Saffron and Brimstone: Strange Stories (19 page)

“Ivy?”

That was when I saw him, a tall figure like a shadow breaking from the fog thick beneath the birches. He was so big that I had to blink to make sure that this, too, wasn’t some trick of the mist: a black-haired, bearded man, strong enough to yank one of the birch saplings up by the roots if he’d wanted to. He wore dark-brown corduroys, a flannel shirt and brown Carhart jacket, heavy brown work boots. His hair was long and pushed back behind his ears; his hands were shoved in his jacket pockets. He was a bit stooped, his shoulders raised in a way that made him look surprised, or unsure of himself. It made him look young, younger than he really was; it made him look like Christopher, Julia’s thirteen-year-old brother.

He wasn’t thirteen any more. I did the math quickly, bringing the boat round and grabbing the wet line to toss on shore. Christopher was Narouz Sa’adah’s son by his third wife. He was eighteen years younger than Julia; that would make him eleven years younger than me, which would make him—

“Little Christopher!” I looked up at him from the dory, grinning. “How the hell old are you?”

He shrugged, leaned down to grab the end of the line and loop it around the granite post at the shoreline. He took out a cigarette and lit it, inhaled rapidly—nervously, I see now—and let his arm dangle so that the smoke coiled up around his wrist.

“I’m thirty-four.” He had an almost comically basso voice that echoed across Green Pond like the foghorn. An instant later I heard a loon give its warning cry. Christopher dropped his cigarette and stubbed it out, cocking his head towards the dory. “Is that the same boat you used to have?”

“Sure is.” I hopped into the water, wincing at the cold, then waded to shore. “Jesus. Little Christopher. I can’t believe it’s you. You—Christ! I—well, I thought you were dead.”

“I got better.” He stared down at me and for the first time smiled, his teeth still a little crooked and nicotine-stained, not Julia’s teeth at all: his face completely guileless, close-trimmed black beard, long hair falling across tawny eyes. “After the bombing? I was in hospital for a long time, outside Cairo. It wasn’t just you—everyone thought I was dead. My father finally tracked me down and brought me back to Washington. I think you and Julia had broken up by then.”

I just stared at him. I felt dizzy: even though it was a small piece of the world, of history, it meant everything was different. Everything was changed. I blinked and looked away from him, saw the birch leaves spinning in the breeze, pale gold and green, goldenrod past its prime, tall stalks of valerian with their flower-heads blown to brown vein. I looked back at Christopher: everything was the same.

He said, “I can’t believe it’s you either, Ivy.”

I threw my arms around him. He hugged me awkwardly—he was so much bigger than I was!—and started laughing in delight. “Ivy! I walked all the way over here! From the village, I’m staying at the Inn. That lady at the General Store?”

“Mary?”

“Right, Mary—she remembered me, she said you still lived here—”

“Why didn’t you call?”

He looked startled. “You have a phone?”

“Of course I have a phone! Actually, it’s a cell phone, and I only got it a year ago, after they put up a tower over on Blue Hill.” I drew away from him, balancing on my heels to make myself taller. “Jeez, you’re all growed up, Christopher. I’m trying to think, when was the last time I saw you—”

“Twelve years ago. I was just starting grad school in Cairo. I came to see you and Julia in Rockland before I left. Remember?”

I tried, but couldn’t; not really. I’d never known him well. He’d been a big ungainly teenager, extremely quiet and sitting at the edges of the room, where he always seemed to be listening carefully to everything his older sister or her friends said. He’d grown up in D.C. and Cairo, but he spent his summers in the States. I first met him when he was twelve or thirteen, a gangly kid into Dungeons & Dragons and Star Wars
,
who’d recently read Tolkien and had just started on Terry Brooks.

“Jesus, don’t read
that
,” I’d said, snatching away
The Sword of Shannara
and shoving my own copy of
Love Plucking Rowan Berries
into his big hands. For a moment he looked hurt. Then, “Thanks,” he said, and gave me that sweet slow smile. He spent the rest of that summer in our apartment overlooking Rockland Harbor, hunched into a wicker chair on the decrepit back deck as he worked his way through
Sybylla and the Summer Sky
,
Mellors’ Plasma Bistro
,
Love Regained in Idleness
, and finally the tattered remnants of
Ardor ex Cathedra
.

“Of course I remember,” I said. I swiped at a mosquito, looked up and grinned. “Gosh. You were still a kid then. How’re you doing?
What
are you doing? Are you married?”

“Divorced.” He raised his arms, yawning, and stretched. His silhouette blotted out the grey sky, the blurred shapes of trees and boulders. “No kids, though. I’m at the Center for Remote Sensing at B.U., coordinating a project near the Chephren Quarries, in the Western Desert. Upper Egypt.”

He dropped his arms and looked down at me again. “So Ivy—would you—how’d you feel about company? I could use a cup of coffee. We can walk back to town if you want. Have a late lunch. Or early dinner.”

“Christ, no.” I glanced at my raw tattoo. “I should clean that again, before I do anything. And I haven’t even had breakfast yet.”

“Really? What were you doing? I mean, are you with a customer or something?”

I shook my head. “I was up all night, doing this—” I splayed my fingers above the figure on my thigh. “What time is it, anyway?”

He looked at his watch. “Almost four.”

“Almost
four?
” I grabbed his hand and twisted it to see his wristwatch. “I don’t believe it! How could I, I—” I shivered. “I slept through the whole day.”

Christopher stared at me curiously. I was still holding his wrist, and h
e
turne
d
hi
s
hand, gently, his fingers brushing mine. “You okay, Ivy? Did I get you in the middle of something? I can come back—”

“I don’t know.” I shook my head and withdrew my hand from his; but slowly, so I wouldn’t hurt his feelings. “I mean no, I’m fine, just—”

I looked at my thigh. A thread of blood ran down my leg, and as I stared a damselfly landed beneath the tattoo, its thorax a metallic blue
needle, wings invisible against my skin. “I was up all night, doing that—”

I pointed at the kneeling man; only from my angle he wasn’t kneeling but hanging suspended above my knee, like a bat. “I—I don’t think I finished until five o’clock this morning. I had no idea it was so late—”

I could hear the panic in my own voice. I took a deep breath, trying to keep my tone even; but Christopher just put one hand lightly on my shoulder and said, “Hey, it’s okay. I really can come back. I just wanted to say hi.”

“No. Wait.” I counted ten heartbeats, twelve. “I’m okay. I’ll be okay. Just, can you row us back?”

“Sure.” He stooped to grab a leather knapsack leaning against a tree. “Let’s go.”

With Christopher in it, the dory sat a good six inches lower in the water, and it took a little longer with him rowing. Halfway across the brief stretch of pond I finally asked him.

“How is Julia?”

My voice was shaky, but he didn’t seem to notice. “I don’t know. One of my sisters talked to her about five years ago. She was in Toronto, I think. No one’s heard from her.” He strained at the oars, then glanced at me measuringly. “I never really knew her, you know. She was so much older. I always thought she was kind of a bitch, to tell you the truth. The way she treated you—it made me uncomfortable.”

I was silent. My leg ached from the tattoo, searing pain like a bad
sunburn. I focused on that, and after a few minutes I could bear to talk.

“Sorry,” I said. The dory ground against the shore of the islet. The panic was receding; I could breathe again. “I get these sometimes.
Panic attacks. Usually it’s not at home, though, only when I go off island.”

“That’s no fun.” Christopher gave me an odd look. Then he clambered out and helped me pull the dory into the reeds. He followed me through the overgrown stands of phlox and aster, up the steps and into the Lonely House. The floor shuddered at his footsteps. I closed the door, looked up at him, and laughed.

“Boy, you sure fill this place up—watch your head, no, wait—”

Too late. As he turned he cracked into a beam. He clutched his head, grimacing. “Shit—I forgot how small this place is—”

I led him to the couch. “Here, sit—I’ll get some ice.”

I hurried into the kitchen and pulled a tray from the freezer. I was still feeling a little wonky. For about twenty-four hours after you get tattooed, it’s like you’re coming down with the flu. Your body’s been pretty badly treated; your entire immune system fires up, trying to heal itself. I should have just crawled back into bed. Instead I called, “You want something to drink?”

I walked back in with a bowl of ice and a linen towel. Christopher was on the sofa, yanking something from his knapsack.

“I brought this.” He held up a bottle of tequila. “And these—”

He reached into the knapsack again and pulled out three limes. They looked like oversized marbles in his huge hand. “I remember you liked tequila.”

I smiled vaguely. “Did I?” It had been Julia who liked tequila, going through a quart every few days in the summer months. I sat beside him on the couch, wrapped the ice in the towel, and held it out. He lowered his head, childlike; and after a moment I very gently touched it. His hair was thick and coarse, darker than his sister’s; when I extended my fingers I felt his scalp, warm as though he’d been sitting in the sun all day. “You’re hot,” I said softly, and felt myself flush. “I mean your head—your skin feels hot. Like heatstroke.”

He kept his head lowered, saying nothing. His long hair grazed the top of my thigh. He reached to take my hand, and his was so much bigger, it was as though my own hand was swallowed in a heated glove, his palm calloused, fingertips smooth and hard, soft hairs on the back of his wrist. I said nothing. I could smell him, an acrid smell, not unpleasant but strange; he smelled of limes and sweat, and raw earth, stones washed by the sea. My mouth was dry, and as I moved to place the ice-filled towel on his brow I felt his hand slip from mine, to rest upon the couch between us.

“There.” I could feel my heart racing, the frantic thought
It’s just a symptom, there’s nothing to be scared of, it’s just a symptom, it’s just—

“Christopher,” I said thickly
.
“Just—sit. For a minute.”

We sat. My entire body felt hot, and damp; I was sweating now myself, not cold anymore, my heartbeat slow and even. From outside came the melancholy sound of the foghorn, the ripple of rain across the lake. The room around us was full of that strange, translucent green light you get here sometimes: being on an island on an island suspended in fog, droplets of mist and sea and rain mingling to form a shimmering glaucous veil. Outside the window the world seemed to tremble and break apart into countless motes of silver, steel-grey, emerald, then cohere again into a strangely solid-looking mass. As though someone had tossed a stone into a viscous pool, or probed a limb with a needle: that sense of skin breaking, parting then closing once more around the wound, the world, untold unseen things flickering and diving, ganglia, axons, otters, loons. A bomb goes off, and it takes twelve years to hear its explosion. I lifted my head and saw Christopher watching me. His mouth was parted, his amber eyes sad, almost anguished.

“Ivy,” he said. When his mouth touched mine I flinched, not in fear but in shock at how much bigger it was than my own, than Julia’s, any woman’s. I had not touched a man since I was in high school; and that was a boy, boys. I had never kissed a man. His face was rough; his mouth tasted bitter, of nicotine and salt. And blood, too—he’d bitten his lip from nervousness, my tongue found the broken seam just beneath the hollow of his upper lip, the hollow hidden beneath soft hair, not rough as I had thought it would be, and smelling of some floral shampoo.

It was like nothing I had imagined—and I
had
imagined it, of course. I’d imagined everything, before I fell in love with Julia Sa’adah. I’d fallen in love with
her
—her soul, her
duende
, she would have called it—but in a way it had almost nothing to do with her being another woman. I’d seen movies, porn films even, lots of them, watching with Julia and some of her wilder friends, the ones who were bisexual, or beyond bisexual, whatever that might be; read magazines, novels, pornography, glanced at sites online; masturbated to dim images of what it was like, what I thought it might be like. Even watched once as a couple we knew went at it in our big untidy bed, slightly revved-up antics for our benefit I suspect, a lot of whimpering and operatic sound effects.

This was nothing like that. This was slow, almost fumbling; even formal. He seemed afraid, or maybe it was just that he couldn’t believe it, that it wasn’t real to him, yet.

“I was always in love with you.” He was lying beside me on the couch; not a lot of room left for me, but his broad arm kept me from rolling off. Our shirts were stuffed behind our heads for pillows, I still wore my cut-offs, and he still had his corduroy jeans on. We hadn’t gotten further than this. On the floor beside us was the half-empty bottle of tequila, Christopher’s pocketknife, and the limes, cloven in two so that they looked like enormous green eyes. He was tracing the designs on my body: the full sleeve on my left arm, Chinese water-dragons, stylized waves, all in shades of turquoise and indigo and green. Green is the hardest ink to work with—you mix it with white, the white blends into your skin tone, you don’t realize the green pigment is there and you overdo, going over and over until you scar. I’d spent a lot of time with green when I started out; yellow too, another difficult pigment.

“You are so beautiful. All this—” His finger touched coils of vines, ivy that thrust from the crook of my elbow and extended up to my shoulder. His own body was unblemished, as far as I could see. Skin darker than Julia’s, shading more to olive than bronze; an almost hairless chest, dappled line of dark hair beneath his navel. He tapped the inside of my elbow, tender soil overgrown with leaves. “That must have hurt.”