The Waters & the Wild (5 page)

S
he woke and looked at the clock. It was three in the morning, the time when, she'd heard, people most often die, the time for spells.

She bit down on her lip and ripped the tube from her arm, then pressed some gauze to stanch the blood. Surprisingly, she felt no pain.

She was still wearing the gown. It was a sickly green color and open in the back, exposing her rear end, so she took it off and went naked. It didn't matter. No one could see her. The invisibility spell had worked. It was easier not to make the unsightly gown
invisible along with the rest of her, anyway.

She left the hospital.

She stood on the sidewalk in front of Cedars-Sinai. The sky was hazy with night fog. Not much traffic. Not much breeze, but she lifted her arms and closed her eyes. Now it was time for the second spell.

 

The city stretched below her, different than she had ever seen it. Beautiful, really. A grid of lights giving off a phosphorescent glow.

She flew north toward the shimmering hills, then east above Sunset. From this high up the billboards looked different, even huger. Giant boys and girls in designer sunglasses weren't just reminding her she could never be like them; now they were threatening to eat her alive. But they were so outrageously pretty, she wasn't sure she'd
mind. She passed the fancy shops, the hotels, the record store, the restaurants, the nightclubs. Deena used to hang out here when she was a kid. A hippie born a little too late, coming of age when the kids were shaving their hair off and wearing swastikas instead of peace signs. Luckily, there were still remnants of an earlier time then; Deena had told Bee about having sprout sandwiches and hibiscus tea at a ramshackle place called the Source, seeing Cat Stevens browsing at Tower Records and Joni Mitchell holding court at the Rainbow. Now the Source was some cantina for hipsters, Cat Stevens was a Muslim named Yusef and Joni never left her house in Bel Air. Bee thought, What a strange place this is. If you made up a city like this, no one would have believed you. It seemed more like myth than reality—a
whole metropolis built up around an industry that recorded dreams on giant screens, a city bordered by an ocean and a desert and snowcapped mountains. And right through the middle of the urban sprawl were canyons full of flowers, wild animals and secrets.

The French chateau on the corner was hidden behind a hedge, but you could see the peaked roof, especially from above. She landed softly and walked down the steep tiled driveway and entered, took the elevator to the lobby. No one stopped her—there were a few employees behind the desk—so the invisibility glamour must still be at work. She tiptoed over the carpet and down the steps into a room with high windows and lushly upholstered sofas. The color scheme was garnet and emerald. There were sconces on the wall, and the candlelight
made the room seem haunted. She realized that the ghost haunting it was probably herself. Someone had left out a tray with a wine bottle and a glass, and a plate of fudge and strawberries. She poured herself a glass of wine and drank it. Immediately her head felt as if it was going to detach from her body and float away, so she stopped and ate a bit of chocolate instead. She realized then that she wasn't sick anymore. The symptoms she'd experienced in the hospital were gone. This was when she wondered if she was dead.

She vibrated with a chill and dropped a strawberry from her hand, then hurried out of the chateau and back out onto the boulevard. The night lifted her again, swirling her into the air like a leaf, and carried her farther east, and then north again into Laurel Canyon.

This was where she knew she was supposed
to be. The road was narrow, and the hills sloped up at a sharp angle on either side. Here were the eucalyptus of her dreams, the sleeping primroses. She flew farther into the canyon world until she came to a strange structure on the side of a hill.

It was a brick wall and stone balustrades—the remains of a grand stairway. Squat palms and jacarandas grew all around. She remembered her mother showing her this place before, and the queer chill she felt then, as a little girl, staring out of the car window.

“That's Houdini's mansion. The magician. It burned down in the fifties,” Deena had said.

“Nineteen fifty-eight. His wife, Bess, said he came back to her during a séance,” Lew had added. “And people see an apparition of a coach driven by white horses at Lookout Mountain Avenue.”

“I knew he'd bring up ghosts,” Deena said, in that eye-rolling way.

Lew just shrugged.

What would he think of his girlfriend's daughter now? At least he'd probably believe it, as opposed to Deena, who never would. Bee knew she should be missing them, but somehow she didn't. Was this what it felt like to be dead? She missed Sarah, though, and Haze. She remembered Haze sitting at her bedside in the hospital. Was that Haze? He'd only stammered once, and where were his glasses? He hadn't smiled—he was too worried—but she wished she had seen his smile one more time. Why couldn't her friends have come with her? The missing was an aching feeling in her chest, but dull, like when a part of your body goes to sleep. She realized the ache was in the exact space
where her heart might have been beating. Maybe ghosts had to have longing or they wouldn't be ghosts; they'd just go away for good.

But there was another feeling inside her now as well. A sense that she had begun to love the world, finally, this alien world into which she had been thrown. Yes, she loved the world, with its Haze and its Sarah. It was no longer lonely. It was beautiful in its way, with its oceans and roses and light. But there was also the feeling that now, having met her friends, she had accomplished something, the thing, perhaps, she had come for: to touch their lives, to bring them together. Now she could go back to the place where she belonged. The balance had to be restored.

The bench. The one in her dream. She
knelt and ran her hands over the cool stone, the thick leonine legs wrapped with ivy.

Then she saw the opening in the side of the hill and she knew she was home.

H
aze and Sarah were eating lunch together when they saw her. They knew immediately when she walked right past them. She did not even smile or say hello, but she did glance their way for a moment. Her eyes were completely different. The pupils that had made you want to jump inside them
were now tiny pricks.

She was wearing new clothes—a pink tank top and pink camouflage pants. Her hair was freshly washed and pulled up in a high pony-tail. She wore makeup—mascara, lip gloss, blush on her cheeks.

A few nights before, Deena held her new daughter and wept with relief that she had recovered. Deena knew nothing of the change, but still she sensed it. This girl who snuggled in her arms had warmer, less translucent skin. She was less frail and less aggressively beautiful. Her breasts were starting to show. She sucked her lower lip like a baby so that her teeth protruded slightly. When did Bee start needing braces? Deena wondered. Even if Deena suspected something, she did not pursue it. She was relieved, deep down, that this new child had come to her. A real child.
One who needed her. A child of the world.

The girl walked right past Haze and Sarah and went to sit at Lindsey Carlisle's table.

“I miss her,” Sarah said.

“Me, too.”

“What happened?”

“I don't know.” He lifted his fingers to his mouth, then dropped his hand in his lap. “She had to go back where she belonged.”

“I thought she belonged with us.”

“I know.”

They were quiet for a while; it was too hard to speak about it. Plus, there was a part of both of them that wondered if they were wrong, if they were experiencing some kind of mutual delusion. It struck them, though, that whatever they were experiencing, they were not alone with it the way they had once been alone. Something had changed in both
of them. It was as if they were seeing each other for the first time.

“I'm glad I have you, Alien Boy.”

“You've got me.” He could feel his chest tingle with the surprise of saying the words out loud to her. He never stammered anymore, and his mother had taken him to get contact lenses. He'd also gained a few inches, suddenly, almost overnight, so he towered above the other boys his age—above Sarah, now the tallest girl in their grade—and his skin was clearing up. It had started to get better the day after Bee had touched his cheek. Come to think of it, that was also when the stammering had stopped.

Sarah had changed, too. The dreams didn't haunt her anymore. Just yesterday, Haze had filmed her singing “Strange Fruit.” They were going to send it in to
American Idol
for
fun. In the video he'd made, she wore a gold satin dress that had been her mother's, and her grandmother had put waist-length braids in her hair.

 

One day, Haze and Sarah went to the park where they had once flown with their friend. They were close enough that they could smell each other, but they had not yet touched. His skin looked even paler beside hers. His hands were big. He could have covered her whole hand with his, made it disappear.

They were both beautiful. Neither realized that they had feared their own beauty, hid it intentionally. Neither realized they had been challenging the world:
Find me lovely anyway, desire my friendship, come close in spite of my strangeness, my belief in UFOs and reincarnation. I dare you.
But someone had come close anyway.
There was nothing left for them to prove.

“Are you really an alien?” Sarah asked him, turning her head to the side, wrinkling her nose. “Because you look like a young man to me.”

“Are you Sarah?” he answered. “Or Stephanie?”

“Neither. I think I need a stage name.”

“How about ‘the Comeback Kid'?”

“Ha. What is that supposed to mean?”

“You know. Like you came back from another life.”

“I thought that's what you meant. I'm okay being in this one now, thank you.”

“Me, too,” said Haze.

A cool low sea fog had chased all the children from the park. Night was coming, darkening the lawns. The sky was clear again now, a deep pulsing blue tinged with violet.

“Do you remember when we flew?” Haze asked her.

“Of course, young man.”

Haze stood up, brushed the grass off his seat and held his hand out to her. His heart felt light and buoyant, as if it might lift him off his feet, an internal hot air balloon.

“Will you join me?”

“Are we leaving Planet Earth?”

“No, just taking a little trip. I don't want to leave anymore,” he said softly, his new voice smooth as the evening sky.

 

Haze and Sarah knew that this was not the end of the world. At the same time, they sensed that perhaps the end of the world as they had known it was near. One of them had seen, or believed he had seen, whole galaxies destroyed and new ones reborn. The
other had witnessed, or believed she had witnessed, unbearable human suffering and then returned to a world where one kind of suffering had been abolished, at least in certain places, and new suffering had come to pass. They both, in their short present lives, had known war and watched the climate change enough to threaten the earth's existence. They had found each other; they belonged to the world. They had lost Bee, but not forever. Under the earth upon which the dream city of Los Angeles had been built, they sensed a stirring as of water, a shining as of gold. They felt the reverberations of music. Magic had returned. The king and queen, having shed their old skins, reached out to embrace their lost child in an underground garden.

And her friends knew someday they would find her again.