Forget the Sleepless Shores

by Sonya Taaffe

  “I was going to ask you that.” Even as she tried to make the words into a smile, Acacia heard them pouncing, defensive, the question spun too quickly back at Quince in her private atmosphere of silver-streaked air and smoke. Her pulse was jammed in her throat, a dam for words. She considered asking Quince for a drag, an old nervous reflex that still dried the back of her mouth, but Quince was stubbing out her cigarette against the brick, and Acacia had never smoked after high school. “He left late last night, before you got back. Before I thought you’d get back,” wondering briefly where Quince had slept, in whose arms, and how it never mattered. Leo and Acacia, the two faces of Quince’s coin: one was as true as the other. Tears burned abruptly behind her eyes and she said, “I haven’t seen him all morning. We had a conversation. I thought you might have.”

  “No.” Restless, Quince knocked one heel against the cindery ground, looked slantwise at Acacia. In the overcast, drowned-grey clarity of light, she had a child’s lucid complexion; blackish brows and lashes limning her eyes like a mask. “But tell me how you’re using that word conversation. It has uneasy echoes.”

  The words were easier to say than she had feared: repetition, she thought bitterly, practice. “I’m pregnant.” Dead air; rain on industrial ruins. “We talked about that.”

  At a distance, Quince’s eyes were indefinitely dark; up close, they changed and became differentiable, shades and textures of dark, as telling and legible as a blush, a pallor, a frown. Her voice was as impenetrable as the bricks at her back. “It must be his.”

  Leo’s skin, like honey in the light, silk and ivory in the dark; all the words of sculpture and artistry that she used even as shorthand for sensation, the touches and tastes of him, long watered-honey eyes and the feel of hard velvet under her hand; and Quince, laughing above or below them, her small breasts and her scars and her graceful hips, entering, entered, her seed as sharply aromatic as her flesh— Acacia shook her head. “I’m not sure.”

  “You can’t have mine.” Now Quince was shaking her head, denial in return; she had a silver stud in her left ear, gold in her right. My brother, good morning: my sister, good night…. Her voice tipped slightly, a note sharp. “It’s got to be his.”

  Acacia discovered her arms crossed low, almost around her belly and the invisible weight within, and jerked them back to her sides. “I said, I’m not sure.” Her voice had gone ragged much faster than she expected, the unreliable ease flaking from her words like rust or dried blood, chips of brick from the wall that Quince slammed her hand up against, flat-palmed, percussive smack of meat and she swore between her teeth as Acacia said fiercely, “I haven’t had any tests done—”

  “You can’t!” Only in bed, in the warm chaos of caring and desire, had Acacia seen Quince as unguarded, as intense: perhaps as frightened. “You fucking can’t, Acacia. Not my child. It’s not—”

  “Not what, possible?” Between breath and word, she was shouting. Catching fire from each other, reflecting like always: she no longer felt the cold. “You’re not any more possible, what does that matter? Quince, it’s either yours or Leo’s, and it’s mine!” Less than five minutes, and things were already splintering: the center cannot hold and the poetry, immediate and familiar as a second language, was no comfort now. Quince shook her reddening hand, stared at Acacia. Rain sharpened on brick and battered glass, the sound of knives. “It doesn’t matter,” Acacia said quietly, around the hurt in her throat that might have been shouting and might have been her heart, “how much you want it not to be true. You can leave, Leo can leave. But I’m still pregnant. Tell me later why you don’t want it. I don’t really want to talk anymore right now.”

  She kicked aside a thin rubble of broken concrete as she walked away, dry clatter and a metallic ricochet off the grating up ahead; the nearest set of doors stood ajar, unlocked slabs that ground orange-rind rust into her palms as she pulled them open, damp and a deserted, erosion smell in the soot-colored shadows beyond. Dishwater light crossed overhead, filtered through broken layers onto metal beams and disused machineries, the good salvage and scrap sold long ago. She did not think she had really expected Quince to follow her. Still she looked back, through the doorway to the space where Quince was no longer smoking, once: neither salt nor dead shade, but the underworld that trapped, the burning disaster.

  She had walked home from the clinic in rich, late afternoon, clouds like rough marble shoaled above the skyline for the sun to slide around and turn the air to fire. Pigeons rose up from the roofs, the flock lifting in one noisy-winged, furling curve against the sky; a skinny tree on the corner, potted in cement and spoked iron, was putting out buds that Acacia stopped and fingered for a moment, germination swelling cool and rough under her touch. Even the storm grate smelled like approaching spring, clean and humid, as she passed. Do you want to make a follow-up now? the doctor had asked, a neat short-haired woman as bristly grey as a fledging bird, and Acacia had ducked her head and mumbled something indistinct about talking to the father, getting back to her; the sickly knot in her stomach winding tighter and colder as the woman spoke, and she wondered if morning sickness would give her enough excuse to throw up on the white-tiled floor. A promise got out of her mouth instead, I’ll call tomorrow. Keys cold in her hand, she unlocked the front door and went up without turning on the light, bare bulb hanging in a sphere of silver wires at the top of the stairs, aesthetically caged.

  Leo was at his desk in the living room, among the more portable and less fragile aspects of his work: assistant curator buried in manuscripts and orreries and cracked icons, cataloguing, cleaning, running for coffee, and sometimes his glasses had a fur of dust around the rims. He twisted around in his chair at the click of the lock, one arm braced across the overstuffed back, a manila folder in his other hand raised in familiar, puzzled salute; the long-sleeved T-shirt he wore, If you’re a Goth, where were you when we sacked Rome? in white capitals on black, Acacia had bought for him when he got the museum job. There’s tea in the kitchen, he said easily, as if he had not expected her home until much later, but it’s herbal, and when she only stood with her jacket in her arms, staring at the hardwood joins underfoot—polished with years and bare feet, the color of fresh bread, and she thought about kneeling to lay her hand against their fine-grained shine and feel where the cracks were—he put down the folder and walked across the small carpets until he could put his hands on her shoulders and ask, Acacia? What happened? No good way to start the conversation, though her skin flamed under his palms; no beautiful seams of language for this moment. Haltingly, she said, I went to the doctor’s, and watched Leo’s expression change.

  Light like antique gold sloped through the window and made his hair a corona, his face a painted mask of the sun: a frustrated summer-god, a bewildered star. But constellations never stared down from heaven and said, Oh, fuck. Weren’t we safe? Didn’t you use anything? I always—oh, fuck. Fuck. I can’t deal with this, and Acacia had never seen a solar myth come to adolescent pieces before her eyes. She tried to touch him, his name thrown out like a line for him to hold, Leo, but he was too lost in some nightmare of responsibility, already running too far and too fast for anything other than distant light to reach him. I have to think about this, he said, sometime much later when she had run out of tears, cried herself into a sore throat and spasms that he would have soothed any other time, if she had been crying for any other reason. Instead she curled in a feral tangle of sheets and tried to pin her breath down again, gulping, dry-heaving tears, head buried in her arms to keep him out of her peripheral vision. Acacia; Acacia? Listen to me, Acacia, please, I have to think about this. I have to talk to Quince. I have to—oh, my God, I have to talk to my parents. I can’t. I’m sorry, I’m so sorry, and she heard the bedroom door shut even before he finished saying sorry.

  She must have slept; she woke to dull cloud-light, mouth sticky and salt grit in her eyes, the blinds making tambourine noises in a wind that tasted of storms. When she sat up, the emptiness of the a
partment settled around her as the chill had not. She got out of bed in a movement as convulsive as a shudder. With oils and a fine brush, Quince had half-blinded all the apartment’s mirrors, so that Acacia’s passing reflection looked back in slices and fragments from among brilliant, blasphemous tableaux. In a glade of burning green leaves, a naked woman accepted a crimson globe mouth-to-mouth from an androgyne plumed in rainbow-slick scales; another woman stood, bloody-handed, one fist still clenched around an ear of pulped, dripping grain, above her sister sprawled in her sacrifice’s blood; sheep, horses, flailing human figures sank beneath choking cobalt waves that tossed afloat a ship full of fabulous, archaic beasts. Over the dresser in the bedroom, a female figure whose wings were made of flames and calligraphy stooped like a hawk to embrace a male figure that looked upward, dumbstruck, lovestruck, ready. Gaze no more in the bitter glass: as if her heart would have given her any better suggestion.

  She smelled Quince before she heard her lover’s boots on the cement, musk and sweet burning almost tangible from where she stood; she unbent from memory slowly. Spray-painted tags littered this side of the wall, the browned scaffolding overhead and the nailed-up plywood blocking another door: an archaeology of graffiti, vivid strata she could not read. Once Leo had pretended to translate some for her, charting the dynastic rise and fall of urban legends. Apple-green glass fanned in a brittle, glinting spray about her feet. Without turning her head, Acacia said, “Why don’t you want a child?”

  Quince’s voice was a breath at her back, glancing, recitative, not soothing. “When men began to increase on earth,” she said, “and daughters were born to them, the sons of God saw how beautiful the daughters of men were, and took wives from among those that pleased them….” Glass cracked under her heel; half a step away, Acacia felt Quince’s nearness working its way into her own skin, loosening muscles, burnishing nerves, until she waited for Quince’s mouth at the curve of her neck, telling story into her skin, Quince’s hands holding her close against hard-budded breasts and the press of desire at her groin. She had always courted Acacia with myths and mysteries. Still she held herself tightly away from even the air that eddied around Quince, breathing rain and spices and the familiar scents that meant comfort, need, companionship: nothing safe. Leo had smelled like sweet salt and brittle pages, and that had not stopped him. Then Quince’s voice slanted, wryer and less ritual—“The sons of men were also pretty beautiful”—and something untwisted beneath Acacia’s breastbone. That first day, summer in the creamy marble shadow of the museum where Leo did not yet work, where Acacia was looking at Leighton and Rosetti, Quince had given her the same sideways truth: the low-voiced speaker coming up behind her as she perused studies for John Singer Sargent’s Annunciation and Acacia turning around to interrupt, Unless I’ve really got the story wrong, it’s not Gabriel’s kid, and look at Quince, and consider whether Mary had ever wished otherwise.

  Rain dripped through cracked slates and girders, little sounds in the hollow space, as negligible as the details of Quince’s strangeness had always been: inexplicable and no one asked for answers. But Acacia had one already, that she had not wanted to hear. She said, a thin ache of a word, “So?”

  “So,” Quince said, “so,” and nothing else.

  Glass shone under both their feet, little more than reflection and razor edges in the dimness. Acacia’s fingers twisted in her hair, under her braid where loose, rain-curled strands had inked themselves to the back of her neck; one snapped and pain wired into her scalp and she had to close her throat against the sound that wavered too close to tears for the minor, momentary hurt. Under Quince’s regard or indifference, and she would not know unless she looked, she felt scraped raw at the surface, pressures inside and outside wearing her to little more than a shivering handful of tears wrapped around less than a handful of life. Some kneeling girl with passionless pale face, that museum afternoon. She wanted desperately not to say whatever would come next; she took her hand out of her hair, and turned around.

  Quince’s eyes were the darkness of desolation, sounded and known, and water brimmed along her lower lids. The clotted light turned her skin to dusted stone, ancient paper, blank; she looked neither old nor young but unreal, and a sudden chill sank in Acacia’s stomach. At once, she wanted the tagged bricks to crumble dryly, let her through as she backed against them and out into the drowning, rain-swept day; she wanted to lean forward and lick at the sweat shining at Quince’s temple, salt and the crisp, feathering brush of Quince’s hair against her lips; or, simplest of all, to uncross her arms and open them so that Quince, if she wanted, could move into their circle and rest there until she was no longer terrifying, terrified, full of tears. But Quince was saying, “It’s not safe,” and Acacia would be dead and dust before light crossed that space between them.

  “Not safe how?” she asked anyway, because she could not touch Quince and Leo had never waited to have this conversation. “For me? Or you mean the child?” Quince’s arms were as tightly folded as Acacia’s, pale fists tucked under black-leather elbows; her mouth admitted nothing. “Quince…. You keep saying can’t, like that fixes everything. But if there’s any chance, if there’s some kind of problem, you have to tell me. If I carry this child, if it’s yours, is there going to be something wrong with it? It’ll have birth defects, it’ll be retarded, psychotic,” she was biting off the words like bitter stalks, “what?”

  “Like me,” Quince said tautly, “and like you. And that’s forbidden.”

  “What?”

  “They drowned in the Flood, all the children of men and angels. And there have been no more since. All the beautiful monsters”—one corner of her smoky mouth crooked upward, very slightly—“long before Leo’s reliquaries and papyri, those ferns and fossils down the block—or maybe long after or somewhere in between. Somewhere else, it doesn’t really matter. Here, now: no more. The universe would not permit it. The laws of physics and angels don’t allow.”

  A desert in her mouth: teeth to tongue to palate like a cleavage of dust and wax. “You’re grander than Leo, after all. He only thinks this will destroy his life.”

  “It’s raining,” Quince whispered. Her face was not an icon. When she moved forward, tines of shadow passed over her face like expressions, writing, rewriting; a palimpsest. “Not by water, not again—there was a promise. But still, it keeps me thinking. Oh, my love,” and her hands touched Acacia’s shoulders so lightly that she might have been an echo of Leo, a ghost frozen to this conversation in a flash of time. Recursive, while it rained: a shiver went like a shockwave over Acacia’s skin and she could not imagine that Quince had not felt it. One hand angled briefly upward to cup the back of Acacia’s head, fingers sliding through her tight-gathered hair; returned to her shoulder, the point of her pulse, blood for two circling through her veins now. “Oh, God. Acacia. It had better not be my fucking child.”

  The air smelled of ozone and myrrh. Quince’s thumb caressed the shallow rise of her collarbone, sweet dry warmth against her sweating skin; the movement relaxed Acacia no more than Quince’s remote gaze, the change of dark in her eyes that Acacia could not read. Something pushed hard into her throat, horror or laughter; words came out instead. “Stop this. Just stop. You and Leo…I haven’t been struck by lightning; his parents haven’t disowned him; I don’t care. Let it be nobody’s child. Just mine. There’s nothing else to say.”

  “You don’t understand. I love you,” and before Acacia could answer, Quince’s hands stilled. She might have smiled like this for the sight of world’s end, a sky full of fire and ash. “I can’t even take the chance.”

  Acacia drew breath to shout again, and stopped. “Quince—” But Quince’s fingers were pressing silence into her throat, tightening with less pain than burning where she should have breathed and a distant, gathering roar like thunder rending the air open, a wave toppling toward the shore. Her vision swam red and dark: the blind landscape of the womb. “Don’t….” She could not even hear the noises she ma
de.

  “If you aren’t sure, I can’t. Please.” Quince’s voice heaved like Acacia under her hands, driven and cornered, trapped as the breath that she could not catch; her shoulder struck plywood, glass bit into her knees, and she could as easily have wrenched free of Quince as her heart from her bursting chest. She could not see Quince’s face clearly anymore, nor the ruined walls beyond, old before Acacia was born and how many cities had Quince seen rise and fall? Her lungs threshed for air. The fountains of the deep; forty days’ deluge. Nothing to salvage, this time. “Just tell me it’s Leo’s.”

  Her fingers pried at Quince’s wrists, like clawing at marble with her nails. There was nothing in her left to whisper with, no air, no thought; she heard her own voice like something pinched from sand, from the gravel ballast scattered beneath the old tracks that she had followed here, a path of stones into darkness. “It could be Leo’s,” and before the fingers could loosen, her vision clear and the choking fire in her throat turn to air again, she got the words out. “And it could be yours.”

  The darkness crushed down on her.

  But now I know

  That twenty centuries of stony sleep

  Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle….

  Rain was falling on her face, freshwater cold that tasted faintly bitter as tarpaper and smoke, salt drops warm as the amniotic sea where a pearl of flesh drifted, moored between worlds. Far above her, against the wrung-out wash of sky and shrouded sun, someone was saying, “Fuck me,” over and over, like a prayer. Her throat was full of cinders. Half in Quince’s arms, her head fallen back against Quince’s shoulder and a freezing glaze of rainwater seeping into her jeans, Acacia blinked and tried to speak, made a noise like breath ceasing. Quince’s arms tightened around her, eased as she struggled, spasmodic in a terror that sluiced out of her as abruptly as her strength; she heard Quince’s voice, half-crying and hasty, “I won’t, fuck me to God, Acacia, I won’t!” and a different darkness slipped up over her before she tasted Quince’s tears again.