There is no moon tonight, but a beam glows through the fog from a secret satellite. We sit, Simon and I, in our sun-beaten lawn chairs by the ocean on this final evening. At my ankle lies a worn red picnic basket. It must belong to the rest of my life, which has passed behind me. All its faces, all its moments of terror and euphoria, fall back into the tide of memory. Behind us the oaks stretch thick as fur over Lyra, laced in that blue light, stretching from the soil to the sky. It is beginning to burn.
I turn to my husband of all these years. “Simon, do you remember that night, the night Gabriel drowned?” I ask. The sound of my own voice reminds me of whale song, of a woman crying underwater. We are already crossing into different realms, Simon and I.
“Oh, Elle, how many times have we trod this ground? The man was desperate. He drowned himself. It’s all very sad.” His eyes flutter from drowsiness. Simon will awaken before the dawn, his best suit hanging on the door for the journey, the unanswered letter from Thomas secure in his coat pocket.
Where will he think I am? Saying farewell to the garden, perhaps. It will take him too long to realize I am not anywhere when he runs through the oak, which will appear to him like a dream as the fire gains traction overnight, at last reaching the dunes, an old man, panting there, staring at the sea. His Elle, gone.
Simon will have only enough time before the flames sweep the woods in every direction. He will never have seen a fire so pretty, so blue. And yet Death will not take him. Death will have to claw him out of this life. Simon will run madly west toward the river, toward his world, his Earth.
“Perhaps he wasn’t desperate,” I say. “Perhaps there is another world waiting for us.”
“It’s too late, Elle, for all this philosophizing.” Simon yawns and rises, preparing to leave.
“Do you think you’ve been a good person?” I ask. This is the last question I have for my husband. It is simple. After all, we have so little control over anything else.
Simon looks lovingly at me, his eyes that deep Atlantic blue. He is already on the mainland, in Savannah. He has already arrived at tomorrow. “I made my mistakes,” he says. “Lord knows. But I know one thing—I always strove to make you happy, Elle. Even when you didn’t want it for yourself. And perhaps that has been my downfall.”
“Is it really my happiness you wanted, Simon? Or did you want our life together to appear happy? Beautiful as a song you might play on the piano, for some enthralled audience?”
Simon’s gaze drifts into the fog. He looks at his watch. “Dear, what’s the point in all this? The big sins are behind us now. We are losing paradise. What do you say we call it a night?”
“Very well. I can tell you plainly what would make me truly happy tonight, Simon—a few moments here by the ocean to myself.”
“But it’s conspiring to rain, Elle.”
“Don’t fret over me. I even managed not to forget an umbrella.” And there one rests on my lap, like a magic trick.
Simon formulates a lecture on the further dangers of my remaining here alone, but I intercept him. “More than anything, Simon, we are alike in exactly one way: we’ve always wanted things to be beautiful. For me, even if I wasn’t always happy, I had this place. You gave me this. All this. The ocean, the woods. I could breathe here. But now that’s being taken from us, too. Maybe that’s how the end always is. Nothing ends like it does in the movies or a symphony. The end is just loss.”
“Why are you talking like this?” Simon asks. “It’s not the end of anything. Lyra is ours forever, Elle. We’re just leaving it for a little while. We’ll be back.”
“I know, I know. It’s not yet the end,” I reply.
“Please don’t stay out here too late. Our son will have the car ready for us and waiting at seven.”
I must appear suddenly confused. “Raymond,” Simon adds for my benefit.
“Yes, our Raymond.” I nod confidently.
Simon looks satisfied. “I love these days. The days you come back to us.”
He kisses my forehead, and in that last touch it returns—the day Raymond was born, mid-July, wailing upon arrival. I felt just as I had upon giving birth to Zelda, that I had uncovered my treasure, my entire reason for coming to this Earth, and for remaining.
I listen with tenderness as Simon walks the path to the house and disappears beyond the blue gates. “Goodbye,” I whisper when his footsteps fade. “Goodbye, Raymond, goodbye, Zelda.”