The Glass Ocean(123)

            —and for your father’s glass. My late husband. All his various goods and chattels.

            Against my will almost I found myself drawn then toward the other things, my father’s things, those small, self-contained ambiguities that proved, on closer inspection, to be very specific indeed: a delicate yellow nudibranch, a prawn striped red and white like a candy cane, and something else, resting on a tiny pillow, like a reliquary itself or the finger of a saint, delicate and perfectly lifelike, down to the blush of pink beneath the nail. I had seen something like this before, picked it up now, held it in my hands, turned it over, my father’s work certainly. Though she whose finger it resembled was no saint. I am sure, could I have examined it closely enough, I would have seen, in a thread of gold, her initials, CGD’O.

            But I could not; and as I held it the clock struck twelve, the curtains exhaled again, cold blasts without, spackling of rain against the windows, and fragments of sound filtering up to us from below—laughter, “Carol of the Bells,” doors slamming, a woman’s voice crying out Oh, no, you wouldn’t, a man’s replying, Oh, yes, I would!, heatless sparks thrown off some distant source of incandescence—it was a party down there, corks being popped, songs sung, dances danced (awkwardly, skillfully, gracefully, reluctantly), troths plighted and plights complexified amid the tinsel and party hats and streamers. Another world it was. It was for others, not for us, this celebration. And then she asked me, as we were each other’s only family now, what gift she could give to me for Christmas.

            I want to sail, I said. I want to find my mother. And my father.

            For I still believed, as I do now, that he was not dead, but had slipped away somehow, in search of her; disappeared, on some pathway multifarious and branching, in pursuit of his obsession. He is a Dell’oro, after all; as am I.

            • • •

            And so I find myself at the point of embarkation. Mother I have none, father neither; both gone; missing; having stepped off, as I am about to do, over the edge of the world.