The Invisible Circus (31 page)

There it was—the laugh. “That’s right,” Faith said. “He does.”

At that point their companions straggled onto the scene, and Wolf had a jealous fear of all that nice food getting eaten up. He and Faith left the wall, and they all sat down to eat.

“Where?” Phoebe asked. “Here? Where we are?” It didn’t seem possible.

“Right by this church.”

“Did it—how did it look?”

“I don’t know,” he said. “I remember it bigger. Higher or something. The wall.”

When he’d stuffed himself, Wolf had leaned back against the church and dozed awhile. A stirring woke him. He opened his eyes and saw Faith standing on top of the wall, her back to him. “Get the fuck off there!” he’d shouted, scrambling to his feet.

Faith flinched, startled, then turned to look at Wolf, the wind pounding so hard he was amazed it didn’t shove her right off. “Stop,” she said calmly.

Instead of pulling her down the way he’d planned, Wolf reached up and took Faith’s hand. It was warm.

“I’m thinking,” Faith said. “Just let me think.”

“Think down here.”

“I can’t,” she said, this absolute calm in her voice, to the point where Wolf thought, Hell, am I the one who’s acting weird?

He held her hand, warmed by the strength of her grip. “Let me go,” Faith said.

“I can’t.”

“Yes, you can,” she said. “Trust me this time. Everything will be good.”

Wolf clung to her hand, to that strength. He wanted it. Faith towered above him in her torn flapping jeans and lacy blouse like some mythic creature from the prow of a ship. He felt dwarfed. The world was their event, but it had worn him out. Faith gazed at the horizon, then turned back to Wolf. “Now,” she said. “For a minute. Let go.”

Wolf let go of her hand and backed away. The rest of them were propped against the church, watching Faith sort of goggle-eyed. The whole thing felt unreal. Wolf was terrified but riveted, too, in the grip of something bigger than himself. He leaned against the church. Faith stood on the wall. She had such guts. Someday we’ll look back on all this and die laughing, Wolf told himself, die when I admit how goddamn scared I was, and he felt himself reaching for that time, that calm, sweet place out ahead. Faith shielded her eyes from the sun. Wolf kept having the urge to sneak up behind her; the wind was loud enough so that she probably wouldn’t know until he was on her, pulling her down—he thought of that and rejected it time after time because it seemed low, so undignified against the vision of Faith alone on that wall facing the sea and open sky, something pure, almost noble in the sight of her, and Wolf found himself thinking, If I let her do this, the whole craziness will finally be behind us.

“She looked back at me,” he said. “I saw her face and I knew, I jumped up—” But before he could reach her, Faith had spread wide her arms and dived off the wall into the sea.

Wolf’s swallowing made a prickling sound. Phoebe wondered if he might be sick again. She felt sick herself.

“Dove,” he said. “Not a sound, not a shout. We sat there totally stunned—this sense of the inconceivable having happened—and suddenly I thought, Jesus Christ, this is all some fucking joke, she’s hiding behind the wall, there’s some ledge I didn’t see, and I ran over there ready to grab her, but when I looked down I saw her shape on the rocks and I started screaming …”

He fell silent. “So what did you do?” Phoebe said, the words seeming to come from her chest, not her mouth.

“Well, the rest of them split. Took about ten minutes, they just sort of drifted away. Meanwhile, I …”

He paused again. Though his eyes were wet, he didn’t cry. Lifting the story out of himself seemed to require all the energy he had. “I tore into town hollering and screaming, got it across pretty quickly that I’d seen a girl jump off the cliff. My hair was cut short for the factory, so I didn’t look too much like a maniac. A few guys started climbing down the cliff where it wasn’t so steep. They knew what they were doing—I got the feeling it wasn’t the first time someone had ended up on those rocks. I followed them down—the whole time thinking, Maybe she’s alive, please God, let her be alive—but when the first guys reached her, I could tell by the way they leaned over, I just knew. Still, I thrashed my way over there, half swimming, and then I really knew.”

“How?” Phoebe whispered.

“Her neck.” He could hardly speak. “Her neck was wrong. I put my hand on her chest …” He began to weep. The sound was wrenching, unpracticed. “I can’t remember,” he said. “I can’t talk about this.”

All hell had broken loose in the town, meanwhile. People streamed down the cliffs, some weeping, most just excited, as if it were a holiday. Wolf stood half freezing in water up to his chest, and only then did it hit him that what had happened up there was his fault, that he could have stopped it. He imagined Gail and Barry and Phoebe, having to face them, explain what had happened—no, his mind veered away, it was impossible, he could take almost anything but he couldn’t face them, couldn’t bear having anyone know. Finally, in a last mad effort, he’d sprinted back up to this spot, made sure Faith’s stuff was all where they would find it, backpack, passport, all that, right by the wall. Then he’d fled back down the way they’d come, back to Manarola, stood on the train station platform heaving from exhaustion, thinking, What the fuck am I doing? Nothing seemed real, Faith dead, him running—to what? His head was about to explode; he thought he might actually lose his mind right there, just fly away, but then he heard a train coming through the mountain and in that moment Faith seemed to come to him, so clear, nothing to do with that body bent on the rocks. She was smiling, saying, Wolf, go on, are you nuts? Get on the train! Don’t you see? she said. We’re free, both of us. Get on the train, baby, what’s the matter with you, go on! Urging him, her voice rising with the noise of the approaching train until they merged, the pounding train and Faith’s voice, and when it pulled into the platform, Wolf got on feeling weirdly uplifted, elated almost, as if he and Faith were escaping the disaster together, one more hair-raising exit.

The feeling didn’t last. By the time he got back to Munich, he was a zombie—Faith dead, his own fault, everything shrunk to dust beside the enormity of these facts. He’d been certain someone from the town who remembered would come after him with handcuffs. But no one did. Hell, maybe they’d never given him another thought.

Each time Wolf spoke to Faith’s mother he would think, I’ll tell her now, I can’t go one more second without telling her, but he was always too afraid. He’d promised Faith he would never tell anyone about the bomb or the dead man—her last wish, it now seemed, and he couldn’t bring himself to violate it. But without telling that, how could he explain the rest? So he’d find himself saying, “I’m sorry, Gail, I’m sorry, I’m so goddamn sorry,” going on like that until finally she would break in. “Stop Wolf,” she’d say gently. “Stop. What could you have done?”

Perversely, he’d found this comforting.

Wolf fell silent. “I don’t see how you lived,” Phoebe said. “After that.”

He gave a mirthless laugh. “Tentatively,” he said. “I lived—I live—very tentatively.”

For years, he said, his life had felt to him like a kind of experiment. The question being, How long could he hold out before the whole thing came crashing down on his head? He’d pictured himself looking back on the present day or week from his jail cell, or while contemplating the grass outside the asylum where surely he was headed. But rather than defeating him, these thoughts had actually fueled Wolf with determination. Fuck it, he’d think, if he had to go down, he sure as hell wasn’t going without a fight. And Faith was part of that feeling. Come on, he’d imagine her saying, have some guts, the last thing I want is to bring you down—although later he’d wonder if thoughts like these were merely self-serving. And gradually, as a life of sorts took shape around him, he’d started having them less, not that he’d resolved anything, he just didn’t think so much. But meeting Phoebe that morning weeks ago on the stairs, Wolf had heard a voice that said, You knew it was coming; well, here it is. And he’d felt relieved.

“I promised myself a thousand times—until the second I opened my mouth—that I’d never tell you what happened up here.” Wolf said. “But maybe I always knew that’s where we were headed.”

Phoebe looked at the wall, searching her mind for some question to draw Wolf out. But her mind was empty.

She shut her eyes and leaned her head against the church. Something unbearable was happening inside her, a sensation like despair, only deeper, more wrenching. The wind blew dust in her face. She felt as if she were dying, as if this pain were the pain of her soul being torn from her body. In fear she opened her eyes. The wind filled them with dust but it didn’t matter, that pain, it was so small. It felt almost good.

Faith was gone. She was gone. Her absence felt as fresh to Phoebe as if she’d watched her sister dive from this cliff.

She tasted metal, the peculiar taste that follows a sudden sharp blow to the skull. A stunning emptiness blinked around her.

Wait, she thought. Wait.

In vain Phoebe tried to push her way clear, but her own thoughts seemed faint beside the vast finality of her sister’s act. It whirled like a vortex, dragging every part of Phoebe irresistibly toward itself, swallowing her whole. She couldn’t breathe.

Wait, she thought. But I always knew what happened.

Yet in all this time the reality of Faith’s act, its brutal finality, had never really touched her. It was cloaked in gauze, in light, a terrific flash of light that left in its wake a soft orb.

Phoebe opened her eyes. The bright empty sky made a buzzing noise. The very air seemed full of panic, a tingling whiteness.

“Come on,” Faith had said, reaching for Wolf. Phoebe wanted to follow them, but the door was closed. “Can you feel it?” Candlelight on the kitchen walls. “Can you?” Faith asked. “Can you?” And Phoebe did, at seven years old. She knew what it was.

“Come on,” Faith said. Something behind that door. Faith opened every door she found, but Phoebe was afraid to.

A flash of light. Then a long glow.

Faith opened every door.

One gesture. Everything distilled.

Faith spent herself. She gave herself away. And time stopped.

She killed us both, Phoebe thought. Killed all of us.

Phoebe’s limbs hurt. She wanted to move. She stood up.

The sea opened before her, wide and still. Cowed to stillness, Phoebe thought, the sea and everything else. She walked toward it.

“Stop!” Wolf cried.

Phoebe gave a violent start. Turning, she saw Wolf on his feet, poised to spring at her. She opened her mouth to speak but found she could not; her own astonishment silenced her. Wolf actually thought she would jump. Phoebe strained to imagine it—standing here, making that choice—but her mind veered away in disgust.

“I’d never do it,” she said, staring at Wolf in disbelief. “Never. I would never do it.” And as she spoke, Phoebe’s perception of the act itself began to shift. It was a choice that appalled her.

Huddling with her mother and Barry on the cliff near the Golden Gate Bridge, releasing Faith’s ashes to the wind. Feeling so small, just the three of them together—hardly even a family. And her sister chose this.

“What about us?” Phoebe said. “What did she say about us?”

“I don’t remember.”

“Something, though? She said something?”

“I don’t know.” He looked uneasy.

“But I mean, what did she think?”

There was a long pause. “I don’t think she thought,” Wolf said.

Phoebe shook her head. Her ears were ringing. “Okay,” she said, “that guy who died had children. But what about us?”

She looked at Wolf, who knew nothing, and was engulfed by a surge of wild anger. “I can’t believe she did it,” she cried. “I can’t believe she stood here and did that to us!” Each word incensed her further, until she felt crazed with the need to vent her rage. “Was she out of her mind?” she shouted. “Standing here and—goddammit!” She kicked the outside of the church, hurting her foot, knocking flakes of plaster to the ground. She pounded it with her hands, raking them over its rough surface until a hot, delicious pain flashed through her. “Goddammit!” she cried. “Goddamn her!”

From behind, Wolf took Phoebe’s hands, scraped and bleeding from the plaster’s abrasion. He folded her in his arms, holding her still. “Stop it,” he said. “You’re hurting yourself.”

Phoebe let her weight fall on Wolf. “I hate her,” she said. “I hate her more than anything.”

“Okay,” Wolf said gently, holding her.

After a while Phoebe turned around, facing him. Wolf watched her a moment, as if to gauge her calm. “Phoebe, I have to say this,” he said. “The last thing Faith wanted was to hurt you—any of you. In her mind it was a sacrifice. She was trying to right a balance.” He paused, breathing hard. “The fact that she caused more misery is just a horrible irony. Her worst fear, all over again.”

He let go of Phoebe. She moved away from him and hunched against the church, its stone warm at her back. She shut her eyes.

Can you feel it?

Faith opened every door.

Reaching, reaching. Whatever it took.

Come on, Faith said. Come on, come on. A lump on her head, who cared? A bloody nose? So much the better.

And they’d loved her for it.

Adored her.

Everyone had.

Watching. Silently egging Faith on as she climbed or pushed or mounted the high dive, craving the spell that fell on the world when she risked her life.

Strangers scrambling over rocks, holding her sister’s wet head in their strangers’ hands. Not what Phoebe had imagined. Policemen picking through her things. A whole life—a warm thing—broken into procedures. Not what Phoebe had imagined. The opposite.

And she was riven, then, by a vision of her sister unlike any she’d had before: a girl like herself, reaching desperately for something she couldn’t see but sensed was there, a thing that always seemed to evade her. Reaching violently, giving herself to that violence, only to find, when normal life resumed, that she’d done a thing she couldn’t live with.