid. Katelyn’s powers always moved toward something essential, something true.

Once each girl had her power, I would lay out the problem. The Thief of Sunshine, for instance, was hovering over the Midwest. Several days of gray had passed and people were beginning to forget that there ever was a thing called light. Annie made people laugh so they looked up and saw a crack in the clouds. Maggie talked to the birds and they flew into the crack and used their wings to make it bigger. Katelyn sent love to the clouds, and when they felt it, they wanted to get moving. The Thief released his grip on the sky.

There were always songs. “Ping Pang Walla Walla Bing Bang” was good for dancing and defusing tense situations. “Mujer, Mujer, si puedes tú con Dios hablar” was slower and warmer, settling the room when feelings ran deep. “Sha Boom, Sha Boom” was full of bounce and nonsense joy. Toward the end of each adventure, when Mavis began his descent, came two more — “The Man in the Moon” and “God Bless the Moon” — quiet songs that told the night the heroes had done their work and the world was safe again.

The threat eradicated, the problem solved, that called for cake and ice cream — imaginary, of course, yet real enough to bring everything to its proper ending within the bonds of sisterhood.

The big secret of these adventures was that the girls got to be part of the narrative. They were not audience members. They were not passengers. The imagination of the solution was theirs. They strung different parts of the story together, pulled threads in directions I had not anticipated, and made the whole thing something none of us could have reached alone. Night after night, without quite knowing it, they were learning to think — to hold a problem from more than one angle, to trust their own particular way of seeing, and to understand that the best solutions usually require more than one kind of mind.
Maggie, Annie, and Katelyn are grown now, moving through the world in ways that astonish me. Maggie has become an army with banners — the one who plants a flag and holds the ground, who others orient toward when things get hard. Annie has become a difference-maker who sees the human element behind every institutional veneer and quietly, persistently makes things better. Katelyn has become a scholar who teaches the world to listen in ways it did not know it could, by asking what the body knows that the ear does not, and finding music there.

I wonder occasionally if they remember the Thief of Sunshine, or the night the ocean forgot how to kiss the shore, or the city where shadows had gone on strike and refused to follow anyone around. I wonder if they know, as I do now, that those weren’t just stories — that something real was being practiced in the ritual of the question, the choosing of a power, and the challenge of working it out together.

Watching them now, I sometimes miss that room — the three miniature beds and the sound of Mavis banking through the clouds, a small cabin on his back packed with our heroes laughing in good fellowship, deciding what needed saving, which villain needed neutralizing, what darkness needed co-opting into light. I miss the wristbands crackling to life. I miss the songs.

In those stories, I always began the same way with a question. “What are your powers?”

They already knew. They always had.

Patrick J. Wood
Publisher