Her Here

by Amanda Dennis

  I retreat to the table with hors d’oeuvres. It is next to another table, where copies of the book are fanned out. A woman is reading one, her dress lit by the beam of the projector. Watching her read is uncomfortable, as if someone were touching my skin at a sensitive spot, like the stomach, except it is not only my stomach—also Ella’s, our bodies together. The woman looks to be about Siobhán’s age, also my mother’s age, and she moves in a way that reminds me of someone, elegant and anxious at the same time.

  Scanning the room for an instant, I let myself see them all here: a young man leaning against the back wall, copper hair and linen trousers, dusty sandals and a satchel, gray eyes narrowing at the room. He has cheekbones prominent enough to brighten an otherwise suffering face. He gazes up to the loft, where Ella is now sitting, next to the projector, swinging her legs over the space. Her sarong is sand-worn and bleached. Her T-shirt is almost transparent. Traces of blood on her cracked heels. Long, tangled hair the color of straw. Her face is the face in the picture Siobhán showed me so long ago. They who are absent are probably not how I imagine them at all.

  —Elena, Béa says, placing a hand on my arm. This must be strange for you. I’m Béatrice.

  —It’s great to meet the people Ella cared about, I tell her, though she is right about the strangeness (I know her, and I don’t). Are you still in touch with many of them?

  —No, apart from Lek. I left Chiang Rai the year after Ella disappeared.

  —Do you know what happened to Sebastian? I ask, still searching for information.

  It has become a habit.

  Béa sighs.

  —Not really. To be honest, his reaction to the news about Ella turned me off him. He refused to talk about it at all. And they were so close—everyone thought he was in love with her.

  —I thought it was the opposite, I say, perplexed, then suddenly anxious.

  The book is there, on the table, full of lies. What if Ella’s unrequited love wasn’t at all what the journals describe, or I imagined it wrong, or invented it entirely? Béa only shrugs.

  —You could never tell where they stood from one day to the next. When he heard she was missing, he went into his house, pulled in all the shutters, and wouldn’t talk to anyone.

  She shakes her head.

  —He refused to socialize with us at all. I went to check on him. There was a student of his he’d started seeing, a pretty Thai girl. We didn’t get to really talk. When I went over a few weeks later, with the detective and Siobhán, the neighbors said he had moved to Japan.

  —And Aurelia? I ask, absorbing this, trying to imagine how the others reacted.

  Béa purses her lips, and a smile breaks across them. She motions to the far end of the room, where Lek is sliding his arm around a blond woman in a cotton dress. The woman turns to whisper something in Lek’s ear. She is resting one hand across a large belly.

  —Lek was in love with her for years, Béa explains, then finally it happened.

  I study Aurelia. She is startlingly pretty, as Ella described her: hair so blond, it looks white. Yet she seems at peace, one hand across her stomach. She is softer. Perhaps she has discovered something, just by living on.

  —I have a daughter now, Béa is saying. She plays with their children when we’re in Chiang Rai. They have a house in the hills—a bed-and-breakfast.

  Alarmed, I stare again at the artist’s book.

  —Don’t worry, Béa says, guessing my concern. She’s stronger now. She’s open about it. Lek did a shoot of her during her first pregnancy—this will be her third child—it was really sensual, beautiful.

  Aidan appears beside us with Siobhán. He points to one of the large framed photographs on the gallery wall, one of fishermen netting their catch, and announces that he and his partner have purchased the print for their flat.

  —What about Anthony? I ask Béa, looking at Aidan.

  —He never came back, she says. He left all his things in the village. I called him many times, and then one day his mobile number had been given away to someone else.

  To put everyone at ease, Béa raises a glass, congratulating Aidan on his purchase.

  —What will you do now? she asks me. What are your plans now that the book is done?

  Siobhán looks on with interest. I have the sense I’ve misplaced something. A vague fear, constantly with me, isn’t anymore. My own notebooks come to mind, inside of which are stories, other lives. I’ll need a job. My British passport (through my mother) makes this possible. Maybe one day the old films and theories will feel urgent, the way the stories feel now. If they do, I’ll go back. Siobhán says I can stay in the flat until I find a job.

  I laugh, to cover the trembling under it all.

  Ella stares out from me a moment, taking in the crowd. She’s feeling something stronger than pain—a longing for our living, for the possibility of withstanding what destroys, rocked by moods that pass like monsoon storms, for the knowledge that no matter how long fear sits heavy on your soul, there is always the infinitesimal chance that it will pass, and imagination will run wild in the world again. That’s the difference between the dead and the living: the possibility of the impossible, the going on, the not knowing, the inability to epilogue.

  Siobhán puts her arm around my shoulders and pulls me close, encouraging. Ella must feel, through me, that Siobhán is hugging her, too.

  44

  A PATH WINDS THROUGH CLIFFS. Steep stone steps descend into the sea. In the forests by the coast, we track each other under a copper sky split by tawny hues. A light rain begins to fall, rust-colored in the twilight.

  I am two. I have descended the stone steps, making no splash. Ella beckons from the water. Her face is blurred, as in a photograph out of focus. Mists steal in across the horizon.

  Ella reads to me from the last journal, the lost one. Its pages are underwater. At the edge of the world, in the salt sea, all channels open. She ducks under the surface, laughing.

  My mother is watching us from the steps. She is drawing something in red chalk on the stones. At first, I think it’s a script of ideograms I cannot read. I look more closely and see that it’s the image, over and over, of a swimmer, a little body. Her orange scarf billows out against the rust-colored sky.

  The air is humid around us, and my hands are not my own. They are tanner, gripping a book that doesn’t dissolve in the sea. I’ve never understood her so well, the whim that sent us beyond ourselves, beyond what we wanted, into something greater. This part is indistinct, but I go over and over it, remembering, until it is clear: My mother, with a quickness that is hers alone, pulls me from the other body, leaving me alone, struggling to hoist myself up via the steps with my shaking arms, stinging with scratches. I crouch on the steps, clinging to them, coughing water, struggling to breathe. The warm mists are gone; the cold is bitter and shrill. My towel and sandals are gone. I walk to the inn along stone and mud paths, between the cliffs, through the village, empty in the spreading darkness. My breath still comes in short gasps. The innkeeper is home when I arrive and rushes to me, alarmed. She says over and over again that I am lucky in view of how fast the tide comes in, in view of the cold front and the storm. She towels me off and draws me a bath so that I’ll stop shaking, gives me lavender soap to use and makes verbena tea in a red pot when I am dry and can breathe again. I sleep soundly, without dreams.

  AWAKE. THE DAY IS CLEAR. Wide windows let in the early-autumn air that carries hints of things complex, cold, to come. I stand for a moment, breathing the place, savoring the ripeness of the morning. Beyond the dome of the Invalides, the peaks of the Pyrenees rise up, then the sea stretches on to Malta and Cyprus, then over Iran and Afghanistan, India, Thailand, and Indonesia. My gaze floats over the Pacific and across the Americas.

  There’s a writer somewhere who says that a journal kept by an artist must be banal, compensatory—grounding in the turmoil—full of lists, recipes, appointments, all the particulars that keep a self alive. Ella didn’t bother. She looked int
o the depths and drowned. What else could she have done? Outside the window, a white trace cuts across the blue.

  WALKING ALONE. THE CITY OPENS. Leaves scatter across the place des Abbesses with its carousel, painted horses frozen in space, deserted by tourists. Sky the blue of potter’s glaze is crossed by tracks of airplanes.

  Colors vibrate an instant and are still.

  Stones are grown over with vines, like young ruins in the city of the dead. The cemetery stretches beneath the bridge that leads to place de Clichy. Ghosts breathe into spaces sewn by shadows. Under a tree with orange leaves, a woman sits and sketches.

  The cover of the artist’s book is rough, like the surface of the tombstones or like the skins of elephants. One hundred and fifty copies pressed and bound. The day after the vernissage, I packed all six journals into a briefcase—so light!—and took them to Siobhán.

  The cemetery moves like a film in full color and keeps moving. Ella dead, and we keep moving, she in us, her words dilating space like an aperture as I stumble over roots up quiet streets into the world. Streets beyond the cemetery go up and up and I can feel the way time moves in me as I climb, shaping space with my limbs, letting a world rush in, when for so many years I kept it out. Something loosened, opened, and I may never understand, but I go on, climbing the hill to its peak, the sky shaking with color, the city glittering out of thin cloud into color and form, peopled by trajectories, movements through space to the speed of time. Higher still to the steps flowing down from the mouth of the church. In a body, you feel this breaking without dying, this entrance of light, of color, of sound.

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  WITHOUT ERIKA GOLDMAN’S EDITORIAL GUIDANCE, the book would not have found the shape it now has. Her energy, talent, and stimulating conversations helped focus my vision of the work, and I admire her larger dedication to publishing literature that takes risks. Everyone at or connected to Bellevue Literary Press—Molly Mikolowski, Laura Hart, Joe Gannon, Carol Edwards, Elana Rosenthal—has been delightful to work with. I appreciate their precision and creativity. Thank you to Michael Coffey and Douglas Atkinson, who read and believed in this book, and who each had a special role in helping it find its way into the world. I’d also like to thank my agent, Marya Spence, for her enthusiasm in championing this novel and for being the first to call it an existential detective story.

  The Iowa Writers’ Workshop and Columbia’s School of the Arts provided convivial, peaceful environments in which to write, due, in large part, to the work of Connie Brothers, Deb West, and Jan Zenisek. I’d like to acknowledge the generosity of the Whited Fellowship from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, which gave me valuable time to revise the manuscript. Thank you also to Howard and Patricia Kerr, whose funded fellowship enabled me to attend the Workshop and whose company and conversation I enjoyed so much in Iowa City.

  For their insight and encouragement, and for pushing me beyond where the possible seemed to end, I thank Lan Samantha Chang, Paul Harding, Charles D’Ambrosio (especially for the “you are here” sign), Margot Livesey, Rebecca Makkai, Wayne Koestenbaum, and Stacey d’Erasmo. To my peers, many now friends, from whom I learned so much, thank you—especially Raluca Albu, Mia Bailey, Sasha Khmelnik, Claire Lombardo, Paul Maisano, Regina Porter, Will Shih, Nyuol Lueth Tong, and DeShawn Winslow.

  I’m grateful to Mui Poopoksakul for expertly vetting my language games at the last minute, and, for other reasons, to the international Beckett community, fierce-witted, wise-hearted people, all. I’d like to acknowledge and thank Tinnakorn Nukul, whose arresting photography inspired Loose Boat, and also the Center for Writers and Translators and the Department of Comparative Literature and Creative Writing at the American University of Paris—I’m thrilled to have found such a lively literary and intellectual community.

  To my writer friends who read the manuscript multiple times at various stages and talked matters through with me at length, I’m so grateful: Albert Alla, Susan Barbour, Kate Brittain, and Tasha Ong. And to friends who read extensively, commented, or offered conversation, inspiration, and encouragement, thank you, especially Molly Crockett, Lauren Elkin, Nina-Marie Gardner, Violeta Gil, Eliza Gregory, Dan Gunn, Jane Han, Cary Hollinshead-Strick, Rafael Herrero, Delphine Jacq, Matt Jones, Rachel Kapelke-Dale, Alexandra Kleeman, Corinne LaBalme, Ferdia Lennon, Harriet Alida Lye, Spencer Matheson, Mark Mayer, Reine Arcache Melvin, Chris Newens, Helen Cusack O’Keeffe, Lex Paulson, Rosa Rankin-Gee, Jonathan Schiffman, and Erik Zwicker. I’m grateful for your perspective, intelligence, and humor. My love and thanks go also to Jack “Giant” Mahaffey (for sharing his love of Cormac McCarthy), to Mindy (for her stories and her verve), and to all the Dennises.

  I’ve dedicated this book to my mother and father and to my sister, Laura, and would like to thank them here also—for being unflagging in their belief and support, which they put into action in so many ways over so many years. And thank you, Emmanuel, my traveling companion, for sharing the journey and for pointing out magic in surprising places.

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  BORN IN PHILADELPHIA, AMANDA DENNIS studied modern languages at Princeton and Cambridge Universities before earning her PhD from the University of California, Berkeley and her MFA from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, where she was awarded a Whited Fellowship in creative writing. An avid traveler, she has lived in six countries, including Thailand, where she spent a year as a Princeton in Asia fellow. She has written about literature for the Los Angeles Review of Books and Guernica, and she is assistant professor of comparative literature and creative writing at the American University of Paris, where she is researching the influence of 20th-century French philosophy on the work of Samuel Beckett. Her Here is her first novel.

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