by Tom Crockett
“You said that before. . . .” It was hard to frame complete thoughts, but Marina’s mind was filled with images. “. . . That I had to find some part of me that was lost. I don’t know what you mean.”
“You have many women living here.” Atana put her hand on Marina’s heart, slipping just her fingertips inside the jacket to touch skin. “Girls, young women, mothers, lovers, grandmothers. You can give these pieces of yourself away. This is a great gift. You can also lose them.”
“What do you mean lose them?”
“They can be driven away by fear, misplaced by inattention. They can seek places that better nourish them. There are many ways to lose these things.”
“Have I lost . . . ?” It was a silly question and she stopped herself from finishing it. Of course she had lost something. She hadn’t always woken up sad and heavy. She had once been able to find beauty and meaning in things.
“The question is not have I lost, but what have I lost,” Atana said softly. “Can you name the pieces you have lost?”
Marina’s head was spinning. She looked up at the night sky. Could she name the lost ones? There was the little girl in the woods of Georgia, the Marina who felt in her heart the connection between her life and everything around her. That little girl had been gone for some time. The Marina of the past few years had felt nothing but disconnection and disorientation in her life.
And what about the artist—the artist in Marina who had always been able to see beauty and pattern and, above all, the light? She had left Marina sometime after her assignment in Baghdad. Sure she could still make incredible photographs, but the light had gone out of them. Marina made them from instinct and habit, not from passion.
Then there was Marina, the lover. She’d lost her virginity at twenty. She knew this was late. It seemed that all her friends had matured much sooner. She hadn’t been afraid of sex or intimidated or embarrassed by it. She just hadn’t been ready for it. She made up for her late start with passionate and uninhibited affairs. She’d loved Christophe body and soul, but something inside her had died along with him. Afterward, she could still enjoy sex, enjoy the erotic attention of men, but it was never the same. She could never abandon herself to the passion. She’d gotten some of that back with Rafael, but what good would that do her now?
“I’m curious.” Marina asked, “Can I get these pieces back?”
“You have already found some of the most important pieces.”
“When? I mean how do you know?”
“Well, you have the turtle’s mark on you. What did you discover on the beach?”
Marina wondered how the woman could know about her tattoo, but glancing down at her own chest she saw the head of the little sea turtle just visible between her breasts in the V formed by the jacket. It had been on her belly this morning and now it seemed to be heading for her throat.
“Balance!” The word came quickly to Marina. “Something about balance. Physical balance, but something more than that. She talked about a kind of emotional or maybe spiritual balance. That I needed to pay attention to the light as well as the shadow.”
“And did this make sense to you? Do you know the part of you that once kept you balanced?”
An image came to Marina of her mother. Her mother had been sensual and emotional, even unpredictable, but she had always been optimistic. She could find beauty and wonder in the most commonplace of objects or experiences. Her father, on the other hand, had been a brooder, a deep thinker, introverted and intense. He was an academic, a historian who wrote about genocides and holocausts, great rents in the fabric of humanity. But despite this, he had found his own balance in life. His daughters and especially his wife were his lifeline, his way up and out of the darkness into which he often wrote himself.
Marina had a little of each of them in her, both the brooder and the optimist. She realized for the first time that this meant she must have spent a good part of her life with that one aspect of her personality functioning as the lifeline for the other part. Now she had no lifeline, no way back. Her mother’s spirit within her had gone. She had stopped nurturing it with observations of beauty and wonder. This was her balance.
“My mother,” was all she said.
“Call her back, then.”
“How?”
“Look for them in the mirror.” Atana made a circular pass with her hand over the pool. It was still and jet black now, but a light glowed at one edge. Marina looked up through the circular opening formed by the tall trees. The moon was just edging into the dark circle of sky. It was almost full and reflected off the surface of the pool.
“Call them back. Call them all back.”
Marina slid closer to the edge of the pool and knelt facing it. She leaned forward and looked down into the water. She couldn’t even see her own reflection very clearly, just a darker shadow that seemed to blot out little sparkles of stars.
She turned back to Atana. “I don’t see anything. What do I do now?”
“Keep looking, child. Ask them to return.”
“What am I looking for?”
“Reflections. Look for your reflections.” She wanted to question Atana’s use of the plural, but understood that she was just avoiding what she knew she must do.
Marina felt awkward about speaking out loud, so she tried focusing her thoughts and willing the pieces of her soul back. She thought about the little girl on the farm in Georgia—the naked, clay-covered, wild animal. She thought about her mother. She pictured herself as an artist like her mother had been. Her mother had worked in a studio, her paintings were abstractions based on landscapes. She had not required people, and yet she had been very sociable. Her relationships with friends mattered almost as much as her art. Marina’s art required people and yet in the past several years she had come to see them simply as props.
The water shimmered in the area of her cast shadow. She thought she saw a woman’s face. It was her mother’s face, then her face, then her mother’s again.
Marina tried to picture the lover in her. She instantly saw herself with Rafael. Yes, she thought, this is how I want to see the lover in me—passionate, absorbed, present.
The water shimmered again and she saw herself clearly. An image filled the shadowy area. It was her image, but not a reflection. She saw herself lying on her back, naked, glistening with a fine sheen of sweat, her pupils swollen, her body flushed with orgasmic exhaustion—ecstatic fatigue. She looked powerful and strong and deeply feminine. She thought of the great sculptural representations of the erotic goddesses of India. It was as if this image of her own body was a manifestation of that energy. Her hand traced a line in the perspiration from her lips to her throat, down between her breasts, over her belly to touch the turtle tattoo between her thighs.
Then the image held a hand out, palm level with the surface of the water, as if she was touching a glass or mirror from the other side. Marina hesitated, then extended a hand out over the surface of the water. The image floated closer to her so that she didn’t have to bend out far to touch the watery hand. She put her palm over the image of her palm and pressed lightly into the water.
Her hand met resistance. Instead of sinking into the water her hand touched another hand, palm to palm. It supported her weight. She leaned on it tentatively. The image lifted another hand and Marina placed her palm down over that one. She leaned forward. Her image supported her. She felt strange, giddy. She knew this was not possible, but . . .
Her knees were at the very edge of the moss-covered stones lining the pool, and as her image drifted back into the center of the pool it pulled Marina with it. She was off balance and sprawled into the water, but she never splashed or broke the surface. She seemed suspended against her image at every point where her body made contact. It felt like floating, like weightlessness without the pressure of water around her.
“Call them back, Marina.” She heard Atana’s voice as if from a long way off. “Make a place for them.”
Marina laughed. She felt
absurd, even surreal. She looked down at an image of herself as if pressed against soft glass. Her image seemed to be aware of her, patient, waiting to be seduced.
“Come back,” Marina whispered. She felt self-conscious, but spoke anyway. “Please, I need you.”
Almost at once Marina felt herself slipping through the glass—spinning around and into the water. Her point of view shifted radically and she became the erotic image of herself. She was looking up and saw herself, floating face down in the mirror pool in her colorful jacket.
At first it felt awkward to be inhabiting her own erotic body. Then, gradually it became more familiar. This was not a foreign place, after all, only a long unused, unvisited, unrecognized place within her. How do I bring this back? she wondered. How do I make room for it?
But even as she thought this, she was aware of some essential part of herself filling this powerful feminine body—slipping into the unoccupied spaces. This image she was exploring was not her. It was not a complete person. It was more of an archetype—the divinely erotic feminine—a potential and a possibility that she’d once had access to. She’d lost or severed her bond to this goddess. Now she wanted it back. She drew this image around her, expanding into it until she could not say what was her and what was archetype.
She flipped again and was looking down once more. This time she saw her mother beneath her. Her mother alone. Her mother alone in her studio. Her mother and herself as a child. Her mother was teaching her to dance. She was young again in her mother’s studio. The radio was playing something classical and her mother was teaching her to waltz. She did not need to know how to waltz. In fact, she already seriously doubted if she would ever have occasion to waltz, but her mother’s laughter and enthusiasm was infectious. They danced out of the barn that her mother used as a studio and across the lawn, finally collapsing in the grass almost beyond earshot of the radio.
“You will be very pretty and talented and people will say great things about you. They will also be jealous of you and say hurtful things.” Her mother toyed with Marina’s hair. “Just remember that the voices inside you are the only ones that can hurt you and the only ones that can keep you truly happy.”
Marina vaguely remembered this event from her childhood. Her mother was often taking her aside to tell her what seemed to be important things. And every time, Marina promised herself that this time she would remember the advice. But the little bits of shared wisdom didn’t seem to have a place in her childhood and were too quickly forgotten.
There was something she wanted to say to her mother or something she wanted her mother to say to her. She slipped again beneath the water, into the body of her mother. It was a strange feeling. This too was not her body. In an odd way, however, it was comforting. She had, after all, once spent nine months in the body of this woman. If she listened carefully she could hear her mother’s feelings and contradictions.
Marina’s mother, Maria, was acutely aware of the amount of energy she possessed. She saw herself as an artist and a mother, but she knew that both of these challenges tapped the same source of energy within her. She constantly struggled to find the balance between her art and being a loving and nurturing mother. These were not constraints placed on her by society. Maria cared little for social conventions. This was a struggle formed from her own self-awareness, her own drives, her own passions.
Marina recognized this contradiction in herself. She had unconsciously made a choice where her mother had found a compromise. Her mother was a talented artist with a regional following. She still painted, she still sold pieces, but she had not pushed herself into the kind of prominence that Marina had achieved.
Marina had an international reputation as a photographer. She was known by her work around the world. But she had no children, not even a steady relationship. It was not that she believed that these things were necessary for happiness or fulfillment, but they did represent the choice she had made.
Now, looking up at herself from her mother’s body, Marina saw a confident and vibrant woman, a daughter and a person well loved. This was how her mother still saw her. She regretted the letter her mother must have received by this time, the note that calmly and rationally explained why Marina had decided to give up the gift of life her mother had given her. She thought about the pain it must have caused. She had known it would be a sad thing for her family, but had not realized what that truly meant until now .
Marina didn’t have time to cry. She flipped once again into her own body. Her mother was gone and in her place was the little child she had recalled earlier. Actually, all she saw was her face, as she’d once been, buried in the warm red clay as the rain pelted down on the hot summer afternoon. She almost laughed. Was that what she had looked like? The little girl seemed so intense, so focused on her experience. How old had she been then?
It did not surprise her when she slipped into her child body. She wanted it, wanted to remember the warm mud, the rain on her face, the intimacy with the forest, the sense of connection. She looked at herself through her own young eyes. She was delighted by how easy it was for the young Marina to see herself as a woman. She’d always had a kind of self-confidence about her abilities that was unusual enough in a child but somehow extraordinary in a young girl. It often made adults ill at ease with her, but it also meant that she had a clear view of her future. To a young Marina, the woman she saw floating in the water above her was a mixture of mother and father and something else, something powerful, but unpredictable. How can I bring this part of me back? she wondered. Perhaps by seeing as she saw.
Marina abandoned herself to the sounds of the heavy rain blanketing the Georgia forest. It was a dull sound that had rhythm and almost a song to it. She saw the stag drink water from the little pools that formed close to her. She saw a salamander slither from some hiding place. She saw birds overhead in the trees—crows, blue jays, a solitary owl. She saw a turtle crawl slowly around the edge of her mud wallow. It stopped to look at her in a way none of the other creatures had. The rain and forest song grew more insistent. The turtle. There was something about the turtle that reminded her of something. There was something she was supposed to remember.
It grew suddenly darker and Marina felt as if she was sinking. The image of herself as an adult receded as she descended. The song became a voice, a familiar voice, but one she could not quite identify. She tried to will herself back into her body. She imagined herself as an adult again, but it did not help. She sank still deeper into the pool.
“Marina.” A voice called to her. It was not Atana’s voice, but it was familiar. “Are you ready to come back to me?”
Marina could see no one. She was also not sure how to answer. Not sure if this was her imagination or some real voice.
“Marina.” Again the voice called. It was a woman’s voice, strangely seductive. “Have you chosen?”
Chosen, Marina thought, chosen what? A hazy shape began to materialize out of the darkness. Marina realized she was holding her breath. She had not been aware of breathing or not breathing when she had shifted perspective between herself and the lost pieces of her self, but now she felt pressure in her lungs.
“Yes, just take a breath and come to me.” The ghostlike image in the water coalesced into a body. The body took on soft feminine curves. She began to recognize it. The Turtle Woman, the young incarnation she had first met, floated in the water before her. Her dark hair floated like a tangle of seaweed around her head. When she floated back her hair engulfed her face. When she moved closer to Marina her face emerged from her hair like a hesitant sea creature. “Come with me now. It will only get hard for you if you continue.”
There seemed to be something overwhelming and attractive about surrendering to the Turtle Woman. She knew that surrender was what she was being asked to do. She had wanted that surrender before. She recalled dropping into the night dark sea from the cruise ship. The Turtle Woman had been there, too. She had surrendered to her then, but now some part of her hesitated.
>
Must I? she wondered.
“You must surrender to one thing or another. You have only a short time to walk this edge.”
“Is my time up, then?” She was not aware that she was speaking, but her thoughts seemed as good as conversation.
“Very nearly.”
“And if I choose your way, it means death, right?”
“My embrace just carries you further down death’s path. You knew this before. It is what you said you wanted. Don’t you remember?”
“Yes, I know, but you said I could choose a different path. I don’t understand how I can, but I don’t want to die or go on with my dying right now. If I can live, I might do it better this time.”
“That path will get harder before it gets easier, Marina. Come with me now and I will show you worlds you cannot imagine.” The Turtle Woman floated closer to her.
Marina looked at her own body. She was not a little girl anymore. She had her body back. She had the body that had jumped overboard, determined to die.
The Turtle Woman pressed against her, wrapping her arms around Marina. She closed her eyes. She expected soft flesh but what she felt was hard and firm. When she opened her eyes the Turtle Woman was gone and Rafael held her once again. He pressed his mouth to hers, probing her lips with his tongue. She wanted to let him inside her, opening herself in every possible way, but something inside her resisted.
He pressed harder, squeezing her tighter and tighter. A battle raged within her. Her lungs ached.
She parted her lips lightly against the phantom Rafael’s press and tasted water. She inhaled in spite of herself and choked. Water filled her nose and mouth and burned her. She was drowning. She recalled the sensation. When she had drowned before it had hurt, but she had also been resigned to it. The experience had been passive and oddly dreamlike. Now she struggled against it.
Rafael—or was it the Turtle Woman?—held her firmly the way a mother might hold a struggling child or the way a lover might hold a partner who was saying no but meant something altogether different. She was no longer certain who it was, but she was in no mood to be cradled and supported into oblivion. She pushed and kicked against the figure that held her. She broke its grasp and pushed it from her.