The Elementals (22 page)

That was it.

Everything was over.

The lovemaking, the sprawling garden dinners, the dancing, the music, the dreams, the dresses, the fairy tales told while John kissed me in the dark.

And also the not knowing whom I slept with, the living in the land of the dead.

It wasn’t that I was so shocked that they’d asked me to sleep with them. I’d seen it coming—I’d desired it in one way, though another part of me wanted to keep John to myself. But I’d run because of
why
they had wanted me.

Now it was all over and I told myself I was relieved. And my heart hurt just the way they say it does—as if it had been pierced with something sharp.

Along I-5 there weren’t many trees but I tried to remember which ones had elves in them according to one of the books I’d read in John’s library. Birch and cherry and oak, I remembered. Elm, ash, willow, cypress. There were no elves of the oleander bushes, that deadly poison with its deceptively cheerful flowers that crowded the islands on the highway and lined it on either side. I found myself yearning for tree elves and books. John had so many books. Books on Kabbalah and Gnosticism, Norse and Greek and Celtic mythology. Fairy tales and books of poetry and philosophy. I wanted to lock myself up in the house in the Berkeley hills and read every book there instead of going to school, instead of going back to Los Angeles. But it was too late. And even the stories in the books were changing, becoming as poisonous as the oleander.

The sky was gray with haze and there was such a bleakness everywhere that I found myself sinking into a kind of stupor. I thought of all the tales John had told me. But I remembered them differently now. The girl who didn’t believe in the Fates and had a spindle stuck into her heart. The wood spirit who was captured in a wild hunt and nailed bleeding to the door of a man who did not believe in fae. The witches with sugar candies for fingers who lured children into their wells and ovens. Why hadn’t I pondered those tales before? I only heard the beauty, saw the glamour. Whom had I been living with?

My mom sat in the backseat with me and cradled my head against her breast. She’d had reconstruction and you couldn’t tell. I heard her heartbeat through her thin sweater. She called me baby.

When I was born, she told me, she rode home from the hospital in the backseat so she could be with me. She thought it seemed wrong, somehow, to bring something so tiny in a car. She had kept the clothes I wore that day—a little gown that made a pouch around my feet and a tiny pink knit cap that they’d given to me at the hospital. The gown had pink, blue and yellow ducks on it.

We didn’t talk about what had happened to me that night in Berkeley. My parents played
Little Earthquakes,
not realizing that it made me think of Jeni. They stopped at a Fosters Freeze and bought me a vanilla soft serve, not seeming to know that I had given up sugar and, more recently, dairy. I licked it to its demise anyway and then promptly put my head down on my mother’s lap and fell into a deadly sleep. Like Beauty.

But she only pricked her finger.

I had a spindle through my heart.

25. Deep as marrow

In the weeks after I returned home, Melinda Story called me a few times and John Graves called me many times but I didn’t answer. I never even listened to the messages on the cell phone. They, the messages, especially John’s—the rich sound of his voice, the voice that had whispered to me in the dark—would only have drawn the spindle deeper in. Besides, I didn’t want John anymore. I wanted nothing because I was nothing.

Except that, from the moment I saw my bed, with the little-girl butterfly quilt cover, I wanted to sleep.

Sometimes I got up in the mornings and went jogging with what little energy I had left, returning home to take a bath and collapse back into bed. My bones ached and my back felt hollow, like the elf girl in the tale whose husband caught her pouring food into it and sent her away. One smoggy day, much too hot for November, I felt my phone vibrate in my sweatshirt pocket, against the jut of my ribs, as I ran on my spindle legs along the cement wash near my house. It was John. I took the phone out and watched it move in my palm like a creature. Then I lifted it above my head and threw it over the chain-link fence into a trickle of dirty water at the bottom of the L.A. river. My arm trembled from the effort. My phone was gone. But, more significantly, John was gone. I was gone.

I didn’t get a replacement.

*   *   *

On another run I went farther than usual, past the house where Fritz Kragen lived. His car was in the driveway and I stopped for a moment, panting, pulsing, the day white in my eyes. My clothes were sopping wet and even under sun I shivered.

Slowly I turned and stumbled away, knowing I wasn’t strong enough to fight with anyone. Except myself.

In December, my parents sent me to a therapist they were also seeing, a tall, blond woman named Elise Ronan with an office waiting room filled with
People
and
Us Weekly
. I didn’t like her from the first moment. She gave my dad a bright smile and then turned to me and took my hand.

“I’ve heard a lot about you,” she said. Her lips looked puffy, like a fish’s.

I stared blankly at her. I could feel my father staring at her in a different way. I could feel Angelina Jolie and Brad Pitt staring, too, from the cover of one of the magazines.

“Please, come in.” She smiled at my dad again and led me into her office. It was decorated in pastel colors. I sat on a mint green couch and crossed my arms over my chest.

“This must be a hard time for you,” she began. “With your friend gone like that. Your mom being sick.”

I shrugged and picked at my cuticles. I didn’t trust her, not at all. There was an ugly floral print on the rug and I stared at it. The flowers seemed to have eyes.

“Do you want to tell me how this whole thing is making you feel?” Elise Ronan asked. Although she was probably in her forties, there were probably more lines in my face than hers when I smiled.

“I don’t feel much,” I said. “I’m just really tired.”

“Are you eating?” she asked.

I shrugged again. “Yes. I’m not really that hungry.”

“You know, a lot of women your age have body issues. I know I certainly did,” the therapist went on. “I always thought I was fat.” She smoothed her skirt over her narrow hips.

I blinked at her. Was she really talking about her weight?

“You know,” she went on, “when the mother is ill it can really affect how the daughter feels about herself. It’s very natural. How do you feel about yourself in general?”

I shook my head. Tears were coming to my eyes and I didn’t want her to see them. I couldn’t believe my mom had sent me here; if she hadn’t gotten sick it would never have happened.

I stood up. “I can’t be here,” I said.

My dad was waiting in the lobby, waiting for me. He looked worried but his face brightened again for a split second as Elise Ronan followed me out.

“What’s the problem, Ariel?”

“I need to go home,” I said.

He turned to the therapist and made an apologetic gesture with his hands. Was this my father?

“It’s okay,” she said. “We can try again next week.”

“What the hell was that?” I asked on the way home after my fuming silence didn’t provoke any response from him.

“What the hell was what? You walked out on her. I don’t really appreciate that. Her time is valuable,” my father said.

I wanted to bang my forehead against the glass. “Who is she? She’s scary. I can’t believe you and mom picked her.”

“Actually she’s a very good therapist,” my dad told me. “She’s very caring. Your mom wanted us to be in good hands…” He stopped.

“What are you even saying?” He came to a sudden stop at the light and I slammed my foot forward on an imaginary brake. We went on in silence for a while.

Finally, he spoke. “I’m sorry, Ariel.” He pulled the car over and leaned his head against the side of the car. “I don’t know what to do.”

“Neither do I. But not this. I’m not going back to her and I don’t think you should, either.”

“That’s not your decision.”

I looked over at him. It was as if he’d aged ten years. I wondered if he was imagining having sex with Elise Ronan. I hated him. And I didn’t.

“Just take me home now,” I said.

*   *   *

That night my mom came into my room in her bathrobe and sat on my bed, took my hand. Her hands were always cold now and the flesh looked as if it would stay in little peaks away from the bone if you pinched it gently, like there wasn’t any moisture left in her.

“What happened today?” she asked.

“I can’t stand that woman. Who is she?”

“My oncologist recommended her,” my mom said. “Dad really likes her.”

“
Dad
really likes her? What about you?”

“She’s very practical. I just want someone who can handle things.” I could hear the fragility in her voice and I didn’t want to make it worse but I felt like I was about to scream.

Instead I pressed my head against her chest and she held me but she seemed very far away already.

“I have to have some more surgery,” she said, finally.

I pulled away. “What? What’s wrong?”

“There’s another tumor.” She was managing a smile but her eyes were shining with tears. Illumined. But the word didn’t matter. “I’m sorry, baby.”

“Why are you saying sorry?” I turned away from her. “You don’t have to be saying that.”

But I was lying. I wanted her to be sorry. If she was responsible for this then she could be responsible for making it go away. And she would do that for me, of course she would.

*   *   *

My mom’s surgery was scheduled for after the first of the year. All we did, all of us, was wait.

My parents had given up on trying to get me to see a therapist for the time being. They let me lie around and sleep, as long as I promised to eat three meals a day. I did as they asked, although the thought of having food in my system just seemed wrong, like making a plant eat a sandwich.

I felt a lot like a girl in a tower or one who slept in a briar-covered castle or a glass box. My skin was always clammy and my hair was tangled. I slept and slept on soft pillows, seeing almost no one. But if I was the spellbound princess I was also the witch who had put myself in that place of icy isolation. One thing I was not, though: the faithful prince with the sword and the kiss, the rescuer.

I thought about John a lot but in an abstract way, the way you would think about a character in a book, an actor in a film, a singer whose voice haunted you or a shadowy figure in a masochist’s wet dream. I watched candelabra-lit videos in my head of him dancing with me through the house in the hills, wearing a dark blue velvet suit and a carnival mask over his eyes, Chopin nocturnes coming out of his mouth and into the whorls of my ears. Even though it wasn’t real, the desire was worse than reality. Deep as marrow.

*   *   *

The tree has a hollow in it. That is where the children live. The dead children.

Sometimes you can hear them crying.

The tree grows up from the water. Its leaves fall into the creek. The water shines at its roots, a thin sheen over the mud. Light twinkles off of the wetness. You can see your face if you look closely enough. You can see their faces.

The children walk in a procession. They drink from the cups of flowers. They weep their songs.

There is one of them, a girl, who visits me.

She has small bright eyes, like little lights in her face, and tiny dimpled hands.

“They only wanted you to help them,” she tells me with her telepathic baby voice. “They did not want to hurt you. They did it for me.”

Sometimes I see her holding a large flower.

“What is that?” I ask her.

She shows me the drops of liquid glistering among the petals. “It’s Mommy’s tears,” she says, holding it out to me. “Drink.”

26. Whether they are ghosts or memories

Sometimes I think I dreamed it, at least some of it. Like this:

New Year’s Eve day there was a knock at the door.

I was lying in bed in my pajamas, watching the rain shaking the trees outside my window, making them look like frightened children. I didn’t move.

The knocks grew louder, more insistent. My dad was out and my mom was sleeping. I didn’t want her to wake up; she needed her rest.

I pulled on jeans and walked into the hallway.

Even with the rain outside, there was a strange winter afternoon stillness to the house. I shivered, barefoot on the wooden floor. I wondered if I listened closely enough, could I hear my mom breathing through her door? I was always listening for her breath.

I walked slowly to the top of the stairs and held the banister like I was eighty years old.

The knock came again. I went down the staircase and asked who was there.

“John Graves,” he said.

My heart was beating so hard it felt as if it could animate the rest of me—a stern puppeteer—but my limbs were frozen. I had to force myself to open the door.

It was the way I felt when I’d seen Jeni on the streets of Berkeley. He couldn’t be real. But there he was.

“Greetings.”

I took a step back and stared at him. He had grown a small beard and his hair hung shaggily to his shoulders. His glasses and his corduroy jacket were sparked with raindrops.

I tried to speak but couldn’t find any words in my throat.

“I tried calling you and you never answered.” His voice rose a notch and I put my hands over my face as he moved closer. “I’m sorry,” he said.

I backed away one step. But that was all. I didn’t shut the door.

“May I come in?”

I shook my head.

“Will you come driving with me then? I need to talk to you.” There was a heavy, lost sound to his voice.

I looked back into the house. Cold air was rushing into the warm living room. I imagined my mom calling me to her bedside, beckoning me to put my ear to her lips. My protective mommy who wanted to shelter me from everything. But there are some things from which you cannot shelter yourself.