Chapter 12
Richie
Riv hugs them even when he’s not in the same room with them, even when he’s not touching them. The boy, Jojo, and the girl, Kayla. Riv holds them close. He sees that they eat in the morning: oatmeal and sausages. He cuts little slivers of butter and slides them into the steaming insides of the biscuits he mixes and kneads and bakes. The butter melts and oozes out of the sides, and I would give anything to taste bread made with such care: I imagine it moist and crumbly. Kayla smears butter over her face, and Riv laughs at her. Jojo has food at the side of his mouth, and Riv tells him to clean it off. Then they go off to Riv’s garden, where they pick strawberries and blackberries and weed until the sun is high. They eat the berries from the bush. I expect to see a winged shadow over them, but there is nothing but this: the garden, green and sweet. Life-giving flowers, ushering forth sweetness from fruit. Jojo sits on his haunches and chews. I bend over him.
“Tell me,” I say, “what it taste like.”
He ignores me.
“Please.”
He swallows, and I can read the answer in his face. No. How he holds the deliciousness inside him, a rich secret.
“I want to remember,” I say. “Ask Riv. Ask him to tell you.”
“Enough,” Jojo says, pulling at a weed with a deep root.
“What you say?” Riv asks. He whips the weeds from the soil like knives through cake.
“I done had enough berries,” Jojo says. “I’m full.” He looks through me and bends to pick at stray grass.
Leonie and Michael leave without walking out to the garden. The red car cranks to life and growls down the road, and they disappear in the tunnel of trees. I think about climbing into the car with them, just to see where they go, but I don’t. I follow Jojo and Riv and Kayla instead. I walk in the boy’s footsteps, and I watch. I watch the way Riv ushers them around furrows and troughs, how he cooks them beans for dinner, the way he makes sure they are clean when they lie down to sleep. Watching this family grabs me inside, twists, and pulls tight. It hurts. It hurts so much I can’t look at it, so I don’t. I go outside. The night is cloudy. I want to burrow into the earth, to sleep, but I’m so close. I’m so close, I can hear the sound of the waters the scaly bird will lead me over tumbling with the wind. So I crawl under the house instead, and I lie in the dirt under the living room where they all sleep, making a cot of the earth. And I sing songs without words. The songs come to me out of the same air that brings the sound of the waters: I open my mouth, and I hear the rushing of the waves.
* * *
This is what I see:
Across the face of the water, there is land. It is green and hilly, dense with trees, riven by rivers. The rivers flow backward: they begin in the sea and end inland. The air is gold: the gold of sunrise and sunset, perpetually peach. There are homes set atop mountain ranges, in valleys, on beaches. They are vivid blue and dark red, cloudy pink and deepest purple. They are yurts and adobe dwellings and teepees and longhouses and villas. Some of the homes are clustered together in small villages: graceful gatherings of round, steady huts with domed roofs. And there are cities, cities that harbor plazas and canals and buildings bearing minarets and hip and gable roofs and crouching beasts and massive skyscrapers that look as if they should collapse, so weirdly they flower into the sky. Yet they do not.
There are people: tiny and distinct. They fly and walk and float and run. They are alone. They are together. They wander the summits. They swim in the rivers and sea. They walk hand in hand in the parks, in the squares, disappear into the buildings. They are never silent. Ever present is their singing: they don’t move their mouths and yet it comes from them. Crooning in the yellow light. It comes from the black earth and the trees and the ever-lit sky. It comes from the water. It is the most beautiful song I have ever heard, but I can’t understand a word.
I am gasping when the vision passes. The dark underbelly of River’s house looms before me: creaking then silent. I look to my right and see a flash of the water, the rivers, the wilderness, the cities, the people. Then darkness. I look to my left and see that world again, and then it is gone. I claw at the air, but my hands strike nothing; they rend no doorways to that golden isle.
Absence. Isolation. I keen.
* * *
When I leave the crawl space as the sun rises, Leonie and Michael are slamming car doors and walking toward the house. The trees are still and silent in the blue dawn light, the air even wetter than the day before. The sun is a hint of shining light through the trees. The sound of the water is strongest now: that other place hovers at the edge of my vision. As they half walk, half stumble together, Leonie looks over her shoulder like someone walks there, on her right, behind her. I dart forward because I see a flash. For a breath, someone is there, someone with a face like Jojo’s, lanky and tall like Riv, someone with the same eyes as the saltwater woman who lays in the bed. And then, nothing. Only air. Leonie and Michael stop at the door, hug and murmur, while I circle the spot where I saw the flash. The air feels like needles.
“You need to sleep, sugar baby,” Michael says.
“I can’t. Not yet,” Leonie says.
“Just lay down with me.”
“I got something to do.”
“Really?”
“I’ll be back,” Leonie says. They kiss and I turn away. Something about the way Michael grips the back of her neck and Leonie palms his face seems desperate. So desperate and needy it demands privacy. He disappears into the house, and she walks down the side of the road. I cannot help but follow her. We walk single file under the overarching oaks, the cypress, the pines. The road is so old it’s almost been beat to gravel. Every so often, there is a house, silent and shut: in some, people speak in low voices, brew coffee, cook eggs. Rabbits and horses and goats graze for their morning feed: some of the horses come to the lips of their yards, raise their heads above their fences, and Leonie brushes their wet noses with her palm as she walks past. The houses come a little closer together. Leonie crosses the street and I see it: a graveyard. The headstones are half-ovals dug into the earth. Some have pictures on them, pictures of the dead once living. She stops in front of a grave nearer the front of the cemetery, where the newly dead are buried, and as she sinks to her knees in front of it, I see the boy I saw over Leonie’s shoulder this morning, but now he is etched into marble, and under the picture of his face, a name: Given Blaise Stone. Leonie pulls a cigarette from her pocket and lights it. The smell of it is soot and ash.
“You ain’t never here.”
Birds are awaking in the trees.
“Would you do it, Given?”
They rustle and turn.
“She’s giving up.”
They chirp and alight.
“Would you?”
The birds swoop over our heads. They chatter one to the other.
“Would you give her what she wants?”
Leonie is crying now. She ignores the tears, lets them fall from the blade of her chin to her chest. When they freckle the skin of her collarbone, only then does she wipe them off.
“Maybe I’m too selfish.”
A small gray bird lands at the edge of the plot. It needles the earth, twice, feeling for breakfast. Leonie sighs, and it catches and bubbles into a laugh.
“Of course you won’t come.”
She bends and picks up a stone embedded in the dirt above Given’s grave, and she untucks her shirt, holds the hem, and puts the rock into the pocket made by the hanging material. She stands and talks to the air, and the bird hops and flitters away.
“What did I expect?”
Leonie wanders among the headstones, bending and collecting rocks from all the graves, from those just beginning to gather on raw earth, to those at the center and back of the graveyard, where the stones are wind- and water-worn, the names shallow etchings. The birds wheel up in a great flock in the sky, away to find richer earth. When Leonie walks home, the basket made by the front of her shirt is heavy with rocks, and she cries. The long road is quiet. Her tears darken the stone. They are still wet when she walks into the house, past Jojo and Riv and Kayla, still asleep in the living room, into her mother’s room. The smell in that room is all salt: ocean and blood. She kneels and lets them tumble out and onto the floor, looks at the saltwater woman, who has startled awake, and says:
“Okay.”
The tears and the ocean and the blood could burn a hole through the nose. The saltwater woman, the woman Leonie crawls toward over the rocks as she says, “Mama, Mama,” looks at Leonie with so much understanding and forgiveness and love that I hear the song again; I know that singing. I have heard it from the golden place across the waters. A great mouth opens in me and wails; I am an empty stomach.
The scaly bird lands on the windowsill and caws.