I looked at Jeff. Businessman. Boring face. Earthly smile.
I don’t know yet. And I turned up “Lithium” and looked out the window. Jeff was still looking at me. I turned it up as high as it would go, but I still heard the want of Jeff the whole way across the ever bluer and brighter sky.
* * *
When we landed, Jeff asked me if I needed a ride. My mother is picking me up, I told him as we walked down the long, wide arrivals corridor, my headphones still on. They’d stay on, in one form or another, for the rest of my life.
Your mother, Jeff said, like that was something he wanted to see. Where is she?
We’re riding the escalator down together toward baggage claim. A long, slow ride down. Jeff is asking me if I’m sure I don’t want a ride. If my mother doesn’t show up, he can take me. More than happy to, definitely. Anywhere I want to go. He has a limo, have I ever ridden in one of those? Oh, they’re fun. He’s surprised that a pretty girl like me has never been in one before. Striking, has anyone ever said that? Definitely.
And then I see her. At the bottom of the escalator. She’s alone. Doesn’t see me yet. She’s looking all around for me, her eyes wide open. Worried. Maybe a little afraid, which hurts me. I almost don’t recognize her because she’s cut her hair to her chin like Isabella Rossellini. Dyed it ice-blond. She looks beautiful still. But older, smaller. The blue of her eyes is less bright, more watery. Her mouth is still red, but small and puckered like now the world has a sour taste. There’s a new softness around the edges of her face, like she eroded. When she sees me, she smiles. I smile back. And just like that, she stops smiling. It’s only for a second that she stops. Something dark comes over her face like a shadow. And then it’s gone. When I get to the bottom of the escalator, she’s smiling again.
“Belle,” she says, and her eyes flood, and mine flood too. She hugs me and Jeff scuttles away. I smell her violets and smoke, and something else—a ripe sourness, a faint rot of the flesh. She holds me at a distance. “Let me look at you.”
And in Mother’s watery eyes, I see it. The dark ache. Consuming and consumed. She looks like my face is telling her something and she’s deciding if she wants to tell me. Whatever it is makes her happy and sad and scared all at once. And then she smiles over it, a window with a drawn shade. Shakes her head.
“I’m just… So happy to see you, Sunshine.”
“I’m happy to see you, too.” It’s a lie and the truth. The tears in my eyes sting with it—the lie and the truth. She hugs me again, a hug full of air. Her body so far away, I can barely feel her arms there. “I love you,” she says into the space by my ear. There’s a space between us now. A space that feels as big as the years. It’s been there ever since.
* * *
“Why did she stop smiling at you?” Tom asks me, pulling me out of the dream, back into the fog with the red jellyfish.
“I don’t know.”
“You do,” Tom says. “Because of what she saw. What did she see, Belle?”
“I don’t know, I don’t know.” Though of course I do.
“You. Her Beauty in your face. Her Beauty that you took back. You thought I didn’t keep my promises. But I did, Belle. Didn’t I get you to California in the end?”
Tom’s smiling his constellation smile, his gaze an ocean wave. If I try to focus on his face, he nearly seems to dissolve before my eyes. I remember longing for him, loving him even as I hated him because of Mother, because he left me. I remember standing in the mirror, knocking and calling his name until the glass shattered and the shards cut and my blood pooled red as roses onto the floor.
“But you weren’t there,” I say with my dead lips, with my broken voice. “You said we would be together, but you weren’t there.”
“I was everywhere,” he says. “All around you. I was the air you breathed and I was the ocean you swam in. I was the breeze that came through the window and lifted the sheets where you slept.”
And as he says this, my body grows cold. I’m deep in the cold, rippling ocean of Tom’s eyes. “I grew up swimming in your eyes,” I whisper. “I became more beautiful in my way and I grew taller and Mother grew shorter and older and her smile turned into a smirk. And the world never got cold, never turned the color of Mother again. It stayed green and blue like the great Pacific. I floated on its white waves while Mother sank to the silty bottom. Quit her acting career and opened up a dress shop. She gave it my name. I got a job as a princess and even dated a prince. And a fellow princess. But they were nothing like you. There was a space there, too, like the one between me and Mother. Like the one between me and everyone forever after. There has been a space between me and everything ever since you turned to smoke. There has been a wall of glass.”