Vern tapped her fingers on the cabin floor. “You ever heard of a book called Giovanni’s Room?” she asked, fearing the only copy in the world was the one she’d left back at Cainland.
Gogo smiled. “I’ve got about five of that one. Hold on.” She left for her bedroom to rummage and returned a few minutes later. “Got it.”
Vern looked up. “I can read it myself,” she said. Vern cherished honesty more than anything, but, like most, she could lie to herself when her self-protective instinct demanded it.
Shrugging, Gogo opened Giovanni’s Room to the first page. “I like reading to you.”
“Fine, but only if you want,” said Vern, but before Gogo began, Vern could already hear the first lines being read.
“I stand at the window of this great house in the south of France as night falls, the night which is leading me to the most terrible morning of my life.”
Vern turned toward the source of the voice, but she already knew who it was. A haunting of Lucy sat on the couch, her old copy of Giovanni’s Room in her hands. Dead, but alive again just for Vern.
Vern had always loved that very first line because it was how she felt most every evening of her childhood. She’d stare out her own window as night fell, the night leading her to another terrible morning.
“I may be drunk by morning but that will not do any good,” said Vern, joining in as Lucy read. The words tasted as soft and sweet against her tongue as lemon cake.
Next, the narrator described the train he’d be taking with its litany of mundanities, so quotidian that he predicted his morning with the clarity of someone who’d already lived it.
That got Vern, how the future could be identical to the past. “Someone will offer to share a sandwich with me, someone will offer me a sip of wine, someone will ask me for a match,” Vern read, though she wasn’t really reading. She was remembering.
Vern inhaled the way Lucy always did before reading the last sentence of the paragraph. “It will all be the same, only I will be stiller.”
Finally Lucy was here. This time she was dressed in her Cainite uniform, though she’d taken off her headscarf. There was a fresh cut on the side of her cheek where her father had gotten her with the belt. She smelled like peaches because she’d spent the whole afternoon canning.
Vern did not touch her, though she longed to. The edges of her hair were shiny with grease, freshly laid with a hard brush and secured into cornrows. Her father hated this look because he said it made her look hard, like she’d just escaped prison. Vern understood in retrospect that he meant the style made her look like a lesbian.
“You can read, Mam,” said Howling.
Vern turned to him, too dazed by the vision of Lucy to keep the gambit up. “I memorized it,” she said. “When I was a girl. My friend read it all the time and the words stuck, I guess.”
“You know what happens, then?” asked Gogo.
“I do.”
Vern took the book and ran her fingers over the lines of text and watched for Lucy to reappear, if only so she could give her a proper goodbye.
Lucy came again, this time reading from a later section of the book. “He pulled me against him, putting himself into my arms as though he were giving me himself to carry, and slowly pulled me down with him to that bed. With everything in me screaming No! yet the sum of me sighed Yes.”
Vern shivered the way she had the first time Lucy had read it, and all the times since. It had made the private parts of herself declare themselves, suddenly wishing to make themselves known.
Hearing the details of what Sherman called the white man’s unnatural lifestyles had awakened a forbidden part of Vern. If it was so unnatural to feel this way, then why did Vern exist? She was a part of nature, too, wasn’t she? Humans and their proclivities were as much a part of the earth as trees, as rivers. Loving and fucking and kissing and nuzzling and bucking were more commonplace than sunrise.
Vern reached out to squeeze Lucy’s hand. Lucy squeezed back. In her mind, Vern said the words, I love you, I miss you. Lucy put down the book, turned to Vern, and said, “I like living inside of you.”
Vern expected her to say more, but she returned to the book and read, as if again only a looped memory. This was their goodbye to each other. This was their end.
“It’s a good book, isn’t it?” Vern asked Gogo.
Gogo smiled. “Yes.”
“Have you always known you were … like you are?” Vern whispered, but she didn’t need to whisper; the children played, oblivious.