When You Believe

by Jessica Barksdale Inclan

  “I know. I know,” Zosime interrupted. “Well… at least they’ve left Felix in Hilo. I don’t know if I could bear it if all three of you were on this mission. If anything happens to either of you by Quain’s hand…”

  They were silent, both trying to tamp down their thoughts about Quain. Sariel breathed in, listening to the world outside the window. The rain outside had stopped, but the wind still blew leaves and twigs against the windows, the intermittent pat pat sound accompanying the satisfying hiss of the fire. For a second, he caught himself casting his mind out, listening for something, feeling his body want to sail into the gray to stand by someone. What was he trying to uncover? A message? Someone’s thoughts? Was he already trying to find Kallisto?

  He rubbed his forehead, focusing on the bright color of his mother’s robes. He’d been having a hard time focusing since he arrived here. He needed to sleep. He needed to get ready for what was ahead of him. Battle.

  Zosime sighed and looked at him, her eyes resuming their usual lightness. “How are you? I haven’t heard too much from your neck of the woods lately. No girlfriends? Intrigues? Mysteries? There hasn’t been a scrap of juicy gossip floating my way. Neither of your brothers has interrupted my day with Sariel updates of any kind. I actually think they are hiding things from me. And hiding what, I ask?”

  Sariel opened his mouth as if to say something, feeling a story dissolve even before he could breathe it out. There was something he wanted to tell her, something wonderful. But what was it? He shrugged.

  “Not much,” he said.

  “Okay, keep your secrets,” Zosime said, standing up and smoothing her robe. “But I’ll think it out of you somehow.”

  Sariel stood up with her, taking her arm as they walked to the door. “I’m glad you came, Mom.”

  “How could I not? That Brennus is such a chatterbox. I couldn’t sleep for the life of me with his messages. Kallisto this, and Kallisto that. Disaster, retribution, revenge. My goodness! It was tiresome, but then when the plaques were stolen…” Zosime paused, the light tone falling from her voice. “Then I knew it was serious.”

  Sariel felt his mother’s thought before he actually saw it, Hadrian as a young man, turning toward her, his robes swirling around him, his eyes on her and only her.

  “Mom,” Sariel said.

  Zosime waved him off. “Never mind that. So, Adalbert is such a dear friend, he invited me to spend the night so I could be here when you and Rufus left. Of course, if he were really such a dear friend, he would have asked two other sorciers to take your places.”

  “He has no choice, Mom.” Sariel looked at his mother and reached out a hand to pat her shoulder. Without wanting to, he picked up her sadness that verged on despair. Not another, she thought. Not another.

  But before her feeling overtook her, she closed her eyes, and Sariel saw her sadness whisk out of her mind, nothing but love and kindness replacing it.

  Zosime stroked his cheek, her hand moving to his hair. “Anyway, get some sleep and I’ll see you in the morning. Then, I’m sure, we will all hear the plan.”

  Sariel hugged Zosime again, and then he closed the door behind her, feeling like he wanted to call her back and tell her the truth, the real story, but even as he let go of the door handle, he knew there wasn’t anything to say.

  Chapter Eight

  Miranda jolted awake, Sariel’s call clear in her head. Miranda. I’m sorry. Miranda! He was upset, hurt, angry, maybe even scared, and she spun to the side of the bed where he’d been the night before, but he wasn’t there. He wasn’t there because he wanted her to forget him, to erase their entire relationship. She could still feel his fingertips on her forehead. But if he really wanted her to forget, why had he called out to her just now? He had called. It was his voice, in pain, suffering. She knew that. He’d needed her.

  Or did he? Probably just another dream, she thought, looking at the sunlight on her walls. Not only was she inventing an entire relationship with a man who could disappear at will, but she was hearing voices, too. Paddy wagon material.

  At least hearing voices was a symptom the doctors would believe. There were drugs for that.

  Rubbing her eyes and throwing off the blankets, Miranda walked out of her room, desperately needing coffee. Dan was going to pick her up at ten and take her to an all day conference entitled, Does Poetry Matter?, held at the auditorium of the Palace of Fine Arts. The main question of the conference was moot because every attendee—poets and writers all— would, of course, think poetry mattered, and Miranda herself was on a panel to talk about why poetry was important to everyone and everything. Someone from the conference titled her panel, Real Poets Speak to the Real World. But somehow, words didn’t seem that important to her at all right now. And which real world, she wondered? Hers or Sariel’s or all the others that could be out there? If the theoretical physics Sariel talked about were true, there could be hundreds, thousands, millions of worlds, all incrementally or radically different from the one she was in.

  Math could barely explain that idea. How could words?

  All she knew was that poetry didn’t matter at all right now. The truth of that matter was that it would be torture to think about anything other than Sariel’s face as he lay pressed to the mattress, his eyes flicking back and forth. He’d received some kind of message, but what kind? And why did he choose then to try to take her memories? All she wanted to focus on was what he’d been trying to do with her mind. What had happened? She’d been trying to hang on to something, and it seemed that she had. Had she made that happen or had Sariel made a mistake?

  Miranda opened her apartment door and picked up her copy of the San Francisco Chronicle. She stared at the front page, which showed another terrible thing that had happened in the world somewhere, some kind of fire or explosion, people running. No wonder she only read the arts section.

  She closed the door, walking toward the kitchen. She just needed to know where Sariel went. And most importantly, she needed to know if she would see him again.

  In the kitchen, Dan’s flowers—slightly wilted—were still in the coffee mug. Despite her lazy arrangement of them, they were beautiful, white and deep yellow irises surrounded by delicate green eucalyptus leaves and baby’s breath. Her hands on her hips, Miranda stared at Dan’s gift. Two nights ago, he’d sat so close to her on the couch that she could feel the heat from his leg and smell his Altoid breath, his Irish Spring deodorant soap, his cologne that reeked of the Macy’s men’s department. If she could have, she would have scooted over on the couch and taken a deep, free breath. But Miranda didn’t want to make him feel bad, and she knew she had nothing to be nervous about. Dan was nothing if not polite.

  As they’d sat there together on her couch, she’d wished for Sariel’s magical gift, needing to go into Dan’s head and see what was really going on in there. Or better yet, she’d wished she could think her way out of the living room and into the gray, to wherever Sariel was. But instead, she’d had to sit through a bottle of wine and a long conversation before Dan stood up, smiling shyly, waiting for Miranda to say something more than, “Well, that was fun.”

  He’d stood in front of her for a while, his hands balled in his pockets, a smile on his face. Miranda had crossed her arms, and then stood up, moving toward the front door, yawning loudly. Finally, he’d gotten the message.

  She turned on the tap, filled the coffeepot with water, and then poured it into the machine. As the coffee began to drip, she took the bouquet out of the coffee mug and brought it over to the sink, where she snipped the stem ends. Taking down a vase, she arranged the flowers, doing them justice, and brought the vase out to the dining room table. Just as she was doing a last bit of arranging, the doorbell rang. Panicked, she glanced up at the clock, but it was only nine A.M. Then, her heart jumping as if to a starting gun, she thought, Sariel! But he wouldn’t use a door or the bell. No, he’d show up in secret and then wrap his arms around her, finding her from memory in the great expanse of energy
and matter.

  Blowing air out of her mouth, she walked to the front door and looked through the peephole. She looked down, shaking her head. It was Dan, of course, smiling into the tiny round glass window, his hair combed, his face smooth. He was early. Ready. Wanting to go and wanting her.

  “So what I’m saying is that readers in America today are lazy,” Archie Cornis-Piper said, leaning back in his chair. He was a small round man in a tweed jacket, his stomach like a tidy basketball under his button-down shirt. If he weren’t so well published, few of the women staring at him from the rows of chairs would give him a second glance. But because he’d won prizes, he was sexy, even with his tufts of reddish hair and receding chin. “They want Stephen King, Tom Clancy. Not something that would actually make them think.”

  Pompous ass, Miranda thought, wishing that instead of speaking at this conference, she was in her nightgown on her couch reading a thick novel of indeterminate importance. Whatever the story was, she wanted it to be long and juicy and full of predictable but happy plot points. Girl finds boy, girl loses boy but only for three days, girl gets boy back in a huge, happy denouement. Boy loves girl forever and ever and all her problems are solved.

  “Think!” Archie said, raising his hand. “Enlighten!” The women in front of him nodded, their eyes wide and glassy.

  Miranda watched Archie speak, only able to think of the comic-book character Archie, and then, in succession, the character’s friends Jughead, Veronica, Reggie, Moose, and Betty. Now there was some literature that could make you think.

  “It’s the image we should crave,” Archie went on. “Not sensation. Not the hype. We need to focus on words that bring forth memory, idea, thought, and then feeling. Not the reverse.”

  Miranda stifled a yawn and looked out to the crowd, where fifty people sat, furiously taking notes, some on laptop computer, the keys clicking furiously. What were they writing? That the image was all-important? All Miranda wanted was sensation, the kind she’d had more of in the last week than she’d had in her entire life. She wished she could interrupt Archie and say, “Listen, that’s all very well and good and sounds quite impressive, but have any of you ever slid through time and space? Do you know that our bodies are actually energy packets? Have you ever had something think through your flesh into the bone? Have you ever made love with a man who could later take you to Hawaii in minutes? Talk about sensation!”

  But of course, she couldn’t. She’d promised Sariel she wouldn’t talk or write about it, and as she glanced at Dan sitting in the front row, she knew she didn’t want to embarrass him, either, even if he could not, would not, understand that she would never date him. Not in a million years.

  “Ms. Stead,” a man in the audience asked. “Your poetry is really focused on the body. Do you agree with this idea about sensation?”

  Channeling her pseudo-intellectual self, Miranda breathed in. “I think Mr. Cornis-Piper has some important thoughts, but I feel that since we are bodies and our experiences and thoughts are interpreted by our bodies, we should pay attention to our sensations. We sense an image before we understand it. Our eyes and brain and whole body see and feel and taste and smell a tree before we are able to understand it literally as tree. What does that process feel like? Whatever it feels like, it comes from within our bones and blood. Our bodies know things our mind has long forgotten. In our cells, we understand things we would often try to forget with our heads.”

  As she talked, she kept her eyes away from Archie. She started to remember what it felt like in her body to cling to Sariel and move through the gray, how her bones felt light and hollow, her skin almost transparent. She could feel the muscles in his shoulders, breathe in his warmth, feel the way they were moving, together, away from San Francisco toward Hilo. Time and space had moved through her, touched every part of her insides, as if the atoms in her body moved aside to let space through.

  “And the body—” she was saying, and then, as something flickered at the back of the room, she almost gasped. What was that? She stopped talking, focusing on a pulse of gray at the back of the room. Was it? Could it be? And yes, there it was, hovering at the back of the auditorium. Miranda blinked, her mouth open as she squinted, focusing on the wave of matter that hung just beyond her.

  She hadn’t opened her eyes when she traveled with Sariel because she was so afraid and because she knew that he was taking care of their travel arrangements. But this—this matter—appeared for her, and she watched it, saw it spread wide and long at the back of the room, knew that if she closed her eyes and thought of, well, Hilo or New York or Paris, there she’d be. She had pulled it forth, all by herself. But how?

  Miranda shook her head, her mouth open slightly.

  “The body…” she repeated, zombielike. Archie Cornis-Piper coughed, and then Miranda shook her head.

  There was no way she was responsible for that. Only Croyant could be. She was Moyenne. Everyone at the meeting had agreed, and as she had been on the floor and they had all been standing above her, how could she argue? Sariel had taken them everywhere. All she’d done was clutch on tightly.

  The audience was silent, waiting. Miranda looked down at her hands in her lap and then peeked up, surprised that the gray now appeared to be rolling toward her, matter condensed and ready for her to step into and travel through. And what was that she could almost see? A building? A house? A dark room? Was she seeing it or feeling it?

  “And the…” She stopped speaking, closed her eyes, tried to find the weight of her bones again, the heaviness of her flesh. How had she seen that? Had she actually conjured it herself? No. She wasn’t magic. She was ordinary, average, Moyenne, blind to vortexes, unable to mind-read, clueless about space and time travel, and just generally a boring human.

  All of this must be posttraumatic shock brought on from her insane fantasies of the perfect, magic man.

  Breathing in, Miranda looked up again. The gray had vanished, nothing at the back of the auditorium but doors and people leaning against the walls, looking at her raptly. Even the women in the first rows were staring at her, mouths open, ready for wisdom.

  Archie hissed, “And the body? Are you in yours? For Christ’s sake, Miranda.”

  Miranda smiled at the audience. “Sorry, I think I started to write a poem just then.”

  Everyone laughed, and she sat back in her chair. Glancing down at the first row, she saw Dan was beaming at her, his face full of the exact glow she felt throughout her entire body when looking at Sariel.

  After her panel ended, Miranda sat at a table in the lobby and signed books. She knew she was looking at people, smiling, talking to them about imagery and sensation and the current publication climate, but she was somewhere else altogether. Sometimes as she wrote her name, she realized that she was almost writing Sariel’s name on the front page. Once, she had to stop in mid-S and reconfigure her written remarks. Luckily for Miranda, the woman who bought the book was named Sally.

  “Sorry,” Miranda said, turning Sariel’s S into Sally and then writing her name below. At least she hadn’t written something truly ridiculous, as she had one time at a signing that involved cocktails. Instead of writing Happy Reading, which she often did, she wrote Happy Birthday. The slightly tipsy man who’d bought the book hadn’t noticed, and Miranda only realized her mistake in the cab on her way home.

  But she had to get a grip. Even if she was obsessed with Sariel and hallucinating the gray, she had to get ahold of herself.

  Finally, the poets and writers began to leave. Janitors came in, ready to fold up the tables and chairs. As Miranda was standing up from the table, saying good-bye to Archie Cornis-Piper, she saw a wisp of gray again, undulating at the far corner of the room, almost as if it were calling her. She stared at it, wanting to run toward it, throw herself into its wavery softness so that she could go wherever Sariel had disappeared to.

  “Really,” Archie said, putting a meaty hand on her arm. “You need to stop writing so much. You are completely space
y these days. You’re not even here at all.”

  “You have no idea,” said Miranda.

  “Well, then, you must be ready to have a breakthrough. The perfect poem!” Archie clapped his hands. “Then we can argue about it next year at the conference.”

  Another year, thought Miranda as she walked toward Dan who was waiting for her by the door. How could she make it through another year when she didn’t know how she would survive losing Sariel? Or making him up and then losing him. Or was it that she was making up what she didn’t have? How could she live without having what she finally knew she needed?

  On the way home from the conference, Miranda managed to convince Dan that she couldn’t go out for a drink because she had to go see Viv and the new baby. Now, they sat in his car parked on Lombard below her apartment, Dan just about to unbuckle his seat belt and get out of the car.

  “Oh, Dan. I told you. I’ve got to go see Viv. She’s—you know, postpartum and all. A C-section is major surgery, and Seamus has the other three kids to take care of.”

  He turned to her, the glow diffused now, his eyes narrowed. “I can drive you. That’s it. Let me drive you out there. We can pick up take-out and feed the whole family. Give them a break.”

  Miranda swallowed, shaking her head. “I think she’s really tired. Wiped out. I’m going to go and sit with Viv, clean the house. Get the other kids into the bath. That kind of thing. It’s going to be very quiet. As if I’m really not there. Just a member of the family.”

  Dan shrugged, irritable suddenly, and she didn’t blame him. Ever since the first time he’d met her two years ago, Dan had been patient and kind, calling her, bringing her flowers, taking her out to dinners, insisting on picking up the bill, even though Salt Point Press had a very small entertainment budget. And what had she been? First she’d used Jack as her excuse. “Oh, it’s too soon after my breakup. I don’t want to do anything on the rebound.”