by Emily Temple
16
I don’t remember how we got back to the dormitory. I don’t remember the climb down the mountain, or taking off my clothes, or getting into bed. But I must have, because when I woke, I was curled around my pillow, and it was bright. Everyone else was gone.
I had no idea what time it was. The grounds were silent. I walked to the empty garden and sat on the bench. My fingers felt cold, despite the sun. Exhaustion, perhaps. It was August. I stretched them, pulled them to pop the knuckles, the way Luke had once done. Maybe he would come. I would wait for him to come. The sun would warm me, bring back the feeling. The Feeling. I may have fallen asleep. But if I did, my dreams were the same texture as the world: I was lying on the bench in the garden, face turned to the infinite sky, dreaming about lying on the bench in the garden, face turned to the infinite sky. They say we’re constantly dreaming, not only during sleep. It’s only that during the day our conscious minds overrule our dream minds, so sure are they of the rightness of their reality.
What had Serena said, holding Laurel over the abyss? You know what worked, that first time we fainted? Spilling a little blood.
Luke did not come.
It wasn’t until the next morning that we were called into the shrine room. The space was heavy with people: all the girls were there, plus every staffer I recognized, and a few severe-looking adults I didn’t, who I think now must have been board members or similar. Sarah kept fiddling, twitching, squeezing her left thumb with her right fist as if it were a lever. Magda whispered incessantly to Colin. Harriet kept her back to us; Nisha couldn’t help but stare. Only Shastri Dominique looked calm, easy, her face empty, her hands gathered loosely in her lap.
We were told that Serena was missing. To the best knowledge of the Center, she hadn’t been seen for two days. She hadn’t taken a cab, she hadn’t appeared anywhere in town, or used a credit card, or made a call. We were asked to come forward with any information we might have. We were asked to think about the last time we’d seen her, what she had said, what she was wearing, or carrying. Her father was on a Greek island for the summer and couldn’t be reached.
About Luke they said nothing. At the time I thought this was a good sign. Now I suppose they just didn’t want to build a bridge between them.
But, wait: “Her father?” I whispered to Laurel. Gone, she’d said. Had I assumed? “What does she mean?” We hadn’t spoken much since that night; we had kept our distance, like thieves. There was too much to say. We couldn’t say anything.
Laurel laughed. It came out thin and shrill, and smelling like gin. People looked at us. “Did she tell you the story about the creamery?” she said. “Or the one about the houseboat?” She didn’t wait for me to answer. “The truth is that her father is alive and well and remarried to a nice wealthy woman named Karen, and they live in Los Angeles in a huge mansion, and they give the Center millions so Serena can keep coming no matter what she does, and so she can have the run of the place,” Laurel said. “How do you think she gets everything she wants? Why do you think she never gets in trouble? Why do you think they leave us alone? It’s because her dear old daddy basically owns it all. This whole program, Special Teen Retreat? It’s all for her. Her daddy bought it. He invented it.”
It was the banality of this explanation that hurt me the most.
“Poor Olivia,” Laurel said. “What will you do with your little comb now?”
My stomach twisted. She must have come across it that night she’d drunkenly gone through all my clothes. “I was just borrowing it,” I said.
“I knew it,” Laurel said, walking away from me. “From the beginning. I knew you were going to ruin everything.”
The atmosphere at the Center changed after that. How can I put this? It seemed that the grounds themselves had tensed, that the Center, which I had grown to love so much, had been peeled away in the night and replaced with another version of itself, almost the same, and nothing like it at all. I was sure that even a stranger would have been able to tell something was off just by setting foot onto our chalky driveway. It was that charged, that basic. When the staffers counted us at the start of an activity, they made sure to touch us, each one, on the head or the arm. When they had us all together in one room, at meals or during group meditation, they paired off among themselves, heads together. When they gave us directions, their voices were near-screams.
What was known, now, about Serena: that she was lost in the woods. That she was dead in the woods. That she was pregnant, and Luke was the father, and that they’d run off to be together—that old slog. That Luke had married her. That Luke had killed her. That she had killed Luke. It didn’t have to be Luke, though. Anyone could murder us up here, anyone. That she was caught in a bear trap, caught in a web, caught in a crevasse. That she had hitched to the nearest town, only to get drunk and murdered and chopped up and hidden in some townie’s walls. That she’d been walking down the road, on her way to freedom, and a car had hit her, and kept going, and her body had rolled off into a ditch. What would you do? we asked one another, and ourselves. What would you do if you were the driver, and the girl was clearly dead, and no one was around to see? Turn yourself in, ruin your own life, or? That she was hanging by the neck out in the woods somewhere, in a noose of her own invention, her toes brushing grass—that long-desired levitation, in that long-imagined stance. That she was just playing with us, and would appear in the next day, in the next hour, in the next five minutes, blinking, smirking, asking what.
What was known about Luke: still nothing, officially, but we all had our suspicions. Men and girls only disappear on the same night for one reason, we all knew, no matter what Shastri Dominique said or did not say.
It could have been a bird I saw, a white bird, a cloud, a scrap of something floating in the wind. A dream, an illusion, a fata morgana. It could have been the moon itself, barely camouflaged by clouds, so that it took on the shape of a girl. The moon can easily take on the shape of a girl, given the right circumstances. Or could it have been the ghost of that girl abandoned on this mountain so many years ago, making her sweet sorrow known once again? If I were that girl, I wouldn’t be content with letting my tears speak for me, even if they spoke by splitting the earth. I’d come back again and again, to enact my revenge on lovers who weren’t the lovers they should have been.
In Marc Chagall’s The Birthday, Chagall is the floating man, lifted by his love for the wide-eyed woman, a doll-like depiction of his first wife, Bella Rosenfeld. She is running toward the open window, her face white, her expression unreadable. She still touches the ground as he contorts to kiss her. She has flowers in her hands. Her dress is black. Is she about to take flight as well? Why is she running? Is it a game? Will she escape? Will she survive?
Serena said you couldn’t levitate unless you had to. She was full of fictions in the end, but I don’t think this was one of them. Our bodies can issue imperatives. Anyone with a body knows this. There are stories of mothers performing superhuman feats, raising cars to save their children. There are stories of mysterious misfires, instant deaths. The human body is only a parcel of particles assembled in an uneasy alliance, hanging in tandem for a few years before they dissipate back into the universe. Their nature is to be separate. Chaos rules. We hold ourselves together by force, natural or otherwise. But all forces are inconstant. There’s no reason why any set of particles might not decide: rise.
This is how I’ve tried to straighten it in my mind, you see, to square a thing that cannot be squared, to put the round peg in, to reify the emptiness. I have piles and piles of pages on my desk: lists of rumors, eyewitness reports, science projects, photos, fairy tales. Things are falling apart. Things are bleeding together. On my desk and in my mind. The stitches I make don’t always hold, or they dissolve. The stitches I make spell out messages. If I were to tell you I made it all up, you would be forced to believe me.
Was it a final display of rage, of sorrow, the force that lifted her up at last? The sublime ecstasy o
f pain? Did she finally find that feeling of control, her eyes closed, as one ground to pieces, only to lose it, because yes, beauty, it hurts us, lose her grip, like Niobe, all tears, and fall to her death?
That’s how it is, she’d said. The heaviness, the black sand. Did she slip free from all that weight, all that want, for a moment and rise, and did it rush back into her organs and bring her down like a thrown stone?
Was it belief that raised her, finally? Is there any way it might have been enlightenment, real and actual?
Or did she just jump?
Because of what I told her?
17
Here’s a version: Serena was nothing but a snake oil salesman, a cheap magician, silk tie and spit-slicked eyebrows. It was all a trick, a series of mirrors, a set of false bottoms—even the end, her grand finale. The wonder show of the universe! Key-mouthed Houdini herself. The Great Serena. Watch her beat the Devil, one night only. She wasn’t looking for enlightenment. She wasn’t looking to avenge her mother’s death. She believed in nothing. She was merely whiling away the hours, the days she was forced to spend at the Center, doing her best to keep herself entertained. Reading her books. Working out her old grudges. Pulling us like rabbits out of hats, coaxing us through hoops, starving us, dangling us in the air, on strings oh so cleverly hidden against the black backdrop, as we squealed and shit and dove desperately for her breast, and the audience clapped and clapped.
Here’s a version: my father loved me. He just loved his religion more. And here’s a version: he was right. He made the right choice.
Serena had said she would find out where my father had gone, whatever holy place had been next. Maybe she had forgotten. Maybe she had found out, and kept it from me. Maybe she had never intended to help me at all. Now it was too late. When I finally mentioned him to Janet, she furrowed her brow. “Why didn’t you say?” she said. “This place keeps files, you know. Forwarding addresses. Credit card information. We’ve had the key to the office for years. How do you think Laurel knows everything about everyone?” The key to the office: where Harriet had worked all summer, if only I’d trusted her. If only I’d chosen her. I might have asked Janet to take me there, but we both knew it didn’t matter anymore.
Buddhists do not believe in a soul, you know. Which is not to say that nothing remains—though nothing remains forever. Buddhists are comfortable with death. The Buddha taught Anatta, the doctrine of No-Soul, which identifies a cluster of forces within us—body, sensation, perception, mental formations, and consciousness—as that which makes us believe we have something unmoving and eternal at our cores. But we do not.
What, then, is reincarnated?
Nothing, my father told me once. Reincarnation is just one candle lighting another.
Taoists, on the other hand, believe that if you do all the right things, in the right order—well, you’ll die, of course, but if you’ve been very good, you’ll skip the afterlife and become immortal. Hindus have an eternal atman, similar to the Christian soul. A couple of Mormons came to my door recently, and I asked them about death. They said we’d definitely be corporeal in heaven (I would be included if I’d only read a certain book, give them my telephone number, maybe a donation), but they couldn’t tell me how far up heaven would be, or how our body parts would get there from our graves, or whether we’d be healthy again, our bodies fixed and fused, or whether we’d also get space suits. I think this is all there is, I told them. But it’s all right. It’s not so bad, the world. Their faces fell. This can’t be all there is, the paler one said. If that’s true, that’s the most depressing thing I’ve ever heard. They were so young; razor burn and starched collars.
When we saw the truck drive up, the men unloading equipment to dredge the pond, it was impossible to understand it as anything other than an admission: they were no longer looking for Serena, or for Luke. They were looking for their bodies. Even the peonies that had lined the paths so brightly at the beginning of the summer hung their heads, left petals in the dirt. It was just as well. They were spoiled now, overfat. They would die and be reborn.
Somewhere off to my right, Jamie was talking loudly to one of her friends. She laughed, clearly unmoved by the dredging, and I was surprised by the way her voice carried, her calm squared shoulders, the new solidity in her form. It suited her. She caught me looking and nodded once before turning away.
That was the day Dominique called me into her office alone. I had never seen her look so small. Even her magnificent breasts seemed deflated behind her desk.
“I’d like you to explain the nature of Luke and Serena’s relationship,” she said when I had closed the door. I sat down in the chair in front of her desk; it offered a weak plastic protest. I am so heavy now, I thought. I stretched out my legs and pulled them in again. “You were there every day, in the garden. Serena was your friend,” she said. “They’re both missing. Explain it to me.”
“She is my friend,” I said. “Currently.”
“And what kind of a friend is she?”
I didn’t answer. There was a large chip in the wood on the side of her desk. I squinted at it. I imagined putting my tongue there: the sharp ridged feeling, the danger of splinters.
“Were they sleeping together?” she asked.
“No.” Janet had fooled everyone, even Dominique.
“Then what?”
The chair was growing more uncomfortable, as though the plastic itself were trying to punish me, to push me off. Did it matter what I told her now? “Serena wanted Luke to teach us to levitate,” I said.
She remained impassive. “And did he?”
“No,” I said. Whatever else, it wasn’t Luke after all. I knew that much. Whatever else, she did it on her own.
“It’s important that you tell me the truth,” Dominique said. “You won’t get in trouble. I know it isn’t your fault.”
“The truth about what?” I said.
She shifted slightly. “What were you doing in Luke’s cabin that day?”
“What day,” I said.
She picked up a pencil and pressed one soft finger pad against the lead. She sat back in her chair. “He has a history,” she said at last. “You should know that. For a long time, I thought it was innocent, that he just liked the attention. It would be understandable.” She gestured helplessly at the walls. “But it turned out to be more than that.”
“You were going to marry him,” I said.
“Ironically, he’s much too young for me.”
“Why didn’t you do anything?” I said.
“It’s complicated,” she said.
I stood, because even at my tender age I knew that this answer was a bad one. She didn’t protest. She thanked me and asked me to please shut the door—yes, all the way.
Well, she loved him, I expect. Can we blame her?
(Oh, yes.)
What else? I started dreaming the blackness. I won’t tell you about that.
The police found Luke’s body at the bottom of a gorge on a bright, dry afternoon, far away from the rock palm, a detail I couldn’t understand then and still can’t. A suicide, they said. Nothing to suggest otherwise. If not a suicide, perhaps an accident. The steep cliff, the shifting rocks. When you see hoofprints in the forest, the authorities said. What would horses be doing in our forest, we wanted to know. Accidents happen all the time, the authorities said. We know you had nothing to do with this.
They searched the area, of course. His was the only body there.
Even so, they weren’t suspicious. Girls almost never murder, the authorities said. Psychologists, police officers, social workers, Freud. Everyone’s parents. They’re the wrong age, the wrong gender. Bullying is common. Bitchery. But premeditated brutality is usually the purview of boys.
No, girls are not supposed to kill. Maybe that’s why when they do, they so often take their victims out into the woods, into the green world, where reality blurs, where they can unpeel from themselves. Where they cannot be found, because there is no them lef
t to find.
What had Serena said, the first time we met? There’s nothing sad about destruction. Or oblivion. In my secret heart, I think she had always meant for him to die in the end. But what about her?
At the news of Luke’s death, the girls at the Center erupted in grief. They all lined up to tell one another about the times Luke had smiled at them, helped them, offered them flowers, brushed against them in one way or another. They all lined up to tell one another just how well they had known him. They all claimed injury, wore it proudly, with their hair down. Serena was not part of it. It was assumed now that she had simply run away at last, that it was unconnected to Luke’s accident, a coincidence. Serena had never smiled at them, nor helped them, nor offered them anything except fuel for their ravenous searching tongues. Their tears were only for Luke.
After all, he was kind, our Luke. He was so kind. They were not wrong about that, the crying girls. But he also thought that he deserved whatever he wanted, just because he wanted it. He also thought he could do no wrong. And here he was, surrounded by adoring young things, things like the sister he had lost, the sister he had forgotten about, the sister who had died for his thoughtlessness, his irresponsibility. He’d left the burner on. Yes, anyone could make that mistake. Most people do not. She would have been the same age as we were, that summer. Yes, almost exactly. Serena never had to trick him into desiring her, you see. He wanted her from the beginning. He wanted all of us, any of us, but she was the best prize because she was the hardest to reach. The sacred is always obscure; the inverse is also true, in this case.
Of course we all have our weaknesses. We all have our burdens. A place like that would warp any young man’s sense of self. This is not to say he should be forgiven.