The Crossing Point

by August Arrea

  He chose, instead, to remember her the way he found her shortly after her deliverance from such a hell, when the darkness of war was no more, and her voice once more filled with the embers of life and passion would ring out and fill the War Memorial Opera House in San Francisco. Closing his eyes, Gotham could still see her in all her radiant beauty. She was a young woman then, all of nineteen, but a woman, nonetheless, appearing so diminished on such a great stage until she opened her mouth and let loose her mesmerizing gift that instantly and wholly transfixed the audience.

  ~~~

  “Ironic, isn’t it?”

  The sound of Ava’s voice ripped him from his bliss. Seemingly forgetting momentarily where he was, Gotham glanced over his shoulder to find her standing quietly behind him. So lost in the music, he hadn’t even heard her return.

  “I was looking for something to lift my spirits and lo and behold I happened upon this,” she said moving to stand beside Gotham where she picked up the album cover he had set down. “I can’t even remember the last time I played it. Strange I would choose today of all days to do so.”

  She began to study the image on the cover, but in a much different way than Gotham had. It seemed to bring to her a sadness that slowly filled her eyes with its weight until she, too, returned it to the shelf, face down.

  “No, please—” said Gotham when Ava then reached to take the needle off the record and silence the music. “Leave it.”

  Ordinarily, such an earnest request would have served to flatter Ava. Only there was nothing ordinary about this moment suddenly visited upon her. And it was maybe because of that reason, or perhaps in spite of it, that Ava slowly retracted her hand and allowed the recording of her younger self to continue playing uninterrupted.

  “I was just remembering when I first heard you sing it,” said Gotham.

  “February 5, 1946.” The date rolled off Ava’s tongue with ease.

  She felt his gaze bend her way.

  “Old age may have robbed me of my youth and beauty but I’ll be damned if it steals my memories,” Ava remarked with a defiant chuckle yet unaware of the day nearly ten years prior when Gotham spied her through the window of her childhood home performing as a young girl.

  “In my eyes, you have been fleeced of nothing. Certainly not beauty.”

  His voice, while strong, had a soothing tenderness to it Ava had never gotten used to fully.

  “It seems a lifetime ago.” There was faint tremble in her sigh, as though suddenly caught in an incoming surge of memories washing in from the past that lifted her momentarily off her feet.

  “To you maybe. For me, it’s but a brief moment passed,” said Gotham.

  She turned to him, daring her eyes to slowly move upward to meet his. And when they met she was greeted with the familiar rush that moved through her and made her knees feel as though they might buckle at any moment.

  His eyes.

  It was both terrifying and pleasurable to gaze directly into the piercing pupils, more golden than the most precious ore mined from deep inside the earth. Terrifying because they seemed to possess the ability to look right through one’s soul and illuminate its darkest, hidden corners. Yet they seemed to harness an almost hypnotizing power that bathed the object they were fixed upon with an inescapable warmth emanating from within. These twin orbs seemed to burn like torches inside his skull and Ava long ago found she could never hold his gaze for too long. It was just too intense, like attempting to look directly into the sun.

  His chestnut brown hair was still shoulder-length, smoothed away from the face and tethered into a ponytail, except for a few loose strands that had slipped free and fell across his forehead partially obscuring his left eye that glowed like a tiger’s in the night. She remembered when, as a young woman, she had tried to get him to cut his beautiful locks, like Delilah did Samson.

  This time, she allowed her hand to gravitate to his face. Better now for her to know he was only an apparition of the past than to endure further this merciless joke brought on by her imaginings. She delicately brushed the tuft of hair away from his face, happy he had refused her request to undergo the snip of a barber’s scissors as she felt the silky smoothness between her fingers while sweeping it back along the side of his head and draping it behind his left ear. She smiled. He was real. Solid to the touch. All flesh and bone. And yet the feel of his skin beneath her fingertips offered more pain than comfort than had she reached out and felt only empty air. As her once youthfully beautiful face had captivated him, so did the beauty of his captivate her. It was as though he were a living statue; a classical work of art, sculpted to perfection by the most skilled of the Old-World artisans and untouched by time.

  Literally, untouched by time.

  There wasn’t a mark on him that would betray his true age. Not a line. Not a wrinkle, nor a blemish. He looked exactly as he did the day she first met him. Exactly as the image she had seared into memory and fought to hold onto with every last ounce of her strength.

  Unbeknownst to Ava, the feel of her hand on Gotham’s skin seemed to be as painful to him as it was for her. Closing his eyes, he couldn’t help but surrender to the touch he had spent decades keeping himself far outside its reach. She traced the outside of his square jaw and slowly circled around placing the tip of her forefinger against the cleft of his chin. It was a sign he was special, she had told him once. God had left the mark of his fingertip on him like a child leaving his hand print in wet cement.

  As the last note coming from the speakers lingered before slowly fading to a painful silence, the smile brought on by the memory that had momentarily lightened Ava’s face slowly dissolved when she became conscious of her hand placed against his face. Wrinkled. Withered. Spotted with age. She pulled back abruptly, turning away in shame, and pulled the needle from the record.

  “Why did you come back?” she asked tersely as she spun away from him.

  “Trust me, Ava, I wouldn’t have, had I known my presence would upset you so,” answered Gotham while offering Ava some needed distance by retreating to the other end of the room. The overpowering silence that followed was pricked by the staccato ticking of a mahogany and brass clock on the fireplace mantle counting out each passing second. Gotham made busy casually perusing the numerous framed photographs adorning a long table top stretching the front of a large bay window while Ava, once more composed, found herself a seat on a large olive-green sofa next to a coffee table where right before that fateful knock on the door she had set down a tray carrying her afternoon tea. She was just about to pour herself a cup when she took notice of the empty saucer that had held the cup before she dropped and shattered it at the sight of Gotham and realized she had unknowingly arranged a tea set-up for two.

  “Silly old woman,” she quietly scolded herself as her eyes once again welled with tears.

  “Something the matter?” asked Gotham upon hearing her mumbling. Again, Ava quickly composed herself.

  “Old habits,” she said. “I’m finding some of them difficult to break. This was the time-of-day Isabeth and I enjoyed ourselves our afternoon tea. That is, when she had the stomach for it.”

  Gotham’s eyes gravitated back to the framed photo of mother and daughter he held in his hand, and he was overcome with a solemn look.

  “I know she had been suffering for quite some time.”

  Ava remained silent; her attention fixed on the tea she continued to pour.

  “If it offers any comfort,” said Gotham, “I can assure you she is at peace in a wondrous place free of any pain.”

  “No, it does not offer any me any comfort,” she snapped angrily. “Did any such assurances soothe you when David died?”

  Gotham remained stone-faced, but the unexpected question pierced him painfully.

  “Comfort,” breathed Ava with a quiet hint of disdain. “If God is so hungry for souls, why doesn’t he just come and take mine? Goodness knows I’ve been ready for some time now.”

  Ava closed her eyes and took a
deep breath as she tried wrestling to the ground the brief outburst she regretted displaying. For her, it was an unfortunate characteristic. She did not like losing control in any aspect of her life, especially her emotions, which over the long years of her life she had managed to hone and keep tethered to the same leash she attached to her voice, to be made to heel or unleashed under her command.

  “A mother should not have to bury her child,” she continued, her voice once more, composed and gentle, as she returned to preparing her tea. “And yet I’ve been gifted the displeasure of having to bury both of mine. So, you would like to know if I find any comfort in that, and I can tell you very clearly that no, I do not.”

  Gotham’s notable silence drew a guarded glance from Ava who, for a moment, feared he may have vanished back into the thin air from which he just as quickly had appeared.

  “It’s an odd thing, isn’t it, how the happy moments of one’s life can suddenly take the shape of a memorial one would rather not cast eyes upon for fear of being reduced to a puddle of tears?” said Ava, watching Gotham continue browsing through her collection of framed memories.

  “Death seems to have taken a cruel enjoyment in seeing me in black, always reappearing whenever I decide to retire my funeral dress to the back of my closet. First, it was my family during the war. Then my son David, followed now by Isabeth. And, of course, my husband Silas seven winters ago,” said Ava, mournfully noting the photo Gotham held in his hands and studied intently of her younger self in the loving embrace of a handsome graying man with whom she had shared the last forty years of her life before death came calling.

  “He was a good man,” remarked Gotham.

  “Yes...he was,” Ava agreed quietly. “Much too good to have settled for me.”

  “I doubt highly he ever once considered sharing his life with you as settling,” said Gotham. “He loved you.”

  Such a simple phrase, and yet he struggled to release it from his tongue. Almost as much as Ava struggled with herself to hear it.

  “I know,” was all she replied.

  ~~~

  Gotham returned the framed picture to its spot amongst the many others carefully arranged upon the long table.

  “You understand there was nothing I could have done to have changed things...with Isabeth, I mean,” he said after a few quiet moments had passed.

  Ava paused, then simply nodded while stirring her tea. Despite the solemn topic of death hanging heavy in the air, a sweet, pleasant scent gradually made its way through the room, as if the wisps of steam rising from Ava’s cup in swirling ribbons had somehow seeded the ceiling to rain down fragrant white citrus blossoms.

  “Isabeth knew her time here was quickly drawing to an end, and she accepted it. Being as strong in her faith as she was, I doubt she would have allowed you to come between her and her fate,” said Ava. “Whatever fight she showed during her sickness to keep her soul anchored to her body was solely on behalf of—”

  “The boy,” uttered Gotham.

  “She loved him so, as any mother loves her son. Perhaps more. And with that love came tremendous worry—worry about leaving him alone with no one to guide him when the time arrived to finally reveal to him…well, you know.”

  “Yes, she shared with me her concerns,” said Gotham. “And I did my best to put such worries at ease.”

  The revelation wrung from Ava a slow blossoming look of surprise. “You...you spoke with her?”

  “The night of her passing,” answered Gotham. “She called for me, and—”

  “And you came,” said Ava.

  She was quick to look away, not wanting him to see how visibly moved she had become as she set down her tea and reached for a nearby napkin.

  “Then it wasn’t a dream,” she muttered quietly to herself. “Dream?”

  “I dreamt you had passed through my room…or so I believed it to be a dream.” Ava dabbed at her eyes as inconspicuously as she could before abruptly shifting the direction of conversation. “He’s not home, you know?”

  “Yes, I know. I waited until I saw him leave,” said Gotham. “And then I waited a couple more hours to gather what courage I could muster that would give me the strength to knock on your door.”

  “Yes...we all know how deficient you are in that department,” Ava remarked facetiously. For anyone who laid eyes upon Gotham would never believe the towering, strapping figure had ever experienced a moment where he would find himself lacking courage.

  “Truth be told, despite the unexpected shock of seeing you after all these years, it would be remiss of me if I didn’t confess being somewhat thankful to finally have this moment with you,” said Ava after taking a long sip from her tea. “That is, I never had the chance to express to you my gratitude for everything you did for my daughter by bringing her here where she and Jacob could have a safe life.”

  Gotham stood quiet, staring out the giant bay window framing a view of the front of the house and the surrounding neighborhood.

  “It’s a beautiful place. Quiet. Peaceful.” There was a noticeable longing, almost sadness, in his voice. As though the beauty he spoke of was one that was unobtainable to him—like a scene captured within the confines of a painting.

  “I knew when I found it that it would be the perfect place for your daughter, tucked out of sight from the ugliness of the world. A place she could have her child and raise him, and not have to worry about any lurking…shadows,” he said. “And for the last sixteen years as I continued to walk this world for what seemed like the millionth time, until I have come to know by heart every putrid dark corner it holds, my footsteps would always bring me back here now and then to look in from a distance and see how they were doing. To ensure this womb was protecting them. Protecting him.”

  Ava felt a rush of shame come over her for the quiet anger that had been festering inside her for some time toward him.

  “I didn’t realize you had been watching over them all these years. Once you left I assumed—”

  “That I’d abandoned them? Left them alone to fend for themselves against the wolves?”

  “That’s not what I meant,” replied Ava with an exasperated sigh. “Only that it couldn’t have been an easy thing for you...considering.”

  “No more difficult than it has been for you, I’m sure.”

  “He’s my grandson, my flesh and blood,” said Ava steadfastly without so much as a moment’s pause. “It makes no mind to me how he came into this world. I love him wholeheartedly.”

  She didn’t have to say it. Gotham could hear it in her voice, the same way he observed from an unseen distance her unwavering devotion to the boy over the years. Yet despite the words being spoken, Gotham knew it had been a difficult sixteen years, with each day hinged on a future clouded with uncertainty.

  ~~~

  He continued to stare out the window, his eyes following a group of neighborhood children laughing as they passed in front of the house along the sidewalk. “I’ve watched him. He’s slowly coming to realize there is something oddly different about him he can’t seem to make sense of. Something that sets him apart from the other kids around him, especially these last couple years.”

  “Even longer than that,” said Ava. “When he was a small child, there were moments I could see him struggling with this normal life his mother tried to provide for him.”

  “Only he’s not normal—at least not in the way normal exists here in Cain’s Corner, or anywhere else, as you well know,” said Gotham. “Unfortunately, that false sense of normalcy has begun to create a real feeling of isolation and confusion for the boy, which I’m afraid to say will only grow more burdensome with each passing day.”

  “I know,” Ava agreed with a sigh. “I realized that when I found out recently he had secretly been going to Dr. Gilkey in search for answers.”

  “Dr. Gilkey?”

  “Nothing sets a teenage boy on edge more than the threat of a physical, uh...imperfection. It’s really no surprise, is it, that the eventual changes t
o his back would send him running to the nearest doctor’s office?

  “Modern medicine cannot cure him of what he is,” Gotham grumbled sourly.

  He retreated from the view of the window and slowly began circling around the room, his every step watched by Ava.

  “You haven’t answered me. Why are you here?” asked Ava again, but without the emotion that had earlier choked her voice. “What is it Isabeth wished to speak with you about?

  Gotham, at first, seemed hesitant in answering as he subtly shifted about on his feet.

  “She told me, as she wavered closer toward her final breath, how she tried to tell the boy the truth she had kept from him all these years,” said Gotham finally. “Understandably, he thought he was witnessing the delusions brought on by her sickness, and she, considerably weakened, found herself unable to gather the strength necessary to attempt to prove to him otherwise.”

  “So, she wanted you to tell Jacob finally what he has long been in need of hearing.”

  Ava clearly could see there was more.

  “She wished to remind me of a promise she made me make her the night I brought her here to Cain’s Corner,” said Gotham.

  “Promise?”

  “That when the time came—when the boy reached this age of uncertainty—I would make myself known to him—take him under my wing, so to speak—and see him to the place where he can be prepared for the life he faces ahead of him,” Gotham explained.