First, some feedback to reviews, and then the update!
Iwantaparrot – So, you are reading the whole story again? Yay! Yes, it was Elsa's story all along that changed Anna's life, isn't that cool? The Ledger will have even more connection to this story as it goes on. Anna is 23 in 1999 as the story begins. In reviewing the book, I may have messed up ages and dates a bit here and there, so I apologize now for any inconsistency. I am the same age as the Anna in the story as well. J More of your questions about why Elsa feels guilty, and if Anna knows that Elsa is the author of The Ledger, will become clear in time! I love being a Canadian, though I also love living in Prague just now. Don't know when I'll go home again, but someday I will. I am so pleased that you are one of my biggest fans, and your comments are so appreciated. Thanks so much for leaving your thoughts.
Punky32 – Thanks so much for taking the time to leave a review. I'm so pleased you enjoy my writing.
Valathe – I laughed when I read your review. No, they won't find the fortune teller and all that stuff in the next chapter, but when you read it, you'll understand. I hope you enjoy it! I'm looking forward to your response. Ciao!
Frank Lester – I love your comments, thank you so much for sharing them. When first writing this story, I learned a lot about keeping the balance between the past and the present time, with moving each story along with just enough intrigue on each side but not spilling too much information in either. I really enjoyed getting to know Anna and bringing her to a true realization about her own worth. I am so glad I resurrected this story, and I'm excited to share this chapter with you. I hope you enjoy it.
Aniark – I felt the same way with what Haley said to Anna. I think we all need to be reminded at times that we don't need anyone else to validate us. I also agree that present Anna needs plenty of cuddles. She's having a hard time. Enjoy the next chapter!
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~13~
Now
Haley sat in the back seat of the car, her hands clasped in her lap. She was sitting behind Elsa, who was in the driver's seat. From her vantage point, she should have been able to see Anna in the side mirror, but she could not.
Anna. Mount for God.
A dark horse.
They sped down the highway, a single car among dozens of others. Where were all these other people going, all frantic and speeding in some inane hurry? They were monks and believers of her sister Patricia's philosophies: life was only a race, a place to beat each other down in order to get ahead, oblivious to the road itself and its beauties. Death was the only thing that waited to swallow them at the finish line; would they have a chance to measure their frenzy, or would they just discover they had wasted all their days in frivolous pursuits?
Anna had no wrinkles, no grey hair. She and Haley looked the same age. Time passed her by while Death held her in his hand.
All of their paths were diverted that day, the day of the fortune teller and the fair.
Now time was this one way street that led only to death and everyone hurtled along it with no bathroom breaks or pauses to enjoy the scenery. There was no way to freeze a precious moment and make it last forever. There was no way to revisit that moment, especially when the surroundings were so bleak. Those who huddled in the back seats of their cars, moving on auto-pilot alone, were still racing down this same road, whether they wanted to or not.
Time eventually left some people behind.
People whose cars blew out in bloody fountains, catapulted from the road in violence and pain, sent as rivened spirits to the Marketplace of Souls, just like the still unnamed girl of the first red night, the girl who had loved to ride horses and wanted to visit Mount Kilimanjaro.
There were some people whose cars slowly limped along, their parts falling away, blood seeping out like gasoline, and there was no warranty. People like Casey, dying of cancer at thirteen years old.
Water may be the lubricant of the unseen world, but blood was surely the expressway. Life was just this one-way trip to the Marketplace of Souls.
Correction. Very rarely was it a two-way street, but the price was very high, too high, really, to pay. The resulting debt was deep.
Kristoff and Renee had agreed to stay home to care for Olivia and the inn. Haley had already made her travel plans, her trip to Nebraska that would start the following day. There was a strange and unknown urge to see Casey before she left, and though she tried not to evaluate it, she knew it was because Casey might not be around when she came back.
It hadn't taken long to pack, yet Elsa was the last to be ready. She had lugged a rather bulky and large bag out of her bedroom and Haley, wanting to lighten the mood, had said, "I think they have their own sinks at the hospital."
Bless her heart, Elsa tried levity as well. "I could take one if I really wanted to. This is my Mary Poppins bag. Once we get there, I'll pull out a coat rack for you."
"Only a coat rack? I want my rocking chair."
"Consider it done."
Anna had smiled at the exchange, but it was a brave little toaster type of smile, that takes a licking and keeps on ticking. It made her youthful face all the more endearing, and Haley understood Elsa's heart even more.
How did Elsa lie next to Anna at night, shivering and lifeless before the dawn? She would put her aching hand on Anna's breast and pray for a heartbeat, just as she did every night.
Why did God choose just now to play by the rules? If He had any heart at all, He would have saved them from this fate a long time ago.
Before the seawater.
And certainly before the explosion of cancerous white cells, besieging the body of a thirteen year old girl for ten long years.
It seemed apparent that sometimes God expected you to do all the work yourself, and yet He would take the credit.
Or maybe, just maybe, God was just a brave little toaster himself, takes a licking and keeps on ticking. He didn't save them from this strange fate, born of seawater, just as he didn't save that murdered girl, or little Casey, or Anna herself.
Danny once told her that sometimes God loved people so much He called them home early, by whatever means necessary.
Sometimes God and His love was a laughable concept.
Haley looked at Anna, and remembered the conversation they had in the gardens the day before, out of Elsa's hearing. Anna had pulled a photograph of Elsa from her pocket. It was of a younger Elsa, the vibrant and enchanting girl Haley remembered from the early days at the library, and it was well worn; dog-eared and creased.
Anna had discovered it under Tim's pillow the day he left, while she was making up the bed with fresh sheets. Touching it filled her with terror; had he forgotten it on purpose? Had he really discovered Elsa's identity?
Anna had been enraged and terrified in the gardens, her knuckles white with anger, her nose flaring. Haley felt much the same way, yet they decided not to speak of it to Elsa. They certainly needed no complications like this, and Elsa was worried enough without being worried about a potential stalker.
Haley hoped she could keep all of her secrets separate and safe in the maelstrom of her mind.
It was a mean two hours to Bangor, all the spaces between them cluttered with unsaid words and the unseen world.
When they finally arrived, Elsa and Haley had to flank Anna as they walked through the halls of the hospital. There were a surprising amount of reflective surfaces in the building, whether along the hallways and the plate glass that let people peer into the death chambers of their loved ones, or within the rooms themselves, upon television screens or bathroom mirrors. Surrounding her with their own bodies, it would be harder for someone to notice Anna's lack of reflection.
Haley often wondered if it made Anna feel like a condemned prisoner, or if it made her feel like a celebrity with her own personal bodyguards.
Even from down the hall, making their way to the oncology wing, they could hear the sound of vomiting. Death wasn't just blood; it was bile and puke and urine as well. Death was messy and unavoidable.
When she was young, her grandfather often told Haley that it was no good getting old. That was because he had the shakes; he had to drink his coffee through a straw, had to finger-type on a keyboard. He had to go to the bathroom too often, and withstand the bouts of coughing that plagued him.
"It's no good getting old," he had told her.
Was there really an acceptable alternative?
This certainly wouldn't be it. Anna may have appeared to be drinking from the fountain of youth, but the price was much too high to pay. The price was time itself, and blood, and seawater.
The walls themselves were shielded and sere, as if they had to protect themselves from caring too much about those who suffered within. Pockmarked with holes from ancient tacks where crayon drawings and holiday decorations had been posted, the walls also looked as pierced and jaded as Haley herself. The mirrors making up the closet doors of Casey's room had been completely covered with long rolls of brown newsprint paper, heavily marked like the walls of Elsa and Anna's bedroom with good wishes instead of bad memories. Those who came to visit Casey would write on it, sharing their love and a tiny piece of hope.
Hope was a precious commodity. If Haley gave it all away, would she have any left for herself?
The emetic bin that Casey was hurling into was pink. Gerda was holding it under her daughter's mouth, her face drawn and tight, her hair still in that perpetual bun, her body still that shade of stout. Some things didn't change.
Some things did.
Like Casey. She had lost whatever verve had once existed in her face; that spark of life, that indomitable spirit that had carried her through several relapses and remissions. She currently had curly blonde hair, but it was dull and listless, just like the rest of her. Her lips were pale, almost lost in the off-white ocean of her face.
Haley wondered if Casey would ever get the chance to be kissed.
Not the kiss you got from your auntie or grandma, nor the kiss of a parent. A real kiss, a kiss that would reach down your throat and grasp your heart and give it a squeeze or two for good measure. A kiss to set a standard for all the years to come; a kiss to be remembered and stories to be told of it to an enraptured audience of children and grandchildren. A kiss that would re-ignite the fire within, a kiss with a promise of more to come.
Haley, not quite thirty, pierced, tattooed, and despairing, ached for that kiss as well.
It seemed that brave little toasters were all the rage. When Casey lifted her head from the basin, wiping her mouth with a towel, her eyes shone; the only life in her ghostly face. A central line jutted from her chest with more intention than her tiny budding breasts. Her hand was pierced with an IV, chaining her to machines that produced visual and auditory displays to convince everyone that they were working very hard indeed.
Gerda's eyes were too devastated and tight to thank them for coming. Convinced that the puking was finished, she got up without a word, taking the basin to empty into the bathroom toilet, leaving them alone in the room with the two half-dead girls.
Anna and Casey.
They sat in a ring around the child's bed, and Haley pulled a sheet of rub-on tattoos from her backpack. It was tradition to give Casey a new removable tattoo when they visited; a way for the girl to remember them during the vicious time between their visits.
Casey chose a grinning pumpkin, and Haley carefully rubbed it on the inside of her forearm, where blue veins stuck out like streets in the map of her pale skin.
Haley didn't lie any more than she had to; when Casey asked what Haley was up to, Haley replied, "I'm off tomorrow to Nebraska. There's a neat paranormal haunting in Alliance that I want to check out."
Two parts truth, one part lie, mix well and serve. It was a recipe she had grown very good at.
Haley happened to be looking right at Casey when she said the words, so she didn't miss the quick flash of expression on Casey's face at her news. When Haley said Alliance, Casey quickly looked at her mother, then just as quickly looked back at Elsa and Anna, nonchalant as if to convince that she had done nothing.
Confused and curious, Haley paid exquisite attention to the rest of the conversation, even surreptitiously turning on her voice recorder, telling herself it was just in case.
Elsa was trying hard to contain her anxiety; she hated hospitals. Before long she had retreated into a tight little shell, her arms clasped around her waist, her left hand tucked as ever under her right.
Haley the observer, Haley the sentinel, Haley the one doomed to watch and record and interpret, saw it and remembered.
Then
Anna walked home from the library in nearly a trance, some voodoo controlled zombie that somehow managed to cross roads without being mown down by commuters. Though her eyes were open to the world, they were merely processing the visual information, while the remainder of her brain processed the words that Haley had just said.
You prop yourself up on us.
Never in her life had Anna really considered this stark truth. She had actually taken some pride in the fact that she was a lone wolf now, doing her own thing and answering to no one. Hadn't she left Hans? Hadn't she moved on her own? Hadn't she found her own job and her new place in the world?
Hadn't she still measured herself on everyone else's scale?
You are not bound by what we think of you.
The words were an auditory slap on the cheek. It was like taking all the makeup off her face and discovering that she was beautiful underneath. She didn't need props after all, nor the validation of everyone else.
You are only limited by what you think of yourself.
The thought was astounding. It was a depth charge deep inside her soul. She had once thought so very little of herself. So unworthy, so undeserving and unchallenged. A gas jockey, a Neanderthal, and certainly no more. Yet once everything was scraped away by Haley's words, absolute truth emerged, and, like all truth, it was terrifying.
Be beautiful. Be brave.
Be yourself.
Anna once needed Hans to be beautiful, just as she needed the world to be beautiful. She needed it because the world had seriously messed her over, not only with the gunman and the less-than-intimate marriage, and the world had to redeem itself, had to buy its way back into Anna's good graces with heaping doses of beauty. Once in Bath, she had needed Elsa to be beautiful as well, because this search for beauty was the only thing that made sense to her. It was the only reason to leave behind her old life, to embark on a strange new path with little hope for success.
And she had been dead wrong to think it.
It was never about discovering beauty outside herself, but only discovering the beauty within.
So once again Anna passed by that same shop window on her walk home and paused to look at her reflection in the glass. The same teal eyes looked back at her, the same red hair. What had changed in the space of a single day?
You write your own destiny.
Only the entire foundation for her future. It was an epiphany, the moment everything made perfect sense. It was her light, not her darkness, that had so terrified her.
Anna looked at herself and discovered that she was beautiful.
She discovered that she was attracted to women.
And she realized she would never apologize to anyone for who she was. Not Hans, not her parents, not God. She was Anna Blake, and she was beautiful, and she was gay, and the world was an amazing and inspiring place, full of amazing and inspiring people.
Truth shimmered inside her, a tiny and incandescent ball to light up her life. Her integrity could be sold for so little, but she held it at the core of her. Her previous choices had stripped away much of life's beauty, when she despaired of her loveless marriage and the single unlovely track of life that she had chosen when she chose Hans. Yet with a gunman and a dead dog she had found the courage to change; to leave Hans, to face a future unknown and terrifying, and what could that future be based on?
Her desire for a kiss, a real kiss, a kiss that would reassure her that she was worthy of love.
She knew that she wanted that kiss to come from a woman.
And now she knew that it was okay. Love has no boundaries. This would be the truth to anchor her, to become her sanctuary, her little piece of home in a vastly changing and often bitter world. Life could take everything away but that truth.
Beauty didn't find her anymore. Anna found it instead.
Such a small shift in her perception of the world, nearly invisible, one more course correction that would lead her to the love of her life, and blood, and seawater.
She looked at her reflection in the window, and she smiled.
The last remaining weeks of March slipped away on the current of this new course, where Anna beamed for the sheer joy of it, where she cooked because she loved it, where she threw rocks into the Kennebec River because it reminded her of being a child. The jonquils and narcissus bloomed along with the shrubs of Russian Almond, and she would notice them and their showers of petals.
Her neighbour, the woman with the small son, was so beautiful. She sang in her kitchen even when the windows were open, crooning along with the radio station and grinning when Anna discovered her. The girl at the grocery store checkout was beautiful; she remembered Anna's favourite purchases and reminded her when her favourite things went on sale.
And Elsa, the castle book girl, who still did not return to her carrel. Anna mourned her absence, wishing there were some way she could just know what had happened, but as March ended, Anna decided to stop waiting to live her life and find her love.
With all her heart, Anna wished Elsa well.
And she let Elsa go.
Mid April now, and back at her apartment, Anna took off the Claddagh ring and put it in her jewellery box with a wistful smile. She had her truth now, and she was surrounded by beauty. Her love would grow, one way or another, and would bless the lives of those around her. She did not need that love to validate her; she only needed to love.
Such joy now in her daily routines, even though Casey had again fallen ill, Gerda more haggard and silent than ever. Anna laughed and sang in the play groups with the children, excitedly sharing the lives of the patrons and their genealogy and their gardening and their golfing and whatever pursuits twinkled their eyes. Haley became the sister she never had, and the two of them began saving up to take a trip to New Orleans together; Haley wanted to study up on voudoun and Anna had never been there. Her hands, oil spotted again now, and rough, and beautiful, rediscovering the touch of engines and parts. She fixed her beater and sold it for double, and bought another. There was actually money in her bank account, and she contemplated moving into a house, sharing the house with Haley.
The universe beckoned to her, a velvet caress on her skin.
Freshness on her tongue, blue skies. Not that every moment was keen and glorious; when rough spots came, Anna had only to look in the mirror to remember who she really was.
Anna Blake, and beautiful, and gay, and proud of it.
April 18, and the lawns in front of the library were so lush an emerald green Anna could have believed in the Land of Oz, and munchkins, and the Yellow Brick Road. The whole world was pulsing with life except for four year old Casey, back in the hospital with IV's sprouting from her arms and liquid cancer fighters coursing through her veins.
No conversations with God, though, no talk with the bully in the sky.
It was two minutes until closing time. Patrons had already been shooed from the stacks and the reading room, and children disappeared with their parents under those lofty and benevolent skies. Haley was upstairs, making sure the rooms were vacated and locked.
Anna had her back to the front door, picking up a spare piece of paper and getting ready to close and count the till. She was excited; beauty awaited her on the walk home, her house was clean, her fridge was stocked, she had a bottle of wine and a brand new A.E. Cannon book to seep into.
The bell above the door announced some unwelcome person who dared walk in with only two minutes to spare.
Anna lifted her head, ready to efficiently and firmly escort said person off the premises. After all, beauty was waiting.
Elsa stood just inside the doorway.
But it wasn't the Elsa that Anna remembered.
Anna's heart thundered in her chest, and her breath went watery and weak. Who was this woman who stood there, just within the door? The alabaster majesty of her throat was constricted in raised and vicious scars. A light sweater was pulled tight around her body, held in place by a sundered hand. When Anna's gaze took in the state of that hand, her eyes instantly crowded with tears. Red, swollen, horribly disfigured, Elsa was missing the last two fingers on her left hand. The stumps still looked angry and resentful.
Elsa's eyes were bricked up tight, and she held herself very carefully, as if a shift in any direction would shatter her.
The thinnest of threads connected this woman to life and reality.
The river of Elsa's life, the tide of her destiny, the weight of her world, all hinging on this one moment that neither of them would recognize until much later, after much heartache. A pebble, diverting Elsa forever to the taste of seawater and the brash sound of a calliope.
Anna the pebble.
Anna saw all this, saw it in this moment that seemed to suspend like a drop of honey, and she understood only one thing.
There was no one more beautiful.
There was a vice around Anna's heart, constricting it in painful lubbings. A vast volcanic ache grew, heated and intense, scraping the insides of her ribs and her spine, making her breath slim, nearly delicious in its intensity. She felt no cowardice, no doubt, needed no props, not now. Only desire remained, a desire to wrap herself in Elsa's world, to the convincing of her that life was still beautiful, even here, even now, even with scars and without fingers. Only desire remained, a hunger to take the taste of bitter defeat from Elsa's mouth, to replace it with this honey.
Only desire remained, a yearning to dissolve those walls that bricked up Elsa's eyes, to the disintegrating of all the wards placed around her heart.
And Elsa was this halcyon stillness betrayed only by advancing doubt in her eyes, begging, pleading, a supplication for Anna to respond now before she was destroyed forever by silence.
The tentative bravery in Elsa's eyes was something Anna would never forget. It would be written in that most precious of memory-books, just like the moment Elsa came to her with the cleared plate of lamb and labneh, just like the expression on her face when Anna put the Claddagh ring on her right hand.
Anna would have given nearly anything to be wearing that ring right now.
Buoyed on the tide of Elsa's eyes, Anna walked over to her, the rest of the world fading to black. There was only Elsa now, and she couldn't even open her arms to Anna; she was a castle, fortified, stalwart, and unassailable.
Anna didn't mind. With infinite care, Anna opened her arms wide and enveloped the woman entirely in a gentle embrace. Anna was glowing with warmth and devotion and even a portion of pity, feeling Elsa's tightly folded arms against her bosom.
There they stayed, their hearts beating in tandem. Anna held Elsa, and remained holding her, for it sustained them both, and the devotion was fierce, and desire remained.
Still this moment remained golden, sweet, honeyed. Anna's throat constricted even tighter, for this was a moment she had dreamed of so often, the first moment that she would take Elsa in her arms, but she had never anticipated it would ever happen like this.
What had happened to her? What horrifying circumstance had catapulted Elsa so precipitously from Anna's life, landing her in a mess of scars and a disfigured hand?
Dear God, what did you do to her?
Elsa finally melted in the fire of Anna's devotion, and she unclasped her hands to timidly wrap them around Anna's slight waist. With no more encouragement than this most glorious of embraces, Elsa laid her head on Anna's shoulder and stayed there.
And there they stood, wrapped in each other, sustained by a lustrous moment in time. Rejoined.
Haley saw them, and sat on the stairs, and waited. She was a sentinel and no more.
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See you Wednesday for the next chapter!