by SUZAN STILL
“Caleepso,” he began, in a voice so serious that it terrified her, “I need you to know that…” He stopped and gazed down the length of the pergola, collecting his thoughts. “That I have been thinking.”
He stopped to look her straight in the eye.
“There has never been a time when you did not support every single step of my life, starting that very first day in Berkeley. You have never denied me anything my heart really wanted. You’ve followed me into warfare and into a kind of exile in the mountains. You’ve helped me build the ranch and to rebuild my life.”
Calypso smiled slightly, hearing the listing that she had anticipated. The only real issue, she knew, was what he had included in the other pan of the balance.
“When you decided to buy this property, I was angry. I thought you wanted to leave Mexico for good. I thought maybe you even wanted to leave me. I went a little crazy with that thought. I couldn’t really believe it but I couldn’t let it rest either.”
He let go of her hands and rose from his chair. She looked up his tall frame to his beloved face, now furled in thought, and knew the verdict was about to be pronounced. She braced herself for it, with her fingers curled around the frame of her chair’s seat.
“And then I thought about what I’ve done for you. I took care of you after the rape. That was the start. And I killed a man for you—but my guess is you don’t consider that a plus. I built Rancho Cielo with you in mind. I wanted it to be beautiful and big and strong, so you would feel safe and happy there. And you know, Caleepso,” his eyes sought hers with a kind of desperation, “I have always loved you. I would give my life for you.”
She nodded and swallowed the lump in her throat.
“Then maybe six days ago, I felt something. Just a knowing. And I knew I had to get to you fast. Were you in danger, Caleepso? I was certain I needed to come to you.”
“Only in danger of dying of loneliness,” she whispered.
“But nothing happened about a week ago? I had a big hit of your energy, Caleepso. So strong, I dropped what I was doing—I was building new gates for the courtyard—and I just ran to my truck and came.”
“About a week ago?”
So much had happened so fast. She rummaged her memory for something that could have jolted him, almost six thousand miles distant. When it came to her, she covered her mouth with her hands in astonishment.
“Oh! Of course!”
“What?”
There was no way to explain it to him. She realized he would have to experience it for himself. She took him by the hand, saying, “Come,” and led him into the kitchen. Taking up her ring of keys, she unlocked the door leading to the north entry room, now set up as a mud room and laundry. The same huge Provençal armoire that had guarded the secret stairs was now centered on the wall, leaving the door in the tiled floor unencumbered.
She knelt and unlocked the concealed door and struggled to raise it. Javier shot out his arm and with one heave, pushed it back against the wall and held it, as Calypso maneuvered the metal loop over the hook in the wall.
“If this thing ever fell on you,” he said severely, “it would kill you.”
“Swatted down like a fly! That would be an ignominious death, for sure,” she smiled.
She reached into the armoire and produced flashlights for each of them. “You’ll need this. Be careful going down. It’s even more treacherous than it looks.”
They spiraled carefully down into darkness. When she reached the landing at the bottom she said, “I’m very sure that you’re about to see what—or who—brought you here with such speed.”
She turned and smiled at him, where he balanced on the bottom step, one hand braced against the stone wall of the stairwell.
“Watch your head. This door is very low.”
As they ducked into the vaulted room, the beams of their flashlights immediately spotlighted the statue. Calypso heard Javier gasp and turned to see that he was struck speechless, his eyes fixed on the figure before him. They stood for a long time with their lights playing over the polychrome and gold surface of the Queen of Heaven.
“Caleepso!” Javier breathed at last. “It’s the same figure that’s on the locket!”
“Yes.”
He approached the image and reached out to stroke it but drew his hand back before his fingers touched the surface.
“This is more than a statue,” he said, stepping back. “This has power!”
Calypso nodded.
“Yes, you’re right. It does.”
She went to him and took his hand.
“A few days ago, I was completely overwhelmed by Her energy. Stunned by it. Almost knocked senseless. It seemed to me that time and space were liquid, like a big wave that was washing me into a sea of—of I don’t know what. Pure consciousness, maybe.”
Javier was nodding, even before she finished.
“Yes. I felt it. It felt like you were dissolving.”
He put his arms around her and pulled her close.
“I was scared, Caleepso. So scared that something had happened to you.”
They stood embracing one another for long minutes. At last, Javier whispered, “She did it, didn’t She? She brought us back together.”
Calypso nodded, her cheek rubbing against his shirt.
“Yes,” she said softy, “I think so. I believe She has both the power and the intention to do that.”
At last, they turned away from the serene and infinite gaze of the Goddess and ducked back through the arched door.
§
Calypso spent the remainder of the day touring Javier through her new domain.
“I think She held you off with the passport problem,” she said, nodding her head toward the floor, “so we could finish the decorating. It would have been anticlimactic if you’d come in the middle of scrub buckets and sweating movers.”
Javier made polite murmurs over every room. Only when she opened a door and said, “And this is your study,” did he show genuine surprise.
“Mine? You made a study for me? How did you know I would come?”
“I didn’t. I hoped.”
He nodded, his lips pursed.
“Caleepso,” he said, drawing her to him, “I told you this morning I need to tell you something.”
Again, Calypso’s heart sank. “What?” she whispered.
He cleared his throat, looked down at his boots, and then back at her, his lips still pursed.
“What I want to tell you is this. . .I have been a colossal jerk. I came here to ask your forgiveness. And now I see that you’ve already forgiven me.”
He waved his hand around the study, with its deep leather chair, broad desk and walls of bookcases awaiting books.
“How can I ever thank you?” His voice broke and his dark eyes were limpid with unshed tears.
Calypso raised her face to his and kissed him then. It was a kiss holding all her pent-up doubt, sorrow and longing, all her creative passion, all her joy at his closeness. All her love.
Javier received the kiss in the same spirit. His soul encompassed her in an embrace that knew no time, no place, and no end. What did it matter, if they were in Mexico or France? On Earth or on the Moon? In the twenty-first century or any other, past or future? As long as they were together, everything was possible.
§
Mist that had crept inland from the Mediterranean was just lifting its veil to the clear light of dawn, as Calypso slipped behind the leather-topped desk in her study and began to write. The dream was still heavy upon her and with eyes closed, her fingers flew across the keyboard.
After an hour or so, she heard Javier get up and go down to the kitchen. In the quiet house, the ground floor rustle of water flowing into the kettle and the fierce grinding of coffee beans were audible, but her inner vision persisted.
Javier was just entering the study to put a cup of coffee beside her as she wrote FINI and straightened from the computer.
“I’m done!” she crowed. “F
ree, at last!”
Javier grinned. “Good morning.”
She stood and put her arms around him. “I’m a free woman! I just wrote the final scene of the book. What do you say we go to the coast today? Let’s eat a huge breakfast and then drive down to the shore. What do you think?”
He pulled her close and kissed her. “How can I refuse you on the day when you’re liberated from that thing.” He nodded toward her laptop. “It’s as if you’ve taken a lover, when you’re writing. I’d better take you away before you start a new book.”
They prepared omelets fat with avocado, onions, and cheese, and ate them ravenously out under the pergola, watching wrens coming and going to some secret nest where babies screamed mercilessly for more. After cleaning up the breakfast dishes, they packed more food for a picnic—bread, cheese, olives, and a bottle of local wine. Calypso gathered sweaters and hats while Javier loaded the basket in his rental car.
“Ready?” he asked, keys in hand.
“Ready.” She pulled the front door shut behind her and almost skipped across the gravel to the car. “I don’t know why I feel so unaccountably gay this morning,” she said, as she folded herself into the passenger seat.
“Because you’ve just finished another book?” He went around to the driver’s side and lowered his length into the tiny interior. “Or maybe because you get to ride with me in this little clown car?”
Calypso smiled, pulled down the visor to check her lipstick, and nestled her purse beside her on the seat.
“No,” she said as they pulled away from the house. “It’s that, but also something more. Maybe it’s simply being with you, my love!” She gave him a radiant smile. “Or because it’s spring. Or because we’re in the south of France. Or maybe all of the above.”
They drove through the awakening village and turned onto the auto route leading south to the sea. The roadsides were thick with red poppies that had yet to open their dewy heads to the sun, and the vineyards were just beginning to show a few tendrils and leaves, like topknots on the black zigzags of the old vines. A little veil of sea mist floated seaward and even the somber olive groves seemed to sparkle with silvery inner fire as the morning breeze flounced their leaves.
They drove in silence, so deeply absorbed in communion that no words were necessary. Coming to the coast road, Javier turned left with the aqua ripple of the Mediterranean to their right.
They hadn’t gone far when Calypso exclaimed, “Look at that little point of rocks! Let’s go out there and explore.”
Without a word, Javier pulled the car onto the shoulder, got out and then went around to help Calypso extricate herself.
“We both have legs too long for French cars,” she said, laughing as he pulled her to her feet.
Hand in hand, they crossed the road and went down an embankment, heading for a small promontory crowned with sea- and wind-worn rocks. Shore birds swooped and cried in the chilly air and the tang of salt was sharp and clean on the wind.
After a few minutes of clambering, they found themselves on top of the point, looking out over the restless blue skin of the sea. In both directions, the coast swept away in a gentle curve as if Earth were embracing her glittering waters.
“How beautiful!” Calypso exclaimed.
She ventured out to the edge of the rock and peered over. Below her, slow waves rolled up to the outcrop, splashed lazily and retreated.
“Be careful!” Javier said, slipping his fingers into the back of the waistband of her jeans. “It’s still too cold for a swim.”
Calypso laughed and spread her arms, leaning outward, moored by Javier’s firm grip. “I’m flying!” she cried joyfully.
They sat down with their backs to a sun-warmed rock.
“I almost forgot to tell you!” Javier said suddenly. “A very strange thing.”
Calypso felt a jolt of foreboding.
“What?”
Javier raised a calming hand.
“No, nothing bad. Just strange. I was out with the cattle early one morning, just before I came here, and Lobo was with me. But I got busy with the cattle and next thing I know, Lobo is way over at the edge of the pasture near the woods.
“At first I thought my eyes were playing tricks, because Lobo was leaping and running and spinning around. But then I saw that there was another wolf there, too. They were playing. And then Lobo looked at me—a very long, hard look, Caleepso—and then he just turned and trotted away with the other wolf into the woods.”
“Just like that.”
“Yes.”
Calypso’s eyes glazed with tears. “He saved my life, you know.”
“You saved his life.”
“Well, yes. But if he hadn’t been with me that last time through the tube, I think I’d still be there. I would have given up. I wanted to die. It was Lobo’s nose on my ankle, so cold and wet—so alive— that spurred me on. Without him, honestly Javier, I think I would be dead now.”
Javier took her hand and held it lightly.
“Lots of liberation this year,” he said gently. “From the past, from work in the present, from dreams of the future. Don’t they call a year like this fateful?”
She sighed and looked again out to sea. “He’s not coming back, is he?”
“I don’t think so.”
“But he’s not lost either—is he?”
“No. I don’t think he is. I think he’s gone back to his people, the Wolf Clan.”
She nodded and clambered to her feet.
“Then it’s just you and me, my love. And the sky’s the limit.”
He pushed to his feet and took her hand.
“Maybe there are no limits,” he said. “Just the illusion of them.”
He jumped from the shelf of rock and then turned to lift her down. She was almost insubstantial in his hands.
“My God, Caleepso!” he exclaimed. “You need fattening. Let’s forget the picnic and go to that restaurant we passed down the road.”
“Okay. Let’s.”
Hand in hand, they scrambled through the rocks toward the car.
“You know, I just remembered something, too,” Calypso said, swinging their clasped hands.
“What’s that?”
“That under scopolamine, I called you my husband.”
Javier stopped on the shoulder of the road and turned to look at her.
“Is that so?” he said, studying her face appraisingly.
Calypso only smiled in response.
“In that case, we’d better eat a big lunch. It’s going to be a bigger day than we planned!”
She smiled at him. “You think?”
He nodded, his eyes filled with a new light. “Yes. I think.”
“Where?”
He shrugged. “Anywhere. How about in the next town we come to?”
He opened the car door and settled her into her seat, then went around and folded himself behind the wheel.
“I have a better idea.”
“What?”
“How about in the vault with the Goddess for a witness? I’m sure we could find a notary crazy enough to do it—for a price.”
He nodded. “Yes. I like that idea. Let’s go have lunch and then we can start making calls.”
“What about rings?”
“What about them?”
“We’ll need some.”
“What about an antiques store? Would they have any?”
“Maybe.”
“Then we’ll stop at every one we come to between here and home.”
They glanced at one another in surprise. Calypso smiled.
“Did I hear you say what I thought you said?”
“Yes. Home. But don’t forget, we’ve got two homes now. Like His and Hers bath towels,” he grinned his impossibly enchanting grin, “only bigger.” He started the car and pulled from the shoulder.
Calypso smiled radiantly at him. “No, not His and Hers—Ours and Ours.”
§
“Will you have to give the statue b
ack to the church, Caleepso?”
They were lying in bed. The window was thrown open and night wind brought the sigh of the plane tree and the clear treble of falling water into the room. It was really too cool for open windows but it made snuggling more expedient.
Calypso, cradled against Javier’s chest in deep relaxation, answered dreamily, “No, I don’t think so. It’s odd, Javier. I asked Monsieur Signac about the desecration of the church here in Brignac. His family’s been here since before the Revolution. He told me that a family named Moreau returned the holy figures to the church sometime in the nineteen-fifties. They’d been hidden in an old granary on their mas all that time.”
“So that was the Monsieur M. who helped Father Xavier?”
“That’s what I’m assuming.”
“Then how did the statue get here?”
“That’s a good question—and I have no answer. It’s sitting on a Louis Quinze table so it had to have been placed there sometime shortly before or after the start of the French Revolution in 1789. The making of Louis Quinze-style furniture pretty much died along with the monarch.”
“But it could have been put on that table last week,” Javier said reasonably.
“True, but then there’s the reliquary and the letter. It seems safe to assume that they were put there at the same time, since the box was under the same tarp as the statue.”
Javier kissed the top of her head. “You should have been a detective, Caleepso.”
“Ummmm hummm.” She sighed luxuriously.
“Maybe there was an official set of statuary for the church and then a secret one, that the parishioners didn’t know about.”
Calypso erupted into activity, squirming until she could look him in the eye by the light of the candelabra on the bedside table.
“You know, that’s a really good theory. What if our statue was kept hidden, like something apostate? Many churches were built on the ruins of earlier holy sites. Maybe when they built the church here in Brignac, they dug into an older site—Roman or maybe even an Egyptian one. The Egyptians had a major port on the Mediterranean just a few miles from here, you know, called Ratis. There are all kinds of stories about them bringing images of Isis into the area.”
“What was the name of the woman who sold you this place?”