by Robert Levy
“Better,” she said. “Better.” She embraced him—unexpected, at least to her—and she did so tightly, too tightly. As she held him she realized that he smelled of Blue. Of his funk and stale cigarette smoke, sesame oil and cilantro and kitchen grease. She drew in the scent as if drowning and starved of air; it was impossible to let him go.
“We’re going to find him,” she whispered into the curved shell of Gabe’s ear. She said the words, heard them from her lips and spoken in her own voice. She didn’t know why she had said it, only that it was true.
She pulled back at last. Gabe was startled—unsure, it seemed, of whether he’d understood her. Before he could respond, however, Jason placed a hand on her elbow and led her toward a back room to change.
As soon as she walked through the front door of the MacLeod House her skin began to itch, the nicks and scrapes across her thighs and shoulders all humming with unease. She turned back toward the windows and looked out at the familiar vista, the cove wet with mist and the dusky remnants of a late-afternoon rainstorm. She had to remember to breathe.
“Want some tea?” Jason rattled the black porcelain kettle over the range.
“Sure,” she said, though she did not. This place, she thought, it feels like a trap. “Thanks.”
She forced herself to call her parents. Her mother pleaded with her yet again to return to New York, her father shouting, “Make her!” in the background. But she couldn’t. She couldn’t see them. Or rather, she couldn’t see them seeing her, tracking her movements as though she were a wild animal that might bolt at any moment. “I’ll be back soon,” she said. “I just need to get my legs under me.”
“Knowing you, that might not ever happen!” Her mother’s words daggers; they always were. “Who knows what happened to you? If you do, you sure haven’t told us.”
She groaned into the receiver, a teenager again. “I can’t leave yet, all right?”
“But you’re fine abandoning us?” Fear in her mother’s voice, and choked-back tears, those of a frightened child.
“I haven’t abandoned you,” she said. “And I won’t.”
“But you did. You have. Why can’t we see you? Why? That’s it. I’ve had enough. I’m flying back up there.”
“Mom, don’t. Please. I’ll be back just as soon as I can.”
She wondered which was worse: believing that her parents were strangers now, or being wrong about that fact and feeling it regardless. Because to look upon them would be to know that she was no longer their daughter, and from that admission there was no turning back.
There was a heavy sigh on the other end of the line. “Just tell me you’re safe now. Please. I need to know that. At least give me that, Elisa.”
Elisa. Hearing her mother say the name was like being spoon-fed dirt. You chose wrong, she wanted to say. You gave me the wrong name.
“I’m safe,” she said instead. She looked out the window and caught a starburst of late-afternoon light at the foot of the drive, glinted off the windshield of a patrol car as it slowed and passed. “They’re watching out for me. The police, the doctors, Jason . . . I’m fine. I need some time, okay?” Time. She didn’t know what that meant anymore.
“We miss you,” her mother said. “Julie misses you. She says you haven’t even seen the kids since Mandy’s birthday. Long before all this.”
All this. She wanted to scoff, but the guilt-tipped arrow found its mark. It was true, she hadn’t seen her sister or nieces in months, though back home they were only a short subway ride away. They only wanted to see her face. Selfish Elisa, she thought. Selfish little bitch. She felt awful. Maybe she was still human after all.
“I’m sorry,” she said. “Tell Julie I’ll visit them as soon as I’m back.”
Elisa got off the phone and sat on the couch, unmoving and unmoved, as her mug of chamomile tea steadily cooled. She pretended to read a decrepit Italian fashion magazine she’d unearthed from the bottom of the log trunk, and tried very hard not to watch the windows and the trees beyond, the impenetrable woods that had rebirthed her into this discordant and too-bright world.
Every once in a while she caught Gabe, pen in hand, eyeing her from his perch in front of the woodstove, the glow of flames on his lean face as twilight sputtered out over the mountains. He would look away, into the fire or down at the yellow-paged volume in his lap, the words Entomologia Generalis Vol. I embossed on its battered purple cover. Jason made no bones about his own surveilling, however; his hard eyes stayed upon her, to the point where she ceased to provide him the satisfaction of noticing. And suddenly it seemed like a familiar game: the granting of attentions, followed by their withholding, a cross between a tango and a tug-of-war. Apparently not much had changed between them.
“I’m wiped out,” she said at last, and let out a convincing yawn. “I’m going to take a bath and get some sleep.” Jason began to rise but she stared him back down. “It’s okay.” She tried to smile. “I’ll be fine, really. It’s not like I’m going to get sucked down the drain. You know. Again.”
She crept upstairs, filled the cast-iron tub, and eased herself into the steaming water, first with a moan of pain, then relief. She tried to recall what she’d been thinking when she was last here: in this bathtub, this room, this house. The more she tried to remember, however, the more her memories of that night seemed to dissipate. She was worrying rifts in her mind, fingering greater holes in an already moth-eaten sweater.
In the bath, talking to Blue. Talking and laughing and taking pictures: her of him, him of her, of the walls, the floor, the toilet. Talking about, what? His return to the cove, and disappearing as a child. And then, the pregnancy. Which she told Blue was only six weeks along. Which was a lie.
The child, as hard as it was for her to believe even now, would have been his. Theirs. The embodiment of a connection greater than friendship, or sex, or indeed love. Their union, Elisa had long known, had echoes of the divine. The night in May they got wasted and he told her about his grandmother’s death, how sad he felt that he would never get a chance to see her again, not to mention how conflicted he was that she’d left him her house. Would he be going back to Cape Breton, after all these many years? The possibility seemed to release a powerful grief in him, and from Elisa a resultant wave of compassion, an effect that bordered on the chemical; that night she was doubly intoxicated. She had hitched up her skirt, and Blue gave her a nervous smile that said, Are you for real? and she stared boldly back as if to say, Yeah, let’s do this already. She stood there waiting, as if in surrender. And all of a sudden they hit the bed and they began to fuck, wildly. Blue tried to slow things down but she told him everything was fine, that she was on the pill.
Which was another lie. She’d gone off it a few months earlier for no real reason; she just finished her supply one day and never refilled her prescription. She didn’t understand—then as now—what exactly had made her deceive Blue. All she knew was that she had felt compelled.
Since then she’d been unable to be intimate with Jason (although they had already been sliding down that chilly slope as it was). The growing lump of cells inside of her had weighed heavily on her conscience, its presence seemingly felt before sperm had so much as punctured egg. The baby had later taken on an air of predestination, something to ruminate over while Jason retreated into his work, or into himself. Everyone, it seemed, had their own secret place to go.
But now the source of her daydreams was gone, Blue along with it. Just gone. It was hard for her to digest that she had lost the baby, but what kind of mother was she ready to be anyway? Maybe it’s for the best. At least that’s what she told herself. The alternative was too distressing.
She closed her eyes and let her head slip beneath the surface of the water. Its warmth lulled her, and the pressure mounted as she held her breath, the water hardening around her like a mold; she imagined it shaping her into an elongated, reedier form. A birch tree, perhaps. One tree among many, gray bark peeled back from her eyes and mouth
to reveal a dark and flinty substance beneath: mossy black marble, or maybe blood-speckled stone.
She opened her eyes. Hovering above the water’s surface was a dark figure, its skull crowned with a nest of sharp nettles like barbed wire, vast and green-tinged eyes cast upon her like twin mirrors reflecting an unseen light. Blue. His face obscured, the way it was that night, but still. It was Blue. She would know him anywhere.
Behind him were the others, only hazy shadows but I remember them, she thought. They had touched her, caressed her face with needle-fingered yet surprisingly supple hands. They spoke with no sound, but still they spoke. Home, they had said, you are home. But not to her.
Elisa shot upward in a spray of water, her hands fumbling for the lip of the tub. Her chest was tight, lungs heaving and ravenous as her eyes darted about the empty bathroom.
Once Jason settled into sleep, Elisa slipped from the bed and out of the pink room, easing the door shut behind her. She retrieved her vintage slip dress, beige and embroidered, from a hook in the bathroom, pulled it over her head, and tiptoed down the stairs to the kitchen, her red ballet flats waiting on the braided rag rug beside the back door. Off the rear deck and down past the woodpile, she stopped short in the drive to take in the cove, glowing bright beneath the waning zinc moon. There had been total darkness the night she was taken, half a lunar cycle lost and gone forever. Tonight, everything was painfully clear, including how alone she was.
Blue. She missed him. Deeply, terribly missed him. She missed his cooking! Lord, how she missed that. How he seemed to put a little bit of himself into every one of his meals, the taste of each dish unlike any other. It made so much sense now. Of course his food was extraordinary; it was because he was extraordinary. She felt his absence, conversely, as a weight in her stomach, a tumorous growth gone metastatic, the compression constant beneath her skin. Blue had vanished, yes, but he also remained. The way he had remained for more than a decade, twelve years gone since that ravishing boy appeared to her from behind the Limelight’s tattered velvet rope like some kind of saintly apparition (outside a nightclub that had once been a consecrated church, no less). His hair black-edged and knotted, a cerulean halo above a pale gamin face, one of his two front teeth skewed but perfectly misaligned, as if by godly design. And when he had smiled at her, her heart snagged. She had been safe, as long as he was near.
She closed her eyes as if blinded, and opened them anew to the cove and the shocked round mouth of the moon. A warmer light caught her attention down the hill, from the narrow cabin on the south side of the drive. She skulked over and peered through one of the windows: Donald, hunched over a scratched-up desk beneath a tarnished metal lamp, his brown dog curled at his side. He sat in front of what appeared to be a ham radio, one hand upon a dial with the other cupped to the padded earpiece of an enormous set of aviator-style headphones.
As if sensing her presence, he turned to face her. Startled, she backed into the dark pool of night, but he strode to the cabin door and threw it open. “Who’s there?” he called out as she darted for the trees, her feet crunching over a carpet of pine needles on the edge of the lawn. He remained in place, peering out into the gloom, and she felt foolish hiding from a man who probably only wanted company, or perhaps consolation. I can do that for him. She remembered how she had cradled him on the floor of his cabin as he wept. I brought him comfort once before.
The dog bounded after her, but stopped halfway across the lawn and cocked its head. She made her way back toward the cabin. As she neared she caught sight of Donald’s expression, his eyes unfocused, jaw held crookedly as if pained; there was confusion upon his face. That, and fear.
“My memories,” he said, his voice hesitant, tremulous. “Are you the one who stole them?”
“Donald,” she said, “it’s only me. Elisa.” But as she mounted the steps he staggered back inside, fumbling for the door. He slammed it in her face, the dog shut out alongside her, followed by the sound of the lock being engaged, of a chair dragged across the cabin floor and jammed against the door handle. I’m dangerous, she thought, and had to resist rattling the knob. I’m not to be let in.
She placed her ear against the wood and listened. There was muttering on the other side, but she was unable to make out the words; all it sounded like was “Fae.” Fae. Fae. Fae. The same word, repeated at varying distances. She pictured him pacing the room like a caged beast.
Elisa lowered herself to the steps and sat. The dog nestled its head against her, and she stroked its fur. She knew she shouldn’t because of her allergies, but couldn’t stop herself; it felt too good, and right now she needed something she could love without thinking about it. She scratched beneath the dog’s snout and let its warmth wake her memory.
I’m in the bathtub. An ecstatic poison seeps through her veins, a netting of liquid light enveloping her in a tightening web of paralysis so she can’t scream, can’t breathe. She finds herself without need of air, as if she is already one of them herself. She floats from the tub, cradled in their elongated, branchlike fingers. Light as a feather, stiff as a board, just like the slumber party game. They rush her downstairs and out the back door, the world a black void streaked with starlight through the trees as they navigate the path to their hiding hole. An endless, rushing night.
But when they near their burrow, the sickening smell of burned earth forces them back. There are fires above, as well as below, heat emanating in thick waves from the flames. There are other ways into their warrens, however, other points of access, and so they backtrack and circle toward the cliffs overlooking the bay. Their ecstatic energy continues to course over her, through her, like nothing she’s ever felt. Everything is light. Unable to move of her own accord, she knows she should be afraid, but instead she only feels alive.
They scale the mountain toward its summit, another entryway that might yet be accessible. Near her—right beside her—is Blue. Only she is still frozen as if in amber, so she cannot turn to look upon his face. His true face, she knows now, after all this time. She can’t see him for what he really is.
A melody played in her head, erratic yet also indelible. It took a few moments for her to determine it was Donald, singing close by, on the other side of the door.
Will-o’-wisp before them went,
Sent forth a twinkling light,
And soon she saw the fairy bands
All riding in her sight.
She was as me touched by the Fae,
Not one of them by sight,
For what remains of time below
Is laughter and the light.
The lamp went out inside the cabin. She lay down in the grass and stared up at the stars, listened to the breeze whisper through the rustling leaves and her untamed hair. And all the while, the steady thrum of the dog’s heartbeat thumped against her like an external organ, its paws kneading her side as if trying to extract milk. She was enthralled.
Unseen insects and their droning stridulations, murmurs of waves lapping upon the shore down the hill, the swift rotation of the planet on its axis: she sensed all of it in a new way, and for the very first time. The whole of creation one vast organism, flushed with blood. She never knew how really to feel, until now.
In the morning, her head swimming with chiaroscuro dreams of shadows and light, she awoke in the pink room of the MacLeod House. Jason was already dressed, and stared at her from the foot of the bed.
“Where were you last night?” he asked stiffly.
Elisa opened her mouth, only to find she had no ready answer. I’m running through the woods. Images of tree branches vibrated in her head, calcified and gnarled boughs that reached out with whetted tips as if to take hold of her. But I am fast, too fast, I will never be touched again.
“I woke up and you were gone,” he persisted, the injury in his tone poorly disguised as concern.
“Oh.” She rubbed at her eyes; the trees, they were only a dream, a remnant of a sliver of a memory. She must have fallen asleep outside Donald’s c
abin alongside his dog, her return up the hill forgotten. Was that what had happened?
She sat up and stared at her hands: they appeared the same, but they should have looked different this morning. Her fingers, they should be stiffer, her palms wider, their surfaces thicker and more coarse; her skin should be rough, and it should itch. Her throat should be constricted as well. Because you were with the dog, she remembered. Shouldn’t you be having trouble breathing, like last time? Her mind was playing tricks. She lowered her hands, tried to sneeze but it failed to materialize.
“I just wanted some fresh air,” she said, and adjusted one of the pink peonies in the copper-glazed ceramic vase beside her bed. “Cooped up in that hospital room . . .”
“Sure,” he said. “I get it.”
He stood and went to the door, and by the time he got there his face appeared untouched by distress, smooth and unlined, synthetic. How quickly he changes.
“Are you hungry?” he said. “I can bring you something up here if you’d like . . .”
“That’s sweet.” Now smile. She smiled. “I am hungry. But you know what? I’d really love some diner food. The greasier the better.”
They snuck down the stairs and out to the car. Jason eased the Caddy downhill, but slowed to a stop when they spotted Maureen emerging from her studio. She had showed up at the hospital the previous morning with the vase bursting with peonies; the smell had been so ambrosial that Elisa had brought them back with her, returned to the very garden that had birthed them.
“Well, hello there!” Maureen wiped her hands on her work apron as she rounded the car to the passenger side. “I heard they let you out for good behavior. How are you doing, honey?”
“Great.” Smile. “Really great. Thanks.”
“I’m so glad. I know you’re still recovering. Still . . . figuring it all out.”
“I was down in the ground,” Elisa blurted out. She had to stop herself from covering her mouth.
