The Glittering World (30 page)

“Wait. Please.” Elisa put her hand on the coroner’s latex-gloved wrist to stop him from pulling the sheet up, though he had made no move to do so. She looked closer. Not at the flame-corroded eye sockets, but into them, through them. The longer she looked, the more convinced she became it wasn’t him. The creature she’d seen in the woods, the one she had touched: that was Blue. This was someone else altogether.

“How?” she whispered as she leaned over the corpse. How did they do it? How had he been replicated down to the cellular level, so well it would fool a DNA test? The only answer was that this wasn’t a replica at all.

The coroner pulled the sheet up, the body shrouded once more. Jason signed some paperwork and made preliminary arrangements to return the body to New York, once the next of kin—and that could only be Blue’s mother—was notified.

“Do you want us to contact her?” the coroner said. “The police will want to notify her directly, but in terms of the burial plans—”

“That’s okay.” She stared straight down, still fixed on the withered corpse beneath the sheet, the contoured hollows of its abbreviated shape. “We’ll deal with it ourselves.”

Jason thanked the coroner and stepped toward the door; she could sense him waver there, unsure of whether or not to leave
her alone with the body. She remained beside the slab, incapable of looking away from the sheet’s snow-white topography, and what lay beneath.
Not Blue
, she thought.
Not Blue Not Blue Not Blue.
No matter who said it was him, no matter how many times. It wasn’t Blue. And if he was still alive, that meant she might still be able to return to his world.

“How are you doing?” Jason asked. He returned to her side and placed an arm around her shoulders. “You hanging in there?”

“Trying,” she said, a little nod as she pulled the cotton mask from her face. She was too distracted to focus, her head buzzing with possibilities as she forced herself away from the slab and down the hall to the waiting room.

When Gabe saw them he leapt from his seat. There had been no talk between them of Gabe having lured her onto the sandbar, of the believers meeting and the ensuing struggle, Jessed beating on Fred Cronin with Jason looking on. Elisa remembered her promise then, the one she had made to Gabe in the hospital and then repeated out on the sandbar. It was true; she knew that now for certain. They were going to find Blue, or die trying. And she was going to find what she had left of herself, as well as what had been taken.

“Is he . . .” Gabe couldn’t finish his sentence. He ran a hand through his matted blond curls, darker and thicker than when they’d first arrived in Cape Breton a lifetime ago.

“Do you want to see?” she asked. Gabe recoiled.

“Elisa,” Jason said, a warning.

“What? I’m sure it wouldn’t be a problem.”

“I don’t think that would be a good idea. He doesn’t look like anything anymore.”

“I don’t want to see him,” Gabe said, eyes welling up. He
looked exhausted. “I want to remember him the way he was. Just . . . Blue.”

“Smart,” Jason said, a gleam in his eye. Elisa knew this look well. It was triumph, perseverance in the face of irrationality; illogic always was Jason’s most enduring opponent. She wished she could let him have this one victory, not only for his sake but for the sake of their marriage as well.

She turned to Gabe. Distraught as he was, a charged current managed to pass between them. She would have to trust him with her secret knowledge, maybe all of it; he was the one who would believe.

Gabe’s face brightened and he drew in his breath, his eyes widening in expectation. “Elisa?” he whispered, his voice that of a little boy. Perhaps he already understood.

“It’s not him,” she said. “Blue. It’s not him.”

“Don’t,” Jason said. His face crumbled as he yanked the surgical mask from around his neck. “Elisa, don’t. Please don’t do this.”

“I mean it.” She knew she was going to lose Jason, but Gabe would understand; he’d have to. She’d come this far, seen things she never thought possible, and now there was no turning back. “I know they say it’s him. But you have to believe me, it’s not.”

“He’s gone,” Jason countered, though Gabe was focused solely on her. “I’m sorry. Really, I am. I know Blue’s not with us anymore, but you have to—”

“
No.
” She dug into the word like a boot heel into fresh soil. “I’m not talking about his spirit leaving his body. I mean, that body in there was
never his to begin with
.”

“I believe you,” Gabe said. He wiped away tears with a dirty sleeve, his wan appearance warming under the bright halogen lights. “I do. I believe you. I do.”

“Listen, you two are grieving,” Jason said. “Don’t let your emotions cloud reality. This delusional kind of thinking, it’s very dangerous.” He looked as if he were about to vomit. “You’ve been talking too much to Fred Cronin. Both of you. Blue wasn’t some kind of alien creature. He wasn’t a fairy, or a changeling, or—”

“I know it’s hard for you to trust me,” Elisa said. “I get that, and I’m sorry. I am. For everything I’ve done to hurt you. But that body in there? That’s not Blue. Because I saw him, earlier today. I saw the Blue we know. I held him, out in the woods.” She took Gabe by the shoulders; now they were the ones who were joined, with Jason boxed out. “He’s still alive,” she said. “He’s different now, yes, but it was him.”

“Please,” Jason said, his voice firm, as if she were an obstinate child refusing to dress for school.

“The body in there, it’s the original,” she went on, breathless. “It’s the real Michael Whitley. He and Gavina, the two five-year-olds, they were taken in and replaced by Blue and a new Gavina.”

“He
is
one of them!” Gabe cried.

“Yes. They can make themselves look human, right down to their DNA. The kids, Michael and Gavina, they were raised by the Other Kind, but as their slave labor. Gavina’s still out there, I saw her with my own eyes. There’s a whole bunch of others too, animals even, they all raced off the cliff into the bay. I think they were running from the fires. That must be how Michael died.”

“Please,” Jason said one last time, an anguished cry of desperation, and defeat. “I can’t,” he said, “I can’t.”

And then he said it again, kept saying it over and over as his voice gradually lowered, the words reduced to muttering, an incoherent mantra.

Jason turned on his heel, dropped his mask to the tiled floor, and marched down the corridor to the elevator.

It wasn’t until after sunset that Elisa finally knocked on the door to the pink room and slipped inside. Jason, facing the window, barely looked up at her from where he sat motionless on his side of the bed. He opened his mouth to speak but she shook her head, closed the door behind her, and went to him. She kissed him. Tenderly at first, then with passion; he resisted her, but only for a moment.

She pulled her dress over her head and helped him with his shirt. She had missed the softness of his skin, the power in his broad shoulders and muscular arms. If only they could have shaped themselves together from the start, instead of pretending their unlikely and fully formed selves were some kind of perfect fit. Only then might they have lasted.

Jason laid her out on the bed like one of his old pinstriped suits. He paused for a moment, and she could tell part of him didn’t want to do this, could already read the regret on his face. But he relented. He kissed her neck and shoulders, her breasts and navel, lowered her underwear and moved down to the darkly thatched mound of her sex. She gasped and held her breath, squeezed her eyes shut so she saw a Milky Way of shifting stars, followed by pure darkness. Why had she gone so long without feeling this way? Why had she withheld these tremors, this gratification, not only from Jason but from herself? And why now, on this day of horror and awe?

Jason’s tongue moved inside her. She arched her back and grasped his hair, which over the past weeks had grown longer than she knew he liked to keep it. Dust motes sparked in the
twilight glow from the twin windows, neither branch nor leaf visible from where she lay. Only the night sky unfolding at dusk, wide open above the vast expanse of the cove. She scarcely had time to catch her breath before she felt him hard against her thigh, that part of him that always seemed to act as its own separate animal. The pungent and perfumed scent of decaying peonies wafted from the vase on her bedside.

She rolled on top of Jason and eased him inside. In the narrow channel between discomfort and pleasure, she thrashed against him. She wanted to bite down on his shoulder, to draw blood; she wanted to cut into him with her cracked nails and peel back his skin. She longed to tell him she was sorry one more time, that she understood why he was going to leave her, just as she hoped he would understand why she needed to stay.

But she remained silent, pressed against him as he surged in and out of her. Elisa pictured invading hands, hollowing her out so they could take her unborn child. Down in the underground warrens, through the passageways she could now conjure in her mind’s eye, not by sight but by touch. Down there. Her fingers made their way up Jason’s sides, the way they had felt their way out of the caverns, surfaces slick with humidity and excreted life. That was where she would return.

“I’m—I’m going to come,” Jason said, and sat up, still inside of her. “Do you want me to—”

“It’s okay,” she said. “It’s okay,” but he pulled out anyway, ejaculating onto his stomach. They both knew there was no real healing in this.

A few minutes later, sweat cooled on her skin as they held each other across the worn down comforter, Jason focused on a lock of her hair as he twirled it between two fingers. By the time
she worked up the courage to tell him she wouldn’t be going back home, it was obvious he already knew.

“The body,” he said. “We can’t leave it here lying cold forever. His mother—”

“He should be returned to her,” she said quickly. “Of course.”

Elisa had always related to Yvonne’s need for Blue, but only now could she begin to fathom a mother’s need for her own child. What Yvonne had to face, though, that was too much to bear. The sickly woman had to come to terms with the fact that her son—her first son, her biological son—was truly dead. “Can you . . . Can you bring him back to New York?” Elisa said.

Jason bent to retrieve his clothes from the floor. Next to him was her Konica, the one that contained her undeveloped photographs of the burn-ravaged Gavina, as well as those of the sky and sea: her mad attempt to capture Blue, who never could be truly captured. She reached for the camera but pulled away, and instead let her hand rest on Jason’s back.

“I’ll do it,” he said, without turning to face her. “But I’m leaving tomorrow.”

“I guess that’s everything.” Jason slammed shut the trunk of the Cadillac, its polished veneer glossed with rain. “I don’t know what you’re going to do without the car, but . . .”

“We’ll get by.” Elisa looked back to the house where Gabe waited at the top of the porch steps, under the protection of the eaves. “Maureen said we could borrow hers whenever we need it.”

“And when I hear from your parents?”

“Tell them everything’s fine, that I’ll stay in touch. And
not to come up for any reason.” Jason nodded, and she smiled. “Thank you.”

“Well. Okay, then.” He ambled toward her, and started to raise his arms. “Do we . . .”

“Sure.” They embraced, firmly and for the last time, perhaps. Though who knew what awaited any of them? There was still so far to go. “Have you made all the arrangements?”

“The coroner’s office is going to meet me at the airport. I have more paperwork to sign, but since the autopsy is complete, they’re releasing him into my care.”

“And what about Yvonne?”

“No answer. I left another message, though, so I’m not sure what her story is. I’m going to bring him to a funeral parlor in the city, and from there . . .” He shrugged. “Maybe Flushing Cemetery, where my mom is. Or maybe somewhere in Brooklyn. I don’t know. I’ll figure the rest out when I get home.”

There was an uncomfortable silence, lightning without thunder. It was really raining now. “I know I’ve let you down,” Elisa said then. Couldn’t help but say, really, though there was little point anymore; all she could hope to accomplish would be to agitate the wound. “I know I’ve been a great disappointment to you.” She looked down at the gravel bed of the driveway before forcing herself to meet his eyes. “You must think I’m the most disloyal person on earth.”