Further Out Than You Thought

by Michaela Carter

  When the fire had dwindled to coals, they lay back, Gwen’s head on his arm. The stars had come out, the marine layer of moisture having lifted and somehow cleared. The moon had yet to rise, and in the deep sky there were more stars than she’d ever seen. The sky was cloudy with them. And she thought she could see, in the Milky Way galaxy, the snake with its mouth ajar, its tail inserted. Here on Earth, they were a part of it, part of this very galaxy. Galaxy from the Greek galactose, meaning milk, which her body, all by itself, would soon make—as if she were the universe, she thought, and she focused on a dark portion of the sky, feeling its mystery as though it were her own.

  Leo was talking and his voice—or was it the stars?—made her eyelids heavy. She fought to keep them open, waiting for that one shooting star. “We can only exist in a thirteen-billion-year-old universe,” Leo was saying. “We come from the stars and it takes time for there to be enough atoms from all these stars to make us. An eleven-billion-year-old universe would be too young, and in another twelve billion years, it’ll all collapse into itself and then, maybe, there’ll be another Big Bang, and we’ll start all over again.”

  Her eyes were shut, she’d been drifting. She willed them open, and just as they focused there it was—the falling star. Not very long or luminous. Just a tiny fleck of light falling from a corner of the sky. Her falling star.

  She made a wish.

  Thirty-three

  SHE HEARD THE gulls’ cries and the slow, rhythmic crashing of the waves, and she lifted one drowsy eyelid. Dawn had brought the fog. Soon she’d become aware of just where she was and the fact that she’d slept all night on this bed of sand, but for a moment longer the dream hung like an overlay on the fog. She couldn’t pin it to any characters or actions. It had the texture of dissolution, a thread she’d held in her fingers as it frayed and thinned to air. Less narrative than lyrical—like the ocean that had risen in the night, nearly taking them with it, and was now retreating, leaving in its wake a stretch of flat, abandoned sand—the dream left in her a sense of anguish. Loss in the form of an emptiness that nothing and no one could fill. She felt hollow, and rather than dissipating, the feeling intensified with the realization that she was more or less alone. Fifi lay on the sand beside her, but Leo was gone.

  Her purse was splayed open, and a few of its contents—her brush, her notebook and her pen—were spilled onto the sand. The violation sent a jolt of panic through her. She checked to see if her wallet was still there and it was, along with her cash. The baggie that had held the mushrooms was there, too, only now it was empty. Mystery solved.

  Leo was out in the fog again, spending another morning in Neverland.

  She stood up, brushed the sand from her legs. Crouching behind a boulder, she lifted her dress, squatted in the soft, dry sand and peed. The morning was moist as a good kiss, and colder—her favorite sort of morning. Beside her purse was the jug of water, nearly half left. She drank, and walked down to the ocean.

  Looking into the fog, she could see as far as the nearest wave—the red-brown curl and the ruddy foam, so very different, she thought, from the pure white from which Aphrodite had sprung. Still, the ocean was the ocean and she had to get in it, to immerse herself and come out new. Groggy and inspired, she ran back to their tousled camp and changed from her dress to her bathing suit. She walked into the ocean one slow step at a time, feeling each inch of her calves and her thighs as the gelid water shocked them to life. Behind her, Fifi followed the tideline up and back, barking at the waves.

  Out of the mist, a red wave rose and crashed. Another followed close behind it, dissolving to milk at her waist, and then she saw him in the low cloud. He had never been much of a swimmer, but now he sputtered, he floundered, he sank. Perhaps he was calling her name, but all she could hear was the roar of the waves. From where she stood, she felt the riptide tug at her legs. It was stronger than it had been the day before. The waves grew big and bigger, folding in on each other as the tide rushed in and, more fervently, out again. Thick with kelp, the white water surged and hissed. He waved at her, flailing his arms.

  Not waving, but drowning.

  Perfect, she thought. Now it was his turn. The Fool on the edge. But where was his little white dog to keep him from tumbling off the cliff? Gwen could no longer hear her bark over the ocean.

  The low cloud moved past them, shoreward, and in the clearing she could see a swatch of red fabric flying from the pier. Red for warning: danger. A notch up from yesterday’s yellow, it was a signal she was sure he’d missed.

  She yelled for him, and the ocean folded her voice into its fervent, hissing body. She wanted to turn around and head for shore. After all, no harm could come to the Fool. The sea would save him. It had to. And she had her child to think about. No, she insisted, she’d go no deeper.

  Here was a wave and she caught it. The surge hurled her toward shore, her arms out in Superman fashion, as though she were flying—how her mother had showed her, her mother who had taught herself to swim, who’d mastered Lotta’s fear of the water and made sure Gwen had loved it, seeing that she was on the swim team every summer, that she had strength and stamina. For what? To let this man she loved drown? She turned back to where he had been, but the fog had closed in again. She could see just as far as her hand.

  Panic shot its numb, breathless electricity through her stomach and her chest, down her arms and legs. She realized that he might actually die and she was the only one who could save him. “Leo!” she called. The ocean answered with its thunder. She was a survivor. She’d survived her mother’s death, she’d survived the riots, and she’d survive this, too. She swam under one wave and held her breath. Another wave moved over her and pushed her to the ocean floor. She thought of the child inside her and she felt powerful, capable of any feat. She fought her way up through the seething water and gulped air. With the next wave she was down again, where the rip seized and sent her out further. It was yesterday all over, only worse. No sooner had she thought it than she knew. This would never happen again.

  If she made it out of this ocean, she would leave him.

  She swam parallel to the shore—one fierce breaststroke after another. The stroke had won her a blue ribbon once, and she could almost hear the crowd of parents and children yelling, cheering, her mother’s voice over them all, and she darted under the surface until the riptide had lost its hold and she was free. She saw him, further out still, but close enough to reach. Another wave swept him up and she swam to where it would fling him, her eyes open in the teeming ocean. The salt stung but she found him, a dark mass in the plankton and the kelp. Flotsam. The sailor sunk when the ship had foundered. Their ship. What was no more. She wrapped her arms around his waist, pushed off from the ocean floor and kicked. He was deadweight. She needed oxygen. She gripped his wrist with her hand and reached the surface, sucking in the air. The ocean swelled and gathered and curled around them. She took one stroke, two, and then lost her hold.

  Either the ocean would take him, or it would let him go. She’d done all she could.

  The wave spat her out in the shallows, in a foot of water on the hard sand. The red-brown foam hissed its last and subsided. Beside her, in a patch of clear ocean, he sat, coughing up water and gasping the air. There was a brief moment of sun. It reflected off the rippling water and danced over his body like cool fire. He shivered. His arms shook and he pulled his trembling knees in the wet black knickers to his chest and held them. The tide went out, leaving them on wet sand, and then it rushed back in, rushed past them. His skin was pale and his hair hung in limp clumps over half his face and down his back. A strand of kelp was caught in a tangle. She crawled to him. On her knees, she took her time loosening the hairs around the kelp enough to tease it out.

  This is the last time I’ll touch his hair, she said to herself, as if to give the subsequent act of her leaving weight, as if to make it real. The tide moved out, then in again. A lone sandpiper wading in the shallows jabbed his long beak into the sand. She pull
ed the kelp from Leo’s hair, popped a bladder between her thumb and finger and hurled the foot-long strand behind her into the ocean.

  He seemed not to notice the gesture. His eyes were wide, staring into the fog. “Fucking amazing, Gwen. The light. I saw it and it was beautiful, like they say, only it wasn’t just white, it was a goddamn kaleidoscope. Made of every possible color. Jesus. I could die just to go there, just to see it again.”

  “Be my guest,” she said, and she stood and walked from the ocean to their camp. She was numb. She couldn’t feel her fingers or her toes, and she couldn’t feel emotion, either. Not sadness, nor anger, nor fear. She changed into her dress, took off her wet bikini under it. She pulled on her sweater and wrapped it tightly around her. Warming her hands in the pockets, she felt the shell and closed it in her fist.

  She saw a single jogger, a woman in a dark sweat suit, emerge from the fog and disappear back into it. We get these glimpses, she thought. Brief openings in the curtain. For just a moment things are clear. Things are themselves and we see them for what they are.

  She watched Leo stumble toward her and collapse at her feet. Still breathing hard, he was on his back, his head on a pillow of sand. “I’m just going to nap here. For just a minute,” he said, and shut his eyes.

  From where she stood, she memorized his face—the curve of his dark eyelashes, the Roman nose, the soft pink lips with the center dimple that inscribed them with a pout. In his exhaustion, his body held a dreamy and exquisite languor, but she no longer desired him. Rather, she found herself assessing the lines of his limbs and face as if to draw them—his smooth uncomplicated forehead, the round, ruddy cheeks, the thick black beard she now saw had a handful of whiskers the color of tinsel, and the locks of his hair like the ribbons on a gift, the kind you take between your thumb and a single blade of scissors in order to curl the ends, to make the present pretty.

  The end was different from what she could have imagined, which made the beginning another thing, too. The night they met, when she remembered it, had an antique yellow hue, as if the scene had been lit by candles. It hadn’t, of course. They’d met under a streetlamp in front of the movie theater. She’d been alone, waiting, and Leo had come with their mutual friend, the actor who had set them up. A blind date. The movie was Spike Lee’s Do the Right Thing, and she’d sat between them. She remembered how uncomfortable the movie had made her feel, the actors hurling their names for each other’s races straight at the camera. For Gwen their anger had felt like a slap across her face. After the sting had subsided, she had looked at Leo in the movie light. In that hesitation, before returning to the screen, they had drunk deeply, and the silence of their drinking, Gwen had thought, was the song of a lifetime, an eyelid wide, between blinks. Now she saw it wasn’t a lifetime, but a lovely youth, one slow morning hour of dappled light and remembered dreams. The kind of hour that burns off like fog in the sunlight.

  “Dream of flying,” she whispered.

  She watched his lips curl to a smile. He looked up at her, and what she saw in his eyes was a gleeful satisfaction. “God,” he said. “Maybe I did die. You’re glowing. You have a halo, Gwen. You’re an angel.” His smile widened. “I’d be dead if it weren’t for you,” he said. And she understood what had held her for all these years wasn’t her fear of being alone. Or it wasn’t just that. It was his helplessness. So long as he couldn’t get by in the world without her, she couldn’t leave, because leaving meant abandoning him. The truth, though, was that she was not his mother. She had never been his mother. And now that she was going to be an actual mother, she could no longer pretend to be his.

  She wouldn’t make him choose. He’d be free to grow up when he was ready, even if that time was never.

  “Good-bye, Leo,” she said.

  “You going for coffee?” he asked, rising to an elbow and looking at her. His eyes red from the salt water were green and shining. “I’d have a cup. A large. One sugar, one cream.”

  She thought of the horses on those boats in the doldrums, the horse latitudes. How did the sailors do it, she wondered. Throw a horse overboard and watch its hooves hit water, pound and tire, and not just one horse, but a team of horses? It came down to survival. Die of thirst or else lighten the load to catch the wind and move.

  Her purse over her shoulder, her bikini and her flip-flops in her hand, she bent down and kissed Fifi on the head. Leo sat cross-legged, like a swami, staring into the mist as if he were seeing visions. He opened his mouth and a chant filled the air between them. Aaahhh, he sang. The first vowel, born in the depths and rising. She knew he wouldn’t hear, but she said again, “Good-bye.” The gold angel over his heart caught the sun sifting down now, warming her back, and she turned and was walking before the tears ran onto her cheeks and dripped from her nose and chin. Walking away, her feet and legs, her whole body was heavy. She could still turn back—but even as she thought it she knew it was part of a fiction, a story she’d told herself for so long she’d begun to believe it. The fact was that the two of them together in the world had never worked. Leo belonged to his own world. His was an island, where he leaned his back against a palm tree, played his pan flute and sang and the fairies circled and danced.

  She heard again what he’d said that night in Tijuana—no one will love you as much as I love you. Perhaps it was true. But her steps were quickening now. They were finding their rhythm. She was moving through the fog or the fog was moving through her and the moving was the thing. Moving accrued momentum, sloughed off inertia. Walking fast on the hard wet sand, she dropped everything and turned a cartwheel, another and another, gaining speed. She stopped, dizzy, and faced the ocean, the spinning motes of mist. She walked into the water. It lapped the hem of her dress and she stood in one spot as the tide covered her feet in sand. She looked up and down the beach. No one was around. Facing the waves and the endless ocean, she opened her hands and stretched her fingers and her arms wide and she opened her mouth and screamed, and the fear and the anger awakened from their slumber rose up inside her molten and seething, and she screamed again, screamed until she had nothing but emptiness—emptiness and a child—inside her.

  She grabbed her things, crossed the sand and the street, and passed Frank’s and Pizza By the Slice. Smelling espresso, she ducked into the café, and the girl with the glasses and the pretty eyes pulled her a double shot, and Gwen downed it and paid her, tipping double again for karma and luck.

  She climbed the stairs from the beach and stopped at the top to feel the holiness of the place. She gripped the metal rail and closed her eyes. As if the world were a ship and she were on its prow, she leaned into the wind, feeling her body, her miraculous body with two hearts inside it—one loud in her ears and the other quiet as a birthday wish you close your eyes to make before blowing out the tiny wax torches of the years.

  There, in front of the little Spanish-style church, stood a phone booth she hadn’t remembered seeing. Inside it a black phone dangled from its cord. She hung it up and then took it in her hand again, slid two quarters into the silver slot and dialed the familiar number. He picked up after two rings.

  “Dad? I just wanted you to know I’m fine. And there’s something else,” she said, and she told him everything.

  “Ah,” her father said. “Now isn’t that wonderful news.”

  Thirty-four

  GWEN HUNG UP the phone.

  Outside the church an old woman was sweeping. She wore a long black dress. Her silver hair was pulled back in a bun. The church had one door, arched, wooden, painted a dark red. It was ajar, and Gwen found herself drawn to the simple building. She asked the woman if she could go inside. “Sí, niña,” the woman said. She smiled and Gwen noticed that she had a gold front tooth, just like the psychic. The detail gave the moment a holographic, synchronistic feel—a stone skipping over the smooth water of time.

  It was a memory, the gold tooth in the mouth of her great-grandmother, Maria, and Gwen three or four, the last time she saw her before she died
. She was sitting on her lap as she sang in Spanish, her voice low and craggy, and the song sweet. She’d looked old as the earth—the branching wrinkles in her face, her clouded eyes, and how her mouth as she sang was like a mine, full of darkness where her teeth were missing, and full of treasure.

  And in this instant of the stranger’s smile, Gwen knew it was right—the fact that she was on this morning standing in front of this church talking to this woman. It was just a flash and then it was gone, but the realization cast a new light on those other moments out of which her life was made. With the slightest adjustment—this shift in view—it all lined up. Not in a straight start-to-finish sort of way, but more like a circle. By walking ahead she was sure to reach the beginning soon enough. It would look different because she would be different, and it would wait for her with the patience of an old friend.

  Gwen closed the door behind her. The church was cool, damp, and dark. A chill ran through her. It took her eyes a minute to see. The room was tiny. There were five rows of wooden pews. And on the wall there was a fresco of Mary. With her red and gold and green veils, her brown skin, she was the Virgin of Guadalupe. In front of her a table held white candles in red glass jars. A few flames swayed, and red light danced across the Virgin’s downturned face, across her hands parted over her heart. A sign said DONATIONS, ONE DOLLAR, beside the matchsticks and the metal collection box.

  She folded a dollar into the slot, lit a candle. This was for Lotta. She sat on the pew and felt the stillness of the room and the stillness inside her. “Hail Mary, full of grace. Blessed art thou among women, and blessed is the fruit of thy womb,” she said. And although she was praying to Mary, she was praying to Lotta, too. Blessed was the fruit of her womb, which meant her mother was blessed. Even if Lotta had been afraid to touch her, afraid she’d somehow kill her, she was blessed.