‘Shh,’ she was saying. ‘You are safe. You are loved.’
I placed my mouth over the bite on her hand and felt her pulse jump against my lip. Her wrist was warm and soft and there was the suggestion of vein and artery and tiny bones lying hidden beneath the skin, and I touched my tongue to the punctures and tasted something oddly sweet, a little sharp. I sucked at it in a wild hope that it would do something, that I might help her. There was no bitterness.
‘You are safe,’ Thea was still saying to Johann. Her voice had become strained. ‘You are loved.’ She said it again and again until Johann stopped crying. She said it until she could not form words, until it sounded as though she were talking underwater, as though she had moved beyond language, as though her tongue had lost its way. I could hear the roar of the sea taking back the bush, filling the valleys and the high country, taking the air from the room.
Thea’s breathing changed, then. I heard her heart fall out of time with every hymn I had ever composed to its syncopation. Her chest began to rise and fall, too fast. I was no longer certain she was taking in air. Her body shook.
I wanted so badly to pray, but my tongue had forgotten the taste of the Lord, and so I sang. As her eyes closed and her face became slack, as her breathing became strangled, I sang. I sang against the rushing of the tide. Her fingers trembled, but there was no intention in them, and then they were hanging, and she was still, and my song had become a cry. The ocean rose up around the bed and I asked the trees and the earth and the burning fire in the hearth to do something. It was not enough that they might move and turn as though nothing was happening; they must stop what was happening because I could not. I could not do a thing.
Oh God in your Kingdom, oh Thea. Thea. Open your eyes.
I was holding her. I was bearing it, bearing her. I was not letting go of her.
The waves rose and we were underwater, and, suddenly, there was a stillness and a silence.
I held her. She died as I held her.
Hans came home later that night. He came into the house holding a lamp aloft, braced against the dark, and in its light I could see the concern and fear on his face at Johann, screaming in his cradle, his swaddling unravelled and his face red and tight with tears, at the fire dead in the hearth. I had listened to the baby choke on his own cries for hours by then, but I couldn’t move. I was afraid to let go of Thea.
Hans set the lantern on the table and picked up Johann. I watched him take in the cold ashes, the absence of Thea’s usual candle casting a glow in her corner by the fire, by the seat he had made her. He rubbed Johann’s back, soothing him.
‘Thea?’ Hans’s voice seemed too loud for such a small space. I could hear the fear in it and guessed at his thoughts. She has run for help. She is trapped outside somewhere. Someone has taken her. A well. A fire. A fall. Then he turned to the bed and saw that she was in it.
Hans took up the lantern again, his other arm holding Johann, already shuddered into sleep, exhausted, relieved to be held finally.
‘Thea?’
She did not move and he said her name again.
And then he set the lantern on the floor so that he could touch her.
I saw the touch confirm for him what he must have feared the moment he stepped into the house and heard the screams of his son. I saw him understand that his wife was gone.
Still, he gently lay Johann on the bed between Thea’s body and the wall, and leaned over to kiss her. Then he sat and, for a long time, looked at her. I wondered if he knew what had happened.
Eventually, in that silence of deep night, he stood and put on his coat, then picked his son up and wrapped him in a blanket, before leaving, lantern in hand.
All that long night I hoped that Thea would remain as I have. I held her body and remembered the albatross, and wondered whether Thea, too, might find herself outside the cottage by the fig tree, listening to the rare sound of a magpie singing the midnight hour, wondering at angels. Even as I held her body, I listened for her footfall, and there was a moment, when the birdsong summoned the dawn and I heard voices, that I thought I might see her again. But the grey light brought with it only Hans, Flügel and Anna Maria, cradling Johann in her arms.
The pastor found the strike marks and fit his lips around prayer and condolence. Anna Maria broke down and cried with such undisguised grief that Hans left the cottage. Flügel reached for Johann, but Anna Maria would not relinquish the boy, and the child and the woman cried together, over the pastor’s assertion of grace. When Flügel stepped outside to give her a moment with her daughter, I watched the Wend wipe her eyes and go to the cold fireplace. She was still when she saw the bricks upon the hearth, the keeping hole uncovered and empty. I watched her kneel and extend a hand over the ashes, then slowly, as though it were still alight, pick out a small, charred fragment of paper. She brought it to her chest and howled.
I left, then.
I kissed Thea’s forehead through the sheet that had been pulled up over it, and without knowing quite what I was doing, knowing only that I must leave, must go, I walked outside, past Flügel waiting by the door, past Hans hurling stones at the sky, and climbed up to this ridge. I sat and watched the sun rise over the world. I felt surrender approaching.
And then I felt within me the urge to speak.
NOW
heart-shimmer, heart-shiver
Thea died three days ago, and since then I have felt a change within me. Even this sunlight on my skin feels strange, as though it pours through me, as though it cannot settle its warmth upon my body. I sense time at work too, when for so long I have felt adrift on endlessness. My bones feel as though they have been kneaded by years. I think, perhaps, I am finally waiting for a folding-up. Dissolution.
I think back to the darkness that held me after the whale song on the Kristi, and it no longer seems like an abstract memory, but a promise. That great benevolence. That suspension of nothing and everything. Something coming. A happening.
This will all end soon.
And so I have spoken. These passing days I have described what has happened to me, and what I felt, and what I continue to feel. Gathered up and thrown on the wind to be wound on the air. To stir leaves and gutter candles and fill the sails of ships. I am unthreaded of it. I am the empty eye of the needle.
That two girls might meet and already know each other. Might already love each other.
One hand finding the other.
I thought that if I placed my palm against the rush of quickened wind and swore to our love, made myself an apostle of it, wondered at the miracle of it, I might inure myself to the pain of severance. I wanted to bear witness but perhaps, too, I was searching for a way to understand that it is all over. I wanted to say goodbye to her. Testimony as farewell.