He is ready now. His work, his real work, is about to begin.
• • •
He can do amazing things with glass, turn the rod in the heat of the flame until it grows soft, caress it with his tools to form the bulb, the bud, the first perfect, translucent body upon which he will practice his art, from which he will conjure, with a series of small but eloquent gestures, other bodies, other forms, embedding as he does, within each of them, her initials.
• • •
It doesn’t matter. It’s useless, all of it.
• • •
Harry Owen wonders, gesticulates, grows emphatic, spastic. Froths at the mouth practically. My father says nothing, nor do I.
We are in collusion, we two.
Finally, painfully, Harry Owen stops asking, sharpens his beard instead over books by the stove.
• • •
Her absence has become a wound nobody wants to look at.
Meanwhile the snow is replaced by a sullen, dark dripping; the sea reclines on the horizon, an indolent, silver-scaled beast, cold thickened, slithering slowly: forward, back; forward, back; into the harbor, out; into the harbor, out. I am lethargic, too, my numbed fingers awkwardly fumbling the buttons of my dress in the frigid bedroom where nobody bothers to light a fire anymore.
Nor is there a fire in the parlor.
Nor are the lamps lit.
The fifteen corners of the three pentagonal rooms of the Birdcage are stale, contain, suddenly, strange, unexpected pockets of abandonment that hover like ghosts, cling damply to the skin when passed through. Smelling of dust, of fur, of feathers, of formaldehyde; of unbrushed hair, unswept fingernail clippings, unread books, undrunk tea, uneaten food, unriddled cinders.
• • •
In this way, it seems, we are haunted.
It is a reverse haunting, though: instead of a presence, an absence. Trembling of air. Attempts at conjuration fail: descending the spiral stair I see her from above, sitting at the table. I hear her: footstep in the pantry. Voice—a single word—short, sharp, impatient, imperious: Carlotta!
But I am mistaken. It’s just a shadow. Vinetap on windowpane. Snippet of dream. I wake up; she isn’t there; things fly apart: the molecules will not cohere.
My mother is gone. She isn’t coming back.
• • •
Finally though, one day, after many days of tense silence, through a blue filigree of frost I do see a figure after all, dimly familiar, lurking at the gate, indistinct in the sleeting; from its slouching, clowning manner I realize it cannot be my mother, yet just the same I feel a sense of relief, of breath inheld released: I have been waiting for this, too, without realizing. It’s Hip. How long has it been? Long enough: he won’t know she’s gone. There’s relief in that. Wrapped in a thick, greasy parka, tongue protruding teasingly from the gap between his teeth, colorless as ever, his breath white upon the grey-white freezing air, he is a shadow, unlike others, that grows in solidity as I approach. It is easy enough for me to slip out to meet him, to disappear, myself, into this monochromatic world; to slip between; nobody, after all, is looking. In the shed the bellows respires, smoke rises greyly through roof vent into grey sky, this is my father at work; Harry Owen, reclined by the fire, has buried his spade of a beard deep in the pages of a book and will not be aroused. So I slip past, slip through. What is one more disappearance, after all?
Quickly I cover my hair with a shawl, and become invisible. A ghost myself, gladly conjured.
I won’t tell him she has gone. In our shared world, she’s still here. This is magic.