Ghost Dance (41 page)

“She could be very cruel, you know,” she said.

“Yes, I know.”

“But she could never really be cruel to us.” Sabine smiled slightly. “She was still raging out on the street, so much so that I was afraid she might lose you, right then, and I said to her, I remember it perfectly, I said to her, ‘If you don’t calm down that beautiful baby of yours is going to be born angry and fighting.’ Your mother looked at me. Her eyes were purple and wild and she said to me in perfect control, ‘If she’s lucky—oh, Sabine, she’d be very lucky to be born fighting.’

“And here you are now, all grown up.”

The sun was rising. It was getting light outside. In slow motion Sabine got out of the bed and began dressing.

She got back under the covers fully dressed and lay next to me. She brushed down my hair, kissed my forehead, and took my hand. “Ah, Vanessa,” she said in her quietest voice, running her finger up my arm, my needle-marked arm, the punctured vein, “this would break your mother’s heart. Your mother was not afraid to suffer. She never gave up, even in the face of terrible sadness. She was always brave. And she asked that we be brave with her.” Sabine turned toward the wall.

“I know,” I whispered and hugged her shoulders and kissed her ear. “I know, Sabine.”

We lay very still in silence. The sky was white. It had started to snow. I could feel the white struggling to enter the holes in my arms. I crossed them. Sabine stared out the window. With each flake on the pane she seemed to be moving further and further north. When she began to speak again her voice was not audible. The snow had taken it away from her. Only gradually did it become something I could hear.

“It had snowed overnight,” she sighed. “Your mother slept late that morning, for her, until about ten o’clock. When she woke I pulled up the shade. She was so thrilled with the whiteness of the landscape. It was a complete surprise. I remember that morning as perfectly as if it were yesterday: the beautiful light in that house in Maine and Christine in her robe looking out the window into the whiteness. She was fascinated, spellbound almost, very preoccupied. She had one of her faraway looks on her face. You know how she could look sometimes.” I thought of my mother burying herself in that snow as she looked out the window.

“But then she pulled away from her vision, and, in a voice I will never forget, she said, ‘This is what I’ve wanted all along—this peace, finally. All this,’ and she motioned into the air. ‘You, Michael, the children—and this calm. This is what I’ve wanted,’ and she looked back into the snow and put her hand in mine. That was the last morning I would ever see her. And now it is almost one year. The last thing I remember her saying to me,” and she smiled slightly and said every word slowly like a prayer, “‘This is what I wanted.’”

Sabine closed her eyes. “We were lovers for twenty-five years.” I looked at Sabine, her head that had not left my mother’s shoulder, the arm that cradled the neck still.

“Did Daddy know?” I whispered.

“Oh, yes, he knew all along. The only thing he ever wanted was that she be happy.”

“But wasn’t it hard to always love her from such a distance, Sabine?”

She gazes off. Her thoughts are in French. She puts on her coat. I am not really waiting for an answer. I see us differently now, not like before but from what I assume the real angle is, the angle my mother must see us from. I picture us from far above. Sabine and I are very small. I open the door; she kisses me in the hallway and says something that is inaudible from such a distance and turns to leave, looking back at me several times and waving as she saunters down the hall. From that angle we are laughable, pathetic, pitiable. From that angle we don’t have a chance. From that angle it is clear we are doomed.

“But wasn’t it hard to love her from such a distance?” The question lingers.

“No,” Sabine says, walking back to me, and the vision breaks, “it was not really so hard.”

There are other angles. There are other ways of seeing.

“No,” she says again. She takes my hand and holds it tightly, squeezes it. “Vanessa,” she says, and I see her straight on now. She is an enormous, brave figure, this small woman who holds my hand. She is a figure of extraordinary courage.

“Vanessa,” she says, and her voice is strong, fierce. “We must learn to love her from here now.” She hugs me tightly. “Oh, Vanessa,” she says, and a great tenderness floods her voice, her whole body, which I hold in my arms in this last embrace, “we must learn to love her from here.”

Marta did not see her at first from such a distance, in the great cold. She had forgotten what a person looked like and was frightened when she saw the ballooning head and heard the terrible scraping noise which came from an open, moving hole. Long, dangling strings fringed the balloon, moving, making noise too, she thought. Arms appeared and the strangeness of fingers. She watched their motion, concentrated on them. She tried to find her own corresponding finger and lift it, but she could not locate her hands and she wondered whether she looked like this figure at all. She was dying. The sounds faded, the mouth closed up, the balloon filled with helium and began to rise. What had been the neck became a long, white string. The fingers, too, floated off, detaching themselves from the hands. What came at her must have been hands without fingers, or maybe arms. Something warm touched her and, though she was bone-tired, she felt a slight curiosity at this warmth, and when she looked once more she saw the head again, the mouth, the teeth, the blue pools that were the eyes, the long blonde hair. And the mouth opened and the voice said, “Marta, Marta, Marta.” The sound began to make sense. It was her name. She was not thinking. She remembered nothing, but the word came anyway, automatically, outside time, memory, outside all history; it came anyway.

“Natalie,” she said.

“Marta,” Natalie said again, and, with that sound—which was, she now realized, Natalie’s voice—her old features came slowly into focus and Marta began to remember.

“Natalie,” she said. It was the only word she knew.

“I’ve been waiting for you,” Natalie said in her delicious death voice, the voice Marta had tried to recreate in her head many times but could not, then tried to block out but she could not do that either. “Where have you been?” Natalie asked. “I’ve been waiting for you a long time.”

“Where are you?” Marta said slowly.

“Here,” she said, “I’m so close. But I can’t touch you yet.”

Marta must have only imagined the warmth, the arms, the hands without fingers. “Try to touch me,” Marta pleaded.

Natalie shook her head. “No,” she said, “I can’t. Don’t you remember? I’m dead.”

“Natalie, don’t go,” Marta whispered. She felt herself sinking back into her body where everything slowed.

“Look at me,” Natalie said. “Look at me.”

“Why did you have to die?” Marta whispered.

Natalie shrugged. Marta watched her light a cigarette. “You’re almost with me now. You’re so close. Come on. It’s like swimming,” Natalie said. “It’s so easy.”

Marta thought of swimming. “Help me, Natalie,” she said.

“I am dead.” She held up her palm. There were no lines in it anymore. “I cannot come into life for you. You must come to me. Do not be afraid.” She stared at Marta. “In death things fall into place. We could be happy here. We could be together forever. There’s nothing to be afraid of. In one second, as soon as you cross over, you stop missing the world. Believe me.”

“Are you lying even now, Natalie?”

“No.”

“It was so hard to know what was true. It was so hard to love you. Do you forget now everything that went on between us?”

“No, I haven’t forgotten, Marta, but it’s like seeing from a great distance, a trillion, billion miles away.”

“Natalie, you were always so distant.”

“I realize now how much living we missed together,” Natalie said.

“You are as beautiful as ever.”

“No,” said Natalie, “it’s only because you still see me with the eyes of the living. When you are dead and with me you will see that none of that ever mattered. I do not look the way I did. My body is green, decomposed, bones in a grave somewhere—I’ve forgotten now, somewhere in Europe. You see the memory of me, not me as I look now.”

“You were so distant in life, so untouchable. You were never really mine—though I tried so hard to hold you. I never knew what you were thinking. One minute you loved me and the next minute you acted like you did not know me. I wanted you to be happy. I would have done anything for you.”

“I’m not beautiful anymore. I’m different. Believe me. I realize now, Marta, all the living we’ve missed together.”

“I love you, Natalie. I have always loved you. I love you now. I am dying for you. I have spent so many months dying for you.”

Natalie began losing her human shape; the cells in Marta ‘s brain fell into disorder, and her body began to break down.

“Die now, then. Die.”

Marta ‘s pulse began to slow. It was almost over. She could feel herself leaving her body. She could view the scene from above. She was being pulled down a long tunnel, but there was no light at the end of it. It promised nothing. It felt like falling forever. She stopped falling somewhere midtunnel. She hovered suspended in midair. There was nothing there, only darkness, silence.

“It’s so easy.” Marta heard a voice from the other end of the tunnel where Natalie was. “It’s like swimming.”

Swimming.

A great warmth flowed through her system. She felt her blood for the first time in a long while. She felt her blood moving inside her.

Swimming.

She began to think of Venezuela with what must have been the last part of her brain. She went back to an early, early time. She folded herself around these sensations: a wave, a smile, a ray of light, a hammock, a baby crying—bananas, the tops of trees, the heat. She curled herself around it.

Natalie panicked. “Please, please.”

“What?” Marta said slowly.

“You don’t understand. I was restless. I looked everywhere for a way to feel better—in Florence, in Nice, in Paris. All of this I am sorry for. I loved you and you never knew it.”

“I never knew it for sure. You never explained anything. You were always so difficult. You were always saying good-bye.”

“Come with me now.”

Tears fell from Marta ‘s eyes and dripped into her mouth. She tasted the salt. In Venezuela the natives made salt at the edge of the sea. The air was white some days with it. She breathed in: the smell of fish and salt and sweat, and the wonderful beach. She pictured three white pillars of salt.

“It was so lonely to love you.”

“In death you will finally understand everything. Things fall together. Believe me. I didn’t mean to hurt you.”

“Hush now.” Marta began to sing the Billie Holiday song, softly at first. “Don’t explain. Just say you’ll remain. I’m glad you’re back. Don’t explain.”

“Please don’t sing that,” Natalie cried. “I’ll miss you too much.” Already Natalie must have known the ending as the dead must know endings, far in advance.

Marta nodded.

Natalie moved closer to Marta. “Come with me,” she begged. “If you ever loved me at all, come to me now.”

Marta closed her eyes. “I never thought it would be this hard to die,” she said. “Natalie,” she cried, “it means giving up everything.”

“Marta,” Natalie whispered, but it did not sound like Natalie really. “Marta,” the voice said. It was Natalie but her voice was smaller, softer. “It’s so lonely here,” she said. “There’s no music or bells. There’s no one we know here, Marta. Most everyone is old. There’s no brilliant light like we thought—nothing.”

In the darkness, her eyes closed tightly, Marta saw for the first time since she had fallen into the coma, not a black void but the Vassar campus, the chapel, the library, her small room in Cushing. And she remembered the story of a woman in a dress made of twilight fluttering across the lawn with another woman, some time ago. Then she saw Venezuela again: a house, a shell, a smooth, white stone, the ocean lapping in her ears, and the lovely clean coastline of an island in Greece, beautiful, blue and white.

And France, too, not Natalie’s France but a different one—a France filled with earnest faces, loaves of bread, bottles of wine; a cat on a fence and someone singing with a big voice in the street; an alley. And yes, Natalie, too, Natalie was there, too, but she seemed further away and she did not have the pull somehow, and Marta thought, I have her still but it’s different. It feels different. And with this recognition, that it feels different, with this letting go came not a release or a feeling of freedom but an unaccountable pain. She could never have imagined the pain that she now felt. It was a sharp pain, a shrill, horrendous scream of pain as if she were giving birth; it was a birth pain—one body pulling out and separating from the other. She was alive and she could feel everything, even her own death, her own mortality, and she shrieked again over her own inevitable death, not now, but some other time, far in the future.

She could still hear Natalie’s voice, but it was getting softer and she could no longer see her. “Natalie,” she cried, “Natalie,” and she felt the pain of what it means to be alive and, as she surfaced, she gave out a long, loud howl—a horrible, bloodcurdling scream that Natalie disappeared into.

She was alone. As she pulled herself up through oceans and oceans of pain into the air, she managed to say a few words.

“I love you still,” she whispered. Her body ached. “I will always love you, Natalie.” She was breathing light; she would live.

“Natalie,” she said. “Don’t look for me. Please don’t look. I’m not coming.”

In a blink the whole world had turned white, in a nod: the sky white; the church, the steeple, completely white, the cobblestones covered like a thousand graves; the butcher-shop window filled with the white heads of sheep, the frail bones of rabbits, white, all white; the cars buried in white like animals in the snow—winter’s fleece.

I barely heard the door open or recognized Jack when he came in. He looked different. I touched the snow that bearded his face. He smiled, looking past me out into the white.