He inched forward on Elsie’s left so she’d be aware of him. He forced himself to stay outwardly calm while battling the adrenaline surge, the fear within. Surely she heard his breathing, because he heard hers, saw her shoulders rise and fall, her scapulae wing out and return with each breath. Very slowly she leaned forward and looked over her toes, tantalized by the invitation that lay below. He stopped breathing. A breeze lifted the pallu of her sari so that it streamed off her shoulder, a green flag.
She turned her face to the sky, which bathed it in angel light, her expression radiant, her eyes silvery and glinting. He followed her gaze and saw a raptor rising on a thermal.
Elsie had raised her hands a few inches away from her sides, palms up as if to receive a blessing, or in imitation of the raptor. Digby had yet to breathe. He thought his heart would stop. He was a step behind her. If he tried to grab her and missed, he’d send her over. If she fought, they’d both plunge to their deaths. He called on the Goddess of the Chair, on any god listening, begged them to set aside the petitioner’s disbelief, his contempt for all gods, and preserve this bereaved mother’s life. Silently, he pleaded with Elsie. Please, Elsie. I just found you. I can’t lose you.
After an eternity her left hand reached tentatively back to him, and his right shot out to meet it, as if hands knew what heads didn’t. Their fingers locked around each other’s. He walked her back from the treacherous edge. One step, then another. He turned her to face him, their exhalations and the breath of the valley all one now. Her legs shadowed his in a tango snatched from the edge of dying. Her body trembled.
He was certain she’d imagined stepping off, that she’d intended to shame God, shame that shameless charlatan whose hands stayed behind his back when children fell from trees, when silk saris caught fire; she’d imagined sailing out with outstretched wings just like the raptor, gathering speed and reaching that place where pain ended. He was suddenly furious with her, shaking with anger. How do you know you go to a better place? he thought. What if it’s a place where the horror that haunts you repeats itself every minute?
Elsie stared at him, reading his thoughts as tears rolled silently down her cheeks. With his thumb he wiped them, smeared them on her cheekbones. He stepped down from the tabletop first. Then, as she tilted to him, her hands on his shoulders, he lifted her clear by her waist, as if she were no heavier than a feather . . . and then he held her tight, clasped her to him out of anger, out of relief, out of love. I’ll never let you fall, never let you go, not as long as I live. She buried herself in Digby’s chest, her shoulders shaking as he pressed her to him, muffling her terrible, wrenching sobs.
Walking back, they were unburdened. Elsie, if you step away from death, that means you’ve chosen life. If there was a Malabar raven to see, he wasn’t looking. Nature had spoken enough that day. It was Digby Kilgour’s turn, and he couldn’t stop.
He told her about his school tie, biting into his mother’s neck. When he spoke of his love of surgery, it was in the language of a man mourning the death of his one and only. And then he described another death, that of his lover, Celeste, an agonizing death by fire. As a boy he’d found it puzzling that the word “confessor” applied both to the one who listened and the one who admitted their sins. Now it made sense, because the two were one, clutching each other’s hands, bound together without need for hair ribbons or charcoal sticks. Even when the path forced them to walk in single file, neither could let go, nor could he cease his story. He described his months of despair, the many times despair returned, and his desire to end it just as she had wanted to end her own. “What stopped you?” she said, speaking for the first time.
“Nothing stops me. I turn a corner and there it is again, the choice to go on or not go on. But I have no confidence that ending my life would end the pain. And pride keeps me from choosing to leave as my mother did. She had people who loved her, who needed her. Me. I needed her!” The last words were like an explosion.
He was silent for a few steps. Then he stopped walking altogether. He turned to her. He’d thought of Elsie often; he knew she’d grown up, married, and yet the image enshrined in his mind for so many years was that of the ten-year-old schoolgirl who unlocked his hand, a schoolgirl whose talent for art, whose genius was so evident. The grown woman before him, now in her midtwenties, orphaned, robbed so cruelly of her child, feels to him like someone altogether different. If this is Elsie, then she’s erased the seventeen years that separates them. Perhaps shared suffering did that. “Elsie, that portrait we drew in Rune’s bungalow, our hands bound together? That beautiful woman was her. That was my mother’s face the way I needed to remember it. Seeing the image we made together on paper released me from the grotesque death mask I’d carried around for so long in my head, the last image I had of her. Elsie, what I’m trying to say is you restored me. I’ll always be in your debt.”
She clutched both his hands, his mangy and mismatched paws, but still functional, doing everything they possibly could. She probed the ridge of raised scar on his left palm, the mark of Zorro, pressed down on it. She manipulated each finger like a clinician, determining the limits of its extensibility—a clinical exam, but by an artist. Then she lifted his hands, first one, then the other, and pressed the palms to her lips.
The next day she slept late but emerged looking rested. She sheepishly showed him a blister on the ball of her foot.
“What was I thinking? I shouldn’t have let you walk that far in sandals.”
He unroofed it with iris scissors, then powdered it with sulfa. She looked on, interested. “Does that hurt?” he asked. She shook her head. He put a pressure dressing over the fiery-red oval.
“Digby, don’t you need to go to the meeting?”
He considered his answer. “I’d rather be with you,” he said at last, not looking up. It was the truth. She didn’t question him. They had a new way of being with each other.
Instead of taking her on a hike, he led Elsie to his indulgence: three curving terraces carved from the steep slope like an outdoor amphitheater, just in front of the bungalow. A sweet perfume met their nostrils. Digby’s beloved rosebushes were planted along each terrace, like a colorful audience dressed in their play-going finery, looking down on the valley. He walked her as though past an honor guard, introducing her to the palette of discrete scents, beginning with orris, his favorite, which smelled like violets; then a clove-scented rose; then nasturtium. “I breed for scents more than for color.”
They sat down. Elsie turned to point to a stone obelisk at the end of one terraced row. “What’s that?”
“Ah, the Usher. He was meant to be a dancer. But the stone cracked.” Her presence beside him animated Digby, made these insignificant artifacts of his life significant. “Michelangelo said every stone has a figure locked in it. This,” he said, patting the bench on which they now sat, looking back at the roses, “this stone I thought was elephant. But I was wrong. Its destiny was bench.”
She laughed and stood up to examine it.
“Digby,” she said, and he heard the eagerness in her voice. “Where did you make these?”