by Lydia Netzer
George’s boat was a cruising trawler. The hull was navy blue, the pilot’s cabin glossy bright wood with white trim. The boat cut briskly through quiet lapping waves, creating a sharp white wake. George stood at the helm, one hand on the wheel, one hand on the throttle. He wore a captain’s hat. Irene and Belion sat politely at the stern on a seat that stretched across the back of the boat. Irene hung over the side, trailing one hand in the water.
“Everyone alright back there?” George called.
He heard Belion say, “Great.”
“Irene? You alright?” he asked.
“Never better,” he heard faintly from the back.
Kate Oakenshield emerged from the cabin, wearing nothing but a loose, strapless white dress, gathered at the top with several rows of elastic over her breasts and just long enough to cover her butt. Her hair was a tangle of chestnut curls, falling down everywhere. She hung over the side of the boat, gazing intently into the water as it moved past.
Irene pulled her ponytail out and unbuttoned the top button of her shirt.
“Let’s go out on the lake, away from the city lights a bit, so when the stars start coming out—” George began.
Kate gave a little gasp and then dove into the water. George instantly cut the throttle but did not seem alarmed. Irene, however, jumped up and rushed to the side of the boat. George switched the motor completely off, and the sound stopped. The boat drifted.
“Is she alright?” Irene asked. “Should we—”
“She’s fine. She must have seen something.”
“I didn’t hear her beep or twitter or growl or anything. She just … kind of draped herself over,” said Irene. “And then she fell in.”
“Yes, yes, don’t get worried,” George urged her. “She does this kind of thing all the time. I promise you she’ll be back up in three seconds.”
They stood next to each other by the railing, watching the waves for signs of Kate’s resurfacing. Belion started to take off his shoes.
“I’m going in after her,” said Belion.
“Now hold on a minute, there, knight in shining T-shirt,” George began. “Just because I signed you on to muscle her father doesn’t mean I need you scouting for peril around every corner. Testing everyone’s food for poison. You know, plucking us from—”
Belion threw his meaty leg over the side of the boat.
“Oh, alright, are you going in?” said George. “Fine, dive in and see what you can see.”
Belion splashed into the water just as Kate resurfaced, holding tight to the horn of a narwhal. She was beaming, rubbing its horn, patting it on the face.
“Are you kidding me?” Irene asked. “Is that a fucking narwhal?”
“Yeah,” said George. “She’s one of those, you know, St. Francis of Assissi types. Twitter-dee-twoo and then you’ve got an orangutan for a pal, a Yorkshire terrier for a copilot, right? Especially birds but also, you know, the Erie narwhals.”
“But I thought no one could catch them alive, they’re so dangerous,” said Irene.
The narwhal began to dive, and Kate let go of it. When she came back to the surface, she had shed the dress. It floated to the surface. Belion picked up the dress and, without looking at it or the boat, balled it up and hurled it back onto the deck.
Belion said, to Kate, “Are they dangerous? The—” Then Belion made a pretend angry face and a motion with his hand to indicate a narwhal horn.
Kate shook her head, smiled radiantly, and dove down under the water again. Her feet kicked up, and she was gone under the surface.
Another narwhal came up for air, and Belion gingerly, hesitantly touched it. It lashed around and dove. Belion looked up at Irene and George, amazed.
“Narwhal!” Belion trumpeted.
George laughed. He said to Irene, “Do you want to go in?”
“No,” said Irene. “Let them.”
“Come on up here then,” he told her.
George took the key all the way out of the ignition and went up a few stairs to stand on the bow. He gave Irene a hand coming up and then leaned against the side of the pilot cabin comfortably, one bent leg crooked against the rail. Irene leaned against the rail, facing him, where she could still watch Kate and Belion cavorting with the whales.
“River dolphins,” she said. “Like on the Amazon.”
“They’re actually whales, not dolphins,” George said. “And don’t tell me you’ve been on the Amazon.”
“Actually, yes, my mom took me to Brazil when I was in high school.”
“No, that is not true! I have been there, too!”
Kate made a screeching, burbling sound, putting her face in the water. Belion orbited her like a big polite buoy.
Irene said, “I bet she’s a screamer in the sack.”
“I wouldn’t know,” said George.
“Really?” said Irene.
“You don’t need to be jealous,” said George. “Really.”
“Am I good at it,” she said. “You know, am I good at it?”
George felt his body tighten up like a spring.
“At sex?”
“Yes,” Irene said.
“You are the best,” said George, “that I have ever had. But that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t practice like ten times a day for the rest of our lives. Because you never know. You could get even better.”
She smiled and stretched. “It’s just that, I don’t understand how you could want her, and everything that she is, and then turn around and want me, and the person that I am—”
“Sweetheart, I only wanted her because she was a bad approximation of you. Don’t you see that?”
“No,” said Irene.
“Irene.” George pulled her into his side and put his hands around her, clutched her to him. “We are soulmates.”
“I don’t understand that,” said Irene into his chest.
“It doesn’t take you understanding it,” George explained. “In fact, if you’d stop understanding it so much, it might be a lot easier.”
“But I’m not—like her,” said Irene.
“You mean crazy?”
“I mean sexy.” Irene’s voice caught, and she coughed. “She’s like you, like all plants and freedom and music and such an artist, a dreamer, like you are.”
“You’re a dreamer,” said George.
“I am not,” said Irene.
“Well, OK,” he conceded. “If you say so.” He moved his fingers up and down her spine, going up into her hair and then down, down, into the waistband of her jeans.
“The truth is you’re not like her at all,” he said. “You’re prettier than she is. And you’re smarter. And when I’m with you, she seems like she’s made out of paper and feathers, and you, I’d like to take down into the cabin, and treat you in ways that only wild bears can treat each other.”
She smacked at him, and it felt good.
“George!” she said.
“You’re the faery that I imagined when I was six,” George went on, “I know what faeries look like. This is it. Why don’t you just try loving me? It might be really easy.”
“I—” Irene began. But George wasn’t done.
“You’re all I want, but you have to believe it, too.”
“I’m not a believer.”
“But you want to be,” he said. He knew that he understood, and he tried to make her see it. “You want to believe, and yet you want to be honest. You want us to be great, but you want us to be real. I want those things, too. This is where we are the same.”
She put her arms around him and held her face up sweetly to be kissed. He leaned into her, and their lips came together. It was as if George was spinning through her and back into himself, more rapidly than he could track. When she pulled back, he was dizzy.
“I love you,” he said to her.
“Love isn’t real, George,” she said, her voice low and strange. “It’s not real. It doesn’t make any sense. Not for me. I don’t believe in it.”
“Then t
his must be science,” said George.
“I don’t believe in marriage either,” said Irene.
“Fine,” he said, trying to make her smile. “Then we’ll be in science, and we’ll perform a futuristic sex alliance instead of getting married.”
“George! I just can’t do it,” Irene said. She looked sorry. Sorry that she couldn’t do it. “I’m not good enough.”
“We’re soulmates—look at everything we know, everything we’ve done. It’s like we were made for each other. That weird old folk music, what are the odds we would both have that same album? We’ve memorized the same poetry, you play the flute and I play the hand drum, you went to Brazil and so did I, we both loved Philip Pullman to the point of making Halloween costumes before it was a movie … For chrissake, you have one of my dad’s paintings in your house.”
“I don’t believe in fate,” said Irene. “Or destiny or things like that.”
“But it’s more than that, Irene,” he urged her. “What do you want, what do you want most of all, for yourself?”
He knew it was not fame, or to be right about black holes, or to be somewhere locked in a lab. He knew her better than this. But would she say it? Would she give this to him?
“To be loyal,” she said slowly. “I want to be loyal. Loyal like my mother never was. Or my father. I want to be loyal for my whole life. I think that would be great.”
“I want that, too,” he said.
“But that doesn’t mean we are in love,” said Irene. “That doesn’t make it true.”
He kissed her again. “You’re wrong,” he said. “You’re wrong about love. Maybe it’s not true, but it’s real. And it doesn’t have to be true to be real. Can you see—”
“What if I do give up,” she said suddenly. “What if I say, OK, I give up. What if I say I love you. I don’t know what to do after that.”
“I love you, too,” said George. “There’s nothing you have to do. It’s done.”
“George.” She held onto him, but turned to look at Belion and Kate, who were swimming out some distance away from the boat, as the sunset turned the water to gold. “I feel stupid. I have this really stupid feeling in my brain.”
“That’s not stupid,” said George. “That’s happy. You’re feeling happy.”
Irene smiled and he picked her up and held her, leaning back against the wall of the cabin. She put her legs around his waist and pressed her face into his neck where he could feel her breathing.
“OK, I’m happy, George,” she said. “I’m happy.”
And then it was done.
20
The phone in the underground cavern rang. Sam Beth picked it up.
“Toledo Institute of Astronomy,” she droned. Then she rolled her eyes and covered the receiver. She called out, “Dr. Sparks?”
Irene came riding down the walkway in the tunnel on one of the mopeds that the physicists used to traverse the sections of the collider between the insertion hubs and detectors.
She parked the vehicle and took the phone from Sam Beth’s resentful hand. It was an irony that in the vicinity of some of the most specialized and technologically advanced equipment in the world, they had to use phones plugged into wires because their mobile phones could not communicate from four hundred feet belowground, around so many magnets.
“Sparks,” she said.
Then she listened. Then she said, “This is unacceptable. How do you just lose a person from the face of the earth? I gave her to you. You were supposed to give her back to me, all burned up and stuff.”
“This has never happened before,” said the funeral home director.
Irene said, “That doesn’t make a damn bit of difference.”
“You’re right, you’re right,” said the man.
“You’re in big trouble, mister,” Irene told him. “You don’t just erase a person from the world. You don’t just twiddle your thumbs and throw some glitter in the air and whoops, she’s gone. You just can’t do that, do you understand?”
“I do,” said the funeral home director. “I do understand. I’m still hopeful that we will find her. It’s still possible.”
“See that you do,” said Irene. “She was my mother. She was not just some box of dust that you don’t know what to do with. She was all I had.”
She slammed the phone back into the receiver and turned around to find that Sam Beth was looking at her with her mouth hanging open.
“What happened?” said Sam Beth.
“I stole my mother’s body from the funeral home,” said Irene. “Her burned up, postcremation body. And now they can’t find her, and I am blaming them for losing her.”
“Wow,” said Sam Beth, seeming to be genuinely impressed. “What are you going to do with her?”
“That’s the thing,” said Irene. “I don’t know. I can’t just randomly plant her in some flower garden.”
Sam Beth narrowed her eyes and blew air out gently between her lips. She inflated her lips in this way, tapping one finger gently on the desk.
“I know what to do,” said Sam Beth. “There is a ceremony that the Daughters of Babylon can perform. I think I can help you.”
“You would do that?” said Irene.
“When you just stood there and said you stole your mother’s ashes from the funeral home, my opinion of you kind of changed. I mean, I still don’t think you’re right for Dr. Dermont. But I think what you did was pretty badass.”
*
It was summertime, 1986. Bernice and Sally had planted a flower garden, trying to attract as many hummingbirds as possible to their kitchen window, because the two-year-old George and Irene found them so interesting. They planted phlox, bee balm, tried to get a trumpet vine to riot over an arbor installed by Ray and Dean. The two men had stayed friends, in spite of the situation, and they often did projects around the house together, Ray coming in to visit for a few days or taking Dean off hunting in Michigan in the fall. Bernice avoided him when he was around, but came to grudgingly appreciate his continued interest in Irene. He was a wild character, but they had underestimated him.
Of course he later became a felon and a gambler, but this was still the golden summer when they were all together, and Bernice could pretend it would always be this way. The babies would sit in their high chairs, side by side, and eat their breakfast watching little birds hover over the flowers while the women drank tea, Bernice resting between sessions, Sally serving up applesauce, scrambled eggs, peach slices, and ripe tomatoes to the kids.
“We need to separate them soon,” Sally said one morning.
“You said when they’re three,” said Bernice, her hands around a mug of tea. They had been making applesauce and had kerchiefs on their heads.
“I said when they’re verbal,” Sally corrected. She used a rag to wipe off the counter and replaced George’s spoon with a new one from the drawer.
“Does it really matter?” Out of habit, she loosed the tea from the tea ball and swirled the contents around in the remaining liquid, then upended the cup on the saucer.
“Yes, it matters,” said Sally. “We don’t want them to be like cousins. We want them to meet as adults. Don’t be weird. If they know each other too well, they can’t fall in love.”
Bernice slowly turned the teacup back over and peered inside.
“What is it?” asked Sally.
“You’re not the one that’s got to move out,” said Bernice. “And lose her job.”
“Yeah, you’re not the one who’s going to have to get a job. Without you here, there’s no astrology practice—it’s just smoke and mirrors.”
“I’m smoke and mirrors,” said Bernice. In the cup: a whirlwind, a broken chain. Sometimes there was a bell, a bridge.
“You’re not smoke and mirrors,” said Sally. “You have real talent, whatever your personal feelings about it are. I’ve seen you predict stuff, like spooky accurate.”
“It’s all science,” said Bernice. “You know that. Charts, lists, books, technique. Th
e fact that it happens to work has nothing to do with me, any more than the fact that you’re affected by gravity has anything to do with you.”
“What’s in the teacup?” said Sally. “Is it more plane crash?”
“No,” said Bernice. “I mean, yes, but it means nothing.”
Sally pulled a large ceramic bowl out of the sink and set it on the kitchen island. She began to hum as she wiped it with her towel.
Irene said, “All done,” and Sally swept her tray clean with the rag and replaced the food with some paper crayons for her to play with.
“Can’t get down yet, darling,” she said. “Mama’s still resting, and I’m going to finish putting away the dishes we made the applesauce in. Then I’ll take you outside. If only Uncle Dean would get back, he could take you kids for a while and let us finish.”
Then Dean came through the door, pulling his flannel coat from his shoulders, “Hello, family!”
Bernice saw Sally’s mouth drop open, her head jerk up. Her eyes met Bernice’s eyes. “Wait, this is that moment. Applesauce,” she said. “From our own orchard. It’s happening. And here he is. It’s him. He’s about to do it.”
“What, me?” Dean asked. “Brave, handsome me?”
Dean turned and swung his arms out wide, and the bowl, knocked off the counter, fell toward the ground. But Bernice was already there, standing, and caught it before it shattered on the floor.
“Yeah, right,” said Sally. “You’re smoke and mirrors. You don’t know anything. But you predicted this moment, ten years ago. Down to the pot in your hands. And you know it.”
Irene laughed in her high chair. George threw a tomato. Both the women turned then and looked straight at the children in their high chairs. George was holding Irene’s hand.
*
Maybe Bernice did not realize that the moment of separation would ever come. Maybe she thought she could keep on tossing herself onto the sofa next to Sally, pulling her friend’s head into her lap, or brushing Sally’s long hair while she was on the telephone. “Oh, that feels good,” Sally would say, hanging up. “It gives me goose bumps. Don’t stop.” Maybe Bernice imagined she would keep on hugging her behind the stove, rubbing her temples with arnica, doing her toenails and laughing. Never mind that she would fall into the arms of Dean, say “Hey, baby,” and kiss him. Never mind that she would fall so eagerly into his bed, laughing into the night. Shitty as it was being third wheel, Bernice could go on forever.