1910 #2
“Who then?” Opal challenged. She crossed her arms. How stretched her grief for Oren had become, like the dough she made for braided holiday breads. Her grief had morphed into bread, something she fed upon on special occasions. She waited for the woman to speak.
“Tomorrow,” the woman said. “Sit with me, and I will tell you. Come by, before the show.”
At home, Opal studied herself in the mirror.
Her eyes were caves, sunken. Soft lines waved across her forehead.
Her skin dulled, even in the light. How different she looked from the woman she imagined herself to be—the woman she used to be.
She’d once been described as beautiful. Now, she stared at herself, unblinking, half believing the woman in the mirror might speak.
And what would she say? She pulled the pins from her hair, and it fell to her shoulders in a mess that she then brushed and brushed until her arms grew tired.
You’ve lost someone, the woman had said.
Oren. It’d been so long since she’d allowed herself to really remember him.
Opal had liked how his name required her to make a circle of her lips, as one does when whistling, like Oren had been doing the first time she saw him walking across the Malarkeys’ field.
A wooden box rested on his shoulder. He stopped midstride when he spotted her.
“Hello, kid,” he said. Something struck Opal as so peculiar about the way he called her kid, as though he were addressing someone else.
She looked behind her. “It’s dangerous to look up today,” he said.
He hitched his thumb toward the sky. He wasn’t wearing gloves, and his hands were red and cracked from the cold.
Immediately she drew her eyes to the ground.
The fields beneath her feet were fallow.
The Malarkeys had a daughter just a little older than Opal, and rumor was she’d killed her father’s crops by bleeding too much between the legs, until one day the bleeding stopped and she ran off with a millworker.
Opal had been fascinated with the story, with the idea of a life beyond town, and a girl who could leave and never come back.
“I’ll look where I want,” Opal had said.
“Burn your eyes out, unless you have one of these.” He patted his box, and for the first time Opal studied it: a sawed-out circle at the bottom, a square of tin affixed to one end with a hole drilled through it.
The inside of the box had been painted white.
A solar eclipse, he explained. The moon would align itself between the Earth and the sun, blotting out the light, turning day to night.
“Totality.” He said the word like a line of poetry. “Seven minutes of it.”
“A few minutes doesn’t feel very total to me,” Opal had said.
“When the moon lines up just right—that’s when you can look directly at the sun with your naked eye.” He blushed when he said the word naked. He patted his box. “Like staring into the eye of God.”
He demonstrated how he’d put the box over his head, and then use the tin to attract the sun and project the eclipse onto the other end.
“But you have to be faced away from the sun. That’s the trick.
That’s what most people don’t know—that to observe it, you have to look away from it. But then, if you’re lucky…”
“Totality,” Opal said. Her body warmed.
Opal would later learn that Oren saw dark spots in his vision from staring at the sun through a telescope.
The sky held all his dreams. He’d lived up the road at that hospital for a time, until he’d been cured of the seizures that’d plagued him since he was a child.
Now he worked as a farmhand. Months later, after they’d been together, on a blanket thrown between a row of cornstalks, his face lit up as he pointed out constellations.
He made her stand, naked still, and she thought he was going to explain the sky to her again—there the North Star, the Big Dipper, Orion’s Belt—but he didn’t this time.
He wrapped the blanket around her shoulders, and they swayed together, dancing.
Standing there in the Malarkeys’ field, she felt breathless from the cold.
Woozy. She didn’t know why she removed her hat and let this stranger place the box over her head.
The wood scraped her forehead going on, and the weight of it pitched her forward so that Oren had to catch her by the shoulders.
They took turns with their heads in that box, studying the sun—the closest star, but not the biggest, he explained.
How intimate to put that box over her head and breathe in the air where Oren’s breath still floated. Intoxicating.
THE NEXT EVENING, OPAL FOUND Madame de Fleur sitting on a cot in the small room behind the stage.
She buried her face in her hands when Opal sat across from her, and at first, Opal thought she’d misunderstood the woman’s invitation.
She shifted in discomfort, then rose to leave, but at that moment, Madame de Fleur slid a small wooden crate between them.
She lit a candle. Opal sat again, and the woman reached for her hands.
The woman’s hands were impossibly soft. Warm. Her long fingers slid through Opal’s own like a puzzle box, now complete.
“It’s like telephoning,” the woman had said.
“I can call someone up?” Opal said, too quickly. She’d revealed her nerves, and, besides, she’d rarely used a telephone, and when she did, it was Jagr’s voice on the other end telling her he’d been called away for work or to the hospital to see a patient who’d taken ill.
“Everything lost returns,” the woman said. “The fundamental rule of our lives.” She spoke softly, her voice nearly a whisper, so Opal had to lean forward, strain to hear.
Opal could not speak, her own voice a solid object lodged inside her throat. She tried to imagine Oren standing in this room. She should leave—what would Jagr say if he found out?—but the woman now gripped her hand tighter, as though she’d overheard Opal’s thought.
Together, the women sat in the darkness.
The candlelight bounced off the fabric of the tent; shadows curled and arched.
Opal breathed quickly, or maybe she’d forgotten to breathe.
She had to keep reminding herself to pull the air through her lungs.
Madame de Fleur began to hum, and Opal felt the vibrations where their skin touched.
After a few moments the woman said: “He’s come through.”
“Who?” Opal challenged. Even if she wanted to leave, she feared her legs would not listen. Her body seemed to be revolting. Outside she heard the circus goers gasp, then applaud. The night was only beginning.
“Hello, kid,” the woman said.
Opal’s vision expanded, then tunneled, until it was like she was looking through a keyhole at the woman.
“Hello, kid,” the woman said again, softer now, and so quiet Opal leaned even farther forward. She remembered when Oren was sick, just before he passed, she’d visited him. Hello, kid. He could only speak in a whisper, like his voice was the first part of him to cross over.
Now Madame de Fleur pressed her forehead to Opal’s. “Can you sense his presence?” she asked. Opal could hear the woman’s breath; she could feel each dewy exhale. A warmth enveloped her, a familiar energy. That’s how she’d describe it: energy. Like she could light a room with it.
“Oren?” Opal said. She hadn’t spoken his name out loud in years, and to speak it now brought him there.
She could feel it. Madame de Fleur squeezed her hand in acknowledgment; Opal squeezed back.
How could she ever describe the truth of that first moment?
The depth of it? She didn’t care what she’d heard of spooks and spiritualists, what she understood then—what she felt—was as real as anything she’d ever experienced.
“Yes,” Madame de Fleur said. “It is me.”
Now they both stood, their hands still clasped, their foreheads still touching. The women moved together. Madame de Fleur seemed to lead and follow at once. Outside, Opal heard the boom of a cannon, then the band started up. Inside, the women swayed. They were dancing.
The next day, Jagr had called to say he’d been delayed another ten days, and that evening, Opal waited for Madame de Fleur after her show.
Outside her tent, she didn’t know what to expect from the woman.
That night, and the week that followed, they walked through Mound Hill Cemetery, so close together they brushed arms, then shoulders, then hips, and Opal felt suddenly aware of her body, how tensely she held it.
The cemetery appeared more beautiful at night.
Pebbled paths wound past rows of gravestones.
Madame de Fleur stopped to read the names and trace her fingers along the carvings, those dates and dashes the sad summaries of their lives.
One night, they came upon it—Oren’s grave, a rectangle of sandstone already tarnished at the edges.
Opal hadn’t been here in years. She stooped to pick a mum from a patch that grew at her feet and placed the flower on his grave. Madame de Fleur laughed, not meanly, but even so, Opal felt foolish, like she’d broken a rule she hadn’t known existed.
She must have looked hurt, because the woman draped her arm across Opal’s shoulder and told her there’s no comfort to be found in stone. The dead don’t want for flowers and condolences.
“Then what?” Opal had asked.
“My dear, those on the Other Side crave what we all do: contact. Touch.”
Afterward, they lay on the sloping bank of the river, making a blanket of the grass. They looked for shooting stars, meteor showers from the comet still months away, but they found only bright, stationary light.
“What is it you want from this life?” Madame de Fleur had asked her.
Nobody had ever asked her that. She hadn’t known she could have desires of her own. She ran her fingers through the grass beside her, as though she were searching for something. The summer air was bathwater. In Madame de Fleur’s presence, she felt submerged.