The Lace Reader (39 page)

Barry

the untrustworthy. Having no other choice. Hoping that it has come full circle, as all evil must do before it meets its final end. There is fear in this room. But there is also hope. I can see it. The hope is over there, on the far side of the room in the small black opening that leads downward toward freedom. The hope is in the tunnel.

“We can’t stay here,” I say, seeing her sit down on the bed. Seeing how tired she is.

“It’s high tide,” she says, knowing the mistake she has made. “We can’t get out of here until the tide is low. At high tide the whole entrance to the tunnel is underwater.” She wants to sleep, she says, leaning back on the bed. “Just for a minute. I’m so exhausted,” she says. She’s right about the tides. You can smell the water from here. But you can smell the smoke, too, and that smell is stronger. It isn’t exhaustion that’s making Angela so sleepy. It’s the smoke.

“Come on!” I say, pulling her up. She wants to wait. She wants to see if they’ll rescue us. But the room is filling up with smoke. Already it is having its way with her. She thinks her judgment is clear, but it isn’t. We can’t wait to be rescued, if anyone even tells them we’re inside the house. If they come to get us, they will go up toward the widow’s walk. Where we told them we’d be. Even if they check the cellar, they will not find us. No one knows about the tunnel.

“Come on,” I say again. “We can’t stay here.”

The rats are ahead of us in the tunnel. I try not to look at them. They scramble down the sides, all going the same way, moving away from the smoke.

Except for the scratching sound the rats make, it is silent. When we stop to rest, the smoke catches up with us.

As we move farther from the burning, it gets easier for Angela to breathe. “Maybe we can wait,” she says, encouraged a little by it. The Lace Reader 363

“When we get to the end of the tunnel . . . maybe we can wait there until the tide goes out.”

“Maybe,” I say, trying to give her hope. But the smoke is right behind us. There is no waiting here.

I can feel the water on our ankles. I take the flashlight from Angela, shine it dead ahead. I can see the opening to the tunnel get narrower, higher, as the water deepens around us.

“How far to the end?” I ask.

She either can’t or doesn’t want to make that call.

“Estimate,” I say.

“I don’t know. . . . Fifty yards, maybe?”

“Half a football field?”

She nods. “I think so.”

“Is it straight or does it curve?”

“Straight,” she says, “but we can’t . . .”

We are waist-high in the water now. Ahead of us the rats have stopped. There is only a foot of tunnel height left. A half-moon crescent of air. The rats have given up. They cling together on its edge as close to the water as they can get. They have come as far as they can. They have reached their end.

Behind us the smoke curls up and creeps slowly forward.

“I’m not going in there,” she says. “It’s suicide to go into that water.”

But then she sees the smoke. Stealthy, creeping forward.

“We don’t have a choice,” I say, looking at the rats, making her look at them.

I can see my own history in her eyes. She has heard the stories about me. She thinks she has just made a big mistake, that she has just turned her life over to a crazy person.

I see her think about it. “I can’t make it,” she says, crying. “I can’t swim that far underwater.”

“I can,” I say.

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We’re up to our chests. Too close to the rats. She looks at them and then at me. She knows I’m her only choice.

“Don’t swim,” I say, “don’t paddle.” She nods at me. “Don’t even kick your feet.” She nods again.

I show her how to do it. How to breathe and exhale. The way you do for long dives. Getting all the air out first so that you can take that one deep breath that will sustain you.

“God help me,” she says, still a believer.

“God help us both.”

We exhale everything. Taking one bursting breath, I push her down into the water. And then under.

I grab her by the hair. That’s the only way to do it. Make her go limp and grab her hair. Holding it in my teeth so both hands are free. Feet alternately scissoring and pushing off against the bottom or sides of the tunnel. Propelling us slowly forward.

It seems hours, years, an eternity, maybe, in this blackness. I am aware of her under me, or alongside. Limp deadweight, letting herself be pulled along. My lungs ache. Time shifts.

The blackness is everywhere. I haven’t touched wall for a long time now. Or floor. Maybe the tunnel has widened.
Keep moving,
I think,
keep the rhythm.

I’m losing sensation, of the water, of its coldness. We are lost. All around us there is nothing but the empty blackness, vast and stretching endlessly in every direction. I realize for the first time what doom really feels like. Not the fantasy—the reality. Not the end of a painful life but the endless nothingness. Angela was right. This is suicide. It’s Lyndley’s plunge. The jump from the Golden Gate Bridge. The swim to the moon. This is the death I always thought I wanted, the death I’ve been trying to find The Lace Reader 365

my way to every day since I was seventeen. It’s mine now, finally, if I want it. The nothingness is all around me.

And there is a moment where I let go. I begin to die. It would be so easy. To rest here with the shells and smooth stones. I’ve been here once before, and it was perfect. Peaceful. But not now. Not anymore. Because it’s not what I want anymore. It’s what Lyndley wanted, not me. I do not want to die in the water, and I do not want to die in the tunnel. I try to want it. But I can’t. I have to save Angela. And her baby. And, as I am just beginning to realize for the first time in my life, I have to save myself.

Angela’s hair starts to slip out of my teeth. I grab for it, catching the tangles in my fist, unleashing everything that’s hidden. Like May’s hair, Angela’s hair holds secrets. It is a gill net, catching the magic as it drags, now releasing it back one treasure at a time: the
milagros,
the veil, the picture of the Virgin Mother. All caught in the lace net of her hair, all leading the way.

As I push her in front of me, I see the lace web of hair and, through it, the luminescence. The sea horse swims ahead of us, into the web of light. It is the sea horse I first saw in May’s hair as a child. This symbol is mine, I realize now, and I follow it into the web, spotting something in the distance . . . and I see . . . a faint green glow. Then, as my hand moves back in its stroke, Angela’s hair falls out of the way, and I realize that the glow remains. We have found the opening to the tunnel. We are swimming toward the light. We surface in the boathouse. Under the dock. I push Angela out in front of me to open air. We gasp for breath. I manage to help her upstairs to the loft. She sits on the bed, rolls onto her side. “Are you all right?” I ask her.

“I think so,” she says, though I can tell she’s not. She turns again, moans.

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“I’ll get help,” I say to her, opening the loft window to light my way. She manages to nod.

There is a pay phone on the docks. I start down the stairs when I see the robed disciples. Sitting on the other side of the canal, on the bench where the old men usually congregate. The old men have left that bench empty. They have gone up to see the fire, like everyone else in town. In their place are three robed figures looking toward the boathouse. Then, as I glance across the water at the opposing pier, I see more of them. Moving down from the house. Torches still blazing. The mob. Lighting grass, buildings, anything that will burn. I run back up the stairs. Angela is on her knees.

“He will come for me. I know he will,” she says.

“Who?”

“Reverend Cal.”

“Cal is in jail,” I say.

“No he’s not, he got out. He should be here. Reverend Cal will come for me. We’re going to Vegas. We’re getting married.”

“Get up.” I try to help her off the bed.

“He should be here by now. They said he’d be here.” She is staring out the window, scanning the crowd.

“Reverend Cal will come. He promised.”

“Get away from the window!” I grab her and pull her back. Angela starts to cry. My eyes trick me. I see . . .
Lyndley standing in the same spot. Crying. Our first summer together.
We are thirteen years old. We keep saying how happy we should be to be
teenagers, that everything is going to change for us now and how good
it is going to get, but everything has changed already, this summer. And
it is not good for us. It is horrible. I can feel her pain. Horrible things
have happened. Things I can’t say or even think about. They happened to
Lyndley, but I felt them, too; in some dark twin place, I felt every beat-
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ing. I knew every time Cal came to her bed. She could handle things, she
said. And I believed her. She could handle things as long as we were to-
gether, as long as she was on the island and we were together. That’s what
she said, but she was wrong. She couldn’t handle things. She couldn’t
handle them any more than I could.

We have to tell someone, I said.

He said he’d stop. He promised.

I am jolted back to present by the sound of more fire engines, from all the adjoining towns, answering the alarm call that Salem has sounded.

The torches are moving forward. There are fires now, on the street leading down from Eva’s house. A back lot. A shed. They are moving toward us.

They are all races, all religions. They are flashbacks. They are hallucinations. The angry mob: the farmer whose crops have failed, the neighbor with the stillborn child. They are all the people who have ever been hurt enough or angry enough with their lot in life to go looking for someone to blame.

“What are we going to do?” Angela turns to me.

As if I had the answer. As if I have ever had any answers. And then I see it. The answer. It is immediate, and it is all around us. It’s in the glint of moonlight shining golden off the roof of the Custom House. I think of Hawthorne and the stories he wrote, sitting at his desk over there. Even after he left this town, he couldn’t get away. It was Salem he wrote about.

And I think about Ann Chase. And what she said about the Calvinists the night of Eva’s funeral. “I wouldn’t want their god,” she said, “if their god isn’t powerful enough to make them unafraid of us. What kind of weak, lily-livered god is that?”

And my mind flashes back to Ann and the first spell we ever saw 368 Brunonia

Barry

her do. Lyndley and I sitting in the harbor off the pier, spying from the darkness. Giggling as we watched Ann and her hippie friends lifting their arms to the full moon and dancing around at the end of the pier. Performing their love spells. And us just laughing and laughing, because although we couldn’t hear them, they looked so damned silly, like true believers, out there dancing around like that with their hands raised up to the full moon and the future loves of their lives all still ahead of them. And I remember thinking that even though they were older than we were, they were so young and so very naive and believing. Because the world doesn’t work like that, not even for true believers.

“What are we going to do?” Angela sobs as the Calvinists get closer.

“We’re going to give them what they expect.”

She watches as I raise my hands to the full moon.

“Put your arms up,” I say to her, and she does it.
I’ll pit my God against your god
any day
,
I say to the Calvinists. It’s not their god I’m praying to, and it’s not one of Ann’s goddesses either. The God I’m praying to is neither male nor female. My God is the one who exists apart from all of men’s agendas, the God who takes you away when there is no possible place you can go.

“Please,” I pray.

Angela and I stand with our hands in the air. Our hands are lifted to the light, which I thought was the light of the full moon yet which I now realize is not one light but many. The many lights are moving toward us now in formation, hanging just above the water like tiny UFOs.

The Calvinists see them, too. And it stops them, just like that. The robed men, the ones who were wading across the water, are scrambling out of the way. And I watch as the formation shape-shifts yet again and turns into the lights from the top of the Golden Gate Bridge.

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“Trust your gift.”
I hear Eva’s voice in my head. . . . And then I start to laugh.

Angela sees the success of it, but she doesn’t get the joke. It’s not just that our prayer has been answered but that it has been answered so immediately and so thoroughly and with a sense of elegance and irony that only the real God could provide. Because when I asked for help, God sent me the symbols of my own demise. First the moon. Then the Golden Gate Bridge. But I was wrong about what I was seeing, I realize now. The images were never wrong. It was only my interpretation that failed. The treasures in the water were not symbols of my death at all but of my survival. And then the sound cuts through the silence, the requisite blast—

as the Golden Gate Bridge morphs into the party boat and the party boat makes its turn into the canal between the boathouse and Derby Wharf. The Calvinists scramble back onto the banks and out of the way of the huge boat full of drunken revelers and loud music and everything the Calvinists are repenting for as the party boat pulls into port.

“Jump!” I say.

We jump into the water below as the boat passes, putting it between us and the Calvinists, blocking their view. We jump just as the other robed men arrive at the back side of the boathouse, the smarter ones who walked instead of swimming from one pier to the other. They break down the doors and rush up the boathouse stairs, only to find that we have disappeared, confirming their belief in our powers, making them fall to their knees and beat their breasts and pray for deliverance from the likes of us.

No one sees us jump. The captain of the boat is too busy trying to dock. The revelers are all looking past us, up toward town and Eva’s house, wondering at the flashing lights, the fire trucks, and the smoke that has turned now from black to white as the firefighters finally begin to contain the blaze.