The Woman Who Lost Her Soul Hardcover (76 page)

What she saw, the entire beach, had the appearance of a washtub overflowing, snowy
with suds, skittering balls of foam leaping into the air as far as the eye could see,
the ocean a roiled slate-colored mountainscape of successive peaks, every summit hosting
an avalanche, the atmosphere what she knew painters would call Payne’s gray, the bluish
dark gray color of a tempest gathering or expiring, the assault of the clouds slowed
from invasion to occupation, the rain slackened to an apathetic drizzle. She gazed
at the panorama in wonderment, feeling unexpectedly well, perhaps finally on the other
side of the torment of her withdrawal, a little raunchy from the daylong indulgence
of liquor and the night’s accommodations but clear and unchecked in her overall sense
of body and spirit. Eville, obviously, looking pale and hungover, was a different
story in the aftermath of the night’s excesses, shambling off behind the dunes.

Dottie exchanged her damp and rumpled clothes for the ill-fitting orange bikini, splashing
across a slow river of ankle-deep surge to the ocean and its daunting upheaval, pausing
respectfully at the edge of the spume, the furious shore break and its lethal riptide,
before stepping in just far enough to yank down the bottom of her suit, relieving
herself quickly, her pants still lowered when a wave she had not anticipated reared
behind her, towering overhead at twice her height, sucking her up helpless into its
bilous yellow-green curl. Then it broke and trampled her like an elephant, her body
bounced and tumbling and pounded, the top of her head rammed against the bottom, seeing
stars and tiny tendriled threads of lightning, having the strange panicky thought
that she had lost her grip on her father, allowing him to be swept away, until the
whitewater deposited her with a final flipping smack far up onto the beach, her fingers
clawed into the sand to keep herself from being sucked back out. Her suit was somewhere
else, ripped off, oh, well; where’s my Botticelli? she thought, spacey and nonchalant,
standing up with whimsical defiance, re-creating the Venus pose, shielding herself,
an arm across breasts, the other dropped to cup her pubis, Oh, the shame! You little
tramp! she teased herself, that thing that would have killed her long ago if she hadn’t
gotten rid of it, willing shame from her psyche, a smothering friend turned foe. She
executed a girlish liberating half-pirouette, chortling, and began to shake the water
out of her hair but stopped because the motion made her dizzy and her neck stiffened
with pain.

She touched her forehead and there was blood, a small trickle from a small abrasion,
not worth considering. Then, fully realizing the stark sublime beauty of her isolation,
she began to walk up the flooded beach in a state of tranquil ecstasy, nearly out
of sight of the truck when she began to sense something was very wrong, very confusing,
existence itself disrobing, and she lay down in a few inches of water to quell her
sensation of spinning but the spin remained and she closed her eyes but the spin accelerated.
Maybe I have a concussion, she told herself. That would explain what’s happening.
When she opened her eyes again the clouds in the sky whirled into a vortex, melted
and drained, leaving behind an express train of sunlight and shadows, strobing at
a pace so rapid it seemed to hypnotize her and when she closed her eyes again it was
a mistake, filling the vision behind her eyelids with uncountable flashes of simultaneous
lightning, the balls of her eyes deflating. She felt sharp pellets of glass nick her
teeth, like a rodent biting her mouth, she felt her lips stinging and a scream locked
in her throat and time smashed into a million phosphorescent splinters of braiding
memory.
Am I dying, did I die, am I dead?
she thought, reassuring herself,
No, that was a trick, dying was a trick, you’re fine.

Then,
what?

She was being tumbled again, not by water but by time, which made no sense, to be
time’s prisoner and yet not, to be outside as well, beyond the burden of chronology,
oblivious to the count of the days, where time was amorphous, porous, popping up here
and there and everywhere, everything happening all at once. I’m naked and lying on
the beach, she told herself, but she was aware of an impossible connection, there
was one beach but not one
now,
the trick seemed to be time itself, you could
think
this way but it was not real to
be this way.
I’m lying on the beach, she insisted, but something’s broken, something’s wrong, how
do I fix it, what do I do? Oh, she said with great relief, I get it, I’m dreaming
this incredible dream and Eville was inside of her, they were nuzzling, smeary with
sweat, the taste of him salty as she licked his chest, then she was poised to come
and she was almost there and then she was there, her orgasm running like a shiver
through the timbers of a ship. Wow, she thought, opening her eyes, if that wasn’t
real, then—but it was too real, the walls of her vagina swollen shut with pleasure.

She could see the sky again, the vestiges of the storm clearing off, and she had one
of those rogue memories that didn’t fit, which seemed to skip ahead, Eville telling
her he didn’t know how to love her and she asking why are you taking so long and Ev,
laughing, saying sweetly, I guess I’ve run out of options.

I’m lying on the beach and I’m dreaming or I’m dead,
she thought. Prescient, clairvoyant, hallucinating, delirious, insane. Then a compulsion
to pray became irresistible, and she found herself in a familiar sanctuary, kneeling
in St. Luke’s out in Langley with her family, the church packed with a congregation
of families much like hers, the ossified OSS crowd and the graying Cold War crowd
and the new crowd and her crowd, the spiritually slothful and the divine firebrands,
and she bowed her head and prayed, Dear God, I want them all dead, but a modern person
could not pray for this. Pray for enlightenment and tolerance, pray for democracy
and justice, pray for her father’s salvation. Lord, forgive me, I am a deadly wayfarer,
the means by which sin enters this world, the vessel willing to carry forth the corruption.
Is it true, Lord, only angels can fight the devil? Has that worked well for you, Lord?
I stand and face your enemy. What shall you have me regret? My father, Father? Where
is the time for that? Would you replace my hate with nihilism, oh, Lord? What shall
you have me sacrifice—but it was never a question of how far she’d go. Kill them all,
she prayed, and paused, reconsidering a possible correction, a potentially definitive
flaw in her understanding—perhaps a soul is what you have spent your life making,
not a piece of metaphysical equipment shipped ready-made from the factory, another
myth like original sin, which you were outfitted with at birth and could somehow lose,
like men high and low somehow lost their humanity—and so she prayed that no god was
listening, she prayed she hadn’t been heard. At last she prayed, We must be patient
until love turns. Amen.

The sun broke through the clouds to stay and warmed her body and the water began to
retreat and she wanted to rise but for some reason could not until Burnette, dependable
Burnette, the good soldier, came to her rescue.

I’m here, he said and stooped to take her hand.

I was waiting for you, she said. You found me.

Let’s get you up, he said, and she never felt more grateful in her life, or properly
loved, than when he pulled her up and they walked on, the headwinds fresh and ever
lessening, the world receding in their wake, faded into haze.

CHAPTER FIFTY-ONE

Friday morning as he broke camp Dottie stood on top of the dunes, checking in on her
satphone, and she skipped down after a few minutes saying, He wants to talk to you.
Eville took the receiver and listened, confused, to hear her father rip him a new
one for the vanishing act he had just pulled off with his daughter. Then abruptly
Chambers changed his tone, assured him not to worry,
Remember I’ve given my word,
a gift like gold, incapable of devaluation. He had the situation in hand, he said,
but for the moment they had to deal with a temporary glitch, an interagency overlap,
Bureau agents down in Fayetteville knocking on Burnette’s door with perfunctory questions
about the death of Renee Gardner, nothing to be concerned about, trust me, said Chambers.
An episode of miscommunication, not investigative zealotry. Inevitable that your name
would come up but you’re covered, said Chambers, your command is heads up on this.
However, I think it wise you remain unavailable for several more days. Bring my daughter
home and by the time you get here this inconvenience will have disappeared into its
natural tangle of ego-webs and protocols.

Roger that, sir, said Ev, and the undersecretary said, Good, I’ll see you tonight
then.

He snapped the phone back into its cradle and disconnected the system, thinking,
Inevitable, right? Why didn’t I see that coming?
and Dottie asked if something was wrong and Burnette said he wants me to give you
a ride to Virginia.

Really? Why?

He didn’t say. Maybe he wants us to have a chance to get to know each other.

That might take some time, she said, flashing a cagey smile and he told her it was
beginning to look that way, wasn’t it, and they finished packing and rode the
Green Grass
back to the mainland and caught the Cedar Island ferry to Ocracoke, where they drove
out onto the beach again to fish and swim, an encore for their evolving dispositions,
but the run had been pushed south by the storm, which had left behind magnificent
rollers, the water transparent again and restored with an aquamarine tint. The day
was hot and bright and the fish nowhere to be found and after several hours they decided
to drive back down the beach a mile or so to a break they had noticed where the swells
hit a sandbar about fifty yards offshore and popped straight up into a body surfer’s
version of paradise. She had been fishing in running shorts and a T-shirt but the
weekend crowd had yet to arrive so they both stripped down and dove in and swam to
the bar and walked out to where it dropped off again and lined themselves with the
peaks and started riding them in, shooting out of the curls, human torpedoes propelled
toward the beach in a joy-filled surrender to catastrophe, getting to their feet to
hoot and cheer and going back out and doing it again and once more, once more. Then
on his last wave he came smashing to shore, his back wrenched by the impact, and looked
around for Dottie, who had pulled out of the same wave and held back. When he spotted
her again he saw her mermaid’s form suspended in the wall of a gigantic swell, her
body vertical, hair like a crown of fire, her arms outstretched, not wings but the
bones otherwise meant for wings and beautiful, she was so beautiful inside the wave,
but then like a target flipped up at a carnival’s shooting gallery, suddenly ascending
to her right she had company, a mako shark, its split tail fin only a few feet away
from her hip in the screen of the wall, its shape silhouetted in the refracted light,
its length easily twice her length, and there they were, embedded inside the wave
like objects in amber, beauty and the beast, the image frozen for a second before
the wall spit its curl and collapsed and when her head finally bobbed up in the foam
and he saw she was safe in the shallows, what he had seen remained like a panel in
a painting, the otherworldly juxtaposition gesturing toward something mystical but
profoundly unstable and hopeless—the girl, the shark, the rising curtain of underwater
light, the moment of suspension, the cosmic wink, the clap of erasure.

When he told her about it she said, I’ll bet that happens all the time. They’re always
out there. We just don’t know it.

They head for the Hatteras Inlet ferry in the late afternoon, Dottie delighted this
time by their day of ferrying from island to island, standing in the bow together
here, now, leaning into him, Ev daring his heart to wait and see, looking at her and
thinking with a vague uneasiness how normal she could be sometimes. She smiled and
reminded him of what he had said back in Fayetteville about the cure.

A week ago I was a burnout.

Really? he teased. How did I miss that?

They stopped for dinner at a restaurant in Hatteras Village and arrived on the outskirts
of Norfolk well after dark. When she said, We’re not in a rush, are we? he readily
let her convince him to exit off the bypass to spend the night in a roadside motel.
They began in the bathroom, showering together, Dottie hooking a slippery leg behind
his granite thighs, balancing on the ball of her left foot,
en pointe,
to let him enter her, the entering the strangest black magic of all, taking her away
to an obliterating nowhere. She changed positions, facing away, her hands flattened
against the tiles, arrested, her face upturned and contorted in the spray, the sound
she made a wincing feral gurgle, like ecstatic persecution, as he slapped against
her flesh, Dottie pushing back against the plunge with extraordinary force. Then on
the other side of the blowout she sat like someone hypnotized on the edge of the tub
to shave the week’s growth of bristle between her legs and Eville, kneeling, asked
if he could do it, his tongue replacing the razor after the final careful strokes
along the puffed ridge of her vulva, then she was thrusting against him with a violence
he would never have imagined from a woman, coming from there, the bone at the top
of her pussy hitting his mouth like a mallet, his teeth cutting the inside of his
upper lip, then they were flopped on the bed, Eville trying to hold on and keep his
cock plugged in, her body in some type of convulsive escape trance thrashing from
the foot of the mattress to the headboard, her hands blindly clawing the sheets until
he had ridden her over the side and onto the floor and she shuddered and kept shuddering
and thought she was done but the aftershocks would not stop coming. He shook himself
out of his own daze and returned to the bathroom, wiping the steam from the mirror
to trim his new beard to a more acceptable goatee, but his hands were unsteady and
she came in and saw what he was doing and took the scissors and razor from him to
repair his hack job. We’re becoming a real ma-and-pa act, aren’t we, he said and Dottie
smiled, Yeah.

They went back to the bed for more and slower lovemaking, interrupted by intervals
of reading and short immersions into the television, falling asleep snuggled back
to back. In the morning they lazed around, stealing time, going to a nearby truck
stop for a breakfast of biscuits and sausage gravy, returning to the room for another
bout, checking out at noon and spending the rest of the day on the freeways, at the
mercy of the weekend traffic, 64 to Williamsburg, then the stop-and-go torture of
95, the traffic bumper to bumper north of Fredericksburg, then the Beltway, she guiding
him to the exit to Vienna on 123 until the two of them sat in the parking lot in front
of a row of colonial-style town houses, hedgerows of unpruned azaleas in bloom, the
brick walkways lined with tidy boxwoods, behind the building the tops of maple trees
like green clouds poking above the roof, Dottie’s mood swung low the moment he pulled
into an empty space and turned off the engine. I don’t want to stay here, she said.
Okay, said Eville. Nobody says you have to, but tell me how this works. You’re supposed
to be dead.

I think it’s a case of mistaken identity, she said, getting out. You must have mistaken
me for somebody else, and when she says this senseless thing, for a moment he wants
to throttle her.

She knocked and they waited, listening to the clicking release of multiple locks,
Eville bewildered by her infuriating caprice, Dottie nervously fluffing her unruly
hair, sun-bleached to a color resembling cantaloupe, mumbling that she hated this
place and then the door swung open and there stood a reproachful, stern-faced Steven
Chambers dressed in a navy polo shirt and crisp chinos and tasseled loafers with no
socks. Eville observed her quicksilver change into loving daughter, greeting her father
with a prolonged hug and a peckish bouquet of kisses, Steven Chambers looking gimlet-eyed
over her shoulder at Burnette with a tight courtroom smile of parental displeasure.

I had expected you last night, said Chambers. Why on earth didn’t you call?

Yes, sir, said Burnette.

You ignored your pager. We call that dereliction, don’t we?

It’s my fault, Daddy, she said, ending her embrace to come to Ev’s rescue without
bothering to explain the nature of her blame. Don’t be cross.

Her father’s mint-blue eyes rescinded their indictment as they fell back upon his
daughter and he looked at her then directly, brightening with repossession, the graying
bon vivant restored to his natural pose of conviviality and panache. You made it,
thank God, he said. You almost missed your surprise.

The surprise made its happy entrance—her brother Christopher, a shorter, dark-haired,
and less dominating version of his father, and a lovely woman with shoulder-length
locks and a strawberries-and-cream complexion, dressed in a white knit top and printed
cotton skirt and rubber flip-flops, stepping out from the living room into the foyer.
Dottie, who hadn’t seen Christopher in six years, walked into the invitation of his
arms with an effusive spool of questions. Wasn’t he supposed to be in Texas, working
on his doctorate? Done, said Christopher, comps, dissertation, defense, the whole
academic shitload, signed, sealed, delivered, done. Never again a schoolboy, his real
life now beckoned, replete with an unexpected nostalgia for the wider world. Hey,
this is Jocelyn, he said, and his sister seemed stunned when he made his announcement—they
were getting married in August in Harare. Harare! It’s where my parents live, explained
Jocelyn in the sonorous lilt of an Anglo-African accent. It’s where I’m from. Rhodesia.
Zimbabwe. But we were neighbors, weren’t we, in a manner of speaking. You once lived
in Kenya yourself. Christopher has told me so many wonderful stories.

Forgotten, Burnette stood awkwardly on the front stoop, a teenager all over again,
bringing home his date, waiting with no little ambivalence to be invited inside to
the rituals and bigotries of another’s family code; instead, the undersecretary joined
him outside to speak confidentially. I have some good news, he said, lowering his
voice. You’re off the hook.

What hook is that, sir?

Chambers said Jack Parmentier seemed to have hired a private detective, who was down
in Haiti snooping around. With someone I believe you know, a lawyer—Tom Harrington?

Yes, sir. We’ve met. Dottie knows him too.

Well, it seems they tracked down the actual gunman.

Sir? How can that be?

I’ve been told that the Feds in Miami plan to release Parmentier tomorrow.

Excuse me, sir. What the hell is going on?

Chambers looked Eville up and down, faintly patronizing, mildly dismissive and entertained,
unruffled by Burnette’s challenge to this ludicrous assertion that two plus two equals
three. He shrugged and said, It all seems damn promiscuous, doesn’t it, Ev? and then
looked absentminded, glancing at his wristwatch, apparently lost in a swath of empty
thought before he turned away and clapped his hands inside the doorway, collecting
his children. Everyone, let’s go, he announced. To Maria’s first, a cramped little
Mexican joint a short drive up 123, and then Christopher and Jocelyn had an international
flight to catch out of Dulles.

The reunited family piled into Chambers’s silver Mercedes and Eville followed unhappily
in his truck, kicking himself for being a damned fool, screwing the boss’s daughter
perhaps the least of his transgressions in light of his apparent inclusion on the
list of suspects in her murder, a decoy in their fucking games, the self-dramatizing
schemes of overheated minds, unrestrained in power and influence and felonious inspiration.
It all seemed a bit too diabolically fanciful and he felt once again shanghaied, made
to join an absurdist theater troupe renowned for bloodshed, performing exclusively
for kings and their unsuspecting subjects, the cast and audience equally at risk of
cutthroating or mock executions or ironically, because it was less titillating, almost
a disappointment in its imaginative deficit, wholesale slaughter.

Dinner passed without a hint of discord, save for the Chambers’s collective inconsiderate
bad manners, the group oblivious to their outsider and yet its mutual exchange of
affections unexpected, given what Eville had been conditioned to assume about the
family from Dottie’s innuendos. The implicit unwholesomeness of her relationship with
her father, aberrant by any rational standard, was a mystery Eville had no desire
to solve. The tacit regret he had heard in her occasional remarks about her brother,
who Eville had been led to believe was too weak to bear the harsher realities of life
as an adult. But none of these assumptions seemed to hold up and he endured their
ostentatious enthusiasm with a sinking of his own.

The meal’s celebratory theme was water. Newly armed with postgraduate degrees in hydrology,
the engaged lovebirds were off to southern Africa to launch an NGO, DrinkUp,
the organization already hatched, chartered with the United Nations and the war-weary
government of Mozambique, where DrinkUp had received its first grant for its inaugural
project, drilling bore wells and designing irrigation systems in the arid countryside.
(Chris is the engineer. I’m the queen of groundwater, quipped Jocelyn. My path is
the one of least resistance.) This is so exciting, trilled Dottie, who vowed nothing
would stop her from attending the wedding. Then without pause the siblings shifted
the conversation to their mother, apparently reincarnated as a saint, whom Christopher
and Jocelyn had just visited in Missouri on their journey east from Lubbock, where
the mother had immersed herself in devoted care for her elderly parents. The topic
of his wife the Samaritan seemed to produce a surge in their father’s appetite, Chambers’s
fork set in a quickened rotation from plate to mouth, packing in the chicken enchiladas
and carne asada quesadilla, his disinterested eyes watering from the heat of the chilis.
Will she come to the wedding? Dottie asked her brother. It depends, he said. You know.
If she can get away. You’re coming, aren’t you, Daddy, she asked, and he looked up
distracted from his plate, chewing boorishly, a grain of rice stuck to his chin, and
nodded, his affirmation unconvincing, but with his mouth again empty he declared with
a receding smile, Wouldn’t miss it for the world.