26.
We are back on Lyra, Simon and I, staring at the Atlantic. I look down to find myself seated in a wheelchair. “Happy to be home?” he asks me.
Lacking the will to complain, I nod my head. The surf surges toward us, reaching for our feet. The ocean wears a different face today. This steely winter ocean is my favorite. The summer sea is gaudy, a showgirl, but in this last season, it belongs only to me.
“A week in the hospital isn’t a vacation,” Simon says. “At least the chair’s just temporary.”
“Am I cured?” I ask him, relieved that at the least I’ll walk again.
“Well, you can speak,” he says. He has not brought his papers with him today. I have known him long enough to know that this signals there’s something we are meant to discuss here.
“What’s on your mind?” I ask. Overhead the clouds are inky, swollen. Soon they will defeat our little outing with rain.
“I was thinking of when I almost drowned as a kid,” he says. “And also, of how I wished I’d gone swimming more here.”
“That was with your brother. . . . He held you down, didn’t he?”
“Good memory,” he says sarcastically. “You know Joe’s sick?” He is testing me. “It isn’t kind to speak badly of the ill. Deb says he’ll go any day now. But I hate him much more than I love him, at this point.” Simon takes my hand in his, draws an infinity symbol with his finger on my wrist. “Thank God I’ve had you. Better than a brother or a sister. I should have listened to you when you told me to stick to my guns about the business.”
“What would have happened if you’d have stuck to your guns?” I ask.
“We’d never have manufactured the Caeruleum. I’d have died looking for those jewels. I suppose we’d still have lost all our money. The end would have come sooner but been the same,” he says. “The only difference is, maybe you’d never have . . .” The rest of Simon’s thought falls into the wind. “Do you think your mother is alive, Elle?”
I shake my head and meditate on the tug of the ocean. She’s everywhere now. Lurking beneath even the calmest surface is the void itself—that plummet through stars, ocean fairies. “My mother has been dead almost as long as I’ve been on this planet.”
“You thought so this morning,” he goes on. “The entire time in the hospital, you called Zelda by her name. Called her Sanya. And Raymond—you won’t even address him directly.” I have so rarely seen Simon cry, but here come his tears. “And I can’t stop thinking it’s all my fault. I mean, you might have gotten sick without the Caeruleum. . . . All our life together, I wanted to just find the answer. I just wanted you to wake up one day without that weight on your chest. That gray aura haunting your eyes. Happy. The way you were when we were kids. I thought that’s what you wanted, too, that that was why you put up with the ECT and then the Caeruleum. I thought you wanted to be saved. I mean, doesn’t everyone want to feel better?”
“I don’t recall ever arguing about it,” I say.
“Just yesterday at the hospital, you threw a fit about how I’d ruined your entire life, Elle. With the help of Madera, of course. Your favorite villain.”
“What’s yesterday when you are old?” I reply. It is suddenly very funny to me. Yesterday’s gone. Gone as what washes up in the tide and is carried back to sea. I try to suppress my laughter, but it feels too good. Soon it will all be washed away, the memory of our ever having been here. Good riddance. Let the ocean devour it.
“I’ve spent my whole life thinking about tomorrow,” Simon says. “What’s going to happen tomorrow? And now there’s nothing to see there. It’s all in yesterday.” He stands up, Scotch in hand, and starts to do a little jig in the sand. He has a small limp now, in his left leg. I can smell, on his skin, the scent of my father’s final years. How must I look to him?
“Also, I never found them,” Simon says, kneeling down and pulling a fragment of seashell from the sand. “I wanted to place around your neck the most magnificent rock any woman had ever seen. Every morning I woke up with the notion. That that very day I would dig out those gems—Elle, you are still the most beautiful woman I’ve ever seen. From the first time I saw you, at the old shop in New York . . .” Simon drowns the rest of the memory in his drink. “Perhaps that was the right answer all along. Just to find the jewels for you. Nothing else.”
“My former glory isn’t why you brought me down here today, is it, Simon?” I ask.
“Elle, you go in and out. But you’re really here today, aren’t you?” he asks, and I return his gaze as reassuringly as an ailing woman can. “There’s a lot that’s been happening—that I’ve lost control of, you might say. I’ve missed confiding in you about it. Well, the north end of the island’s abandoned. It’s a ghost town up there. Clarke Junior’s developers bought everyone out of their homes. Ethel’s been living with us—kindest woman there ever was—but I’ve got to let her go. We’ve got to live simpler now.” He tilts the glass to his lips, barely noticing it is dry.
“And, oh God, Elle, I’ve had to sell the house. That’s what I couldn’t bear to tell you. We had to pay back the creditors after the Caeruleum recall. That Clarke boy made millions on some mumbo-jumbo dot-com I don’t understand. He even got Ray involved with some folks out west, told him to invest in some robot nonsense that failed miserably. And once Clarke Junior knew we were completely done for, he made the offer for the house in cash. How could I refuse him, Elle? He’s interested in the Caeruleum, too. Says he’ll bring me back on as an adviser. Something about portable phones I don’t understand. The fool thinks the future is all in machines.” Simon has been avoiding my gaze, but now he looks me in the eye. “Elle, we have until the end of the month in the house. I’m so sorry.”
“We used to come out here when you had good news to tell me,” I say, trying to make Simon laugh. “Will the horses be allowed to remain, at least?”
One fine day, the world will be left to the horses, when the planet decides at last there have been too many of us. I imagine it is all the horses have ever wanted, to run free on the ever-diminishing land, and all we have ever done is beat them down and entrap them. But nature will have its solution for them, too, and when the ocean sweeps over all this, the horses, native to the steppes of another land, will find their last graves in the Atlantic. Perhaps the ocean might show them some grace, transform them into seagoing unicorns, and they will go on, galloping gorgeously beneath the waves. In a few centuries, if we survive at all, it will be as mermaids, ocean fairies. And at last, after it’s too late for us to realize we were never alone, some extraterrestrial ship will pass over this cul-de-sac of our galaxy, peer over the heaving blue, and recognize it as the ultimate living thing, ignoring that beneath it lies the wreckage of less advanced intelligences: humans, horses, Lyra. And then they will sail on.
“I hope they’ll leave them be,” I reply on Simon’s behalf.
“I’ve been having these recurring dreams,” Simon says. “You’re in the sky above me. And I’m below you in this frozen landscape. You’re flying, but it looks like you’re swimming, swimming through the clouds, and there is nothing else but you.” He looks at me and takes my withered hands in his. “Let’s have one last party here, Elle. Fireworks and all. I know you love a good party. What do you say?”