18.
The sky and the sea are one again, as in the ancient days when the heavens had not yet separated from the face of the waters. All breathing on the planet has ceased. No horses aggravate the lawn. My Mina has disappeared. The birds have all gone, flown far away from this heavy atmosphere. I wonder if I am all alone, with only the company of weather—this fog that has re-formed the entire earth. For so long, I have prayed that just one thing in this life might attain permanence, even if it is this, this dominion of fog. But a human voice enters the room, and in an instant the climate is rearranged. “I’m late,” he says.
“Late for what?” I ask.
“The meeting.” He is no longer young, my husband, but remains thoroughly a gentleman in his becoming blue shirt, the color matching his eyes. “I’ve got to get down there. Ray’s walking Clarke Junior over, and knowing Ray, before even saying Hello, how are you, he’ll sell off all our jewels and our linens, too. I swear to God, that boy didn’t get a single Ranier gene when it comes to negotiating money.”
“What kind of meeting?” I ask.
He grows exasperated again. “Elle, I wrote it in your notepad in case you woke up and found me gone. You’re having more trouble tracking these days.”
“It must be the weather,” I offer with a shrug, but my husband fails to nod in response. In my lap, I find a small leather-bound book. The pages are mostly blank, except the very first, where there is a little scrawl in familiar penmanship: Clarke Junior’s brought developers in again to discuss sale of the land. Holler for Ethel if you need something. Do not worry, my firefly. The house is ours forever. Love, S.
“Love, S.,” I say aloud.
“Oh! And, Elle, please remember not to come down to the office this time,” S. says, rummaging in the closet before emerging triumphantly with a tie.
“Let me write that down for you, too,” he says before kissing my cheek. His breath smells sour, age confused with peppermint. Cold sweat drips off his skin onto mine. I flinch as he draws up the pen and begins transcribing his note.
“It’s the second time they’ve come, which means they’re serious. Not the house, Elle, I know. I would never, as I promised. It’s mostly the remaining Clarke land in the north and some of the property I bought in town. Clarke Junior’ll back down on the rest.”
“This house?” I ask, then look down at the book. PLEASE STAY IN BED UNTIL I RETURN, a postscript to the original note now reads.
“Elle, dear, I’m sorry, but I really do need you to try to remember this. Last time you came down to the office raving about all kinds of island ghost stories and wildfires. These developers are very businesslike people. Clarke Junior says they’re even interested in the Caeruleum site . . .” He trails off. “Well, I suppose they might find some better use for it than we did.”
“Do you know if my father will be there, too? At the meeting?” I ask S. I feel as though I’ve been running through a forest that spans the circumference of the world, looking for my father, for a very long time.
My husband, in his pretty blue shirt, picks up a little mirror from the nightstand and holds it up to my face. Suddenly, I understand I have been dreaming the morning up—the godlike fog, the mysterious meeting, this S. moving around the room like a tired machine. “Elle, look at yourself. Look at me. It isn’t 1939,” he says.
But in my reflection is a woman whose irises are swallowed by their sockets. Blue medicinal powder is caked on her lips and teeth. Her hair is gray, falling out of her skull in two long braids. I have seen her before, sitting alone, watching me in the dark, from the beach, a shadow passing between the oak trees. The shivering begins in my fingertips, and grows more intense. I smash the mirror out of his hands and onto the floor. That will wake me up. Violence always ends these visions. I hit what remains of the mirror over and over against the nightstand until the woman fractures, disappears. But the rest of the nightmare persists. S. shouts at me and I cover my ears.
“There was a woman here,” I try to explain. “With blue all over her teeth.”
Another figure enters the room and the fog evaporates all around her. Flames fly out of her hair. No, they are butterflies. “Thought you weren’t giving her those pills no more, Mr. Simon?”
“Excuse me, Ethel, did you become a physician overnight?”
“I know what I seen all these years, Mr. Simon.”
“Have you seen what I’ve seen, Ethel? Because what I’ve seen is a woman who has refused to leave the past behind for sixty years.”
“With all due respect, Mr. Simon, I been here almost every day of those sixty years and I heard her tell you over and over she didn’t want them pills, but you, being no different than most men, thought you knew better what was good for her.”
“Can you tell me where my father is?” I ask them both.
When I last saw him, rain was falling over New York. It seemed the entire city lay sleeping beneath its gentle drum work, except for me. We slept on either side of a thin wall, my father in the living room on the sofa, me in the little bedroom beside it, and I fell asleep most nights to the soundtrack of his snoring. Sometimes his breath became caught in his throat, and in the sudden silence I feared it had stopped entirely, until a trumpet of sighs assured me that he was still with me in this world.
But that last night I lay on the mattress fully clothed and tiptoed into the living room once the snoring circus had begun. My father lay on his back, his face pale in the cool light from the street, his lips parted and bursting with broken sound. He looked defeated even in sleep, hands outstretched at his sides, supplicating to the God that had abandoned him so often. From his pockets, I delicately took two dollars for Gabriel; I had long since learned to steal without waking him. As I creaked open the door to the rest of my life, my father said something in his dreams—a few undetectable words, the last he would ever say—but I did not pause to try to hear them. That night, Gabriel was taking me to the Cotton Club.
Why is it that we never manage to still bliss? Is it because time escalates when we are happy—becomes as drunk and blurry as its passengers? Gabriel’s sweat was my sweat that night as I fell into him and out of him, our hips tambourines, my shimmying feet detached from their limbs, dancing onstage after hours to the intoxicated saxophone. How did he know all these people? I wanted to know. I couldn’t hear his answer, or my own voice; he kept walking away from me, his chest puffed out, impersonating someone or some instrument; he said something about Prohibition days, when there was money for people like him, and now there was nothing; they were pouring drinks from all sides into our mouths, a pretty face here, a prettier face there; Gabriel was talking to one and she kissed him on the mouth and I started to scream at him, at her; I was slapping him and he was laughing, pointing to the famous pianist, cigarette between his lips, conjuring a river of beauty; I thought we might dissolve into the walls and never get out and watch lovers for a hundred generations dance; but then it was morning and the bright rain was making its sad music on the concrete outside.
Back on Earth, my entire body shook with cold. I was wearing just a flimsy dress beneath a wet coat. I held my heels in my hands. All around us, men in suits rushed by responsibly to work, averting their gaze from our ruined figures. Hours had disappeared inside that club; there was no way to prove the night had ever happened.
“Too much to drink, Elle Bell. I’m taking you home,” Gabriel said, as I began to weep. Something, somewhere, was deeply not right.
The journey downtown seemed to last for hours. The persistent rain had grown troubling, a clattering voice reminding us that every party ends. I knew what awaited me in advance; my body knew it before my mind did. I left Gabriel at the station and ran down my street and up the apartment stairs. It was too late. My father lay prostrate, just as I had left him, but he was no longer there. He would never be there again. No no no no no no no no, I cried, a whisper, then a wail. I did not stop until my voice gave out, along with my feet and my arms and my fingertips. It felt as though the earth might crack open beneath my weight. I pressed my face against my father’s quiet chest and opened his hands, clutched tightly in rigor mortis around the few coins I’d left in his pocket—all that remained to us, to me. I threw them against the window; the metallic jing jang of their crash amid the rain commanded me to marry Simon. Money ruled life until death. Somewhere, in some time before time, men had made it that way. The realization was suddenly fact. I threw up in the sink. For the first time in my life, I felt I was made of flesh. There was no secret animus: I was of my father and mother, and to them, to dust, I would eventually return. That morning I saw my face old, saw it dying; life was on its way forward from that moment on. The former world had passed away.
The rain continued all that day and the next, until the day my father was interred, when it settled into a polite mist. Simon’s father paid for the funeral, in a plot not far from the Raniers’. I wore a black dress of my mother’s, one my father had brought out to show when he spoke of missing her. She was shorter than I; the dress settled just above my knees.
At the service, I was standing between Simon and his mother when Gabriel appeared, uninvited, wearing a midnight-blue suit that fell heartbreakingly well on his frame. He stood directly opposite me, the grave between us, watching me so intently, waiting for me to lift my gaze and return his. I began to weep then, though I also wanted to laugh hysterically. I could never look at Gabriel’s face without smiling; even when he wasn’t trying, there was always something of the clown in it. Suddenly, I felt punched by the dirt thrown over my father’s casket. He won’t be able to breathe! I wanted to shout. But I remained quiet. I have let everything I have loved be taken from me.
And then the service was over. Gabriel crept up behind me at the reception, whispering into my neck, the two of us gazing out at the long-dead fallen leaves, “Don’t you recognize this place, Elle? It’s our cemetery.”
“Gabriel,” I said with a sigh. “Why are you here?”
“Why am I here?” he scoffed. “Why wouldn’t I be? You’re my girl. Look here, Elle, I didn’t want to speak too soon considering the circumstances, but—” He paused, looked around him. “The thing is, I’ve come into a very large sum of money. All I need to do is pay it back after a while, but it’s ours, so don’t you mind about that. So we can marry, and I can prove that I can take care of you. I must take care of you now. You don’t need him, whoever he is,” he whispered loudly. “I’m not sore at you, I promise. I’ve been irresponsible, I know. No kind of man asks the girl he’s courting for money, even just the once because I was in an awful pinch all of a sudden.”
“It wasn’t just the once,” I said.
“It wasn’t?” Gabriel replied, looking truly bewildered.
“Who did you get the money from this time, Gabriel?” I asked.
“That’s not for you to worry about, ma chérie,” he said. “I spoke to Jerome—you know, the one in that business I told you about. You’ve met him—good guy, good family man, and he gave me a loan for a while to get us on our feet. Not for you to bat one beautiful lash about. Let’s just go now. You just have to walk out of here. Tout simple. You haven’t married anybody yet. It isn’t a crime to change your mind. And now you don’t even have to worry about what your daddy has to say.”
I thought of my father’s face there on the blue sofa, his broad, outstretched hands. What was he saying to me, those last few words mumbled between dreams? I thought of his sad shuffle, the way he always shut the door softly when he used to leave for work at six in the morning and return at six in the evening, and I counted in my head what I’d taken from him, one dollar here, five dollars there, though he never said a word in reprimand. I saw us at the sea when I was so very young, after Mother died, when Father brought me into the waves deeper and deeper and picked me up over them as I cackled and quaked in his arms. Your mother is here, he said. She’s always all around you now, and that was when the ocean began to haunt me, and I screamed, because the ocean harbored ghosts, harbored death. Now my father, my first love, my only parent on this lonesome, whirling planet, was gone.
“But I promised my father I’d live for . . .” I began to say before being called away from Gabriel.
“And now we owe some loan shark half a million dollars,” Zelda screams. Everything that was disintegrates with her piercing shriek—that long-vanished funeral, Gabriel’s beautiful blue suit, his pleading, downcast gaze, that day we stood at a distance, formal as strangers. I stand, decades later, in my own driveway. Wild turkeys run gracelessly across the road. My daughter’s pretty, forlorn face is smeared with mascara. I wonder again, as I have so often lately, how I have arrived at this moment. It was only recently that Zelda was just a tadpole in my womb. Where have the years gone?
“Zelda, lower your voice,” Raymond says, looking toward me. “She’s been so good today. You’re going to upset her again.”
“Hey, Ray, how’s AA going?” Zelda asks. “Because I can smell your breath from over here and I bet she can, too.”
“That’s enough. We don’t have what we used to have, Zelda,” Simon says. “I can’t get you and that husband of yours out of this one, not this time. Have you at last given any thought to divorce?”
Beyond their voices I hear the sea settling into itself for the winter, its mournful singing through the trees a warning for the four of us. Zelda once listened earnestly to my tales of the mermaids, emerging from hibernation each autumn, their hair long and violet and shining. The jewels they wore, I told her, were the same ones her father sought. Nothing was fair, Zelda whined; why couldn’t she ever see one while swimming in July? A valid complaint, I told her, but that’s the way magic works. It’s always just out of our reach.
“You have this house,” Zelda spits back at Simon now, scattering her beloved mermaids to the world beyond. “You know Clarke Junior wants it. He’s been groomed since birth to take back his daddy’s old jungle kingdom, and now he can. Why not let the Clarkes take the fucking house?”
“We are not leaving the house,” Simon replies firmly, then walks toward me and holds my hand. He squeezes it once, again, and looks at me with desperation. He wants me to say something, but all around us the branches are trembling as if something unknown is threatening to blow them away.
“What about all her bills?” Zelda flings her hands toward me like I’m already a corpse. “When will you just accept she’s not getting better? Ray tells me you’ve been paying visits to every quack in the state, spending a fortune on potions and elixirs. Why not raise Edgar Cayce from the dead and ask him where we can find some rose water?”
“I never told you that!” Raymond shouts.
“Simon, I warned you twenty years ago you were poisoning her with your happy sappy Caeruleum. But now it’s too late!” Zelda shrieks. “She doesn’t even know who we are!”
I try to scream back that she is wrong. I built this dream. Simon. My son, my daughter, my daughter, my son. I carried them here, bled until they breathed. Zelda’s first cry, that aching, ancient sound—I still hear it. I form the words in my mind, but I lose them as soon as my mouth opens, as if they were in another language.
“Where did Gordon even meet this loan shark? Or has he cuddled up with the Mafia again?” Simon yells, succumbing to the fray at last.
“The Mafia!” Zelda shouts hysterically. “The Mafia doesn’t even exist anymore.”
Simon’s voice, once strong enough to command an actual ship, shakes unconvincingly now; it will never regain that command. “You could have had anyone. We sent you off for a private education, which cost us a fortune, let me remind you. You could have found a lawyer, a doctor, a finance man, a man from a good family like yours. Instead you found some good-for-nothing from under a heap of trash in Atlanta who spends his time in casinos full of whores and squandering what little we have left on drugs and slot machines. Do you aim to destroy everything, Zelda? I suppose you share that instinct with your brother here, who worships Clarke Junior so much that he’s invested our last penny in that crook’s robot scheme. Not to mention handing him back the entire goddamn island.”
“I am your daughter,” Zelda says, between gritted teeth. “I am your flesh and blood. And this house is just a house that one day some hurricane will tear to the ground.” She slams her car door and turns on the ignition. Simon’s hand slips out of my own. His arms rise up helplessly. Raymond is weeping. Even the ocean roars. I cover my ears. There have been times in this life when I have been unable to bear the noise of the world.
“I promised your mother we’d grow old together here, and I’m not going to break that promise,” Simon shouts at Zelda’s car.
She stops, rolls down her window. “Let me use my Ivy League education to explain it to you. You wanna shit on Ray, but how about all that fancy mining equipment you spent a fortune on? Hunting some fucking myth sold to your daddy by old Clarke Senior—”
“Don’t you get started on that!” Simon shouts.
“You know where Ray and I got our bad habits? It’s you. Sure, I married a gambler, but then I had a gambler for a daddy, didn’t I? At least Gordon has been after real money. My daddy wouldn’t ever give up. But when his dreams finally turned to dust, he became a drug dealer to his own wife.”