Ophelia runs.
Pim holds her hand, and they run along the beach through a storm, toward the city.
This time, the slide in was very fast. That kiss . . . and then she was gone.
It seems to Ophelia that she can hardly remember a time when it rained in Antilia. But it’s raining now, and windy; the rain whips them in the face. The clouds are so low they almost touch the land.
When Rowan kissed her, it was hard to remember the way he left her hanging as his parents dissected her. It was hard to remember feeling so horribly out of place in the kitchen. How impossible it was—be logical, Ophelia!—that someone like him would fall for someone like her.
She stumbles, almost falls. Pim catches her. “I am not letting you go this time!”
“It doesn’t work like that,” Ophelia gasps. They start off again. It’s a long way to the city, to Calabar, the volcano is rumbling again, and Pim has said they must hurry. “You know that. I never know when I’ll go home.”
“This time, you are home. Antilia is home now.”
Ophelia snatches her hand out of Pim’s. “Why do you call it that?”
It wasn’t until Ophelia met Rowan that Pim started calling her other place Antilia.
“Because this place is Antilia.”
“No, it isn’t. . . . It’s never been. . . .” Ophelia’s mind whirls. Could the fact that she started calling it Antilia herself somehow communicate itself to Pim? Is everything here just a product of her own imagination? How then, does it feel so real?
How does Rowan know about it if it’s all in Ophelia’s head?
Or is she just that crazy?
Pim and Ophelia face each other, panting. Pim rubs her face with her long, beautiful hands. She’s frustrated, Ophelia can tell. “The Mender, she can answer your questions.”
“Then I’d better talk to the Mender.”
They alternate walking and running. They stop at a stream to slake their thirst. Ophelia flings herself down under a coconut palm to shelter from the worst of the rain, panting. The tree bends and lashes under the wind.
Rowan’s father had moved around the kitchen like he was frightened in his own home. And the mother. She’d looked so very much like Rowan. It was as if the production of Rowan had occurred by mitosis, like the man had had nothing to do with it, this woman dividing cells in a science lab to make her son.
But where Rowan was quick to smile, quick to worry, and the light in his blue eyes was warm, she was cold. Cold and brilliant. She changed the feeling in the room. Both men—Rowan and his father—they wanted to impress her.
Ophelia had never seen parents flirting with each other like those two had. It didn’t feel like love, it felt like manipulation.
A memory, clear, from long ago: Her mother and the man she knew to be her father. He is sitting in the easy chair. Her mother comes from behind and wraps her arms around him. He reaches up and back to embrace her and they hold each other, rocking together. She kisses him. “I don’t deserve you.”
He was tall, and had big hands and feet with beautiful, square nails. Ophelia’s inherited his hands, she thinks. Yes, those belong to the Miller side. And he’d kept his hair short, square across the back of his neck. His voice was deep; how she’d loved the sound of his voice.
“Don’t deserve me? Don’t be so foolish, woman,” he’d said. They’d both laughed. But Ophelia, little girl, could see something sad in her mother’s face.
Is that how two people love each other?
Most painful of all was how Rowan had changed. He’d moved away from Ophelia, physically. He hadn’t defended her. Surely if he really cared about her, he’d have defended her?
Nor had he stood up for himself.
And gradually, Ophelia had felt the magic of the afternoon, that golden sunlit day, she’d felt it all drain away under the cold kitchen light.
She saw herself clearly through the eyes of these adults.
A small girl in cheap clothes, the latest in a string of Rowan’s girlfriends.
And she didn’t even have any underwear on—that had disappeared, of course, with her slide into the Antilian ocean. She’d be so self-conscious about this, her face perpetually hot with shame.
But they hadn’t noticed. They’d barely bothered to acknowledge her.
She’d been stupid to think there was something magic in her connection with Rowan. Someone as good looking as him, he had to have girls hanging off him. Candace had said as much. She kept her ear to the ground; she’d know about that kind of thing. Unlike Ophelia, Candace has had tons of boyfriends. Besides, the signs were there. Ophelia just hadn’t wanted to see them.
His own mother had said it.
She remembers how he’d been surrounded by people after that Romulus gig. If she’d left just a little faster he would have missed her. And would he have cared?
She’d fallen for it. She’d totally fallen for it, kissed him on what was really their first date, like an idiot, so he could think he could use her.
It wasn’t all his fault. She’d acted like a fool. And that letter, the conscription . . .
Sure, there was that. But he, being so much like his mother, would know he could use that to get her. Predator.
The ground trembles. Pim gets to her feet, holds out her hand to Ophelia. They run.
Rain trickles down her back, her legs; the dress Rowan bought her is soaked. Her feet keep time to her thoughts. What a fool. What a loser. What an idiot. Of course it’s not real, the so-called connection. Only someone like her, who spent thousands and thousands of precious hours making up a dreamland, would think you could fall in love that fast. Someone insane.
He’d probably made up that island stuff, too. Seen her longing, her penchant for fantasy, and used that to reel her in. Pretended to have an island, another place, just like her. Probably laughed inside as he did it.
She thinks back, thoughts jumbled as her feet hit the wet sand, remembers leading him on with her longing, asking, How about the standing stones? It wouldn’t take a genius to play that image out, pretend to know all about it.
Yet she thinks she remembers that it was him who first confessed to a childhood fantasy of being a knight.
But she’s probably making that up, wanting to believe the best. She’d been the one to spill about recognizing the island on the map—this, she does remember clearly. Fed him everything he’d need in order to lead her on.
But then how does Pim know this new name? Antilia?
The ground trembles again and Ophelia stumbles.
“It started again last night,” Pim says.
“The volcano?”
“Yes.”
The beach curves abruptly to the right—north, Ophelia knows. She sees the red map, burning on the wall in Rowan’s house.
The question of how he had that map—the island that she knows so well sitting on his wall—is one her mind jitters away from, like a frightened animal.
In the distance, far off, the red roofs of Calabar show through green trees; tower upon tower, climbing up and up the steep wet green slope into the grey clouds.
“There they are,” says Pim. “At last.”
Ophelia thinks she’s talking about the city. But then she sees, far off up the beach, a group of figures.
“Welcoming committee,” says Pim.