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It was midday.
The sun was high and the humidity stifling. Yet Naren didn’t ride in a cart or hurry his approach. The miser watched him from her third-story window, his steps measured and fully present. He moved naturally, like a branch on a tree, a feather on a wing. No pretension in his movements, no self-congratulatory thoughts. Empty and present, no one would notice him.
But the miser did.
She had followed him for quite some time. He was demure when presented with accolades, original in his approach and innovative among his peers. She’d followed his reluctant rise through Silicon Valley and his sudden fall from grace.
She had her eye on him from day one.
He was a married man, not one to stray. Emotionally unavailable to his lovely wife, the smart ones always were. But not to his daughter. Fatherhood appealed to him, and his daughter looked up to him. It was easy for them. There was always a favorite parent.
His wife was jealous.
But bad things happened to good people, too. God did roll dice, the miser had always decided. If there were winners, there were losers. Naren was both. He was caught in an elaborate plan of the universe, one that demanded great loss and sadness. He didn’t deserve it.
Many don’t.
Shortly after he proved a groundbreaking achievement, he hid in Alaska. The miser was smart, but she wasn’t omnipotent. She knew why he was hiding but not what he had planned to do in Alaska. But after so many years, it was clear that he had no plan at all.
He was simply hiding.
The miser didn’t expect that. A brilliant mind such as his couldn’t go to waste, despite what he did to himself. Perhaps he believed that he’d chosen to come to the island. The illusion of free will is a convincing one. He’d come because she wanted him to come. And he would stay for the same reason.
She needed something.
The miser leaned against the window and opened the door on the first floor. Nicholas wasn’t coming back to the tower. He was acclimating to his new home quite well.
She pulled the cloak tight and yanked the hood over her head before stepping into the snow globe. She arrived in a room much different than the one Nicholas had endured. There was no valley or campfire. Now there was a long table and flames flickering on a multipronged candelabrum. Jingle bells pleasantly rang. This would be her happy room from now on.
We’ll call it the Christmas room.
Naren, however, stood in the open doorway. She waited for him to enter. A nervous smile was hidden deep in her hood, but a chuckle escaped.
“Come on. In you go.”
He peered into the room. He’d been going to the second-floor lab all this week. She was happy with his progress. It was time to take the next step.
Well, several steps.
“Too Christmassy? The candles, the bells... it means nothing.”
She knocked the candelabrum across the room. He nodded—so mysterious, so serious—but still didn’t step inside.
“If we’re to move forward,” he said, “no more hiding. I’m here, I’m honest, I’m fully exposed. You know exactly who I am. Meet me in this moment with your true face.”
“Honest?” She didn’t dampen her laughter.
“You see me. I need to see you.”
“You didn’t spend the last week in my lab to suddenly give me an ultimatum.”
“I know you, Heather. You are not your past—”
“Ah-ah-ah.” A tendril of smoke leaked from her sleeve. “Don’t talk that talk, not now. Not ever. And that’s not my name.”
“That’s your cure, to forget who you are?”
“Who I was is not who I am. The past is useless, why not cut it away? It would only slow me down if I cherished it. You carry yours like a dead fish. Put it down, Naren.”
“Put it down, or erase it?”
“One and the same.”
“I don’t think you put yours down. It’s still with you.”
“Where?” She looked around as if her past were a leprechaun darting about the room. “Don’t look so sad, Naren. Come in, sit down. Let’s celebrate the most wonderful time of the year.”
She pointed at a seat. The candlelight brightened. Naren remain firm-footed and heavy-lidded. Stubbornness ran deep and wide in this man. It was what made him great. He considered what others said, but at the end of the day, he listened to his own voice.
She liked that.
The trick was to sound like his voice when he listened. And make it say what she wanted.
“I know what you want from me,” he said.
He was tired from lugging his past around, she tried to tell him. But something about his willingness to be there, to be open and present with everything—the past, the present, the possibilities—made her weak in the knees.
She wanted to open the stairwell that led to the third floor, invite him to come up, to see her true face. The freedom to just be there like he seemed to be was intoxicating. She had erased her past, got rid of who she was before she became this, but she was still hiding. The more she tried to look away, the harder her true nature was to avoid.
The impulse to invite him up took her by surprise, and she spontaneously stepped out of the snow globe before she did something stupid. She had to be in full control of this situation.
How did he turn it so quickly?
She threw off the cloak. Her warped reflection looked back from the watery surface of the snow globe. Long legs and sinewy arms, ribs that could be counted beneath bright red flesh. She was as red as Christmas cheer, including the rims of her eyes and long fingernails. Lips plump beneath an angular nose, her face was framed in sizzling kinky hair that reminded her of a crimson dandelion whose seeds refused to be free. She hid from the world for a lot of reasons.
But it was mainly the ashes.
To reveal her true self could turn everything to ashes. She’d seen it happen before. The island was for protection.
For her and others.
She pulled the cloak over her shoulders and cinched it around her neck, threw the deep hood over her head. Naren wasn’t leaving the island. She preferred he choose to remain, but she decided that either way he was staying. It was time to move forward whether he liked it or not.
She needed him.
She went downstairs and met him outside the tower. “I need to show you something.”
He backed away, expecting her to pull the hood off and perhaps smile with relief. Instead, she offered him a gloved hand.