Off-Island

by Marlene Hauser

  “If you didn’t, you wouldn’t,” she mumbled into the side of his neck. The luminescent stars Krista’s father had painted and tacked to the ceiling of his daughter’s nursery years ago glittered in the wavering light from the street. Through the rain and the wind-blown oak leaves, the tentative light seemed to quiver across the ceiling, and pulse, and intensify. And Krista was suddenly far away, swept up in a memory of the man who had once painted a sky for his daughter.

  *

  The airplane engines droned as perspiration trickled down the side of her face. Her father’s familiar voice said, “Nothing is as it seems. Take nothing for granted.” She expanded as if weightless and disappeared. “Never trust your senses in the air. Watch your instruments.” He was piloting the plane and she was playing her usual role of his favorite passenger. The glare of the sun through the windshield was overbearing. “There!” Charlie Bourne, Jr. pointed out for his young daughter. “Do you see Grandmother’s house? Look for the apple tree.”

  The Island was not the same viewed from the sky as it was from the ground. Charlie turned the plane into a nosedive. The force was not sufficient to hold the slight young girl in her seat. She fell forward. He pulled up the stick. Blood drained from her face as he circled the house and the apple tree in one slow-moving, tight circle. “Do you see it? Do you see it, Kris?”

  “Daddy,” she answered, “Daddy… we’re dying.”

  Charlie widened the plane’s course and slowly lifted his daughter back to the center of the green canvas seat.

  “No, Princess, that’s only the sun, the hot sun. Daddy only pulled two Gs. Say two Gs, Krissie,” he said as he attempted to explain to her the gravitational increase.

  “Two Gs,” she repeated as she saw Ilsa’s apple tree, heavy with fruit. “Apple,” she said, wanting to touch the tree. That would make her safe. The plane glided over the iridescent water. It sparkled in the shades of her grandmother’s favorite watercolors – blue, lavender and sea-foam green. Charlie unbuttoned his daughter’s white blouse, saying, “The sun will make you faint up here, Honey. The sun will make you faint.”

  She rolled her eyes at her father and repeated after him, “The sun will make you faint.”

  “Daddy’s girl,” he answered, and she crawled into his lap because there the seat did not billow beneath her. Her arms fit inside his, and she could do anything he asked.

  “Fly us home, Little One, fly us home.”

  They landed then parked the blue-and-yellow-striped plane on the Island’s short landing strip. Krista pretended to help anchor it to the ground. The metal hook slipped into the ground link. Amazingly, for a three-year-old, she knew a pilot’s routine almost by heart. She knew the rudiments of her father’s take-off procedure as well, and the following morning, when she followed Charlie to the garden gate, she knew where he was going and what he would be doing. He was going to test a new plane. Krista sensed his excitement and clutched at his flight suit as he left.

  Pushing against the gate, first the dark-green frame, then the wire mesh, she called repeatedly after him. Finally, she forced the latch, which sent the small bells ringing. The summer nanny came after the child, and Charlie returned up the path. Kneeling, he kissed his daughter roughly on the forehead and gave her a tight hug.

  “Listen,” he said, “Daddy will be back soon. Wait for me.”

  Krista squirmed in her nanny’s arms, trying once again to follow him. She pounded her fists against the white uniform. “Daddy!” she called after him.

  “Go on now,” the nanny called out, “she’ll be fine.”

  Instead, Charlie stopped, came back up the path, put his flight bag down and retrieved his daughter from her nurse. He carried her patiently into the back garden where Ilsa was busy raking apples from the grass, preparing for the yardmen. He set the child down by the bucket under the drainpipe and pulled out a seashell.

  “I want you to wash all the shells we found yesterday,” he instructed his daughter. He placed the scalloped shell in her palm and folded her fingers over it. “Keep this safe until I come home.”

  He stood up, satisfied the child was sufficiently engrossed in her task. The bells on the gate rang again as he closed the latch and he waved back at his daughter. “Help Grandmother rake the apples. Wait for Daddy.”

  Charlie waved goodbye to his mother. Krista studied the inside of the wet shell. It glistened in her hand. “Yes, Daddy,” she said, running to the gate, “I’ll wait. I’ll save the shell for you.”

  Two days later, Charlie Bourne died. His test plane exploded. Both the pilot and the navigator disappeared without a trace. In the New York City brownstone, the galaxy on Krista Bourne’s ceiling remained unfinished. On the Island, there was a mock funeral with no body. Krista always remembered her father: the games they had played, his warm breath over her crib, his steadiness and reassurance in the bleached-out brilliance of a fragile cockpit. She preferred to believe Charlie Bourne had simply disappeared, fainting away under an overbearing, endless sun.

  *

  Whenever Krista slept with Michael, whenever they had sex, she remembered Charlie leaning over her crib. Whatever he had said to her then had drifted away, but the feeling of his warm, watchful presence remained with her. Krista loved her father. Charlie Bourne had asked her to wait for him, and she still did. She went out to greet him in the only way she knew how, in the secret space inside reserved just for him – what she saw as a cockpit in a clear blue sky.

  Sexual excitement for Krista was a dazzling reverie. She pretended to be the dotted axis of some supernatural thing. She felt herself expanding as a vapor around a hot blue star or a planetary nebula around a blazing burnt-out shell. She ejected thin bursts of color like the remnants of an ever-widening circle of supernovae debris. She contracted. Pulsed. She took in a deep breath, and held still, searching for something in that white light.

  Her breathing became harsh like her father’s when he fought to bring the plane under control. She saw a thing recognizable as an apple tree in a yard. Earth from space. Daddy. She called out in silent fury to that arching thing: Life enter here. She was laid open, and drew in darkness. For one split second she was flooded, overcharged, bringing forth light.

  *

  Krista lay at peace in the room that had always been her nursery, the one with the stars on the unfinished ceiling. The rain stopped. The wind continued. In the courtyard, a few lights went on, and another few went off. Krista placed two fingers against her sternum. Her heart beat hard. She had conceived. She knew it instantly. A searing bit, an infusion of light, pierced her soul. It was like a switch thrown on, igniting in one moment every vein and artery. She imagined a circuitry overload, and wondered briefly about karma, about calling back the dead. She thought about Charlie.

  “Life,” she said, folding her hands over her abdomen.

  “Krista?” Michael asked, as if calling from a great distance. She sat up in surprise. She had forgotten he was even there.

  Chapter Two

  The following morning Krista awoke before Michael. She lay still, thinking about the ceiling, sadly eyeing the points of the five-armed stars peeling from their glitter-speckled surface. In the far right corner, a water stain, years old, spread in concentric iron-red waves, like a pebble tossed into the sky and frozen there. She touched Michael’s hip. Maybe, she thought, the ceiling could be repainted a plain white. She would ask Helen, or better yet, Daddy Bourne. She nudged Cosmos, curled up at the foot of the bed, and turned on her side. The sun had not yet risen.

  There would be no dance class for her today or tomorrow. Not ever again, she thought, as she rested her head on her arm. In a thousand years, she never would have guessed that one day she would wake up and not have to rise, pick out tights and a leotard, pull back her hair in a tight chignon. She would not have to race to make it to the studio on time, to find her balance and to strive endlessly for perfection. Audi
tions? She never really once auditioned. Directors saw her, invited her to dance for them, but even that was happening less, especially when they discovered she looked the part but could not deliver what they wanted most: vulnerability. More than one choreographer told her in vain: “Open up. Project!” When she did not, they demanded to know what bled her psychic energy. Psychic energy? What was that? Krista didn’t have a clue.

  She stretched deep into the covers, into the coolness at the far reaches of the bed. She worked her way back into sleep and towards dreaming. She laid a hand on her abdomen. Cosmos crept over her ankles and settled against her belly. She forced the cat away. I am not pregnant. The thought startled her almost as much as Cosmos’s behavior. Usually he never sat on her lap or lay beside her unless coerced. I am pregnant. Perhaps, Krista thought, this is a sign.

  “No,” she said aloud, almost at once thinking of Deirdre, Mary and Justine.

  The summer Krista turned nine, Ilsa Bourne had suggested her granddaughter study dance on the Island, just as she did all year in the City. Ilsa wanted more time with her, and she wanted Krista to meet the other girls who came over for the summer from the mainland, mostly from New York and Boston. Krista agreed because dancing was something she did every day, and because spending time with Ilsa was always fun. So in the afternoons, after a morning swim or ride with her grandmother, Krista would go with the other girls to the studio over the fire station. They danced together, dressed all alike in pink tights and black leotards.

  The instructor would flutter her birdlike fingers over her emaciated chest as she spoke, and on Krista’s first day directed her towards a pair of blond-haired twins who, unlike the other clusters of dancers, needed a third partner. The old dancer drummed her fingers against her prominent collarbones, impatient with her young students’ delaying. Krista remembered the music: classical, oriental and jazz. She remembered the teacher’s bright red lips, the incessant smoking and the diet colas always at her side. She never took her students beyond pointe, tendu and glissade. She believed dance was the ability to hear.

  “Let the sound transport the body,” she would say. “Become the rounds expressed in the ringing of a brass bell. The voice of Buddha.”

  Miss Catherine, as she was called, would declare in her sonorous voice, “Inner space is the beginning of any and all movement, and I want you to improvise, turn yourselves inside out. Breathe and dance. Show me that there is no difference between the inside and outside.” She would then resume smoking, drawing hard on her thin, filtered cigarettes.

  Giggling, the girls would dance, some hearing the music in their heads, their hearts, others only the wobbly 45 on the small phonograph. Each seemed to imitate the next, no one knowing where the gestures originated or with whom. All summer, the routine never changed. For two years, the routine never changed, never, until the day Mary danced out the plate-glass window and died, impaled on the prongs of the chain-link fence surrounding the fire station. Miss Catherine stopped teaching dance, and the remaining girls took up sailing or horseback riding.

  Krista felt Michael stretch, not yet awake, on the far side of the bed. He reached for her in his sleep. She remained still, pretending to be asleep.

  It was five thirty in the afternoon when Mary danced out the window. Miss Catherine’s sermon regarding the inside had seemed exceedingly long and endlessly boring that day. As soon as she finished, Krista and her two partners stole to their coveted spot, the area directly in front of the plate glass. Mary discovered what she considered the best spot. She called it that because at five thirty, when the sun shone at just the right angle, both inside and outside could be seen at once. The girls could see the harbor, the cruisers, the sailboats and the fishermen coming in from the sea. Immediately in front of the fence they could see the tops of the trees. When the sun began to burnish the sea to a high gloss, when the glass was not yet dark, a dancer might perceive the faintest outline of her own body. This outline framed the inside, the girls supposed. Therefore, they concluded, the inside could clearly be viewed as the outside, a wonderful place full of trees, summer sun and water. All three girls agreed upon this dubious truth.

  Mary discovered this same principle in almost every darkened glass, every surface capable of reflection – the shoe shop on Main Street, the ice-cream parlor on Wharf, and in her own extravagant bedroom windows. Any reflection became more than just a mirror image. Krista remembered giggling with them in front of the deli window once.

  Mary’s twin Deirdre asked, “What’s inside if your eyes are closed?”

  The girls pretended blindness, knocking into one another, the buildings and other pedestrians.

  “Darkness,” Mary said.

  “Right,” Deirdre agreed.

  Krista did not. She was momentarily troubled by this girlish mischief. She did not see darkness. She saw her father’s ceiling, a galactic expanse, a clear midnight blue where everything and anything was possible.

  Mary continued with what seemed like playfulness. She looked into her sister’s eyes, then Krista’s eyes, and finally into her own. “What do you think the inside might be like if the outside were someone else’s eyes?”

  “What?” Deirdre shrieked as if the question were the most nonsensical she had ever heard. At once all three girls fell into fits of juvenile laughter and pretended to be spellbound.

  Krista recalled Mary, the best dancer among them, turning faster and faster that particular day. She had never seen anyone’s head whip around so quickly. She knew Mary was focused on the inside and the full sails in the harbor. She felt danger. The glare on the glass that afternoon had been particularly sharp. They had joked about needing sunglasses. Krista knew that while she and Deirdre recognized the window as an obvious boundary, Mary did not. Krista decided, then and there, her inside was her father’s ceiling, nothing more and nothing less. Anything else might be harmful, dangerous, perhaps bringing death, as it had to Mary. And if Krista died, if she could not keep that magic sky alive, where else would that bright cockpit exist? How could she wait for Daddy? What if he should come back and find her gone? These thoughts she shared with no one. She never had. In a funny way, as she mulled the idea over and over, the older she became, the less she could really explain it to anyone – not even Grandmother Bourne with whom she felt she could share anything. Once she tried to share it with a classmate, who simply shrugged, and said, “Oh, nothing in that, it’s just preverbal.”

  After Mary’s death, dance classes were postponed for Krista until the end of the summer when she returned to the City. Grandfather Bourne, after hearing Ilsa tell her granddaughter: “You must get back on the horse and ride,” bought the child a horse. Both Ilsa and Krista tried to tell D.B. that they were referring to dance but he would have none of it. He still felt another activity, like horseback riding, was entirely in order. So the horse he purchased and its successors were kept in the old stable behind the summer house. From that time, the summer they were nine, Deirdre and Krista became proficient equestrians, spending their summers riding, jumping and generally cavorting in the brush, never again mentioning to one another or anyone else notions of inside and out.

  Michael grabbed Krista around the waist. He nudged her spine between her shoulder blades with his nose. Krista closed her eyes. She tried to hold on to her father’s space. For the first time there, something seemed different, out of kilter, off center. Something, Krista felt, had penetrated the skies. She panicked, and yanked Michael’s arms away from her.

  “Don’t touch me.”

  “What’s wrong with you?” he asked. “You don’t even have to dance today. You don’t have to get up for the rest of your life.”

  “Don’t—” she said, and threw back the comforter and the sheet and reached for the blue beach towel. Michael lunged, catching the corner of her towel, pulling her back towards him.

  “Marry me,” he said.

  Krista stopped resisting, started t
o speak and then held still. Michael lay on his back, his head extending backwards off the bed and hanging down. He looked at her from his upside-down position with his blond curls falling away from his face. Krista covered herself.

  “Some jokes,” she said, “are not funny.”

  “Jokes?” he questioned.

  “Jokes.”

  “Well, someday,” he answered lightly, “I might just be serious.”

  “I’m pregnant,” she told him.

  “No.” He rolled back on the bed so he could look at her properly.

  “Yes.”

  “When?”

  “Last night.”

  “Krista, don’t be so dramatic.”

  “I’m not being dramatic.”

  “But how can you know?”

  “I felt it for a split second. New life.”

  “That’s impossible,” he told her, frowning.

  “I asked for it.”

  “For what?”

  “Life.”

  “So marry me.”

  “Don’t be stupid.”

  “Okay. I won’t ask you again.”

  Michael jumped from the bed and raced Krista to the bathroom. From the shower, she listened to him sing. He sang every morning. He took such pleasure in life, she thought as she shook out the sheets, the comforter and the beach towel. From the bathroom, he shouted,

  “You know what? I am going to repaint that ceiling myself.”

  “Okay, okay,” she said, not really paying attention.

  “Every time I sleep with you,” he shouted again, “I get this ridiculous glitter all over my legs and everything else. How long do you think it can possibly continue to rain down?”