by August Arrea
Jacob stood for some time in the hallway with his mind blank and yet wrestling with a flood of thoughts at the same time. He then came to notice a warmth of light resting on the right side of his face. Turning his head, he saw he was standing in front of his grandmother’s bedroom. The door was open and sunlight was streaming in through the window inviting him inside. And most likely he would have had he not heard the opening and closing of the front door downstairs.
~~~
Rushing downstairs in his stocking feet, he found his grandmother hanging up her coat in the entry closet.
“I was wondering where you went off to,” he said.
“What you mean to say is you were beginning to worry I might have become like one of those old persons you hear about in the news who go out for a walk and suddenly can’t remember their way home.” said Ava. “Well, fear not. I needed a couple things at the market and somehow I managed the survive the treacherous journey.”
She went to pick up the bag of groceries she had set down but Jacob rushed over and beat her to it.
“Thank you, dear,” she said, giving her grandson a grateful pat before leading the way to the kitchen.
“I wish you would let me know when you need a grocery run. I could have picked these things up for you on my way home from school,” said Jacob while peering down into the grocery bag to see what goodies might be inside.
“What am I, suffering from infirmity?” scolded Ava, “You’ll notice I’m still able to depend on two able legs to get around and not some mechanical scooter of which everyone seems in a rush to get behind the wheel.”
“Yes, but—”
“But nothing,” said Ava, motioning with her finger to a place on the counter for Jacob to set the bag. “Besides, I’m going to trust you to know how to pick out porcinis?”
“Porcinis? That’s cheese, right? How hard can that be?”
A knowing look of judgment came to Ava’s face.
“I rest my case,” she said, retrieving the bag of fresh mushrooms from her bundle of groceries.
When she turned to make her way to the refrigerator, Jacob instantly began to rummage through the rest of the groceries. Potatoes, carrots, celery—it was clear his grandmother was preparing to make a batch of her vegetable soup.
“All I’m saying is the grocery store is a good half mile away.”
“I enjoy the walk, especially at this time of the year,” said Ava. “Perhaps you’d rather I stayed cooped up in this house twenty-four hours and get my allowance of exercise through a pair of knitting needles.”
“I’m not saying that,” said Jacob, with a sigh of frustration. “I’m just not sure being out alone carrying groceries for such a long way is a good idea for someone so—”
Jacob stopped himself, but not soon enough. Ava leveled on him a piercing glare from across the counter with those steely blue eyes of hers. She grabbed from Jacob’s hands the bunch of red grapes he had found knowing he could devour the entire bunch faster than a swarm of locusts to a corn crop and leave nothing behind but the dried-up vine as evidence.
“So what? Old?” She allowed the last word to be cast from lips with a noted infliction of disdain.
“Delicate, as all beautiful, grand women are,” Jacob brown-nosed with a matching smirk which only made Ava’s left eyebrow arch itself even higher.
“Do yourself a favor while you remain one step ahead of being disinherited and grab me the soup pot and get it ready for the stove while I finish putting away the rest of the groceries. That is if my delicate arms can muster enough strength for such labor,” she said, plucking free a small bunch from the grapes she held for Jacob to nibble.
She couldn’t help faintly smiling while watching him go about the task she had given him. She found him to be a good and kind-hearted young man, even when his kind-heartedness reminded her of her advanced years. All ninety-four of them, of which she held more and more in contempt. Not because of any vanity she possessed, but from the added worry each passing year brought with it; worry that the limited time she had left would take her from him too soon. Especially now when she was all he had left.
“How is school?” she inquired suddenly in an attempt to clear her mind of such unsettling thoughts. “I trust you are keeping up with your studies.”
“Sure,” replied Jacob as he waited at the sink for the pot to fill with water.
“I hope so. Beautiful, grand woman as I may be,” she gave a sarcastic glance over her shoulder as she continued to put food away in the refrigerator, “I’m not so much that I’ve forgotten what it’s like to be a teenager.”
Discussing his studies, or the generation of teenagers long passed was the last thing Jacob was interested in doing. Placing the pot on the stove, he turned on the burner igniting a flowering blue flame beneath it. He then leaned himself against the counter and watched his grandmother grab the last remaining items from the grocery bag. His mind, however, was clearly elsewhere—miles elsewhere—which Ava was quick to notice.
“You okay?” she asked.
“Perfect,” replied Jacob through a not-so-convincing half-smile.
He nervously started drumming his fingers against the edge of the counter while continuing to compete in the ongoing tug-of-war taking place with his thoughts.
“Speaking of school,” he finally forced himself to say rather tentatively. “I had a visitor today.”
“That’s nice, dear, ” replied Ava, who remained busy with her groceries.
“Yeah. In fact, he said he knew you.”
“That so? Who was it?”
Jacob hesitated at first.
“He said his name was Gotham.”
Ava came to an abrupt halt just short of the refrigerator, as if she ran straight into some invisible wall, and lost hold of the carton of eggs in her grip.
“Grandma?”
She remained stock-still, not even moving to clean up the omelette of broken egg shells and running yolk pooling at her feet.
“You’ve seen him? Gotham?” she finally inquired in a faint voice as if fearful to even pose the question. “What did he want?”
“Maybe you better sit down—” said Jacob, gesturing to the kitchen table, but Ava was in no mood for his convalescent handling of her with kid gloves.
“What did he want?” she repeated with noted impatience.
“I’m not really sure. He didn’t really seem to be playing with a full deck.”
“What do you mean?”
“Well, for starters, he told me he was an angel,” Jacob answered with a forced chuckle while closely watching his grandmother’s reaction. Yet his words didn’t seem to faze her in the slightest. Not even a questionable flinch. If anything, what looked to be a wave of relief swept its way visibly across the profile of Ava’s face serving to only confuse Jacob all the more.
“He changed his mind,” he heard her mutter in a comforting whisper to herself while closing her eyes and bringing her clenched hands to her bosom. “He changed his mind.”
“Did you hear what I said?”
“He told you he was an angel. Alas, my hearing is one of the few things not yet diminished by age.” She then took a few steps forward to close the door to the refrigerator she had left open and asked simply, “Was that all?”
Was that all? Jacob thought to himself. Wasn’t claiming to be some kind of winged myth enough?
“Hmmm, well, let me think here for a minute,” Jacob hemmed sarcastically. “Oh yeah, there was one other thing he brought up. He said he wanted to inform me I was a neph—a nephol—”
For some reason Jacob’s tongue couldn’t find the word, and in his growing frustration he found himself stammering even more until Ava, with a heavy sigh, put silent her grandson’s continued hiccupping search for the word by interjecting clearly and calmly, “Nephilim.”
The kitchen once more grew quiet. Ava didn’t need to glance over at her grandson to know he was staring at her with dazed disbelief.
“Perhaps the pronu
nciation of the word got itself tangled up in all that sarcasm,” she remarked.
Ava didn’t need to worry about any further mockery passing through Jacob’s lips. He was too busy trying to dull the unpleasant shiver he felt beginning to make a slow crawl up his back.
His back...
“What’s going on?” Jacob managed to ask with great hesitation.
It was then she finally turned her gaze on him, and at first Jacob wasn’t sure which to focus on first, the faint smile curving his grandmother’s lips, or the glistening of tears in her eyes she struggled to choke back, which made it all the more difficult to decipher whether it was good news or bad she seemed to be preparing herself to unload upon him.
“What’s going on, indeed. I guess you’ve waited long enough to finally have that question answered, yes?” asked Ava, her smile overcoming the diminishing tears, and yet offering little comfort to Jacob.
“Why don’t you turn off the burner and let us go up to my room, hmm?” said Ava. “What I have to tell you may take some time.”
~~~
There comes a moment in each person’s lives when Destiny chooses to reveal itself to us, Ava told Jacob as they climbed the stairs to her bedroom.
How it ultimately chooses to unveil itself is as different for each person as there are stars in the heavens. For some, it could be as jarring as the most numbing of tragedies or profound good fortune, while for others it chooses to be as subtle as a leaf surrendering itself to an autumn breeze as it takes leave of a tree. More often than not, however, it comes and goes with as much fanfare as two strangers crossing paths on the street offering little more than a polite exchange of nods in passing.
The endgame of Fate’s presence, however brief its visit, is always the same, to be certain; to forever alter the course of the life held in its sights, in the same manner trade winds change the trajectory of a boat set adrift upon an uncharted sea.
For Jacob, such a moment presented itself in the simple opening of an aged cigar box unburied from the bottom of an old cedar chest where it lay concealed beneath the weight and clutter of a lifetime of memories basted in the musky scent of mothballs and time. The unbelievable truth the contents of the box would spell out in front of him when they finally were carefully unpacked would prove far beyond anything Jacob had already come to conclude concerning his supposed destiny in life, if he in fact believed in such things, which he did not. Not by a long shot.
~~~
Lingering in the doorway of his grandmother’s bedroom, Jacob watched as she made her way to the sturdy chest resting at the foot of her bed. Not surprisingly, his grandmother’s room was as tidy as could be. Unlike his mother’s room, his grandmother’s presence could be seen in every corner; from the photographs capturing frozen moments of her youth displayed in frames lining the top of her dresser, to the walls decorated with the surprisingly beautiful oil landscapes she painted over the years; a past-time hobby she acquired to help keep her arthritic hands limber.
Ava knelt down in front of the chest and pulled away the cream-colored crocheted blanket which was carefully folded and draped over the top of it. The chest let out a creak as she opened it and a pungent scent of locked-away age wrapped in mothballs rose up and met her nose. Inside held a cargo of relics from a time long passed into memory: some linen, a few hats from when women wore such things, and what looked to be several finely made costumes tailored for the stage.
“It never ceases to amaze me how a life garnering as many years as mine has can be reduced to fit within the confines of a simple cedar chest,” Ava remarked as she busily dug her way deeper into the folded artifacts.
It wasn’t long before she found what she was looking for and brought into light the large cigar humidor she had long ago secreted at the bottom of the trunk. The sight of the box seemed to drape a veil of sadness over Ava, and Jacob could tell instantly his grandmother held an untold reverence for whatever resided inside it. The way she held it was unmistakably guarded, like someone holding an urn containing the ashes of their most beloved, and for a few moments she sat quietly with it until she turned to Jacob and held the box out for him to take.
“There’s something inside here you should see,” she said.
With some hesitation, Jacob forced his feet to step across the room to where his grandmother remained kneeling beside the trunk and take the box from her before taking a seat on the edge of the nearby bed. There he looked over the mysterious wooden box, nondescript in appearance except for a faded but decorative carving etched across the top. There was a keyhole in front but when Jacob attempted to open the lid he found it was not locked.
Inside more mementos of the past lay hidden, but Jacob knew right away before even looking through them that these items were far more personal in nature than anything else residing in the trunk, beginning with the small bundle of letters resting on top. They were tied together with a wilted white linen ribbon slightly discolored with age which also held in place a large, grayish-colored feather. Only it wasn’t like any feather Jacob had ever before seen. At least not from any of the birds who made their home in their nearby woods where he frequently walked. Nor did it feel like an ordinary feather when he went to touch it. There was an armored hardness to it which would make one think twice before stuffing a pillow with it.
When Jacob went to slide the feather out to get a closer look, the plume’s edge severed the ribbon as easily as if it had been cut by a knife or a pair of scissors. The unbound letters fell across his lap and onto the floor. Jacob saw each envelope was addressed simply to “Ava.” On the back of each envelope where the carefully opened flap had once been sealed was imprinted a mysterious symbol, not by ink but what somehow looked to be burned into the paper itself as if by a tiny branding iron. Jacob had never before seen the symbol. Yet it seemed to register with some part of his brain, in the same way the Spanish words scrawled on the blackboard in Mrs. Lopez’ class suddenly unscrambled themselves just like any word written in English. Whatever this symbol was, he knew it stood for the letter “G.”
“G”?
Jacob then scoured through the rest of the articles inside the box. A small clear bottle filled with what looked to be water rested beside a worn, brown leather-bound book. There was also a brightly colored flower so fresh and alive it looked as if it had been picked no more than a few minutes earlier. And like the feather it was oddly unlike any other flower Jacob had ever before seen. It gave off the most wonderful of scents, and its soft pedals appeared to subtly change hue right before his very eyes. Yet as strangely magnificent as the flower was, Jacob soon found himself looking past it to the upside-down face staring out from a black and white photograph half-covered beneath the book.
He pulled the photograph out for a closer look, and an uncomfortable feeling slunk its way over him. In the photo was a man—a man whose face he recognized instantly.
“This is the man I saw in gym after wrestling practice today,” said Jacob.
He then took notice of a woman with a small, light-haired boy also in the photograph standing beside the man, and he grew even more puzzled. The woman was his grandmother. Only she appeared not as she did now, but how she was then, in her youth—the way she looked in many of the numerous photos scattered in frames around her bedroom and downstairs.
“That can’t be right. That’s you in the picture, isn’t it?” asked Jacob, pointing at the Ava who had yet to be touched by the finger of age and stood frozen in the prime of her youthful beauty, while looking to his grandmother for an explanation.
“So, what...you knew this Gotham guy’s father?”
Ava could help but smile slightly.
“I doubt I’d be sitting here with you now had I been granted the privilege of such a face-to-face meeting,” she answered cryptically. “No, that would be the man you met today. That is Gotham.”
Jacob felt his chest tighten. It couldn’t be possible. The man beside her in the photograph looked exactly the same as the one he saw in
the school gymnasium, as if he had somehow managed to step out of the photograph into the color of the modern world like Dorothy walking through the front door of her drab farmhouse into the technicolor of Oz. But how? Unless, maybe, he had one of those rare aging diseases. You know, the kind which makes a person who has it look older than they really are, only in reverse. Yet even then—the photo itself was taken a good sixty years ago—even the idea of such a preposterous notion was—
“Inconceivable, I know,” Ava’s voice echoed his own thoughts. “I had a hard time accepting it at first myself, despite everything I was taught to believe in growing up. Then again, I was just as cynical and head-strong as you are now when I was your age.”
She came and sat on the bed beside Jacob with what looked to be a large green scrapbook with gold trim on her lap which she proceeded to open.
“Where to even begin,” she muttered to herself after turning the first couple pages. “If only I could unfold the memories I carry inside me as easily as opening this scrapbook, as many I wish to share with you are far more vivid than anything I can offer your inquisitive eyes.”
Jacob glanced down as Ava continued to thumb through the scrapbook and saw the pages inside held numerous newspaper clippings and articles cut from magazines which told the story of Ava’s short yet illustrious career as one of the most renown soprano singer’s ever to bend the world’s ear.
~~~
In a time long removed from the present, Ava Delacroux was known as the “Living Aphrodite of the operatic stage”—at least that seemed to be the consensus according to the clippings Jacob scanned. Of course there was little question why when one glanced at the numerous accompanying photos of Ava in her youth. Her’s was a classic beauty; subtle enough to quicken a man’s heart while powerful enough to bring an army of men to its knees if she had ever so desired. Her captivating presence, however, went far beyond just the beauty of her living portrait. It was her voice: soft when she spoke, infinite when she sang. A voice which was laced with a hidden spell to take all who heard it to profound, sublime places and turn oceans into molten mercury into which anyone whose ears had been blessed to take in such sounds would willingly cast themselves to drown, and die so quite happily.