Blue Woman Burning--, page 24
Fallon and Will pulled back and sat in the square under the ficus tree, its trunk like the strained neck tendons of a 60-foot giant.
“Should I send her one of her notes to prove who I am?”
“I don’t know,” Will said. “It will put her on guard. Might be better if she doesn’t know you’re coming.”
“Perhaps we could pose as reporters.”
“Little late for that. I say we sneak into her trailer during the show tonight. Didn’t you say her act was last? From what you told me, I’m guessing everyone will be on high alert. They will be distracted. You can speak to her when she comes back to change. I’ll watch the door and run interference.”
“What will I say?”
“I don’t know. Just don’t kill her.”
That night after Fallon had rehearsed what she wanted to say with Will, and while the show was going on, they snuck out to the trailers. The muscleman with the dogs was on patrol, but he was the only one, so it wasn’t hard for Fallon to sneak up to the trailer door. It was locked. She and Will circled the trailer until they found an open window. The music, the roar of the crowd, and the buzz of the generators provided great cover. It was easy to pop the screen out, and with Will giving her a boost, Fallon dove quickly through the window.
She took a deep breath and looked around at Embra’s things. Fluffy costumes stuck out of a half-closed closet, and the vanity was covered with pots of makeup and cream. Paper flowers, creased photographs, and newspaper clippings adorned the mirror. Fallon touched Embra’s brush, feeling for her mother’s energy. She looked for objects that might betray Embra’s true identity. She opened the vanity drawer, looking for anything with her handwriting. Nothing. There were nail files, a ball of twine, a few screwdrivers, a light bulb, and a pinecone. Nothing said Eustacia specifically, except maybe the pine cone. What if she was wrong? What if she was about to scare an innocent woman to death? She’d get arrested again, for sure.
As she backed away from the vanity, she almost tripped over the marble bust draped in a scarf on the floor. She pulled the scarf off to reveal a bust of Einstein. Her heart, which had migrated to her stomach, drummed dizzyingly along with the muffled sounds of the circus drums. The intensification of the applause and foot-stomping indicated that Embra’s return to the trailer was imminent. Her mouth went dry, and a burr materialized in her throat. She coughed involuntarily and froze. Footsteps. She hid herself in the costume closet.
“You were more brilliant than the stars, as always, querida,” a man’s voice said.
“Caro, what would I do without you?”
Was that her mother’s voice? Fallon scanned her memory. The memory was mute. Endearments were uncharacteristic of Eustacia, though, as well as the slight accent. Fallon couldn’t remember Eustacia expressing affection of any kind to Walter. The door opened, the trailer shook slightly as Embra mounted the steps. The man’s footsteps crunched away.
Embra sighed, unzipped her costume, and let it drop to the floor. She whirled a fringed kimono around her slender, aged body. She pulled off her black wig and put it on Einstein’s head. Fallon stayed hidden, watching.
Embra was smaller than Fallon remembered her mother to be, and older. But that made sense. Her hair was completely white. As the woman sat facing the mirror and opened a jar of cold cream, Fallon thought she could trace her mother’s features, even through the heavy makeup. Until this moment, she hadn’t realized just how large Eustacia had been to her. She had covered the sky, yet she was so small. A longing as large as the sky sprang up inside her. The ground undulated to make room for this new reality, but disbelief numbed her. Her plan had been to call her by name to see how she reacted.
“Eustacia Kazan,” Fallon said, stepping out from the costumes.
Embra started, her hand flying to her chest as she looked up at Fallon’s face in the mirror. Fallon thought she saw a flicker of recognition, immediately masked.
“My God.” She half-rose from her chair. “Marco— Antonio—” but her call was half-hearted, almost a show.
“Shh,” Fallon said. “You know me, don’t you?”
“I have no idea what you are talking about. Get out of my trailer. How dare you intrude. I’ll—”
“Have me arrested? No. Even you wouldn’t go so far.”
“You have mistaken me for someone else. What do you want?”
“I want you to confess.”
“Confess what?”
“That your name is really Eustacia Kazan. That you abandoned your family and staged your death.”
“I am Embra Menendez, spiritual mother of millions.” As if to prove that she wasn’t perturbed, she sat back down and whipped a tissue out of the box, thought better of it, and smeared a glob of cold cream on her face with her hands.
Fallen felt lightheaded. Her hands shook as she unraveled the scrolls.
She read aloud, “Einstein said, Logic will take you from A to B, but imagination will take you everywhere. Sound familiar?”
Though Embra kept her eyes lowered, they darted to Einstein’s bust and back. Her hands stopped circling for just a minute and continued caressing her cheek and neck adoringly. She picked up a discarded tissue and dreamily rubbed the cream off her face. “I’m sorry for whatever happened to you, but I can’t help you.”
Fallon’s head felt like a balloon, floating away from her shoulders. Embra was so cold. Her mother had been self-absorbed, not cold. Even considering Eustacia’s self-absorption, Fallon couldn’t believe that a person confronted with a truth so naked would not so much as quiver. Perhaps she was wrong, after all. Perhaps she was delusional. She tried to feel the ground but couldn’t. Silenced, she watched Embra wrap a new tissue around her finger and carefully wipe away the thick black eyeliner. When she uncovered the mole on the lower lash line of her right eye, time expanded to fill the enormity of the moment. Fallon’s feet found the ground, and bending her knees slightly, she regained her balance. She breathed and jumped forward.
“It is you.” She raised her hands to grasp Embra by the shoulders but thought better of it at the last minute, teetering over her and regaining her balance again. “I knew it. I knew it when I saw the act, but I needed proof. I would know that mole anywhere.”
Embra held both her hands to her cheeks, looking up at Fallon’s reflection in the mirror with a complex mixture of expressions: dread, joy, embarrassment, relief, pride.
“All right. I’ll give you this. Parts of me were once part of Eustacia, but she exploded. Antonio taught her how to part the atoms, and it was just as I—she—thought! So much space between the electrons. She just flew apart…and…Antonio reassembled her into me. No one has ever parted the atom and lived to tell the tale!
“But now that my parts are reassembled, I belong to everyone, not just to you.”
“He reassembled you right down to the mole under your right eye?”
“He’s very good at his job,” she said without irony. “It took him a long time.”
Fallon almost laughed. Her own emotions ran the gamut from hysterical amusement, to melting love, to nuclear rage, all wadded together in a wordless concoction.
“Mother,” was all that came out.
“She would never have just walked out on you,” said Embra. “She loved you too much.”
“Love?”
Embra/Eustacia twisted around in her chair, and looked up at Fallon, for the first time, face to face. She reached up to touch Fallon’s cheek but hesitated. “Of course, she loved you. How could she not? So much, so much! Why else would she have brought you all those shiny bits of the world, day after day?” She turned back to the mirror and looked off through the window behind her, reflected in the glass. “But sometimes a different kind of love comes. When it comes, you obey.”
For a second Fallon could almost hear the strains of “I Have a Love” from West Side Story and wanted to laugh, but too many different emotions battled with each other as Eustacia continued.
“That woman, Eustacia, didn’t understand love until she met Antonio. She knew the indescribable beauty of life’s mystery, but without love, she couldn’t experience it, couldn’t become it. She had to die and be reborn. ‘Love is not love which alters when it alteration finds, or bends with the remover to remove: O, no; it is an ever-fixed mark, that looks on tempests and is never shaken; It is the star to every wandering bark.’”
“You’re quoting Shakespeare to me?” Fallon found herself panting.
“You wouldn’t understand true love unless you had found it yourself. I—she had to leave…to fulfill her destiny with Antonio.”
“To become a circus act?”
Embra drew herself up tall in her seat and said, “To become art! The perfect blend of art and science in a form that reaches the masses. I bring wonder to everyone.” She gesticulated with her arms into the mirror, her eyes flashing at Fallon with anger and excitement. “People love the world more intensely because of what I do. You have seen how I feed their hunger.”
Fallon laughed.
Embra’s voice cooled. “But you have to be a genius to truly understand the importance of what I do. No one understands it like me.”
“Genius,” Fallon said. She wanted to hurl the truth of Ovid’s death at her. She wanted to hurt her as much as she had been hurt, but some fragment of herself knew this vengeful feeling was cruel and wrong. She breathed deeply to still herself. She looked at her feet and felt how solidly they touched the floor.
Still, she wanted—needed—to wring some acknowledgement of the truth from her mother. The “Battle Hymn of the Republic” began to march through her mind . . . He hath loosed the fateful lightning of His terrible swift sword; His Truth became a shining sword in her hand, raised over Eustacia’s head.
“Do you have any idea what you did to us?”
“I told you, I am not that woman.”
Fallon longed to bring the blade of truth down, to slice through all the years of bullshit, to cut clean and cauterize at the same time.
“You twisted our brains, our hearts.”
“I had so much to give the world,” Embra replied, hands swirling around her now, as graceful and expansive as peonies. “If I didn’t find a way to give it, I would have smothered you. I loved you too much. That’s why I had to leave.”
“That is such bullshit,” Fallon said. Words flew from her mouth now like revolving blades. “You did smother us, but not because you loved us. Because you loved yourself loving us, and because your so-called ‘self’ extended about two miles out from your body. You never even saw us.” Her hands chopped the air.
“You don’t understand.” Eustacia rose to her feet and faced Fallon.
“And it’s not just your inflated super-egotistical apotheosis that was so galling—it’s the way you raised us. It’s even in our names. God damn it, Mother.”
Fallon looked up and caught her own reflection in the mirror, and it caught her back. The skin was drawn tight and white as a drum, the eyes were jagged obsidian blades that conducted electricity to every spot they fell upon, the nostrils flared, the body pumped ten thousand watts of energy. She had never seen this face before. This face was beautiful, powerful, fully present. She loved this face as she had never loved her face before.
“Why didn’t you just leave? Why did you have to do this whole act?”
“Would you have preferred the banality of infidelity? How would you have felt if I told you that running away with the circus was more important than my own flesh and blood? The way I did it was so much better. Eustacia was a phoenix; she had to die to embrace the universe, and she died giving you the gift of mystery. Look how well you turned out. You are so competent. After all, you found me. How did you do it?” With a sharp intake of breath, Eustacia’s eyes lit up. “It was Ovid, wasn’t it—”
“Mom,” Fallon said, breathless. The word felt foreign in her mouth.
“—My sweet, brilliant boy—"
“Mom.” She tried the word again. The truth was blazing in her hand now, too hot to hold. All at once, the difference between reality and truth became clear: Reality could never be pinned down, but truthfulness could. It was hard enough to figure out what was real, even when people weren’t trying to deceive you. In the face of all life’s twists and turns, people had an obligation to tell the truth as they knew it.
“—He figured it out, didn’t he?” Eustacia continued on her tangent, “Oh, I knew he would. He’s just like me, he—”
“Mom! Ovid is dead.”
Embra/Eustacia/her mother collapsed inward as if stabbed in the stomach. She stopped breathing, clasped her breast and abdomen, and curled around the wound in silence. “You’re lying. You’re just saying that to hurt me,” she choked out.
“He died trying to follow you. Right off the fucking roof!”
“How dare you!” Embra rose from her chair, holding her breast and gut as if she truly bled. “Antonio!” she called, “Antonio!” It was a piercing wail, more cat than bird, the universal cry of the lost Fallon remembered so well from the campsite in New Mexico. The door to the trailer flew open. Antonio the Tarantula Man strode in, a small but intensely burning force.
“¡Fuera! Fuera de aquí! ” His glittering black eyes in his time-etched face stripped Fallon of her self-righteous anger and propelled her from the trailer. She stumbled down the steps into Will’s arms, and he guided her out of the circus camp to the parking lot.
27
A DIFFERENT MAGIC
“What?” Cosmo jumped off the couch when Fallon and Will told him the truth the next morning. The sunlight bounced off his eyes, making them crackle like fire. “I’m going to tear Esmeralda a new asshole!” He commenced to pace, his vibrant voice filling the room.
“Embra,” Billy corrected.
“Please don’t,” Fallon begged. “For one thing, she has guards, and you’ll get arrested. But also—”
“One asshole is enough,” Billy Baroo chimed in. “Imagine the kind of shit she’d make with two.”
Cosmo stopped for a second and half-laughed before anger overtook his face, and he fell back to pacing in front of the balcony windows. “What an unbelievably worthless piece of shit she is. The fucking coward. The manipulative, narcissistic, mind-fucking bitch.” His voice was so round and resonant that it left little room for them. He ran both hands through his long hair, pulling it back from his sweating brow as he paced, his eyes wide and staring at some middle distance below him. “Fucking Imelda—”
“Embra,” Billy corrected again.
“Whatever the fuck her name is. Eustacia Kazan. That’s her goddamned name. She’s alive? She’s been fucking alive this whole time?” He whipped around. “Not for long.”
“She claims she really did explode and was reformed as a new person,” Fallon said, but she didn’t know if she was trying to calm or feed his rage.
“What utter horseshit. And that—that—spider man—”
“Tarantula Man—Antonio, actually—” Billy corrected.
“That cocksucker stole our ever-lovin’ cunt of a mother! I’m going to pulverize him.”
“How about a drink?” Billy said, holding a full glass of tequila up to him.
Will raised his hand to intervene, but Cosmo downed it too fast.
“Whoa,” Cosmo said, swaying slightly. “Empty stomach.”
“That’s the stuff,” Billy nodded approvingly.
“She makes me wanna puke. She makes me—” His eyes opened wide, and his brows wrinkled in puzzlement. “I think I’m actually gonna puke.” He dashed to the bathroom. The three of them sat looking at one another, listening in silence as the sounds of retching echoed off the toilet bowl.
“Oops,” said Billy.
After that, Cosmo said he had to lie down. He hadn’t gotten enough sleep, he felt like shit, and he suddenly couldn’t keep his eyes open. He was going back to bed and would deal with that witch-cunt-whore later. Fallon winced, hearing Eustacia referred to that way. Will quietly pulled Fallon out of the apartment.
“We need to take a break from all this. Just cool off and forget about it for a few hours.”
“Easier said than done,” Fallon said.
“Let me rephrase. Let’s connect to something bigger.”
“Sounds good to me.”
It was only a forty-minute drive to Long Beach and a one-hour high-speed ferry ride to Catalina Island, which felt like a world away. They docked in Avalon, a city that could have been in the Mediterranean, with its white, red-tiled cottages studding the hillside, punctuated by columnar poplar and cypress.
“I grew up in Long Beach, but my family never went snorkeling,” Will explained as they got out of the car. “Their idea of a good time was a Sunday afternoon drive down a hill. Discovered a whole world under the water on my own after I left home. Ever been? Some of the best snorkeling in the world, right here.” He pointed to the marina.
“I don’t know.” Fallon looked at him dubiously. She didn’t feel like she had the energy for anything new, and she didn’t want to get wet. A blanket and bed sounded like the best cure at the moment.
“Come on. Trust me.”
“Why do I trust you?”
Will watched her and waited.
“Because you listen to me. Because when we talk, we are really having an exchange. In my family, talking was more like someone giving a speech and me trying to figure out how to give a better one.”
“Come,” he said. He bought tickets for a snorkeling expedition.
As they sat on the boat with the saltwater breeze ruffling their hair, Fallon had trouble absorbing the beauty of the turquoise water and brilliant sunlight. “I’m disappointed, in a way, that it was all a trick,” she said.
Will nodded sadly.
“I mean, of course I’m glad she’s alive. But as disorienting and dangerous as it was to believe she spontaneously combusted, she was right that it made the world seem more miraculous.”
