Ghosts are not real. The thing that operates upon her as she dies is not a ghost. The thing that pulls a tangled mass of the impossible from her belly is not a ghost. It is intentional. She first felt the mass quicken inside of her when Elodie grabbed her in the crypt, and that is the only moment she has not visited, has not repaired.
She looks again at the Augustine-who-is and follows back the threads of him. The first shards of bone are laid down while Augustine-who-was still lives, while he wanders, lost, far from Jane’s voice. When Jane, alive and beyond the crypt, calls out for him, it is this new creation who responds, because she needs him to. It is this new creation who asks Jane where he is, and quickens when she tells him, “You are in the cellar.” Even as the real Augustine fades, unable to move, lying in her arms and waiting to die, another Augustine is built, piece by piece, in answer to queries Jane doesn’t realize she is posing, that he is asking, that she is answering. He is kind. He is gentle. He is the greatest surgeon the world has ever seen, and he does not believe in magic, because if only he had not, none of this would ever have happened.
She does not need to build him, because she already has. Her living self knows beneath thought, knows in place of wants, and so this new Augustine comes to her, and crosses her circle, because ghosts are not real, and he is not a ghost, not exactly.
He is something where magic converges.
She can undo him. She does not need him to exist, not if she is dead. But she looks at him, in the fullness that she has sketched him. He draws not only from her, but from the house, from his own memories that fill every crack and crevice of it. His magic still exists, and she can see it working its way into him, making him not just her creature, but his own.
In her longing, she has taken the man she married and rebuilt him the way she dreamed he could have been. Subtle variations on the original pattern; he is himself but better—or not better, but better suited to her tastes. Possibly he would have approved. Possibly he would have rather been made confident and proud and easy, the Augustine who has nothing to hide, who does not stand upon a shifting foundation of shame and obsession. She has not made him flawless—she does not know what he would look like, flawless—but she has made his weakness conquerable.
Or has that been his doing?
Whoever has made him has made something wondrous and terrible, but they have made a man, and to unmake him would be to kill him. He lacks certain finer points of existence, but he is a living thing. To unmake him would be horrible.
No, she cannot unmake him.
But she can finish him. She can kindle in him true life.
She can hope he never learns what she has done.
The day the magicians leave, and Jane goes down to the cellar, she finds herself. She begs Elodie, not knowing, not understanding, to explain it all. And instead, Jane seizes herself. Terrifies herself. Breaks herself down, knowing where it will lead, the pain that will come, the anger, the hatred. But it is necessary.
She plants the seed, a quickening of an egg outside its time, and gives it meaning, a sequential ordering. She takes from the Augustine who lies dead in her arms and gives to the mass the truth of him. It grows his hair, his teeth, his eyes. She watches as it grows with her obsession, with each forward step she takes to knowledge, and as Jane begins to know, the mass begins to know, too. When Augustine at last removes it from her body and burns it in ritual offering, it will banish his ghosts, replace the nothingness he has left in his wake, and complete the absent parts of him. The paradox will be resolved. The white brilliance of a life Jane could not have lived will shrink to a mere point buried in his heart, because, at last, all their actions will lead here.
He is her great working.
And then Jane Shoringfield Lawrence closes her eyes and for the first time in many weeks accepts what life has given her.
She dies.
CHAPTER FORTY-THREE
A GASP.
A name.
“Jane?”
Jane. Jane. Jane, with a body, a body that had weight, that felt pain, that breathed, that was no longer bound to cold stone. She gasped, air filling her lungs in a fiery cold rush, and then she was falling, falling, into Augustine’s arms. The world was faded around her, blurry, but she saw black statues with crescent heads all dressed in blood-spattered white stepping back, beginning to crumble. She heard rock upon rock, pebbles falling, then greater stones. The statues’ crescent heads broke apart, unmade, banished from the world.
Shame followed with them, and then nothing except the roar around her and Augustine’s arms beneath her.
“Augustine,” she murmured, but was too weak to move.