So many horizons now. There, over there is Maureen, taking on the mantle of responsibility, a paisley robe too big around her shoulders, protecting her siblings from what she does not yet know or understand. Surrogacy assumed of her whether she is ready for it or not. On her horizon, Maureen is watching a sports event on television, an opening ceremony, and her own children are teasing her for weeping at the underwater sequence where giant fabric fish swim in the charged, milky air of the arena as though they are speaking to her. Katherine sees this. And there on another horizon, there is Elizabeth, Elizabeth sitting listening to the radio, her hair cut short now, wearing a tartan blouse and black jeans. She is listening to the radio and wondering why so many times she does not offer her opinion on things she knows so much about. She has not been prepared for just how quiet sorrow has made her. Oh, and Elsa. Elsa is there, too. Elsa’s twin girls, gorgeous little things with golden hair, beside her at the dinner table and she is feeding them. But they are easily distracted, and react with bewildering panic at the sound of a door closing or a too-quiet kitchen. Their mother tongue is the language of checking, Are you there? Where are you now? as though they have inherited the expectancy of abandonment. And there is Stephen. Stephen. What a beautiful man he has become. Look at the dark wave in his hair just like his father’s. Look at his broad shoulders. He is alone, happily working on a remote island. Another blue horizon. Imagine. How extraordinary. But soon he will resent the visit of a group of students to his one-man anthropological station. While their company will enliven him, the sense of loss when they leave will be so unbearable, he will wish that they had never come.
And George. Where is George? What horizon is his? Is that him, tiring himself out from trying to make the world as real as possible? Holding his breath as though he lives in a state of constant fear? Is that George there, watching the goodness of his city crumble in front of him like dirty, dried earth falling through his fingers? Uttering his city’s place names in bewilderment. George, in an awful, endless winter, reassembling, in his sleep, the pieces of a body he has found, the remaking of a beautiful child? Trying to make sense of loss. But there is no sense to it, George.
The downward sweep takes her again, but this time there are no more horizons, as though the ocean covers everything. Now everything appears reduced and intensified. In the distance a dark, wide head appears. It moves towards her. The ocean begins to part and then disappears. The dark, wide head moves closer. Up out of the invisible sea. Closer and closer it comes. Katherine stares at it. Then she sees what it is. This dark wide head is the head of a woman. The eyes of the woman hold on her. The heft of her body now remarkably still, her bulk buoyed by the invisible sea. That big gray head. The woman now walks toward Katherine. She wears what looks like a Quaker’s bonnet covering her hair, the bonnet so simple, it is a black-and-white arc around her face, its black ribbon elegantly tied under her chin. The woman is standing looking at Katherine, her body slightly twisted away from her, her head turned toward her, a look of soft intent upon her face. A moment and then the woman taps her hip censorially with her left hand and then begins to slip her right hand under the belt of her long skirt. She pulls a little muslin pouch out from under her belt. She opens the pouch with a challenging look on her face. In the little pouch, a swell of yeast. The woman folds the muslin once again and returns it to the warm skin of her hip. She turns away from Katherine and walks out toward the infinite arid scrubland that now spreads out before her, which has arisen out of the sea. Then the woman stops after only a few paces. She stops and turns her head and the whole sequence starts over again. She is simplicity at its most eloquent.
But they have met before, she and this unnamed angel in the bonnet.
The association of his touch as he had brushed her hair away from the back of her neck to measure her and Katherine’s sighting of the framed photograph of Princess Elizabeth and the woman in the bonnet had somehow fixed itself somewhere in Katherine’s psyche. A moment regarded. He had measured her from her neck to the center of her back and her spine had taken it in, had registered it, just as in the same way, in the same moment, her eyes had taken in the woman’s face. Now, Katherine’s spine, as it disintegrates, begins to release what it has been holding on to, like the last fizz of a dying insect’s wing against a flame, like a last skin, and the woman returns to Katherine in her disease as though to offer her possibility. As though to offer Katherine the song lines of the wide, open plains, where, in the faint cracks of the baked, hardened landscape, love survives.
How do you stay awake to see the thing that eats you?
Now the woman is gone and everything is bleached white.
Where is George?
She finds him.
I can feel your hand in mine and mine in yours, George.
“George,” she says to him.
Elsa sits up on the edge of her bed. She sits as though she is on a wall watching the sea, or watching people playing in a park, or watching for a thrush to return to its nest with worms for its young. She sits in her long white cotton nightdress with the blue m embroidered on the cuff. Her arms hang by her side, the heels of her hands press lightly against the mattress, her legs swing loosely over its edge and her shoulders and her back slope casually downward. Her eyes slowly scan the darkened room. Is it early or is it late? She does not know. She sits quietly with the remnants of her recent dreams, allowing fragments of thoughts to drift, settle a moment, then wander again.
The blind of the bedroom window has been left up. Elsa slips out of bed to look outside. Tiny lights, headlights of cars in the distance, wind their way down the hills behind Stormont. Elsa is able to determine their curious paths as they dip into the half-black and out again. Broken pieces of light, they relentlessly follow the twists of road all the way down, blotted out only for a brief second, then satisfyingly reemerging to complete their journey. Night-weary. Black-swallowed. Home. These are the hills where the big white building sits. The big white building, which is full of angry men, all shouting for the playgrounds and swimming pools and cinemas to stay closed on a Sunday, all yelling for the curbs and streets to be painted red, white, and blue, all asking for the nonbelievers to be brought to retribution. But no big white building now. It is obliterated in Elsa’s picture window, where everything looks dark and shades of dark. All black, all safe. Elsa looks out at the night through the window of her bedroom, as one single piece of light moves down the hills behind Stormont, trickling down the indefinable black, disappears and, this time, does not reemerge.
Elsa can see the reflection of her face in the window, can see the small shape that is her mouth. Behind her, the outlines of her sisters’ bodies in their beds, like mountain ranges in the distance.
Elsa leaves the bedroom. As she passes her father’s room, she checks to see if he is there. There is only Stephen in his cot, fast asleep, lying on his back with both knees bent, as though he is sunbathing. Elsa goes downstairs. She cannot tell what time it is. There is not a sound in the house.
“Dad?” she calls tentatively.
“Yes, love, I’m in here.” George appears in the doorway of the front room. He smiles at Elsa. “Can’t you sleep?” he says gently.
Elsa doesn’t reply but stretches and yawns. Her hair has become tangled with every twist and turn she has made during the night and now sticks out all on one side, a semaphore of her restlessness. Elsa looks past her father, who still stands in the doorway, and into the room behind him. Suddenly she sees it. For the first time. Her mother’s coffin. She had heard the commotion of the coffin being brought into the house the day before, late in the afternoon, but she had stayed in her room. And when Maureen and Elizabeth had both gone into the front room to see their mother laid out, she had refused to go in with them. Elsa’s eyes dart quickly away from the coffin to the empty air in front of her. But too late not to realize that now the world is utterly different.
“Are you all right, darling?” George is concerned. How does he explain to El
sa? How does he help her understand?
“Dad, Isabel has a chocolate machine and it makes real chocolate.”
“Really?”
“And she can make chocolate anytime she wants to because it never runs out.”
“Very good.”
“Dad, I’m hungry.”
“Well, there are some sandwiches I’ve made for later, but you can have some now if you want. They’re on the kitchen table.”
Elsa stands rigid by the doorway.
“Elsa, there’s something I want to show you.” George moves over to his dead wife and delicately lifts a small golden locket that is hanging around her neck.
“Look,” he says to Elsa. Elsa does not move. “It’s okay darling, it’s okay,” he reassures her.
Elsa moves hesitantly toward her father.
The locket is the size of a threepenny piece and is engraved with a delicate wandering design, like a tiny garland of still-moving threads. The gold of the locket is slightly tarnished. Elsa now stands on tiptoe beside the coffin, beside her mother’s skin, catching its creamy pallor out of the corner of her eye, taking in the overwhelming smell of aging lilacs. George opens the locket. Inside are two photographs. Elsa recognizes them immediately. They have each been cut from the photograph that used to sit on the mantelpiece, the one of her parents on their honeymoon in Mexico. Both her mother and her father are squinting into the sun. Each of them wears a Mexican hat. The way the photograph has been cut, her dislocated father’s hand rests on her mother’s shoulder. Elsa thinks of her father using the huge kitchen scissors to cut her mother’s face out of the photograph, as though he is cutting out a paper doll on the back of a comic, feeding her head and shoulders to the heavy working blades, sensing the point of no return as soon as he starts. She wonders why he chose this photograph to put in the locket. They look so silly in their Mexican hats.
Elsa now closes the locket and hears a delicate click. Then she opens it again almost immediately. Has she caught them unawares? No, there they are, still squinting into the sun. Still wearing their big silly Mexican hats. She closes the locket again and thinks about the two of them in there and how they would be like that forever. Smiling at each other in their big silly Mexican hats, forever.
“There’ll be lots of people coming to the house tomorrow,” George speaks quietly. “It’ll be a hard few days, love.”
Elsa remains quiet.
“Why don’t you stay here with me for a while, Elsa? We don’t even need to talk.”
Elsa still says nothing.
“It’ll be okay,” George says, putting his hand on Elsa’s shoulder.
Elsa looks up at her father. “Can I go now?” she asks.
The vacuum cleaner has sounded relentlessly in the house since Katherine’s death, sonorously sucking the moments of love that have fallen over time onto every carpet in every room, until the house is different. Mother memories disturbed, collected, disposed. Leave the bits of flaky life, the strands of hair, the crumbs of bread eaten when there was hope. Leave the fibers of love and life as they are.
It is Saturday evening. Outside, the gray-black March sky promises sleet. Its hazy blanket of cloud is covering the whole world, not just the end of this one life, in this one house, in this one street.
A solemn swarm of people have gathered in the back room, talking in low voices and exchanging head nods and shakes as though trading in the currency of grief.
Elsa looks around to see if Isabel is there. No. Probably wading deep in seashells with her father off some windswept coast, dusk rippling on their earnest pursuit.
Elsa’s Aunt Vera, her mother’s sister, appears and, wrapping her arms around Elsa, hugs her tight. So tight, in fact, that, for as long as the hug lasts, Elsa cannot breathe. But her Aunt Vera smells lovely. She smells of roses and toast. Vera lets go and stares at Elsa. She says nothing for a while.
Elsa looks up at her Aunt Vera. It is like looking at her mother. Vera has the same warm red-brown tones to her hair that her mother had and the same ring of hazel around her eyes—although now her eyes are tired and the skin around them slightly puffed and flecked with pink—and when she speaks, it is as though it is her mother speaking, so similar are their inflections. Vera is casting a spell over Elsa.
“Now, my love, can I get you something to drink? Would you like some lemonade?”
“No, thank you, Auntie Vera.”
Elsa thinks her Aunt Vera looks so elegant in her red tweed suit with its tiny handmade wooden buttons. She watches as Vera clicks open her shiny brown handbag—which matches her shiny brown shoes—and, searching through its contents for a moment, pulls out a crumpled cotton handkerchief. When she opens the handkerchief, there is an amber brooch inside.
“I was just looking through some things I had. And I remembered this. It used to be your mother’s, then she gave it to me, and I thought it might be nice for you to have it.”
Elsa looks at the brooch nestled in the handkerchief in the palm of Vera’s hand. The brooch is shaped like a marigold, its petals golden, its center an amber glass heart.
“Would you like to have it?”
“Yes, thank you, Auntie Vera.”
Elsa lifts the brooch and then holds it to her eye and squints through it. It is an automatic reaction, to lift it to her eye, to want to sense the world through the light it promises.
“You’re the image of your mother, d’you know that?” Vera remarks tenderly, stroking the side of Elsa’s face.
But Elsa does not answer. She thinks it funny that Vera, who is the image of her mother, should say this to her. Elsa turns her concentration now on what she sees through the glass center of the brooch. The amber warms her. Its uneven glassy surface makes things appear hundreds of times beside themselves. Elsa now views the room through her trinket periscope, delighted to find, suddenly, such abundant life beached before her. There, from her warm and watery den behind the colored glass, she can see Nanny Anna shaking all of her one hundred heads in unison while one hundred of Uncle Frank’s hands gently pat all of her shoulders at once. One hundred each of George’s twin sisters, Heather and Susan, sit still and quiet at the table together in the center of the room, and Aunt Vera has now conveniently multiplied one hundredfold to be able to fill all of the one hundred cups of tea requested by the abundant sea of faces.
And there is her father, hollowed, one hundred times hollowed at the very least. Elsa swivels the brooch around in her fingers and watches every one of him sparkle and glint like gold milk-bottle tops in the sun before the birds have pecked them.
She turns her head with the brooch to her eye, continuing to peruse the curious life upon these sanded shores and now wishes she could submerge herself and completely disappear from them all. She moves her head a little to look at the lighted lamp on the table beside her, like a moth irresistibly drawn. A fist of sunsets bursts through the amber-colored glass and Elsa feels she is in Heaven.
Elsa moves through the subterranean landscape of the long room like a deep-sea diver, her walk slow and deliberate, her periscope placed firmly to her eye. She needs to find something special in which to put her amber brooch, like the blue box she keeps for her pennies.
Elsa makes her way out of the busy kitchen, her hair tousled by some tea-warmed hands, and moves quietly along the hall past the “good-front-room,” where the coffin ticks. If she steps quietly enough now, the door of the room will stay as it is, she thinks, solemnly half-closed, and she will make it to the end of the hall. If, however, she lets herself be heard, the gape of the door will swallow her and the room will suck her in. Elsa holds her breath and moves quietly to the end of the hall.
There are some boxes and small bags in a corner at the end of the hall. Her Aunt Vera had been looking for some personal mementos belonging to her mother to place in the coffin and had left them there, either to be kept or disposed of. Amid the bits and pieces Elsa spots a small box wrapped very loosely in a cloth. She pulls the cloth away and opens the box. Inside
the box is an object wrapped loosely in paper. She opens the paper, to find a small broken statuette. She puts the pieces of the statuette back in the box and looks at the paper. The paper is lovely, she thinks. It has lots of writing on it and lots of music notes and lots of colorful orange-red lipstick smudges, as though someone has kissed it over and over. Elsa wraps her amber brooch in the paper and takes it upstairs.
She finds Maureen and Elizabeth, sitting on Maureen’s bed, story-picking from the Bunty Christmas Annual 1969. Maureen and Elizabeth are reading “The Four Marys,” and when they finish the story, curiously at exactly the same time, they flick over the page to begin “Pansy Potter.” Elsa sits with her two sisters on the bed, listening to the murmur of voices rising from the room below them. It is like some melancholic music, she thinks, that someone has piped around the house, making everything “The Four Marys” and “Pansy Potter” do seem much more serious than usual. Even the obligatory celebration in the tuck shop appears to be a sad affair.
Elsa looks at Maureen. She watches as Maureen slowly reaches down and fixes the curve of her slipper around her heel. The movement of her hand is soft, soft and desperate. Elsa follows the arc of it. She then moves to her bedside cabinet and, trying not to raise her sisters’ curiosity, reaches into the back of the cabinet and takes out the little blue box fastened with an elastic band. She slips the amber brooch wrapped in the piece of music paper with the kisses into the box without taking its lid off completely and replaces it firmly. Then she finds her place again upon the bed.
Just then, a gentle knock comes on the door. The girls lift their heads to it but say nothing. The door opens, revealing their father. George looks tired and cold.
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