27.
The branches shiver and shed blue light, as trees elsewhere shed snow. This new weather slithers up through Ethel’s hands as she braids my hair. I look in the mirror and see where the light enters and leaves my skull, enters and leaves my lungs, falling through the rest of me as it behaves in the trees. “Can you see it?” I ask Ethel.
“I can barely see an inch ahead of me,” she replies. Her hair has turned so white. There is no black left in it. So short a time ago, we were just girls. “But you know I always say seeing is like Mary Magdalene going to the tomb of Christ and finding out it’s empty. The ears are more reliable.”
I ask Ethel when she will leave Lyra.
“Well, I had planned on dying here like my mama and daddy,” she replies. “But since nobody asked my opinion about selling the island off to Mayor Clarke’s damnable offspring, and I don’t plan on having him for my eternal company, I was thinking ’bout using my savings to go west. Like I told you, to Phoenix, Arizona. Cheap land. Never rains. Sun is always shining. I want to get far away while I can. I can’t just live on the shores of Georgia forever, knowing they took everything. That’s how Moses died, an inch from glory.”
“Our house didn’t burn like the others,” I say. “I always waited for it to.”
“You can’t ever tell what God has in store, for Lyra or any of us,” Ethel replies. “Now stop fidgeting and let me braid your three strings of hair.”
For a moment, in her hands, I fall into the ocean and find my mother and father. Just past shore, the water is already deep. I stretch my toes down to the bottom, but there is nothing, no floor. Thousands of graves float in the water. The sea changes color from red to purple to blue to red, as if it suffers its own sunset. There is an event we are all swimming toward. My father cups my hand in his. “I feel so very sad,” he says.
“You’d better get out of this old night slip!” Ethel sighs, returning me here. “It’s almost time for the party!”
They arrive in the hundreds. I go out among them, candlelight shines in their glasses, a dull remembrance of a name, what happened between us, who we have been to one another, which one of us always drank too much. There is a band, saxophone, trumpet, trombone, dancing, shattered glasses, curses, laughter. I navigate the circus in a wheelchair. For a moment, in the dim light, I am the only one among them who has grown old. Time has touched only me and my demolished garden. They are gathered around all the cocktail tables. Cheeks red with cheer. I have done it. I have made them all happy. I have become a Ranier.
My girl approaches, very drunk, tripping down the steps. Her glittering dress drags in the wet mud. “Mommy, you look so clear tonight,” she says through hiccups. “It all looks like it used to . . . except the people. I wish there were more people like there used to be here. There was always so many, many people.”
Oh, will you smell that cake? It’s Elle’s famous chocolate cake! She says she does it herself. How can a woman bake chocolate like that and stay so slim?
My mother’s face. The years spin backward to 1926. A bar of chocolate on the bedside stand. Let her memory of me be sweet, my David. Every afternoon I take another nibble at it, as if it were a wonderful story that I never want to end. Then all that is left is the wrapper. I ask my father when my mother is coming back. Oh, honey, she’s not, he says. She’s not coming back. She’s an angel. She’s everywhere now. Like the ocean.
Even earlier: My hands are in theirs. My mother and father, Sanya and David. A woman walks hastily ahead of us with an umbrella for shade, a red picnic basket in her hands. The sun is resplendent. I fall beneath her canopy. Embroidered there is a land of enchantment—a faraway land, where once upon a time ancient emerald woods met crystal dunes and the blue sea. My mother squeezes my hand, says something to me in Russian. Then looks at my father. This is my very first memory of the world. I close my eyes and fall through the cobblestone road back to Lyra.
“Make a wish!” someone shouts. In my hands, a feast of chocolate again. Laughter and wind come for the candles. They sputter, then return. A man kneels before me. His hands are rough, but they handle me so gently. He sets my braids aside, then places a necklace over my head. I look down upon it, its blue burning heart. My sight blurs. Gabriel. But is it you?
The voice of a woman occludes him. Elle, did you do the flowers tonight? Why, you should run the florist’s shop yourself! Not that you need to, with Simon out on that ship every day hunting treasure.
The smell of lilies returns. Their perfume of moonlight. Everywhere I look, daffodils, roses, tulips. It’s spring, and I walk between my mother and father, and the strange woman’s umbrella has just made a left turn into oblivion. The sun burns my face. And I begin to weep. It is gone, my enchanted land. My mother squeals with delight, paying me no attention. My father has stolen a blue rose for her.
I hear my girl talking with a group nearby. Something about a Gordon, about his time away . . .
“Second chances are important,” a man responds. His hand clings to my shoulder.
“Well, Ray, this is not a second chance. This is a third strike. More like a fourth or fifth, really,” says a familiar voice behind me.
“He’s ill, Simon,” my girl says. “No different than what Mom’s sick with.”
“If he’s so ill, Zelda, why then does he refuse treatment?” the older man replies.
“Oh, like you’re the big expert!” she cries. “Perhaps I should dose him up with Caeruleum after a few rounds of ECT and see what happens.”
“Remember Mom’s fiftieth?” the blue-eyed young man interjects. “There were so many people here that night. Do you think anyone else is coming? It’s like they’ve all forgotten—”
“We had parties for every occasion!” my girl cries back. “Not just her fiftieth. She was always overdoing it. Fireworks. Champagne. God, the money you two spent. To think, the entire island and all their third cousins once removed were feasting on our backs.”
“Those were the golden days. Just look at what the Clarkes have done to this garden,” the older man says from behind me. “It’s like a war zone. I don’t understand why they have to tear everything up. Why they’ve got to destroy everything we made.”
“Don’t get all maudlin,” my girl says. “You wallow in the past worse than her sometimes.”
“The past is all that’s left to the old, dear Zelda,” the gentleman replies. “One day you’ll understand and you won’t have us around to console you.”
I look down at my neckline. The jewel from the handsome stranger is gone. I clutch at my chest.
“What’s she doing?” my girl asks.
“Everything’s missing,” I say.
“I know, sweetheart,” the older man says to me, his face coming into view. “I know. But we’ll get it back.” Then he turns to the rest of the group, lowers his voice to a hush. “I’ll tell you, since he stopped drinking, Clarke Junior’s turned into some kind of robot. I don’t think he’s still got real blood knocking around underneath that skin. He was talking to me yesterday about using the Caeruleum deposits for some kind of telephone device. Straightfaced, says these things could have about a jillion times the memory of the human brain. No more worrying about our, and I quote, ‘entropic carcasses.’ Like he doesn’t know my own wife, the woman who was like a godmother to him—”
“Doesn’t he know the Caeruleum causes—you know, rapid onset?” my girl asks. “His big plan sounds pretty counterintuitive.”
“They never proved causation,” the younger man responds quickly. “Besides, Clarke’s in technology, not pharmaceuticals. You can’t get dementia from holding a phone to your face.”
“Well, he was quite gabby with me today,” my girl says, changing the subject. “Told me I’m welcome to visit anytime, like the goddamn place has always been his. Can’t believe the Clarkes couldn’t be bothered to show up tonight, of all nights. . . .”
“They could have come just for her,” the older gentleman says, eyeing the younger man. “She used to get so nervous at the beginning, before people really started coming. And now no one will ever come again.”
“What do you believe, Ma?” the young man says, turning his attention toward me. “Do you still believe there’s some magic out there in the ocean, like you used to?”
I want this dream to end, I wish to reply as the blue light disperses across the garden in falling stars or fireworks. Their voices grow muffled beneath it. And another is just beside me. He surrounds me like music. See, Elle. It didn’t take so long to get here. Let’s just live on this beach at the end of the world.
Gabriel, but what about all these strange carnival people?
Oh, darling, but you’re in love with a regular tramp. Isn’t that what you love about me? I’m free.
“Mom, raise your glass for the toast!” my girl screams.
The young man stands beside her, a guitar in his hands. His voice is so mild, like the breeze in April. “Let’s sing together, okay, Ma?” he asks me and begins to strum a few familiar chords. “We’ll do your favorite song.”
The guests twirl around me as if on a carousel; my girl stumbles, her champagne spilling. The music touches all the chandeliers in the universe. And the lyrics pour out of me: “I’ll be coming home—wait for me . . .”
“Mommy!” It’s my Zelda. I turn and look for her like I might find her five years old again, clutching her nightgown, looking for her four-leaf clover.
“Yes, angel?” I say.
“Have you really come back?” she asks.
I gaze out upon Lyra, which still astounds me, even after all this time. The light fairies through the air, recasting the island in blue, violet, blue. Down the tumbling lawn, past the abandoned wooden tables, is the tiered pagoda where I was married. And just beyond the shuttered pool lie the ruins of the former mansion, that circle of stones—a vision of the past and future at once. Then my favorite part of all begins: the congregation of emerald oak and the ocean beyond. One can stand beneath the low shade of the woods, just before those dunes of fallen stars, and never know the Atlantic is there at all. But it has been there, just beyond my garden, all these long years, waiting for me.