I sat down on the ground, the crinoline bunched up underneath me, and I held out my hands to collect the ash that fell from the sky like flakes of snow.
Margot Simons found me. She tried to lift me, but my legs didn’t work right, so instead she sat down next to me on the road. Her face was streaky with soot and dried tears. She put her arms around me.
“It’ll be all right, Lumen,” she said.
“Yes,” I said.
“I’ll take care of you,” she said. “I’m not going anywhere,” she said.
“Yes.”
“He loved you,” she said. “There was nothing else in the world for him but you.”
The ash collected on my palms. Miss Simons tightened her arms around me. She used one hand to brush away the ash that was collecting in my hair.
“You’re going to be okay,” she said.
I said, “Yes.”
Chapter 14
Jack drives. It is deep night. No moon at all. There are no streetlights out here. We are in the middle of a great black, the aperture of our headlights opening on the two-lane blacktop scrolling out before us, the margins of the trees flashing past. The only sound is the stable hum of the engine and the groan of the upholstery under us as we shift in our seats.
I glance into the backseat at our son, Marcus. Jack could not find someone to watch him when he came to fetch me from jail.
“He’s asleep,” I say.
“It’s late,” Jack says.
“It’s late,” I repeat, nodding.
I am very much alone, the light in the car strange, the flashes from the oncoming headlights casting shadows that make my husband look like someone I don’t know.
He looks at me, earnest.
“It’ll be okay,” he says. “Helena and her fiancé won’t press charges. They won’t. I’ll talk to them. You’ll apologize.” He makes his hand into a flat sword and cuts it through the air with each point. “She’ll forgive you. It’s what people do.”
This is true. It requires unrelenting effort to hate. It takes strength, commitment. Most of us are not that ambitious.
“We’ll…” he goes on, “we’ll schedule an appointment for you. To see a psychologist. It’ll be good for you to talk to someone. We’ll find someone you can talk to, someone you feel comfortable—”
He stops, looking to see how I will respond.
“I will,” I say simply. “I trust you.”
He gives me a tentative smile. A solitary car comes from the other direction, and we squint our eyes against its headlights. Then there is a shift in his voice toward gentleness.
“How are you feeling?” he says.
“Sleepy,” I say. “But okay. I feel fine.”
Then we are quiet for a while. In my mind, I say a little prayer for my father, but it’s a prayer I sometimes say over my son in his crib, and sometimes over my husband when he is asleep beside me in our bed. It was one of the traditional lullabies in Pale Miranda—first taught to me by Polly when we were both very little girls. It made everything seem blameless, and it went like this:
Sleep now, baby— Sleep now, child.
See the moon, so still and mild.
Dream away
From sun’s bright noon.
I’ll watch you walking on the moon.
And when you’re older,
Stout and true,
I will see the moon in you.
None of us is a saint, but the world is still magic.
“Just a few weeks till summer,” Jack says beside me.
“It’ll be nice.”
“We’ll have time. Maybe we should go somewhere.”
“Yes,” I say. “Let’s go somewhere. Where do people go?”
My mother, she got lost during the Lacuna, the June moon. My father, he died just before it. Do you know what a lacuna is? It’s a space. A hole. A lumen. In music, it’s a pause that makes you hear silence as though it were being played by an instrument. In moons, it is the middle of the year—a hiatus. In literature, it’s something left out of a manuscript. Here is a lacuna:
Do you see me there? In that empty space—that’s where I got lost. It’s where I went from that night to this one. It’s where my father and Blackhat Roy went. I hope it’s bright where they are. Bright as my aching girl-chest, where their hearts, black and white, still do dances.
Next to me in the car, Jack takes a deep breath. Then he speaks, haltingly, as though any word might cause the whole night sky to collapse.
“You know,” he says, “you can…talk to me.”
“About what?”
“I don’t know. About things. Anything. Whatever’s important.”
After a pause, I say:
“I miss my father.”
I turn and look at my husband, the way the dim light from the dash makes his face glow with a strange tint. His skin seems almost unreal, his eyes glassy. Then I look at my son, asleep in the backseat. I can see his little chest rise and fall under his striped cotton shirt, his hot breath coming slow between parted lips, his head, hair messy, cocked to one side and leaning against the cushion of his car seat. His hands rest loose on his lap, but I see his tiny fingers twitch slightly around his stuffed pet bunny.
I think of an Easter Sunday, when I was ten.
Every year my father made a special Easter egg hunt for me. He hid them in difficult places, both inside and outside the house, then he gave me clues to those hidden treasures in the form of rhyming couplets written in script on index cards.
That year I was stuck on the last one. The clue said this:
Here lies the measure of all our worth— Look where sleeps the most precious thing on earth.
I looked in all the places in the house where we kept valuables. I scoured the sideboard in the kitchen, where we kept the china and the silverware. I looked through my father’s office drawers, where he kept important documents. I sifted through the dresser where we kept all the things that once belonged to my mother.
While I looked, he watched me, smiling. He refused to help me with any additional hints.
I scowled at him. He gazed back at me with a look I’ll never forget.