The Glittering World (25 page)

Bobbing, she thrashes and the gelatinous bile fills her mouth, her nostrils, ears; it coats her eyes as well, the putrid film rapidly hardening into a mask. Finally, contact—a length of what might be a tree limb, bristling with a coarse fiber like pine needles. She tries to climb the limb but it lifts her from the mire instead, a gnarled arm bending to bring her against its rigid form, cradling her like a newborn.
You are safe in our arms
, a temperate voice says in its secret language, and she is surprised that she understands.
You are safe so long as we are here.

Her rescuer begins to clean her. Starting with her mouth,
bristles scour her, hard and fast, brushing away the sludge. Wetness upon her face as a slithery tongue licks at her lips, takes up fluid as a hummingbird takes up nectar. Her nose and cheeks are scraped clean; her ears swabbed, and now she can hear a click-clacking of something at work, the sound of shell on hollow bone.
Click-clack.
The filth from her fingertips is scrubbed away, as it is from her breasts and belly, her body damp but drying in the hot air. She feels exposed, oxygenated.
Click-clack.
At last, the black mucus is licked from her eye sockets, and she lifts her heavy lids. Blinded by the light of a dozen distant suns high above, she tries to focus on the face of her savior, her redeemer.

Its eyes are onyx domes, black as the surrounding sludge. For a moment she swims in them, lost in their polyhedral depths, each facet of which appears to hold many more eyes. Each unblinking eye examines her within and without, the spindling branches of her redeemer’s fingers lingering upon her dimpled navel. Now she can see more of it towering above her, the rest of its red and ridged crest of a skull, twin horns quivering upon its crown like fat grubs wriggling in a mound of sodden dirt. Aspects of it seem impossibly large—two pairs of great sheltering wings, aglow with bioluminescent scarlet chitin, its trijointed limbs alive with twisting hairs, jagged jack-o’-lantern jaws moving sideways like a pair of garden shears—though its exoskeleton is slender, a narrow cage of interlocking muscle and bone.

The Queen
,
the Queen.
She trembles in her presence.
She has birthed me anew.

Her reverie is broken, but still she cannot scream. She can’t scream. She can’t wake up. She can’t wake or scream or cry, so she twists from it, its gangly limbs loosening their grip. She falls away, back toward the dark pool of life, the cavern lit by engorged tubers that sway from tangled roots draped in diaphanous
webs. She spins downward, and right before she hits the liquid surface she spies her reflection in the black water, her mouth a crooked slash warped with shock.

She is a gnarled but graceful tree. A tall gray birch, pale skin peeled from her flesh in strips to expose her lichen-flecked bones.

Elisa jackknifed awake. Her fists released damp clumps of bedsheets and moved to the stem of her throat, where she ran her fingers along its length, felt for the familiar contours of bone and cartilage. She was herself again. But she no longer knew who that was exactly, and was unwilling to hazard a guess; she’d been wrong too many times before.

She rose from her nap. It had been raining for days, and the sameness of the weather only exacerbated the disconcerting sensation of endlessness she’d felt since her return. Time worked differently now, every hour accordioning down into interminability. Still no sign of Blue. She vaguely recalled telling Jason he could go ahead and book their tickets back to New York, just to get him off her back. But were they scheduled to return tomorrow, or the next day, or was it in fact next week? She couldn’t remember. Not that it mattered to her, since she had no intention of leaving. But the indistinct date grew ever closer, and soon she would be forced to tell Jason that should he leave, he’d be going home alone.

She dressed in a red tank top and chocolate brown balloon shorts and went to the dresser to retrieve her camera, the one Detective Jessed had delivered to her hospital room with a pointed knowingness she couldn’t place. When she drew back the curtains of the pink room, she was surprised to see the
clouds had evaporated, the cove bright with sunlight; the rains had ended at last. A moth was pressed to the outside of the window, where it slowly beat its wings against the screen like a black and dying heart. Elisa flicked at it with her finger until it took to begrudging flight.

She spooled a fresh roll of film into the old Konica and headed downstairs. Jason was on the phone with a patient, one of the dozen or more strangers who depended on him. Elisa drank a cup of coffee and eavesdropped on the session, and was struck by Jason’s deliberate and measured tone, the one that said everything was going to be okay. Which of course Jason relished. His clients’ desperate clambering for his reassurances was his own source of relief; he needed to be needed. Which must be why she found herself pathologically denying him of it, especially when she needed him most.

She absently brought a hand to her flat belly, then forced herself to return it to her side. Soon, she would bleed. And then she would bleed again.

Elisa went out to the porch, the door swinging shut behind her.
Click-clack.
She stopped short on the far side of the threshold.
You are safe
, she thought,
so long as we are here.

Gabe was on the porch swing, hunched over a library book and drinking a beer, his golden hair a corona of bright curls in the late-morning sun. The cover of his book depicted a stone carving of a pagan nature spirit, the primitive sculpture’s chipped and leering face distorted by protective cellophane.

“Hey.” Gabe pointed his chin in her direction. “How are you doing? You need anything?”

“I’m all good, thanks.” She looked out at the cove and its emerald sweep of trees, the sunlight glinting off the misted gray water. The pristine beauty of this place was intoxicating; it was
easy to see why people were drawn here, and why they ended up staying. She remembered then how Blue, as a joke, had asked her their first morning whether they were going to stay in the cove forever. How dismissive she’d been, how afraid to so much as imagine such a thing, lest her carefully constructed world come tumbling down. Which of course it did anyway.

Gabe eyed her camera. “Going to take some pictures?”

“Thinking about it.”

“I was just going to take a stroll by the water. Give me a minute to grab my shoes and I’ll go with you.”

She motioned to Jason that they were headed to the beach, and he gave her a little wave before going back to his call. Elisa turned back toward the vista and started to shift into a little pirouette as she did so, but she stopped herself.

You don’t do that. You don’t dance.

But why not?

Because you don’t. Not anymore.

But oh, how she loved to dance; she would never stop, not ever. How could she? Just because she no longer pursued it professionally, that didn’t mean she wasn’t still a dancer at heart. A lifetime spent spinning in studios and on dance floors, in performance spaces and theaters and bars; she would dance in meadows and down country paths, in another place and time. Anything to feel her electrified muscles surging with the life-giving energy that movement provided her. It didn’t matter if no one was paying, or even watching.
Only when I’m dancing can I feel this free.

She had thought she was the girl in “The Red Shoes,” that she would dance and dance, maybe even after she died. But then her nemesis, that reliable fiend plantar fasciitis, crept in like Rumpelstiltskin to snatch the temporary gift she’d foolishly considered hers to keep. She should have taken better care of
herself, but as was the case with so much in her life, she’d pretended instead that everything was just dandy, that there was no reason she couldn’t keep on dancing forever, without any true cost. Hubris had gotten her in the end. It was a slow enough process, however, that she saw that ending’s arrival long before it came. She’d grown tired of living in an illegal sublet with four other roommates, of the demoralizing and endless audition process, all for projects that only paid half the time, if she was lucky. She began to feel old, and tired, and poor. And suddenly, there was Jason, and she’d, what, chosen him? Or chosen to give something else away?

Gabe returned after a few minutes and they walked down the drive, gravel dust clouding the tips of her ballet flats; Gabe’s sneakers, once vivid green, were now a dullish brown, caked in mud and dirt. “I’ve been spending a lot of time in the woods,” he said, noticing her attention. “There are all sorts of interesting things out there. If you know where to look.”

She pointed the camera at his feet and released the shutter.
Click-clack
.

As they passed Donald’s cabin, she could hear the subdued sound of a barking dog over the blare of opera music. “Donald’s dog,” she said. “Where was he?”

“I found him two days ago, digging a hole out by the Colony. Going at it like his life depended on it. Took me a half hour just to coax him onto the trail. The poor thing was soaking wet. He was frantic.”

“Maybe he was burying something.” Gabe didn’t reply, only grinned, without showing his teeth.

They walked toward the main road and the rocky beach beyond. She paused at irregular intervals to shoot pictures: two sandpipers on an electrical wire, the sunlit fringe of leaves atop
the tree canopy, Maureen and Donald’s place up the hill with the MacLeod house in the background, now some distance away. “I’m glad you found the dog,” Elisa said after a while. “Maureen was worried that something might have happened to him.”

“I was worried too.” Gabe gave her a strange look. “I saw you that night, you know. Last week? Outside Donald’s cabin.”

“Saw me . . . ?”

“With Olivier.” She walked ahead of him without answering. “You were allergic to him,” he went on, unimpeded. “Before.”

“I must have forgotten,” she said; she had no real explanation. She returned the viewfinder to her eye, obscuring her face. “Say cheese.”
Click-clack.

They headed down to the dock. Elisa left her shoes on top of one of the wood pilings and lowered herself onto the thin stretch of beach, while Gabe dropped right into the shallows, sneakers and all. “Let’s go this way,” he suggested, and pointed up the shoreline, away from town. “There’s a sandbar about a half mile from here. You can walk on it and see trout and stuff, just hanging out.”

They continued for some time without speaking. She was forced to acknowledge that all they had left to talk about—the only thing they really
should
be talking about—was Blue. “It’s okay, you know,” she said, breaking the silence. “We can talk about him. If you want.”

“Who?” But Gabe couldn’t sell it, and stared out at the bay. He pulled a candy bar from his pocket and gnawed on it, while she stuck to the shore and her camera. The water was menacing in its placidity, a hostile sheen with murky shadows moving restlessly beneath.

“I’m so alone,” Gabe said then, quite matter-of-factly. He
looked at her, his light blue eyes honing in and penetrating, almost fearsome. “Without him, I mean. You know?”

“Yes.” She lowered her camera and shot him from below, allowing him to see her face. “I know exactly what you mean.”

“He was special, wasn’t he? How he made me feel. Made
us
feel,” Gabe qualified, though still in the past tense. “From the second I met him, I felt caught up in something larger than myself, larger than anything I’d ever known.” Blue had the same effect on her. He had been her grounding wire ever since their clubland days, her port in those hedonistic rough waters. And she needed him still.

“You love him,” Elisa said, and shivered in recognition. She stopped in her tracks, the wet sand cold beneath her bare feet, and took another shot of Gabe’s face.

“Come on,” he mumbled, and turned away. “The sandbar is right around this bend.”

He convinced her to wade beyond the nettle of creeping brambles that clung to the shoreline, the frigid water to her waist as they made their way forward. The sandbar came into view: a five-hundred-foot shoal of pebble and silt jutting out into the bay, its sloping mass disappearing into the water like the neck of a diving loon. There was a near vacuum of noise as they approached: no gulls overhead, no rumble of the occasional flatbed truck from the main road. The shoal was isolated from the rest of the cove, the only way back the same way they had come.

“Peaceful,” she said, but didn’t mean it. The stillness and seclusion set her on edge.

They went out on the sandbar, the small rocks pinpricks on the soles of her feet. Ignoring the sting, she photographed the path ahead and the intricate pattern made by mussels alongside
the wet polished stone, rendered visible by the receding tide. Gabe kept his attention on the water, his eyes darting back and forth as if in REM sleep, searching something out. There was the faraway sound of a motor as a fishing boat rounded a bend in the cove, its needle-nosed prow a bright lance in the sunlight.