THEY SAT ON THE boulder, wrapped in snow as if in quilts. It was a high, round throne and the woods were their kingdom. The night was old now. The silver sliver of moon had come to rest directly above them, and its frail light gleamed on the old snow and shimmered on her gold hair.
She kept his hands in her lap like possessions. They were real hands. They had turned real between her own, as if the oven of her caring had burnt away the bad parts. “You are a real boy,” she said to him.
“I was once. It was a long time ago.”
She snuggled against him as if expecting a cozy bedtime story of the sort her parents loved to tell.
“Long ago,” said Jethro. He told his story in short spurts, letting each phrase lie there in the dark, as if each must mellow and grow old like the night before he could go on to the next. “Long before the Pilgrims,” said Jethro, “ancient sailors from an ancient land shipwrecked here.”
The town was only a few miles from the sea, but she never thought of it that way. There was no public beach and Nicoletta rarely even caught a glimpse of the ocean. People with beaches were people with privacy.
“They found the cave,” said Jethro slowly, “and explored it for gold.”
Yes. She could believe that. Those gleaming walls and incredible patterns of royal rock—anybody would expect to find treasure.
“There was none. The men who went first fell to the bottom, and could not be rescued by the others.” His voice waited until she had fully imagined the men in the bottom who could not be rescued. “They had to be abandoned,” he said, his voice a tissue of sorrow.
“Still alive?” asked Nicoletta.
“Still alive.”
Wounded and broken. Screaming from the bottom of a well of blackness. Hearing no words of comfort from above. But instead, words of farewell. We’re sorry, we have to go now. Die bravely.
“In their society,” said Jethro, “the soul could not depart from the body unless the body was burned at sea with its ship. But they, of course, could never return to the ship. And so the men at the bottom of the cave never died. Their souls could not leave. Their bodies … dissolved over the decades.” His voice was soft. With revulsion or pity, she did not know. “Until,” he said, “they became the cave itself. Things with warts of sand and crusts of mineral.”
His hands took her golden hair, and he wove his fingers through it, and then he kissed her hair, kissed that long thick rope, but he did not kiss her face. “The ones who fell,” said Jethro, “put a curse on the cave.”
A chill of horrified excitement flashed down Nicoletta’s spine. She had never heard a human being utter those words. A curse be upon you.
“What was the curse?” She whispered because he did. Their voices were hissing and lightweight, like falling snow.
“Whoever entered that cave,” said Jethro, “would be forever abandoned by the world. Just as they had been.”
Was he one of them? Ancient as earth? But the boy she knew from Art was her age. A breathing, speaking boy with thick, dark hair and hidden eyes.
“And did Indians fall in?” she asked.
“The Indians always had a sense of the earth and its mysteries. They knew better than to go near the cave.”
He seemed to stop. He seemed to have nothing more to say. She asked no questions. The moon slid across the black, black sky. “Then,” said Jethro, “white men came again to these shores. To farm and hunt and eventually to explore.” Now he was speaking with difficulty, and the accents of his voice were lifting and strange. “My father and I,” he said, “found the cave. So beautiful! I had never seen anything beautiful. We did not have a beautiful life. We did not have beautiful possessions. So I stayed in the outer chambers, touching the smooth rock. Staring at the light patterns on the brimstone. Dazzled,” he said. “I was dazzled. But my father …”
How softly, how caressingly, he spoke the word father. A shaft of moonlight fell upon the monstrous shape of him and she could see the boy inside the rock. His eyes might have been carved from a vein of gold. He smiled at her, the sculpture of his face shifting as if it lived. It was a smile of ineffable sadness.
“My father went on in.”
She turned to look at him.
“My father fell, of course. He fell among the abandoned, and they kept him.”
He stopped. The warmth of the great rock dissipated. It was cold. She waited for Jethro to descend through the centuries and return to her.
“I didn’t leave the cave. If I had run back out … things would have been different. But I loved my father,” he said. His voice broke, “I offered myself in exchange. I told the spirits at the bottom of the cave that they could have me if they would give up my father. They were willing. My father was willing. He said he would come back for me. He emerged at the same moment that I fell into the cave on purpose.”
Jethro paused for a long time. “I try to remember that,” he told Nicoletta. “I try to remember that I stepped off the edge because I wanted to.”
“Were you hurt?”
He smiled again, his sadness so great that Nicoletta wept when he did not. “I broke no bones,” he said finally. He said it as if something else had broken.
“What did your father do? He must have run back to the house and the town and gotten everybody to brings ropes and ladders.”
Jethro’s smile was not normal. “There was a curse on the cave,” he said. “I told you that.” His words seemed trapped by the frost. They hung in front of his lips, crystallized in the air.
She had been listening to the story without listening. It was a problem for her in school, too. She heard but did not keep the teachers’ words. She moved her mind backward, to retrieve Jethro’s speech. “Whoever entered,” she repeated slowly, “would be forever abandoned by the world. Just as they had been.”
Jethro nodded.
The moon was hidden by a cloud.
Jethro put a hand gently over her eyes. “Don’t move,” he said softly. “Don’t look again.”
His hand was heavy. Stonelike. “Your father?” she said. “Abandoned you?”
“He walked away. He walked out of the cave and into the daylight. He never came back. Nobody ever came back. I called and called. Day after day I called. He was my father! He loved me. I know he did. Even though there was nothing else beautiful in our lives, that was beautiful. He loved me.”
She opened her eyes under the weight of his hands and saw only the underside of a rock. She closed her eyes again.
“Even though I gave myself up for him,” said Jethro, his voice caught as if it, too, were falling to a terrible fate, “I didn’t understand that it was forever. I was sure he would return and rescue me.”
Rescue. A lovely word. Certain and sure. I will rescue you, Jethro, thought Nicoletta. I love you. I will rescue you from all curses and dark fallings.
“But he didn’t, of course,” said Jethro.
Jethro cried out. A strange terrible moan like the earth shifting. A groan so deep and so long she knew that he was still calling for his father to rescue him.
Being a monster was not as terrible as being abandoned by his father. Nothing on earth could be worse. Forgotten by your father? A child goes on loving a father who drinks too much, or beats him, or does drugs … but a father who leaves the son to endure horror forever … and even forgets that he did that … it was the ultimate divorce.
Abandoned. The word took on a terrible force. She could see his feet—that father’s feet—as they walked away. Never to turn around. She could hear the cries, echoing over the years: that son, calling his father’s name. Never to hear an answer.
“I try not to hate him,” said Jethro. “I try to remember that there were no choices for him. The curse carried him away from me and kept him away. But he was my father!” The voice rose like the howl of a dying animal into the winter air. “He was my father! I thought he would come! I waited and waited and waited.”
The voice sagged, and fell, and splintered on the forest floor.
“Oh, Jethro!” she said, and hugged him. He was sharp and craggy but the tighter she held her arms the more he softened. She felt him becoming the boy again, felt the power of her caring for him fight the power of the curse upon him. He removed his heavy hand from her eyes but she kept them closed for a while anyhow.
“You can emerge from the cave and be a real person some of the time,” she said.
“It’s a gift of the light. Sunlight, usually. I am surprised that the moonlight is giving me this now. Sunshine is a friend. It doesn’t end the curse, but sometimes it gives me a doorway to the world. Haven’t you noticed that I am only in school on sunny days? I cannot touch the world except on bright days.”
“I will make all your days bright,” said Nicoletta.
“You have,” he said, his voice husky with emotion. “I think of you when I cannot leave.”
For a long time they sat in each other’s arms. Moonlight glittered on the fallen snow and danced on the icy fingers of trees. Very carefully she turned to look at him. He was Jethro. She sighed with relief. He had been in there all along, and she—she, Nicoletta Storms—had freed him with her presence. “At least I’ll see you in school,” she said.
“No. I can’t go again.”
“Why not? Why not? You have to! Oh, Jethro, you have to come back to school! I have to see you!” She gripped his arms and held him hard.
“You must forget about me.”
“I can’t. I won’t. You don’t want me to. I don’t want to. We’re not going to forget about each other.”
He said nothing.
“Why do you come to school?” she asked him.
“To dream of how it might have been. You are my age. The age, anyway, that I was once. The age when I fell. I hear human voices, I recognize laughter. I see human play and friendship.”
Oh, the loneliness of the dark!
She pictured her family. How loving they were. How warm the small house was. She thought of Jethro, returning every time to the dark and the rage of the trapped undead. She kissed him, hungrily, to kiss away his loss. Around them the trees leaned closer and looked deeper. “Jethro, it feels as if the woods are alive,” she whispered.
“They are,” said Jethro. “We were all something else once. Every tree and stone. Every lake and ledge.”
Horror surrounded her. She breathed it into her lungs and felt it crawl into her hair, like bats. She could not look into the woods.
“You must go home. You must never come again.”
“But I love you.”
He flinched. He pushed her away, and then could not bear that, because nobody had loved him in so very long. He held her more tightly than ever, cherishing the thought. Somebody loved him.
Love works only when it circles, and it had circled. It had enclosed them both. She loved him and he loved her back. He had to love her enough to make her stay away.
“Never come near the cave again. They know about you. They will look for you now, and guide your steps so that you fall. They will take you, Nicoletta. What else do they have to do for all eternity? Nothing. They will never be buried by fire at sea. You must go and never come back.”
She was unmoved. Nobody would tell her never to do anything. Nobody would tell her that she could find true love and then have to walk away from it! No. She would always come back.
“Nicoletta,” he said. His voice was hollow now, like a reed … or a cave.
“If you get too close, not only will you fall, I—cursed by the cave—I would do to you what my own father did to me.”
She was looking into his eyes, eyes like precious gemstones. I love you, she thought.
He said, “I would abandon you.”
Abandon her? She could not believe it. He loved her. Love did not abandon.
“Abandon you forever, Nicoletta. In the dark. Turning to stone. Forgotten. I would not come back. Nobody would ever come back for you.”
The moon hid behind wispy clouds. The night was too old to be called night. Jethro left. He had been there, and then he was not. She was alone on the stone in the dark.
For he did love her.
And to prove it, he had to leave. And so did she.