6.
It was still in New York City, some June long gone, fireflies rising and falling out of the trees—when Gabriel first introduced me to the lovebug. I was more mesmerized by the swarm all around us, their mimetic starlight, than by Gabriel’s nervous chatter. “Did you know, Elle, there’s an insect down in New Orleans that kisses each other just like we do?”
Gabriel’s hand rested on the small of my back, then slipped down beneath the band of my skirt. I slapped him there and he went on. “I’m serious—the bugs, the male and the female ones, can’t live without each other. They never go unattached. They’re just always together, literally stuck to each other, making love until they die,” he said. With his knuckles, he mocked the movement of his fantastical bugs.
“Is that right, Professor Bell?” I asked. “And what about why the fireflies light up like that?” I was still more interested in the biosphere all around us. As it turned out, his lovebug was real flesh and blood, too, though I didn’t know it then. His lovebugs would only manifest themselves in droves later, here on Lyra.
“Those aren’t lightning bugs, Elle, they’re fairies,” he said. “They’ll be even prettier in there.” Gabriel gestured toward the entrance to Green-Wood Cemetery. He had been searching all night, in the way that young men do, for a place to be adequately alone with me. I never knew where Gabriel called home. Perhaps he came by his familiarity with the city’s outdoor secrets because he found his bed so often in a park or on the beach or beneath a bridge.
I pleaded with him not to enter the graveyard. “It’s forecast to rain, Gabriel!”
“I’ve not only come prepared with an umbrella, I’ve even brought us a five-course supper in this red picnic basket,” he said and slipped through the iron lattice, his body passing without effort. “And a sweet little French Bordeaux,” he said, whipping a bottle from his pocket.
“Where are you going?” I shouted into the dark. “Come back!”
His pale face emerged again. “I’ve met a ghost, Elle.”
“I don’t believe in ghosts,” I countered.
“Don’t you want to hear what the ghost has to say?” he replied. “You’ll have to come in here to find out.”
The trees in the cemetery shivered in the wind. Graveyards always harbored that hush, the hush of deserts and oceans, of the places on the planet where the violence of the living is disbanded. Sex lived beside death, too, and I felt it draw shapes along my skin when I finally joined Gabriel. It was true—the fireflies were everywhere, winking light on the grassy knolls between graves. There were no lamps, no lanterns. The moon had set. The night was ours, a secret we shared with those glittering bugs.
“Now that you’re here, I can tell you,” Gabriel said. “I’ve seen what heaven looks like, Elle. The ghost has shown me.”
I felt I might begin to hate him for this line of conversation, morbid as it was foolish, but then he drew me into him, whispering fairy tales in my ear, and I was wrangled back into our love—our summer solstice forever, our dreamscape sea.
“What the ghost told me is that heaven is here among us, only we can’t see it. These trees aren’t full of bugs—those are blue and violet lights, crawling through the branches and on into the sky. And that pond just there? Well, if you swam in it, rather than little fishes you’d see stars.”
“And how did this person die, the one who’s now your ghost?” I asked.
“For love,” Gabriel answered. “The woman he loved married another. He was a poor man and couldn’t care for her, so he drowned himself.”
“Your ghost committed suicide rather than look for work?” I asked. “How very romantic of him.”
I pulled myself out of Gabriel’s arms. I was no lovebug; we were only human. I stumbled away toward the pond—with its celestial stars or goldfish—and considered one possible future: that in the years to come I’d receive a letter saying Gabriel had died in the war we were not yet in, but would be soon enough. I saw his body, the one I loved, bloody and at rest on a cliff in France. In my youth, I was intoxicated by the velvet promise of tragedy, of how adult it could make me feel. There is a certain competition for the weight of experience that only the inexperienced desire. Still, I wonder now if that moment, and the others like it, sprang only from my penchant for melodrama. Have I always craved sadness? Or did I know, from the very moment I met him, that we would be parted too soon?
Gabriel chased after me, breaking my reverie, and we tumbled to our knees against a tree, its bark drawing pinpoints of blood.
“You’ve hurt me, Gabriel Bell,” I chided.
“I am the ghost,” Gabriel said, his mouth already passing over the shaded places on my body, “who exists to haunt you.”
The dawn was stunning that morning, a heartbreak of red, when at last I snuck back into our apartment just before my father rose for work. I was too intoxicated by love to sleep. The smell of burned coffee and the smell of Gabriel return to me from that long-ago kitchen. I brought my nails to my nose to remind myself of him, of what we had done, of the earth and the sweat and the mammal of him, the scents that only lovers love. When my father awoke, I shoved my hands into two oven mitts, as if he could smell on me what I could smell on myself. The apartment was so small, the windows in it fit for a prison cell, but in that sliver of an opening, the sunrise was still ostentatious, symphonic. But when I looked up at my father’s face, I saw that it had aged ten years in a night.
“I’m glad you’re awake, Ellie,” my father said. “There’s something I want to discuss with you.” Suddenly tumbling forth from his face was a great sob. I had never seen the man cry.
“I’m so sorry, Papa,” I wailed, figuring he knew where I had been, what I had done.
“Elle,” he said, calming me, petting my hair. “Sorry for what? It’s me that’s sorry. I’ve been a failure all of my life. The only thing I didn’t fail at was marrying your mother, and she would have done better to avoid me. But that’s all spilt milk.” He forced a smile. “I’ve been meaning to tell you . . . You’re a woman now, Elle, and a very pretty one. We can marry you well.” He suddenly became sheepish, as if he’d just won a match against an invisible opponent. He looked at me with tenderness, his eyes the color of cedar. “There’s a man . . .” He swallowed, then continued. “My boss, Ranier—you know how wealthy he is, he’s got more jewels in his house than a prince, and though I know all these years I’ve only been his shopkeeper, well, he has a son named Simon who’s in need of a wife. Apparently, this Simon saw you once when you came to fetch your old father, and I’m told he fell in love on the spot.”
Here was my punishment for being with Gabriel out of wedlock. The penalty had come. “Oh, well, Father, I’m sure Mr. Ranier was only trying to give you a compliment,” I said, anxious to dodge the inevitable.
“Ranier’s let me go, Ellie. I’m too old for the work. And he needs someone to do more of the heavy lifting, is what he says.” The decades had settled upon my father. It was not just his face that had aged, but his shoulders had shriveled. He had shrunk, and what hair of his he still had left was white. If time could defeat my father, it would defeat us all. Everything ends, I thought then. We fall from the branch, disintegrate. There is no explosion. We don’t burst into light. Our smell becomes rot.
“But it doesn’t matter anymore, you see?” my father continued. “Don’t you worry, oh my child. Once you’re married, we’ll both be taken care of. We’ve always been a team, haven’t we?”
I still hear him saying it, oh my child, the way one reaches for the sound of the ocean inside a seashell. “Everything will be all right. Mr. Simon’s in love with you, my Ellie. And Mr. Ranier, when he let me go, he says to me, ‘How ’bout it, Cumberland? Now you can really be a part of the Ranier family.’ Oh my child, why do you cry? I’m giving you away to the American dream!”