by Sonya Taaffe
Both of them stopped, as suddenly as if the air had been pulled from the room: Delia gathering one last breath like a mouthful of salts, Evelyn’s face as white and stiff as bone. Ari was staring at her, fingers curled into rotting fabric like a cat crouching to spring, so deeply driven that the soft grey threads were starting to fray. Her eyes were so wide, she looked like a child at a magic show, and Delia could already see them narrowed with condescension, the magician’s hands caught mid-pass, the mirrors picked out from the smoke. Two steps behind her, the oar lay on the desk’s old unfinished surface—dust-filmed, scarred with ballpoint doodles and cigarette burns—within easy reach of a dart and grab, and if it could have split her down to Hades in that instant, nameless, voiceless, memoryless as every shade, she would have seized it without a second thought. It had no virtue over the living. She had failed to be dead for twenty years.
“Oh, Dee.” Her sister’s voice was so soft, she thought for a moment some other ghost must have slid up through the crack of her wish, coiling around her in the night to comfort them both. “You never did leave, did you?”
She had been crying the last time she left Providence, staring out the train window through a hot, splintery blur that made even the sea, running alongside the tracks in its course of pebble-dash beaches and bridges, loom like a reproach: as vast as death and even less known to her. Ari only ten years her junior then, her phantom’s T-shirt that must have gone to Goodwill long ago looking newer than Delia’s much-washed, mail-ordered Black Dice, whispered in a voice like acetylene, It’s like the song, Dee. You don’t know what it’s like. You never know what it’s like, the refrain of their last living year together. Then her face had crumpled and her arms caught Delia like freezing water around the waist and Delia had had to push her away before she screamed, brought down the Brown students whose green-dank marijuana smells, seeping down through the floorboards, had told her they were home. I will come back, Ari, I swear to God—I swear to you, I will come back.
You’re always coming back.
She did not think she was crying; she heard the rusty sound of her voice as if it belonged to someone else, who had more reason and occasion to speak.
“Probably not.” She could say it if she did not look directly at Ari, but focusing on her sister’s hands meant seeing the death in them, so that Delia’s fingers went unthinkingly to scars she had never worn, the clean lines of her own wrists, pink-grazed only where Evelyn had fought her. He was the shadow in her peripheral vision, climbing to his feet with one hand on the wall for support; better not to see him, either. Her mouth hitched a half-smile, folding over itself like paper. She was not sure who she was apologizing to. “I really goddamn tried.”
Something moved in front of her and she closed her eyes at last, knowing it would be Evelyn and for once she could not reproach him. It seemed to take much longer to open them, to understand in pieces that she was smelling patchouli and cloves instead of salt meadow and books; that Evelyn had never worn a hand-strung necklace with a knot of white-ringed glass at its center, black-pupiled blue as a Phoenician eye; that he had never been an inch shorter than Delia, so that she saw the amulet tremble in the hollow of his throat with his heartbeat, as if warning her off. She had wondered, in those first raw months of autumn, if Ari had been trying to keep off something she had seen in dreams or reflections—the hovering shadow of pennies on her eyes, the tugging attention of the dead who swarmed in at the least chink of notice. Maybe she had only liked the look of it, like the ankh she had dug blackwork into her shoulder the summer before they started eighth grade; Delia would not push her sleeve back to see if it was still there, though she could have done it just by putting up her hand. The air between them was close as cast iron, cooling like blood in an empty room.
Not easily and not diffidently, because she would never have the chance again, Delia said, “You ran from me first.”
Ari’s shoulder lifted in her old, slight shrug: an adolescent’s indifference to interpretation.
“It wasn’t you I was running from.”
When she picked up the oar this time, she could feel the world spring into edges around her, as sharply incised as black-figure pottery. Fractures, fissures, the stitches that could be picked open, the wounds that would not close: noctes atque dies patet atri ianua Ditis. Ari stood where Delia had left her, enigmatic as a figure in a frieze, while Evelyn watched from the couch-back, at a sideways lean to avoid the water pipes, arms folded and nothing on his face she could read. Chain-smoking over a windowbox of geraniums like somebody’s grandmother, more trouble to find than the dead man she had given directions to—a neighborhood full of apartment blocks overlooking Italian restaurants, their smoky-red bricks older than at least one war—Aronowicz had only been truthful with her, not even oracle-slant. He’s odd about it, but he understands the arrangement. Without malice, her dry husky voice excluding neither of them, That’s the best you can say of most of us in this line…. The smell of wet smoke was coastal, shifting about Delia’s face as if a wind were changing, night-fires smoldering on a sea-wrack shore. She had had her fingers in death’s door since she was fourteen.
She drew breath, held it until the tide-roar in her ears was louder than the sound of footsteps, trudging sand to stone to soil that had never felt a keel. The other thing had been harder to say.
“Go on, Aurelia Margrete Tabor. Go if you’re going. Go gently.”
She handed the oar to her sister and watched the world go out.
**
“Delia,” the dead man said for the third or fourth time. He still sounded suspicious.
In the late breeze off the water, his hair ruffled back like a soft wing over his forehead and Delia knew the wild thing’s look he would once have had, gazing out across the darkening sea. Much to her surprise, he had taken the passenger seat without asking, dragged the shoulder belt under one arm and settled himself against the door while Peter Bellamy sang them down Route 138 and the toll roads of Conanicut by way of Kipling’s India; he drummed impatient fingers on the dashboard and flicked among pages as though irritated by some passage that had escaped him, but he said nothing about her music, even “Gentlemen-Rankers” or “Follow Me ’Ome,” until Delia was idling on Webster Street, trying to find somewhere among students and tourists to stash the car, and she remembered O leave the dead be’ind us, for they cannot come away just as Evelyn snapped the Baedeker’s Roman-red covers shut. An’ you must pack your ’aversack, for we won’t come back no more…. He was out of the car almost before she had finished parking, a stiff, heron-stalking stride with the wind billowing his jacket; the mansion-museums of Newport’s Gilded Age stood like sundials along the shore, Louis Treize terraces and slate-tiled widow’s walks repeating later than you think, and she let Evelyn lead her among them without so much as a Eurydike-look backward. Halfway down the Forty Steps, he retreated abruptly when he saw a couple backed against the stonework, hands in each other’s hair; after that he followed Delia until she settled them both above the broken granite of the breakwater, cliff-shadow at their backs, the water under its antique patina of sunlight curling all shades from glass-grey to the acid blue of copper salts. The sea seemed to calm him, or at least he had left the Baedeker on the front seat. He was still crying a little, reflexively; he made room for her on the wall, wiped at his eyes as if they annoyed him, and would not take any more Kleenex from her.
“Delia and Aurelia. People do that if you’re twins. Our mother was supposed to have picked one, our father the other, I don’t know which. We were Ari and Dee as soon as we figured it out. Mostly. She was Ari. I was still Delia, sometimes. Until I wasn’t.”
“And no one noticed?”
“Everyone noticed. We weren’t that kind of twin. I was the one forgetting to return obscure folk records to the Athenaeum and frying calamari over a Bunsen burner for extra credit in Bio. She cut her hair with a straight razor and dyed it black the night she heard Kurt Cobain had died.” She would have expected the w
ords to be easier, now, but not when she had never said them aloud; she had to take the same deep, diver’s cold plunging breath before she could say, “Not six months later, she used the same blade to open her wrists. I don’t think it meant anything. It was just the sharpest knife she owned,” and then out again afterward, quickly, as if Ari’s ghost were still at her shoulder, ready to correct her. The next wave was coming in to the seawall, fretting a lace-edge against the slabs, black-tilted under a bronze rust of weed. Because it had never been the most important distinction between them, invisible anyway to the boys who jeered, the girls who turned ostentatiously away: “I was the one with girlfriends.”
The surf below their feet was white as holystone, flowering out of deep glass on the rocks. Evelyn said nothing, hunched forward with his hands clasped between his knees, so that Delia looked for the oar resting across them before she remembered: the last thought before sleep come back the next morning, more distant than the night’s dreams. She could not tell if he was listening; if it hurt more or less to tell him these things, if she owed them to him, why her voice was not breaking, unless it had long ago. “I don’t know why the couch,” she added, as the wave drew back. “The last piece of the house left over, I guess. I found her in the bathtub,” as scarlet as a special effect, streaking the white enamel and spattered on the tiles as if Ari had tried to grip the tub’s sides with unstrung fingers, the razor lost or relinquished for use of the next suicide. “I didn’t want to shower in that fucking room for months. I kept thinking I’d see her in the steam, one of those wandering, white-eyed ghosts that condense and draw useless, mirror-written messages on the walls with wet fingers even when the water isn’t on….” She could smile a little, thinking of the fair-haired codemaker and Ari the next morning, looking up from her ghost’s mercurial hands with a sudden, starving hope in her face, more terrible than any way Delia had dreamed her; it was easy, with her mouth already wried with salt. “It wasn’t like that at all.”
Evelyn’s voice was its thinnest and most remote, a seabird’s far cry. “And you couldn’t send her on.”
Delia said shortly, “No.”
He had kept so carefully away from her since the marshes, she almost shook free and elbowed him across the jaw before she realized the sudden hard grip on her forearm was meant for comfort. His death jangled through her, a choking blank terror as shapeless as whatever scars it had left on him: she clawed in it for a moment, a blood-black thunder drowning the warm twilight, the mortared stones and the waves’ grey noise against them, the pressure of a curved thumb and fingers, not living and not immaterial, the first time he had touched her of his own will. He was holding on to her, not taking his eyes off the endless origami folding of the tides. She covered his hand with her own and was terrified, and pressed back once, tightly, hard as a heartbeat, before she let him go.
With equal care, she said, “Elpenor?”
It was not an uncomplicated snort of laughter, but she heard it nonetheless; his mouth turned a corner so slight, she could not be sure whether it was amusement or just another self-regarding wince. “No. Oh, no. I should…I should have been so famous. I held onto the side of the boat until it went down, in the dark waters; I held on to the water and then I held on to the dark. My name was heavier than I was. It dragged me down. I let it go.”
“Long-suffering Charon.”
Now he looked actively wry. “Not if I can help it.”
“Evelyn Burney?”
He made a vague, harassed motion with his hands; it could have explained anything from a taste for durian candy to a morning-after tattoo. “I poled a boat on the Thames for a while. I liked it.” Too late to change the subject, she wondered if he was about to ask her the same—suddenly hoping that he could not hear, running through her head as for years, and Delia she’s in the graveyard, trying her best to get up—but he was staring down at the water again, like a litter of mussel shells, strings of foam dusk-shadowed to the bloom on a beach plum. His voice was low enough for a mumble, his accent crystal-crisp. “She’ll have better charge of it than ever I did.”
Back on the dry ground of Ochre Court, she had left the Crown Vic beside a candy-red Honda with Salve Regina stickers and a decal for Miskatonic University, walked after Evelyn with the murmur of the seaside dead growing in her ears like the rush and drawl of ocean: the drowned fisherman tangled in his lines, copper-slick kelp splayed from his mouth like a scream; the hotelier’s daughter whose crinolines had billowed around her like a jellyfish’s bell as she sank. The casualties of ’38 in their storm-surge rags, smashed like piers and street signs. The archaeologist loitering on the waking edge of the world with the memory of her latest find, as if when she finally showed it to Delia, the sands she had died among might cover her over at last. After all the ghosts and all the years, she had still imagined something might be different with Ari, but she had left nothing behind, not even Odysseus’ oar, and Evelyn had still been there to watch as Delia staggered up the weather-cracked steps into a bright-branched afternoon she thought had been over hours ago. Stick close to me, she had said incautiously; and now he sat beside her like the hanged man of a sailor’s pack, swinging forever between the world and its waters, the boatman with no crossing. Her with too many, all the rivers and roads the dead could be lost on, the living learn to chart. The house on Ann Street was empty. The door had not closed.
When she looked over at Evelyn in the last gold-leaf light, he was watching the small sickle-wings of terns against the eastern sky, his face oddly tranquil: absorbed in something beside himself. He looked tired and disheveled, still dirty-faced around the edges; she almost reached to spike fingers through her own hair before she remembered it would be fruitless, with the wind picking up for night. As sharply as a physical pain, she wanted a hot shower, water pounding her skin until it ached, a bed to fall into until the sun was well into afternoon again and she could roll over and watch the light moving lazily on walls she could rest within, as unhaunted as she could make herself. She thought of bookshelves, saltgrass, a boat the color of an old lobster buoy.
She said quietly to Evelyn, “Do you want to go home?” She saw his glasses glint before he answered, settling like running lights at sea; he might have been laughing softly, light voiced, or only breathing the strong salt air in deep. “I’m not sure that I know where that is right now.”
Without grief or surprise, Delia said, “Me neither.”
The wind was in her hair like a hand, the tousling caress of trade and loss and fortune; she raised her face to it, looking for nothing especially, and saw the first star over the sea.
THE DYBBUK IN LOVE
And then there are souls, troubled and dark, without a home or a resting place, and these attempt to enter the body of another person, and even these are trying to ascend.
—Tony Kushner, A Dybbuk, or Between Two Worlds
Sunset through the clouds, air full of ozone and the sweet aftertaste of fallen rain, and she walked home from the bus stop through gleaming, deserted streets, the first time with Brendan.
Side by side all the way back from the library, they had talked quietly, about unimportant things like teaching kindergarten and accounting and the books in Clare’s leather bottomed backpack, while the sky spilled over with rain and the bus’s wipers squeaked back and forth across the flooding windshield. Arteries and tributaries of water crawled along the glass as they moved slowly through traffic, in washes of red and green; the downpour sounded like slow fire kindling everywhere a raindrop hit, matchstrike and conflagration. Against Brendan’s knee where it had shed rain all over his khakis, the vast blackboard-colored folds of his umbrella stuck out struts at odd angles: he had offered its shelter to Clare on the library’s neoclassical steps, and again when they got down from the bus in the last fading scatter between storm and breaking sun, though she had refused him both times. Now they were crossing a street crowded only with puddles, and Clare looked down between her feet to mark their reflections. No shadows, i
n this diffuse light; no certainty. Brendan’s eyes were whitened blue as old denim, a pale mismatch for the heavy leaves of his hair that he wore drawn back into a fox-colored ponytail; she watched them, and listened carefully to his voice, and prayed to be proven wrong.
The sky had turned a washed-out gold, full of haze, luminous, blinded; unreal as an overexposed photograph, dissolving into a grainy blur of light. Up and down the street, windows that had not been thrown open to the cooling, clearing air were opaque with reflection, blank alabaster slates, like the broken hollows in the asphalt that had filled up and rippled only as Clare and Brendan passed. Rain-slicked still, the gutters and the pavement shone: filmed with light, paved with gold; goldene medine. Words she could have bitten from her tongue even for thinking them, because they might so easily not have been hers. Sheyn vi gold iz zi geven, di grine…. No one’s cousin, only child of only children: a spare-boned girl, eyes half a shade lighter than her hazelnut hair hacked short and pushed behind her ears; denim coat that buttoned almost to her knees and a scar across her left eyebrow where a stainless steel ring had been. Her sneakers had worn down to soles flat as ballet slippers, laces mostly unraveled into grit and no-color fuzz. She tilted her head up to Brendan and said back reasonably, “If you think I should be reading Gershon Winkler to half a dozen five-year-olds, you can come in and explain their nightmares to their parents.”
His prehistoric umbrella was swung up over his shoulder, cheerful parody of Gene Kelly; she had noticed him in the stacks, rust-tawny hair and suit jackets, before he came up to her this afternoon at the circulation desk and asked why she was always taking out children’s books. “I don’t see why they’d have nightmares.”
“This is why you’re the number-cruncher.”
For the first time, she saw his mouth warm in a laugh, almost soundless as though he feared someone might interrupt and catch him at it. “Clare,” he said, and stopped. The laughter stayed trapped in small places in his face, the lines around his eyes and the angles of his gingery brows, his lips still crooked slightly to his surprise, her teasing, the conversation that might fork and feather out like crystal into somewhere unexpected. “Clare,” he said again, gently. A chill pulsed down her bones. “Will you let me come to you?”
