What even is this? Alexei had said while we floated through the cave. Could we be dead? Would we even know?
I don’t think we’d know anything, I’d said. In general.
Yeah, he’d said, it’s just wishful thinking that life and death would be interchangeable. This is nice, though. It’s very nice.
The whole thing had been impossible from the beginning, of course, but I still felt a stupid sense of loss whenever I thought about him. Other people get to have infatuations that last long enough to become real love and then disappointment and boredom. I only got the cold, extraterrestrial luminescence of an afternoon and evening spent staring into someone’s face and saying, Yes, exactly, I know exactly what you mean.
“I’d like to see that someday,” Redwood said about the glowworms. “Here—come into the kitchen. I have a couple more things to do and then we can eat.”
“You cooked?”
“It’s a salad. I assembled.”
The kitchen’s big sliding doors were open to the patio, and he’d set two places at a table under a pergola grown over with wisteria. While he whisked vinaigrette, he said, “Sorry, I’m realizing now that I didn’t really think through how much like a date this would feel. I hope it’s not awkward for you. I just wanted a chance to talk without any minders around.”
“Will it feel more or less like a date if we have a glass of wine?” I said.
“Who cares?” He opened the refrigerator, its stainless steel door as large and heavy as a bank vault’s, and retrieved a bottle, poured two glasses. His hands were unexpectedly elegant, his fingers long and deft. We clinked. “Cheers. You read Marian’s book, right? Don’t break my heart and tell me you only read the script.”
“Of course I read it,” I said, as though I would ever think of not reading the book, as though I’d read all the Archangel books and not, as was the truth, only the first one. “I’d actually read it before, as a kid, basically by accident.” I realized I was wading into a conversation about my parents, so I said, “I read your mom’s book, too.”
“What’d you think?” Before I could answer with some vague flattery, he said, “I know it’s not the best thing ever written. I thought I should say that. I didn’t want you to think I thought it was some masterpiece.”
“It’s good,” I said.
“So noncommittal. But what?”
I looked at him over the rim of my glass. “But nothing.”
“Come on. Say it. I’m not defensive about her book. She is, fair warning, but I’m not.”
I suspected he was setting a trap, but I still answered. I said I thought the voice of the book, Marian’s voice, the I his mother had given her, didn’t line up with the voice in the actual book Marian had written, as herself, for real.
All I knew, Carol Feiffer had written, as Marian, all I’d ever known, was that I belonged to the sky.
All I knew, she’d written in the next chapter, all I’d ever known, was that no man would ever own me.
In her journal, in what’s now Namibia, Marian had written: I’d like to think I will remember this particular moon, seen from the particular angle of this balcony on this night, but if I forget, I will never know that I’ve forgotten, as is the nature of forgetting. I’ve forgotten so much—almost all I’ve seen. Experience washes over us in great waves. Memory is a drop caught in a flask, concentrated and briny, nothing like the fresh abundance from which it came.
I told Redwood I thought Carol had missed the point of Marian a little bit. I said the book felt wishful, like it was trying to force Marian to be something—someone—more familiar and reassuring than she actually was.
Redwood nodded almost sorrowfully and said, yes, he knew what I meant. “It’s trying to bend Marian to make her more—I hate this word—relatable, but in the end it distorts her.”
“Exactly,” I said. More than once, while reading Carol’s book, I’d thought of the fan fiction Oliver and I had read about ourselves, the dollhouse feeling of it, the author gripping us so tightly we might have snapped in half. I live you so much.
Redwood blew out a long breath. “My mother has strong impulses toward tidiness. She’s not religious, but she still thinks everything happens for a reason. In the middle of a nuclear war, she’d be the one saying everything was going to be fine, and it’s nice she’s an optimist but annoying she’s not more of a realist. I’m not sure she actually remembers anymore what parts of the book she invented. Anyway, I made a decision to be purely supportive. Grab the wine, would you?” He picked up the salad. I followed him outside.