9. Clarity
Where are you from, Peter Lake?
His eyes had caught the light, soaking it up like salt-soaked coal. Black, orange, rose… He'd smiled and a map had unfolded before her. Beverly had looked at him and she'd felt no fear.
A boat.
His answer, sharp, unexpected in its simplicity. Her laugh, somewhat uppity. She'd been struck by an intoxicating amusement.
Again, she'd been greedier back then. Her back to the sunlight. Casting a shadow upon this older, stronger man, one who'd imagined himself so menacing. She'd somehow reveled in his humility.
His audacity to crack these walls open, to skulk about. A mouse, caked in soot, his nose twitching, his whiskers trembling. Peter Lake had looked so lost, so taken aback by her joy.
A boat?
She'd understood better later. She'd loved him later.
Oh…
Beverly coughed out boiling water. Stardust, salt, white and crispy like crusty fireflies, dead, in her mouth.
"Open your eyes, honey."
She clutched her chest. Squeezing, despairing fingers, digging into the bedsheets, the skin they shielded. Beverly's stomach twisted in panic. She found her legs. She curled herself up, shrinking, cowering.
She was swaying. Rocking.
They'd rocked together…
"I don't have much time. Open your eyes."
She'd said this to him.
Open your eyes.
He'd been breathing so quietly…
"I'm dreaming," Beverly whimpered. "This is all a dream…"
A melody, faint and insufferable. Crickets of crystal, clinking along the tiles of this deep blue sky. She didn't want to scream now. Her fingers weren't pressing any keys.
"I wish I could speak to you thoroughly."
A voice. Soft, yet sandy. And thick, and somewhat tired.
"But one day you'll understand."
"This is a dream…"
"Speaking too much could break the delicate threads that hold these stories together. Like words themselves, destinies could waft in the breeze and fade into silence, within a second."
"What are you talking about?" she groaned, her voice brusquer than she intended it to be.
She was rocking, afloat, damp hair plastered to her face. Body curled, wrapped in the bedsheets. A night ablaze with starlight. She could see, in spite of the darkness. Perhaps because of the darkness. These scalding seeds of gold, popping, melting. Candle wax bleeding into the sea.
An oil lamp, feeble and trembling, shaken by the tide. Gusts of burnt mustard washing across a soft, dark face. The stranger's eyes shone in the half-light. For a moment Beverly thought that the sky itself was addressing her.
"You'll understand soon enough. We know much and speak little. We speak little because we know much."
She didn't want to cry. She had no privilege to become embarrassed. Her heartbeat was silent, stone-still. A frog waiting to jump.
"My friend is in the water," Beverly said, shivering. "He's all alone, I need to bring him up…"
"He can't come up here."
"Then- Then let me go back down!"
"You may dive down. You may not touch him."
"Please-"
"You cannot touch him," the stranger said. "Not with these hands. He will never see you or feel you as you are, as long as you're up here and he's still down there."
His eyes moved wildly as he spoke. Whites reshaping, thinning and thickening, like moons. Crescend silver rings. His eyebrows waving, a slight tremor tinging every occasional word that slithered out of his mouth.
Where are you from?
Beverly cast no shadows at this moment. It was too dark and too late for her to tower over anyone, for her to jest at the expense of men or their vulnerability, their fear of her. And the stars were too loud, all around her, and the ocean moved.
A boat…
"If you wish to touch him," the stranger said, "it will be through other means. A gust of wind. Raindrops, snowdrops."
He blinked, sighing. Relaxing. Beverly shook her head. She swallowed and tasted a whisper of champagne.
"Sir…"
"I'm sorry," the stranger murmured. "I can say this much: I'm sorry, honey."
He breathed out mist that flushed amber in the oily spotlight cast by the lamp. The stranger dug into his pockets and dredged out a single coin.
He waited a moment, then his eyebrows curled, his lips thinning out. And he spoke.
"I know him. Your friend."
Beverly stared quietly.
The stranger spoke again: "Peter Lake."
She parted her lips but said nothing.
So, the stranger took a deep breath and spoke once again: "He's known me for a while. I've known him for a very long time."
His every attempt at speaking was carried with intensity and hesitation. Beverly wondered about him. She thought of how long he may have sailed these waters, all by himself. Perhaps forever. The whole thing seemed preposterous, beyond her wildest theories, but she did consider that conversation had become a rarity to him. A privilege lost to the sea.
And she did understand the pain of this loss.
Squeak.
For her, a loss only barely prevented.
The floor squeaks.
Beverly felt dizzy. The boat wobbled from side to side and the ocean was black and splattered with stars.
The stranger continued: "On Christmas Day, he gave me this."
He had the most elegant hands Beverly had ever seen. Deft, long fingers, turning the coin to the embering starlight. A graceful twirl, so simple yet so beautifully mesmerizing. Glimmers, breaking into spears of gold. Blinding her momentarily.
She recalled the wrapping paper. The chocolate and Peter's scarce understanding of commerce.
This is gold. This is currency.
The glossy yellow glare danced along the stranger's face. He was younger than his voice suggested. His eyes were solid in hue, brown, sweet, iris-less. His eyelashes curled at the edges, like a feline's.
"I didn't expect him to be the one to return me up here," the stranger commented. "Of all people, him. Peter Lake had nothing to give and yet he gave me this."
There was a subtle peculiarity to this face. Beverly watched him intently. To the point that she couldn't look away, even as she tried. She couldn't piece the element he lacked, what was missing in these perfect hands and this youthful face, that caused her to hesitate from regarding him as reality.
Peter Lake had been real from the moment she lay eyes on him. Everything he did moved to the rhythm of the city that she inhabited. Even if it was against his desire to function this way, he was mundane, he belonged to the world, he was anything but a dream…
"What's your name?" she whispered. "Can you tell me that?"
"I'd rather you tell me," the stranger said. "Like I said, I prefer to speak as little as possible."
"Are you afraid?"
"Yes," he said, chuckling dryly. "Terribly."
He smiled a little. Beverly sat up and the wind teased the curve of her neck. She let her hand slide away from her chest and the inert muscle caged within her ribs.
Where are you from, Peter Lake?
She did understand. Though she made no attempt to gauge a vocal affirmation from him. She was tired and her head was spinning and the air was thinner, colder, up here.
Up here…
Where are you now?
And despite her scarce comprehension of the current situation, it was always in Beverly's nature to break a picture into pieces. To web it all back together. To shatter and reconstruct. Music sheets, broken into music. Crickets freed. She wasn't real to her father or anyone else in need of heroes. She had to break in order to fix. She created her own puzzles.
Overtime, she'd realized that this was the most direct way of finding clarity. Sentences, broken, reshaped.
Say "America."
Gazes unspooled and translated. True intentions, found.
Where are you from, Peter Lake?
Not just theirs, but her own, found, too. Who did she want to ask this particular question? Who could she trust with the answer?
A boat.
She'd broken Peter Lake down and pieced him back together so many times. It was why she liked to stare at him so intently. She liked complicated puzzles. She liked being proven right, too.
Where are… you from?
She craved a certainty that sank beneath the waves, farther and farther away from her reach. Joining Peter, wherever he lay, weeping, with a corpse in his arms.
You…
So she swam, diving.
Just you.
Like she'd dived before. Into the wind. Her eyes open. She hadn't screamed.
"You're Cecil," she murmured. "You work in the stables of Grand Central Station. You showed him how to get to the attic…"
The stranger hesitated. But then a boyish grin sweetened his shadow-cast face. And he offered one of his beautiful hands to her and Beverly stared at it, a chill coursing through her veins.
"Are you real, Cecil?"
Quietly, he replied: "I can't be. Real people are not supposed to be like me."
In a flash Beverly took his hand. As if a handshake would seal this vessel together and prevent her from sinking again, into the blue, the depth. The death she'd almost touched.
And Cecil burst out laughing.
Author's Note: To anyone who is here today, thank you for reading.
I stopped writing this chapter halfway through and jotted down some extra stuff in my map because I was becoming confused with what I was doing and that cannot happen XD I'm sure that by the time Beverly actually gets to the Brooklyn Bridge moment, I'll have a much easier time writing this. I know exactly what to do between this chapter and Peter's "death," so for now, I'm good. Just don't be shocked if I take a little longer than usual to write the next couple of chapters. I should have foreseen this but I rarely have a hard time writing these things XD Oh well. In the end, I like the result, and the story is still moving forward, so that's all that matters.
I've said that, for "The Flight of the Magpies," I am making way more changes to the actual plot than I did in "A Star in the Lake." In "A Star in the Lake," I did change a lot of the things that happen, sure, and I elongated the timeline to make room for countless original scenes and dialogue, I basically made it longer XD, but the events that take place are still all in all faithful to the movie's chain of events. Peter and Beverly at the dance, Peter and Beverly's love scene, Beverly's death, Peter's chocolate, Peter's return to New York, Beverly's funeral, Peter's death. All things that happen in the movie, that still happen in my version.
For Part 2, I have a lot of changes in mind to the plot. The ending will not change, that is for sure, but some (not all, but some) of the key events that the movie has in its second half, I really want to change: putting myself in Beverly's POV is already a very different route from what the movie actually does, which is leave Beverly behind and never show her, at least physically, ever again. That will not happen in my version. I have an entire storyline planned out for Beverly and I'm hyped to see it unfold.
But, then again, I'm still technically in the prologue, before the events in which ASITL ends, and prologues are always a little boring. To make up for it, I tried making this as aesthetically pleasing as possible - I'm being faithful to my "the sky is an ocean" idea, Cecil is literally on a boat in the ocean, with a lamp, he is a star in the water. I was visualizing lots of The Little Prince-esque imagery while writing this chapter, and I honestly love that because I feel a great tenderness for The Little Prince, literally one of my favorite books ever :,3
So... yeah. This chapter was tricky to write because I was bracing myself to fully going all the way with this plan. The weirdness, the ridiculousness, all aspects that I love from the movie, that I want to be present in my version, just differently. I love the movie and I want my story to give it justice. I just want it to be different, I want it to be my own, you know? My own reinterpretation :3 But when I actually try to explain my own additions to the worldbuilding I always feel kind of dumb XD
For example: Cecil saying that "he cannot speak much." I thought it'd make sense in the "Winter's Tale" universe if stars/angels, like Cecil (and also like Beverly) cannot actually reveal, with words, the future that awaits the people they guide. I thought it was logical. So I try to explain it, and, again, expository worldbuilding has never been my strong point, so if I made anyone cringe or confused, I'm sorry XD
Well, then... This Author's Note is all over the place, I apologize, but I will get back to you as soon as I can, and I'll try to get to the Brooklyn Bridge quickly and let the plot actually begin for real. Basically, for Peter to return. I already miss him, as you can see I don't shut up about him when speaking from Beverly's POV XD I miss my boy...
See you next time! Take care. And again, thank you for reading.
