The Glittering World (10 page)

After another minute of wheeze-tinged silence, Elisa sat up. “Too mean?”

“What?” Blue said. “You? Never.” She smiled and winced, slid her small frame down the couch. “How are you feeling?”

“Honestly? Pretty lousy. Consumptive, even.” She took a sip of tea and used the mug to warm her hands. “Goddamn allergies. Can’t take me anywhere.”

“It was for a good cause, though. You were really sweet with Donald.”

“Maybe that’s why I’m acting like such a bitch. I must have used up what little charm I had left.”

“You want some more tea?”

“No, thanks. But you can run me a hot bath. A good soak might do the trick.”

“Sure.” A saucepan on the stove began to bubble angrily, and he turned down the flame. “You mind if I ask Jason? He’s begging to be of use.”

“Knock yourself out.”

After Jason ran the tub, he escorted Elisa to the bathroom and hurried back down to the kitchen. “Blue, listen. I phoned the pharmacy in Baddeck. They have EpiPens there, and we don’t need a prescription. Normally I wouldn’t feel the need to manage her, but she’s just being so stubborn.” Blue looked up at the ceiling, unsure of where this was going. “I’m just going to make a fast run into town and pick it up. That way, if she’s not feeling better in an hour or so . . . Well, we can cross that bridge when we come to it.”

“No worries. I’ll hold down the fort.”

“Thanks, man.”

Shortly after Jason headed out to the car, Gabe popped in from the porch and placed Blue’s paperwork from the house sale down on the dining room table. “Hey, I’m going to ride into town with him. Is that okay? He looks like he could use the company.”

“Of course.” Blue was consumed with peeling, chopping, paring; as long as he was at work, nothing could be wrong. Not when he had the cashier’s check in his pocket and could leave this place behind.
Tomorrow
, he thought.
Just hang on until tomorrow
. “We’ll be fine. I’ll have dinner ready and waiting.”

Once Gabe and Jason left, the house fell coolly silent. Donald’s tantrum and Elisa’s subsequent allergy attack had been enough to temporarily forestall the inescapable, but the nauseated feeling that had surfaced in his grandmother’s basement came roaring back. Worst of all, it made some sort of sick sense: Blue remembered so little of his life before leaving Cape Breton that he must have wiped his memory clean, his nightmares the only trace he had failed to extinguish.

Not even cooking could distract him. He was suddenly alone, and afraid, and above all cold. Gooseflesh raised along his arms, and a chill settled in from an unearthed slab of ice deep inside his chest. He struck a kitchen match and set fire to the pile Gabe had prepped in the woodstove, newspaper and kindling aflame as the bittersweet scent of cedar smoke permeated the room. He thought about calling his mother back, but the prospect seemed too daunting. She would simply lie to him, the way she always had. Anything to keep him tied to her. She had said it best, after all: he was her little angel, and always would be.

After a few busy minutes of chopping tomatoes and mincing
garlic for the sauce, he could no longer take the solitude and headed upstairs to check on Elisa. “Knock knock,” he said, a drumbeat knuckled against the bathroom door. “How are we in there?”

“Come on in,” she called, faux seductive. “The water’s fine.”

Suspended in bubbles up to her neck, she appeared dismantled, her hair a fan of eels in the cast-iron claw-foot bathtub, face adrift on a sea of pinkish foam.
The head of Orpheus
, Blue thought, recalling a painting he’d once seen. He flashed back to his grandmother and the disembodied, Hummel-esque children on her wallpaper, her gnarled fingers on the handle of the slop bucket. And her voice, her baleful, murderous voice . . .

“Feeling better?” He moved a towel from the chair beside the tub so he could sit.

“Better, yes. A little regretful is all.” Elisa blew a spray of bubbles from the back of her hand. “
Non, rien de rien,
” she sang to the heavens, her voice old-vinyl scratchy. “
Non, je ne regrette rien . . .
” She coughed and stared at the ceiling. “Would you do me a favor?”

“What’s that?”

“Could you grab my camera? It’s on the bed.”

He brought her the old Konica. She dried her hands and began to take pictures from the bathtub of the room’s corners, its slanted ceiling, the patchy topography of the worn terry-cloth bath mat, and the chipped toilet seat; she tried to shoot Blue as well but he pulled the towel over his face.

“Show yourself,” she implored, and he did, mugging gamely for her as she snapped away. “You have such a pretty face. Don’t hide it.”

“You’re the one hiding.”

Elisa peered at him over the top of the camera, and he slowly
reached out and took it. She disappeared below the water, only a dark corona of hair visible before she surfaced, the bridge of her nose snaked with foam. Through the camera’s viewfinder, her face looked bisected and veiled, half masked. He shot her face, her breasts, her hand on the lip of the tub. A parting of the bathwater revealed the dark thatch of her pubic hair, and, barely, the small mound of her belly.

“You’re lingering,” she said.

“Sorry.” He tried to chuckle. “It’s been a long day.”

A popping noise downstairs: the crackle of the fire, or the sauce as it ran over the side of the pan. Could he trust her with his secrets, after all this time?

“Listen,” he said. “We’re still best friends, right?”

“Sure.” She waited, then said, “Of course we are. Why? Is there something going on?”

“I don’t even know where to start.” He hung the camera off the back of the chair by its strap. “I’ve been feeling strange, ever since we got here. Like I’m being watched. Or more like I’m being . . . manipulated.” He was holding back from her, something once upon a time they’d both sworn they would never do. “I’ve been getting a feeling like vertigo, or at least what I imagine vertigo must feel like. Except it’s mixed with déjà vu. You know?”

“Not really.” She eyed him doubtfully, and all of a sudden he was unsure any of it had truly happened. “Are you okay?”

“I have those nightmares, right? The ones where I’m buried alive? I think they might actually be memories. Maybe I—Maybe I was underground, you know? Or trapped somewhere, or something. But I don’t just feel it when I’m sleeping. Not up here. I mean . . .” He decided to start over. “That day we were in the woods and ran into Donald? I had this feeling. That first
night too, at the ceilidh—I was outside and I kind of spaced out, but there was this sense that . . .”

She scrunched her face; he wasn’t getting through to her. “I found some newspaper clippings at my grandmother’s house,” he said. “They said I disappeared as a child.”

“
What?
” Her mouth hung open, and for a flickering moment it became a gaping hole, ridged with crooked stalagmite needles. “You’re kidding me.”

“ ‘Boy Goes Missing.’ Actually, boy and girl; it happened to someone else too. ‘Frantic Search Under Way.’ That sort of thing. Pages and pages of this stuff.”

“What happened to you?”

“I don’t know. I mean, obviously I was found. But the strangest part is that even though I seem to have gone missing for days, I don’t have any memory of it. Forget the fact that I’m thirty years old and my mom has never seen fit to mention it to me. She must’ve taken me to the States soon after it happened.”

“Who could blame her? So, where are the clippings?”

“I . . . left them there.” An image of the cage swinging above him, followed by the sound of him kicking the photo album into the hole, the hollow echo as it plummeted into the carved-out depths beneath the house. Elisa couldn’t know about all that, not yet. “Maybe I’ll go back for them. Tomorrow, before we leave.”

“Well, maybe you should ask your mother what happened. She’s the one who seems to be keeping things from you, no?”

“Believe me, I tried. She wasn’t very forthcoming.” He rested his head in his hands. “I feel pretty dead. I can’t really think about it right now.”

His thoughts traveled down a dusky path. A stranger—his father, perhaps—at the foot of Grandma Flora’s drive, beckoning
Blue and the little girl Gavina down to his car. A cabin in the woods, a mattress on the floor. The man’s hairy white hand on Blue’s cheek, and then on his inner thigh . . .

But that didn’t happen. Not at all. And if he could imagine such a scenario so vividly, who was to say what was the truth? Even his authentic memories had been distorted to the point of invalidity, like some kind of grotesque funhouse mirror; he might never know what had taken place, not really. Maybe that was for the best.

They both sat in silence, still but close, no sound but the leaky tap as it dripped out water one drab at a time.

“I’m pregnant,” Elisa said. She stared straight ahead at her clear polished toenails, feet crossed on the far edge of the tub.

“Wow.” So there it was. “Is it . . . Jason’s?”

“Of course,” she said, stung; he wished he hadn’t asked. “Why would you bring that up? I told you—”

“Sorry! I’m sorry. That was wrong of me. Really wrong.”

“Forget that,” she said. “Forget it.” She drew her legs up and used her knees to shield herself from him. “I’m six weeks along, as far as I can tell. So relax.”

It had taken him this long to figure out he was secretly holding out hope they were pregnant together. The realization hit him like a body blow. What had he been thinking? That the two of them would run off together? The idea was laughable. Wasn’t it?

“I’m sorry,” she said, her face concealed. “I didn’t mean to interrupt what you were saying before. It just seemed like we were sharing, and . . . I needed to tell someone. Someone besides Gabe, that is.”

“You told Gabe?”

She nodded. “The other night. He came right out and asked
me, said the two of you had been speculating.” She lowered her knees, her eyes trained on him. “Quite frankly, I’m surprised you didn’t ask me yourself.”

“I just—I guess I thought if you wanted me to know that you’d tell me.”

“Which must be why you don’t exactly look surprised.”

“Well, I’m not. I mean, yes, I thought you might be. You have been acting a little strange lately. No offense.” She was staring at the ceiling again. “So,” he said, “I guess the word I’m looking for is congratulations.”

“I suppose.”

“You don’t sound thrilled.”

“Let’s just say it wasn’t planned. I mean, so much for getting back into dancing, right?”

“Not necessarily. You could start up again, if you really wanted. You could do anything.”

“Sure,” she said, absent of any conviction whatsoever. “Sure I can.”

“What does Jason think?”

“I haven’t told him yet.”

“Elisa . . .”

“I know. But can you imagine what he’d be like if he knew I was pregnant? He’d have me on bed rest by now.”

“He did just sneak into town for an EpiPen.”

She rolled her eyes.

“Okay,” Blue said. “Let me get this straight: You’ve stopped drinking and smoking, which leads me to believe you’re keeping it. But you’re not telling your husband, who, yes, would be irritating and yet obviously supportive and a complete prince. So instead you’re being freaky and passive-aggressively angry at him, even though he’s really done nothing wrong.”

“That pretty much covers it.”

“And you wonder why I won’t settle down.”

“If you had settled down with me, things would be different. For both of us.” She reached out her hand. He took it, traced her palm with his thumb, her heart line, the life line, fate. “We used to have a great time together, didn’t we?”

“We still do,” he replied. “Always.”

“Maybe you’re right,” she said, and withdrew her hand, let it fall beneath the surface of the water with a splash. “What you said that first morning? Maybe we should live here forever. Just stay. And leave everything behind.”

“We could do that.” He pulled the cashier’s check from his pocket. “We could go anywhere.”

“What’s that?”

“The proceeds from the house sale. It’s about enough to cover my debts, but fuck it, maybe we should skip town and never look back. Head off to Newfoundland. Or Greenland.”

“Or outer space.” She laughed. “What? It’s just as likely.”

Something rattled and clanged downstairs: the saucepan lid as it slipped off and clattered to the floor. “I shall return,” Blue said, and tucked the check back into his pocket as he leaned down to kiss the crown of her head.

There was a dryness in the air, a barometric shift as he exited the room that made his brain ache for hydration, if not a stiff drink. A tightness pulled at the corners of his cracked lips. Elisa was right, of course. They could never be together, not now, not without the both of them feeling as if they were usurping what was not theirs to take, or give. It would remain a fantasy.

Blue skipped down the stairs to the kitchen and turned the heat off the range, retrieved the fallen lid from the floor where it sat in a ruddy pool of boiled-over tomato sauce. He put the
lid down on the counter, turned on the cold water valve, and bowed to drink straight from the faucet, his thirst boundless.
Just drink
, he thought.
Drink and eat and most of all sleep. And when you wake up, everything will be normal again. No worries, no pain. Tomorrow, you’re out of here.

He turned off the tap, went to put the lid back on the pan, and froze. The sight of the sauce, bubbling gory red and pulped, brought him back to the basement and the boiling water that had burned him, the bloodied gristle mess of his small hands as they clung to the bars of the cage.

He placed the lid on the counter and, without another thought, plunged his hand into the scorching sauce.

He saw white with pain and shut his eyes, nearly blacking out. But only for a moment: just as quickly as it hit him, the pain began to recede. A tiny dark spot formed in his mind’s eye, and he focused upon it; the spot began to grow, until what was once the size of a pencil point became the black mouth of a tunnel through which his consciousness climbed, the hurt already memory. He lifted an eyelid to find his hand still pressed inside the pan, the sauce a stormy red sea around his wrist. There was no pain, not anymore; it had been an illusion.