Chapter 12: Remembrance
Time is a simple enough concept. Beats of darkness, flashes of light. A forward march into the unknown. It is terrifying in its indecisiveness, comforting in its predictability and all who face it lose in the end. I am no longer afraid to admit my fear for the future, my hatred for the ticking clock and chiming of distant bells. Each sound is a tidal wave, pushing us ever closer to our fate. Yet for all of time's wickedness, hours of beauty are ours for the taking. This is one of them.
I catch her eye from across the room and all that we have is now and now is enough. The lobby, once littered with broken chairs and unused set pieces has been transformed for the occasion. Namely, the customary celebration to mark one week before opening night. Thespians and locals alike mingle, holding flutes of sparkling wine. Marigold excuses herself from what appears to be a humorous conversation with Lolly and Ione. She moves, a vision. Graceful as she was at our wedding. Her hands brush across the yellow floral fabric of her gown. It is the same color as the tiny flowers that have been braided loosely through her hair. I long to tell her how radiant she is, but smile and stammer instead.
"Good evening. You... you belong in the fashion of this century."
She grins sweetly before gifting my lips with a light and airy kiss. "It is a costume that Lolly wore several seasons ago. You should have seen it earlier this week! I made the alterations, myself and am quite pleased with the results."
"It is fit for a queen! Or to use your vernacular, it is groovy! Most groovy, indeed!"
"We should test that theory! It might get messy, though. I have no idea what I am doing!"
"How do you mean?" It dawns on me that the music has started and that other couples have joined us on the floor. I take her hand and together, we glide into synchronization with the waltz.
"You should know by now that I have two left feet!"
"You, Marigold? Heavens, no! You do not dance, you float!" And she does, just as she always has. A living sunbeam, playfully traipsing over the uneven floorboards. I let her lead for three songs, enraptured by her grace and fearlessness. She knows each step well enough to bend the rules without losing count. Either that or she is, in secret, the best improviser to ever set foot in the building. "You astonish me! Though I must confess, with you, I prefer a sparser dance floor." Without warning, she changes course, weaving through the circle of spinning suits and flowing silk. "You are spectacular!" I exclaim. "Like a needle pulling thread around the ring of an embroidery hoop!"
"A sewing metaphor!"
"I thought you would appreciate that," I peck her lips once we are still. If our sudden departure from the group did not draw attention, our behavior in the sidelines likely did.
"Come to the costume shop with me," she glances at Arthur who appears lost in his own little world, nursing a large drink, "there is something I'd like to show you." We sneak away, down the hall and into the dark, lavender-scented room that she has claimed as her own. Not only has she taken the record player from her employer, she has a handful of his vinyl as well. "Lock the door." The needle drops on a song that I have never heard. All that I know for sure is that it is deep track Donovan. Slow and sultry.
"Turn the volume down. We'll be caught for sure!"
"We won't be dancing long," she whispers in my ear, followed by an awkward chuckle. Sexy, then silly. She is precisely my cup of tea.
"No, I suppose we will not." As I embrace her in our solitude, my body grows weak. The air between us smolders in my throat and chest. I am drowning. Not in desire, not in passion, but in all that has ever separated us. I cling to her for dear life, fearful of what might happen should I let her go. My teeth clench as I hold my tongue, frightened of what might be said should desperation get the best of me. I lose in the end, just as I always have. "I need you," I confess, grasping longingly at her shoulders. My very soul dives into her eyes. I see them glisten, I see the love in them burning brightly, I see her desire matches my own and so, I fumble with the buttons and strings on her bodice.
"How long exactly until the invention of zippers and Velcro?"
"Too long," I caress the outer corner of her left breast as it comes into view, scar and all. "I would rip it off if I could, but I know how dearly you love your dresses and how hard you worked on this one." With that, she frees herself from the heavy canary-colored gown, casting it aside with care. All that she wears underneath it is a sheer full slip. "This looks familiar, as do your panties." My hand glides skyward across her inner thigh, brushing against the lace. "You wore these all the time back home. On those all too common 'special occasions'. Do you remember them?"
"Barely. Remind me," she softly demands as my fingers move up and over the front of the elastic seam. She draws nearer, rising into my touch. Lips parting, eyes closing. I guide her back a few steps, laying her down across the sewing table where she lands like a snowflake, like a leaf, like a petal from the sweetest rose.
"May I," I ask, almost shyly before lifting the thin bit of silk up and over her bent knee. "It is not that I have forgotten. Only that I have hungered for you a great, long while."
"Do to me what you will."
I hold her gaze as she strips bare and assumes her previous position. My attire is easier to remove and toss aside. I do just that, marveling at her. She looks like a painting. Soft and statuesque. Bold in her vulnerability. The blade of her left index finger meanders across the pink cushion of her bottom lip. As she watches me, her mouth curves into an impish half-smile. Eagerly, I lean and lay a trail kisses across the pale canvas of her skin, across each dainty breast and her meager belly. I briefly pause above her navel to wonder if my blood still pumps inside of her, if what we planted there still grows. That thought and all others fade away the lower I go. I know this terrain. I have lost myself countless times in the shaded and fertile oasis before me. I know each rosy canyon, deep and shallow alike. I have charted out every hill and plateau. Onward, I venture, a weary traveler returning to his homeland. "Close your eyes, my beautiful one. I will take away, back to our home. I will meet you there." My tongue finds its mark with ease. Blindly, it moves like a thumb across the smooth surface of a wishing stone.
She trembles, releasing the faintest gasp of eagerness and ecstasy. "Speak to me, William. Those secret words of love known only by you and I. Whisper in that sacred vernacular. Those stanzas too beautiful for any page to hold or ear to comprehend. Only the lips, the tongue, the precipice where the body becomes the spirit. Speak to me! Oh, speak!"
A second song, slower than the one before begins, setting the tempo for another dance. I add more pressure, more weight and depth to this divine exploration and mortal words evade her. I would not call them moans, but rather songs condensed into single, ephemeral notes. Another comes, then another and another. They glow and dance like fireflies across the landscape that Donovan paints with his lyrics of palm trees, beaded purses and cold water with the essence of lime. I surface, still tasting her, still wearing her sweet nectar on my lips. With a kiss, I stifle her sigh and gently drag her hips to the table's edge where we reunite at last.
Deeper and deeper I plunge. Heavier and heavier our breathing becomes with every steady thrust. I feel earthquakes move within her, hurricanes rise from her lips as she cries and sings. Her temperature climbs. I feel her all around me, hot as a furnace as I send another spell of waves. They swell and crash upon her ivory shore. The moonlight melts against my naked, heaving chest; pouring downward, clothing us both in silver light. We break apart only once to trade positions, panting and stumbling. I am now the one spread across the table. The yellow flowers in her hair loosen and tumble all around us. They graze her spine and wavy locks as she arches her back. Her hand lays flat across my heart. Our frenzy intensifies, but also slows. I surrender myself to her, wearing her name on my lips as a plea. Pleasure thrills my mortal form, numbing every pain. My heart, however, aches upon release. I call out in joy, in anguish, raking the fingers of my right hand across my brow and through my own dark hair. We part, at least for now. The trickling of sweat across our skin cools as she collapses into my arms.
"I remember you," she mutters, touching the scar on my breast. "I remember it all. It hit me like a bolt of lightning, like a resuscitation. I remember the mirror. You were so upset. I went looking for you. But before I came here I... that explains so much. The nausea. The nightmares. The torn page that I found in Arthur's desk." My body makes a sudden, uncomfortable shift. Had she not been sprawled across me, I would have sprung upright. "You wrote it, didn't you?"
I hold her tighter, burying my face in her yellow hair, not wanting to answer. "It is to my understanding that I will someday."
"It paints a pretty vivid picture, almost as if you were there."
"I will be there," I confirm. Slowly, against my own will, "and you, Marigold... you will be there, too."
"So, it's a journal entry? From the future?" She lifts her head, looking me in the eye. I see that she is troubled, but also trusting. Seeking counsel as if I have any comfort to give on the subject. "What am I supposed to do?"
"I don't know. You must be so frightened."
"Mabel," she sits beside me, touching the outline of her abdomen. "I have dreamt of her often. I fear more for her than I do myself. I fear for you as well, for what this cruel foretelling will do to your heart."
"As you should. I have not found the courage to read it. But I could not destroy it either. Now you know and it is because of my cowardice." Panic consumes me as she steps away and opens the cabinet above the sewing table. I see her retrieve the scrap of parchment in question. "How can you be so courageous? Teach me how to be," she hands it to me without questioning. "I don't want to read this. But I also know that I must."
"I love you. I will love you forever. No matter what you decide."
With one hand enveloped safely in hers, I read:
I look out the window. All is still as we travel down the empty straightaway of the One Mile Road. Dust coats the glass, distorting the outside world like a shroud of golden fog. No one speaks. No one moves. Two EMTs and a young paramedic sit in silence along the wall. The eldest watches Mabel without blinking while the other two cradle their heads in their hands. My fingers sink into the fabric beneath me. It is a thin enough barrier and yet, there are universes in the fibers between Marigold and I. I can feel her, just as I could when she was mine. Touch holds memories, not unlike the human heart. My flesh can still recall reaching for her in the earliest hours of the morning and feeling her from the other side of our comforter. If only I could convince myself that this is what I am doing now.
Peace knows otherwise. For it is peace that now makes her inanimate. She is as much alive as the steel walls around us, the sand on the ambulance's exterior, the cold metal table rocking against my leg. I can see the outline of her motionless form beneath the soft fabric that I wrapped her within. Such a pitiful gesture on my part. As though she could feel my care, as though her body still needed comforting even after being irreversibly broken. What little comfort I still have inside folds over me, just like that yellow fleece. This moment right here, not back at the farmhouse or anywhere else for that matter, is the last time that we will ever truly be together. All other moments to follow, will be life and mourning for me and death for her. The remnants of my heart, my soul, topple from my core, spilling and staining the blanket with her blood. Never in my life have I seen so much blood. Soldiers hemorrhage all the time, on and off the battlefield. In cramped and filthy tents, they die. Alone in damp gullies, partially submerged in streams of red, they die just the same. Death came for her in a safer place, in our home, in my arms. Yet, her death is cataclysmic. Perhaps from afar, poetic. She bleeds for every life I ever took, for my penance.
I feel her blood pooling between my fingers, seeping into my flannel and sweatpants. As its temperature decreases, I almost swear that I can feel my own mortality fade to nothingness. I am hollow now, if only momentarily. My heart will fill with pain again. When the silence and the stillness is broken, grief will come in for the kill. It seems almost impossible that I could hurt more, that there are tears left unfallen, that there is enough strength within me to cry again. This is the curse of loving what was and what is no more. Mabel moves, then whimpers. The technician beside her looks to me, wordlessly. That connection shakes me to the core and I return, unwillingly, to the world. Mortality stirs from all around me, from above and below. An assault from every angle like a storm upon the sea. The wheels beneath us leap from the country road and onto the smooth pavement of Main Street. Cars fly by, horns blare and traffic lights flash. The town that she loved is so unaware, so unshaken by our arrival. There are people in those buildings who know her name, who claim to love her. They do not know. They did feel the earth stop moving. They did not witness the sun and stars recede into eternal night. How is it that we can occupy the same space and time? How, tell me how, can they be so blind?
It is the ignorance of Waterford that sends me to my knees. I can no longer stand beside her. All that I can do now is wither beneath her, like the final petal at the stock of a dead rose. What I do there, in the shadow of her ruin I cannot say. Whether I weep or scream or faint is known only by the witnesses in the ambulance, the hallway and the morgue. My awareness and with it, my sanity return in fleeting form when I hold her again in that dim and sterile room. The blood has been wiped clean away, her nightgown replaced by a simple, shapeless tunic and surgical trousers of white. I will never forget the frigid bite of the metal snap buttons all across them and how they are only half as cold as she. Gently, I rock her, waiting in vain for her to spring back to life in my arms. I lift her cheek from my own long enough to watch her face.
She is as beautiful as I remember, if not in a different way. Her humor, her quirks, her gleaming smile and soothing voice have long since vanished. I see her now as her creator must have, long before the breath of life first stirred within her lungs. I beg her to return, to fill that home once more with her sweetness and her light. I call her back and just as before, her only response is peace. Again and again, no such miracle transpires. I pretend that she is asleep on my hand, for pretending is my final means of escape. Words of my own may have evaded me, melody has not. I hum a song, one of her favorites and watch her lips for any change. I sang to her often when she was nearly sleeping. She would always smile. I take my time, clumsily fumbling over the lyrics. With every word, my heart hopes then sinks, hopes and then sinks again, a bitter and excruciating cycle.
My vision blurs, then sharpens as several heavy tears spill across her unchanged face. No smile would be offered now or ever again. She has not heard a word, neither in body nor soul. Wherever she is, it is not with me. I listen to the silence. No sound lives on its own within this concrete fortress. There are no beeping computers, no ticking clocks. Just this heartbreaking room, a bank of dark offices and the long hallway where the dead are stored on shelves like unused books. She does not belong here. Even if her stay is temporary, even if she is simply passing through this purgatory on the way to the grave. The thought of leaving her behind destroys me, but my suffering remains unchecked. Just as the suffering, just as the grief of every mourner who stood here before me. The pain felt here, the tears fallen, the angry and broken cries do not travel past those thick doors at the end of the hall. I lay her down before me and with my hand placed gently across her porcelain brow, I try again to reach her.
"Where have you gone, my love? I have searched every shadow in this building, every gust of air and trace of light. Am I right to assume that you truly are gone from my side? That you made only part of the crossing with me? That somewhere out along the One Mile Road, the sunlight and the wildflowers called you home? You are needed here, not there. I need you to come back. To speak and smile and sing. Come back, if not for me then for Mabel. I beg you please! I cannot live without you!" My cries go unheeded. They fall upon her like rain on a statue. "What would you have me do, Marigold? If I am to go on without you? I," I take her hand. Remnants of the perfume she always wore still linger on her pulseless wrist. "I will do all that I can for you now. I will go out into the field where your bees dance and find the loveliest flowers that grow there. You shall be their queen, with a crown of vibrant blossoms. It will be golden hour, just before the setting of the sun, just before the fireflies ignite the darkened sky that the world will gain its final glimpse of you.
Oh, my beautiful one. You are untouched by the emptiness of this realm and all the horrors that it contains. You need not fear that icy cavern that will soon replace my loving arms. May you never hear the ghastly roar of the neighboring furnace. Nor feel the wounds and mutilations of the mortician's needle and blade. Return to me," I stop myself, realizing that this is the first time today that this request is being made in a different way. Realizing that this is my first tiny step towards understanding that she is gone. "Return to me, as a whisper of a memory when I see you in that sunlit chapel. Find your rest, find your peace at my command alone. Let my eyes be the last to look upon you, my words of love be the last vow that you will hear. Give me that moment so that when I return to life as a ghost, a living memory, I can remember that loveliness and light exists in death. Wait for me there. A beacon, just as you were in life. Wait for me so that I may seek you when my lonesome days without you are finally spent."
I stand, barely able to find my footing. My vision is foggy. My mind is, too. I feel stunned. Like a man who has spent his entire life underground, who is experiencing the terrible and jarring sensation of light for the first time. Listlessly, I hand her the page, feeling only slightly relieved once it is freed from my grasp. My trousers hang on a nearby chair and I collect them, stepping gracelessly into their coverage.
"You're angry with me," she states as though that is a fact. It is not.
"No, no." I try my best to smile. The tension in my jaw and mouth surely makes me look ridiculous. I try to face her, but my eyes are not strong enough to behold her without welling over. "You cannot want this for yourself."
"A life with you is all I want, no matter how brief."
"I don't know if I can go through with it," I confess, continuing to dress myself, refusing to look her in the eyes. "You are asking too much of me."
"William-"
"Please. Go to Arthur. Ask him to take you back. Back to your childhood where you can begin anew. Forget me, forget this place!" I see her in my periphery. She pulls on her slip and approaches me, a golden blur. "Live, please!" I shout, finding her shoulders and then her glassy eyes. "Live! Hug your parents again. Create, explore, gather your strength and rally up your dearest friends and loved ones so you can fight that battle and emerge victorious. I promise you that someday, when the approaching darkness is defeated, you will meet someone. A man who is as gentle and as kind as you are. The sadness of his past will melt away like frost in the warmth of a springtime morning. He will be loyal and selfless. All the things that I was not and could never be. You will grow old together, inseparable until the very end. I have seen it for myself. In a tiny square on the tapestry."
"There cannot be a time or place where we do not find one another," she says, pained. Pained but also strong. "You know this as well as I do."
"You will find me in your stories, tucked between every line of poetry and prose. I will reach to you through the speakers of your record player, holding and spinning you while you dance, soothing you through your stereo while you drive. I will be the sunlight that kisses your hair and warms your skin, the breeze that cools you on a summer day. To know that you are living and inspired and joyful will keep me beside you. I will be your ghost, just as I was before."
"I love you. With a love that can never be undone. Don't you understand? What you are asking of me is impossible!"
I hold her near, feeling her warmth, her breath, her pulse. "This is impossible. For a ray of light and a shadow to live as one. Of all the demons you ever faced, I am the one that you must overcome. If only to shine again. Farewell, dear Marigold. Farewell forevermore." As I make for the door, I expect to hear her footfalls behind me. But she does not move. The last that I see of her before departing is her reflection on a broken mirror in the hall. I dare not turn. No, I am far to weak to do so but our eyes meet there on the silver lake of shattered glass. "Farewell. You are meant to be so much more than you and I."