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She falls to her knees, holding Patches tight, and buries her face in his neck. The smoke billows toward her, the fire close behind it, and then it envelops her. The world turns black and choking. She sees nothing, not the sky above or the water below, even as her ears fill with noise. The creak and pop of the burning pier. The splash of the water below. The roar of fire and wind. The harsh and angry sound of her breath as it drags ragged into her throat and comes out as a retching, hacking cough. Her thoughts are disjointed and wild, images flashing through her mind. Mother and Papa, as they were when she saw them last, gazing at the horizon with fear in their eyes—and then as they used to be, dancing, laughing, twirling arm in arm. She sees her brothers, young and tanned and chasing her along the shore path after she dropped a piece of seaweed down Robert’s collar. She sees Robert’s eyes full of unspilled tears above his stubbled cheeks, and Edward’s casket laden with white gardenias. She sees herself: running shoeless through the garden. Tiptoeing like a ghost through the house during hide-and-seek. Riding beside Harold Chandler with the sun on her face. Running to the edge of that rocky ledge and taking flight—and that split second, before she began plummeting toward the water, when she thought she might never fall at all.
She sees Theodore Caravasios, smiling and offering her a choice.
She chose to leap.
She’s not sorry. She would do it again.
The cold takes her breath away as she plunges feetfirst into the sea and then surfaces, gagging, her feet reaching in vain for purchase against the ocean floor too far below. She had let go of Patches asshe jumped, but he’s here now, paddling around beside her, his fur matted down against his head, his small body being knocked here and there by the waves. But he stays afloat, he keeps swimming, and she thinks that the dog might make it to shore—and feels heartened by it, even as she understands that she will not.
She’s just chosen a better way to die.
The needle-sharp cold of the October water is already beginning to dull, and Miriam knows this is how it begins. Already her fingers are numbing, refusing to clench; already her extremities and sodden clothes are getting heavy, dead weight that will drag her down. She gazes back toward the shore, where the upper peaks of the Whispers can be seen just above the swirling smoke. There are flames licking from the windows. The house is going. And so is she.
Miriam closes her eyes.
The freezing water begins to touch her ears as her legs slow their frantic treading. She sees death approaching, reaching for her. Soon its icy fingers will grasp her ankles and draw her down. But not yet. Not quite.
To everything there is a season. A time to be born, a time to die. A time to plant, a time to pluck up that which is planted.A time,she whispers, and her thoughts grow sluggish.A time.
Her ears are under the water. She cannot hear the fire anymore, or the creak of the boards, or the puff of Patches’s breath as he swims anxiously in the tossing bay.
She cannot hear the splash of water against the hull of the fast-approaching boat.
She cannot hear Theo shouting her name.
But when a strong arm wraps her from behind and she feels herself pulled through the water, through and up and out—and when his mouth presses hot and fiercely over hers to blow life back into her lungs—she knows that there is time yet.
Time to keep, and to cast away. To embrace, and to refrain. To gain, to lose, and to love, to love, to love.
She opens her eyes. Beside her, Patches is pacing and whining, pushing his wet nose against her hand—and above her is Theodore Caravasios, his face inches from hers. She watches his expression change: from fear to relief, and then relief to anger, and then anger to something else. Something fierce and dark and all hers, if she wants it, and she does. She does.
“God damn it, Miriam,” he says, and kisses her under the flame-tipped sky.
10.
2014
December
Christmas was coming, and Mimi was disappearing. The dreamy look she’d had at the bakery was on her face all the time now, as if her last mooring to reality had finally snapped and she was drifting away. Every day she was a little bit more diminished, a little bit less there. Instead of dying, she seemed to be slowly turning transparent, fading away until she was nothing but a shadow, a disturbance in the air—and then nothing at all, just gone.
She’d started having visitors that nobody could see but her. Old friends, former schoolmates, her mother, her brother Edward. They came to her out of the past or sometimes out of her imagination: one evening she fell asleep beside me and Diana while we were watchingApollo 13,then informed us the next morning that some nice young men had taken her on a trip to visit the moon. I woke that night to the sound of her getting out of bed, followed by the creak of her footsteps as she paced the room, back and forth. She was muttering,something unintelligible at first, but then her voice floated up from below, bright and clear.
“Is that you?” she said, so imperiously that I felt the absurd urge to reply. I listened as she paced for another few minutes, then heard the creak of her bed frame, the click as she turned the light off. And then a sigh, so soft that she could only have been talking to herself. “Forgive me,” she whimpered. “I never meant for him to hurt you.”
The next morning, I asked her politely if she’d had any visitors last night and what they talked about.
She smiled slyly. “He says it’ll freeze soon,” she said.
“Who?”
She giggled. “Why, the weatherman, of course.”
I didn’t bother to point out that the local weatherman was a woman, or that her forecast for the coming days, which we watched together every morning, was highs in the mid-thirties and more fog, endless fog. Mimi’s weather reports were like the old songs she sometimes sang under her breath at odd moments, the conversations she had with herself in the dark. Just flotsam from the wreckage of her memory that had improbably bubbled to the surface.
“My goodness, the time,” she said suddenly, twisting in her chair and looking toward the door. “Hasn’t Shelly brought the tea?”
“I’m sure she’s getting it now.”
