Moonlight & Vines (16 page)

Once outside, I lean against the front of the building, feeling just as lost as I did the night Traci took me under her wing. I don't know what to do anymore, where to turn. I start to look for a pay phone—I figure I can at least check my answering machine again—when someone grabs me by the arm. I yelp and pull free, but when I turn around, it's Nina I find standing beside me—not the blonde from the club I just left.

“Sorry,” she says. “I didn't mean to make you jump like that.”

She's smiling, but I can see she really means it. She leans forward and gives me a kiss on the lips. I don't know what to do, what to think. I'm so glad to see her, but so scared she had something to do with Martin's death. Not magic mumbo-jumbo, nothing like that. Just plain she couldn't take the shit from him anymore and it all got out of hand.

“Martin's dead,” I say.

“I know. I was there.”

My breath catches in my throat. “You . . . you didn't . . . ?”

I can't get it out, but she knows what I'm asking. She shakes her head. Taking my arm, she leads me off down the street.

“I think we have to talk,” she tells me.

She leads me to my car, but I don't feel like I'm in any condition to drive. I start to go to the passenger's side.

“I can't drive,” Nina tells me.

Right. So we sit there in my car, parked just off Gracie Street, looking out the windshield, not saying anything, not touching each other, just sitting there.

“What did he tell you about me?” Nina asks finally.

I look at her. Her face isn't much more than a silhouette in the illumination thrown by the streetlights outside. After a few moments, I clear my throat and start to talk, finishing with, “Is it true?”

“Mostly.”

I don't know what to say. I want to think she's crazy but there's nothing about her that I associate with craziness.

“Where did you go after you called me?” I ask instead.

Nina hesitates, then says, “To the lake. To talk to my sister.”

“Your sister?”

I hadn't stopped to think of it before, but of course she'd have family. We all do. But then Nina pulls that piece of normal all out of shape as well.

“She's one of the Ladies of the Lake,” she says. “Bound to her sword, just like me. Just like all of us.”

It's my turn to hesitate. Do I really want to feed this fantasy? But then I ask, “How many are you?”

“Seven of us—for seven swords. My oldest sister is bound to the one you'd know best: Excalibur.”

I really have to struggle with what I'm hearing. I'd laugh, except Nina's so damn serious.

“But,” I say. “When you're talking about a Lady of the Lake . . . you mean like in Tennyson? King Arthur and all that stuff?”

Nina nods. “The stories are pretty close, but they miss a lot.”

I take a deep breath. “Okay. But that's in England. What would your sister be doing here? What are you doing here?”

“All lakes are aspects of the First Lake,” Nina says. “Just as all forests remember the First Forest.”

I can only look blankly at her.

Nina sighs. “As all men and women remember First Man and First Woman. And the fall from grace.”

“You mean in Eden?”

Nina shakes her head. “Grace is what gives this world its worth, but there are always those who would steal it away, for the simple act of doing so. Grace shames a graceless people, so they strike out at it. Remember Martin told you about the scabbards that once protected our swords?”

“I guess. . . .”

“They had healing properties and when men realized that, they took the scabbards and broke them up, eliminating a little more of their grace and healing properties with each piece they took. That's why I'm in my present predicament. Of the seven of us, only two still have their swords, kept safe in their scabbards. Three more still retain ownership of their swords. Ailine—my sister—and I don't have even that. With our swords unsheathed, we've lost most of our freedom. We're bound into the metal for longer and longer periods of time. A time will come, I suppose, when we'll be trapped in the metal forever.”

She studies me for a long moment, then sighs again. “You don't believe any of this, do you?”

I'm honest with her. “It's hard.”

“Of course. It's easy to forget marvels when your whole life you're taught to ignore them.”

“It's just—”

“Lucy,” Nina says. “I'll make the same bargain with you that I made with Martin. I'll stay with you for a year, but then you must hold up your side.”

I shake my head. I don't even have to think about it.

“But you wanted to sleep with me,” Nina says. “You wanted my love.”

“But not like this. Not bargaining for it like it's some kind of commodity. That's not love.”

Nina looks away. “I see,” she says, her gaze locked on something I can't see.

“Tell me what you'd want me to do,” I say.

Nina's attention returns to me. “There's no point. You don't believe.”

“Tell me anyway.”

“You must take the sword inside yourself. You must do it willingly. And you must believe that by doing so, you are freeing me.”

“I just stick it into myself?”

“Something like that,” Nina says. “It would be clearer if you believed.”

“And what would happen to me?” I ask. “Would I die?”

“We all die, sooner or later.”

“I know that,” I say, impatiently. “But would I die from doing this?”

Nina shakes her head. “No. But you'd be changed.”

“Changed how?”

“I don't know. It's—” She hesitates, then plunges quickly on. “I've never heard of it being done before.”

“Oh.”

We look some more out the windshield. The street we're on is pretty empty, cars parked, but not much traffic, vehicular or pedestrian. Over on Gracie we can see the nightlife's still going strong. I want to ask her, Why didn't you tell me the truth before? but I already know. I don't believe her now so what difference would having heard it a few days earlier have made?

“Did you love Martin?” I ask instead. “I mean, at first.”

“I'm not sure what love is.”

I guess nobody really does, I think. Is what I'm feeling for Nina love? This feeling that's still swelling inside me, under the confusion and jumpiness—is it love? People die for love. It happens. But surely they
know
when they make the sacrifice?

“I really didn't kill him,” she tells me. “I went to the apartment—I'm not sure why or what I meant to do—and let myself in. When he saw me, he went crazy. He looked terrified. When I took a step closer, he threw himself out the window—straight through the glass and all. He didn't say anything and he didn't give me a chance to speak either.”

“He told me he was scared.”

Nina nods. “But I don't know why. He had no reason to be scared of me. If I hadn't harmed him in the two years since he failed to keep his side of our bargain, why should he think that I'd hurt him now?”

I have no answer to that. Only Martin could explain it, but he'd taken the secret with him on his three-story plunge to the pavement below his window.

“I should go,” Nina says then, but she makes no move to open the door.

“What about the sword?” I ask.

She turns to me. My eyes are adjusted enough to the vagaries of the
lighting to see the expression on her face, but I can't figure it out. Sadness? My own feelings returned? Fear? Maybe a mix of the three.

“Would you do this for me?” she asks. “Would you bury the sword—in hallowed ground?”

“You mean like in a churchyard?”

She shakes her head. “It will need an older hallowing than that. There is a place where the river meets the lake.”

I know where she's talking about. The City Commission keeps the lawns perfectly groomed around there, but there's this one spot right on the lake shore where a stand of old pines has been left to make a little wild acre. The trees there haven't been touched since the city was first founded, back in the eighteenth century.

“Bury the sword there,” she tells me. “Tonight. Before the sun rises.”

I nod. “What'll happen to you?”

“Ailine says it would let me sleep. Forever.” She smiles, but it doesn't touch her eyes. “Or at least until someone digs it up again, I suppose.”

“I . . . I'd do this other thing,” I say, “but I'm too scared.”

She nods, understanding. “And you don't believe.”

She says it without recrimination. And she doesn't say anything at all about love, about how, to make the sacrifice willingly, I'd have to really love her. And she's right. I don't believe. And if I love her, I don't love her enough.

She leans across the seat and gives me a kiss. I remember the last time she did this. There was so much promise. In her kiss. In her eyes. Now she's only saying goodbye. I want to talk to her. I want to explain it all over again. But I just let her go. Out of the car. Down the street. Out of my life.

There's a huge emptiness inside me after she's gone. Maybe what hurts the most is the knowledge I hold that I can't let go—that I love her, but I don't love her enough. She asked too much of me, I tell myself, but I'm not sure if it's something I really believe or if I'm trying to convince myself that it's true to try and make myself feel better. It doesn't work.

I drive home to get the sword. I unwrap it, there in my hall, and hold it in my hands, trying to get some sense of Nina from it. But it's just metal. Eventually I wrap it up again and take it down to my car. I get a shovel from the toolshed behind the building. It belongs to the guy who lives on the ground floor, but I don't think he'll miss it. I'll have it back before he even knows it's gone.

And that's how I get here, digging a grave for a sword in hallowed ground. I can hear the lake against the shore, the wind sighing in the pines above. I can't hear the city at all, though it's all around me. Hallowed ground—hallowed by something older than what I was taught about in Sunday school, I guess. Truth is, I turned into an agnostic since those long-ago innocent days. I was just a girl then, didn't even know about sapphic impulses, little say think I might be feeling them.

It's easier to dig in amongst the roots of these pines than I would have thought possible, but it still takes me a long time to get the grave dug. I keep stopping to listen to the wind and the sound of the lake, the waves lapping against the shore. I keep stopping to look at the sword and the minutes leak away in little fugue states. I don't know where my mind goes. I just suddenly find myself blinking beside the grave, gaze locked on the long length of the sword. Thinking of Nina. Wanting to find the necessary belief and love to let me fill the emptiness I feel inside.

Finally it's getting on to the dawn. The grave's about four feet deep. It's enough. I'm just putting things off now. It's all so crazy—I
know
it's crazy—but I can't help but feel that it really is Nina I'm getting ready to lay in the hole and cover over with dirt.

I consider wrapping the sword back up again, but the blanket was Martin's and somehow it doesn't feel right. I pick the sword up and cradle it for a moment, as though I'm holding a child, a cold and still child with only one long limb. I touch the blade with a fingertip. It's not particularly sharp. I study the tip of the blade in the moonlight. You'd have to really throw yourself on it for it to pierce the skin and impale you.

I think maybe Nina's craziness is contagious. I find myself wishing I loved Nina enough to have done this thing for her, to believe, to trust, to be brave—crazy as it all is. I find myself sitting up, with the sword tip lying on my knees. I open my blouse and prop the sword up, lay the tip against my skin, between my breasts, just to see how it feels. I find myself leaning forward, putting pressure on the tip, looking down at where the metal presses against my skin.

I feel as though I've slipped into an altered state of consciousness. I look down to where the sword meets my skin and the point's gone, it's inside me, an inch, two inches. I don't feel anything. There's no pain. There's no blood. There's only this impossible moment like a miracle where the sword's slipping inside me, more and more of its length, the harder I push against it. I'm bent almost double now and still it keeps going
inside me, inch after inch. It doesn't come out my back, it's just being swallowed by my body. Finally I reach out with my hands, close my fingers around each side of the hilt, and push it up inside me, all the rest of the way.

And pass out.

When I come to, the air's lighter. I can't see the sun yet, but I can feel its light seeping through the trees. I can still hear the lake and the wind in the pines above me, but I can hear the traffic from the city, too.

I sit up. I look at the grave and the shovel. I look at the blanket. I look for the sword, but it's gone. I lift my hands to my chest and feel the skin between my breasts. I remember the sword sliding into my chest last night, but the memory feels like a hallucinatory experience.

No, I tell myself. Believe. I hear Nina's voice in my mind, hear her telling me,
It's easy to forget marvels when your whole life you're taught to ignore them
, and tell myself: Don't invalidate a miracle because you've been taught they're not real. Trust yourself. Trust the experience. And Nina. Trust Nina.

But she's not here. My body might have swallowed the sword, impossibly sheathing the long length of its metal in my flesh, but she's not here.

My fingers feel a bump on my skin and I look down to see I've got a new birthmark, equidistant from each of my breasts. It looks like a cross. Or a sword, standing on its point . . . .