deposits them at the entrance. Carrying her valise, Nolan leads them through a door made of glass (imagine!) into a large room with sofas, chairs and an illuminated ceiling. Someone approaches them. A woman, she realizes with a thrill. A woman who rises on the toes of her flat black shoes and kisses Nolan on the cheek.
“Thanks for being here,” he says to her. “Where’s Carolyn?”
“With Mom. She’ll keep her as long as we need.”
“Ah, she’s a peach.” Turning to Miranda, he says, “My wife, Doris.”
Doris has tightly curled black hair and a swollen stomach under a long white shirt: a mother goddess at full moon. Her black trousers stop mid-calf. Doris captures Miranda’s free hand with her two small ones. Her smooth hands are pink against Miranda’s candle-white skin, her pursed lips painted the color of fresh blood.
“You poor thing,” she says.
Panic flaps its wings inside Miranda’s chest as Nolan excuses himself to check on arrangements for viewing James’s body. She no longer wants to see a corpse. About her come and go more people than ever she’s seen. Voices from nowhere say words she can’t decipher and invisible chimes go bing-bing. She misses the slow, predictable rhythm of the house, wants to chase after Nolan and ask would he take her home. But Doris, smelling like dried wildflowers, steps even closer and shines a smile on Cian.
“What’s your name, little guy?”
Miranda answers for him. Cian isn’t one of the five words he can say.
Doris mispronounces it as a single, reverent, syllable: “Keen. That’s a new one on me. How old is he?”
“One year and four months.”
“I would have guessed younger.”
Miranda lays a hand on Doris’s melon-hard stomach.
Doris quicksteps back then catches herself and smiles. “Three more months.” She extracts a red tubular object from a large blue and white checked cloth bag. “Say, Keen, do you like kaleidoscopes?” The lad frowns and sniffs it, puts his tongue on it. She laughs. “No, no. Look into the eyehole. Here, let me show you.” Softly, almost mouthing the words, she asks Miranda, “Can he understand?”
“And why wouldn’t he?”
“Well, I wasn’t sure, given his condition.”
“There’s no want in him,” she says as James answered her when she wondered if the lad was like other children. James said naught about a condition.
Doris succeeds in getting Cian to peer into the tube and hold it by himself. “Oh, you’re clever.” She sets her bag on the floor and opens it wide. “I have more toys. Want to see?”
“See,” Cian says. Miranda sets his bare feet on the floor. He toddles to the bag and reaches in as though he’s done it forever, pulls out a block with the letter Y.
Nolan returns and says to Miranda, “Whenever you’re ready.”
Doris bends her head to touch Miranda’s: a silent benediction. “Go on,” she says, her voice as soft as dusk. “He’ll be fine with me.”
• • •
Their footsteps resound as Nolan leads Miranda through double doors and down a hallway smelling like pinecones. At the end, a blue door opens to a narrow windowless room with a red floor, a yellow chair beside a gurney. Her toes in the open shoes recoil at the cold. She shudders.
All the dark was cold and strange.
“It’s called the cooler,” Nolan says. Another word for her personal lexicon.
They move from doorway to gurney. Tightrope walking again, a thunderous pounding in her head. She stares, unseeing, at the white tiled wall before her. Nolan says, “Jeez, they usually clean them up.” He guides her to a spot in front of the chair. Asks for “a positive eye-dee.”
She slowly lowers her gaze and sucks in a breath. The body on the gurney is rigid, its face and neck the color of moldy bread, the mouth frozen into an O, the eyes open in surprise. The carapace of a life reborn in the Other Life.
So this is what death looks like.
She finds the frigid chair with the back of her legs, sits herself down and says, “Aye, ’tis James.” She knows that shiny black suit with the satin lapels and frayed cuffs, the theatrical red shoes. His Mad King Sweeney outfit, he called it.
He’d make his hair and eyes wild and say, “Tell me, is this a look that would sour cream?” He wanted people to think he was gone in the head so they’d stay away from him and not find out about her. “We are the gods’ hidden children,” he’d say, his voice defiant and proud.
The suit is wet in spots, as though he’s leaking. His cheeks have sunk into his face. Terrible strange flecks lodge in his moustache and beard. She studies his chest, half expecting its rise and fall, sees her child self crawl into his lap and fall asleep to his thumping heart.
Nolan says, “I’ll be right outside.” The door closes on the silent cold.
She reaches out and lightly touches a hand, bloodless on top, deep purple where it rests on the gurney. The fingers curl under as though they died scratching the earth. His skin is as alien as the chrysalis he once carried home to demonstrate life follows death as surely as morning, night. “One day I will shuck this shell,” he said that day, “and emerge on the other side fluttering and swooping among flowers so beautiful they forbid themselves to grow here.”
She wept at that, unable to imagine life without him. Being human is incomplete, he explained, disappointed she couldn’t see that. He could leave his body at will but a craving for whiskey held him back.
Until now.
She swallows a deep breath, holds and releases it, trying to channel his energy. She drinks more air, holds and releases it. She listens with ears and heart.
She’s never matched his concentration, never lifted the physical veil. Someday, he said, she’d summon the will to let the power enter her. Then she’d be ready to accept the legacy of her grandmother and great-grandmother, who taught him to call forth summer and winter on the harp he was to have played for her this day of summer sun standing.
She rises from the chair and sniffs his length. Unwashed hair, stale sweat, urine and feces: the smell of a body abandoned and a vow forsaken. He’s left her alone to care for the child. She and the lad were no longer enough to tether him to the World.
“Couldn’t you wait?” she cries out. She hugs herself to stop her arms from shoving him off the gurney and squeezes until she feels her pulse beneath her fingertips. Empties herself of tears then leans over him until her swollen eyes are level with his deflated ones.
He isn’t in there.
She whispers what he had her say each morning: “I am the same and not the same as I was before.”
“As tonight’s moon will not return tomorrow,” he’d say, “you will emerge altered after each night’s sleep, after each book you read, after each moment
