This I remembered, but hadn’t told. Still hadn’t told, though the fire was snickering down now, and the wind and the hail were rising. And the girl was at the cottage door – the model, the beneficiary. Lena. She stood soggy and forlorn in her wet earmuffs, still hesitating with her hand upon the knob, composing some savage or penetrating or triumphant exit speech to clobber me with because she thought she wanted to hear about how her crazy mother fashioned her likeness every day and then used it every morning to cut down on her heating bills. What ode of inspirational joy would she make of that, I wondered. What would she console herself with – it would be kind of interesting to know. Well, Agnes probably did save her life back then by refusing to let Roland bring her home to the cabin. And the great sculptress did get a little glum of an evening because she still felt enough mother-love to intrude on her madness – almost. For myself, I know – because none of us lives without consolation – for myself, when I get tired of rehearsing it in my lonesome bed, and the stars have revolved toward sunrise in the unseen sky – not by way of mitigation for my crimes, incidentally, but just to get some sleep, dear God, to get a little sleep – I remember that I did jump into the river after her, I did try to pull her from the water in the end. As I say, I’m no hero; I was plenty scared and almost certain I’d get myself killed. And it was ridiculous, of course: she was a much better swimmer than I was. I even knew it was ridiculous at the time, which is part of what helps me sleep. Because I certainly wasn’t suicidal or anything. I just loved her and was pissed off and had to do something, even if it was useless, even if it killed me. So I jumped in.
Hilarious how the river dragged me off and sucked me under. Hilarious, I mean, because I’d had some idea of swimming after her on the current. I don’t think a person’s imagination contains any image of his own helplessness. Complete helplessness like that. Even in retrospect, you always wonder if you could have fought harder or thought smarter or done something to gain the upper hand. Even when it was happening, come to think of it, I struggled and thrashed as if it made any difference – which it didn’t; I could’ve floated limp and the river would have carried me off the same way, wherever it went. I can still feel the inanimate fact of it, the insentient, irresistible strength big with its guiding laws. I might have been one of the broken branches spinning and shooting past me. I might have been a twig off one of those branches, just part of the river now.
And the fact that I was stronger at heart than Agnes, that I was saner, that I had a better grasp of the minimum daily requirements of life; these things, like whether she was smarter or kinder or better or more creative than I, had nothing to do with the fact that I survived and she didn’t. There just happened to be this rock, this boulder, out in the middle of the river around the bend, submerged but still visible in the rising shelf of waves that curled above it where the river struck. The current at that point carried you out smack toward it, and the water seemed to flow in equal measure around either side. If I’d hit that thing – and there was no chance of missing it – and spun around it to the right – and there were good odds of that, being positioned as I was – I would have died for certain because there was nothing beyond it on that side but a thrashing stretch of white rapids to the brink of a thunderous falls. But, tumbling helplessly about as I was, I was tossed up to the surface with my legs in front of me. My thigh smashed against the rock, sending my whole leg numb, but my upper body, most of my weight, was on the left side of it, so I was carried off, by this chance, to the left, where a tree had been brought down on the bank by the storm. The tree – a maple, I think – was still anchored firmly to the earth by its roots and its branches reached out several yards into the water, much of it above the current. I went crashing into the branches backward – else probably I’d have lost an eye – and, half-conscious, I held onto them, and the tree bore the pressure, and so I dragged myself to shore.
‘You’re just afraid – really,’ said Lena at the door. This was her valedictory now. Spoken to my back because I was still sitting in the Windsor, facing away from her. Hands between my legs, shoulders slumped a little. Ready for the speech to wash over me with whatever force it had. ‘You’ re just afraid that no one’ll, like, give a damn about you anymore. I mean, it’s like: you think the only thing that matters about you now are your secrets. All these people, these reporters, my mother’s biographers, me – we all come around here, like, begging you to tell us what you know. And then, like, what if you tell us, right? What if you tell everybody what happened? I mean, it’s not like it’d make you famous or anything. It’s not like Agnes was a movie star or anything. She just made art. So no one would care, right? No one would come here. They’d just write about what you said and they’d pretend they knew more about it than you did, and what you thought wouldn’t even matter. And you wouldn’t matter. And that’s what you’re afraid of, right? They’ll go away and I’ll go away, and then you’ll just be here with yourself and no one’ll care. You’re just a coward, that’s all. You’re just afraid to be alone.’
That was it. That was her speech. I lifted one shoulder. Not bad, I thought. I mean, nothing an adolescent ever says is true, of course. It can’t be. They can’t possibly have lived long enough to discover how the most grave, urgent and human decencies are only to be achieved through self-deception and hypocrisy and lies. But because of that – precisely because of it – some of the stuff they come up with has the ring of truth to it, the aura of something hidden away, half known, and then uncovered, the way truth often is. And I confess, when she spoke, I felt the old inner shudder, and I quailed at the bleak prospect of what would follow if I gave in. I could envision the rosy glow of triumph in her cheeks, the misty gleam in the youthful eye, as she crammed this miserable series of circumstances into some salvific mold or other. Oh yeah, I could see her marching off, into whatever personal destiny, with whatever fresh lesson of life she thought she’d learned, leaving me here alone with the unredeemed history of it, empty of solace, having been there, standing at the window, my hands in pockets bulging with events and sensations and whatever few meaningless patterns I could discern. I would watch her, through my own reflection, as she strode off forever into the dead, the winter woods. And she had a point: I didn’t think it would be tolerable.
Sensing – as ever, unerringly – her advantage, she let go the knob and came toward me: I heard the floorboards squeaking at my back.
‘I had this dream before I came here, Har … Mr Bernard,’ she said.
Uh oh, I thought, a dream; this wasn’t going to be good.
‘I mean, I know it was just, like, a dream and everything but I had this dream where she came to me. Okay? I was walking in the woods, just wandering, you know, the way you do in dreams. And then I came out into this really scary place. And she was standing there. It was really dark, it was night, but I could see her. Just like this shadow sort of in the distance, waiting for me. And I walked toward her, and suddenly I realized: we were in the Valley of Dead Elms. Just like in the photographs, you know. All the statues lying in the mud everywhere, and the big dead trees hanging over us all around like they were watching us. And she was standing in the middle of it and I walked up to her. And I could see her face. And she was, like, smiling. This really happy smile. And she said I could come with her. I could come and live with her forever. And I was really frightened because it was such a horrible place. You know? I looked around at all the statues and everything and it was … it was horrible. But then she said, no – see? She said she didn’t really live here, in the valley. This was just the place she had to come to so she could meet me. Where she really lived was in the meadow, she said. In that meadow, you know, that was full of wildflowers. And she said it was really beautiful there, all the time, and if I came with her, she would take me. But I didn’t know what to do. I was afraid. I was too afraid I would have to stay where we were, stay in that valley.’ I heard the child swallow. I heard her breathing. ‘Like, forever,’ she said.
She stopped. And I do believe – I do believe I moaned aloud. What mystic chord she hit with that one I couldn’t say offhand, but it rose up through me full of sadness, full of phrases, full of images and redolent, I have to say it, with the very spring air of my youth and of the little stream where Agnes and I first met.
I heard her take another step toward the chair – and she was right behind me now – gazing down at me with what last hopes, what silent prayers I didn’t dare imagine.
‘Tell me about my mother, Harry,’ she whispered.
I leaned forward and buried my face in my hands.
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This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
copyright © 1996 by Andrew Klavan
cover design by Jason Gabbert
This edition published in 2011 by MysteriousPress.com/Open Road Integrated Media
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Agnes Mallory Page 28