1910 #3
She’d told the woman the stories she’d tucked away—about the person she was before now, a different self altogether.
The stories were so old, they arrived like lies upon her lips, but as she spoke they hardened into truth: how she carried Oren’s baby, how her mother had taken her to see a doctor who would soon become her husband, how her husband forced her to take medicines, perpetually worried about her weakened state.
Wanting, for her, had never proven useful.
“Sometimes the smallest decisions paralyze me,” Opal admitted. “I stand in front of the icebox, and stare into it. Rump roast and potatoes or beans and salted pork? I can’t even decide. Isn’t that ridiculous?”
“I asked you what you want from life—not for dinner,” Madame de Fleur said.
“My point is, how can I even know that answer, if I can’t choose between rump roast or salted pork. Which do you prefer?” Opal asked.
“I don’t want to influence you either way,” Madame de Fleur said, smiling.
She belted her arm around Opal’s waist and held her there in a way that didn’t ask for anything more than closeness.
“When we’re like this—I can feel what you two shared.
He wants so badly to get through to you.
” They stayed like that for a while, then Madame de Fleur turned, until she was flat on her back staring up at the sky. She drew her arms behind her head.
Opal did the same—she studied the sky and felt diminutive beneath it.
She searched the sky for a little trail of light.
When the comet arrived, the circus would be long gone.
Madame de Fleur would be long gone, too, and Opal’s world would shrink.
So small again. So ordinary. Sometimes she imagined her life like a winding path through the dark.
She could see lantern light up ahead, but she didn’t know how to reach it. She could barely make out her own feet.
Opal rolled onto her stomach. Her body inched closer to the woman. She studied Madame de Fleur’s eyes, which looked like pools of ink in the moonlight.
“I want him to get through to me,” she said.
“So, there, you can choose,” Madame de Fleur said, then she quieted.
“Listening is a choice. Shhh.” Opal heard insects and a train whistle in the distance, but nothing else.
She had lived to be older than Oren ever was, and it made her sad to think of him so pristine, so young, so untouched by time.
She considered what kind of man he might have grown to be.
Would he have been so tender with her still? Accepting of the woman she’d become?
Madame de Fleur propped herself up with her elbow. Her dress fell away from her shoulder, and Opal followed the slope of her neck. Her heart thumped everywhere inside her at once. In the distance, the town’s lamplights flickered like fireflies. If she tried, she could find her house. It was late.
Opal touched the woman’s lips and felt the waves of her breath.
Then, the woman caught Opal’s hand and pressed it to the bone of her chest. She could feel the thudding.
“Is that what you want from this life? Oren?” Opal hadn’t known what she wanted until that very moment when she faced it.
The moon tucked behind a cloud. The world around them fell away.
She wasn’t surprised when Madame de Fleur kissed her.
Or was it she who leaned in first? They drew to each other, all at once; they magnetized.
It felt different from kissing a man. Madame de Fleur’s lips were soft and her breath was light and she smelled of cottony perfume.
She grazed Opal’s neck with her fingertips, encoding a message onto her skin.
Opal breathed it in, all of it, the presence and the memory of it, the pleasure of it, the exhilaration of it, until Madame de Fleur pulled away.
Then the world returned again, unchanged. Cicadas chirped in the distance. Neither woman spoke.
“Now, for a swim,” Madame de Fleur finally said.
She stood. She removed her shoes, then her shirtwaist, then her belt, then her skirt.
Her slip fell away like skin; her body limned with light.
Opal had never seen another grown woman naked before, and she studied Madame de Fleur with curiosity.
The hair between her legs was trimmed. Her hips drew wide and round.
Her breasts were shaped like bells, fuller at the bottom.
As a final act, she removed her moonstone necklace and bent to fasten it around Opal, telling Opal the powers of the stone—that it could draw two people together, if the celestial conditions were right.
Opal hadn’t known what she meant by that.
Still, the moonstone offered cool relief against Opal’s skin. Even in the night it appeared to glow.
Then the woman walked toward the water until she was a shadowy figure at the bank of the river, until she jumped in headfirst and disappeared.
Opal again studied the stars above her and considered how this same sky spread over the entire world.
She listened to the sounds of the night.
Owls. Crickets. Coyotes howling in the distance.
The night teemed with life one missed when sleeping.
She watched a barge move down the river in the distance, its flatbed carrying a pyramid-shaped mound of coal.
The first Europeans to settle Ohio were French and, upon initial sight of the Ohio River, had called it La Belle Rivière.
She always felt an instinctive pull to its water.
As a girl, she used to wade into its shallow edges or swim across the bank at its narrowest point, paddling until she touched the shores of West Virginia, which felt like a different world to her altogether, even though it had the same shaggy trees, the same mossy rocks, the same waves that lapped at her feet as she looked back toward the other side.
After a few moments, the woman still hadn’t come up for air, and now Opal hurried to the bank, calling her name, worried she had snagged herself on a tree root or hit her head on a rock.
She pulled off her shoes and her stockings and her skirt, and waded into the water to her knees.
“Madame de Fleur?” she yelled. “Are you there?” She drew her hands beneath the surface of the water, feeling for her.
Reaching. The moon popped out from behind the clouds.
She spun in a circle until she was dizzy and breathless, until finally the woman’s head breached the surface, her hair clinging to her face.
Madame de Fleur gulped air and laughed.
“I thought you were dead!” Opal said, and when she spoke, a frantic sadness passed over her body, like the woman was already gone from her life.
“I plan to live forever,” Madame de Fleur said. She smoothed her wet hair and water dripped over the bony ridges of her shoulder.
Years later, when she’d remember this moment, Opal would swear that time had slowed, that the world around them ceased to exist. Time cracked and expanded and contracted.
There was no time. Only the two of them in space.
The woman waded closer to Opal, and Opal to her, and they drew together, aligned until they fell backward, their lips and hips touching, their bodies pressed tight so it was impossible to tell where one woman ended and the other began.
In that timeless space of free fall, before they landed on the bank, Opal knew.
She knew. What she’d lost had returned to her.
The next day, Jagr, too, had returned, earlier than expected.
In Wheeling he’d learned of some new medical advancements.
He’d brought home with him some herbs. He busied Opal with chores.
He’d asked her to separate the stems from the leaves.
He’d instructed her to grind the seeds to powder with the mortar and pestle.
He told her to weigh milk of licorice on the balance scale and add it to the pill press as he took notes in his formulary.
When he caught her crying, he said she was not acting like herself.
An unusual episode, he’d determined, and he’d forced her to drink that elixir, bottom to top, and she was thankful, in a way, because then he would not touch her.
Finally, a few days later, he was called away to check on a patient.
Opal stood on the hill above the fairgrounds, where for more than a month the circus tents had billowed like a breathing, living thing.
Before she even crested the hill, before she allowed her gaze to affix itself below, to the brown grass of the field that held the memory of posts and stakes, before she discovered the note Madame de Fleur had left for her—attached by a peg to the small square shed that once served as the admission booth—she knew.
Again she knew. Madame de Fleur was gone.
She pulled the note from the post and read it. One sentence: I prefer rump roast.
Beneath it, her forwarding address. France. An ocean away.
The world shrank, until the sky and the ground formed a little box around her. For a moment, everything went silent.