Chapter 18 #2
We watch the sun drop slowly in the sky in front of us.
It’s pretty. Everything around us could be called beautiful, but I don’t feel that tingle in my stomach I was looking for, so I guess none of this is it.
Still, I like sharing the silence with Will.
He’s sitting next to me as the gilded hour envelopes us in its haze of orange light, and he rests his hands on the surface of the stone.
I wonder what would happen if I moved my fingers over and caressed his.
If then I would feel that tingle in my stomach I want.
I wonder if his skin would still be as warm as it was last week.
And I wonder if he would pull away from me.
In my pocket is the amethyst Lucy left in the game box. I stroke it with my fingertips over and over, feeling its irregular edges, as if they will reveal the answers that haven’t come to me yet on this late afternoon.
Will’s pensive, and his eyes stay pinned to the horizon until the sky turns a cobalt blue and the waning moon appears high in the sky.
“We should go before it’s too dark to see,” he says.
“Yeah. But this is nice, isn’t it?”
“It is,” he responds.
Will lies back and looks at the dark blanket of the sky stretched out before us.
I follow suit, and we stay there a long while without bothering to speak.
An airplane’s lights glow high up, and I ask myself where the passengers must be going and how is it possible that this place where I grew up, the only place I’ve known until now, can be so important for me when, to them, it’s just a stretch of land they have to cross to get to their destination.
It’s stupid, but it hits me hard, confirming to me the irrelevance of my existence.
There’s no one to save anymore. There’s no one at all.
And I feel small and invisible in this world that just won’t stop spinning…
The darkness is thick as we stand.
I don’t know if Will fell asleep or if his eyes were closed when we lay on the rock, but when we get in the car, he seems lost in thought. What’s inside his head? What would it be like to journey across the furrows of his brain and contemplate all the crazy ideas in it?
“Turn on your brights,” he says.
I feel around with my fingers trying to find the lever, but instead I turn on the wipers. I’m not used to this car.
“Shit.”
“Can I?”
“Of course.”
Will bends toward me and touches something and the road ahead of us lights up. I go on, straight to Ink Lake, only turning off close to the RV park. I stop in the lot but leave the car on.
He looks at me with his usual impenetrable expression, and the shadows of the night play in the corner of his nose, in his eyelashes, in his chin.
His face is full of unexplored highways, and I’d love to travel over them with my fingertip until I know them by heart.
He asks, “Did you find what you were looking for?”
“I don’t think so. But thanks for coming with me.”
“I enjoyed it. I needed a breath of fresh air.”
“Something bothering you?” I mean it almost as a joke.
The purr of the motor seems to shelter us in the darkness. Will’s fingers are toying with the door handle, but he hasn’t opened it. Not yet. He turns to me, that imperturbable face of his is gone—in its place is…nothing.
“Too much time with myself,” he says.
Then he gets out and vanishes. And his absence remains there with me.
On the way home, I turn on the radio, and when I arrive, I get in the shower.
The hot water falls over me and my muscles relax.
I close my eyes. I think of Will and all I know and don’t know about him.
What matters more? Briefly, everything around me turns purple, the purple of his aura, it’s warm, then I come back to reality, to the sight of the water droplets pearled on the gray tile.
I wrap a towel around myself and go to my room. The word beauty follows me even as I turn on the bedside light and look for my pajamas in the closet. The towel falls off, and I catch a glimpse of my nakedness in the long mirror on the wall.
I walk slowly toward my reflection. The girl staring back at me looks scared. As if wanting to calm her, I sit down in front of her.
I look at her.
I look at myself.
I run my fingers through the dark mane sliding straight down to my shoulders.
I observe those fearful eyes asking what I’m doing.
I see constellations of freckles around a sharp nose and I come closer to the mirror, almost touching it, and find pores and spots, tiny pimples near my chin, a mole under my collarbone.
I push my hair behind my ears instead of hiding them, as I always have, because I think they are big and ugly.
Even if it’s only thanks to them that I can hear songs and birds chirping and the murmur of rain.
And there’s more. Much more. I get a knot in my throat as I move my hands and uncover my breasts, which are small, with pink nipples.
I haven’t shaved my armpits, and the dark hair contrasts with the white skin—white like milk, not like porcelain.
I’ve never managed to get a tan; I’m apparently immune to summer.
But it’s my skin. I understand that in this instant, as I examine the stretch marks on it, every imperfection I find along the way.
I stop to look at a scar on my knee. I got it falling off my bike when I was seven.
I stayed on the sidewalk and cried and cried until a neighbor saw me and told Grandpa, who was busy in his workshop at home.
I got two stitches. I remember I was scared of the needle and asked for my parents; Mom was already at the hospital with my sister, but he couldn’t find her till two hours later.
I’ve been in this body for twenty-two years, but I’ve never looked at myself like this, focusing on every detail, learning who I am centimeter by centimeter and knowing that it all belongs to me.
Two legs that can move. Healthy organs. Crisscrossed lines on my hands.
The pure white of my eyes’ sclera. Narrow, rounded fingernails.
Dry skin on my elbows. Hair over my genitals.
Bony knees. Reddish lips in a pale face.
Gap between my two front teeth. Everything, everything, everything.
Every forgotten corner, every part of me I’ve ever forgotten.
How many times have I thought I hate that?
How many times have I tried not to see myself?
How many times have I looked outside myself for what I already had inside me?
At that moment, I understood that there was beauty inside me.
A strange, imperfect beauty full of crazy ideas but still. I don’t know if that’s better or worse than a Monet painting or a flower blossoming or a sunset, but it belongs to me, and I will spend the rest of my life with those eyes and that nose and that mouth.
I don’t realize I’m crying until I lift a hand to my cheek. The tears fall like rain, soft at first but foretelling a storm.
I sob. I hug myself.
I sob and sob until the door opens suddenly and my mother stands in the frame with a look of terror on her face. And it doesn’t stop when she bends down and shakes me by the shoulders and shouts something at me that I can’t understand.
“Greta, Greta, Greta.”
Beauty can be devastating.
“Greta! Did you hurt yourself?”
Finally, I understand. Eyes burning, I see my mother looking for a sign of something on my naked body. An ankle twisted in a fall, a sharp pain with no apparent cause in the stomach area, a sign of something worse?
“Mom, it doesn’t hurt there,” I tell her.
“Where does it hurt, then?”
Inside. The wound is inside.
It takes her a few moments to understand.
Her expression is relieved. But there’s something mixed in that looks like powerlessness. Her arms surround me, and I cry again, but this time she’s with me, sitting next to me on the floor in my room, still in front of the mirror.
And in that embrace, there’s beauty too.