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My strategy now was to return to the post office and tell the woman that I was staying at the Riverside Resort. But before I’d walked more than a hundred yards, I noticed small groups of people standing along the road, looking at the sky, as if they were waiting for something. Schoolchildren clustered around teachers, holding small pieces of cardboard. Everyone seemed to be talking at once.
I’d never seen an eclipse, except once, on television at the McGarritts’ house. Now I stood close to one of the groups and listened to a teacher talk about the eclipse path, about the moon moving into the earth’s umbra. She warned the children to use their cardboard pinhole cameras, and she urged them to watch for the “diamond ring effect. ”
When the teacher stopped talking, I asked her if she had an extra camera. She looked at me oddly, but she handed me two cardboard squares. “Don’t forget to turn your back to the sun,” she said. “Are you from around here?”
“I’m visiting,” I said. But I heard her think, She looks like Sara.
“Do you know my mother?” I asked, but she’d already moved away. The sky began to darken, and the air was colder now. We all turned away from the sun, like obedient ducklings. I held the squares apart, so that the one with the pinhole filtered light onto the other. The sun appeared — a white dot.
As noisy as they’d been before, the people around me suddenly grew quiet. As the moon passed through the earth’s shadow, the sun on my cardboard became a crescent — and for a moment, it did look like a diamond ring, a radiant gem attached to a thin band of light around a dark center. It was, to use Kathleen’s words, totally awesome. And those words awoke my memories of her — racing ahead of me on her bicycle, or lying on floor cushions, flipping back her hair and laughing — a girl full of life, not yet a victim. Standing in the near-darkness, I wished she could have seen the eclipse, and I hoped that she was at peace.
How much time passed before the sun emerged? We stood silently as mourners in the faint light. I stood looking down at the cardboard long after I needed to. I hoped that no one saw me cry.
The noise of the others brought me back. I wiped my eyes with my sleeve, and when they were dry, I looked up again, straight into the eyes of my mother.
She stood at the edge of a group of children, watching me. Except for her clothes — faded jeans, a t-shirt — she looked like the woman in the wedding photos: fair skin, long hair that curled back from her forehead, eyes blue as lapis lazuli.
“Well,” she said. “We wondered when you might drop in. ”
She held her arms out, and I ran into them. This time I didn’t care if anyone saw me cry.
And this is the hardest part of all, wouldn’t you agree? How to describe the first experience of your mother’s love, without sounding like a bathetic greeting card?
Perhaps I needn’t try. A phrase from the Bible conveys it: “peace that passeth all understanding. ”
Three
The Blue Beyond
Chapter Thirteen
The road to my mother’s house was narrow, made of dirt, and bumpy. Her white pickup truck skirted the deepest ruts, but it still made for an exciting ride. She drove fast, and when I looked into the side mirror I saw clouds of dust behind us.
She left that road and turned right onto an even narrower one. Small white lights marked its curves. Finally she stopped at a tall aluminum gate, connected to a high aluminum fence that sprawled off in both directions.
“Ugly, isn’t it?” she said. “But necessary, at times. ” She unlocked the gate, drove us past it, then locked it again.
I couldn’t take my eyes off her. When she returned to the truck, I said, “Please? Tell me what I should call you. ”
She smiled at me. “Call me Mãe,” she said. “It’s Portuguese for mother, and a nicer sound than mother, don’t you think?”
“Mãe. ” I extended the two syllables: MY-yeh.
She nodded. “And I’ll call you Ariella. A name I’ve always loved. ”
Tall trees made a canopy over the road; some were live oaks, trailing Spanish moss; others, I’d learn later, were mangroves.
“The river is off to the west,” Mãe said. “And to the east, we border a nature preserve. We have forty acres. ”
“We?”
“Dashay, and the animals, and me,” she said. “And now, you. ”
I was about to ask who Dashay was, but we turned another curve and I saw the house. I’d never seen anything like it. The central structure was rectangular, but a dozen or more rooms and balconies had been added on. Skylights and round windows were set at angles and positioned high or low in the walls. The house was made of gray-blue stone; later I found out that the additions were stucco, painted to match. In the late morning sun (brighter than usual, it seemed; did it seem so because of the eclipse, or because of my finding my mother?), the walls seemed to glow.
We left the truck. Mãe carried my backpack. I paused to touch the wall near the front door; close up, I could see the stone’s veins of silver, slate gray, and midnight blue. “It’s beautiful,” I said.
“Limestone,” Mãe said. “Built in the 1850s. This part is all that’s left of the original house; the rest was destroyed by Union soldiers. ”
Beside the front door stood a stone statue of a woman riding a horse, next to an urn full of roses. “Who is she?” I asked.
“You don’t know her?” Mãe seemed surprised. “Epona, goddess of horses. Every good stable has a shrine for her. ” She opened the heavy wooden door, and beckoned me in. “Welcome home, Ariella. ”
The smell of home: wood polished with the oil of Meyer lemons, roses, a savory soup cooking somewhere, lavender, thyme, white geranium, and a hint of horses. Mãe removed her shoes, and I did the same, embarrassed at the sight of my socks, one of which had a hole in its heel. She noticed but didn’t say anything.
My first visual impression of the place was a jumble of things: each wall (painted varying shades of blue) had a mural, or framed paintings, or a bookcase, or an alcove holding statues, flowers, and herbs. The furniture was simple, low and modern, most upholstered in white. Carpets and cushions were scattered everywhere. She led me down a corridor, into a room with periwinkle walls, a vast white bed, and an ivory chaise next to a floor lamp with a mother-of-pearl shade.
It was so different from the ornate Victorian furnishings of my father’s house. I’d always assumed that my mother had decorated it, but now I wondered. And that thought brought me back to the one that kept me from happiness: why had she left us?
She looked at me, and I tried to hear her thoughts, but couldn’t. “You probably have questions, Ariella. I’ll answer them as best I can. But first, let me get you into some clean clothes and feed you. All right?”
“All right,” I said. “Sorry about the socks. ”
She put her hand on my shoulder and looked into my eyes, and I wanted to melt into her arms again. “You need never apologize to me,” she said.
My mother — Mãe — ran me a bath with rose petals floating in it. “To soften the skin,” she said. Her own skin was like velvet. And while her voice shared Sophie’s Savannah accent, its pitch and rhythm were more like those of Mr. Winters. Her voice was gentle and light, as hypnotic as my father’s voice, but in a different way.
“You look like your wedding photo,” I said.
“I thought your father would have put all of those things away. ”
“Sophie showed me. She gave me an album. ”
“So you’ve been with Sophie?” Mãe shook her head. “It’s a wonder she didn’t shoot you. You must tell me all about her, after your bath. ”
She left me in the bathroom — a hexagonal room with cornflower-blue walls, and a large stained-glass window over the tub depicting a white horse against a cobalt background. I shed my clothes and slipped into the water, rose petals floating over me, and I looked up at a skylight that framed the leaves of a vine-covered tree and a smal
l patch of lazuline sky. On the wall over the tub, shelves held small green plants, each in a mother-of-pearl pot.
When I left the bathroom, wrapped in a fragrant towel (she added geranium or thyme oil to the laundry rinse water, I found out later), I saw that new clothes had been left on my bed: a shirt, pants, and underwear, all made of the same soft cotton, the color of blanched almonds. They looked comfortable — but they wouldn’t protect me as the metamaterial suit had. Maybe I wouldn’t need to be invisible, here.
I dressed, slathered on sunscreen — a ritual automatic by now as breathing. Humans and vampires alike need constant protection from the sun. I hope you will remember that. If more humans realized it, they wouldn’t age as horribly as they do.
On the table next to the bed lay a wooden comb. I tried to un-snarl my hair, not altogether successfully.
Mãe knocked and came in, a small spray-bottle in her hand. “Sit,” she said.
I did, and she sprayed something on my hair, then worked the comb through the tangles. “Do you recognize the smell?”
I didn’t.
“Rosemary,” she said. “Mixed with a little white vinegar. ”
“I know about vinegar,” I said. “And I’ve read the word rosemary, but I never smelled it before. ”
She worked the comb gently through my hair. “What did he teach you?” she said.
“He taught me a great deal,” I said. “History, science, literature, philosophy. Latin, French, Spanish. Some Greek. ”
“A classical education,” she said. “But not Epona, or the smell of rosemary?”
“He didn’t teach me about some things,” I said slowly. “I’m not good with road maps. And I don’t know much about goddesses. ”
“He didn’t teach you mythology. ” She said it decisively. “There, your hair is like silk. Now let’s have lunch. ”
The kitchen was another large, high-ceilinged room, with stone tiles of alternating shades of blue on the floor and walls of turquoise-colored plaster. Copper pans hung from the ceiling, and a saucepan simmered on a blue-enameled stove. Eight chairs were pulled up to a long, battered oak table.
I wondered how to tell my mother about my diet, for want of a better term. “I don’t eat the same foods as most people,” I said. “That is, I can eat them, but only certain foods make me feel strong. ”
She ladled soup into two large blue bowls and carried them to the table. “Try some,” she said.
The broth was dark red, with a hint of gold in it. I took a cautious spoonful, then another. “Oh, it’s good,” I said. The broth had vegetables in it — carrots, beets, potatoes — but I couldn’t identify the other flavors. It was thick and sultry, and it made me happy.
“It’s red miso soup. ” My mother took a spoonful herself. “With beans, lentils, saffron, and some other things — fenugreek and lucerne and such — added for flavor. Plus some vitamins and mineral supplements. You haven’t had this before?”
I shook my head.
“That’s right, eat,” she said. “You’re too thin. What did he feed you?”
Her voice wasn’t critical, but the references to “he” were making me nervous. “My father hired a cook especially for me,” I said. “I was on a vegetarian diet. And he and Dennis monitored my blood, and gave me a special tonic when I was anemic. ”
“Dennis,” she said. “How is he?”
“He’s well,” I said politely. Then, more honestly, I said, “He’s worried about his weight, and about getting older. ”
“Poor thing. ” She rose and took my bowl to refill it. “And Mary Ellis Root — how is she?”