“We lay together like this once, remember?” he says. “In your silly pink room with the dolls and spiders. Under those dumb stars. And you made some promises to me. Do you remember?”
“No,” I say. My lips find it hard to make the word.
“Let’s remember together.”
“There’s supposed to be a cold white paste on my face,” I say with my half-numb lips. “The whisper woman puts it on. And black discs on my temples. There’s supposed to be an oil I breathe in and she breathes with me.”
He shakes his head. “We don’t need her tonight. We don’t need the fucking accessories, you and I. The oil, the discs, the paste—those are just flourishes to impress the idiots. The essence is just this. Just you and me.”
And he takes my hand again, my first love. Somehow I know that he was my first love. How nice to know that I am holding the hand of my first love and I’m not cold anymore or I’m so cold, I’m burning. It was a troubled love. There was something between us, always between us, what was it? A kind of wall. Shiny but smeared. Made of cracked glass. Hiding in the dark. Turned toward the wall, until I turned it to me.
“I would come through it to be with you, remember?” he says.
His name is nearly on my tongue. And my heart is frantic inside me.
“Yes.” It’s all so familiar, there are tears in my eyes. He tells me to look up at the glass ceiling exposing the Depths. At the red jellyfish floating by like comets with fiery tails.
“What do you see? Tell me.”
The table we’re lying on floats up now toward the sky of water. The small tank with my red jellyfish floats up with us. Beating fast and wild as my own heart is now. I am burning with cold and very still. There’s a movie playing up there on the ceiling glass like a screen. I see a young girl. Lying in her pink bedroom. Night outside. A low moon lights up the room. She’s not alone. There’s a man with her in the room. Lying beside her. She’s holding him tight. There are tears in her eyes. She’s saying, Don’t leave me. Please don’t leave me.
“Who’s that?” he asks me.
“Her first love. She’s holding her first love,” I say with my mouth that’s so very hard to move now.
“What’s his name?”
I look up at the little girl on the glass screen. Her eyes shut tight. Tears streaming down her face as there are tears streaming down my face. I feel them tingling on my skin. Her mouth saying his name again and again. And I remember. I start to say the name along with her with my now dead mouth. Together, we’re mouthing his name like a refrain in a song. And the man beside me is smiling at the sound.
Part V
23
“Tom,” I’m whispering. “Oh god, Tom. Don’t go.”
But Tom leaves me. He holds me once more and then he becomes smoke in my arms. And I’m holding nothing. Air. But he promised that if I do what he says, we’ll see each other again. He’ll see me on the other side if I do it exactly. Exactly like he said.
I’ll do it, Tom, I promise.
Not Tom, Seth.
Alone in my bed, I look up at the wrong stars that were just the right heaven when Tom Cruise was here. What did I just promise him? What did Tom ask me to do?
There’s a garden, he said. Whispered in my ear only minutes ago. You know the one. Behind your so-called friend’s house across the way.
And in my mind, I saw the bright red petals. Stacey’s hand leading me quickly through the thorny beds, toward her back door. Alla smiling hard at me, a spade in her gloved hand. I nodded.
Her Russian mother doesn’t like you coming over, does she? Doesn’t want her daughter playing with the Egyptian girl. Not even a Christian. Never baptized.
I nodded again. I hated that Tom knew this. I was so ashamed.
It’s not you that should be ashamed, Tom said, knowing my every feeling as I felt it. Can’t hide anything away. They should be fucking ashamed, he said. But they do grow the most beautiful roses, don’t they, Belle? he said, smiling at me under the stars.
Yes. And I pictured them through the cloudy glass of Stacey’s basement window. Red flashing in my eyes while I watched her dance.
So you’ll go to the ripest bed. So you’ll pick the blooms off the stems, he said.
I looked at Tom in the dark. But that’s stealing.
Not stealing, Tom said. Stealing back.
* * *
Now I’m standing in Stacey’s garden alone. Still in my white nightgown, which lifts in the breeze. The moon is red and full and low in the black clouds. No stars I can see like the ones in my bedroom. I guess the right stars are too far away to see tonight. Or the clouds are too black and thick. I’ve never been outside at night alone before. The wind is soft on my face like a hand. I’d like it if I weren’t stealing.