Hello Now

by Jenny Valentine

  I had so many questions. I could feel it, the current of the unsaid, circling the room, that thread of light between them still there somehow, still glinting. I wanted to try to understand what was going on. But Henry Lake turned before I could speak, his back to the light, his face in darkness, shielded again, all hat and beard and dark glasses. He took the glasses off and he and Novo looked at each other for a long time, and there was no speaking then. There was no breaking into that. Charlie Parker landed soundlessly on the table and settled down. Henry looked up at the painting of the dark-haired woman, her beautiful back, that tantalizing almost-turn.

  “Is that her?” Novo said, and I said, “Who?” and Henry smiled. “Yes.”

  “Who is she?” I said, and Novo said, “She’s beautiful.”

  “Her name was Dulcie,” Henry said, and for a second the lights flickered under his skin, the way I’d seen my own skin shimmer, and his eyes filled instantly with tears.

  “You?” I said to him. “You too?” But Henry said nothing, he just sat there, glowing and weeping.

  “What is it, Henry?” I said. “Novo. What does he know?”

  “I loved her,” Henry said, still looking up at her, still waiting, as if she might turn at any moment.

  “When?” Novo asked. “How long?” and Henry sighed. “A moment. A lifetime ago. A whole lifetime.”

  He looked away and wiped his eyes. “There was never enough time,” he said.

  “For what?” I said, and that look passed between them again, all the things they knew and I didn’t. “What’s happening?”

  “We have time now,” Novo said, sitting down on the sofa, pulling me toward him.

  “But that’s your time,” Henry said. “You shouldn’t waste it on me.”

  “Jude needs to know,” he said. “Do it for Jude.”

  I had no idea what that meant, but I leaned into Novo and he put his arm around me, and Henry watched us. He smiled.

  “Tell us about her,” Novo said. “Tell us Dulcie’s story. Come on. You know as well as I do that right now we have all the time in the world.”

  FIFTEEN

  Henry sat down, and Charlie Parker hopped onto the back of the chair, just behind him. Downstairs a door banged shut and another one groaned open and then it was pin-drop quiet while we waited for him to begin.

  “There are so many doors between this life and my last,” Henry finally said, and Novo smiled.

  “I could never remember them all.”

  “It doesn’t matter how many,” Novo said.

  “No. Just what’s on the other side,” Henry said, and his skin flickered again, and his eyes lit up. “I saw her first. Dulcie. I knew her before I met her. I think I always knew. But still. I was blindsided.”

  “Where did you meet her?” I asked him.

  “The first time? On a boat,” he said. “We were on a boat. There was a terrible storm. Forty of us, maybe more, trapped like cattle on our way to the slaughter, showing the whites of our eyes.”

  “When was this?” I said.

  “I was about your age. I was practically brand-new. I remember the horizon. Blue on blue, and nothing else, in a fine, straight line. I let myself stretch out along it. I made my mind wire-thin.”

  I thought of the moment, only hours ago, on the dark beach when I couldn’t tell them apart, the sky and the sea.

  “The edge of things,” Novo was saying. “The line between.”

  “I couldn’t think how far away it was, as far as the eye could see, and afterward I learned the equation by heart: 1.22459√h, where h is the height above sea level. The distance that first time was about four miles. But the line itself is endless.”

  “Yes,” Novo said.

  Henry narrowed his eyes as if he could still see it. “Sun on its decks, all that red metal crusted with rust and bird shit. The sky above us was thick with gulls. There was no sign of the storm.”

  He bowed his head. “When all around you is water, and all you can hear and smell and feel is the boom and stench and weight of water throwing itself against you, you forget everything.”

  Novo reached out and took his hand, and that’s when I felt it, this dank, dead cold lapping at my ankles, and when I looked down, the floor was moving, soupy with murk and bird droppings and the glinting scraps of dead fish, like the bottom of a boat.

  “What’s happening?” I said, and Novo’s grip tightened on Henry Lake’s hand.

  “Just a memory,” he said, his other arm still round me. “Not real. Not now. I promise.”

  He closed his eyes but I kept mine open while the whole room peaked and dropped on those remembered waves, over and over, the walls outside battered by great punching gusts of wind, the rain that landed on the windows deafening and relentless. I watched it all.

  “Only two things were sure in that moment,” Henry said. “My death and the water. I tried to picture the world without me and it was easy. I knew the world wouldn’t notice. I wondered if there was anyone on that boat the world would miss. I thought about them all dying and their families never knowing, only picturing them alive and well, and if that would make a difference, if that would keep a part of them alive and well somewhere after all.”

  “I’ve thought that,” Novo said. “I’ve wondered that.”

  “And then I saw her,” Henry said. “The woman next to me was trying to comfort her daughter. The little girl screamed with each drop of the wave, screamed with everything she had. I could see the white arcs of her teeth and the back of her throat, but I could hardly hear her over the noise. And then she lifted her head and looked at me.”

  “The woman?”

  “No. The girl. She looked at me and her eyes saw everything. With the movement of the waves, the high sky, and the dark slap of the water, she was there and then gone, there and then gone. But still, she anchored me to something. Just the sight of her stilled that storm, for me.”

  “Yes,” Novo said. “That’s it.”

  That thread between them again, turning and glinting. A secret understanding. The look they shared keeping me out.

  The storm in the room dropped. The waves of Henry’s memory flattened out. The water at our feet went still, like dirty glass.

  “And then?” I said.

  Henry said, “She asked her mother, ‘Are we dead?’ and I could see in her eyes that the woman wasn’t sure when she told her daughter, ‘No.’ I looked away from her for half a second. Less. And when I looked back, she was gone.”

  “Gone?” I said. “How could she be gone?”

  Henry shrugged. “I couldn’t find her,” he told me as the water drained through the floorboards, leaving dirty great marks on the walls and the skirting boards. I pictured Mum downstairs, seawater raining down on her in her new kitchen. I half expected to hear her call out, but she didn’t. The rest of the house was silent. The sky outside was blue and still. There wasn’t a leaf moving on the trees.

  Novo let go of Henry’s hand. “And after that?” he said. “The next time?”

  “It was here. I saw the back of her, going into this house. She was older. But I knew her instantly. I would have known her anywhere.”

  The memory glowed on his face, warm as the sun on a bright wall. We all felt it. Henry closed his eyes again. “She went in and left the door open, and I tried to see something more in that brief slice of inside, but there was nothing there for me to see, just her disappearing into the dark. She looked like she was stepping out of one world and into another. I knew even then that before long I would go in, that a part of me already had.”

  “So when did you?” I said.

  “Not right away. I walked past, every day, for weeks, but the house looked so shut up and abandoned. I started to lose hope. And then, one day, there she was, at an upstairs window. This window, in fact.” He pointed. “This one right here.”

&nbs
p; “And what happened?” Novo said.

  “Well. I stopped. And I waved at her. And she went very still, as if she didn’t want to be seen at all.”

  “Like you did,” I said to Novo. “Just like you did,” and he smiled.

  “My heart went into a tailspin in my chest,” Henry said.

  “And then?”

  “And then,” he said, “she smiled. She ran downstairs and opened the door. And my heart righted itself and flew straight. I stood at the gate and she stepped out barefoot onto the path. She was wearing a thin black dress and an old black robe, and her hair was black and her skin was the color of honey. I hadn’t opened the gate yet. I hadn’t moved.

  “‘Aren’t you coming in?’ she said. Just like that. I walked up that path and I took off my boots before I followed her in. It seemed like the polite thing to do. Outside I could hear sounds, birdsong and wing flap, a light wind in the trees, a passing car. Inside was silent. As if the house was holding its breath. She was already at the top of the stairs, smiling. She held her hands out toward me.”

  Henry’s smile was bright with rapture, lost in the story that was so long ago and could be yesterday, could still be happening right now, for him.

  “Did she recognize you?” Novo said.

  He nodded. “She couldn’t think where from. I didn’t tell her about the boat. Not at first. I didn’t want to make her remember.”

  “But you told her later,” I said.

  “Yes. Of course. In the end, I told her everything.”

  “Tell us about her,” Novo said, and I could see from his face that he was as bewitched by this story as Henry. That it was the stuff of legend now, for him.

  Henry sighed. “Everything about her was spectacular. I remember watching her throw a ball into the sky until it disappeared. I remember her careering down the hill from the top of town on a cart she’d made from fruit boxes and an old stroller, heading straight for a tree, swerving at the last minute. I would have sworn an oath that the cart took off. I was utterly convinced that she flew. Dulcie was fearless. She really lived. She did everything better and everything first, before me.

  “The morning after I found her, I woke up in a clean bed in a bright room. I felt alive, for the first time I could remember. I came downstairs to find her and she was in the yard. She didn’t look at me. But she always knew when I was there just the same.

  “She had a huge kite and she was untangling the string. She said, ‘Hold this, and don’t move,’ and I held it and every muscle in my body as still as stone for fear of disappointing her. The smile stayed locked on my face, like rigor mortis, like a happy corpse. I did exactly as she asked, and Dulcie liked that. When she had finished untying the knots, she let me come with her to fly it—to watch while she flew it, at least. I can still feel the ache in my neck from looking up as it turned on the wind, free as a bird and still tied to her, the strings invisible, so it looked like it was just her deft hands anchoring it, strong and heavy, to the ground. For days afterward, I kept seeing her hands, and the look on her face, and the kite whipping and spinning above her. Pure magic.” He smiled. “Pure magic.”

  He got up and went to a drawer in his bedroom and pulled out a box. His feet shuffled on the floorboards like they were tied together at the ankles. Such slow, small steps. He brought the box back to us and opened it and filled our hands with old photos, some black and white, some color, paled with age. The woman from the painting, her whole face, her wide smile. And Henry. Young and dark and clean-shaven, with fierce eyes. He hardly registered the camera. He was almost always looking at her.

  Novo was quiet, and ran his fingers over their faces, and frowned.

  “After that, we were never apart,” Henry said.

  “Really?” I said.

  He blinked. “Not once.” Then he looked at Novo and said, “Please. Can I see us?” and when Novo nodded, the bright room went dark, and Henry’s memory played out in front of us like old film, soft at the edges, scratched and jumpy. Dulcie, larger than life and sheer as a ghost, graceful and smiling, reached out from some ephemeral half-place for Henry’s hands, and part of him watched with us while another seemed to move before our eyes with the strength and power of his younger self, sweeping Dulcie off the ground, her black skirts turning in a circle, her bare feet. Images crowded the room in hologram layers, a chaotic slideshow. Her head on his shoulder. Their joined hands. A face in close fragments—the corner of her mouth, a tiny scar by her eye. A walk in the long grass. Stone beach by a river. The flat sea rolling from the deck of a ship. Cities and deserts. Mountains and palaces and canyons. Countless memories, speeded to a blur like the moving blades of a fan, passed over us like whipped air. And then, lastly, rooms in a house, this house, different but familiar. A painted chair. And Dulcie, sitting up in bed now, thinner, older, smiling at us all with a world of sadness spinning in her eyes.

  She faded slowly, and then the room was bright again, the window open, the seagulls calling for Henry, crying for more.

  “She always wore black,” Henry said. “Every day of her life. Black dresses. A black robe. Her wardrobe was like a funeral parlor. Look.”

  He unlocked one of the giant wardrobes taking up space against the wall, and it jostled with the swing of black skirts—silk and wool and organza and lace. Elaborate and old-fashioned, they smelled of mothballs, and Henry ran his hand across them like a pianist, and bowed his head and closed the doors.

  “What happened to her?” I said.

  He gave a sad smile. “She died, Jude. She lived and we were happy together and there was a lifetime in each heartbeat, a million perfect Nows. And then she died.”

  “I’m so sorry.”

  He looked at Novo. “It was a long time ago.”

  “And you’ve been here ever since?”

  Henry nodded.

  “I kept everything,” he said. “At the beginning, I was sure she would come back. I couldn’t understand it, not really. I pictured her rushing in the front door and scolding me for getting rid of all her things.”

  I thought of Mrs. Midler’s life laid out like that, the flesh picked off its bones, those plates, split apart like orphaned children.

  “Later,” he said, “when I knew she wasn’t ever coming back, when I finally understood her death for what it was, as something permanent, I just couldn’t bear to part with them.”

  “What else was hers?” I said.

  “The clocks. All the furniture. Those books. The map of the world. Dulcie loved to travel.” He looked at the map and at us, and he wiped his watery eyes, pale as marble. “But after she left, I never could.”

  Novo put his hand on me, and I looked down, and I held it in both of mine, his skin its own map, his body another country.

  Henry got up and walked to the window. The sun shone almost straight through him, like he was made of paper, or something thinner than flesh. He took a long, deep breath, and he was shaking a little.

  “Are you okay?” I said.

  He bowed his head, under the weight of it, and the pulse in my veins got bass heavy, and my heart felt huge in my chest. “The next part has been hard.”

  “Stop now,” Novo said. “Take a rest. You’re exhausted.”

  Henry looked at him, and I knew there was something else they weren’t saying then, to me.

  “What is it, Henry?” I said.

  “Nothing compares,” he said. “Nowhere near. Never will.”

  “Compares to what?” I said, and Henry didn’t speak for a minute. He held one more piece of fish out for the birds and then he wiped his hand on a rag and went over to the chair where Charlie Parker was still perched. He stroked the bird’s tired feathers with one gentle finger, took off his glasses, and brought it up to his face for a closer look, his pale eyes flat with sadness, his frown a deep dark line.

  “To this,” Novo told me, taking my han
d, bringing my knuckles to his cheek, holding it there. “Nothing compares to us.”

  SIXTEEN

  We scaled the wall at the side of the house, up to my roof, Novo and I. I climbed up first so I could watch him arrive: hands first, then face and eyes and shoulders. We looked at each other, for too long, without speaking. I remember thinking if I looked away he might fall and I’d be to blame, like I was the only thing keeping him up there. There’s not much I wouldn’t give to have that over again, that feeling at the beginning, whatever the risks. He crouched there, a hand’s width from me, and it was like seeing him through a microscope or something, so much detail, like I had nothing else to look at in the world. Only him. Nothing but him. Tiny scar on his cheekbone, hairline crack in his tooth, and his mouth—soft, I already knew it, and dark as a bruise. I felt these details, little barbs in my chest and fingers, my limbs, my gut, hooking me in. I can only talk about Novo’s face in pieces. I can’t put it all down in one place, the mind-numbing, accidental perfection of it. Up to my neck in him, even at that distance, happy to drown. I breathed, like I’m breathing now. Things quickened—the blood in my veins, the day’s noise, more urgent suddenly, more . . . well, more everything. Novo wiped the dust off his hands, straightened up.

  I knew it already. Nothing compared to this. To us.

  “Jude,” he said, and I said, “Novo,” and that was it. Enough. He looked at me and smiled. Gap-in-the-clouds, shaft-of-sunlight wonderful. I could feel it. But I still had so many questions.

  “Who are you?” I said. “Where did you come from? And why did you come here? To me?”

  He shrugged. “I got out of a car.”

  “Nine thirty-four,” I said.

  “Yes.” He smiled. “Nine thirty-four. Doesn’t matter where I was before. I’m here now. We’re here now. That’s the point.”

  He scanned the houses and the yards and the hills and sea beyond. The shine on his hair was lacquer, the water at night. A pulse ticked, soft, behind his ear. He bit his lip and I thought I could taste it, and I felt all the spaces between my ribs suddenly, all my body’s absences, all the ways I wasn’t only me, and I thought, This is what desire feels like. This is why people lose their minds over it. I had to force myself to look away. I was greedy for the sight of him, but like someone who’s been starved, and has to eat slowly, take small bites, because the thing they want more than anything on earth might be too much, suddenly, for them to take.