Where the Veil Is Thin

by Alana Joli Abbott

  “Someone,” he said, “loves you more than anything. Someone loves you enough.”

  The moat was a glassy flatness of circular momentum where no drowned thing could drown again. I could walk atop it—we all could—but as with the river, we could not pierce the surface without a great deal of effort. We walked in this world with the lightness of damselflies.

  Inside the moat, the object that had first caught my eye was still growing larger. It had been the merest speck when I’d first laid eyes on it, a pale blot in the surrounding green. Now that indeterminate pallor was taking shape.

  First a head emerged. Orange beak, black mask, black eyes. The rest of the head was white: a dingy, dirty, muddy white, the white of maggots and mushrooms and wilderness abandonment. Then the neck, carved into that signature S curve. No wings, just the bulbous body of a one-time pedal boat. A two-seater for lovers, or best friends, or a parent and child. It sank slowly upward until it broke surface and began bobbing heavily on the water.

  I stood on the bottom floor of the tower, the coyote-cut glass door flung open right over the moat: no deck, no steps, no footbridge. The water lapped at the water of my toes; we were all the same river. The swan boat was only a few feet from where I stood.

  And so was mamita.

  “Luz!” Her voice, like the cracked-open sky. “Luz!”

  “Mami,” I whispered.

  “Luz,” sobbed Corazón, pressing against me from behind.

  Mahalia, who stood next to him, told me, “Go to her,” and tenderly peeled Corazón from his desperate embrace of my waist, cradling him in her beams of summer, her sheaves of wheat and daisy fields and dandelions dancing. “Go on, Luz. She came a long way to talk to you. They always do.”

  “Don’t go!” Corazón begged me. “Please! Don’t leave us! Don’t let the tower fall! Don’t leave us like…”

  Mahalia set her forehead against his, sunshine to midnight. “Her decision, kabagong.”

  My decision. My mother.

  I threw myself through the open door, and fell upon mamita like rain.

  She is wearing my old red Converse high-tops. Her feet are bigger than mine by a whole size—“whopping elevensies” as she likes to say—so she’s had to chop off the round rubber toes to make the shoes fit. Her Solmate socks stick out the ends, bright and mismatched, like crazy quilts that keep only your toes warm. Her hair is… different. Frizzled. Undyed, undark. Like the silver-on-white wood. Like rain-clouds. It is much shorter than I remember it, as if she cut it all off at some point. There is a child’s vulnerability in her skull; it gives her a priestly cast. The veins stand out on her hands. Shadows like too-full trash bags bulge out under her eyes. The delicate sparrow-feet lines I recall around her mouth and nose are now carved chasm-deep.

  “Hi, Mamita.”

  Once I am in the swan boat with her, I stand back to gather more of my shape. I want her to recognize me. But I do not think she can hear me when I speak. Not all the way. Or see me either. Not properly. She leans forward, like someone staring into the depths of a dark pool, trying to hear whoever is shouting at her through several thousand tons of water.

  “Luz.” She is staring. I wonder if she can see her face reflected in mine, which, when calm, can become like a pond or a mirror.

  “I’m so happy you’re here!” I tell her, raising my voice to shout. Something on her face wavers, as if she has caught just the gist.

  “I… wanted to see you again,” she says, and her voice is harsh, like she has been wailing a whole year without surcease, and would be wailing now, except her throat has failed her. Her voice is like dynamite to a fall of boulders. Everything in me falters, cut off at my source, severed from the thing that feeds me.

  “I…” I pause, uncertain. Try to smile. Raise my voice to bellowing again: “Do you want to see our tower? Come on in!” I wave an inviting hand toward the coyote door behind me, but I do not turn away from her. “We’re still under construction—so much to be done! You have to meet Mahalia. And Corazón! You will love th—”

  “Wait.” Those words, the dry rasp of tears wept out. “Luz! Don’t go.”

  Her words remind me of Corazón’s. I wonder if he is still there, behind me in the doorway, waiting, watching me. I do not look. I do not dare. My mother is lifting a shaking hand to my face, her fingers practically translucent with thinness. The skin sags from her arms, robbed of all jolly surfeit. Her feet shift in the boat as she tries to keep her balance. The red canvas of the sawed-off Converse high-tops is wet. That makes no sense, for water here is not wet.

  “Are you,” I ask, uneasy, “drowning?” But I do not say it loud enough for her to hear me. The thought is filling me with a suffocating melancholy that even my own drowning had not merited. “Don’t do that,” I whisper, shaking my head. “Don’t do that, Mamita. Not for me…”

  “I need to ask,” she says in a low voice, the knees of her jeans now soaking wet. “What is lost in the river… it comes here, in the end? If I… if I direct them to cremate me, and bury my ashes in the riverbank, or scatter them on the water, will you find me—after?”

  I imagine Mahalia reaching into my belly some bright morning to scoop out more objects for her mosaics. But instead, her massive midwife arms, slick as summer sunlight on a stream, pull my own mother out of me, strange and silvery with scales. The reverse of birth. Mamita, bare and barefoot. No red shoes. No swan boat. Here to stay.

  But this is fancy, not fact. And since I do not know the true answer to her question, and do not think she would be able to hear me anyway, I lift my arms and shrug helplessly. Her face falls. The brine of her eyes falls. But she nods, decisively, and shakes herself out, even though her T-shirt (an old one, practically cobwebs, a favorite oversized nightie that reads: “1987: I survived 120°!” sold everywhere in the southwest after a particularly deadly summer), is soaked up to the armpits.

  “Never mind. I’ll take my chances, Luz. I’m putting it in my will that I’m to be cremated.”

  She takes a deep breath. But what is she breathing, I wonder, when this air is not air? It is difficult for her; I can see that. Like sucking oxygen through a noxious cloud. There is a red strain in the tiny capillaries of her eyes. The effort to ask the next question darkens her dear face, as if she was bending to lift a barbell twice her body weight.

  “Luz. Mi vida. Can you come back with me?”

  “Come… back?” Where my heart used to be, a frog leaps. “But I—” I want to glance over my shoulder at our tower, at my beloveds. But mamita’s gaze fastens me, dry and red-rimmed and desperate.

  “Come back. In this boat. I can lead you back. The red shoes will help. I will give you half my heart. One of my lungs. I would live half a life to take back half your…”

  She cannot say the word. And, I? I do not know how to tell her that dead is not dead like we thought. That I am just… rivermade. Remade into a rivermaid.

  This time, I lift my voice to decibels that could take on a storm, compete with a tidal clash of water, give the thunder a scolding: “What if you stay here instead?”

  If I wait a few more minutes, she will no longer have a choice. The water-mark has crept up to her throat: the wet water of another world. She is like the betrayed lover in a Childe Ballad, sinking slowly in a rising current I cannot see. I offer my hand. If she touches me, maybe the waters will rise faster, and we can get this all over with, and she can come inside our tower with me.

  “Luz!” Mahalia’s voice pops in my ear, makes me flinch. She must have crossed the water to stand right behind me. “Family does not pull family under. We pull each other out.”

  I snatch my hand back from mamita, just in time. Mahalia is right. Of course she is right. And yet, if she were not watching me, I would do it. I would.

  “But you can go back with her,” says Corazón, from my left side.

  He is standing right beside the swan boat. But he is not walking lightly on the water; he is hip-deep in the moat. The water does not wet him; i
t vivisects him. Traps him in its green glass ice. He treads, but he is sinking, like mamita is sinking. I wonder if this is how he had come to dwell at river bottom when I first met him. If he had sunk there for sorrow. For loss. When his last companion left, and he let their tower fall.

  “You can go back with her,” he repeats, his voice now calm though he is crying steadily. White stones tumble from his eyes. Quartz. Teeth. Freshwater pearls.

  “She offered you half, which is fair. Half of everything. You can go back—at least halfway. You will not be the same. Neither will she. But you will be together. Half-enchanted. Half-haunted. And then, at the end…”

  His fingers tighten earnestly on the edge of the swan boat. “I do not know if there will be enough of either of you to come back here. Maybe you will go elsewhere. I do not know. But I know that if you let her leave now, without you—and she does as she says, with her will, with her ashes—then you will see her again. We will lift her ashes from the riverbank, or from the weeds, or from your left shoulder, and we will re-kindle those ashes in the flame of our hearth. She will take for herself the freedom of a firebird, and you will never be parted again.”

  I look at mamita with longing, but I do not touch her. The water is up to her mouth. I want to embrace her. I want her to live in my tower with me forever, with new wings of fire, a new flamelight in her once-red hair. I want her to grow strange gardens on the riverbank with her long green hands, and braid the river of my hair until the currents flow three ways at once.

  I also want to go back to our little apartment. I want to make abuela’s tamales in our kitchen together with groceries we’ve picked up from the food pantry. I want our movie nights again, and trips to the Groton Goodwill, and all the free library events on the bulletin board, and all the Town Forest foraging walks the Preservation Trust can offer. I want it all, and I cannot choose.

  Mamita, of course, sees this. Somehow, she can read my riverface like she used to read my frowns, my ups and downs, my sighs and grumbles and sudden fits of giggles. The lines on her face shift, lighten, brighten. She even seems to smile, and tells me, her words spluttering through unseen waters: “Never mind, cariña. Never mind. Entiendo perfectemente.”

  And then, suddenly, her hair is floating all around her head, and she is drowning in water from a different world.

  “Push her back!” I shout to my beloveds, to Mahalia and Corazón. “We’ve got to get her back!”

  Mamita begins to struggle in the swan boat, to fight, to thrash. Her movements are slow, weighty, languorous. This, more than anything, tells me what I must do. She is not ready. She must not come here now, not like this.

  “Te amo, Mamita!” I whisper, and for once, for once, she seems to hear me with the clarity of a hard-struck bell. Her eyes meet mine.

  Leaping from the wobbly wooden deck, I crash through the green glass water until I am shoulder to shoulder with Corazón. Mahalia is there too with us, treading the quickwater current, strong as summertime. Together we three grasp the edges of the swan boat, and push, push, push the boat with all the mightiness in us, back down to where it came from, down and down and down,.

  Or perhaps up.

  — DON’T LET GO —

  by Alana Joli Abbott

  The music at Carter’s left something to be desired, but Rain danced to it anyway. She had never particularly been a fan of what she thought of as “thump-thump dancing,” but being out on the dance floor meant not having to watch Brianna and Cole get snuggly again, which she got enough of at the house, and meant she didn’t have to play second fiddle to Jonas, who was yet again picking up more offers for dates from men than she was. None of the brochures she’d read about the Isle of Man had prepared her for being out-dated by her gay roommate, which just went to show that either you couldn’t believe everything you read in tour books, or that Jonas was the god of sexuality that he believed himself to be. She smirked, realizing she almost preferred the second option—at least then there was no commentary on her own lack of love life.

  The bass shook her rib cage, music filling her all the way down to her toes. She was too close to the speakers for good sense, but she had always liked the reverb that seemed to push her cells out of place, seemed to infiltrate her entire physiology. Letting the music take over, she could stop wondering why she was still here, what she was even doing living on the Isle of Man, dancing at a club in Douglas she didn’t like, failing at her independent studies, and generally wasting a year abroad. She wanted so much to not have to think about that, ever; to just be able to lose herself to the island, to actually study the history and read the books she’d meant to read, to have her papers materialize. But since none of those things were happening, she mostly wanted to go home.

  The music slowed, incessant backbeat falling away to a ballad, and she moved to the edge of the dance floor, eyeing the bar. Two good looking men stood next to Jonas, neither of whom she’d seen before.

  “Figures,” she muttered, wiping away some of the sweat that drenched her forehead.

  “What does?”

  Rain liked to think of herself as reasonably laid back and in control, but the stress must have been getting to her. That was the only reasonable explanation for the height of her jump. The man who had spoken just laughed as she grounded herself. He looked down at her from his impressive height. His hair nearly glowed in the dim light of the club, and the piercings along his left ear caught the colored lights that flashed across the dance floor. Despite knowing that the Isle of Man had as much Nordic heritage as it did Celtic, Rain was always surprised when one of the tall, super-blond residents strolled her direction—natives of hundreds of years, rather than transplants from England like most of the population.

  “What?” she shouted over the music, even though she’d heard him.

  He gestured with his thumb over his shoulder toward a couch at the far edge of the room emptied of its usual wallflowers. She followed the gesture, still stuck on the idea that he must have been almost two feet taller than her—her shoulder was about the height of his waist!—before nodding and trying to find her usual grin. He started off toward back of the room territory and she followed.

  Game face, she thought, trying to bolster her confidence. First time a cute guy has approached you in a month, and you act like a complete dork.

  He grinned back over his shoulder, as though he’d heard her thinking, and the blush spread through her, starting somewhere near her shoulders. She hoped between the heat of the dancing and the dark of the club, it wasn’t noticeable to anyone but her.

  The stranger swung onto one end of the couch like it was part of his living room, and Rain perched on one arm, trying to give herself enough space to see his face. Even here, the hair and piercings glowed. Now that he was sitting, she could see his face better. He had smile lines at the edges of his eyes, despite being only a year or two older than she was, and his smile itself looked devil-may-care. But something about it was false. She glanced around the room again, spotting Jonas and the table where Brianna and Cole were snogging, planning an escape route if she needed one.

  “You’re safe enough here,” said the stranger. “I’m Fin.”

  “I’m Rain,” she said, taking his outstretched, and very polite, hand. He shook it, his grip far less tentative than her own. “I didn’t mean to look nervous.”

  “Hard to know who to trust these days,” he said, not sounding judgmental at all, “but less on the Isle than other places. Old fashioned morals and values here.” His eyes flicked over to Jonas and he grinned. “Open minded though. We’re good folk.”

  “I’ve noticed,” Rain said wryly. “That’s my roommate.”

  “Ah, so not a beau.” Fin sighed in dramatic relief. “Here I thought you were pining.”

  “Nope, just jealous,” Rain said with a laugh, watching his face to see how he’d react. He just continued to grin at her, carefree on the surface, but… “You’re a native then?”

  “Born and bred,” he said proud
ly. “What tipped you off? Accent or good looks?” He must have seen her blush, because he rushed on before she could answer. “Hulking Nordic body on top of the traditional Manx charm, I bet. It’s a sure combination. And you’re American?”

  “Yes.” She wondered if he’d said all of that so quickly to save her embarrassment or to avoid hearing something that might not have flattered his ego. A bit of both, she decided. “I’m doing independent studies here.”

  “On?”

  “Mythology and archaeology,” she said. “You’ve got a fascinating hybrid of both stories and architecture here, part Irish, part Norse, a bit here, a bit there…” She stopped, feeling silly to be telling him about his home.

  “You’ve been up to Maughold, then?” he asked, and she nodded, tickled that he knew one of the sites—the largest collection of crosses on the Isle—off the top of his head. She’d expected that everyone who lived on the Isle would be like that, but their landlady hadn’t known about them.

  “I wanted to stay up in Ramsey so I could be closer to the church,” she said, “but Jonas and my other two roommates had a house rented in Port St. Erin, and they were looking for a fourth. It’s not far from the hill fort at Cronk Moar, but otherwise…” She trailed off with a shrug.

  The music changed again, and he moved off the couch like a wave crashing on the beach: fluid and swift. “I’m partial to this one.” He put his hand out for her.

  She took it, more confident this time in the way his hand felt around hers. His fingers were long, like a guitar player’s. She hoped he wasn’t. Nothing good ever came of her dating musicians.

  “Never been good at any part of music but dancing,” he shouted when they got out to the dance floor.

  The music filled her up from her toes, and there was movement and chaos and electricity, and her thoughts vanished as she enjoyed the moment, enjoyed the tension in the space between them, the way he never let his body get uncomfortably close to hers. Likely because our proportions are all wrong, she thought to herself, looking up as he loomed over head. He winked down at her, looking as full of the music as she was, as though the drumbeat had become both of their pulses at once.