CHAPTER THIRTY-SEVEN
Reparation
Even though her eyes are closed and the room is quiet, Prissi knows she isn’t alone. She imagines opening her lids to find Jiffy Apithy smiling down on her, but in her heart, she knows that’s not who she will see. The thought of Jiffy reminds the girl of her feverish time underground and the nightmarish feeling of having the zie’s bite cleaned and stitched. Now, for a second time, that same dark presence is hovering near. Prissi slightly flexes her muscles, starting with the arch of her feet and working her way up her legs to her torso. Each time she changes her focus, the type of pain and intensity change, but nothing is without its hurt. When the teener tries to move her wings, she realizes that they are immobilized. She tries to lift a shoulder, but that, too, seems to be pinned down. An image of a butterfly, in a glass-faced case, wings spread, thorax riding on a silver pin wells over Prissi and causes her to mewl. She thrashes harder to move her wings and when she cannot, that sense of being pinioned elides into the desperation of her last seconds in the air before the crash. Her mewls turn to screams, which continue even after cool skin, as soft and smooth as chamois, brushes across her forehead and a raspy whisper tells her a dozen times, and then a dozen more, that she is safe.
Prissi knows that even if the whisper tells a truth and she is safe, that she is not sound. The thought slams her like a sledgehammer when it comes to her that she only thinks her wings are bound when, in fact, they are paralyzed.
Sitting across the room, two burning eyes looking out from a frazzle of white hair and a frumple of gray cloth, Olewan has watched her daughter come back to earth. Olewan has been expecting the girl to return—but not so much as a traveler certain to arrive on the landing strip at a specific time, but more as a 18th century trans-Atlantic voyager who has a modest chance of arriving within a certain span of weeks. The girl is tenacious. Olewan has spent hours looking at her daughter’s face and she is sure the girl is not only tenacious, but also bright, competitive, cynical, teachable and impatient, very impatient. As Olewan sits through the hours and lets her body rock in rhythm with the increasingly steadier rise and fall of the girl’s chest, she thinks of how that litany of words had been used to praise and contemn her so many years before.
As the old woman thinks of who and what she had been three-quarters of a century before and of the links between that long ago girl and the girl on the narrow hospital bed across the room, parts of her begin to fissure. In between the cracks, like a precious mold worming its way through cheese, grow feelings long suppressed. Loss. And love. And loss. And love. Like the double click of a metronome, love and loss kept a beat in Olewan’s head, a beat so insistent that the beat of her own heart increases and over the hours becomes ever less steady even as the girl’s grows more so.
Pride and anger have been Olewan’s sustenance, her daily gruel for so long that the possibility of a menu change has been beyond consideration for decades. Until now, when, with the suddenness of the cherry blossoms’ arrival, loss and love appear and with them the possibility of driving pride and anger aside.
The girl across the room, of her but not from her, of her but not hers, is destroying what had been inviolate for a half-century. From the sharp shards and bitter ashes of Elena Howe’s life is arising a phoenix-like desire to love. To love so truly, to love with such abandon and determination that love’s ever-present companion, loss—the loss of that love or the one loved—would make death seem a welcome dream. With twisted fingers twitching and withered arms forming a formidable X across a part of her that she now finds frightening, Olewan sits still while her insides fracture like tempered glass.
Holding a crippled hand to her heart, as if that frail claw could contain what is exploding within, Olewan shuffles across the room. She bends over the girl, bends deeper until pain jolts up and down her spine, bends even further so that the tendons at the back of her knees pulse with a white burn, bends more, touches the girl’s wrist with the dry point of her finger tip and, then, touches her lips, lips that resemble earthworms trapped on hot concrete, to the lips of the girl.
Olewan has only backed off three steps before her kiss breaks the spell and the girl’s eyes flutter, her own lips quiver, and she begins to thrash and scream.
Love’s black magic at work.
Standing stock still, as if afraid of drawing closer, Olewan hushes the girl. She spins lariats of comforting words in the hope that words can heal, but her efforts have no effect. It isn’t until a long minute of watching the girl’s thrashing and listening to her tortured wails that Olewan realizes that her palliative words have been thought and not spoken. Olewan sucks air into her lungs and forces her feet to shuffle forward until she stands over the screaming girl. She rubs the scorched brow with the back of a walnut-sized knuckle and speaks her crackly, grinding words of comfort. The louder the girl screams and the more violently she fights to be free of her bonds, the surer the old woman grows in the knowledge that she is having her best day in more than a half-century.