The Descent (20 page)

It seemed absurd and cruel of fate to give me an endless expanse of time to reflect on my sins when an innocent like Fiona was made to die early. I had to guess that my family was cursed . . . and then it occurred to me that if this were the case it might be my fault, for hadn’t I been singled out, too? Perhaps I was to blame, my unnaturally long life offset by their brief, unhappy ones. But that couldn’t be, could it? . . . I was aghast at the thoughts that danced in my head. What strange perversion of our natures made us want to torture ourselves in this way?

For the first time, I was struck by the uniqueness of my immortality. I—and a few select others—experienced life differently from everyone else on earth. We experienced it as anyone who has taken a history class in school would expect to experience it: as a timeline, always moving forward. But as I listened to Sophia and heard the news of my family’s fate, I came to see that all anyone knew of life was the brief bubble in which he or she was alive: the rest was hearsay, however well documented. Only we few immortals were able to experience more than one bubble, to witness more than one piece of it, and thus, only we immortals were really in a position to judge what was true and what was false.

I wasn’t sure what to make of this trip to the underworld: Was I back in the early nineteenth century, or was this exchange with Sophia an approximation influenced by memory? It could be any number of things, really. After all, in reality I was lying on a bed on Adair’s magical island. Ever since setting foot there, I’d been made acutely aware that nothing was as it appeared.

But I never questioned that I might
not
be moving forward in time, though maybe I wasn’t. I remembered hearing of a theory among physicists that all of time went on simultaneously. As I stood in Sophia’s company, the tug of this crazy rabbit hole distorting the periphery of my vision, I couldn’t help but wonder if I was experiencing it at that very moment. It didn’t seem like something you could experience consciously or rationally—and maybe that was why my brain was fighting me for all it was worth.

In any case, I wanted to be released from this unhappy scene that I was helpless to change. “Can you tell me, Sophia—do you know what you are? Are you a ghost?” It was the question I’d wanted to ask but had been afraid I would offend her.

She looked at me warily. No response, just a narrowing of her eyes.

I pressed on. “You remember dying, don’t you? Going into the Allagash? Drowning?”

She turned her face away from me, but I caught a flash of red rise to her cheeks. “I remember the water . . . so cold . . . but that’s all. It goes black after that. And I don’t care to recall anything more, thank you.”

I didn’t blame her. Sophia’s suicide had haunted me for years. She had killed herself because she was pregnant with Jonathan’s child, proof that she was an adulteress, a serious crime at the time. The night before she took her life, I had spoken to her, pretending to be Jonathan’s messenger and telling her that Jonathan wanted nothing to do with her anymore. I had been harsh with her, and the next day she disappeared. No one knew what happened to her until the search party found her half-frozen body floating in the frigid Allagash River. Although Jonathan had since absolved me of my part in her demise, I couldn’t help but feel responsible.

Sophia stared at me now as though my guilt were painted on my face. “You think I drowned myself because you lied to me, don’t you? You are a silly woman. It’s only natural to put ourselves in the center of everything, I suppose, but still—why would I care what
you
said or thought? The only one whose opinion mattered one whit to me was Jonathan, and his position was clear enough. He would never, ever acknowledge the baby.” She gazed down at the bundle in her arm. “But it wasn’t my pregnancy, not really. I cannot blame this child. It was my marriage that broke my will. It was a death knell. I couldn’t bear the thought of raising a child in that household, of the two us being crushed under the weight of Jeremiah’s thoughtlessness and inconsideration. He wasn’t an exceptionally bad man”—her eyes met mine, as though this was something every woman could understand—“but it would’ve been the slow death of me, to spend my entire life under his yoke. I did not end my life because I couldn’t have Jonathan but because I could not escape from the choices that had been made for me.”

“Have you seen Jonathan since you’ve been here?” I asked, hopeful that she might have information that could be of help.

At this, her stern expression crumpled a little at the edges, but after only a moment’s falter, she gathered up her steely reserve again. “What’s past is past—we cannot change the outcome. No matter how many times I may revisit that part of my life, the outcome will always be the same.” Even in the underworld, Sophia’s afterlife seemed anchored to this place as a point in time like a ball on a tether. She could travel all the way to the end of the tether or come back to the point of her origin, but she could never get away.

I looked through the window of my family’s cabin into the
woods. How well I remember feeling the same as Sophia: Was I really meant to live my entire existence in these few square miles, among these same forty families? I could not accept that these two hundred people would be the only souls I would ever know. It seemed the most unbearable sentence. The next town, Fort Kent, was only thirty miles away but it might as well have been on another planet. In that small town, in St. Andrew, life’s few precious milestones—birth, marriage, the birth of your children, death—were all you were given. Sophia, like me, had longed for something more.

“You could’ve left, Sophia. I left. What I found out there was beyond my wildest dreams.” I opened my mouth to speak and tell her about the incredible existence I’d had, the places I’d traveled, the people I’d met, and of course Adair’s fantastical realm, which had swallowed me whole. But then I remembered that I was speaking to someone who was chained to this time and place seemingly for eternity, who would never get to see a fraction of what I had, and I couldn’t do it.

Sophia shifted the bundle she was carrying one more time, bracing it against her hip. Ah, the baby. This was something in her favor: at least she’d had her baby with her for eternity—mine had been taken away from me. I felt a pang of envy as I watched her . . . but then it occurred to me that something was wrong. I’d not heard the baby once this whole time. Not a burble, not a cry, not a sneeze. The child was very still.

“Sophia, is that your baby?” I asked carefully, my stomach tightening.

“Yes, a girl,” she said but offered no name.

“May I hold her?”

She shot me a contemptuous look but, tentatively, she held
the child out to me. She was still in my arms and too heavy for her size, like a sodden bundle of wash. With trepidation, I lifted the corner of blanket covering the baby’s face, steeled for something horrific. There was a neatly swaddled infant inside, but whether she was alive or dead was impossible to tell. The baby didn’t seem to breathe and yet there was a whisper of animation to her, a pulse behind the eyelids, a slight tremor at the corner of her mouth. Her skin was the strangest color, a pale gray-blue as though she had stopped breathing—or because she had never breathed.

Poor Sophia. This had been her punishment for taking her life while her unborn child was still inside her: to carry the baby with her for eternity and never to see it wake up. She could not put her down, she couldn’t bury her and be done with it. She was doomed to be forever hopeful that the baby might open her eyes and look at her, but to know in her heart that she never would. I thought my punishment had been horrible but it paled compared to this. This was the real lesson here, I thought as I handed the baby back to Sophia, who cooed and fussed over the lifeless child all the while in a melancholy air; this was the reason I’d been sent through that particular door out of the dozen in the hall, to be reunited with Sophia: not only to better understand my punishment, but to witness hers.

TWELVE

A
dair stood at the foot of the bed, watching Lanore sleep—at least, it
seemed
as though she was sleeping—and wondering what was happening wherever she was. Was she safe? Had she found Jonathan? Perhaps she was lying in the pompous fool’s arms at that moment. He pushed the thought from his mind; no, she’d promised that she was not looking to rekindle her old romance, and for some reason (perhaps the fleet look of disquietude she gave him when she’d made the promise), he was inclined to believe her. It had been several weeks since he’d cast her into this trance and honestly, he was surprised that she hadn’t returned yet.

By this time, relations with Terry and Robin had deteriorated to the breaking point. Waiting on tenterhooks for Lanore’s return, each minute more fraught than the last, meant
that he had no patience for distractions, which included the girls’ interruptions. They’d gotten the message, eventually, and now stomped sullenly about the fortress like Clydesdales, or got drunk at night and stayed up playing music, shrieking and laughing and behaving as though there were a party going on—anything to prompt a response from him, even an angry one. He refused to rise to the bait.

He blocked out as much of their noise as he could and remained with Lanore, pacing in her tiny room and watching for a sign. The only thing he
wanted
to do, however, was to hold her, aching for the reassurance of her physical presence, but he felt constrained from doing as he wished by the girls’ obnoxious behavior, which undoubtedly had been their intent.

It wasn’t until one night, when there had been a long silence in the dead hours, that he thought it was safe enough, and he took his chance. After bracing a chair against the door, he climbed on the bed and hugged Lanore close. He was amazed anew at how small she was, how fragile. Her toes came only to his shins. Her body was so narrow. He ran his hands over the parts of her that were exposed to him and thrilled at the rose-petal tenderness of her skin. He brought his face close to her neck, drinking in her scent, and that tiny bit of intimacy only made him want her more, made him shudder with the great physical potential inside him, like a tsunami rippling over the ocean and reaching for shore. He was seized with the desire to relieve his longing by coupling with her unconscious body. It wasn’t as though Lanore would be surprised if he told her when she awakened what he’d done, he thought. Knowing him as she did, she’d probably
expect
it of him. She’d excuse his base behavior and yet . . . he knew she’d be disappointed. It would
be a bit of the old Adair resurfacing, the demon who frightened her so, proof that he hadn’t been exorcised completely.

He rolled away from her, closed his eyes, and reached for his member, already full and heavy with need. Pressed against her on the bed was enough of a connection for what he had to do, and he was able to bring himself to climax quickly. His relief was short-lived, however: he felt his hard-earned peace dissipate like mist, to be replaced with an aching sadness. He was, after all, still alone, and she was still lying next to him like an effigy on a tomb.

He went to the window and saw the entire island was in sleep. Even the goats were huddled together under the pine trees, their heads resting on their knees. A mist seemed to have settled over the island, covering everything in a thick white fog, as palpable as cotton batting.

Adair went downstairs, past the dining room, where he found the two women passed out at the table, a number of empty wine bottles strewn between them. He put on his greatcoat and went outdoors. It was wintertime, but aside from the biting wind whipping in from the sea, it didn’t seem like winter on the island, which was too far south in the Mediterranean for frost or snow. As Adair stood staring at the water with his hands thrust in his pockets, he thought that he would like it to
look
like winter. What was the coldness he felt in his heart, if not winter?

Without saying a word or even thinking about it too strenuously, he made the temperature fall. A frosty veil of white started to bloom over the black rocks. Plumes of breath rose over the sleeping goats. Where the sea met rock, a ring of ice began to form, then spread out to the sea, until the island was
encircled by a huge disk of thick ice. Adair tried not to be surprised, because he knew that—in some way that wasn’t clear to him but was nonetheless undeniable—he’d willed this change to happen.