The path felt alien to Aleyna, and while the fog had thickened since their outward journey, the road itself was new to her, the hedges and walls and fences on either side were unfamiliar; the potholes in the tarmac seemed fresh.
She stopped abruptly, forcing Jack to tug at her arm in surprise.
“What is it?” he said.
“This isn’t the way we came.”
He looked about him, flustered.
“It has to be,” he said. “There’s no other way we could have gone.”
“It’s wrong,” Aleyna said. “We didn’t come this way.”
Jack sighed.
“We could go back,” he said.
“No.” She pulled out the map from her coat pocket and started unfolding it. But it was too big, too unwieldy. Lines and shapes and endless place names. Already she felt the paper softening in the mist.
“Listen.” Jack squinted into the fog. “The sea’s that way, you can hear it. If we carry on downhill, we’ll get to the main road eventually, and we can just walk along it to get to the cottage. We can’t be far.”
“Fuck,” Aleyna said. The word sounded misshapen when she said it, like the previous night’s drinking, it felt like something she should have been giving up. The map was defeating her. She crumpled it thoughtlessly, searching its hieroglyphics for the cottage, the path, the standing stone. But she couldn’t engage with it, not entirely. The geography swam before her and all the labels conspired to say the same thing in different ways. A hundred places she had never heard of, a thousand places she never thought to see.
“Come on.” Jack rested his hand on the map, a gentle gesture and one that surprised her by its calmness. It occurred to her how she felt at ease in his presence in a way she didn’t feel with Kevin. It wasn’t a relaxing feeling, there was always a nub of sickly tension that she was doing something she shouldn’t, but it felt comfortable in some other, inexplicable way, like two pieces from different jigsaws fitting together snugly even if the picture made no sense.
“I’m sorry,” she said.
“It’s okay.” He smiled. “Let’s go back.”
He took the map off her and started folding it. She saw immediately he was doing it wrong, fold against fold, it bunched awkwardly in his hands, but she didn’t say anything.
They set off again, downward, seaward, deep into the white. Aleyna glanced back over her shoulder, the way from which they had come looking near the same as they path they had chosen to continue down. There was no sign of movement that she could see. No shapes, no shadows, no flapping wings.
Jack reached up and pressed his hands to his head.
“My mum would appreciate this,” he said.
“The walk?”
“The fact I have a hangover. She’d say it was penance. Some sort of purgatorial state the drunk have to pass through before they earn sobriety. She’d say all that to me like she was quoting scripture, but she’d be laughing at the same time.” He grimaced. “Catholics,” he said. “It’s all about what you deserve with them. Sadistic fuckers the lot of them.”
Aleyna could only imagine what her mother would say if she knew her only daughter had been drinking. She certainly wouldn’t laugh, she wouldn’t give speeches either. She’d just remain silent in that way of hers, leaving the room when Aleyna would come in.
“Hey,” Jack said. He had stopped in the path some paces behind her, standing by the low stone wall, staring into the field angling down to their left. He turned back to her, grinning. “Look,” he said.
At the end of the field, the sun was shining. A hazy amber disc suspended low in the spread of grey, punching through where the clouds had weakened. The field beneath it was oddly beautiful, even and muddied, the day’s moisture hung on the too-early shoots of greenery, forming a glittering path to the far side. Aleyna could see a wire fence in the distance, on the other side of which was the angular ghost of a low building, a telegraph pole, a skeleton tree.
“It’s the road,” Jack said. “That’s the place just a few hundred yards up from the cottage, which means we’re over that way somewhere.” He gestured airily, back and to the left.
“So we are on the wrong road,” Aleyna said.
“I don’t know,” Jack said. “This one probably connects eventually.”
They stood together, side-by-side at the wall, and neither said anything for what felt like hours. As they watched, the sun sunk imperceptibly lower and the path of light it cast broadened.
Aleyna sighed. “We should cut across.” One of them had to say it. “We should climb over the wall and just … just walk across.”
She sensed Jack had turned to look at her but she didn’t meet his eyes.
“Farmer might have a gun,” he said. “Might not take kindly to us traipsing over his neatly ploughed field.”
“Farmer is probably as hung-over as you are.”
“True.”
Again, silence and again, it was Aleyna who spoke first.
“I just want to go home,” she said.
She felt Jack’s hand on her shoulder.
“Come on then,” he said.
The field was wet underfoot, a film of standing water reflected the subtle pleats of the clouds, but the ground itself, while spongy, was firm enough. They walked together in silence, Jack a few paces ahead and Aleyna happy to tail behind. As they walked, the mist seemed to loosen around them and the sun brightened to the extent that Aleyna could feel a trace of its warmth on her forehead and cheeks.
Ahead of them, the line of the road slowly began to come into sharper focus and Aleyna could make out the shape of the building they had seen more clearly. It was a hunched little cottage with its back to the road, a single, tiny square window hanging tight under the roofline. They had passed it on their way uphill, and while then it had struck her as a lonely looking place, now there was a warmth to it that felt compulsive.
Jack stopped to shake the mud off his boots.
“Christ,” he said. “It’s like … it’s like fucking porridge.”
He kicked at nothing, long legged and gangly and while small sods of mud spun off his feet, the rest remained clenched around the soles and the uppers, thick and dense and solidifying.
“It’s not worth it,” Aleyna said. “You’ll only get more.”
“It’s the more I’m worried about.” Another kick, this one almost unbalanced him. She caught him and laughed but he shook her off and plunged on ahead.
The mud was sticking to her shoes as well. It felt first like she had something in her shoe and then like she was standing on something, a rock or a tussock, something uneven that threatened to upend her. More than anything, she could feel the weight of it. She could feel the weight of the landscape, pulling at her and slowing her pace.
“I need a stick or something,” Jack was saying. “Do you have a pen? Or some keys?”
“Just keep going.”
“How about the map? Give me the map.”
“Jack.”
But she understood his impatience with it, and when his back was turned again, she set her own feet down at angles, as though she could push off the excess mud against the ground itself, but it just clung to the sides of her shoes, making them thicker and heavier still.
Her legs ached, but still she persevered.
They approached the center of the field, but Aleyna had to look back to see where they had come from to be certain. The road ahead of them looked barely closer than it had been when they had first climbed over the wall. It was clearer, true, but no nearer. Behind her, the path they had come from also seemed too far away. It was a distant blurry line in the mist, another hint of something boundless and infinite.
It reminded her, inexplicably, of a holiday she and Kevin had taken years before to the west coast of Australia. They’d visited a beach with signs warning of riptides to the north. Aleyna had been frightened by the prospect of being caught by the currents and dragged out to sea and yet there had been kids splashing about the wave
s regardless, some barely toddlers, waddling about the surf in inflatable armbands. Their parents were lying on the beach, oblivious under paperbacks and beer bottles. Aleyna and Kevin hadn’t stayed long. He was trying to do work but the sun bleached out his laptop screen, she found herself counting and recounting other people’s children, terrified not just that one of them might get swept out on the horizon, but that she might be the one expected to follow, just because she had been the one paying attention.
Now the field felt bigger to Aleyna than it had been before, it felt sea-like, oceanic, tangled with hidden currents. It was a vertiginous thought and she stopped so abruptly and her heavy feet stumbled so she almost pitched forward into the mud.
And then I’d never get up, she thought.
What a way to start the year.
Jack was still moving onwards. He looked like a string puppet, each foot raised comically high in turn, his shoulders angling first one way then the other, his arms flailing for balance. One foot, two feet. He looked so determined, like a child learning to walk for the first time.
She wondered what would happen if she let him keep walking. Maybe he would disappear into the fog like Kevin and Lou had. Maybe the field would keep stretching and stretching to accommodate the distance between them.
“Jack,” she said. She only spoke quietly, but he turned in surprise as though she had been beside him after all.
“What is it?”
He glanced around him, then without even a thought, started picking his way back to her. One foot, two foot. He looked pleased with himself, as though he had traded his dignity for a way to master himself.
“There’s something I need to tell you,” Aleyna said, taking herself by surprise. She hadn’t intended to say anything at all. Not to Jack, not to Kevin, not to anyone. She smiled at him instead as he reached her, and he put out a hand, maybe to comfort her, maybe to support himself.
“It’s alright,” he said. “We just have to power through. We’ll only get stuck if we let it.”
She looked down at their feet, facing each other like dance partners. For a moment she wondered if it was all too late anyway. She wondered if she would ever be able to move again. She felt that the mud was drawing her downwards. In her shoes, her feet were as cold as stone, water had pooled around them, green shoots rocking like pondweed.
“Jack,” she said and there was something about the way she spoke that made him pull her close and hold her.
Across the outer edges of the field, there was the ghost of something moving. Dark shapes flickered and flapped around the grey-white fringes. Aleyna watched them over Jack’s shoulder, she saw how they approached: circling, fluttering, stumbling, surrounding them.
“We should go back,” she said.
THE CENACLE
Robert Levy
THE WIDOW WAITS FOR THE SERVICE TO be over. The incomprehensible liturgy of atonal Hebrew gutturals, millennia of meaning resonant for so many but not her. She’d never learned the language of her ancestors, never considered that her supposed faith might lend her any comfort until now. Her husband’s coffin thirteen feet away and sunk six more, the pine box lowered south from the light of a sun invisible behind dreary February clouds. She can’t face the hole so she stares down at her feet in the mud-dirtied snow, stockinged legs like sticks beneath her long coat. Everyone in black, from her stepdaughter to the rabbi to the cemetery attendants and scattered among the Brooklyn gravestones, the land blotted out by the unyielding blizzard that had buried the city in its own white grave. Even still the snow swirls.
She waits for them all to leave. From her awkward brothers to her overattentive coworkers, she nods as they go, each one in turn, moving on to the luncheon, then later shiva, and finally to a peaceful sleep she herself could never bear. She is an onen, in a state of mourning beyond reach. “I’ll be along, I’ll be along,” she says, “I just need some time to myself.” A deception. She wants no time alone, not ever. What she wants is her husband back.
Her husband’s daughter, born of his previous marriage, is the hardest goodbye. “Why did he have to die?” the girl sobs, her wet face pressed against the widow’s breast; the girl’s mother keeps a safe distance, frozen beneath a denuded elm far from the plot. “Everyone dies, my love,” the widow replies, and strokes the ten-year-old’s strawberry hair, her wedding ring snagging in the girl’s tangled mess of curls. “Only some go sooner than later.”
She waits until the sun sinks behind the horizon of distant buildings before she admits to herself that she’s too cold to remain here forever, that eventually the attendants will return to usher her from the premises, tell her she can return in the morning, some widows do, day after day after day. Darkening sky and she moves from the gravesite at last, shuffles through the snow until she’s back at the road that snakes through the cemetery in one long and intricate seam.
She steps onto the path, and movement catches her attention: a dark shadow in the distance, hunched and shuffling along a mausoleum-dotted hillock overlooking the snow-caked grounds. The figure progresses slowly across the landscape, shreds of gauzy black cloth flapping like clerical vestments in the wind as it reaches with sickled arms to touch upon each tombstone as if blind and feeling the way forward. The stranger stops and cocks an ear to the side, nose threading the air, a bloodhound seeking a scent.
The widow is chilled by a bitter wind. She lifts the neck of her coat against it, the furred collar tugged up to her eyes as the figure turns toward her and lifts a hand in acknowledgment, the scraps of what seems to be a shawl shifting in the breeze. An elderly woman by the looks of it, hunched in a manner that suggests a kyphotic spine bent by defect or age.
The stranger turns and lowers her head once more before soldiering on, trudging through the scattered stones and disappearing around the side of a large rotunded mausoleum. The widow waits. But when the stranger fails to appear she makes her way up the hill, drawn to the crypt as if toward an answer to an unspoken but persistent question. Her shoes brown with mud as she slides against the wet earth, the still falling snow. She rights herself, and she climbs, until she reaches the twin doors that announce the entrance to the crypt.
The braided door handles have been wiped clean of frost, and she takes hold of their cold iron and pulls. Softly at first, but then she puts her weight into it, leaning back as she yanks until the doors groan open, just wide enough to pass. Within the slash of muted light an interior wall is visible—much deeper inside than she’d expected, given the vault’s outward dimensions—and it’s only upon entering the antechamber and daring to ease the doors shut in her wake that she makes out the dim illuminations of candleflame flickering farther inside the crypt. That, and the pleasing smell of cedar smoke, as well as the vague susurrations of voices, just as they fall silent.
She takes care not to trip upon the raised step leading into the main rotunda of the tomb, and she treads forward, broaching the arched entryway as she comes to a halt beneath the rose marble lintel.
Seated in an approximation of a semicircle are two women, one quite old and another young, along with an elderly man. Lit only by votive candles burning upon the crypt’s every ledge, the three are dressed in funereal black and huddled about a raised granite slab. Upon the stone surface are a further arrangement of votives, pale wax dripping and pooling into gray swirls along the floor of the rounded tomb.
“Hello, dear,” the old woman says from her place between the others, eyes bright in the candle flame as she draws her shawl with a wrinkled hand, brown fingers sparkling with gold and azure rings. “Would you like to join us? We’re just having a spot of dinner before it gets too late.” The hunched woman casts a hand across the stone block: inside the circle of candles a pile of smoked fowl is laid out, picked at with tiny bones jutting from charred skin upon a bed of unidentifiable berries and roots. The widow knows she should be repulsed but her stomach lurches for a moment like a dog jerked on a chain, and she’s shocked by her sudden hunger.
“
Who are you?” she asks. “What are you doing in here?”
“What are you doing in here?” the old man says, his voice a scratched-vinyl rasp. “We’re in this together, aren’t we?” He gestures for her to sit. She stares down at her feet and the puddle of melted snow they’ve left upon the flagstone, and she regrets not stamping the ice off them before entering.
“Come,” the old woman says, “don’t be shy,” and so the widow lowers herself onto the near side of the slab. “Excellent, excellent. Happy to see you’re joining us here today. We’re always looking for a decent fourth.”
“Bridge numbers,” the old man says. “I tried teaching them rummy, but there’s really no convincing these two.”
The old woman laughs, then covers her mouth. “Sorry. Bad joke, I’m afraid. We’re not really much for bridge.”
“What are you, then?” the widow asks, and turns to face the young woman, who remains quiet and still.
“Ah,” the old woman says. “Well. I suppose we’re many things, of course, no person being just one thing. But mostly, we’re the ones left behind.”
“Left behind by who?”
Even as the widow asks the question, however, she knows. For what is she now, but left behind herself? The young woman’s light blue eyes swell with such alarming compassion that it makes her want to weep in recognition.
“How long have you been here?” the widow asks.
“Some time, now,” the old woman replies. “After a while, you lose count of the days. You just … stay.” Her expectant face shines, incandescent in the flickering candlelight reflected upon the granite slab. “You’ll stay, won’t you?”
“I … don’t think so.” The widow makes no move to leave, however. Shadows dance about the curved walls as dusk’s last light evaporates beyond the surprising warmth of the stone shelter. “I have to go.”
“There’s nothing for you out there,” the old woman says. “Not anymore.”
“I have a stepdaughter,” the widow says. “I have friends.”
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