Swansong (8 page)

A hand touches my arm.

It’s the girl who was watering the Black-Eyed Susans.  Her watering can is nowhere in sight.  Her hair’s pinned behind her head in curls reminiscent of the 1950s, a red so faint it’s almost blonde.  Her eyes—sleepy, gentle—don’t match her face—youthful, delicate.

I wipe the tears from my face with my knuckles.  My knuckles graze the scar on my cheek.

“Why don’t you tell me what’s wrong?” the girl asks.

“S-Sorry—”

“Don’t be sorry.”

I tell her about the charm bracelet.  The words tremble out of my mouth, unbidden.  The girl listens quietly, never interrupting.  Just looking at her sleepy eyes, I feel kind of sleepy myself.  Her presence is as calming as Buddha’s, her curls rippling under gray sunlight.  A single azure ribbon dangles next to her ear.

She stands, once I’ve worn myself out.  She brushes off her pleated skirt with the palms of her hands; I don’t know why, because it doesn’t look dirty.  It’s a soothing shade of turquoise, held shut with a black-and-silver belt.

“Why don’t we go to the lost-and-found?” she suggests.

If somebody already picked it up—if they don’t want to give it back—  “I’ve bothered you enough.”  I can go on my own.

She shakes her head.  Her ribbon
bounces, just slightly.  Her smile is older than she is.

We walk together from the courtyard to the school lobby.  My hysteria’s subsided, confusion left in its wake.  The closeness of the girl throws off a citrus scent—some kind of body wash, I think.  It reminds me of Mom’s lemon pies.  I think back to a day when I was nine years old.  Mom took me to the mall in Portland and I just had to bring my Magic Molly doll with me.  I dropped Magic Molly somewhere on the escalator.  A kind stranger in a keffiyeh brought her back to me.

The girl and I step into the headmistress’ office, behind the main elevators.  The walls are scarlet and gaudy.  The headmistress isn’t here, but her secretary is.  The girl fills out a lost-and-found form for me while I stand stupidly by.

“Do you see it anywhere?” the girl asks.

I stir to attention.  I check the basket on the dark desk.  Keychains, cell phones, buttons—why buttons?—but no bracelet.  I shake my head.

“Don’t worry,” says the girl.  “Things don’t just disappear.  They have to wind up somewhere.”

I wish somebody would have told that to my badger brush.  I still haven’t found it.  “Thank you,” I manage, voice hoarse.  I shouldn’t have done all that crying.

“Do you want to get a soda?”

It’s funny—I haven’t eaten, but I’m not all that hungry.  Where did Kory go?  “My friend was waiting for me…”

“I’ll walk you back.”

We leave the headmistress’ office.  We skirt around the elevators, the giant water fountain in the lobby.  Spray droplets slick my arms in a fine, chilly mist.

“Who are—?”  I can’t even finish a thought, let alone a sentence.

“Annwn.”

What kind of name—?  “I’m Wendy.”

“I know.”

My heart sinks.

Annwn turns her head, the better to show me her smile.  “We’re in Precalc together.”

“Oh!”  Well, I thought—of course I thought.

We step through the canteen door.  I spot Kory right away, and he spots us, too:  He gives us the stink eye, sitting alone at a table by the wall.

“Where
were
you?” Kory demands.  We approach him.  “I was starting to look seriously uncool here!”

“Sorry.”  I smile shakily.  “I’ll get us lunch, okay?”

He looks right past me.  He fiddles with his glasses like a scientist with a microscope.  I realize he’s studying Annwn.

Annwn waves hello.

“Hello,” Kory responds, his voice oily.  He kicks out a chair for her.

“Thank you,” Annwn says, with a playful curtsy.  “But I can’t.  I have to get back to my Black-Eyed Susans.”

“I
love
Black-Eyed Susans,” Kory says passionately.

And I’m still upset—because how could I have lost Jocelyn’s bracelet?—but a laugh bubbles out of me without my consent.  Something tells me Kory thinks we’re talking about a rock band.  I know for a fact he prefers techno.

“I’ll see you around,” Annwn says.  “Won’t I?”

“I sure hope so,” Kory says, unabashed.

Annwn leaves the canteen through the back door.  Kory and I both watch her, but—I suspect—for different reasons.

“Now that’s a woman,” Kory sighs.

“Thanks,” I tell him.

“What?  Why do you care?  It would never work out between you and me.  There’s too much of an intellectual disparity.”

I take my schoolbag off my back.  I hit him with it.

* * * * *

I spend my free period on the thirteenth floor.  I turn on the lights in the empty studio.  I unwrap the plastic covering from my paint canvas.

The canvas is blank, save for a solitary smudge of gray.

I swallow a sigh.  I line up the oil paints on the easel.  I take the sable brush, newly washed, into my hand.  There ought to be a scar on my hand.  There ought to be a bracelet around my wrist.

My hands shake like water on a chilly day.  Like the tremors Kory spoke about when he detailed the earth’s ruination.

The universe’s ruination.

The world already ended when Mom and Dad and Jocelyn died.  I can’t imagine the world ending a second time.  What would that feel like?  Who would I lose this time around?  Judas?  I can’t lose Judas.  Judas is my only family.

I can’t.  I can’t—

My ears ring.  Pain blasts its way across my scalp, tunneling into my skull.  The glass floor meets my knees with bruising impact, the room tilting and lurching around me.

The room drains of color, of light.  Darkness fills my eyes.

I try to close my eyes.  My eyelids won’t move.  I try to raise my hands.  My hands won’t raise.  I can’t feel the floor beneath my knees.  Where did it go?  I can’t feel the pain—in my knees—in my head.  I draw a deep breath.  No; I don’t.  Because I don’t have a mouth.  I don’t have a body.

I’m not here.  I’m gone.

* * * * *

Earth is more beautiful than I can put into words, seamless royal blue flecked with raging white whirlpools and splotches of emerald green.  I’ve seen that shade of green before, haven’t I?  In a dream, maybe.  I forget which one.

Earth is so beautiful.  She looks small from here, like I could cup her in my hands.  The billions of people living on it would be none the wiser.  I lift my hands in front of my face.  My left hand is scarred, red with burns, bumpy with skin grafts.  A gilded little swan swims weightlessly on the chain around my wrist.

Thank God.  I thought I’d lost her.

The supervoid is rich all around me, endless space stitched from dark matter, black where it folds in on itself and sea-blue where it rests calm, sea-blue interwoven with bruise shades of lilac and hyperviolet.  I never knew.  Never knew how colorful outer space was, I mean.  They make it look so cold in the drawings.  So impersonal.  They’ve never seen it like this.  I’ve never seen it like this.

A spark of gold flares around Earth’s outline, like an ethereal aura, the sun hidden behind the planet.  All that light in one place—it hurts.  It hurts my eyes.  Do I even have eyes?  I shield the eyes I might not have with the hand I might not have.  I turn my head away.  I’m sure I have a head.  I must.

To my left hovers a planet I’ve never seen, a titan the color of topaz, her surface hazy in raging, blue-gray clouds.  Sixty-seven moons dance around her, vying for her attention.  Shouldn’t she be Mars?  But no; here comes Mars now, soaring my way with hurtling speed, a red as bright as the hottest fire, coal patterns smudged all over her face, iridescent double moons twirling around her in earnest—

I swim through the supervoid, unafraid.  I’m weightless, a cosmic cloud.  A three-month-old weight lifts off my shoulders, fizzling out in the ethers of space.

Nobody told me how warm space is.  It tickles my cheeks in soft fingertips.  It strokes the hair on my scarred scalp.

Crimson dust and molten rocks rain my way.  I swan-dive through them, unharmed, undeterred.  Against the distant canopy of space I can see the giant ghosts of dead stars, ephemeral, incorporeal, pearl-gray and shimmering weakly. 
The stars
, Judas told me once. 
Most of them are dead.
  But no, that can’t be.  That can’t be true, because that’s not fair.  If I could just get to those stars—then I’d see for myself—

An ice-blue planet looms toward me.  She spins freely ins
ide a halo of milk-white dust.  A tiny colony of moons skitters after her, the smallest moon the closest, the largest moon the farthest.  I think of a mother crossing the street with her children.  I think of how that mother might take the youngest child’s hand in her own.  I swim past the quaint family, a sheen of cold air briefly settling over my skin.  A bright blue planet chases after them, her poles painted a startling jade green.  That color again.  I know I’ve seen that color before.

I swim to the very edge of the Kuiper Belt.  Dwarf planets and dead gray rocks glide solemnly past me, a mobile cemetery, the last vestiges of what once was, maybe, or what could have been.  Disconsolate, I watch them over my shoulder.  I watch them fade away.

The stars.  I have to see the stars.

I drift toward the phantoms stamped against the black sky.  The closer I drift, the more distinct become their shapes.  Dazzling white spheres dance in the sky.  They’re alive.  I’m positive of it.  They’re beautiful.  Why doesn’t it hurt to look at them?  They leave afterimages in the sky behind them, powdery shadows in mysterious blue, saffron steam diffusing into white-gold.

“They’re alive,” I say, eyes blurring with beauty.

I have no voice.

The star nearest me flares suddenly, lighting up a dangerous scarlet.  My heart seizes.  The star trembles and quakes, flames bubbling, shivering.  Saturation seeps cruelly out of its surface until the entire vehicle is cold and gray.  Petrified, it holds still.  I want to cry with it.  I want to take it in my tiny arms.

It shatters.

The blast knocks me off my feet—except I’m not standing on anything to begin with.  I cover my face with my arms.  Shards of gold glass fly past me, sizzling, silent as they permeate the vacuum of space.  I lower my arms once the erratic lights calm down.  Where the star once lived billows a cloud of gold, a pastel gold, beckoning in its softness.

I dive in.

Drowsy tranquility claims me at once.  I feel like a little girl lying down to sleep in her summer bed, the ocean waves whispering outside her window, her mother’s kiss on her forehead.  I swim through the nebula, gold raining down on me, gold raining around me, gentle, sparkling and dim all at once.  The heart of the nebula glistens blue-white in the distance, promising, calling.  I swim toward it, stardust caressing my shorn hair.

I emerge in the
baby blues of childhood and restless days.  They’re the freshest blues I’ve ever tasted, the softest, the brightest, a long-lost friend.  Bathed in blue, I tilt my head back.  I drink in peace through my pores.  I want to stay here forever, I decide, forever safe, forever free.

The
sky above my head is an emerald green.  It nips and pulls at me, so that without my say in the matter, I find myself rising into it, weightless, effortless.  It’s riches and jewels, a green threatening blue, a green to rival the stormy Levantine Sea.  It’s soaked in the light of a star I can’t see.

It’s only a thin ve
neer.  I surge up and break through it.  I break free, a bowsprit cutting through ocean waves.  I hover above the sea’s surface.

This must be what an airplane feels like when it skims across the clouds.  The clouds billow underneath me, jade and vermillion and burnt gold.  T
he sky—is that what that is?—is a calming, muted blue-green.  The clouds reach for the sky.  The sky reaches for the clouds.  They touch, birthing a milky, gray-white horizon.

The horizon is singing.

At first I’m sure that I’ve imagined it, because space is a vacuum, and there’s no sound in a vacuum.  But the more I pay attention, the more I realize I could never make up a song like this.  I don’t even know how to put this song into words.  Not volume—not color—not rhythm.  It’s the kind of song that starts first in your belly, deep, reverberating, then climbs into your heart; only after that does it reach your ears, ringing and true.  It’s the whistle of a baby seal, newborn, innocent, and the clap of thunder on a hot summer night, rumbling, rich.  It’s the sound falling snow makes when the world holds still long enough to hear it.  It’s the sound of a redwood’s tangled roots drinking water from the soil.  It’s the chiming of sunlight on sand and surf, and the whisper of the wind, and the ancient laughter of the shifting earth.

Rosa das rosas, e fror das frores.

A new nebula emerges from behind the gray horizon.  It soars into the sky.  It’s the purest white, the cleanest white, opalescent, flecked with sheer pinks and blues so pale you’ll miss them if you blink.  It’s as soft as a baby’s breath, a mother’s waiting hands.  It dips its slender neck in a graceful arc.  It unfolds its elegant wings, spreading them in flight.