I had so many questions. I could feel it, the current of the unsaid, circling the room, that thread of light between them still there somehow, still glinting. I wanted to try to understand what was going on. But Henry Lake turned before I could speak, his back to the light, his face in darkness, shielded again, all hat and beard and dark glasses. He took the glasses off and he and Novo looked at each other for a long time, and there was no speaking then. There was no breaking into that. Charlie Parker landed soundlessly on the table and settled down. Henry looked up at the painting of the dark-haired woman, her beautiful back, that tantalizing almost-turn.
“Is that her?” Novo said, and I said, “Who?” and Henry smiled. “Yes.”
“Who is she?” I said, and Novo said, “She’s beautiful.”
“Her name was Dulcie,” Henry said, and for a second the lights flickered under his skin, the way I’d seen my own skin shimmer, and his eyes filled instantly with tears.
“You?” I said to him. “You too?” But Henry said nothing, he just sat there, glowing and weeping.
“What is it, Henry?” I said. “Novo. What does he know?”
“I loved her,” Henry said, still looking up at her, still waiting, as if she might turn at any moment.
“When?” Novo asked. “How long?” and Henry sighed. “A moment. A lifetime ago. A whole lifetime.”
He looked away and wiped his eyes. “There was never enough time,” he said.
“For what?” I said, and that look passed between them again, all the things they knew and I didn’t. “What’s happening?”
“We have time now,” Novo said, sitting down on the sofa, pulling me toward him.
“But that’s your time,” Henry said. “You shouldn’t waste it on me.”
“Jude needs to know,” he said. “Do it for Jude.”
I had no idea what that meant, but I leaned into Novo and he put his arm around me, and Henry watched us. He smiled.
“Tell us about her,” Novo said. “Tell us Dulcie’s story. Come on. You know as well as I do that right now we have all the time in the world.”
FIFTEEN
Henry sat down, and Charlie Parker hopped onto the back of the chair, just behind him. Downstairs a door banged shut and another one groaned open and then it was pin-drop quiet while we waited for him to begin.
“There are so many doors between this life and my last,” Henry finally said, and Novo smiled.
“I could never remember them all.”
“It doesn’t matter how many,” Novo said.
“No. Just what’s on the other side,” Henry said, and his skin flickered again, and his eyes lit up. “I saw her first. Dulcie. I knew her before I met her. I think I always knew. But still. I was blindsided.”
“Where did you meet her?” I asked him.
“The first time? On a boat,” he said. “We were on a boat. There was a terrible storm. Forty of us, maybe more, trapped like cattle on our way to the slaughter, showing the whites of our eyes.”
“When was this?” I said.
“I was about your age. I was practically brand-new. I remember the horizon. Blue on blue, and nothing else, in a fine, straight line. I let myself stretch out along it. I made my mind wire-thin.”
I thought of the moment, only hours ago, on the dark beach when I couldn’t tell them apart, the sky and the sea.
“The edge of things,” Novo was saying. “The line between.”
“I couldn’t think how far away it was, as far as the eye could see, and afterward I learned the equation by heart: 1.22459√h, where h is the height above sea level. The distance that first time was about four miles. But the line itself is endless.”
“Yes,” Novo said.
Henry narrowed his eyes as if he could still see it. “Sun on its decks, all that red metal crusted with rust and bird shit. The sky above us was thick with gulls. There was no sign of the storm.”
He bowed his head. “When all around you is water, and all you can hear and smell and feel is the boom and stench and weight of water throwing itself against you, you forget everything.”
Novo reached out and took his hand, and that’s when I felt it, this dank, dead cold lapping at my ankles, and when I looked down, the floor was moving, soupy with murk and bird droppings and the glinting scraps of dead fish, like the bottom of a boat.
“What’s happening?” I said, and Novo’s grip tightened on Henry Lake’s hand.
“Just a memory,” he said, his other arm still round me. “Not real. Not now. I promise.”
He closed his eyes but I kept mine open while the whole room peaked and dropped on those remembered waves, over and over, the walls outside battered by great punching gusts of wind, the rain that landed on the windows deafening and relentless. I watched it all.
“Only two things were sure in that moment,” Henry said. “My death and the water. I tried to picture the world without me and it was easy. I knew the world wouldn’t notice. I wondered if there was anyone on that boat the world would miss. I thought about them all dying and their families never knowing, only picturing them alive and well, and if that would make a difference, if that would keep a part of them alive and well somewhere after all.”
“I’ve thought that,” Novo said. “I’ve wondered that.”
“And then I saw her,” Henry said. “The woman next to me was trying to comfort her daughter. The little girl screamed with each drop of the wave, screamed with everything she had. I could see the white arcs of her teeth and the back of her throat, but I could hardly hear her over the noise. And then she lifted her head and looked at me.”
“The woman?”
“No. The girl. She looked at me and her eyes saw everything. With the movement of the waves, the high sky, and the dark slap of the water, she was there and then gone, there and then gone. But still, she anchored me to something. Just the sight of her stilled that storm, for me.”
“Yes,” Novo said. “That’s it.”
That thread between them again, turning and glinting. A secret understanding. The look they shared keeping me out.
The storm in the room dropped. The waves of Henry’s memory flattened out. The water at our feet went still, like dirty glass.
“And then?” I said.
Henry said, “She asked her mother, ‘Are we dead?’ and I could see in her eyes that the woman wasn’t sure when she told her daughter, ‘No.’ I looked away from her for half a second. Less. And when I looked back, she was gone.”