13.
The trees speak in that language granted to them by the wind, bending and lashing and shivering. We drive through their branches into town, disrupting their dialogue. Everything appears to be closed, even Leroy’s Diner. Zelda would always order three pancakes there and drive me mad by eating only one. Simon’s breakfast was three eggs sunny side up and sausage gravy and potatoes with toast and jelly, the rest of Zelda’s pancakes, and a coffee or a cola, and never once did he gain a pound. I restricted myself to a grapefruit and a hard-boiled egg. Ridiculous now to think of all those wasted weekend brunches of denied pleasure. All the onion rings I might have consumed, all the fatty bacon, the luscious corn muffins and buttery biscuits. Leroy’s windows are shuttered now; one solitary man appears to be living, or dying, on its front bench.
Two people shuffle outside the church, passing a brown bag between them. Curses I shall not repeat are scrawled on Tilly’s shop walls. The contents of a compromised trash can fall out unapologetically. Windows are shattered in all the old storefronts. The town that was is now a fading postcard stored only in my mind. It once took patience to drive down Main Street as people crisscrossed the road without care. Now even their ghosts are gone. Their faces return for just an instant as we pass, shards of some minor exchange—the grocer tossing leeks into their containers—My blessings to Mr. Simon—the taste of rainbow sprinkles as the ice cream shop cashier bade me farewell—I hope it’s to your liking, Mrs. Ranier. We were all, for a time, living inside the same dream of a place. We could not know how beautiful everything really was—until now, when Lyra’s emptiness is the only breath that haunts the thin yellow steel of the car.
“Simon?” I venture.
“Yes, dear?” he replies warily. It is likely he has already explained all this to me—why sand has filled the doorway of the pharmacy, why an oak branch has split the candy shop in two.
Before I can muster some clever way to inquire further, the town is quickly past us and we are merging onto a bridge I don’t recognize. I clutch the car seat. The way to the mainland was always by ferry, dolphins chasing alongside, then that moment when, ’round the river bend, Lyra vanished behind us. I used to fear that moment, its reminder that the bodies I loved most in this life were too easily disappeared by water.
Even once I can no longer remember my own name, I will still have memorized the trail of freckles that graced Gabriel’s torso, the way his hands were sculpted, encompassing the whole of mine in his twice over. I can still feel his lips against mine, feathery and tentative. I loved to press against the skin of his belly, the muscles beneath well formed but not garishly so. Some days he was Irish, some days French; he was the son of a Gypsy, or perhaps a Spanish king. Even Gabriel did not know. The only sure thing is that I’ll never get his body back—that body I loved to watch move across the earth, that body born in the streets beneath the constellation of Cygnus, so he always said. Where the dead go out and the born come in . . .
“Elle!” Simon shouts. “What were you trying to ask me?”
“Where are we going?” I ask.
“The doctor,” he says, turning to me. “We just spoke about it. We’re going to the doctor.”
“Do you know the date today, Elle?” someone asks me. I find that we are no longer in the car but in a room tortured by light.
“August,” I say aloud.
“August what?” the man asks.
His line of questioning summons that August back in the fifties, when a hurricane sucked the water so far back from the shore that the sea itself disappeared. We walked out to where, days previous, it licked our feet and found a blank canvas—seashells, dead seaweed. All the water in the world had been ripped off the face of the earth. But even in that desert I could not find Gabriel.
“Yes. It is August,” I repeat.
“Do you know the year?” the man asks.
I review the decades. The thirties were New York, the threat of rain, of starvation, of war, of an ending; the forties we arrived on Lyra, dressed in pearls, a shimmer, we were alive when so many of our young were dead; our children were children in the fifties and there were so many children everywhere for whom we grilled and the smell of meat and charcoal carries me back to the ocean on some bright Sunday in July; it was in the sixties I began to feel so alone, the war was close, all over the television, closer than the moon, and my children were no longer children. I returned to New York at last, horrified that time had reached 1970 and beyond. And then there is nothing. Where was the rest of my life?
“Nineteen seventy-seven—” I reply.
“Not quite. It’s 1998, Mrs. Ranier,” the man says. “And do you remember me? I’m Dr.—?”
“I’m Elle Bell,” I interrupt the doctor. “You must be thinking of some other patient. My name is Elle Bell.”
The doctor looks away from me to Simon, nods his head, and makes a note with his pen. I hit the desk very strongly. I want the desk to break. I want the building to fall into the sea. But nothing happens, so I beg the doctor to please turn down the lights in his office.
We leave after that and Raymond drives us in silence. The August heat recasts the world in a yellow haze.
The first sight of Lyra always catches my breath, that lonely strip of land lurking off the coast of Georgia, mighty enough to face the Atlantic, hushed beneath its haunted oak. There is a secret stored in it that, after all these years, I still want to know. Then there it is, our house, its widow’s walk peeking out from the woods. I see someone walking upon it, young, her hair catching the wind. She takes flight.
“Why did you say your name was Bell?” Simon asks me.
Where do you even come from, Gabriel?
Cygnus, I told you.
What happened to New Orleans?
I’m not from anywhere in this burning world.
But what is your family name?
Elle, you ever notice how the gods don’t have last names? It’s just Zeus, Poseidon, Cronus.
Everyone has one.
Okay, then make one up for me, Elle.
How about . . . how about Bell? Gabriel Bell.
“I’ve been married to you all these years. Has that not been enough?” I reply to Simon.
Simon hits the dashboard, then opens the car door and slams it behind him, leaving me with Raymond.
“Want a cigarette, Ma?” Raymond asks. He lights his own and regards the smoke affectionately.
“You resemble my father,” I say to the boy.
“You always say that,” Raymond says. He pulls a flask from his jacket pocket and drinks from it quickly, then sighs. “Wish you at least had a photo of him.”
“You really do,” I insist, but evening has fallen and I am too fatigued to pursue the topic. I step out of the car and make my way out into the garden, my cigarette preserved. I am shrunken again to the size of a little girl walking beneath the tangled oak. And then I hear the ocean. The night has risen above it, clear and profound. I know that once there were only stars, distant but still bright over the sea. Here on this island, with so little electricity, we could trace patterns of our own making between them. But the blue light now colonizes the sky, drawing star lanes between stars I’ve never seen before, unveiling before me the truest constellations. Cygnus rises on the horizon. Nebulae drip from the distances into my hands. This night knows no such thing as black; it is brighter than day.