I have no answer to that. Only Martin could explain it, but he’d taken the secret with him on his three-story plunge to the pavement below his window.
“I should go,” Nina says then, but she makes no move to open the door.
“What about the sword?” I ask.
She turns to me. My eyes are adjusted enough to the vagaries of the lighting to see the expression on her face, but I can’t figure it out. Sadness? My own feelings returned? Fear? Maybe a mix of the three.
“Would you do this for me?” she asks. “Would you bury the sword—in hallowed ground?”
“You mean like in a churchyard?”
She shakes her head. “It will need an older hallowing than that. There is a place where the river meets the lake.”
I know where she’s talking about. The City Commission keeps the lawns perfectly groomed around there, but there’s this one spot right on the lake shore where a stand of old pines has been left to make a little wild acre. The trees there haven’t been touched since the city was first founded, back in the eighteenth century.
“Bury the sword there,” she tells me. “Tonight. Before the sun rises.”
I nod. “What’ll happen to you?”
“Ailine says it would let me sleep. Forever.” She smiles, but it doesn’t touch her eyes. “Or at least until someone digs it up again, I suppose.”
“I . . . I’d do this other thing,” I say, “but I’m too scared.”
She nods, understanding. “And you don’t believe.”
She says it without recrimination. And she doesn’t say anything at all about love, about how, to make the sacrifice willingly, I’d have to really love her. And she’s right. I don’t believe. And if I love her, I don’t love her enough.
She leans across the seat and gives me a kiss. I remember the last time she did this. There was so much promise. In her kiss. In her eyes. Now she’s only saying goodbye. I want to talk to her. I want to explain it all over again. But I just let her go. Out of the car. Down the street. Out of my life.
There’s a huge emptiness inside me after she’s gone. Maybe what hurts the most is the knowledge I hold that I can’t let go—that I love her, but I don’t love her enough. She asked too much of me, I tell myself, but I’m not sure if it’s something I really believe or if I’m trying to convince myself that it’s true to try and make myself feel better. It doesn’t work.
I drive home to get the sword. I unwrap it, there in my hall, and hold it in my hands, trying to get some sense of Nina from it. But it’s just metal. Eventually I wrap it up again and take it down to my car. I get a shovel from the toolshed behind the building. It belongs to the guy who lives on the ground floor, but I don’t think he’ll miss it. I’ll have it back before he even knows it’s gone.
And that’s how I get here, digging a grave for a sword in hallowed ground. I can hear the lake against the shore, the wind sighing in the pines above. I can’t hear the city at all, though it’s all around me. Hallowed ground—hallowed by something older than what I was taught about in Sunday school, I guess. Truth is, I turned into an agnostic since those long-ago innocent days. I was just a girl then, didn’t even know about sapphic impulses, little say think I might be feeling them.
It’s easier to dig in amongst the roots of these pines than I would have thought possible, but it still takes me a long time to get the grave dug. I keep stopping to listen to the wind and the sound of the lake, the waves lapping against the shore. I keep stopping to look at the sword and the minutes leak away in little fugue states. I don’t know where my mind goes. I just suddenly find myself blinking beside the grave, gaze locked on the long length of the sword. Thinking of Nina. Wanting to find the necessary belief and love to let me fill the emptiness I feel inside.
Finally it’s getting on to the dawn. The grave’s about four feet deep. It’s enough. I’m just putting things off now. It’s all so crazy—I know it’s crazy—but I can’t help but feel that it really is Nina I’m getting ready to lay in the hole and cover over with dirt.
I consider wrapping the sword back up again, but the blanket was Martin’s and somehow it doesn’t feel right. I pick the sword up and cradle it for a moment, as though I’m holding a child, a cold and still child with only one long limb. I touch the blade with a fingertip. It’s not particularly sharp. I study the tip of the blade in the moonlight. You’d have to really throw yourself on it for it to pierce the skin and impale you.
I think maybe Nina’s craziness is contagious. I find myself wishing I loved Nina enough to have done this thing for her, to believe, to trust, to be brave—crazy as it all is. I find myself sitting up, with the sword tip lying on my knees. I open my blouse and prop the sword up, lay the tip against my skin, between my breasts, just to see how it feels. I find myself leaning forward, putting pressure on the tip, looking down at where the metal presses against my skin.
I feel as though I’ve slipped into an altered state of consciousness. I look down to where the sword meets my skin and the point’s gone, it’s inside me, an inch, two inches. I don’t feel anything. There’s no pain. There’s no blood. There’s only this impossible moment like a miracle where the sword’s slipping inside me, more and more of its length, the harder I push against it. I’m bent almost double now and still it keeps going inside me, inch after inch. It doesn’t come out my back, it’s just being swallowed by my body. Finally I reach out with my hands, close my fingers around each side of the hilt, and push it up inside me, all the rest of the way.
And pass out.
8
When I come to, the air’s lighter. I can’t see the sun yet, but I can feel its light seeping through the trees. I can still hear the lake and the wind in the pines above me, but I can hear the traffic from the city, too.
I sit up. I look at the grave and the shovel. I look at the blanket. I look for the sword, but it’s gone. I lift my hands to my chest and feel the skin between my breasts. I remember the sword sliding into my chest last night, but the memory feels like a hallucinatory experience.
No, I tell myself. Believe. I hear Nina’s voice in my mind, hear her telling me, It’s easy to forget marvels when your whole life you’re taught to ignore them, and tell myself: Don’t invalidate a miracle because you’ve been taught they’re not real. Trust yourself. Trust the experience. And Nina. Trust Nina.
But she’s not here. My body might have swallowed the sword, impossibly sheathing the long length of its metal in my flesh, but she’s not here.
My fingers feel a bump on my skin and I look down to see I’ve got a new birthmark, equidistant from each of my breasts. It looks like a cross. Or a sword, standing on its point . . . .
I feel so calm. It seems as though I should be either freaking out completely or delirious with wonder and awe, but there’s only the calm. I sit there for a long time, running my finger across the bump of my new birthmark, then finally I button up my blouse. I fill the grave—this goes a lot quicker than digging it did—and cover up the raw dirt with pine needles. I wrap the shovel in my blanket and walk back to where I parked my car on Battersfield Road.
9
Traci has to know the whole story, of course, so I tell her everything. I don’t know how much she believes, but crazy as it all sounds, she believes that I believe, and that’s enough for her. I’m afraid of getting involved with her at first—afraid that I’m turning to her on the rebound from what I never quite had with Nina but certainly felt for her. But it doesn’t work that way. Or if I am rebounding, it’s in the right direction.
I remember Nina telling me that I’d be changed if I—I guess absorbed the sword is the best way to put it—but that she didn’t know how. I do now. It’s not a big thing. My world hasn’t changed—though I guess my view of it has to some degree. What’s happened is that I’m more decisive. I’ve taken control of my life. I’m not drifting anymore—either in my personal life or on the job. I don’t go for the safe, soft stories anymore. One person can’t do a whole lot about all
the injustice in the world, but I’m making damn sure that people hear about it. That we all do what we can about it. I’m not looking for a Pulitzer; I just want to make sure that I leave things a little better behind me when I go.
Six months or so after Traci and I start living together, she turns to me one night and asks me why it didn’t disappoint me that Nina never came back to me after I did what she asked.
“It’s because I remember what she told me in that dream I had the night Martin died,” I explain. “You know, when I dreamed the sword was lying on the bed beside me and talking to me? I didn’t remember when I woke, but it came back to me a few days after I got back from the pine grove.”
Traci gives me a poke with her finger. “So aren’t you going to tell me?” she says when I’ve fallen silent.
I smile. “She said that if she was freed, she might not be able to come back. That really being human, instead of passing for one, might mean that she’d be starting her life all over again as an infant and she wouldn’t remember what had gone before.”
Now it’s Traci’s turn to fall silent. “Is that why you want us to have a kid?” she asks finally.
With modern medicine, anything’s possible, right? Or at least something as basic as artificial insemination.
“I like to think she’s waiting for us to get it together,” I say.
“So you’re planning on a girl.”
“Feels right to me.”
Traci reaches over and tracks the contour of my sword birthmark with a finger. “Think she’ll have one of these?”
“Does it matter?” I ask.
“Doesn’t matter at all,” Traci says. She rolls over to embrace me. “And I guess it means we don’t have to worry about what to name her either.”
I snuggle in close. I love finally knowing who I am; loving and being loved for who I am. I just hope that wherever and whenever Nina is reborn, she’ll be as lucky as I feel I am.
Held Safe by Moonlight and Vines
1
Lillie’s in the graveyard again, looking for ghosts. She just can’t stay away.
“I’m paying my respects,” she says, but it doesn’t make sense.
These days All Souls Cemetery’s about as forgotten as the people buried in it. The land belongs to some big company now and they’re just waiting for the paperwork to go through at city hall. One day soon they’ll be moving what’s left of the bodies, tearing down all those old-fashioned mausoleums and crypts and putting up something shiny and new. Who’s going to miss it? Nobody goes there now except for the dealers with their little packets of oblivion and junkies looking for a fix.
The only people who care about the place are from the Crowsea Heritage Society. And Lillie. Everybody else just wants to see it go. Everybody else likes the idea of making a place gone wild safe again, never mind they don’t put it quite that way. But that’s what they’re thinking. You can see it in the back of their eyes when they talk about it.
See, there’s something that scares most people about the night, something that rises out of old memories, out of the genetic soup we all carry around inside us. Monsters in closets when we were kids and further back still, a long way, all the way back to the things waiting out there where the fire’s light can’t reach. It’s not something anybody talks about, but I know that’s what they see in All Souls because I can see it, too.
It’s got nothing to do with the drug deals going down. People know a piece of the night is biding in there, thinking about them, and they can’t wait to see it go. Even the dealers. You see them hanging around by the gates, money moves from one hand to the other, packets of folded paper follow suit, everything smooth, moves like magic—they’re fearless, these guys. But they don’t go any further in than they have to. Nobody does except for Lillie.
“There’s been nobody buried there in fifty years,” I tell her, but that just gets her back up. “All the more reason to give those old souls some respect,” she says.
But that’s not it. I know she’s looking for ghosts. Thing is, I don’t know why.
2
Alex’s problem is he wants an answer for everything. All he ever does is go around asking questions. Never lets a thing lie. Always has to know what’s going on and why. Can’t understand that some things don’t have reasons. Or that some people don’t feel like explaining themselves. They just do what feels right. Get an idea in their head and follow it through and don’t worry about what someone else is going to think or if anybody else understands.
In Alex’s world there’s only right and wrong, black and white. Me, I fall through the cracks of that world. In my head, it’s all grey. In my head, it’s all like walking in the twilight, a thousand shades of moonglow and dusky skies and shadow.
He thinks of me sitting here in the dark, all those old stone mausoleums standing around me, old and battered like the tenements leaning against each other on the streets where we grew up, and it spooks him. But All Souls comforts me, I don’t know why. Half the trees inside are dead, the rest are dying. Most of the grass is yellow and brown and the only flowers in this place these days grow on weeds, except in one corner where a scraggly old rose bush keeps on trying, tough old bugger doesn’t know enough to give up. The stone walls are crumbling down, the cast-iron gates haven’t worked in years. There’s a bunch of losers crowded around those gates, cutting deals, more nervous of what’s here, inside, than of the man showing up and busting them. I come in over the wall and go deep, where the shadows hide me, and they never even know I’m here. Nobody does, except for Alex and he just doesn’t understand.
I know what Alex sees when he looks at this place. I see it, too, at first, each time I come. But after a while, when I’m over the wall and inside, walking the narrow lanes in between the stones and tombs, uneven cobbles underfoot, the shadows lying thick everywhere I look, it gets different. I go someplace else. I don’t hear the dealers, I don’t see the junkies. The cemetery’s gone, the city’s gone, and me, I’m gone, too.
The only thing still with me are the walls, but they’re different in that other place. Not so worn down. The stones have been fit together without mortar, each one cunningly placed against the other and solid. Those walls go up ten feet and you’d have to ram them with a bulldozer before they’d come down.
Inside, it’s a garden. Sort of. A wild place. A tangle of bushes and briars, trees I’ve got no name for and vines hanging everywhere. A riot of flowers haunts the ground cover, pale blossoms that catch the moonlight and hold it in their petals.
The moonlight. That moon is so big in this place it feels like it could swallow the world. When I stand there in the wild garden and look up at it, I feel small, like I’m no bigger than the space of time between one moment and the next, but not the same way I feel small anywhere else. Where I come from there are millions of people living everywhere and each one of them’s got his or her own world. It’s so easy to lose a part of yourself in those worlds, to just find yourself getting sucked away until there’s next to nothing left of who you are. But I don’t have to be careful about that here. There aren’t any of those millions of people here and that moon, it doesn’t swallow up who I am, its golden light fills me up, reveling in what it knows me to be. I’m small in its light, sure, but the kind of small that can hold everything there is to be held. The moon’s just bigger, that’s all. Not more important than me, just different.
Those junkies don’t know what they’re missing, never getting any further inside the gates than the first guy in a jean vest with the right price.
3
Trouble is, Lillie doesn’t understand danger. She’s never had to go through the hard times some of us did, never really seen what people can do to each other when they’re feeling desperate or just plain mean. She grew up poor, like everybody else in our neighborhood, but her family loved her and she didn’t get knocked around the way those of us who didn’t have her kind of parents did. She was safe at home; out on the streets, I always looked after her,
made sure the hard cases left her alone.
I’m working as a bouncer at Chic Cheeks the night I hear she’s been going to All Souls, so I head down there after my shift to check things out. It’s a good thing I do. Some of the guys hanging around by the gates have gotten bored and happened to spot her, all alone in there and looking so pretty. Guess they decided they were going to have themselves a little fun. Bad move. But then they didn’t expect me to come along.
I remember a teacher I had in junior high telling me one time how wood and stone make poor conductors. Well, they conduct pain pretty good, as those boys find out. I introduce one of them face-first to a tombstone and kind of make a mess of his nose, knock out a couple of teeth. His pals aren’t chickenshit, I’ll give them that much. I hear the snickt of their blades snapping open, so I drop the first guy. He makes some kind of gurgling noises when he hits the ground and rolls onto my boot. I push him away and then ignore him. He’s too busy feeling his pain to cause me any immediate grief. I turn to his buddies, a little pissed off now, but we don’t get into it.
“Oh Christ,” one of them says, recognizing me.
“We didn’t mean nothing, Al,” the other one says.
They’re putting their knives away, backing up.
“We knew she was one of your people, we never would’ve touched her. I swear it, man.”
Guess I’ve got a bit of a rep. Nothing serious. I’m not some big shot. What it’s got to do with is my old man.
Crazy Eddie is what they used to call him on the streets. Started running numbers for the bosses back when he was a kid, then moved into collections, which is where he got his name. You don’t want to think it of your own flesh and blood, but the old man was a psycho. He’d do any crazed thing came to mind if you couldn’t pay up. You’re in for a few yards, you better cough it up, don’t matter what you’ve got to do to get the money, because he’d as soon as cut your throat as collect the bread.