Everything Beautiful Began After (28 page)

“Yeah, I see them—thanks, car.”

When you get out to shoo them away, you notice a poster stapled to a telephone pole.

A circus tonight at 9:00 p.m. in a village called Noyant.

The poster has a clown smiling and a lion standing up on its back legs as if asking for a cookie.

You glance at your watch.

The show will begin in ten minutes. Every child in the area will be there. All you have to do is look for an approximately four-year-old girl and an old man—Rebecca’s grandfather—or a woman who could be Rebecca’s sister. You feel a burst of adrenaline.

Cows bolt as you swish by.

You arrive in the village of Noyant a few minutes later and park outside a small supermarket.

Circus signs point toward the grounds of a church.

The tent up ahead is a blue and yellow miniature version of a big-top. Its sides are tied with long ropes and staked with wood.

Outside the small big-top is a miniature pony, a baby goat, and a large Alsatian tied with a rope. You can hear grass being ripped by the two small mouths as you pass. The dog wags his tail and looks at you but does not stand up.

Beside the tent is a red van.

As you near the tent entrance, you notice several children hanging about. They stop talking and look at you. Your first instinct is to turn and walk away, but then you would appear even more suspicious. You have no choice but to keep walking and say hello. One of the children asks you in French if you’re here for the circus. You say you are. It seems to be the correct answer because the other children cheer among themselves.

You explain in French that your father was in the circus and you were passing and decided to see it, to remind you of old times.

The children nod but don’t seem to believe you.

Then one of them asks if your father was a clown.

You shake your head.

A ringmaster then?

One of the children, a little girl, explains that the circus will not perform for fewer than fifteen people. She is too old to be Rebecca’s child. You smile politely.

You are the twelfth person, another child adds—which means only three more people are needed to start the performance.

Circus music plays torturously on a loop through loudspeakers.

Children hold hands and dance.

The parents talk in a circle by the wall. Some of the women smoke. It’s a warm night. The air smells faintly of hay. The children’s faces are soft like cheese.

After a few minutes, the ringmaster appears from the trailer and checks his watch. He shakes his head at the children. They raise their arms to protest, and just when it seems that all is lost—three figures appear in the distance. A toddler out for an evening walk with his parents. He is wearing only a T-shirt, a diaper, and little shoes. His parents are talking and haven’t noticed the small big-top. The children start shouting at the toddler. Everyone is watching. As the child spies the small big-top, he stops and looks curiously toward it. Then he notices the group of children calling him over.

His parents call after him. They jog to catch him. The children explain that a circus has come to town. The couple are German and don’t seem to understand. Then the ringmaster counts the crowd and blasts an air horn.

The German family is swept into the tent with everyone else. The toddler is sitting with the other children. His parents watch anxiously from among the local parents.

But no sign of a small girl or an old man.

You are about to sneak away when a boy dressed in a clown costume approaches and asks how many tickets. You laugh. He smiles and asks again. He is about thirteen. You say that you were only looking. He explains that you must buy a ticket for the show to proceed—that you are the fifteenth person.

You give him some money, and he rips a stub from a roll of mint green tickets. Then he hectors you inside with an air horn.

As you enter the small big-top, you notice a wooden sign advertising the circus. It has been propped up against a First World War memorial, beside the names of those who fell long ago in a cold place of terror.

Chapter Fifty-Five

The ringmaster and his son begin by doing handstands. The music is much louder inside the little big-top. Everyone is watching them balance. The ringmaster’s arms tremble and his face turns red.

When the applause thins, the music becomes a drum roll and the circus duo leave the tent. In a few seconds the ringmaster and his son return with clubs of fire juggled by the ringmaster who almost sets fire to himself when a club lands on his shoulder. The son watches and claps in time.

When the clubs burn out, the ringmaster leaves the tent again. The air smells of sulfur and hay. The tension mounts—and then suddenly an old man holding a cabbage appears from under a tent flap. Everyone laughs and the children shout his name. He raises his arms as if to say, “Where am I?” Then he holds up the tent flap he came through to reveal his garden gate.

Then the ringmaster returns with flaming hoops and a dog. He is startled to see an old man with a cabbage standing in the ring. His son starts drumming again, and the old man disappears back through the flap into the safety of his vegetable garden.

Both father and son spin the hoops with long sticks. The tent fills with even more smoke.

A few of the children start coughing.

The German toddler is crying and wants his parents.

In all the confusion, a small girl enters the little big-top and sits next to you. Her teeth are very white and her hair is unbrushed. She’s wearing striped purple pajamas and sandals. You look down at her and she gives you a smile so false it’s funny and you laugh. Her little face turns back to the action inside the ring. You look around for her parents, and then a man enters and sits down next to her. He is in his late forties, dressed in an old T-shirt and blue jeans. A few of the other parents wave to him.

He is wearing tortoiseshell glasses and is unshaved.

And then Rebecca walks in.

The little girl beside you signals to her. The ringmaster seems to notice her because she’s beautiful. The man with the tortoiseshell glasses moves over and she sits down.

You cannot move any part of your body.

Her hair is much longer than you remember, but the same deep red that lightens in sun. She is wearing clothes you have never seen. Same freckles though—and each one exacts a breath from you.

The circus performers are riding tiny bicycles and carrying enormous cups on their heads.

Your eyes shoot backward as though your body is forcing you into sleep. Then your head starts to boil and you are sweating. Your stomach is churning. You are forced to turn away because your body is falling to pieces. And then thousands of remembered moments—like birds flapping their wings inside your skull.

The severed hand.

Dots of blood on the canvas.

Her body falling silently to the water.

You hover between the living and the dead.

But the dead cannot live again.

They cannot see, they cannot hear, they cannot breathe, they cannot talk. Their minds are empty, and they cannot have any thoughts.

Two clowns are standing in front of you, prodding your chest with a long sponge finger. The music is drowning everything, your eyes are rolling around and you can’t see anything. The smaller clown is trying to drag you out into the ring. People are shouting.

Rebecca is looking at you. She’s laughing and waving you out into the ring with the hands she once pressed against your bare chest.

Then you stand up, scream her name, and fall into a circle of waiting darkness at your feet.

Chapter Fifty-Six

Delphine jumps back in fright when the grown-up’s eyes open quickly.

He is no longer where he fell.

She has been dabbing his head with a cloth soaked in witch hazel. The scent makes her nose twitch. The visitor is very still under heavy sheets but looks at her. Then when he looks at Mama, he tries to get up. Delphine steps back even farther. Then suddenly Sebastian is upon him.

“It’s not Rebecca,” he says to the stranger. “It’s her sister, it’s Rebecca’s sister, Natalie.”

The man lies down again, breathing hard as if he had just run somewhere fast but did it without moving his legs. Delphine looks for the drawing she made of him. Perhaps it will cheer him up.

Behind the bed is a picture of her, and another picture of Sebastian and Mama.

“Rebecca’s sister is a twin?” he says as though he’s trying to believe it.

“Oh, yes,” Delphine wants to say. “A twin—oh yes—except that she is in heaven, with the angels and Napoleon.”

The sheets were yesterday blowing on the line—blowing like sails little Delphine ran through on the grassy deck of her ship bound for circus island. The sheets puffed and glowed with noon.

And then it was lunchtime. Sigh. Time to stop and eat.

The strange man is looking at Mama again.

Delphine watches his eyes because grown-ups play games of secrets.

Like little white animals the man’s eyes switch between old portraits that Sebastian found in the basement—and the face of Mama which is so still (like forgotten bath water) that it could be its own portrait if it wasn’t connected to a body and the world.

The man looks afraid.

Perhaps he thinks we have kidnapped him?

What if we have, by accident? Would we all go to prison? Probably not before lunch though.

The radiator starts clanging and soon it will be hot, and the room full of hiss, like some little girl dreaming of snakes.

Delphine likes to pick the paint that peels in the corners where it gets damp, even though she knows it’s naughty.

She hides the tiny paint people in a box that once held bonbons and still smells like them (as if the box is remembering his lost friends).

Then she is distracted by the hanging chandelier.

All those cobwebs.

Maybe the visitor will think it’s a beehive. Delphine wonders if that’s where honey comes from and that it’s high up so she won’t get stinged.

She was stinged in the summer. Her arm has a mark that’s too small to see, but it’s there.

Then without thinking she steps toward the stranger and lifts her bare arm.

“I was stinged here,” she says.

“You were stinged?” the man says with a lulling sweetness.

Delphine nods, “Yes, right here—do you believe me?”

“You speak English,” the stranger says. “Just like Rebecca.”

“Yes, I speak English,” Delphine says. Then she points with her elbow to the man sitting at the foot of the stranger’s bed. “But Sebastian taught me, not my aunt.”

The stranger is being very nice—maybe he prefers children to adults.

Tucked up in the white sheets reminds Delphine of her baby, her very own child, in the mouse village of secret plops in the hedge that stretches up bursting with birds who fly out chirp chirp chirp chirp chirp chirp—scaring everyone, especially the plastic mice who pretend tremble. Birds just don’t know where they’re going.

The man’s eyes are big and sad.

Plastic mice and their poisoning plops.

Delphine wonders if she is going to say: “I’ll be your mother, little lost boy.”

Then suddenly
he
says something to Mama.

“What’s happening?”

Then he says:

“Where am I?”

Mama doesn’t answer but glances at Sebastian.

“Our house,” Sebastian says. “Her name is Natalie, I’m Sebastian, and this is our daughter Delphine,” Sebastian says.

“Natalie?” The man says, exasperated, “Delphine?”

Will he cry?

Will he cry?

Sometimes grown-ups cry.

Sebastian steps over to the strange man’s bedside. “Yes, Natalie. She is Rebecca’s twin sister.”

Sebastian’s accent is sharp and heavy, East London, he told her once.

“Twin? Her twin?”

“You called her Rebecca,” Sebastian says to the visitor. “That’s why we brought you here.”

The stranger closes his eyes.

“Who are you?”

“Henry Bliss,” he says.

Delphine giggles but everyone ignores her. She is repeating his name in her head. She can’t stop herself: