Chapter 25

In summer, the river around the island turns red. Like the color of mud plus blood. Flies swarm the air in dark, buzzing clouds. A kind of fly I've never found anywhere since. You walk outside and you're covered. The flies have a smell that's almost sweet. I'm watching them darken Grand-Maman's window. Blocking out all the light that comes through the green leaves. Grand-Maman's guest bedroom is just like her own bedroom. The same beige everywhere, but darker, shinier. I lie on a beige satiny pillow edged with crackling beige lace. On the beige wall there's a painting of a man with a beard of feathers in a heavy gold frame. There's a painting of a dark house in a dark wood, also in a gold frame. A dirt path leads up to the front door. That's the one I look at. The one I can't stop looking at. What's hidden inside the dark house, I wonder.

Between the pictures, there's supposed to be a mirror on the wall. Grand-Maman took it away when I was in the hospital. Nothing there now but its ghost. I open my eyes to beige. Close my eyes to beige. My body burning from cuts that are healing just fine, the doctor said, but I still feel them burning. And my heart broken. Shattered like glass. Over Mother leaving me, why did she leave? Something happened. Grand-Maman won't say what. When I try to remember, all I see are flashes now. Broken glass. Red powder. A man smiling at me in the dark. Mother on the floor.

When I opened my eyes in the children's hospital, that was my first word: Mother.

Cher, said an answering voice. Not Mother. Grand-Maman. Sitting beside me and dressed up in her black lace like she was going to bridge.

You're up, she said in French. Thank god.

Where's Mother?I asked. And Grand-Maman looked at me.

Gone.

Where?

You should rest.

Grand-Maman, what happened?As I asked, flashes came. Mother being carried away in a hospital bed. Red powder on my hands. A man in my bedroom turning to smoke. Tom, Tom—I started to cry. And Grand-Maman gripped my hand. Shhh, she said. All her gold rings were on her fingers and I stared at the different-colored stones. I stared at the stones because I couldn't look into her eyes. Could never look at what I saw there for long. Listen, she said. Now is the time to bury. Now is the time to forget. We take what hurts us and we put it here. And she made a fist. She put it over her heart. The bright stones on her fingers flashed. And in my head, I saw a box. Like Grand-Maman's jewelry box for her rings. It looked just like a tiny closet, a garderobe. It even had a little gold key like my red diary. We put it here and we lock it up. She pressed her fist to her heart. We keep it for ourselves. We keep it closed. We never open.

We never open, I whispered.

And Grand-Maman smiled at me for the first time. She opened her fist of stones. Put her hand on my hair, greasy and unbrushed. And then it can't hurt us, she said. Ever again.

Now Grand-Maman leaves food for me outside the door. Leaves it with a little knock and then tiptoes away in her fuzzy socks. Cher, she always calls me. I don't answer and she doesn't make me answer. Mostly, I'll leave the food at the door. Usually things out of cans and jars. Smoked oysters. White asparagus that looks like skeleton fingers. Beef consommé, which is a soup that's clear, so I can see right through it to the bottom of the bowl, where an old-timey man and woman dance. I like that best, though to look at the dancing makes me feel strange. Mother sends me postcards from California. She lives there now with Creep, somewhere called Malibu. There, Mother will be making a movie starring Mother, produced by Creep, they're just waiting on something called funding. Hope you are well, Mother writes in a looping black hand. She doesn't sign it with love. She doesn't even sign it Mother, just N for her name. She doesn't call and I don't ask Grand-Maman if I can call. Even though I want to know does she still love me? I want to say, I'm sorry, Mother. Whatever I did that made you leave, I'm sorry. Mother doesn't want to hear it just now, Grand-Maman says. Mother feels some distance might be good for us, and Grand-Maman agrees. More than agrees. Let her try this movie thing, get it out of her system. She'll leave that producer soon enough. Once they've made that movie, anyway. If they make it. But yes, of course Mother loves me, Grand-Maman says. Even if Mother doesn't say.

At night, I come out of the beige guest room and go into Grand-Maman's beige bedroom, where I watch Wheel of Fortune then Jeopardy!, while she sits in her chaise and eats pastries from a box with the prettiest ribbon. Sometimes we watch Murder, She Wrote after. Grand-Maman and I always know who did it before Angela Lansbury does. Or maybe Angela Lansbury knows all along and she just doesn't say until it's time. I lie on her sagging beige bed watching television upside down, my head hanging over the bed's edge and filling with blood.

Grand-Maman looks over at me a lot. Worried, I guess. Sometimes I'll still burst into tears for no reason. Like tonight. She's just flipping channels like she does during commercials and there's Tom Cruise talking to David Letterman. And she looks at me and smiles, thinking I'll be happy. But I'm crying suddenly, I don't know why. My scars and cuts are burning again like they haven't in a while.

"What's wrong, cher?"

"I don't know," I say. Though somewhere inside me I feel I do know. Looking at Tom Cruise's face, I'm seeing roses, why am I seeing—?

Then Grand-Maman flips the channel again to a rerun of Wheel of Fortune. She lets me cry and I do very quietly. Tears drip from my upside-down eyes to the floor full of cracked, dusty tiles.

"You'll be starting school here next week," she says. On the upside-down television, Vanna is turning letter after letter around. "At Sacré Coeur."

Sacred Heart. The French Catholic school on the island where Mother never let me go. She sent me to an English public school in the city. Where there are different people from different places, with different religions, Mother said. Like Ms. Said. Like you. Do you really want to be taught by a bunch of nuns, Belle?

"But you have to be Catholic to go there," I say to Grand-Maman.

"I'm having you baptized. I've made arrangements with Mon Père."

Last Sunday, Grand-Maman took me to church and introduced me to the priest, whose watery eyes kept going to my forehead. They talked in a fast whisper behind me while I sat in the pew, staring at Jesus on the cross. I heard the word troubled. I heard the word Mother. I heard the word devil and I heard the word touched. Mother never wanted me baptized out of respect for your father.

"But Mother—" I say.

"French," Grand-Maman says, "is your mother tongue even if your own mother is too proud to speak it to you. Your mother forgot herself and where she came from when she moved to this city. But I never forget. It's time you spoke French and it's time you were baptized. You are not an English girl and you are not a godless girl, and if your mother hadn't raised you the way she did, we wouldn't be here."

"But my father—"

"Your father was a gentle soul," Grand-Maman snaps. "Very agreeable. He agrees with me, under the circumstances."

How could Father agree? And then I remember Grand-Maman talks to the dead. Every Sunday after church, she lights a candle at the dining room table and talks for hours while she plays solitaire. She does it in quick, quiet French, while she lays out the cards. She talks to my grand-père and my grand-tante Shirley, her sister, and her own mother and father. And now my father, too, I guess.

"He agrees?"

"You know your father knew French before he knew English. He would be disgusted that she sent you to an English school. As for religion, your mother likes to paint him as such a Muslim, but he's really far more agreeable than that."

I have a flash of a man in her doorway nodding and smiling. Agreeing very politely with whatever Grand-Maman said.

I stare at the television. My scars suddenly hurt again though the bandages are long gone. The doctor says I healed beautifully. Very beautifully, in fact, and he stared at me awhile. All that's left of the Day We Don't Speak Of is my forehead bruise. But it doesn't glow like a star anymore. It's just a bruise. Now is the time to bury, Grand-Maman said. To put it away like jewelry in one of her many boxes. So many boxes she has of very dark wood on her dresser, each one with its own lock. The Wheel of Fortune is turning now. Vanna is clapping lightly. She's always clapping lightly. I wonder if she'd clap lightly if the wheel caught fire. Isn't Mother ever coming to get me? Has she forgiven me? Can I go home?

But I don't ask if I'm ever going to California with Mother. I don't say anything to Grand-Maman but Okay.

The priest whispers French words, dribbling water onto my forehead from a golden cup. School is a sea of staring faces I drown in. They all seem afraid of me for some reason, I don't know why. There is whispering in French, but the whispering is too quick and slippery for me to catch. I keep my eyes on the blackboard or on the ground. I do homework in the beige guest room. Stacey calls to ask why the hell aren't I back in school? I'm going to the Catholic school on the island now, I tell her. Stacey says that's terrible. Now there's no one for her to talk to because everyone around her is a fucking child. She asks me if I can come over. I remember the dark basement. Stacey in her black bodysuit spinning for me to "Maniac," her blond hair flying around her like a golden cloud. How I watched her leap and turn until she collapsed on the plaid couch beside me breathless and flushed. Looked at me, her dark mirror, waiting for whatever rating I'd give her. It was the only time I ever felt power. That I had something she truly wanted.

"Well, Belle?" Stacey says. "Can you come over or not?"

Grand-Maman, playing solitaire nearby, hears Stacey's question through the phone. She shakes her head at the cards. "I don't know," I say.

"Don't you at least want your bracelet back?" she whispers.

"What?" My heart. Suddenly pounding inside me.

I feel her smiling on the phone. "I saw you," she says. "That night in the garden."

"What are you talking about?" A flash of red petals. My feet in the cold black soil. My heart beating hard in the dark, like it's beating now.

"My mother's really fucking pissed at you, by the way." She sounds happy about this. "What were you doing out there, anyway?"

I see myself running under a low red moon, the slick grass sinking beneath my feet, while a voice called after me. I shake my head. "I don't know what you're—"

"Never mind, I know."

"You do?"

"Sure. You were trying to see me." She lowers her voice again. "Weren't you?"

I close my eyes. "Yes."

"I knew it. Look, just come over, okay? We'll just have to plan it for when she's not home. Because if she sees you, she'll fucking freak. She doesn't want me dancing for you anymore."

"I have to go," I tell Stacey, and the phone makes such a click when I hang it up.

And Grand-Maman nods her head. Thwack go her cards on the table. Whisper, whisper to the dead.

I never see Stacey again.

The air grows colder. I watch the flies disappear from the window. Then the leaves are the color of fire and they're falling. One by one by one. At night, the wind makes a howling sound and the air smells like smoke. I close my eyes. Sometimes I see Mother. Sometimes a man made of smoke. When I open my eyes, the trees are bare and snow is falling slow and fat. It falls forever. And the ground glitters cold and white like Mother's skin. Christmas comes and Mother sends me a card with a palm tree covered in Christmas lights. Happy Holidays, it says. XO, N. Mother's first XO. A good sign, Grand-Maman says. For Christmas, Grand-Maman gives me a Good News Bible, a necklace with a little gold cross, and a brush that works on my hair. She brushes it for me while we watch the ball drop in Times Square on New Year's Eve. The gold cross glitters on my neck. It makes me remember my bare wrist, where Father's eye bracelet used to go. And in my mind, there's a rose garden. A bed of black soil. A flash of gold glinting there. Now is the time to bury, I think, watching the snow fall thick and slow. Now is the time to forget. And for a long time, the world stays white and shimmering and cold.

Four times the flies darken the window. Four times the river turns the color of mud-blood. Four times the world turns the color of Mother and melts away again. And then the buds are on the branches, and they give way to green leaves. I'm fourteen years old going on fifteen in three weeks. I'm sitting with Grand-Maman in her bedroom watching Wheel of Fortune, watching the rickety wheel turn and turn. I've made us dinner. I know exactly what jars to use now. Spring is in the window. Looking out at the blue sky over the drab apartment buildings, I feel alive and awake in a way I never have before. Grand-Maman is telling me that Mother wants me to be with her in California. She's all settled in a place called La Jolla now. There's a high school I will go to in the fall.

"What about Hollywood?" I ask.

"Well, that didn't work out quite like Mother planned," Grand-Maman says. Now she has some sort of shop. Dresses.

"Like Ladies Apparel?"

"Like your mother's idea of it. You know."

I nod at Vanna White. Yes. I know. Sometimes I play a game where I flip through Vogue magazine and I imagine Mother somewhere among her palm trees, the sun in a different place in the sky, flipping at the very same time as me. What would she call style? What would she call a fucking eyesore? What would she point to and say, Now that's sharp. I never knew before. I'd look at the glossy page of a girl Mother was pointing to and have no idea what she was talking about. Now I see. It's in the cut and how it falls. It's in the clothes and the girl and the spirit they make between. I wish I could tell Mother how I can see it from a mile away now. What's sharp.

I stare at upside-down Vanna White on the television screen. Still clapping her hands. Still smiling white and wide. I had a feeling this was coming. Mother has been signing Love next to the N. She's been addressing the postcards Dear Belle. She even called once. How are you? she said.

I'm okay, I answered in French. I'm going to school on the island.

Mother was silent at first.

I heard, she answered in French at last. And how is that?

Good.

But Mother wasn't listening. She hadn't called to ask me how it was. I do love you, Belle, she said in English.

I love you too.It's the truth. Just not the whole.

"I don't want to go," I tell Grand-Maman in the beige room now.

"I know," Grand-Maman says. "But she's your mother. And you're still a child."

"But you weren't a child anymore, were you, Belle?" Tom says, calling me out of the beige room, back with him in the Treatment Room, under the sky of water. Where we still lie side by side on the floating table. My lips are deader than ever. I can't move my body. He's touching my face and I can't feel his hands. Tracing it like he made it himself, made every shape and shadow that lives there. The forgotten touch I somehow still longed for each night in the beige dark, watching the flies in the window, watching the leaves of fire, watching the glittering white snow and then the green buds. Closing my eyes to the beige and the paintings in their gold frames and the mirror ghost. Finding him only in the very corners of my dreams. Turning to smoke the minute I reached out my hand.

I shake my head at Tom but it still won't shake. He's blurrier around the edges, his face flickering on and off like the most beautiful light.

"Not a child anymore," I say. Beside us, in the glass tank, our red jellyfish has grown bigger now. Nearly the size of the glass tank itself. Not quite the size of the red jellyfish floating up there in the sky of water, but close.

"You blossomed in that beige room, didn't you? Grew up faster than the seasons change. Raised up out of the dirt just like I said you would. Bloomed like a hothouse flower, the red throat of you opening. It was stunning. Even with the mirror gone from the wall, you knew. You could see it in all their eyes whenever they looked at you. Teachers. That sleazy priest. Even the dumb, cruel children at that stupid island school. The dark, aching want in their eyes. That wants in spite of itself. That looks in spite of itself, transfixed. That consumes and is consumed."

I nod with my eyes.

"Envy," Tom and I both say, basking. A smile ripples across his face. He loves how I can say the word even with my dead mouth, clear as a bell.

"You knew that feeling, didn't you? Because you'd looked at someone else like that once. Who did you used to look at like that?"

But he knows the answer.

The answer is up there in the sky of water.

Her face. Its pale eyes looking surprised. Then troubled. Very troubled at what they see…

…Me. Arriving in San Diego to meet her after so many years away. She's standing at the foot of the escalator, a long airport escalator at arrivals. I'm at the top and she's at the bottom and I'm making my slow way down.

I've just flown over the clouds for six hours. Staring at the sky going bluer and brighter the farther west we went. On the plane, a movie called A Few Good Men played, starring Jack Nicholson and Tom Cruise, both very good actors. I mostly watched the screen while I listened to Nirvana on my Walkman that Grand-Maman bought me as a going-away present. To watch Tom Cruise made me feel strange. Made me grip the armrests whenever he came on the screen. Wanting the truth that Jack Nicholson told him he couldn't handle. Still wanting it.

All okay?said the man sitting beside me.

He smiled in a way I would come to know very well. Like even though I wasn't saying anything, my face was telling him something. Some secret thing. Something that pleased him. But when I turned to look at this man, my heart stopped. Dark hair a wave. White movie-star smile. Eyes blue-green as my dream of the sea. He looked just like the actor up there on the screen.

Tom?I said, stopping the music.

Excuse me?the man said. Still smiling at me though he didn't understand.

And then I said, Seth? Which was funny. Where did I get that name from?

He looked at me like he wished that Tom or Seth were his name. I'm Jeff.

Sorry. I thought… you were someone else.

Oh, don't apologize, please. I'm sorry not to be who you thought I was.

Why would someone be sorry for something like that? I thought. But I didn't ask. I turned to the window, turned my Walkman back on. I didn't want to talk to Jeff. But Jeff wanted to talk to me. I could feel his want oozing out of him. He tapped me on the shoulder until I turned back.

Flying home?Jeff mouthed, and smiled. Like there were more questions in this question. And my answer would answer them all.

I looked at Jeff. Businessman. Boring face. Earthly smile.

I don't know yet.And I turned up "Lithium" and looked out the window. Jeff was still looking at me. I turned it up as high as it would go, but I still heard the want of Jeff the whole way across the ever bluer and brighter sky.

When we landed, Jeff asked me if I needed a ride. My mother is picking me up, I told him as we walked down the long, wide arrivals corridor, my headphones still on. They'd stay on, in one form or another, for the rest of my life.

Your mother, Jeff said, like that was something he wanted to see. Where is she?

We're riding the escalator down together toward baggage claim. A long, slow ride down. Jeff is asking me if I'm sure I don't want a ride. If my mother doesn't show up, he can take me. More than happy to, definitely. Anywhere I want to go. He has a limo, have I ever ridden in one of those? Oh, they're fun. He's surprised that a pretty girl like me has never been in one before. Striking, has anyone ever said that? Definitely.

And then I see her. At the bottom of the escalator. She's alone. Doesn't see me yet. She's looking all around for me, her eyes wide open. Worried. Maybe a little afraid, which hurts me. I almost don't recognize her because she's cut her hair to her chin like Isabella Rossellini. Dyed it ice-blond. She looks beautiful still. But older, smaller. The blue of her eyes is less bright, more watery. Her mouth is still red, but small and puckered like now the world has a sour taste. There's a new softness around the edges of her face, like she eroded. When she sees me, she smiles. I smile back. And just like that, she stops smiling. It's only for a second that she stops. Something dark comes over her face like a shadow. And then it's gone. When I get to the bottom of the escalator, she's smiling again.

"Belle," she says, and her eyes flood, and mine flood too. She hugs me and Jeff scuttles away. I smell her violets and smoke, and something else—a ripe sourness, a faint rot of the flesh. She holds me at a distance. "Let me look at you."

And in Mother's watery eyes, I see it. The dark ache. Consuming and consumed. She looks like my face is telling her something and she's deciding if she wants to tell me. Whatever it is makes her happy and sad and scared all at once. And then she smiles over it, a window with a drawn shade. Shakes her head.

"I'm just… So happy to see you, Sunshine."

"I'm happy to see you, too." It's a lie and the truth. The tears in my eyes sting with it—the lie and the truth. She hugs me again, a hug full of air. Her body so far away, I can barely feel her arms there. "I love you," she says into the space by my ear. There's a space between us now. A space that feels as big as the years. It's been there ever since.

"Why did she stop smiling at you?" Tom asks me, pulling me out of the dream, back into the fog with the red jellyfish.

"I don't know."

"You do," Tom says. "Because of what she saw. What did she see, Belle?"

"I don't know, I don't know." Though of course I do.

"You. Her Beauty in your face. Her Beauty that you took back. You thought I didn't keep my promises. But I did, Belle. Didn't I get you to California in the end?"

Tom's smiling his constellation smile, his gaze an ocean wave. If I try to focus on his face, he nearly seems to dissolve before my eyes. I remember longing for him, loving him even as I hated him because of Mother, because he left me. I remember standing in the mirror, knocking and calling his name until the glass shattered and the shards cut and my blood pooled red as roses onto the floor.

"But you weren't there," I say with my dead lips, with my broken voice. "You said we would be together, but you weren't there."

"I was everywhere," he says. "All around you. I was the air you breathed and I was the ocean you swam in. I was the breeze that came through the window and lifted the sheets where you slept."

And as he says this, my body grows cold. I'm deep in the cold, rippling ocean of Tom's eyes. "I grew up swimming in your eyes," I whisper. "I became more beautiful in my way and I grew taller and Mother grew shorter and older and her smile turned into a smirk. And the world never got cold, never turned the color of Mother again. It stayed green and blue like the great Pacific. I floated on its white waves while Mother sank to the silty bottom. Quit her acting career and opened up a dress shop. She gave it my name. I got a job as a princess and even dated a prince. And a fellow princess. But they were nothing like you. There was a space there, too, like the one between me and Mother. Like the one between me and everyone forever after. There has been a space between me and everything ever since you turned to smoke. There has been a wall of glass."

A smile on Tom's shining face, rippling like water.

Though I'm still speaking through dead lips, my words garbled like I'm underwater, he hears every word, he knows it's the heart's blood. My heart's blood. The exact true music of our story. To the very last note.

He kisses me on my dead lips.

Behind us, the red jellyfish bursts out of its tank, shattering the glass.

We watch it from our floating table, the story of Tom and me in one red pulsing fish. It drops to the floor. Flails against the wall like a still-beating heart among the glass shards. Right beneath a giant glass tube along the wall that runs from the floor to the ceiling. The tube is like a vacuum, it makes a sucking noise now. My pulsing red jellyfish is rising up toward the sucking mouth of this tube in spite of itself. It's afraid, I know it. I feel it in my heart beating in time with the pulsing bell. I watch the tube suck it up by its tentacles. I watch the jellyfish float up the clear tube toward the ceiling.

"Where is it going, Tom?" I ask with my broken voice.

But Tom isn't with me on the table anymore.

I'm alone watching the red jellyfish move up through the glass tube. There's a hole in the ceiling that connects the tube to the sky. I watch our story join the sky of water. All its red tentacles. Its red bell still beating like a frantic heart. Its pattern of roses. And then it's floating above me, looking down at me through the glass ceiling with eyes both familiar and strange.

And all goes black.