The Ghost's Child (12 page)

She clamped her mouth shut, her words flying off like bats — her voice was probably the loudest thing the island had ever heard. Feather gazed steadfastly into the fire. “If you can't understand it, Maddy,” he said, “then I can't explain it to you. Sometimes you must do what is right for your blood, your heart — for your spirit. Maybe this place isn't perfect, but I'm supposed to be here — here, alone — and this is where I will stay.”

Maddy said nothing. Her nails were dug in her palms. She glanced away into the darkness, where there was nothing she wanted to see. How curious it was, that this person she craved so much should crave something so different to her. A small voice inside her was piping,
Come back! Come back! Come back!
But she let it cry unheeded, turned her face from it. The palm leaves rustled, the fire popped, the ocean slushed the shore. Maddy thought she must not have a spirit — or that, if she did, it was a boorish thing. Her spirit knew no shades of gray, only black and white. Grief and happiness, loss and gain. “Well,” she said eventually, looking back at him, “are you happy now, Feather?” And she hoped, more than she'd ever hoped for anything, that he would say he was. What purpose was there in all that had happened, if both of them must still suffer?

His silver eyes lifted to her; he said, “My nature is comforted here.”

Maddy nodded. She felt abruptly tired, and ready to go home; she hankered to be aboard the
Albatross,
roving the vast free sea. She could hardly bear how alienated she felt, here on this island of Feather's dearest desire: if she were forced to stay, Maddy would stalk the beach just as Feather had done, relentlessly scanning the horizon for elsewhere. And it was dismal talking to this being who looked like Feather, and spoke like him, who was even tinged with the wheatfield smell of him — but was just an echo of the Feather she'd loved, the one she'd longed to see again. Those days were finished, that Feather was gone, the only place he lived now was in the past. And she resented this new Feather spoiling her memories of the old, which were the most cherished things that she owned. “I'm glad you've found peace, Feather,” she said. “I'm pleased you were able to forget me. Because how else could you live with the hurt you caused? It's a terrible thing, to love, and be left behind.”

“I believe you,” he said softly — and looking up she saw a spangle of someone she had known. “I haven't forgotten you, Maddy. Part of me never stops remembering you. Remembering you comforts my nature now, too.”

She watched him shimmer, turn smoky and flare with light. Somewhere inside him her Feather survived, holding her hand in his own. The realization stung her, and made her eyes smart: she did not know if his absence would be less painful now, or much, much worse. But this was the Feather she had searched for, the one who would most understand. Hastily, before he vanished, she said, “I need to ask you a question, Feather. It's a question bigger than the world. By the time I guessed you knew the answer, you were already gone. But I need the answer so badly that I crossed the horizon to find you.”

“And I'm here,” said Feather. “So ask.”

Maddy drew a breath, rehearsed the words in her head, and asked, “How can you know love, and lose it, and go on living without it, and not feel the loss forever?”

“You can't,” Feather answered. “You feel the loss forever. But you put it in a safe corner of yourself, and bit by bit some of your sorrow changes into joy. And that's how you go on living.”

Maddy saw it in her mind, a great coin flipping slowly, showing first the whiplash tail of sadness, next the warm facet of joy. Sorrow and joy, bonded so closely that occasionally they spun inside each other. “And you take pride in knowing you're capable of great love,” she said, “and live in the knowledge that you can feel it again.”

“. . . Yes,” said Feather. “You can feel it again.”

After that, there seemed little else to say. They sat in easy companionship for a while, feeding sticks into the fire and reminiscing about the cottage and the beach. They did not talk of the fay or the pond, or about his leaving in the middle of the night, because these were things that had not yet been safely cornered somewhere. Their conversation was suffused with a poignancy, which they pretended didn't exist. They talked like two old soldiers with not much in common once the battlefield stories were done.

When the moon hung directly over their heads, Maddy knew it was time to go. She shook the dust from her oilskin and scratched her mosquito bites. Feather walked with her down to the sand, to where the
Albatross
was aground. They stood side by side at the boat's pointy prow, reaching for the right things to say, hoping to make these last moments soar, but flailing like drenched birds. “Will you be all right?” Maddy asked, because it was important that he be so. It would never make her happy to think of him as sad.

He shrugged, smiling sweetly. “Of course. Will you?”

“Of course,” she said too.

“And do you really like my island?” he asked.

Maddy looked up at the ugly garrison of rocks, smelt the cloyed, seaweedy air, felt the sand gravelly between her toes. Eternal peace was an awe-inspiring thing: but it was also a frightening and stultifying thing. Here on his Island of Stillness, Feather would never feel frustration, anticipation, regret, or glee. He'd be immune to confusion, impatience, disappointment, and surprise. He would not yell with exhilaration, he would know no fear. He would not be irate, he would never weep. He would be stone, unmalleable, living a stone's life, as bland as the Island of Stillness itself. Despite this, she said, “It's beautiful, Feather,” and it was, if it made him happy.

They pushed the
Albatross
into the water, and Maddy climbed aboard. As the waves pulled the boat out to sea, Maddy watched Feather become smaller and smaller. Finally, when he was just a tiny speck that could hardly be seen in the dark, she whistled for the west wind. Zephyrus put a shoulder to the canvas and sped her lightly away. When she next looked back, Maddy could see only the thick night sky and the thicker blackness of the ocean below it. The Island of Stillness, she knew, was standing where it had come to a halt centuries ago: it was she who was gone.

M
addy had plenty of time to think during the long voyage home. The west wind steered the
Albatross
while she sat on the seat with her chin in her hands, turning over matters in her mind. She thought about Feather shrinking smaller and smaller as she sailed away. By the time the conifer forest that surrounded her cottage appeared as olive stubble in the distance, Feather would be tinier than a grain of sand, tinier than the tiniest speck of dust that might catch in the eye of the most miniature insect ever known. He filled her heart hugely, though, so there was hardly room for anything more. In her memory he flew as wide-winged as an eagle. She wondered if his shadow would hover over her forever, a bruise in the background of the rest of her life, a wound that pained when it was deliberately or accidentally knocked. Strangely, she wanted it to be this way. If the hurt of Feather healed, metamorphed into joy, she might one day forget him. And she did not want to forget him.

She hoped he would be happy on his Island of Stillness. She wondered if he would ever think of her wistfully, spoiling his serenity.

She would never see Feather again, Maddy knew. That part of her life was over. And the best she could do was take what she'd known — of Feather, of the fay, of the future she'd imagined in the forest's shade — and salvage something from it. She had lost, but loss has its own quality and promise. She could gather up the bare bones of her life and build from them something wiser and more intricate than what she'd had before.

“Thank you,” she said to Zephyrus, when the
Albatross
glided into the bay.

“My pleasure,” said the wind. “Any time. I like you, you know. You remind me of me, and I
really
like me. You don't want peace or sameness. You know that life is for going, not stopping.”

Maddy asked, “Do I?”

The wind said, “You do. But when life goes, it goes fast, Maddy: so be careful. Don't waste your time wanting what you can't have.”

“From now on,” Maddy promised, “I will try.”

She let down the sails, tied the boat to the pier, slipped off her oilskin, and walked home.

The west wind was right: life lasts a long time, but it goes by in a blink. There are plenty of quiet hours in which to sit and think, yet so little time to make decisions and get the serious things done. As soon as she opened the door of the cottage, Maddy knew that living within a dark forest wasn't something she should do. She was not, after all, Snow White. She packed her favorite things into a box, and tied down the lid. The nargun was crammed in a corner of the room, its black face full of worry. “I don't need your protection anymore,” she told it. “I must look after myself now. But I hope that you will always be my friend.” The beast pranced to its feet and wagged its stumpy tail like a pup. When Maddy finished packing, she left the cottage for the last time, closing the door behind her. She glanced back several times as she walked, her heart panging and protesting. But soon there was nothing to see except pine trees, and she turned her face to the front.

“Good riddance to bad rubbish,” was Mama's verdict of Feather. She swallowed a mouthful of wine. “I told you he was intolerable, Matilda. Hopefully one day everyone will forget this sorry saga, and you can hook a widower.”

Maddy's father, slicing roast lamb, said, “He was never good enough for you.”

And although everything had been so futile and disappointing, Maddy said, “I've never known anyone better than Feather.”

Mama gave a snort. “I wonder if he speaks so highly of you, while he's lazing around wasting his life and making mayhem of yours. How can you care a fig for someone who casts you aside — in favor of what?”

“Of truth.” The word occurred to Maddy from nowhere, crisp as crystal. “I'm glad I know somebody who would choose honesty over everything.”

“My goodness! How whimsical! Truth! What is that?”

Maddy shuddered. She would not speak of Feather at this table. She looked to her father and said, “Papa, I don't want to sit about doing nothing. I have been thinking: I want to go to the war.”

“What?” The boy stretched out on the settee sat up on his elbows. “War? What war?”

Matilda leaned back in her chair. “Surely, at school, you've learned about the war.”

“Of
course.
” His eyes thinned, he resented being suspected ignorant. “But what was the war doing in your poky town? The shooting and trenches were on the other side of the world. How did they get to
your
dinner table?”

“Even
our
poky little town had newspapers,” Matilda explained. “My father had them delivered to the house every day. I read them, and I was amazed. While I'd been gone, such a foolish thing had happened. Someone had fired a gun and killed an heir to a throne, and all the countries surrounding the street corner where the heir died had used his death as a reason to pounce into war — as if war is a child's game played with sticks and stones, and its hurts can be healed with a kiss. But this wasn't a game at all. Every day the papers printed lists of men who were maimed, missing, dead; and the lists grew longer, and never seemed to stop growing.”

“So did you want to become a soldier, and help win the war?” The boy smiled at the idea.

“Not exactly,” Matilda replied. “I was brave, but not
that
brave. Besides, the men who were so wantonly slaughtering one another were still gentlemen enough to believe that a battlefield was not a nice place for a lady. . . . But the women in those fighting countries were helping in other ways. With the men gone, it was they who were driving the trucks, running the factories, harvesting the fields. It was they who were manufacturing the ammunition. And they were caring for the soldiers who were sent home broken, unable to play that awful game anymore.”

The boy nodded, and lay down again, his hands folded under his head.

“I told Papa I wished to go where I'd be useful.” Matilda closed her eyes and saw the dining table, the candlelight, the roast lamb and jug of mint sauce, the expression on her father's face. “I knew I could do something more important with my life than paint watercolors and attend the theater and shop for buttons and bows to match a new dress.”

And she had wanted to crowd her hours with noise and busyness and a thousand thoughts that were not sunk nose-deep in the past. “That was a good idea,” said the boy.

“That, perhaps, is a good idea.” Mama licked a scarlet drop from her chin. “The first good idea you've had in a long time. Send you away. Give everyone time to forgive you.”

Papa sighed, and the look on his face was sad but accepting, because he understood that his daughter needed this thing.

So within a few weeks Maddy was aboard ship once more, sailing, this time, for a certain destination, on a boat which had an engine, and thus no need for wind. But Maddy, standing on the deck, spread her hands to Zephyrus, and let him rush through her fingers. She stood at the railing and searched the horizon, but from the deck of a big metal ship such things as spellbound islands are frivolous, and never exist.

She found a place where she could be useful in a grand stone house circled by a park of elm trees and grass, a place where soldiers who'd been injured in the war were sent to learn the laws of their new legless or armless lives. Maddy washed the men, and wrote their letters; read to them, and wheeled them around the grounds in chairs. She spooned supper to their lips and wiped their stained, scarred cheeks. She held their hands when they woke at night, soaked and shouting with nightmares; when fever made them call for their mothers it was Maddy who dabbed their faces and cooed them back to sleep. She wore a white dress, learned to roll cigarettes, went whole nights without sleeping, slept on a cot; and let clouds move over her past.