I look at the jellyfish, a pattern like roses on her back. Her eyes, I see she has eyes, translucent and red like her body, are wide and afraid. What story? But somewhere inside me knows. Knows exactly. I feel the knowledge pulsing just like the red thing in the water.
“What story? Oh Belle, Belle, now you’re hurting my feelings. Now you’re wounding me.” He presses his gloved hand to his chest like I stabbed him there. But he’s still smiling like the movies. His eyes in the mask flash from blue-green to red to blue-green. He brushes my hair away from my face, and I shiver.
“It started the day you found me in Mother’s closet, remember? Beastly little thing in Mother’s lipstick and cheap sex heels. Dreaming of another self, a princess self, in a castle by the sea. Dreaming of me. And I heard you. Dreaming on the other side of the glass.”
He squeezes my hand, that cold, slightly sticking touch that dives me in dark water. He’s standing over me now as I sit hunched on the table, cold coursing through my body.
“You heard me,” I say, and I’m shivering, shivering.
“But the story’s not over.”
“It isn’t?” I say. I’m so very cold. He lifts up my chin with a hand of ice, so I’m looking right into his flashing eyes. Still smiling that smile that burns me.
“Let’s finish it together, shall we?”
* * *
We’re lying together now on the table, he and I, and in the glass, the jellyfish is beating wildly like my own heart, like the black buried thing inside me. He’s taken his mask off so I see his face. His face lights up the architecture of me, my cage of bones brightening. Not just his smile, but his whole face is the movies. As beautiful and unreal as a dream, but somehow right here with me. I must have watched those movies a thousand times in the dark, on dusty TV screens. I’ve seen him on another kind of screen too, a screen of glass. Smiling like he is right now.
“We lay together like this once, remember?” he says. “In your silly pink room with the dolls and spiders. Under those dumb stars. And you made some promises to me. Do you remember?”
“No,” I say. My lips find it hard to make the word.
“Let’s remember together.”
“There’s supposed to be a cold white paste on my face,” I say with my half-numb lips. “The whisper woman puts it on. And black discs on my temples. There’s supposed to be an oil I breathe in and she breathes with me.”
He shakes his head. “We don’t need her tonight. We don’t need the fucking accessories, you and I. The oil, the discs, the paste—those are just flourishes to impress the idiots. The essence is just this. Just you and me.”
And he takes my hand again, my first love. Somehow I know that he was my first love. How nice to know that I am holding the hand of my first love and I’m not cold anymore or I’m so cold, I’m burning. It was a troubled love. There was something between us, always between us, what was it? A kind of wall. Shiny but smeared. Made of cracked glass. Hiding in the dark. Turned toward the wall, until I turned it to me.
“I would come through it to be with you, remember?” he says.
His name is nearly on my tongue. And my heart is frantic inside me.
“Yes.” It’s all so familiar, there are tears in my eyes. He tells me to look up at the glass ceiling exposing the Depths. At the red jellyfish floating by like comets with fiery tails.
“What do you see? Tell me.”
The table we’re lying on floats up now toward the sky of water. The small tank with my red jellyfish floats up with us. Beating fast and wild as my own heart is now. I am burning with cold and very still. There’s a movie playing up there on the ceiling glass like a screen. I see a young girl. Lying in her pink bedroom. Night outside. A low moon lights up the room. She’s not alone. There’s a man with her in the room. Lying beside her. She’s holding him tight. There are tears in her eyes. She’s saying, Don’t leave me. Please don’t leave me.
“Who’s that?” he asks me.
“Her first love. She’s holding her first love,” I say with my mouth that’s so very hard to move now.
“What’s his name?”
I look up at the little girl on the glass screen. Her eyes shut tight. Tears streaming down her face as there are tears streaming down my face. I feel them tingling on my skin. Her mouth saying his name again and again. And I remember. I start to say the name along with her with my now dead mouth. Together, we’re mouthing his name like a refrain in a song. And the man beside me is smiling at the sound.
Part V
23
“Tom,” I’m whispering. “Oh god, Tom. Don’t go.”
But Tom leaves me. He holds me once more and then he becomes smoke in my arms. And I’m holding nothing. Air. But he promised that if I do what he says, we’ll see each other again. He’ll see me on the other side if I do it exactly. Exactly like he said.
I’ll do it, Tom, I promise.
Not Tom, Seth.
Alone in my bed, I look up at the wrong stars that were just the right heaven when Tom Cruise was here. What did I just promise him? What did Tom ask me to do?
There’s a garden, he said. Whispered in my ear only minutes ago. You know the one. Behind your so-called friend’s house across the way.
And in my mind, I saw the bright red petals. Stacey’s hand leading me quickly through the thorny beds, toward her back door. Alla smiling hard at me, a spade in her gloved hand. I nodded.
Her Russian mother doesn’t like you coming over, does she? Doesn’t want her daughter playing with the Egyptian girl. Not even a Christian. Never baptized.
I nodded again. I hated that Tom knew this. I was so ashamed.
It’s not you that should be ashamed, Tom said, knowing my every feeling as I felt it. Can’t hide anything away. They should be fucking ashamed, he said. But they do grow the most beautiful roses, don’t they, Belle? he said, smiling at me under the stars.
Yes. And I pictured them through the cloudy glass of Stacey’s basement window. Red flashing in my eyes while I watched her dance.
So you’ll go to the ripest bed. So you’ll pick the blooms off the stems, he said.
I looked at Tom in the dark. But that’s stealing.
Not stealing, Tom said. Stealing back.
* * *
Now I’m standing in Stacey’s garden alone. Still in my white nightgown, which lifts in the breeze. The moon is red and full and low in the black clouds. No stars I can see like the ones in my bedroom. I guess the right stars are too far away to see tonight. Or the clouds are too black and thick. I’ve never been outside at night alone before. The wind is soft on my face like a hand. I’d like it if I weren’t stealing.
Stealing back.
Tom was right about the gate latch, very easy to lift. The house is dark. A pretty brick house in a line of pretty brick houses, the nicest on the island. I think of Alla meeting me in her garden. How I knew by her eyes that she hated me. She just doesn’t know any better, Mother said when I told her. Small-minded people, Sunshine. You’ll find them everywhere. Yet when Alla invited Mother for tea once, Mother said why not? They sat in the solarium off the garden, sipping tea from gold-rimmed cups patterned with roses and smoking long, thin cigarettes. They laughed and laughed; I heard them from where Stacey and I sat in the den watching Degrassi. No way could we rate each other with our mothers there, Stacey said. Listening to Mother’s laughter, I felt angry. I thought she said Alla was small-minded, but apparently not to her face. Maybe because Alla was a fellow Christian. Mother, why can’t I be Christian too? I asked her when we left. Because I promised your father, darling, Mother said. He had a different religion, so we made a deal. And I said, But Grand-Maman thinks you’re leaving me open to dark forces. And Mother laughed. Dark forces. Do you believe that woman?
In the garden, my bare feet make no sound. The grass is spongy and soft, and the earth smells green and sweet beneath my feet. Some people have gardens, Mother said when we came home from Stacey’s. We will too someday, Belle. In a much better place than this. She sounded drunk. Maybe Alla’s tea wasn’t just tea. We’ll have a garden with fruit trees. And we’ll have fucking flowers. Not roses, though. You know Mother’s allergic.