Chapter 40
I’m in a gray current, drifting, submerged. I don’t need to breathe anymore.
Joel is next to me, he’s right there; I’m aware of his thick body, the comfort of him. He’s saying my name. He sounds upset. I want him to touch me. He isn’t touching me.
I smell loamy pine and dark earth.
My eyes open themselves, and at first there’s only a blur, like paint being swirled by a brush.
And then towering evergreen trees emerge into my vision—the interplay of twilight sky with branches and the delicate fans of needles.
The colors aren’t quite right. Everything is suffused with light like dawn, the trunks of the trees glowing. And it’s warm. A summer evening.
Where are we? I think, but I can’t speak. I can’t even locate my mouth in order to open it. My body is no longer responsive, no longer quite mine, except for my eyes.
If this is death, it’s definitely odd.
But not the worst.
But then Joel is also dead.
Unless this is just some spectral version of him. In which case—impressive re-creation. And also, why isn’t he touching me?
I’m probably not dead. Which is sort of astounding.
“You have extinguished my lover,” says a soft voice that takes the place of the air, that is the same as the light.
And then there she is. I can’t tell if I’ve managed to change my position somehow or if she has materialized. Maybe the whole earth has rearranged itself a little, just to accommodate her.
She is exquisitely beautiful, a very young woman of indescribable size—all warmth, glowing dusky skin with gold and auburn and walnut tones.
Eyes so dark they appear pure black. Soft black masses of hair with hints of green and blue and gold that lift away from her face, spilling out and up as though she is underwater, as though she is a mermaid.
I thought she was standing, in a cascading green waterfall of a gown that frothed around her feet, but now she’s sitting, cradling my father’s body on a long, flat boulder that looks like a throne.
He’s draped over her, much larger, for the moment, than she is, but she holds him easily.
He seems undamaged, unmarked. He’s dressed only in a white cloth that winds around his waist. His head lolls back, his arm has drifted down, the sculpted muscles in repose.
He is different again, exceptionally beautiful himself now.
He has gotten bigger, younger, more saturated in color, his features vivid and lush.
She looks up at us for the first time, and I feel Joel fall still under her gaze. For some reason, I haven’t been able to look at him since she appeared. I wonder if he, like me, is no longer able to speak.
“You weakened him. . . .” She uses a word, like Al first did, for what Joel is. “He died because of you.” There is no distinguishable anger in her voice. There is no voice in her voice, really. It’s too many other things. It steeps the trees, it fills my body.
The violent beam of her gaze slams into me. “And you. His offspring.”
Now Dick Face, the beautiful almost immortal, is lying alone on the rock, and she is standing in front of it, on the ground, closer to us.
Pine needles lift in vague, twirling columns on either side of her.
The rich, wild scent of sap and sunbaked bark and cold water rushes ahead of her.
Her beauty is too much, it’s a flood that has just broken through its dam.
And then she changes, and now she’s very old and wearing trailing white, her hair a translucent fizz in the air above her, her face a mass of wrinkles.
Danger and peace wrestle around her; there is too much knowledge in her eyes.
“Daughter of my lover,” she breathes. I realize abruptly that there are other words underneath her words, shadow languages just inside and around her speech.
I can’t quite hear them, but I also know they aren’t all exactly human.
“Bearer of the curse I placed on his seed.” She reaches out, her fingers knotted, bony, her skin folded silk, her nails curving and yellowed. She touches my forehead.
I think that now I will surely die. I will erupt. I will liquefy, disintegrate. But she wrenches her hand back as though shocked. Her eyes are black holes, gulping matter, devouring light.
Is she angry? Disgusted?
“Hmm,” she whispers. “I see what I have done. So much pain. I can end it quickly.”
Her hand shoots out. There’s no time to react.
I gasp. Fire gushes into my lungs. I’m burning from the inside. I’m being incinerated. My hands open wide, each finger a tunnel of searing pain. My bones are flaming poles. I think I’m screaming, but it’s only a small thought in a raging plane of red and dark.
When I thrash back up to consciousness, Joel is holding me. He is crushing me against his chest—all I can smell is him, his sweat and warmth and blood. He is yelling at the goddess (I think she must be a goddess).
She is laughing.
“Joel,” I choke out. My voice works! I can speak! More than that, I can move. My muscles have breath in them.
“Angel,” the goddess says, except in that other language, still bubbling with laughter, “you would not be able to touch your love if I hadn’t already cured her and accepted your offer. Have you forgotten that your touch would otherwise be poison to her?”
Cured, I think. Cured. I can’t make sense of it.
Joel pushes me back from him, holds me where he can see me. We are both kneeling. His eyes are flat with panic. “Oh God, I’m sorry, I’m sorry,” he cries. His glasses are smudged, the blood vivid on his torn and dirt-stained white shirt.
“I’m okay,” I say. Slowly, I stand up. My feet support me, my legs don’t waver.
I shake out my hands, wriggle my fingers, turn my head on the fragile-feeling stalk of my neck.
Everything works. I have been put back together.
It doesn’t make any sense. And maybe everything about this situation has gone too far beyond the confines of sense to ever be called back, but I can’t help myself: “Why?” I ask the goddess.
She glows in front of me, only a few steps away, her size still impossible to gauge somehow, the air rippling around her. She’s middle-aged now, profound looking, a sunset blazing in her eyes.
“Because I was wrong,” she says unblinkingly.
“I wanted to punish him, but he is not the one being punished. And I do not love him anymore. Although . . .” She glances at Dick Face, considers.
“Perhaps I still love him.” A coyote—or maybe a wolf?
Where are we?—releases a yearning howl in the distance. The goddess smiles.
As she shifts back toward the boulder where Dick Face is lying, she briefly transforms into a hawk, golden wings spread, then becomes the young woman with the oceanic hair again. I think of Dick Face saying she had become a fish. I can imagine it now. I would prefer her as a fish.
She leans over him, strokes his neck musingly.
“I am tempted to reignite him,” she murmurs.
“To hear him sing once again.” And then, closer to his face, “If I reignite you, there will be consequences to the . . .” She says an unknowable word, and for some reason I suspect it is the same one Al meant when he said “the empty” during our first conversation.
“Too much life in you,” she murmurs. “Breath of the ancients! Blood of the depth. Blood of the well. And not enough. Never enough. If only you were just another mortal.” She straightens, studies Dick Face’s supine body for a long moment, her head cocked like she is still a hawk.
Then she reaches down in a flash and slices his chest open. Joel makes a truncated sound.
The goddess wrenches my father’s heart from its cavity and presses it, dripping, against her mouth. She closes her eyes momentarily, tips her head back, and seems to be drinking the blood from his severed heart. I am too stunned to feel anything at all. I simply watch.
“Thank you, my difficult lover,” she whispers when she’s finished, and the trees seem to shiver in response. She tucks the now desiccated organ back inside his body. “I will carry you with me.”
She glances over at us. Joel is gripping my shoulder like he’s about to shove me behind him.
“Oh,” she says, as though she’d forgotten about us entirely.
Her ferocious gaze pins me. “The angel”—the word in her language sounds sharp, glinting like a blade—“has given up his ability in exchange for your life, daughter of my lover. Though it was not necessary. I had already decided to cure you.” Now to Joel: “Angel, I have taken your beautiful ability. It was offered in good faith, and I have accepted it.”
“No,” I whisper. I stare at Joel. “No, you need to be able to heal, to help people.”
He shakes his head numbly. His hands tighten on my arms. “I thought she would kill you.”
“But— ” I start.
“So.” The goddess seems to look at both of us at once, cocking her head in that eerily birdlike gesture. “I will rebalance it.” There are a thousand other words in each one she speaks. “For such a precious sacrifice, you may have a life in return.
“Each of you mourns a loved one whose life was taken by the other. You are bound together. You must choose together. One will be returned to you, and the one who took his life will be purified from this stain.”
I hear my own intake of breath.
I remember in a rush: Dick Face in the bar, blathering about his immortal ex-girlfriend, about “real” power.
The old ones. This is what he meant. This is real power.
The ability to wake the dead, to rework time, to rewrite history.
Joel and I turn toward one another at the same moment, and I can see he believes her, too.
She will do this impossible thing that balances at the top of a swaying tower of other impossible things.
She will bring Adam back for him, or Grub for me.
For a moment, I’m chaotic with hope. My mind is a cacophony of it.
I can almost see him again, in his black hoodie, his hair in strings, his wistful face.
My brother. Grinning at me, confused and wondering and ready, so ready to be alive again.
What it would be, to hug him for the first time.
To offer him the world. To make it all okay. To make it all possible.
I’m tasting it—the sharp, bloody tang of frantic hope.
His future, the years and decades of it, a feast. Decadent, overspilling the table.
The piles of stupid little jokes he will make, the stacks of projects he will stay up all night working on, the love I will never let him go without, not even for a minute, ever again.
“Choose,” says the goddess, as though we’ve already taken too long. Her infinite voices are interwoven with shimmery threads of delight. Is she pleased with her own magnanimousness or with the inconceivability of the task she has set us to?
“Please, Tempest,” Joel says. He looks miserably out of place in the twilit forest, facing me, pine needles bristling in his hair.
His eyes are slick with tears. I know he’s picturing Adam, picturing the brother he has always loved, for Adam’s whole life, from birth through boyhood, to manhood and the corrosive, unnatural illness that brought him step by step to the vicious moment of his death.
Brilliant, gentle Adam, who might have nurtured generations of budding mathematicians, who might have solved some impossible problem and pointed a light into a previously uncomprehended corner of human knowledge.
I should let him have his brother. I should absolve myself of at least one of my crimes.
Imagine, being washed clean of that death, rightness poured into the dark pit inside me, filling it up.
If I let him have Adam, Joel will be complete again, that stinging, searching emptiness in his eyes I saw the very first time he mentioned Adam replaced with peace.
And the woman who destroyed his brother, who made him want to destroy everyone like her, that woman would have to be forgiven.
But my own brother would be left as nothingness. So much less life lived than Adam. We never had any time together.
How can I give up the possibility of that time?
How can I give up the possibility of Grub?
“Please,” Joel whispers.
I close my eyes. Adam is in front of me, spectral, his quick and easy grin, his loose brown sweater, his dark hair like a boy’s, falling into his face.
Gravity increases inside my body, pulling everything with weight downward into blackness. I am shaking.
“Please,” Joel says a third time.
But it doesn’t matter. I can’t.
“No,” I say.