The jungle paths are so deep and lush, I can almost believe I am elsewhere, except then a clearing comes where noble Norman cows are grazing. The paths are damp and buzzing with insects. Each day, I alternate among forest, cliffs, and coast, carrying Ella’s green journal and my notebook of possible endings. The innkeeper worries that the weather is too warm, but it is cooler here than in Thailand, so every degree moves me closer to Ella.
Encountering even one other walker takes me out of the spell I’m weaving, so I press deeper into the forests, away from the paths, and farther into the void of sands at low tide. At noon, most days, a blankness overtakes me. It’s different from a loss of memory, just the cost of becoming absorbed in her. It means that something is working. I am out on the sands. The sun is high. There are no shadows. When I come to, I’m sitting in a tidal pool, wet through and very cold. The light is gold and slanting at hard angles.
This is intentional. I am in control. I walk her walk and swim with her body. Yes, I embody her. The ink runs out of my pen, and it is in such humble, subtle ways that one finds one’s way into another skin. I can feel her thrill and devastation.
The waterline at low tide is far from the cliffs, and I wade in the shallow pools, my sandals slipping on the sharp rocks. Ella will race the tide. We must wait for it. We do. When it comes, it is very fast, but we see it and stay ahead, our lungs burning as we run, adrenaline charging through us. At the very end, we slip on the rocks, but there is still time. We pull ourselves up the stone steps, then dangle our feet in the sea to congratulate ourselves as the water swirls in little breakers below us. Then the water is green, and there is no more sun. The air turns yellow, the way it does before a storm. She dives. I hear her splash. I tell her to be careful. She bobs her head and laughs, her hair plastered to her shoulders, then ducks beneath the waves. The water turns greener in the changing light. Terrified, I call her name. She doesn’t emerge.
The water is freezing, a shock to the whole body. Salt stings my eyes as I grope wildly, cutting myself on the jagged edges of rocks. I dive lower, then charge up for air. The surface gets choppier. Currents threaten to dash us against the cliffs. I can’t breathe and am afraid, and I must tell myself the cold isn’t real, none of this is real—a flaw of this body I must use to discover you.
Then, suddenly, it is morning, and the innkeeper hums as she sets out coffee, fruit, and croissants with salted butter. She goes out to the garden to feed the roses. Birds are singing. My bag is packed beside me, ready for my train. There are scratches on my arms, and I smell of unfamiliar lavender soap.
39
OF THE 572 ISLANDS IN THE ANDAMAN SEA, which was hers? I am empty of Ella, bereft, confused. No ending I have written so far will do. My body knows there will never be a body.
Siobhán left yesterday for London to learn the letterpress process. Aidan is in town for work. I wait for him in the gallery, which is cool and smells faintly—I think—of jasmine.
The Ormeau is the house by the rice fields. The light is the same, and the wall of glass.
When I close my eyes, the rice fields appear.
Climbing the spiral stairs, I sit in the loft, swinging my legs over the space. Under me, the press waits, spiderlike, its tiny letters scrambled in drawers. I might ask them if Ella has to die.
Cross-legged, knees flush with the ledge, I try to meditate the way Pra New taught Ella to do. Wind in the trees and shouts from the park outside play over breaths in and out, Ella’s, mine.
Aidan arrives. He stares up at the loft, shocked the way he was when he first met me. His surprise lasts only a moment, but the effect of his look stays; he has mistaken me for my mother.
—Fancy a spritz? It’s summer, after all, he says, recovering.
His neat white hair and collared pink shirt give me a shock of recognition, too. Having borrowed his physique, his style, I feel I know him in a different key.
Aidan is here to make sure that I’m okay, that Siobhán and the project haven’t damaged me. He is avuncular, like Anthony, whom I miss.
Ella is on the beach with her phantoms.
As we leave the gallery, I catch sight of my mother’s sculpture through the glass front, egglike, dappled in sun. I forgot to touch it before leaving. We find an outdoor table at a café across the park, and Aidan orders spritzes.
—Oh! he says, as if just remembering. Our mother’s first chapbook was printed on a letterpress machine. In Ireland. Before she was married. There’s some sense to this after all—if sentiment qualifies as sense. …
I see an elderly woman with skin as fine as paper and sharp blue eyes like her children’s. But Aidan’s comment grates at me. Any mention of the press is a reminder that Siobhán thinks my writing will be its own end. The artist’s book reduces me to human material, a living canvas or sentient palette knife—when the point is to find Ella. I’m left alone to care for her.
—Here I am off track. We were speaking of endings, Aidan says.
—No, I say, correcting him. Of Ella. Of her whereabouts.
He frowns, leaning back in his chair.
—I never liked the idea of your rewriting the journals, he says. It’s not fair to you.
It’s surprising to hear this. I was sure Siobhán put him up to this meeting.
—The situation is terrible to start, Aidan says. But it’s one thing to set yourself a problem, quite another to involve another person. Just don’t knock your head against a wall. You know what’s likely. Use your instinct. If Siobhán doesn’t like it, believe me, she’ll tell you.
Our drinks arrive. Aidan sips his through a straw. His resemblance to Siobhán is striking: the same eyes, the same sharp features.
—What’s troubling is that Siobhán doesn’t tell me everything, I say. I don’t even know the details of why she gave Ella up. Couldn’t she have kept her, or if she didn’t want the child …
Crossing his legs, Aidan starts to tell me about the little clan he joined when he followed Siobhán to London: three women, all closer than sisters. Ella’s adoptive mother was American, six years older than Siobhán, four years older than my mother. She was married to another American—they were in London temporarily—and trying desperately to have a child.
—More than anything, she wanted a little girl, he says. She learned she was infertile right around the time Siobhán became pregnant. I didn’t know anything about it until it was over. I’ve no idea how the decision was made. It’s such a sensitive issue. Even then it was. Twenty-one years old and she didn’t tell anyone what she was going to do—except your mother. She said she was traveling with Ida. Next time I saw her, Ella was in America, and Siobhán was starting architecture school in Paris. She confided in me only when the adoption turned sour. She didn’t expect to be cut out absolutely, to have no part in the little girl’s life. I’ve always thought she’d have been better off not knowing where Ella went. Brutal of me, but there it is.
—Did she consider just … terminating the pregnancy?
—It’s not something we’ve discussed. I don’t know. But we were raised very Catholic, and there’s a strong sense in our family of what you can and can’t do. My mother knows, for instance, why I’m not married, but it’s not something we talk about. Listen, I’ve said more than I should, but Siobhán doesn’t always express what she feels. You’re precious to her, though, you and what you’ve done. She trusts you. I can see why. You see things clearly, like your mother.
My breath catches. Aidan sees this. There’s warmth in his gaze, a solicitude that makes me wonder about their friendship, what they talked about, how they cared for each other.
—You knew her well? I ask, so that he’ll keep talking.
—Years ago, but yes. There’s much in you that’s like her. Though you seem a touch sadder.
—She was happy?
—Her energy, my God, Aidan says, shaking his head.
I find myself eager to talk about her, to describe how she would get excited over things that weren’t there.
I tell Aidan about her episodes and her time in recovery. I tell him, too, what I can’t tell Siobhán, about the vow I made after my missing months, after her death, to attach myself to certainties. I became a scholar. It fills me with terror not to know, to invent, to create.
Aidan fixes me with a stare that seems so much like Siobhán’s, determined and calm.
—Ida was the freest person I’ve ever known, he says. She did see things others didn’t. She’d ask whether arms were made of serpent tails or fish scales and make a note in her sketchbook. She was having a laugh, of course, but at other times I had the impression she was really checking herself. She made ordinary things beautiful, and bizarre. Being around her filled out the world.
There’s familiarity in what he says, and I find myself smiling at her memory, as if she were here with us.
—I didn’t know things got so bad for Ida, he says, but it’s rare to encounter a person like your mother. Please don’t let what happened to her make you afraid. She had something so vital about her. Don’t ever be afraid of that.
40
WITHOUT MAPS, THE MOKEN KNOW the way to the water’s deepest parts, where even a tidal wave would merely bobble the surface, raising it no more than the height of four hands. Their boats buoy as they might in the wake of a passing speedboat. Do they think of the girl with dry lips and dirty hands, her face browned by the island light, writing in her worn book and sticking her feet in the sea?
Home, for Ella, is oneness with things. The pull of any concrete place dissolves in the salt-swollen depths, where other worlds expand like sunken ships or like the bodies of the drowned. She touches her scars from the little Siobhán. Ella will be wise, fully fused with the world.
No. Too easy. Start again:
Ella is on the beach. Can you see her? Tattered sarong, fabric of a T-shirt worn thin and soft, her skin rough, hair bleached by sun.
The Moken have been at sea for weeks. But she has lost track of time. When they are on land, the fishermen wake early, and Ella, too, so she can watch them cast off in their boats, slicing through the glass sea toward the dark part of the sky. Ella’s hut, made with the help of the Moken women, sits at the edge of their rainy-season settlement. But now they have gone.
Closing her book, she walks down the beach, wishing, the way I did once, that she were elsewhere. In the sameness of days, this one seems sadder and more lucid than the rest, her imagination is at its limits to imagine a road home, dissolved like the white wakes of airplanes.
I know what she feels. I remember how spaces emptied themselves of color, how houses, streets, cities, and countries lost distinction. My body closed. Space lost its quality.
Here, in this room with wide windows, I can see to the dome of the Invalides and beyond when the day is clear. But today the fog is close, clouds slinking in through the open windows.
In her journals, Ella describes a property of the human body that renders it susceptible to the reciprocal action of those which environ it. There is a force, then, that destroys this magnetism among bodies. Maybe it’s sadness. It destroys our sensitivity to space. Left should be green, and right should be the color of persimmons.
The morning in the Andaman is fine and fair. Only the mind prints textures on the waves, stirring storms in perfect skies. Imagination fears to lose itself. How far can a self expand without shattering? She walks to where the sea meets the sky, water moving over her knees, her thighs, giving her goose bumps—not because it is cold, but because she is thrilled, terrified.
It is said that in the seconds before drowning, a tremendous calm comes over the body, which becomes like one about to sleep or blend into things, a world of objects. The autonomic nervous system tries—without the will, whose intentions (who knows?) might have sabotaged survival—to keep the mouth above water.
Medical dictionaries describe how the larynx spasms to seal the windpipe, so that water fills the stomach first. When consciousness goes, the spasm relaxes, and the lungs pull in. The old instinct. Ella’s mouth is open, her lips parted. Her body, her limbs, her hair extend across a deafening silence, vatic and infinite.
The fog lifts over the city, a camera lens twisting into focus.
Imagination at its limit, wanting words that aren’t the property of others—hewn and tilled by others. No words in any language not already owned. Toti se inserens mundo.
Z’s voice is metallic and makes me think of cables running under the Atlantic.
—I killed her, I say.
—Who? he asks, his voice cracking (my call has woken him up).
—Ella.
—So you’re done, he says, without surprise. You’re coming home.
The cobblestones, slick and shiny, reflect the sky. Street name on a blue-and-white sign: rue de l’Abreuvoir. It slopes from Montmartre’s little vineyard. A man with a dachshund stops short. What must he see? A woman laughing, running, her hair loose and wet from the rain.
When I came to Paris for the first time, it was with my mother. She showed me what was beautiful even in ugly things. We practiced finding the “interesting” on sidewalks, in chaos, or in what had been discarded—things that matched in unexpected ways. The pun of the universe is pattern. I remember her laugh. I still hear it some mornings before I wake. At an art show, I find a small print with a blue-and-white design. On the back is a quote from Baudelaire, which I copy out the way Ella would have done: Le merveilleux nous enveloppe et nous abreuve comme l’atmosphère; mais nous ne le voyons pas. The marvelous floods us like an atmosphere. We don’t see it, but it’s there.
There is a dinner at Siobhán’s in honor of a young sculptor. Her show is the last to go in the Ormeau before Siobhán closes the gallery for our printing.
—Je m’abreuve de tout ça! the sculptor is saying, laughing with pleasure, unable to stop.
She is short and charming, full of energy.
—What does it mean? Aidan asks, because everyone is laughing.
—It’s like … I’m drunk or swimming from so being glad, she says.
For the first time, I hear my mother’s laughter in the sound of my own.
41
A PASSERBY GLANCES THROUGH the gallery’s glass front. Inside are two women in baggy clothes, the ages of mother and daughter, hunched over a press. Drop cloths cover the floor.
Siobhán’s silver hair has grown out to frame her face. She fastens it back, pushing wisps into place with the back of her hand. Her eyes seem darker. She wears loose cotton pants and a man’s plaid shirt rolled up at the sleeves.
On our first days of printing, she speaks mostly in anecdotes, perhaps to ward off more serious talk. The press, an antique, is rumored to have passed through the atelier of Ambroise-Firmin Didot. She tells me about the Didot family and their inventions across the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, their printings of Virgil, Horace, Don Quixote, and Thucydides.
Siobhán is a careful compositor. She doesn’t seem to read as she sets the type, but I can’t dissociate from the text. Unnecessary words offend, and it is agony to set them.
Pages appear. Their pile grows. Siobhán tries dampening the paper. She says it opens the fibers for clarity, luminosity of impression. In the Middle Ages, she tells me, paper was made from the skins of stillborn calves, stretched and cleaned of animal hair, rubbed with pumice, and treated with lime to become absorbent.
My neck grows stiff from standing over the press, muscles tensed in concentration. Evenings, I return to the flat with aching arms and back. Even my hamstrings are sore.
I apprentice myself to Siobhán’s work ethic, laying letters in the bed, aligning the parts of the press before each printing. I come to understand her renown as an architect. Methodical and calm, she does not accept even the smallest of errors. If a print comes out smudged, or even the slightest bit uneven, we print again. Everything diminishes around us, Siobhán, the machine, and me, with Ella’s absence pressing into the skin of every page.
It is early September and still very hot. The g
allery door stands open to invite the breeze. Siobhán’s face glows with sweat as she sets the type. She is nearing the end of a page.
—We’ll be done in a week.
My words hang in the air until Siobhán finishes the plate.
—If that, she says, missing nothing.
She goes to the back room and returns with a flyer. Loose Boat is reproduced above the text:
Artist’s Book/Livre d’Artiste
Ormeau Gallery/Gallérie Ormeau
Vernissage le 30 septembre de 19h à 22h
The vernissage is almost a month away and feels too sudden. Lek’s photographs will arrive to accompany the artist’s book. We hope that he will come, too, but his wife is pregnant, and he wants to be sure she can travel before confirming. He would prefer not to leave her.
Dread in my stomach at the thought of the project ending, of returning to Philadelphia.
We take turns again at the press. We’ll finish for the day when it’s time to reink.
Siobhán pulls out a printed page. Catching sight of her own name repeated over and over, she draws in breath. Ella is hallucinating among the chao leh. Finally, she asks:
—There was no child. You made her up?
I nod, and we print for several minutes over the sounds of birds, children, and traffic.
—For the Thai police, there was no doubt what happened to Ella, Siobhán says quietly. It was her adoptive mother who refused to list her among the missing. From Krabi, we hired boats to every island from which the journal could have come. We saw so much wreckage. Everyone was looking for someone.
I take out the page, checking it over mechanically. She continues:
—I stayed on to rebuild houses. It was my job to design and build. It was something I could do. Then the news came from the detective that Ella had been seen in Isan.
—Do you think it was really her? I ask, responding to something in Siobhán’s tone.
—The woman fit her description, but if it was Ella, why would she use a different name?
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