The Mercy of Thin Air

by Ronlyn Domingue

  That night, I wanted to study some of Amy and Scott’s photographs.

  Had they wandered into the room at that moment, they would have seen the box flat on the rocking chair’s seat. I let it slip through my form. There was no need to make a lap for myself. If they approached the chair—and were extremely perceptive—they would have felt the air change, similar to the instant before static shocks through a body. They would have seen the box top move up, to the right, and to the floor. They would have watched a snapshot rise from the box and suspend itself at a height and an angle as if a person were holding it to look. They would have thought they were sleepwalking, still dreaming. They would not have guessed that they witnessed a simple trick of electromagnetic energy shared among the air, the photographs, and me.

  The first picture in the box was of the two of them sitting on the edge of a pool. Water amputated each leg except for Amy’s left one, which was tossed over Scott’s right knee, kicking blue at the camera. Their arms were wrapped tight around each other. Amy wore a T-shirt over her suit. Behind them, a young man with a Beelzebubby beard posed with his hands open near their shoulders. I wanted to see the next moment, the two of them falling into the water, sputtering with surprise.

  I wondered if they had failed to hold their breaths as they went under, whether the water felt familiar in their lungs an instant before mortal panic drew them north to the surface.

  In a membrane of blackness, the absence of air, the presence of water—I never expected to end the way I began.

  THE DAY I DIE, I glance at Daddy’s newspaper before I leave the house. I notice the date, July 10, 1929, and realize it’s been almost a month since my graduation from Tulane. No matter what I’ve done to make these weeks drag wide and full as clouds, they’ve disappeared in a gust.

  I walk the tree-shaded blocks in my favorite green sleeveless dress. The heat makes me dewy. I hope my extra swimsuit is at his house because I terribly want a dip. If not, perhaps I should go bare. Andrew’s parents are in the Swiss Alps, avoiding mosquitoes and tropical heat, and Emmaline will be away shopping until it’s time to cook lunch.

  My pace quickens. Along St. Charles Avenue, I grin at a college boy who offers a ride in his coupe. His F. Scott hair weeps into his neck from the humidity. He looks familiar, someone who’s cut in on me at a dance or two.

  “Thanks,” I reply, “but I’m limbering up for a swim.”

  “Mind if I join you?” he asks.

  “Not today, sport.”

  As he drives away, I stop in my tracks. Andrew’s surprise. The items are still on my dressing table. A sliver of grapefruit curls at the tip of my tongue. Go back home, brush my teeth—forgot to do that, too—sneak it out in a little bag. No one will notice, no one will know. No. Maybe.

  It can wait.

  I unlock the back gate with a key hidden behind the purple bougainvillea. The back door near the pool is unlocked. I find my swimsuit in one of the bottom drawers of Andrew’s bookcase, where he keeps the things I’ve left behind.

  The water sips me into the deep where I twirl against its pull. Inside the house, the grandfather clock chimes ten times; then, after several languid laps, once more. It is ten thirty. He is late returning from his tennis match with Warren. I scissor myself to the pool’s bottom and watch the ribbons of light knit me among them. When I surface, I crawl out to take a dive. With a shimmy, I wriggle the leg openings and bodice of my suit into place. I am tempted to shed the wool—

  Imagine his face if he found me with more than my naked toes pointed at the sky. Wouldn’t he—

  The words fall with my body. A second, then two, of darkness. The light around me becomes gauzy and bright. Did I dive through my thoughts and into the water? What peace, these first moments under the surface when my swimmer lungs haven’t started to burn and I have forgotten that time is moving above.

  An airy-fairy rush fills my limbs and lifts me like incense. I am dissipating, consumed by the weightlessness of a dream—no, I am being pulled up, out, away—

  Stop.

  My eyesight blurs through a veil of faint sparks. I am above the water.

  Andrew approaches the pool, stifling a quiet laugh. He’s not going to let me scare him this time. He’s seen this before. With each slow step, he removes the layers—shoes, socks, tennis shirt, belt. Andrew unbuttons his white pants but keeps them on. He kneels on the pool’s edge, pulls me up, and stretches me at his side. His smooth face goes straight to my neck, but this time I don’t respond. He shakes me.

  He puts his ear to my mouth. He forces his right hand into my suit, under my left breast. He withdraws, holds his palm against my diaphragm. My head bobs as his fingers, frantic in a way they’ve never been, search the back of my head. He feels the lump that swelled after I clumsily slipped at the edge of the pool, slammed backward on the concrete, and fell into the water. My flesh is still warm. He draws me onto his lap. He wraps around my body as if he’ll never let me go.

  I have never heard a man’s heart break.

  Emmaline, smiling, walks through the back door, a grocery bag on her hip. She hears his keen—suffocated, delirious. Her eyes shine with panic. She drops everything, rushes to us. Her shadow covers our heads. When Emmaline touches the thick black waves on his crown, Andrew lifts his face from my neck and looks up. Her hand moves to his cheek. Her palm fills with his tears. Pewter lines streak down her dark face.

  Over and over, he rocks me, the lullaby, sotto voce, no no no no no. He will not release me. Emmaline kneels in front of him and strokes my damp tendrils. Finally, when she touches his head again, he lays me flat, kisses my lips, and takes the silver locket from my neck. He walks into the house without looking back. She traces a cross on my forehead.

  I linger for a week of dawns and dusks near the pool. Each day, the haze and disorientation weakens. My body is gone, but whatever I am—the sum of my final thoughts, my last breath—has begun to take shape, vague as it is.

  I slip through the back door behind Simon, who has watered the plants his grandmother, Emmaline, has neglected for days. I wander into Andrew’s room. He isn’t there. In the reflection of the bookcase doors, I see a short man move into view. He has the grainy look of a silent film, and he wears a baggy shirt draped over tight pants. Around his neck is a faded scapular.

  “I am Noble. I have come to welcome you,” he says to me. His English undulates with the rhythm of French. His giant, heavy-lidded eyes overwhelm his otherwise large nose and long, thin mouth. I know that his hair should be blond—I can sense that—but it has an inexplicable lack of color. “What is your name?”

  “Raziela Nolan. Call me Razi.” I watch him glance at me, tip to toe, and I look down. I am nothing but a blur. “I’m missing. Where am I?”

  “You’re new. It will come soon.” Noble peers around Andrew’s room. This man, I think, has seen castles.

  “Do you know what has happened?” Noble asks.

  “I drowned.”

  “Do you have questions?”

  “Where are we?”

  “Between.”

  “Between what?”

  “I do not know.”

  “What are we?”

  “That, too, I do not know.”

  “So we go about our business as if we weren’t—aren’t—dead?”

  “That will not be possible. You will soon come into hearing, sight, and smell beyond any experience you can imagine. Your form will change, and you will be able to move fluidly through this world. There will be tricks you can do, tricks that ones who are between can observe, some that the breathing can see. Be careful of your audience.”

  I remain silent. I am within the sound of his voice, not near it.

  “There are rules, about which we all have an understanding,” Noble says. “First, do not remain with your loved ones. You can go anywhere you please, anywhere at all, but leave them alone. Second, do not linger at your grave. One brief visit will suffice. Do that when you are able, perhaps in another seven days. An
d finally, do not touch. You have no need for it any longer.”

  “Why not?”

  His small hand brushes the place where my cheek should have been. I know that he touches me, but all I feel is a strange raw vibration. No texture. Nothing familiar. The gesture is hollow. “I will come to see about you again soon. Bonne chance.”

  Noble disappears into the wall. From the window, I see him drift over the surface of the pool and through the narrow bars of the wrought-iron fence.

  SCOTT WAS ON THE FRONT PORCH in a haze of April sunlight. His bare torso leaned like a plank against the white table’s rounded edge. He stared at the puzzle in front of him, its corners taking shape. A breeze stirred the nearby gardenia, and Scott nodded upward, instinctively, to meet the scent. I wanted to trace the slow tension of his intercostal muscles as he inhaled.

  Amy stood at the open front door and watched him. Her gaze followed the curves from his crown to his chest. Then she fixed on his eyes, which scanned the tabletop for a shape that interested him. She walked up with a package in her hand. He reached out without looking up and stroked her arm.

  “Had a good run with the group this morning?” She scratched the base of his skull.

  “Perfect. Ten miles felt like two in this weather.” He pitched his weight back against the chair. “Although a new person joined us. She can’t go the distance yet, but thinks the peer pressure, or support, will motivate her.”

  “My Olympian.” Amy’s hand moved down to his first vertebra.

  “Don’t go lower.”

  She touched the middle of his neck and rubbed her nails deeper, the friction audible. He exhaled with heated satisfaction.

  “I warned you.” He pulled her into his lap.

  “Unhand me.” She laughed and put the package on the table.

  “I can’t help how I’m wired. Or that you take your powers too lightly.”

  They sat quietly for almost a minute. “That’s for you,” Amy said.

  Scott slipped a book from the bag with his right hand. “Thanks.” He turned the cover to read the flap.

  “I noticed you were on a world religion kick lately. I don’t recall that you picked up anything on Hinduism.” Amy pressed her hand against his pectoral muscles. “That lovely new bookcase is going to fill up in no time. You and your obsessions.”

  He dropped his right arm against her knees. “What obsessions?”

  “Oh, aside from puzzles and running and microbrews—the dead presidents’ biography marathon, which led to the strange fixation with all things Roosevelt, Teddy and Franklin, which led to the Manhattan Project history deluge, and then—”

  “I’m a curious sort of guy.”

  “Yes, you are.”

  “And you can feed my obsessions anytime.” His hand moved to the middle of her left thigh. She relaxed into his chest. Scott kissed her forehead. “How’re you doing, Aims?”

  “I’m doing fine.”

  “Since your grand—”

  “Really, I’m okay. One day at a time.”

  He circled his arms around her completely. “How are you right now this minute?”

  “Content.”

  “Good. Then can we—”

  “Not now.”

  “You don’t know what I’m about to say.”

  “Yes, I do.” She held him back. “It’s quiet, it’s cool, you’re warm, and that’s enough right now.”

  THE WALL CLOCK RANG eight times when Amy pounded through the back door. Sketches and a graphic design trade magazine fanned from the top of her red briefcase. Lettuce balanced precariously on top of the grocery bag squeezed against her chest. I joined a draft that carried a billow of pollen and twirled the particles into a saffron spiral bracelet. Amy sneezed when I entered the kitchen. She tossed the bags to the ground with little concern for the contents and squared her shoulders within her cropped Oriental jacket.

  She was breathing so shallow, I thought her fingertips would turn blue. I pushed a book from its place on the edge of the counter. It hit the floor hard. The sudden noise made her turn quickly and breathe deep.

  “Must have knocked it when I came in,” she muttered as she picked it up.

  “I thought I heard you.” Scott walked into the kitchen. He was still wearing his lab coat from the pharmacy. There was a liquid antibiotic stain on his chest—a deformed nipple, petunia pink. He kissed her temple. “Your mom just called.”

  As she put away the groceries, she didn’t turn to him. “How did she sound?”

  “Okay, I guess. She’s still in shock.”

  “Still?”

  “Well, he hadn’t been sick.” Scott took a container from her hands and went to the cabinet to grab a dish. “Besides, your grandmother died—what?—three months ago? That’s a lot to take in a few weeks.”

  “I guess.”

  “Your mom still thinks he died of grief.”

  Amy faced him, holding a can in her hand as if she were going to throw it. “No one dies of grief. That’s like dying of a broken heart. It doesn’t happen. The will to live is stronger than grief. The world would be a lot emptier if people dropped dead like that.”

  “Such a realist.”

  “Just like he was.”

  Scott popped a plate of spaghetti in the microwave. Molecules from the wheat, tomatoes, mushrooms, peppers, onions, herbs, and red wine filled the air.

  “Want a salad?” Amy ducked into the refrigerator.

  “Sure.” He put a colander into the sink, stood with his back to the counter, and watched her. His bottom lip moved slightly, a reluctant comment on its edge. “Aims, I know it’s normal to be angry when someone dies. I was angry when my grandfather died. But there’s something, well, unusual about how you’re reacting.”

  “How am I supposed to react, then?” She gouged a carrot with the scraper.

  “Like you’re sad about it.”

  “He was really old. It’s not like it was a complete shock.”

  “Yeah, but no one expected it.”

  “No one expected Grandma Sunny to die, either.”

  “You’re right. But you seem to mourn her. What about him?”

  “I was close to her.”

  “I know that, but you must feel something for him, don’t you?”

  Amy spun around. “I was never close to Poppa Fin. I loved him, too, I guess. But I can’t mourn him. We never connected. My grandmother is the one I miss.” She turned back to their salads.

  “Your mom told me what he did with her things. Why didn’t you mention it to me?”

  “I was too angry. He got rid of everything—her clothes and shoes, her jewelry, her pillow, her toothbrush. Mom didn’t realize what he’d done until last week, when she went to get the safety deposit box keys. She found a couple of photo albums—Grandma had just started to put them together—but all of the pictures, the loose ones, those are gone. She had a collection going back generations. There were so many of her when she was young—I promised her we’d scan them into the computer and give copies to everyone. But I kept putting it off.”

  Scott wrapped his arms around her waist. She gave him a perfunctory pat on the hand. “I’m sorry, Amy. You were a good granddaughter. No one loved her more.”

  The microwave beeped. “Thanks. Check the spaghetti, please.”

  MY GRANDFATHER dies June 6, 1919, a few weeks before he turns seventy. He had wanted to see that ripe, round age and what he hoped the twenties would bring—better automobiles, better airplanes. Grams says, in some way, he won’t miss a thing.

  Now that Grams lives with us, Mother has stopped taking me along to visit her suffragette friends. I miss eavesdropping on their conversations, but Grams lets me do whatever I want as long as I’m quiet. I’m twelve, old enough to control my impulses.

  I carry an armful of books to the back porch, kick off my shoes, and wave my stocking feet in the breeze. I pile my dress between my legs and prop books on the cushion it makes. I read everything in the house. I read Poe, Twain, and Dickens to
entertain me, medical books to figure out what horrible disease could disfigure me, and Grams’s books to amuse me.

  Sometimes she pulls a rocker near the edge of the porch and sits without a word. I sense her eyes on me, watching as I flip the pages.

  “Did I ever tell you about the year I was diagnosed with neurasthenia?”

  A thousand and three times. “No, Grams.”

  “Well,” she huffs, her cheaters dangerously close to the bulby tip of her nose, “your grandfather had a room on the second floor converted for my convalescence. Some mulattos came to take everything out of the room except for a bed and a chair. They painted the walls a lovely shade of diaper stain. Can you believe he had them hang drapes on the outside of the windows to block out the light?”

  “How awful.”

  “Indeed. I couldn’t read, write, or sew. They fed me food too bland for a baby.”

  I pick a scab away from my elbow and repeat the story in my head. Only the high-hatty doctor and Grandfather had keys to the room. She wasn’t crazy, only bored beyond tears, but at the time, no one knew what else to do with women who found being a woman unbearably dull. She had been locked in the room more than four months when she overheard the doctor suggest “removing the source of her hysteria.” That was all it took for Grams to figure out what she had to do to escape. She convinced everyone she was better when she told the doctor and my grandfather what they wanted to hear. Oh, my listlessness is gone. I know now that I should have given myself more fully to my family. The reading and public lectures I occasionally attended, nothing but folly. Never again.

  Grams was released back to the world paler, thinner, and angrier than ever. Immediately, she tricked her husband into the room to discuss new decorating and locked him away for three days. She ate her meals on the floor with her children while fanning the delicious odors under the door’s crack. Grams teased his want of freedom by jiggling the key in the lock but would never open it.

  She is about to tell my favorite part. For this, I think Grams is the berries: