“And Amina didn’t know that it was Katerine’s father who fired the shots at the soldiers from the woods, or that he lost his life trying to save her and her family.”
Nana nodded yet again. “People on earth often judge each other without having all of the facts,” she said.
I thought about this for a moment. “But it happens here in Shemaya too,” I said. “We can’t read people’s minds on earth, but everything is available here and still cases are decided on only half of the facts. Nothing’s changed. I don’t understand it. What’s God’s excuse?”
Nana patted my arm. “Only the Judge can answer that question,” she said. “Maybe the facts of who did what and when become unimportant when judging a person’s soul.”
We sat together quietly for a moment, watching the merging seasons.
“Bo was named after Toby Bowles,” I said. “Katerine lost the sheet of paper with his name on it but she remembered the sound of his last name—Bowles, Boaz—she almost got it right.”
“Yes, she did. She almost got it right,” Nana said.
“But I still don’t know why I was introduced to Tim Shelly,” I said. “I don’t know how he fits into any of this, and I can’t remember how I know him.”
“You will when you’re ready, child,” Nana said. “You will when you’re ready.”
—
A FEW DAYS LATER, Tim Shelly came to visit me. I was out walking along the Brandywine River behind Nana’s house. I had created a row of snowmen on the riverbank in the alternating bands of winter. Portly and resolute, they watched over the river and me, keeping me company. Tim jumped out from behind one of them and scared me badly. I always walked alone.
“Don’t worry, I won’t hurt you,” he said mockingly, as though he had exactly that intention. He reminded me at that moment of Wally Miller, the bully from my childhood who killed the crayfish and whom I had punched in the mouth after he knocked me to the ground. I thought that might have been how I knew him, that maybe he was using a different name.
“You’re not Wally Miller, are you?” I asked.
“No,” Tim said. “Who’s he?” He seemed genuinely puzzled.
“Never mind,” I said. “It doesn’t matter.”
I continued walking along the river and Tim followed me. He stopped acting menacing and started talking about his mother. He missed her terribly. He said she hadn’t been well since his father died and he worried about how she was taking his own death. They were mushroom farmers, and they had lost their farm and only means of income after his father died. He said his mother was too old to find a job. Tim was all she had left, and now he was gone too. How would she survive?
We stopped walking in a band of spring, at a patch of wild daffodils where a large tree hung out over the river, defying gravity. Tim seemed vulnerable at that moment, like a lost little boy. I felt sorry for him.
“Do you ever wish you could see your husband and daughter again?” he asked.
“Always,” I said. Tears welled up in my eyes, the way they did whenever I thought of Bo and Sarah. “I miss them so much that some days I can’t even get out of bed,” I said. “I have no photographs of them, no letters, nothing the way living people do. I’d give anything to see them again.”
“I miss my mom a lot,” Tim said. “My dad told me when I got here that we can’t go back. We can’t see the living or communicate with them.”
“I know,” I said. “My Nana told me the same thing.”
Tim broke a few pieces of bark off the tree and threw them into the river. They floated away like tiny ships in the current.
“Are you all right?” I asked.
“Yeah, I’m fine.”
But he looked nervous now, like he was hiding something.
“Are you sure?” I said.
“Yeah, it’s just . . .”
“What?”
“It’s just that I did. I saw her the other day. I saw my mother. I went back and visited the living.”
18
Shall I take you to them?”
Elymas appeared as Tim Shelly told me he would, during a moment of despair when going forward seemed no more possible than going back. That moment for me came on the rocking chair in Sarah’s room. I had not been home since my last visit there to disprove my mortality had instead so thoroughly confirmed it. Home teased me the way a casino teases a gambler, luring the eyes and the mind into a world offering pleasure and hope but delivering only pain and disappointment. Tim too had gone back over and over to his family’s mushroom farm, which was as deserted as Sarah’s room. This made the sudden appearance of Elymas so startling and so welcome.
Elymas was older than Luas and much more poorly preserved. His withered body floated inside a pair of green plaid pants that piled at his ankles and gathered high around his chest, held there by a moldy brown belt. A food-stained yellow shirt sagged over his narrow shoulders, buttoned crookedly so that the left side of his body appeared higher than the right. He had a corncob face and relied for balance upon a cane with four tiny rubber feet at the bottom. He was completely blind. His eyes glowed glassy, white, and terrifying.
“Shall I take you to them?” he asked again, hovering in the doorway of Sarah’s room, too vulnerable and frail to have made such an impossible, gigantic promise. A light breeze could have lifted his body like a scrap of paper and carried him off.
I had been crying, mourning the loss of my daughter and my life. “But they said it isn’t possible—”
“You did not listen carefully,” Elymas said. “They said it is not possible to direct the movement of consciousness from realm to realm. They said nothing about you interacting with it. Shall I take you to your husband and daughter?”
“But—”
The old man banged his cane fiercely against the floor. “Do not question me! Many wait for my services. You must tell me now whether you wish to see them.”
“Yes, yes, desperately.”
“Then open your mind to me, Brek Abigail Cuttler. Open your mind and you shall see them.”
The old man’s eyes dilated until they consumed his entire face from the inside out, and then they consumed me. I felt a sudden motion in the darkness of his eyes, as if I were being hurled through space. Two small points of light emerged in the distance from opposing directions, each emitting a soft, warm glow like the flames of two candles carried from opposite ends of a room, growing as I approached them. Suddenly the shapes of Sarah and Bo emerged, with our dog, Macy, barking at their feet! And around them an expanse of an azure sky, an outline of poplar and ash trees, a swing set, a slide, a jogging stroller. The playground near our home! I couldn’t believe my eyes.
Sarah toddled toward me. I swept her into the air, pulling her close, burying my nose in her hair, drinking in her sweet scent. She wrapped herself around my neck and pressed her face against mine. My tears dripped down her cheeks. Then Bo’s strong long arms enveloped us both. I felt his scratchy Saturday beard against my neck and smelled the clean sweat on his back from his long run through the town, the college to the playground. He wore his faded blue jogging shorts and a T-shirt with a large red “10” stenciled on the back. Macy whimpered and leaped into the air to get my attention.
“I miss you so much,” Bo whispered. “Sometimes I don’t think I can go on.”
“I know,” I whispered, “me too.”
I turned my face to his. We kissed, looked into each other’s eyes, and kissed again, longer and deeper. Sarah squirmed to free herself and return to the swing. Bo and I exchanged disappointed but happy smiles. He buckled her into the toddler seat, and we took positions in front and behind to push her, her face sailing within inches of ours as she squealed with delight. Bo had her dressed in my favorite denim jumper and sneakers, with her hair tied up into an adorable fountain on top of her head.
As Sarah flew through the air, I recognized my own features in her face—my dimpled chin and cheeks, my small nose and olive-shaped eyes—and behind them, an unbroken li
ne of ancestors—of Bellinis, Cuttlers, Wolfsons, Schriebergs, and other family names long since forgotten, marching back in history and time, waiting there to step forward into the next generation. This little girl sustained their memories and kept alive their hopes and dreams. And mine.
Bo and I talked over Sarah’s laughter and the squeaking chains of the swing. He said he had taken my death very hard and had just returned to work for the first time. They had stayed with his brother and sister-in-law at first. Then his mother visited for a few weeks to help out until he could get used to taking care of Sarah alone. He had put the house up for sale because the memories were too painful, and he was looking for a job at one of the New York television stations to be closer to his family. They were doing fine, though, he insisted. Work helped occupy his mind, and Sarah woke only twice during the night now looking for Mommy. He had the roof fixed and had gotten the garbage disposal running. Bill Gwynne from the firm had called to offer any help he could with settling my estate, which was kind of him. My parents called once or twice a week, but the conversations didn’t last long and were filled with awkward gaps of silence. Karen came by to talk and left some books about grieving that sometimes helped.
I tried to assemble my thoughts. There was so much to say—not about what had happened to me since my death but about what I wanted for their future. Bo looked so strong and handsome standing there in his shorts and T-shirt, so determined and resilient, yet so wounded and vulnerable. I fell in love with him all over again, deeper than before. I wanted to tell him that, and tell Sarah how proud she should be of her daddy. I wanted to tell her how I wanted her to be like him. And like me. I wanted her to know me—who I had been, how I had become who I was, the experiences to treasure, the mistakes to avoid. I wanted her to live life to the fullest because I could not. But as I struggled to form these words, the color suddenly began bleaching from their faces and with it the green from the grass and the blue from the sky. They were fading from view.
“No! No!” I cried. “Bo! Sarah!”
“We love you!” Bo called back. “We love you forever . . .”
And then they were gone.
I was back in Sarah’s room. Elymas stood in the doorway. I lunged at him.
“Take me back!” I pleaded with him. “Please, please, it’s too soon. Please, take me back.”
A toothless smile spread across the old man’s face. “But of course,” he said, patronizingly. “We’ll go back, Brek Abigail Cuttler. In due time. In due time.”
“No, take me back now!”
He turned toward the stairs. “That is not possible.”
“Wait,” I said. “Please, don’t leave me.”
He grunted for me to follow him. Using his cane to feel his way, he slowly climbed down the stairs. When we finally reached the bottom, he said: “Listen very carefully, Brek Cuttler. Whether you see your husband and daughter again is up to you. But know there are reasons you were told otherwise. Luas is concerned about your effectiveness as a presenter. He believes you should devote your efforts to the Courtroom, and he is concerned you will spend too much time with your family and that it may affect your work. Sophia is concerned that you will not be able to adjust to your death unless you let your loved ones go. It was easier for them to tell you contact is not possible. Do you understand?”
No, I did not understand. I was furious.
“I do not share their views,” Elymas said. “I do not presume to determine what is best for others. The choice is yours, just as they too have been free to choose. I come only to present you with possibilities. I do not criticize your decisions. Now, I must be going.”
“Wait, please. I want to see them again.”
“Yes,” Elymas said, “I’m certain you do. But you must understand that when Luas and Sophia learn of your decision they will be angry. They will deny that it is even possible and do everything in their power to convince you of this. They will tell you it is all an illusion, and they will slander me and claim I am nothing more than a sorcerer and a false prophet. They may even threaten your position as a presenter and insist that you leave Shemaya.”
“I don’t care,” I said. “I just want to see my husband and my daughter.”
The toothless smile flashed again across the old man’s unseeing face. “We only visit them in their dreams,” he said. “Take your time, Brek Cuttler. They will be there when you decide. Think about what I have told you.”
Then Elymas banged his cane three times on the porch floor and he was gone.
PART III
19
City Hall in Buffalo, New York, rises thirty-two stories from the eastern shore of Lake Erie, like a great art deco frigate making a port of call. So prominent is the thick spire at the top of the building that lake pilots, navigating their barges laden with Midwestern grain and ore, use it to reckon their courses from twenty miles out. Inside the sturdy office tower, however, a different form of reckoning takes place.
As if by some tasteless architectural joke, both the Marriage License Office and the chambers of the Divorce Court are located adjacent to each other on the third floor of the building, either making a commentary on the impermanence of marriage or, perhaps more benignly, affording one-stop convenience to people entering into and departing from life’s most important voluntary relationship. The irony of this curious placement of governmental services is not lost on Amina Rabun Meinert while walking past the doors of the former, which she first visited with her fiancé four years earlier at the age of twenty-two, and now through the doors of the latter, where she intends to be rid of him. The crisp clip-clip of her heels echoing from the vaulted ceiling telegraphs news of her return and rouses the sleepy young clerk. He denies Amina entry into the courtroom because at that moment the court is sitting in closed session—something about abuse of a minor and confidentiality. He explains that the case of Meinert v. Meinert will not be called before ten-thirty. And, no, her attorney has not signed in yet.
“When the weather is nice,” the clerk says, trying to be helpful, “folks go up to the observation deck to wait.”
And the weather is indeed nice, surprisingly so for early March. A confused mass of warm southern air has raced up the coast, blessing cities as far north as Montreal with three consecutive sixty-degree days.
“Where is observation deck?” Amina asks in her broken English with a heavy German accent.
The clerk looks puzzled for a moment. “On the roof,” he says, pointing upward. “You can see the lake from the top of the building. Take that elevator over there to the twenty-fifth floor and then walk up three floors to the deck.”
“Danke,” she says. “I mean, thank you.”
Amina tucks her handbag under her arm and walks back down the hall, past the Marriage License Office and into the restroom to check her makeup. The reflection is reassuring.
George will be fine, she tells herself. He understands. You cannot be with him in that way, with any man in that way. You encouraged him to go to other women, which was generous. And you thanked him by giving him money to establish a business. You owe him nothing. You are doing the right thing.
Amina touches up her lipstick.
But you have seen him cry, and you did not know that men could cry.
This plea comes from a different side of Amina Rabun, the Nurturing Amina who consoled Barratte with whispered lullabies after the Russian soldiers left the house in Kamenz. Nurturing Amina made only rare appearances and was always meek and supplicating. Survivor Amina—the dominant side of Amina—detested Nurturing Amina.
It was Survivor Amina who carried Barratte five miles to the hospital at Kamenz and then returned to the manor to bury her mother, grandfather, aunt, and cousins. One month later, Survivor Amina identified the bloodied bodies of her father and uncle in a Berlin morgue and buried them too. Survivor Amina also located her father’s trusted advisor, Hanz Stössel, the Swiss lawyer who, at Amina’s direction and in exchange for twenty percent, liquidated Jos. A. Rabun & S
ons, A.G., and all the Rabun wealth—landholdings, equipment, automobiles, art collections, gold, and the Schriebergs’ home and theaters—and moved the fortune to a secure Swiss bank account. It was Survivor Amina who later bribed the Russian officers into allowing her and Barratte to board a train pulled by a Soviet zone locomotive out of Berlin on May 13, 1949, the day after the blockade was lifted. And it was Survivor Amina, not Nurturing Amina, who seduced Captain George Meinert of the U.S. Army into a bed at the Hotel Heidelberg, and then onto an ocean liner with Barratte, and, ultimately, into the Marriage License Office on the third floor of City Hall in Buffalo, New York.
But now in the mirror where Amina applies her makeup appear the brown shoulders and arms of another man. He wears a helmet with the red star of the Russian army but he has no face. Amina Rabun knows this man well. She has been living unfaithfully with him for years, and he accompanies her wherever she goes. He is a jealous, harsh man, but she gave up trying to escape him long ago, and she has grown accustomed to his presence and his demands. She can deceive him, but only for short periods.
Yes, you are doing the right thing, says Survivor Amina. You are doing the right thing for George and Barratte, for Bette and your mother, for your grandfather, your aunt, your father, and your uncle. For all the Hetzels and Rabuns. You will not betray them.
—
FROM THE OBSERVATION DECK atop City Hall, Amina Rabun looks out across the vast blinding expanse of white that is Lake Erie in late winter under a cloudless blue sky. The sudden thaw brought on by the warm front has caused the thick crust of ice and snow on the lake to heave, sending huge ice floes down the Niagara River into the massive concrete supports of the Peace Bridge between the United States and Canada. If the ice refuses to break up and move downriver soon, the Coast Guard will detonate explosive charges to clear the jam. Amina can see men with ropes cinched around their waists walking on the floating slabs, jabbing long poles into the crevices to set them free.
The Trial of Fallen Angels Page 16
