Thalo Blue (58 page)

In a flurry, Oliver had flown out to Eagle River but only to find that his wife had checked herself out of hospital. She was gone.

He came back to Vaughan defeated.

He never mentioned the trip’s purpose to his son.

He stopped spinning the Yellow Brick Road album on the downstairs turntable.

<> <> <>

Like before, the Druid’s hands were around Zeb’s neck. Her eyes were open, not stinging like his in the harsh cold of the underwater world. It was darker down there, next to black.

Zeb could see only the white parts of the Druid’s eyes—like the headlights of a car. Her grip tightened. He felt himself going insane. Caught in his ears was the roar of the car descending, somewhere behind him. The sounds gurgled, loud, like they were inside his head. It was falling, so was he, and the water pressed against his lungs. His arms strained, not at the Druid, but above him. The push-pull of the car’s descent had pulled them under a sheet of intact ice and his hands banged against it. There was no feeling left in his hands, and little elsewhere in his extremities. Only a burning in his lungs, like a fire. Like the fire in his parents’ summer home, consuming him from the inside out.

His mind blew outward like a tired piston firing after a long winter under a cold hood. Memories came like knots in a length of rope, all tied together and, oddly, all one in the same. They were dull, though, like whiskery lumps of the rope felt in the dark. But memories
are
a bit washed out, aren’t they? Like watercolor paintings done from sharp color photos—a little sloppy, pale in comparison, and overlapping in all the major details. Funny how a painting looks more like what it’s supposed to—
or what you think it’s supposed to
—the further away from it you stand.

He saw Caels in shorts—on a hot summer night. There were no wolves but her neck was long, slender and tanned. She was a bird, free and happy, wings spread. She was in the Madagascar of his imagination. And she was peaceful there, with all her haunting dreams behind her. She had found something new—maybe some
one
new. But she had found
some
thing again; that much was solid. That much he
felt
among the brush, undergrowth and heat-haze of his Dream Island of Madagascar. He knew it, could see it clearly, like a blue smear on the polish of an oak finish.

Zeb was going mad.
The Triplet Pines!
his brain said.
Where had that name even come from?
Caeli and the Pines. They’re here.
Caeli, who loved Jeff Buckley’s version of Hallelujah so much that she would put the song on repeat and play it over and over and over until Zeb was crazy with it in his head, Caeli who always got the shivers after she ate, beautiful green-eyed Caeli. The triplets stood with Caels at their feet and her slender neck, browned by the glare of an imaginary sun was them—or at least
one
of them. Another was Jackson—
oh Jackie-O, Captain Jack! Where are you now, El Capitano?
—strange combination of sidekick and mentor. The third pine, the last, well that one was Zeb. Or was it Sebastion?

Maybe none of them were Zeb. Maybe all of them were. Was one his mom instead? Or maybe Oliver?

Oh Madness! The three pines were uprooted. Like people, they walked on roots of stiff blackness, dank earth spilling and breaking off in moist and spongy clumps, like wandering hunks of core falling back into the hole where they were born. Spider-web light, an intricate pattern of it made by science and time, framed the view as the Triplets turned and walked away, hand in hand, down a road where he was sure he had only seen two before...

He had managed to pull in some air before they went under but it stung. The look in those eyes held him. In his head he heard
Helpless
and that melancholy drone of the harmonica.

Those eyes wound around him.

The harmonica washed out and like a muscle spasm recanting, he recited bits of that poem in the back of his thoughts, thoughts which where already convoluted and full:
The tick-tock mock...Of that grandfather clock...One day will cease to even talk...And the steady commands...Of its laden hands...Will turn, then rest...‘Pon where it stands.

Still that stare held.

—
And the steady commands of its laden hands—

The water turned a gaudy orange from deep blue-black.

—
Will turn, then rest—

His mind was empty all except for those fragments.

—
How now, Brown Cow?
—

It was that nonsense question of Caeli’s. His body was frantic and pulsing, but going quickly numb.

—
Always Smilin’, Purple Lion.
That was the answer he should have given her. That was the answer that he always gave her. But not that last time—

Malin’s eyes were still there, still pot lights in the dark. His troubled thoughts swayed. No it wasn’t
smilin’
. Or was it? Maybe it was
Still
Tryin’,
Purple Lion
? How could something he once knew so well be so hazy? So distant?

After moments of struggling with that battle, after an eternity spent thrashing in the ice water of the lake and staring at Malin’s stolen face, he finally closed his eyes. His lungs burned and his throat ached. His older wound, where the bullet had pierced him, was a sharp stab. His heart had slowed down to a set of spaced-apart lurches. How many new hours or days had he earned from such a slowdown? Enough to make up for all those lost ones?

Still
Smilin’,
Purple Lion?
Still
Tryin’,
Purple Lion
?

No, it was neither of those, he thought, drifting to a warm state in his body and in his head. It was not even
close
to either. This is ludicrous. This is insane. It was
Just fine, Clementine. Just fine. There are no purple lions...

The Druid’s relentlessness won out.

There are no purple lions...There just aren’t.

Fighting for air, Zeb lost the battle.

It means we’re all dying in the sun.

He exhaled.

Alldyinginthesun.Alldyinginthesun.Alldyinginthesun.

And there was nothing but water to breathe in air’s place.

<> <> <>

There was the sight of his mother’s stove, a view through a set of dark bars, a view of his father waving from the back of that neighbor’s boat. The sound of Caeli crying from a nightmare shimmered like a reflection off water. Beneath it was music, a whole symphony, messy and playing on top of itself. He thought he could hear Sgt. Pepper among the notes but couldn’t be sure.

Everything went sallow, the pulse of an atomic ending. It was frameless sight with the empty white he knew from before. It couldn’t be touched, he remembered, only known.

He reached out.

And he found the white dissolving near his fingertips. Behind it was depth. It became a stark steel sky illuminated by unseen bulbs behind.

He was running; running towards it, running away from it. It was in all directions, met at a line of horizon by the white-padded ground. His lungs felt empty, he could not get enough air into them. He turned his neck and behind him, against the backdrop of isolation-gray, he saw the face of a man he recognized from before. The face was not Malin’s, it was not his father’s. It was the face of David Langtree, rising above his flapping maroon shirt. David was chasing after Zeb, following a trail left by bare feet in the frigid powder. And Zeb would come to know his name soon.

In his head was Malin telling him,
Hey, keep breathing
.

He felt warm, despite the snow on his bare feet, and he heard his own wheezing, but he did not feel frantic.
Keep breathing
, she said to him. He thought he may just fall forward into a nest of blankets and pillows for a long rest and he suspected, as David closed the gap between them, that the rest would be coming, but the pillows might not.

Keep Breathing
, he heard.

And then there was another voice, not God’s, only that of his own father:
Go get your mother!

They intertwined, the voices, mingled, became like the confused view of oak branches against sky, no real understanding of which shoot belongs to which limb:
Go Get Your Mother Keep Breathing Go Get Your Mother Keep Breathing Go Get Your Mother Keep Breathing...

His sight was jittery like a film reel that had jumped the tracks of the projector but kept rolling. Behind him, above a blotch of swimming maroon, the face with bared teeth blurred like that slow sluggish vision one might have after a few drinks or a draining and life-threatening fever. The air was stale and his tongue ran against his teeth. They felt unnatural. He sucked in more gulps of that emptiness but they did nothing to satiate. His lungs no longer ached like they had under the ice water, but they didn’t feel good either. They felt missing entirely.

—
GOGETYOURMOTHERKEEPBREATHINGGOGETYOURMOTHER

KEEPBREATHINGGOGETYOURMOTHERKEEPBREATHING

GOGETYOURMOTHERKEEPBREATHING
—

The horizon abruptly vanished. Like a large piece of torn paper, it suddenly became a jagged edge before his feet. He came to a dead stop, inertia threatening to force him over the edge that had suddenly
become
. His arms fanned like a windmill and he regained balance, sending only a few stones and some puffs of dead snow over the precipice that had materialized in front of him. There was nowhere to go but down to those waves; he would be caught and then held with his head dangling over a rocky border. He knew as much.

He witnessed again those rocks two hundred feet below. They were bathed in foamy, breaking waves from an endless ocean and they were without sound. Were those body parts laying down there?

Behind him was the man in the maroon shirt.

Zeb felt the life being sucked out of him. He whirled to find a hand wrapping snake-like around his neck. The other groped and cupped his face at the chin like a clamp. His own fists, reflexive, struck at the man’s temples, doing little good. He tasted dead air in his mouth and he imagined becoming a part of that air, just a fading whiff of nothingness stranded in this place where the time didn’t seem to move properly. His eyes blurred, the landscape of snow and rock shifted, and he looked lazily into the eyes of David, the maroon man.

He noticed his own hands then, batting at Maroon Man’s face and neck, and he caught hold of an impossible detail to cling to in such an absurd scenario. His palm, his left, where a tooth of wood from the Charlemagne house’s deck had dug in and stung him was pristine. The pine dagger was not there, there was no sting, and no blood. The skin was untouched.

Change is what happens to the strong.

The notion arrived out of nowhere, arrived from the sight of his unmarked left palm. It made those other voices vanish, proof that in this place, as with nearly everything of value, most things of importance come at you out of the blue. And this alien notion saved him in that instant.

The flash of titanium white arrived, just like the bursts of it he used to see in front of his unsuspecting eyes at the raves and the clubs, and that one time at the Leland summer home.

He saw his own face then, himself looking tired, strung out and old. He saw his father’s features in his own, and he saw a white dress shirt like Oliver used to wear.

But that shirt was not Oliver’s. Neither were the gray slacks that Zeb was wearing; they belonged to the man who held him down. The traded perspective held—
Change is what happens to the strong
—almost as though Zeb’s attraction to seeing more had kept him inside David a moment longer. Somehow. There was a daunting, confused, warbled set of voices within that space as he looked at his own oddly comforted visage. There was insanity and he paged through this man’s history with deft mental fingertips. David Langtree, wife to Leighton Ashbury.
Oh he loved her so...

He saw those daughters, princess-girls with dark hair and large eyes: Ashleigh and Davina. They both looked like their mother and their stillborn baby sister did too.

Looking into an unfolding storybook of pictures and words, he saw David’s life in an instantaneous eternity. And then he saw his own mother, clinging in her maroon blouse to a tree root, up to neck in foam water, on a cold November night.

In Sadie there was panic, thoughts of her little boy at home under his blue bedspread, thoughts of her little sister alone and ruined, laying naked in a strange place, and thoughts of a strange man’s lips and smooth face, not her husband’s.

In Zeb there was understanding, like a single drop of water, clean and fresh.

In David, finally clutching the face of his prize, there was the hate, springing up like it was new.

<> <> <>

“
Do you believe in human feelings so strong that laws of the universe—perhaps even those of life and death—can be ignored? Broken even?”

“
Yes,” Zeb said without hesitation.

<> <> <>

In a strange sense, his mother, Sadie Nadine Redfield, against all odds, had come back to her son. Sadie was the first; David pulled her down to that mysterious place on the other side of this reality without meaning to. It just happened.

Black like the hair on his daughters’ heads, it was as though he held a lump of coal in his hand and all the sadness, bitterness and blame squeezed it so tight that it turned to diamond in his palm. Within that diamond was a fragment of moment, a place where he arrived several times over in the coming years.

And in that place, the first night, as funny time ticked down and sickly air drew in and out of his lungs, he found himself mangling Sadie, attacking her, hoisting her above his head in anguish, and pitching her over the precipice and into the waves.