People hide their truest natures. I understood that; I even applauded it. What sort of world would it be if people bled all over the sidewalks, if they wept under trees, smacked whomever they despised, kissed strangers, revealed themselves? Keep a cloak, that was fine, the thing to do; present a disguise, the outside you, the one you want people to believe. My sister-in-law was a perfect example: the sunny, near-perfect mathematician who drove through the quiet streets in her nightgown when most good people were in bed, who studied the hundred ways to die. I had already decided I wouldn’t mention the fact that I’d seen her at the book deposit. A liar like all the rest, ready to pretend I didn’t know about the crack in the reality of her life, the dark hour, the library door, the book of sorrow in her hands.
Absinthe, that’s how it began — ingested, of course. Anemia caused by refusing all food, anonymity, arsenic, asphyxiation, barbiturates (crumbled into puddings or applesauce to make for speedy digestion), bee stings (see wasps, see nests, see allergies), belladonna, black hellebore (brewed into a tea), cars (accident, asphyxiation), crucial arteries (knives, razors, ballpoint pens), death by drowning, falls from open windows (eighth floor or above), fire, gas ovens, gunshot wounds, hanging, heroin, death by ice, ivy (pulverized and made into soup or tea), jimsonweed, OxyContin, pennyroyal, plastic bag over the head (see double death, see ensuring overdose), poison hemlock, the root of pokeweed, ponds and lakes, death by provoked police incident (see car chase, public drunkenness, public nuisance), public restrooms, renting motel rooms, sedatives, standing in the wrong place at the wrong time, stimulants, death by wishes.
I had seen Nina in passing since that night at the library, once at the market, another time in the cafeteria while Renny and I ate lunch; both times she’d waved cheerfully to me. I simply waved back, then went about my business as though I hadn’t skimmed through A Hundred Ways to Die before returning it to the shelf, as though my sister-in-law hadn’t been standing on the library steps in her nightgown. Self-help, that’s the section where it belonged.
The truth was, I didn’t want to interfere. Why should it be up to me to touch anyone’s life, guide someone right rather than left, off the road instead of on? Get involved and you made mistakes. Inevitable. Who knows where your advice, interest, love, might lead? Start and it might be impossible to stop. That was what was happening with Lazarus. I had taken the one bead of doubt Renny had tossed out and strung a necklace, red pearls, invisible to my eye, but tight around my throat, pulling at me.
Who was he really? That was the question. What did it mean to have a lover who would embrace you only in the dark? Who wanted to conceal not only his deepest self but everything on the surface? Nothing good, that was certain; nothing you could trust. Something unexpected that was sure to bite you and bring you down. How easy it was to be undone by some things. By these things. Red pearls. Truth. What you don’t want to know, need to know, have to keep in the palm of your hand. Grab it, the stinging nettle, the wasp, the shard of glass. Do it. Then live with the consequences.
Whenever I asked Lazarus what it had been like to be dead, he would laugh. I told you, we’re not talking about that. He had his rules: this, but not that . In the dark, all night long, but never in the light. But I wouldn’t let it go. When did I ever? I whispered and prodded like a nagging wife, a child who wouldn’t give up. Stomp your feet, little girl. Hack off your hair for spite. Get what you want. Don’t give up. Needle, beg, cry. Were there welcoming family members? A black hole? Did time stretch out into infinity, or was it a single slam,
poof, over, like a magician passing a kerchief over a rabbit, and then gone, gone, gone?
He laughed at me. It was a hundred degrees at the time and we were in the kitchen, shades drawn. Lazarus was wearing a long-sleeved white shirt. Now I noticed: every button was buttoned.
“Why don’t you think about right here, right now?”
Lazarus put his arms around me, pulled me close into his burning chest, had his mouth to my ear. His voice itself was hot, melting me. I felt him against me, thigh to thigh, and at that moment I believed I knew him. In a way. Hot, night, fuck, kiss, skin, muscles, heat. The way his arms felt in the dark. Each rib. Ladder, cage, his, mine. The size and heat of him inside me. The words he said that weren’t words at all. The way he wanted me. Wasn’t that enough? Couldn’t that be love? The very science of it was all there: heart racing, the mind willing to believe almost anything; she longs for the dark, wants him when she’s not with him, gets in the car at all hours, drives down dark roads. More symptoms? An elevated pulse rate, the center of the self moves lower, into the abdomen, sex, thighs, the unthinking, the undoing, the you not alone, the you disappeared, the no difference between inside and outside. All the signs. Proof enough of an attachment.
And yet there it was. The power of a single idea in my head. What was hidden, what was not. It was a tape inside me, one I couldn’t rewind. It was a bird’s voice, a mole’s whisper: Find out .
Isn’t that the center of every story? The search for the truth. The need to know. Tear off the sealskin, the donkeyskin, the feathers, the shackles. In moonlight, starlight, lanternlight, bluelight. Wasn’t that what everyone wanted: to see and hear. Take the veil from my eyes. The stones from within my ears. Turn me around twice. Tell me. No matter the consequence. No matter the price. At least until it has to be paid. At least until the price blinds you, deafens you, burns you alive.
When I next went to see Lazarus, I sneaked a look at the bookshelves in the living room while he was working in the study. Paying bills. Having the iced tea I’d made him. Busy. Trusting me. Of all people. The bookshelves were dusty. The whole room was. Bluelight, lanternlight. None of the books had been touched for some time. As a librarian I could gauge such things, what was in use, what wasted away. The layer of dust, the way the book sat on the shelf, unwanted and unused. I went from one bookcase to another. More travel. Guidebooks to France. Museums in New York. Peruvian villages. An entire shelf of Italy. All of it alphabetized, so orderly, so dusty. A museum of books.
Lazarus came into the room and caught me on my hands and knees.
“Getting ready for me?” he said.
He laughed. So did I.
I should have been embarrassed; there was so much about sex between us. I wondered how it would be if we didn’t need ice, water, all that cold. If given half the chance, we would never stop; maybe we’d grind each other into ashes, into dust, burning hot, bloodred.
“I’m looking at the books.” I turned away. I always did that when I didn’t trust something or someone.
“You don’t see enough of them at the library? Is that it?”
He was closer, his hands on the waistband of my jeans, fingers dipping close enough to burn my skin.
“If you’re going to be reading to me, make it a bedtime story.” He grinned, sly. I liked that grin. I liked what he meant. I suppose I flushed. My face was probably red. Rose. Blush. Not embarrassment. Ardor. All of the wanting I had, that much I couldn’t hide. We spent most of our time in the bathtub; we had sex the way fish must, in waves, in the cold, skins shivering into scales. When we were in the bed, we were on top of a blanket of crushed ice. My fingers turned blue; I didn’t care. They were numb anyway, unless I was touching him.
I waved a book in front of him. It smelled like green fields, red wine, sunlight. The subtle scent of printer’s ink. “You’re interested in Italy?”
“I’m interested in you.”
He probably thought that was the answer I wanted.
It could have been. It might have been. Except it wasn’t.
“Seriously. You’ve got so many travel books. You’re not about to disappear on me, are you? Go off to Rome or Florence? You could find yourself another woman, someone pretty.”
He took the book out of my hand. Could anyone be looking at me that way?
“You’re the one I want.”
I believed him. I should have stopped. But it had already begun, the plan I had, the need I had, the direction we were stumbling into, the middle of our story, the most dangerous part, when anything at all can happen.
Lazarus blew the dust off the book and returned it to the shelf. The books were in order, city by city, country by country. He stuck the book into the South American section. He didn’t care about order. All at once I had the sense that he’d never seen this book before. This or any other on the shelf.
“Maybe we should go somewhere.” I wanted a reaction. The way children poke at dead things with sticks. Alive or not? Vicious or tame? “I’m serious. Someplace we’ve never been before.”
He looked at me. Ten years younger. The sort of man who should have never bothered with me. Beautiful. Didn’t he know that? Hadn’t he ever looked in a mirror? Or was it me he couldn’t see? Was it situational blindness — I couldn’t see red; he couldn’t see ugliness or deceit.
But he felt something was wrong. It was in the air, like dust motes or gnats. There was a ridge between his eyes. As though he was trying to figure out why I’d be talking about going away when everything we wanted should have been right here.
“Hey, come into the kitchen,” he said. “I fixed you lunch.”
Just like that. Not interested. Next subject. The here and now . Lunch on the table. Like normal folks.
I followed him down the hall. I had a blank feeling, as if somebody had taken what little there was inside me and blown it away. Now I was sure — he’d never read the books on his shelf.
For lunch he’d fixed me hot tomato soup. He liked it cold himself, with ice mixed in. He poured himself a glass of fresh orange juice.
“Vitamin D,” he said.
He needed to think about such things. His complexion was pale; he was never in the sun. I thought he might be fading in front of my eyes. I thought about the field-worker who had half believed he was working for a monster. I sat at the table. We didn’t have much to say. Outside the oncoming dusk was undulating, moving between the clouds in waves of blue light. I felt heartbroken and I hadn’t even known I had a heart to break.
That’s the danger when you come to the middle of the story. You may find out more than you ever wanted to know.
We stayed in the kitchen and watched the light fading in the orchard. All that blue, all that light. If I stayed, I would rinse the dishes and he would rest his hands on the ice in the freezer, then come up behind me and touch me until I was burning. I’d let the tap water run. I’d put my cold, wet arms around him. But that’s not what happened that day. We were moving into the after; the then and the now and the soon will be were becoming separate realms. This had been happiness and we didn’t know it. We walked right past. Had no idea. Step after step.
I felt a stinging somewhere, a sharpness. We were waking from the dream of the kitchen, the afternoon, the way we wanted each other. When it grew dark we usually went into the bedroom, the bath. We were happy for the night. Now I was tired. It had been a long day. And we still weren’t done. I told him I didn’t feel well. I needed my sleep. I wasn’t ready to find out anything, I suppose. Not yet. I knew the truth would turn things around.
“Sorry,” I said when he walked me out to the porch.
“Sorry for what?”
For nothing. For everything. For all I was about to do.
“For being tired.”
He grabbed me and I kissed him until my mouth was burning. No ice. Not this time. He let me go, looked at me.
“I don’t want to hurt you,” Lazarus said.
That’s what they all said, and then they went ahead and did anyway. When I drove home, I felt bereft.
I’d lost something; I felt it as surely as I had when I lost the color red, a color I’d never even liked, one I avoided. Now every shade was faded without it, drained, not just scarlet and crimson and vermilion but even rust seemed gray; coppers and bronzes were flat without their red tones. Without red, the dawn was milk, rubies were worthless.
I didn’t trust him. That was the loss. Dropped like a stone into a pool. Not a word he said, not a book he’d read, not a fuck or a kiss or a look. Not a bowl of soup. Nothing.
I went home and there was my cat, tail waving back and forth, crouched by the hedge. Every flower was as white as chalk. She ignored me when I walked up the path, but came running when I opened the door to the screen porch. Foul-weather friend. She was due to be fed. She knew what she wanted; I was the one who couldn’t tell if she was purring or if her stomach was merely rumbling as she rubbed against my legs.
My porch. My key. My home. My nothing.
There was the shoebox, atop the carton filled with old newspapers, grocery bags, odds and ends. I couldn’t bring myself to bury the mole, and I couldn’t toss it out with the trash. I thought about Renny. We had been working on the Doric temple, and it was nearly done. He had to finish, and he’d been calling me, trying to set up a time when we could get together. But I was busy, too preoccupied to hear about his classes or how the mole he’d saved was thriving, getting fat on cream and grubs. I did agree to work with him on the coming Sunday, but he’d have to wait till then. I had my own problems to think about.
I peeked inside the box where the dead mole was kept. Some ants had gotten into the mess. There was a smell of damp skin, earth, rot. Nothing pretty. Nothing to keep. Looking at the box, I realized I couldn’t let go; not even of this. I’d been that way all my life, holding on tight. I couldn’t let go of anything.
Except for the things that mattered most.
I had an appointment with my cardiologist soon after. Craven. The man who insisted I had a heart. I’d stupidly complained of pain in my chest the last time I’d been to see him, and now he fitted me with a heart monitor that I was to wear for twenty-four hours.
“You have arrhythmia — and even though that’s not unusual for people who’ve experienced a strike, we want to be careful.”
“Is there some congenital defect that hadn’t been detected before?” I was thinking of that dreadful Andersen character whose heart is pierced by a shard of ice.
“You’re as normal as possible, given the circumstances,” Craven said. “We just like to keep watch. In case.”
I’d been calling in sick to the library in order to spend more time at the orchard with Lazarus. I’d pretty much used every excuse. Nausea, ears ringing, pain in my arm, my side, my everything. My ailments were half true at least, so my guilt didn’t sting as it might have, should have. Obsession did that, I presumed. The wanting of someone, something. The chances a person was suddenly willing to take, the lies so easy to tell. Frances York had never once questioned me or complained. Her generosity should have made it more difficult for me to be selfish, but it didn’t. After the doctor, I headed over to work. Once I’d parked and went in, I found I was looking forward to returning. I’d missed it, in fact. All those untrustworthy words were unspoken here, safely printed and bound up tight.
“Are you feeling better?” Frances asked when I arrived straight from my doctor’s appointment. It was late, hours past the time I should have shown up had I been working regularly. The weather was muggy and not even the old air-conditioning system could do much about that.
“I’m okay.”
Oh, sure. Only sex sick, love sick, lie sick.
Frances studied me. She might be losing her vision, but she was sharp. “Really?”
I pulled up my shirt and showed Frances the contraption strapped across my chest.
“And they said it was all right to come to work?”
Well, here was my chance, so I took it. “Probably not. I have an arrhythmia. They can track my heartbeat this way. But I feel like a horse in a harness. Or a mule.”
“You should definitely go home and rest,” Frances said.
I thought about Falada, that loyal horse who couldn’t help but speak the truth to the Goose Girl, even when his head had been cut off. I suppose I had a moment of remorse, a flash of honesty. It came over me as I stood behind the card catalog.
“I want to be the way I used to be.”
It was a stupid thing to say aloud. I didn’t even know what it meant. The me I used to be in what place and time? Yesterday? The day before my mother drove away from us? The minute before Renny suggested that Lazarus was hiding his truest self from me?
Frances was concerned. “Any recuperation takes time. Don’t rush yourself.”
She was making matters worse, being so thoughtful. No wonder I stayed away from kindness; in some ways it was worse than ill treatment. You could fight against cruelty, tooth and claw, but sympathy engulfed you, took you over, made you aware of all you’d done wrong. I realized I knew absolutely nothing about Frances, except the information I’d garnered from the photographs on her desk. Perhaps she also thought she knew me. I suppose she saw my empty cubicle and made her own assumptions. Poor thing, no photos whatsoever, no personal items, no personal life. And now that harness to chart her fluttering heart — why, it only adds to the already pitiful facts: the ridiculous pixie cut on a grown woman, the way she kneels down in the stacks, as though she had a penance to pay, and her dreadful pale skin. Poor creature. Poor me.
I kept thinking about those strange books on Lazarus’s shelves. I’d been so sure that our stories were the same, and now I wasn’t sure of anything. I didn’t begin to sneak about until Frances went to get some takeout. She was picking up a salad for me as well. Something complicated, I made certain of that, so it would surely take a while for the coffee shop to prepare it for me. Feta and onions and fancy lettuce and olives. Not the kind with pimentos, the dark purple ones.
“Are you sure they have that, dear?”
Not at all. But I was sure my order would give me the time alone I needed. I was ready to dig; I was looking for blood and bones. I watched Frances drive away, then quickly looked up Lazarus’s card. Seth Jones had indeed taken out guidebooks. His interests were deserts, South America, Florence, Rome, and Venice. I held the card in my hand and stared at the titles. A normal enough card, except for a printed mark at the very top. continued.This wasn’t his only card on file.
I returned it to the catalog. As I did I noticed a card made out for Iris McGinnis; this must be Renny’s Iris, the girl of his dreams. What could she find here that wouldn’t be in the university library? Perhaps she’d only wanted to take her time — we allowed books to be taken out for a month, and the university had a cutoff of two weeks. She’d borrowed the Odyssey and the Iliad. A classics major? A slow reader? A woman who preferred mythological creatures?
Maybe I should have jotted down Iris’s phone number for Renny, but I was rushed. Frances would be back soon. It was nearing suppertime. I grabbed a flashlight and went down to the basement, to the storeroom. There were boxes of waterlogged books, from the time when the pipes had burst and Frances had enlisted people in town to help save what they could. In the back of the room, finally, I found the old cards. I opened the first box and sifted through the jumble.
Many of the names referenced residents at the home for the aged. Dozens of yellowing cards, lists of withdrawn books belonging to nearly everyone over the age of sixty-five who’d lived in the town of Orlon. And then, Seth Jones. I held his card up to the light that filtered in through the single rectangular window. More travel books, Africa, Hawaii, copies of National Geographic . Once again, impossibly so, continued.
I went on to the next box, the oldest records of all. Most of these cards belonged to people who had already passed on; deceased was marked on many in Frances’s neat script, then there was some handwriting I didn’t recognize, which I assumed belonged to the librarian before Frances. I looked through it all; at last, I found Seth Jones. The very day he’d taken out his first library book had been marked in blue ink, nearly forty-five years earlier. Surely, this was Lazarus’s grandfather. Seth Jones would be seventy years or older now, not a beautiful young man who rarely left his house, someone ten years younger than I, a man who was burning hot with eyes made of ashes, someone hiding something, everything, including who he was.
By the time Frances came back with our food, I’d tidied the boxes, piled them back one on top of another, then washed the dust off my hands. Seth Jones’s library card was hidden in my desk drawer. Frances had waited for twenty minutes while Renee Platt ran out to the Quickmart to pick up kalamata olives. Now, after all that effort, I couldn’t eat. I told Frances there was something wrong with my stomach. Maybe it was the heart monitor pressing down on me. Maybe it was that I was more confused by Lazarus than ever. Why did I still have the sense he was keeping something from me? Wives, bodies, donkeyskin, rooms that should never be entered, stairs that lead to a storeroom of diamonds and bones.
I thought of the mole blindly puttering around the roots of the hedge until there was a sudden rush of teeth and a sharp twist of its neck. I thought about the way I’d knocked at Lazarus Jones’s door. I thought of “Ring of Fire,” the song people in Orlon listened to against their better judgment. I was starting to have compassion for people who did stupid things. If Iris McGinnis had walked into the library, I would have gone right up to her, had I been able to recognize her, and slapped her. Don’t you know how miserable you’re making someone who loves you? That’s what I’d have said to her. Who do you think you are?
“Go home,” Frances told me. The library had evening hours, but she clearly felt I’d be of no help. I must have looked dazed; clearly I was overwhelmed. I hoped that I’d taped up the boxes in the storeroom correctly, put each in its proper place. I hoped Frances never found out how untrustworthy I was, or if she did, that it was long after I’d gone.
I drove home and stood in my yard. I didn’t want to think, really. The possibilities were too terrible. I thought of all those fairy-tale husbands who hadn’t known their true loves in the dark. Fools who’d slept with evil queens or murderous sisters while their real wives were chained to tower walls or thrown to the wild beasts in the woods to be torn apart and forgotten. As a child, I hadn’t believed such stories. Impossible to be duped in such a way. The lover would always know his beloved, certainly, certainly, without a doubt. I hadn’t understood what a mystery a human being was, how many forms love could take.
The Seth Jones on record had had a library card for nearly twice as long as my Seth Jones had been alive. No wonder he’d been taking out an old man’s books. No wonder his house was dust-filled, his bookshelves untouched. Either the original Seth Jones was an old man or Lazarus was pretending to be someone he wasn’t.
Now I wanted to know whom I’d been sleeping with.
I’d left Giselle out for the day and now she came to rub herself against my legs. Who would ever think that September could be too hot? I watched the cat poke around in the weeds. I wasn’t expecting my brother, but he pulled up and honked the horn. Same car as Nina had been driving the other night. It took all my effort to lift my arm and wave.
“I heard you were at the cardiologist today,” Ned said as he came to join me. “Old Craven gave me a call.”
“Busybody,” I said. “Both of you.”
“I’m just making sure all the docs in the study treat you right.”
Ned had a tall Styrofoam cup in one hand; he went to fetch some lawn chairs from the porch, which he brought down to the scruffy yard, the worst one on the block. Probably the worst for miles around. “Oouf,” Ned said as he set the chairs down. “These weigh a ton. Wearing your harness?”
“Twenty-four hours. Then I’m ripping it off.”
My brother had stopped at the student union on his way over and picked up a large iced green tea. I supposed the research project he was at work on was taxing; he looked exhausted. He took a sip of his drink.
“You don’t like green tea,” I reminded him.
Was I supposed to tell him what I knew? Warn him? Protect him? Tell him all about Lazarus Jones? Reveal my secret life, his secret wife? Should I have said, Your wife isn’t who you think she is. She’s wandering around in the night, searching for ways to die. Not just one or two, you understand. That’s not enough for her. A hundred different ways. Even more than I know, the expert, the death-wisher.
“Antioxidants,” my brother said. “Nina says we should all drink three cups of green tea a day. Oh, and tofu and miso, she’s a big fan of those as well.” Ned looked happy, as he had at his party. Just the idea of her. Just the thought. He was brightened somehow. Uplifted. He leaned his head against the lawn chair and gazed at the sky. Maybe the moon was red, maybe it was gray; I had no idea. “Did you know you had bats?” Ned asked.
“Very funny.”
My brother appeared older now that he’d begun to lose his hair, but when I looked more closely, he was still the same.
“Seriously. Fruit bats. Over by the hibiscus.”
The tall hedge covered with large colorless flowers.
“Is that what that is? Hibiscus?” I leaned my head back, too. A black cloud flitted across the sky. Bats. “Shit. You’re right.”
“You don’t have to worry. You don’t have hair anymore. Long hair,” he corrected when I glared.
“What about you?” I said. Charming me. “You have less.”
Ned ignored the remark. He always did that, left you hanging with your own nastiness. “And you’re not wearing red or yellow. That’s what they’re attracted to.”
“Shoo.” I clapped my hands. My grandmother always told me that would keep bats away. The noise echoed and they left you alone. But the bats in my yard actually came closer.
“They think you’re calling to them,” my brother said. “They hear it as a love song. That’s why they smack into the engines of planes. They think they’re being seduced by some huge horny bat made out of metal and then — kaboom — crushed, mashed, and decimated.”
Proof of my theory: Love destroyed you.
I couldn’t help but think of Nina, that book in her hands, her nightgown, her bare feet, the way she looked right through me.
“If I knew a secret,” I asked Ned, “would you want me to tell you?”
“A riddle, right?” He grinned. He liked games. The more mathematical the better.
“No. I really want to know, Ned. Would you?”
My brother thought this over. He was wearing a sport shirt and chinos. I hadn’t made it to his and Nina’s wedding. My grandmother had already been ailing, and I hadn’t wanted to leave her, but now I wished I’d managed to attend.
Ned had thought enough. “Secrets are only knowledge that hasn’t yet been uncovered,” he told me. “Therefore, they’re not in fact secrets, but only unrealized truth.”
“Bullshit.” I snorted and looked up at the bats.
“Is this about your health?” Ned asked. “Because if that’s what it is, maybe I should know.”
We looked at each other. We were both extremely cautious people. We’d learned the lessons of our childhood. Ask questions, only not too many. Look before you leap. Buy new tires. Be careful whom you love.
“I’m just wearing the heart monitor for my cardiologist’s peace of mind. I’m fine. I skip a beat. Who cares? I get to take this contraption off in the morning.”
Ned looked relieved. I suppose he still felt responsible. He didn’t need to, but he did.
“Now that I know you’re all right,” he said, “I just want to look at the sky.”
Sitting there with my brother, I realized how little we knew about each other; we were like strangers who’d been forced into the same ditch during some vicious, bloody war, and as soon as it was over, we’d gone our separate ways. For an instant I felt like crying. Whenever our mother went out with her friends, Ned would read to me. I always begged for fairy tales, which he’d claimed to despise. I’d thought he read to me only to keep me from whining, to shut me up so I’d go to sleep. Now I wondered if he’d felt responsible back then, if he’d needed comfort as well. I wondered if he’d also wanted to hear those stories.
“If she came back, would we recognize her?” my brother asked.
A funny question from him. I didn’t think he wondered about such things.
“We’d know her anywhere.” I sounded convinced. But in fact I wondered about that myself. If our mother wandered out from behind the hedge right now, she’d still be thirty, her long blue scarf wrapped around her, her high-heeled boots, her pale hair. Why are you sitting in the dark? You aren’t reading, are you? You’ll ruin your eyes. You’ll never get to sleep that way.
I stretched out my legs in the prickly grass. My lawn was the sort of disaster no one could fix. “We’d know her,” I said. “I think.”
“I suppose we would,” my brother agreed.
“So, are you sure you don’t want to know any secrets?” Did I mean whether or not we’d truly know our own mother, lost so long ago, or who I was deep inside, or what his wife was reading when all the lights were out?
“Do you?”
“You have secrets?” I was surprised. Ned had always seemed clear to me in some way, perfectly knowable, logical, a piece of emotional glass.
“Unknown truths,” my brother joked. “At least to you. Known to me, of course. At least in theory. What I know and what I don’t know, I’m not sure I can be the judge of that.”
“Oh, forget it.” I was annoyed, the way I’d been with him when we were children and he seemed more interested in bats, ants, stars, blowflies, theorems, than in human beings. I got up and folded my lawn chair. “Thanks for stopping by. My cardiologist, the worrywart, told me to get a good night’s sleep. Maybe I should listen to him for once.”
“I was thinking about the Dragon today,” my brother said. “I never got the chance to interview him.”
“The old man in Jacksonville? The one who died twice?”
I felt guilty about my current secret life with a dead man. But then, my brother didn’t want to know any secrets, so he wouldn’t have wanted to know about Lazarus Jones.
“It would have been fascinating — just as an incident. I’ve tried to contact him three times for our study. He doesn’t have a phone. I guess I should give up, the way we did with that Jones character. Chased Sam Wyman off his property with a gun.”
I wanted to get the conversation back around to the Dragon.
“So, go see the Dragon. You’re not the one who gives up. You never do. That’s me.”
“Oh, right,” my brother said. “Miss Chickenshit.”
“Mr. Bullshit,” I said right back. It was the way we used to talk to each other, and it was far more comfortable than being polite. It made me miss my childhood. Of all things. I started up toward the porch. I didn’t especially want to discuss men who’d died and come back to life. Not with Ned.
“You’d better run.” My brother grinned and pointed to the bats in a cloud up above. “Woo-hoo! They might come after you.”
“You are so mean.” I started to trot, the lawn chair over my shoulder hitting against my ribs. So, I was still nervous about bats, big deal. My brother got up and closed his lawn chair, then followed me to the porch, where we deposited the chairs into a pile of lawn furniture. The porch was a mess, like the rest of my life. Garbage pails. Tools left behind by the previous tenant. Umbrellas. An old orange crate on its side in which Giselle liked to sleep. My brother spied the shoebox. He would.
“What’s this?” He opened the box; there was the little leaf of a mole. Dry and ashy now. Bone and fur. “You tried to save something,” Ned said.
I laughed. How mistaken my poor brother was. “Idiot. Can’t you see? I killed it.”
Ned went into the kitchen and came back with a serving spoon. I traipsed after him to the hedge, where he intended to dig a little grave. There were beetles flying about. There was the scent of oranges, even here, miles away from any of the orchards. The circle of bats was high in the sky. They looked as though they could reach the moon.
My brother’s knees creaked when he knelt down on the ground. He was thirteen years older than my mother had been on the night she died. He finished digging the grave in no time. He was efficient. Always had been.
Ned took the mole out of the shoebox and placed it in the earth, then covered the body with several hibiscus leaves. I realized I was crying, something I hadn’t done at my own mother’s funeral. When I deposited my heart monitor at the cardiologist’s office in the morning, my doctor would most likely find a spike at exactly this hour. The hour when my brother and I buried something together while the bats flew overhead. The time when I felt something.
I wished my mother would step out from between the hedges. I wished I could take back everything I’d ever done or said or wished. I would throw myself at her feet and ask her to forgive me. She’d be kind, I knew that. She was that way, and would be still. She’d tell me to stand up, to forgive and forget; she’d tell me she wasn’t one to hold a grudge. That her heart was open and always had been; that she was the same as she was, not a day older; that love didn’t change like the moon or tides, that it was the single constant in the universe.
But here was the thing — even if I did know her, I wasn’t certain she would recognize me. A strange woman in the dark, all grown up, standing in the grass, under the moon, beneath a cloud of bats, crying at a funeral for a leaf, a mole, a lost love, an idea.
“Well, that’s done,” my brother said.
He clapped the dirt from his hands and the bats came closer. “What’d I tell you. Poor schmucks. They’re drawn to sound.”
He knew I was crying, but was too polite to mention it. Just as I was too polite to suggest that his wife was someone he didn’t really know.
“Well, thanks,” I said. “I would have kept it forever.”
We laughed at the way I held on to things. I didn’t even like to throw out my garbage; I had a month’s worth of old newspapers stacked in the hall.
“Let go,” my brother told me.
“You first.”
Exactly what we used to say when we both wanted the same thing — the last cookie in the box, the last soda in the fridge.
We looked at the moon.
“Is it red?” I wanted to know.
“Any color you see is refracted by the water molecules in the air. It’s stone-colored, however it appears, kiddo. It’s gray.”
Regardless, it was certainly the most beautiful full moon of the year. In New Jersey it would be rising over birch trees, marshes turning brown, papers blowing down the sidewalks.
It was probably the color of a human heart.
“You’d be able to float if you were walking up there,” my brother told me.
I thought about that after Ned left to go home. I thought about how he’d called me in from the porch when my mother drove away and how I wouldn’t listen. Eventually, of course, I’d had no choice. My feet were freezing; they hurt. At last, I went inside. We were weightless that night. We had both stood at the window together, just for a second, side by side, seeing the very same thing for once in our lives: the long road away from our house, the dark horizon, the future, and everything it could bring.
I brought a candle with me when I next went to the orchard. How many women in how many stories had done this before? Mistrusted a lover, longed for an answer to a question that was not yet fully formed. If a secret was only unrealized knowledge, as my brother had said, what harm could it do? How dangerous could a tiny shred of truth be? It had no thorns, no talons, no teeth nor tail nor sting. Truth, sleeping on the other side of what I knew. Of course, there were a hundred versions of the same story: a woman who has to learn what she already knows, somehow, somewhere inside.
I’d brought matches as well. In my pocket, snug against my hip bone. It was a plan, not an accident. There was no chance involved, no circumstance. It was what I thought I wanted, needed, had to have. I had spent the day waiting for the dark, looking forward to it, the way bats must pine for the last bits of sunlight, green, gold, disappearing from sight. I’d dropped off my heart monitor, then stopped at Acres’ Hardware for the candles; I was in the notions aisle when I saw the man who’d been attacked by the bulldog, the patient my physical therapist had told me about. Bitten, torn apart, he was now shelving cans of paint. Even from a distance I could see the marks on his face, tooth and nail.
“I’ve got the Mandarin Orange,” he called to a customer, just as though he were unscarred. And maybe he was. He had managed to be the reverse of most people. In his case he showed the deep, dark riddle; inside, he might be as clear and pure as water.
I went home and waited for the end of the day. My stomach was jumpy. I couldn’t eat supper. Renny’s project was still in my kitchen. He phoned to check in and I swore we would finish the temple on Sunday; the due date of the project was Monday and without the temple Renny would surely fail. Well, failure was something I knew about. So I promised him, my one and only friend. I assured him we had time. It was Friday now. I had all night. All day tomorrow. Plenty of time to prove my doubts right or wrong.
The sky was even darker than usual, cloudy, no moon in sight. I drove out, my foot heavy on the gas pedal. Florida whirred past me, a dizzying globe. Heat and darkness, beetles hitting against the windshield. I used to walk home from the library in New Jersey feeling lost even though I knew my way. Now I felt found. I passed exits with names I didn’t know, towns I’d never been to, but I knew exactly where I was going. Gold and green and black, like a bat drawn to clapping hands in the darkness, against all logic, a love song it was impossible to understand.
He was waiting for me. That surprised me. I couldn’t imagine myself mattering to anyone. There was something suspicious in his desire for me. I saw him when I got out of my car, slammed the door shut, smelled oranges. There were moths in the night along with the beetles, and little gnats and mosquitoes. Something bit me and it hurt. I ran to the porch. I wanted to get this over with.
“Hey, you.” He rose from the old wooden bench left on the porch for fifty years or more. He was wearing a long-sleeved white shirt, jeans, old boots. I saw him shining there, like a star.
“Hey, you,” I said back.
“You’re late. I was going to make you some dinner.”
Just like normal people. He seemed to want that.
I went to him, reached my arms around him, stood on my toes, started to burn.
He backed away from me, looked into my face. It was just me. I leaned up and kissed him. Once, twice, then I had to stop.
“I missed you,” he said.
He kissed me again, hard.
Every fairy tale had a bloody lining. Every one had teeth and claws.
“Baby,” I said. I called him that. He was so beautiful, his hands, his ashy eyes, his throat, his everything.
“I could still make soup.” He’d opened the screen door for me. I thought I would probably always remember how it sounded. It was the opening into the after . It sounded like wind on a quiet night.
“I’m not hungry,” I said, the way a starving woman might, so as not to give herself away.
Into the dark hallway, past the coatrack, the jackets, the rain boots, all of it belonging to Seth Jones, whoever he was; Lazarus stopped, ran his hands over me, let me feel how he’d been missing me. It was all so strong, the way the before always is. The ice click-clacking on the plastic porch roof. The way your feet hurt after you stomp them and you’re barefoot.
“You know what I want,” I said. Said it to his face. He had no idea, of course, but he thought he did. Hoped he did. Kissed me to prove it. “I need a minute first,” I told him.
I went into the bathroom. My breathing was off. The huff and the puff of all liars, even those in search of the truth.
I ran the cold water in the tub and took off my clothes. I was standing there, looking in the mirror. My pixie hair had grown in. My skin was pale. I turned off the lights, turned off the tap. I didn’t want anything to scare him off, not a wash of light under the door, not any empty tub. I had the marks of the heart monitor on my skin. My heart skipped a beat, but the cardiologist had told me that was now its normal rhythm, abnormal.
I called, “Come in.” I said it the way I usually did, like I wanted him, no matter who he was or what he was hiding. By now we had sex perfected, at least for us. Hot but not burning, or burning just enough. I knew to put vinegar on my fever blisters, knew how cold the water had to be for me to take him in my mouth without a scalding, knew him in the dark, the pieces that fit together, the whole man who’d walked with death and had come back to me, for me, with all his secrets.
This is what I knew about him: the cage of his ribs, the rope of his veins, the hardness of his stomach, the hardness of him inside me, the way our mouths fit together, the burning, the heat of the words he said, the rhythm of the sex we had, watery, overflowing, don’t ever stop, it’s not enough and then it’s everything. Was there more to know? I faltered for a moment. I thought of all those women who had sex with monsters in the dark. Men without names who were bears or ogres, men who were enchanted or enslaved. Men covered with sealskin or deerskin, men with claws, men who could not tell a lie, men who could tell nothing but the truth, though it might damn them. Angels disguised, angels exposed; men who had been dead and came back forever changed, forever altered, hiding what they knew. Who they were. The deep inside. The ever of the after .
He came in the room, already naked. I couldn’t see him; I could feel his presence. His flesh, burning. His step on the floor. I was standing with my back against the tile wall. Ready. I suppose he trusted me, as a mole trusts a cat, seeing what awaits only as a shadow, not as a predator who wants what she wants, needs what she needs, has to have it. He got into the tub. I could hear the water; I could hear him settle against the porcelain. Cool against his burning back. Soothing him, probably, like rain on the night when it happened, pouring soaking rain.
The water around him sloshed back and forth. The tiles under my bare feet were cold. So dark I had to feel my way.
Wasn’t that part of the story? It is not what you feel or see but what you know in your heart? But my heart was abnormal, the rhythm was off. It thumped against me like a rock against bone. Cold thing, stone thing, thing that would not be red if I ripped it out of my own chest. A piece of ice. Clear. See-through.
I took the candle and put it on the ledge, where there were shampoo bottles, soap. I could feel the bottles with my long clumsy fingers. My bitten nails. The bottles knocked against one another. Time was slow. It was the before that I was in, that I was leaving. I could feel myself making my own future, a spider at work on her web. There was a finished woven pattern, one I thought I knew.
When I lit the match, the gleam was so bright I couldn’t see anything for a moment. I thought it would be easier this way, less harsh than switching on the light, but I was wrong. I lit the candle and it flared. Blue. Yellow. I was nearly blinded. “What are you doing?”
I could hear his panic before my eyes adjusted to the light. He was angry. He was shocked. I knew I had to look. Wasn’t that the plan? I saw him as he stood, dripping water, lunging forward to grab the candle. Wax fell onto his chest; he didn’t seem to notice. He grabbed at the flame, extinguishing it between his fingers. I could smell him burning.
“Well,” he said. “This is how it is.”
The burning man, cold now. I heard the betrayal. There it was. What had I expected? What had I done?
Now that I had seen what he’d been hiding, I continued to see it through the dark. Branded, is that what they say?
Memory that is stronger than the present, that stays imprinted behind your eyes, layering itself over everything you see in the present, in the here and now. I still saw it in the dark.
Lazarus was marked by the moment of his strike, covered by what were called lightning figures. I’d read about them in a book my brother gave me. Usually they were treelike images imprinted on the body of someone struck by lightning. No one was certain if the images were actually trees or if instead they were some interior path of the veins and arteries. Some experts felt that these designs were shadows caused by extreme bright light; similar images could be produced on glass by large charges of electricity. Handprints appeared on trees, or the perfect shadow of a horse might be captured on the side of a barn; the last image a person had seen as he’d been struck by lightning was cast onto his skin, his soul. All that remained.
“Want a better look? You wanted to see. Look! Go on!”
He was out of the tub, dripping water. He flipped on the light. I blinked, a cold, untrustworthy fish. I could see myself as well. My reflection in the mirror, a pale woman who was quite capable of repeatedly destroying her own life. I grabbed a towel, covered myself. I felt like crying. You do something and you can’t go back, can’t rewind. I knew that, didn’t I? Ice on the porch, tires on the road, make a wish, light a candle, ruin your life.
There were the marks of trees, shadow branches up and down Lazarus’s arms. The arms I knew. The rope of veins.
On one arm there was a blackbird, startled, ready to take flight. And all over there were the wheeling branches, as though Lazarus was part human and partly made of bark and leaves.
“I’m sorry,” I said.
Barely enough. Barely anything. Disloyal, untrustworthy bitch, shivering now, shuddering with the very thought of what I’d done to us. I could never get anything right.
“No, really. Finish it! Look at me.”
He grabbed me then. But that wasn’t the worst of it, the angry grasp, the hot hands. Far worse was a tone of voice that I hadn’t heard before, except in our darkest, deepest moments. No bullshit, no pleasing me, for himself. Just for himself. Whoever that was. Whoever he was.
“Look at it all.”
It sounded like a threat. It sounded like the end. And something more. Maybe it was a relief to show someone at last. To turn around and let me see. I did the worst thing when he showed me his back, I made a sound, a gasping, despite my vow to myself to have no reaction. His deepest self, isn’t that what I wanted? True self, real self, self you’re hiding from the rest of the world.
There was a shadowgraph of a face on his back. Gray and black, the impression of an older man, mouth half open, eyes frightened.
I knew it for what it was right away, expert that I was. There were a hundred ways, and this was one of them. The shadowgraph was of the moment of a man’s death.
“Happy?” Lazarus asked me.
I had been — how much so, I had no idea. The before, of course. The time I didn’t know was the before, when I’d had something worthwhile, something I had wanted, something that could be turned to cinders with a single match. How many fairy tales had warned me of this? Keep the light out, have faith, trust in what you feel, not in what you see. Leave the matches at home. Leave it be.
I thought how the meteorologists would love to get their hands on Lazarus. How thrilled they’d be to pose him up against their white screen and photograph him, right, left, naked, one of a kind, piece of art, piece of work, shadow man, death man, my Lazarus, or the Lazarus who had been mine. Terrible time to know the truth, not the truth of him, oh no. The truth of me. But here it was. On the floor. A splash of cold water, a leftover, a strand of red thread that was invisible to me: I didn’t know it was love until the moment of bright light. I didn’t know what I felt until I went one step beyond it.
“There you have it,” Lazarus said. “The real me.”
He walked out of the bathroom, slammed the door. I heard the water in the tub, the wind outside. I heard the sound of my own raspy breathing.
I got dressed. I was still shivering. I followed him. I wasn’t thinking anymore. That hadn’t worked for me. It was hot outside on the porch where he was standing. Too humid to see stars. The odor of red oranges. Do they make perfume out of it? They should. I would buy it and I don’t even like cologne. A bottle of oranges, and one of blue ice, and one of tears, and one filled with a potion that was so burning hot when you poured it over your skin you came close to dying. But not really, just hovering above all that was burning, all that was alive.
“You should go and never come back,” Lazarus said.
“Tell them if that’s what you want to do. Phone the newspaper. I can’t stop you. Tell everyone about this damned mark on me.”
“It’s a shadowgraph. I’ve read about them. It’s probably caused by a brilliant flash of light.”
“Is that what it is?” Lazarus almost laughed. But not quite. “Hell, I thought it was my punishment.”
“Maybe I’m your punishment,” I said.
“Yeah, well, I blame the red dress for everything.” Everything,
as in over? Everything, as in just beginning? He didn’t sound as angry. Only sad. Lost. I knew what that was like. The black trees, the path that can’t be found. The ice, falling like stones from above.
The beetles were clicking, and so was my brain. Always my task: undo what has been done. I wanted to whirl time backward, clothes off, lights cut, door open, car on the road.
“I feel him there every minute of every day,” Lazarus said. “I know what it is. Whatever you want to call it. It’s my punishment all right.”
In the story of the fearless boy, the foolish hero played cards with the dead and walked through graveyards without fear, but not even he carried a dead man on his back. The burden of that was an impossible weight. I knew what that was like, too.
Lazarus turned to me. He was barefoot and we were standing on the porch. That alone terrified me. The then and the now slammed together. His white shirt was wet from his soaking wet skin.
“Aren’t you going to ask? You wanted to know, so go ahead. Ask me.”
All things happened this way, didn’t they? Every story, every life, every coincidence. A left turn instead of a right turn. A stomp of the feet. A wish said aloud. A branch falling from a tree. A storm sweeping in from the east. A butterfly. A candle. A match.
When I didn’t ask, he decided to tell me anyway.
“Maybe you shouldn’t,” I said.
As it turned out, I wasn’t so different from my brother when it came to the truth. I felt as though I were about to fall, headfirst, down into the tunnel from which there was no return. I know I asked, but tell me later, tell me tomorrow or never. That’s soon enough.
Lazarus sat on the top step of the porch. Out in the orchard something was flying around the tops of the trees. There were bats here, too. There was my car, unwashed, dusty, the mileage piling on since I’d begun driving here and back. If I was going to stay, he was going to tell me.
I sat down next to him. I got a splinter — just my luck — but I kept my mouth shut.
Seth Jones, the real Seth Jones, the one with the library cards, had worked on this orchard all his life. He’d been born here and this had been his father’s business before him. He was a good son who did as he was told, even after his father had died, even after he himself had gone through middle age. He was so cautious that his life had nearly passed before him and he’d barely noticed. What had he to show for all those years? The oranges he grew were delicious, the land mortgage-free, the workers he hired were honest, and he himself awoke in the mornings, shoulders and legs aching, but alive and well all the same. Maybe that should have been enough.
It wasn’t.
Seth Jones, the real one, the true one, wished more than anything that he could change places with someone. He wanted not to be himself. He wanted to travel to countries he’d read about, dreamed of all his life.
One year, and he’d give up half of what he owned.
And then it happened, the way things do, when it’s least expected: a temporary worker from the hardware store, a young man of twenty-five, strong, healthy, a lost soul who’d been running his whole life. A foster child, always temporary, always on the move. The young man’s shoes were worn down; he had never saved more than a hundred dollars, enough to get to the next town. Twenty-five and he was exhausted. Too many states, too many roads, too many women. He was fed up with life. He dreamed about permanence, stability, trees with roots, land that didn’t turn to sand under his feet and slip away.
One afternoon, on a day like any other, he delivered a truckload of mulch, one job of many. Temporary, of course, already fading. But this time he didn’t get back in the feed-store truck and drive away. He walked through the orchard, drawn by the scent of oranges and water. He stood at the edge of the pond. He thought about drowning himself, but he knew at the last instant the human spirit always fought to live. He’d spent his whole life traveling, doing as little as possible, getting by. Still, he had his youth, his beautiful face, his strength. Surely this should have been enough.
It wasn’t.
Seth Jones saw the stranger fall to his knees. The young man looked as though he was praying, when really he was cursing this world. He was a good man, Seth Jones figured, perhaps sent from above. Surely this was a sign, a man praying for guidance. Seth Jones went right up to the stranger and offered him a bargain no man with just a hundred dollars in his pockets could refuse. One year, not a day more, and in return, half of everything. They shook on it then and there.
The stranger quit his job. He packed up his motel room. He didn’t have much, so it didn’t take long. On the arranged day, he took a taxi out to the orchard. Everything was set in place: Where to call to hire the farmworkers. Where the checkbook was kept and how to manage Seth Jones’s signature. What was a reasonable price for a bushel of oranges, a crate, a truckload. No one would have to see the stranger; he would be Seth Jones while the true Jones was in Italy. That was where his travels would begin. As for the stranger, he felt like someone’s son. Maybe that was his dream: a son who had inherited half of everything, as far as the eye could see.
It was a humid day and there were storm clouds. The earth was damp. The air barely moved. So much the better to leave for one man. So much the better to stay for the other.
They were walking through the orchard when it happened. There were blackbirds calling. The air was fragrant. Each man felt as though he’d been given a year to do with as he pleased, the opposite of his own life. The final step of this exchange: they traded shoes. The new man put on the old 140
work boots worn for fifteen years, so comfortable he could wear them from dawn till midnight. Seth Jones put on the younger man’s walking shoes, light on his feet, shoes that would carry him far away.
The bad weather must have been a hundred miles off. West. North. Nowhere nearby. Or so it seemed. Then it happened the way things do, when it’s least expected. Lightning hit. It tore a hole in the ground. It struck the stranger so hard that his heart stopped. He was floating above himself, and he stayed there, hovering, until he came to himself in the hospital morgue. When he tried to speak, to ask about the other man, smoke came out of his mouth. It was amazing he hadn’t been burned alive, that’s what he heard the nurses saying. No matter what the experts said about rubber soles, he figured the traded boots were what saved him. But he couldn’t figure much beyond that. He was still hovering in some way.
In the hospital he saw the dark, branchlike splotches on his arms. All he could think was that he had to get away. When he stood up from the bath, dripping with ice, he heard them gasp at the marking on his back. It was a burn shaped like a face, someone guessed. A wound shaped like a man. But that wasn’t what it was. He knew exactly who he carried: the man to whom he owed a year.
He got dressed and refused any further medical care; he heard those same nurses refer to him as Lazarus. Since he barely remembered his own name, he decided to call himself that as well. What was death like? For him it was a cloud, and he awoke from it clouded still. Where had he been? He had lost himself, and then he was back. If he thought hard, there may have been a battle. He could halfway remember charging through the bath of ice in some way, fighting to come back, slamming down and then arising.
He left the hospital as soon as he could — they had no authority to hold him, he didn’t appear to be a danger to himself or others, and he had a bargain to keep. As soon as he returned to the orchard he found the exact spot where he’d been hit. The hole in the ground. The oranges turned red. And then he noticed it, what he was looking for. A pile of ashes. Lazarus got down on his hands and knees and breathed it in. Sulfur and flesh. His partner had been struck and had burst into flame. This was all that was left, a pile of ash and minerals, this and the face imprinted on his back.
Lazarus swept the ashes into a dustpan, then funneled it all into a wooden box he’d found on the bookshelf. He didn’t once think of leaving; he kept his part of the bargain. Seth Jones had outlived most of his friends, and Lazarus avoided those Jones had known through his business, hiring workers over the phone, doing his banking by mail and phone. Every night he walked through the orchard to the place where the oranges had turned red. He had made a deal for a year; now he was forced to carry his partner forever more. When the anniversary of that day came, he could feel himself wanting to move on. It was in his blood, that’s what he’d discovered. He was never meant to be a settled man. But now he was living another man’s life, trapped by circumstance. When did a promise end? With the sort of guilt Lazarus had, the answer seemed to be never.
Lazarus took me back inside; I followed him to the bookshelves. There was the wooden box, carved in Morocco, a death box, a burden.
“Do you think I killed him?” Lazarus said.
It could have been anyone who delivered the mulch that day, but it was him. Anyone who stomped her feet on the porch, but it was me.
I held the wooden box; it was surprisingly heavy, amazingly so. We carried it out through the orchard; it seemed only right that we take Seth Jones with us now. The darkness was sifting through the trees. We went out to the pond, where Jones had first seen Lazarus, the moment when he thought his wish had come true. We left the wooden box and our clothes in a pile and went wading into the water. It was cool and deep. Nights in Florida weren’t any more comfortable than the days, only wetter, more humid, closing in, throwing you together. I held Lazarus in my arms. It didn’t matter what his name had been; he was Lazarus now. I could feel everywhere he’d been, all those towns, those women, that life. I could feel that he’d made a wish he now regretted, that he’d give anything to have his own shoes back, his own life.
For once in my life I didn’t consider the what had happened or the what would be . None of that. The nowness, the darkness, engulfed us. Two drowning people who loved the feel of water. Kiss me underwater. Kiss me until I’m gone. I could feel a shudder go through Lazarus. How odd to have the truth there with us, right there in the black water, drifting. Hot night, beetles flying low, lightning in the distance.
I was far above myself. Floating in the dark. No fear for once in my life. It was not at all what I’d expected. That fearless moment. Salvation where it didn’t belong.
I could feel Lazarus shivering in my arms. “It’s not your fault,” I told him.
And here’s the thing I would have never believed about words, my own words, spoken aloud, the ones I said to give him comfort, hope, all those things I’d never believed in: They rescued me.