Blue Woman Burning--, page 25
“Look,” Will said, pointing over the rail of the boat.
A pod of dolphins frolicked in the water beside them. The water was absolutely clear, and the dolphins rippled through it. Those closer to the surface were slate gray, and those deeper down luminescent gray-green. The deepest ones were quicksilver spirits. The sunlight bounced across the water and dappled them in mesmerizing patterns too fast for the eye to retain.
The rules had changed, and reality had thrown her a new bone to chew. She was the child of two unbelievable stories, the real one more unbelievable than the lie. Did she really fly Ovid and Eustacia as kites? Was it coincidence or a vast spider web of design that brought two blue women into her life and that orchestrated her steps so that she would literally bump into her mother?
Later, underwater, as their ears filled with air bubbles and the watery hum of ocean vastness, as schools of black, white, and yellow sunfish surrounded them, as they swayed among the myriad forms of blue sponges, lavender corals, and spiny sea cucumbers, nature’s infinitely varied weave of order and chaos impressed itself upon her and sifted a new knowledge into her body: that she would never have and didn’t need to have all the answers. Between nature, self, community and a beloved other, the obscurity of an order edged with chaos, like the fractal patterns of a coastline, was enough. It was more than enough; it was a blessing.
On the ferry ride back that evening, Will pulled a bottle of champagne wrapped in a bag of ice out of his duffle bag.
“What is this for?” she asked, her eyes shining.
“Your independence.” He unraveled two glasses from an old shirt.
“When did you get it?”
“I have my ways,” he winked.
“So, you are capable of deception,” she said.
He laughed and poured.
“Here’s to not being a prisoner of your mother’s mystery anymore,” he said, holding up a glass.
“Here’s to letting Ovid rest in peace,” she said as she clinked hers to his. For just a second, grief surged inside her and swam away like a dolphin deep under water.
As champagne fizzed down her throat, she knew she could spend the rest of her life with Will. She had always thought love was desperate and all-consuming. The root of the word passion, after all, was “to suffer.” She didn’t suffer with Will, she thrived.
As they approached Los Angeles from the water, strands of light spangled the darkness. She remembered a night camping with her parents long ago beside a lake called Todos los Santos, all the saints. A lava flow had hit the water a hundred thousand years ago and formed hexagonal columns of black basalt that rose and fell irregularly like random steps approaching infinity.
It had been hard to get to sleep because beetles were flying everywhere, their heavy bodies constantly crashing into their faces, ricocheting off their arms, and getting tangled in their hair.
They awoke in the middle of the night when Eustacia yelped, jumped out of her sleeping bag, and leapt toward the cliff, twisting her body, and flapping her arms. Oooo, ooo, ooo! she called, slapping her head and lunging on ostrich legs from one hexagonal step to the next. The moon had risen and glittered in the black waters of the lake.
Hopeful that it was some sort of wild incantation, the children jumped out of their bags and fell in behind her, imitating her twisting, spastic movements with the greatest accuracy, to support her cause, whatever it was—just four silhouettes against the shimmering background of the lake, dancing under the stars.
It was only after Walter managed to catch up to them and made a flying tackle worthy of the most aggressive football player that the children found out that Eustacia had a bug in her ear. The frantic scratching of legs and wings on the sensitive membrane of her eardrum had been maddening.
It reminded her of the words to a Jewish round she had learned in college: “If the people live their life as if they were a song for singing out the light, they’d provide the music for the stars to go dancing circles in the night.”
That night when she was ready, Will touched her, and her body opened to him with such simplicity and honesty, that it was another revelation. In the past, making love had been a struggle. Her mind flew around like a trapped bird, darting, perching, and ricocheting off illusions of space that turned out to be neck-breaking windows. She had never known why this happened and had been too ashamed to ask anyone about it. However, with Will, her mind stayed connected to her body. In fact, her mind became her body, and lovemaking became an open dialogue where her hand on his chest was a question and his hand on her thigh an answer. Never before had sex been call and response in such a sacred space. Making love to him was like taking a sponge bath with hot sunlight.
Afterwards, she felt like someone from the Acoma creation story, who had long been trapped in a dark first world, and who had only just now climbed a tree through a hole in the sky to find a new expansive world, full of light, a world she knew she could live in for the rest of her life.
28
A NEW STORY
A small crowd surrounded Cosmo outside Eustacia’s trailer. He was shouting and shoving someone. As Fallon got closer, she saw it was Antonio. Their mother was cringing and holding her hands to her ears, and Marco, the muscleman, was grappling with Cosmo.
Cosmo grabbed the front of Marco’s shirt and pulled his face in close to his own. “You’re going to sit your ass down, or I’m going to tell the whole world that Evangeline, the mother of millions, is a fraud.”
“Embra,” Eustacia corrected. Marco backed off and looked to Embra and Antonio for directions.
“How’s that gonna play with your fans, huh?” Cosmo said. “Immolation Embra the adulteress. The liar. A woman who abandoned her own children.”
“¡Cálmate, cálmate!” Antonio said, stepping between Marco and Cosmo. “We take this inside.”
Fallon and Will stepped to Cosmo’s side, and Fallon placed her hand on his forearm.
“Come on,” Will said.
Eustacia, Antonio, Fallon, Cosmo, and Will ducked into the trailer, their collective weight jostling it. Antonio stepped in front of Billy as he mounted the trailer step.
“I’m with the big guy,” Billy said, pointing over Antonio’s shoulder.
Antonio stepped back, dark eyes glittering, the lines around his mouth deeply etched. “Siéntense,” he quietly commanded.
“I don’t have to listen to you, spider man,” Cosmo said, his big voice lifting the trailer off its blocks. “You fucking stole my mother. This whole thing was your idea, wasn’t it?”
Eustacia gasped indignantly. “I am no follower. You know I’ve always been my own woman.”
Cosmo whipped around and thrust his face into hers. “I don’t know you at all. And whose fucking fault is that? As far as I’m concerned, you’re a piece of shit that doesn’t deserve to be stuck to the underside of my boot.”
She cringed and clasped her head again, and Antonio stepped between them. Cosmo grabbed Antonio by the shirt.
“Cosmo, please,” Fallon said, pulling on his arm.
“Listen, big guy,” Will said, coming up behind Cosmo. “I get it. You’re totally within your rights. Just take a breath.”
Cosmo took a breath, and the trailer fell silent, except for the sound of their collective panting.
Eustacia spoke up. “All I ever wanted to do was create beauty.”
“Does this face look beautiful to you?” Cosmo shouted, pointing to his face, eyes bulging, veins on his forehead, frothy spittle in the corner of his mouth. “Your so-called beauty drove Ovid right out of his mind. You encouraged his total bullshit. Nursed him on it. You as good as killed him.”
Eustacia’s face contorted and tears fell. “I’m sorry.” Her voice came out as a dry rasp.
“You better be sorry,” Cosmo interrupted her.
“Cosmo…” Fallon placed her hand on his arm again.
“My beautiful boy is gone. I broke his heart.”
“Oh, my fucking God, don’t make me puke, again.”
Will drew Cosmo out of the trailer, and Billy followed.
Fallon rose to leave but turned back and looked at Eustacia weeping in Antonio’s arms. She wanted to be better than Eustacia. She wanted to be able to forgive her. Her mother babbled quietly through her tears, muffled by Antonio’s arms, “Maybe my boy figured it out, maybe he parted the atoms and he is everywhere.”
“Sí, sí. Por supuesto,” Antonio murmured.
Fallon left the trailer. Life was too short and too valuable to waste on any more lost causes.
Back at the apartment, Cosmo was still digesting it all.
“I’m going to call the press and ruin her fucking career.”
“Please don’t,” Fallon said.
“Why do you keep defending her?”
“I’m not. I’m not trying to excuse her, either. I’m not even telling you to stop being angry about it. I’m just saying,” she rested her face in her palms for a second and raised her face to Cosmo, “It’s hard to know where mental illness ends, and responsibility begins.”
“She’s a monster. She should be punished.”
“She’s her own punishment,” Will said.
Fallon, thinking of how many times she’d blamed Ovid for his outbursts, said “Maybe this is truly the best she can do. Maybe Embra is the sum of all Mom’s parts, the way she makes the best sense.”
Cosmo shook his head in silence, looking at the ground. A thought struck him. “Did you call Dad?”
Her complete failure to even think of Walter in all this time opened inside her like a black hole.
“I’ll call him,” Cosmo said.
Warmth for Cosmo flared, revealing as it did, that she had been a little afraid of him until now.
Cosmo went off to his own room, and through the open door she heard him dial.
“Dad?” he said, in a chastened voice. “It’s me. Terry.” He closed the door.
He emerged fifteen minutes later, totally deflated. “You’re not going to believe this.”
They all looked at him expectantly.
“Dad said he suspected it all along.”
“What?” Fallon said. “But why didn’t he say anything?”
“He said he knew it was what she wanted us to believe, and he didn’t say anything out of respect for her.”
“But that makes him almost as guilty as she is,” Fallon said. “He colluded with her.”
Cosmo just shook his head and rubbed his stubbled jaw, the loud whisking sound emphasizing their collective silence.
After a few days of lounging and sleeping, Fallon and Will packed to go.
Will reminded Fallon to call Jacob Sweet before they left.
When she got Jacob on the phone, she said, “You know, you were right.”
“About what?”
“That I needed to finish my journey.”
“Did you find your brother?” Jacob’s voice quickened.
“Yes. But that’s not all I found. I found my mother.”
“No kidding.” Jacob sounded astonished.
“Yeah, and she’s alive.”
“Amazing.”
Fallon gave him a blow-by-blow account of how she’d made the discovery, and telling the story both heightened it and put a containing wall around it. “If I’d ended my journey there, at Buffalo Hill,” she concluded, “I never would have found her.”
“It just goes to show you,” Jacob said.
When Terry hugged Fallon goodbye, his squeeze-lifted her off the ground.
“It was good to see you, sister. Stay in touch.”
“Okay, Cosmo,” she croaked.
“Terry,” he corrected and set her down.
“That’s going to take some getting used to,” said Billy, looking quizzically at Terry.
“Are you going to be okay?” Fallon asked Terry.
“I feel like I could sleep for a hundred years.”
“That’s how he handles trouble,” Billy chimed in. “A regular sleeping beauty.
“Now, Princess,” he turned to Fallon, took her hand, and made an elaborate show of kissing it, “if this big lug mistreats you, I’d be more than happy to come to your rescue.”
Fallon smiled and shook her head.
As they got into the car, Will said, “Where to?”
“Home, I guess.”
“Where’s home?”
“Well, there’s this place in New Mexico I’m dying to show you. I wonder if there are any medical schools nearby.”
“Sure you want to hang out with a dumb old guy like myself?” Will asked.
“You’d better stop insulting the man I love,” she said.
Will leaned over and kissed her.
As she leaned close to him and looked into his dark blue eyes, she remembered the sea sponges waving underwater, spider grandmother’s black and white pot, and the tarantulas moving across the plain like the hands of an unseen body, the earth itself talking in one of its many languages. The invisible barrier between herself and life gently fell away, and the expansiveness of the mountains, dolphins, and Eustacia’s pantomime opened up a space inside her big enough to contain them.
BACK COVER
On the Altiplano, the high plain, between Chile and Bolivia, Fallon’s family witnesses their mother magically disappear. The inexplicable nature of their loss marks each family member in a different way. For Fallon it is the first step toward adulthood. For her brilliant and troubled older brother, it is an abandonment from which he never recovers. Thirteen years later, back in the United States, Fallon is about to conquer self-doubt and apply to medical school, when another mysterious event shatters her reality. The crisis catapults her across the country on a quest to find the truth. What she discovers changes everything.
Blurring boundaries between make-believe and fact, Blue Woman Burning, asks what is real, what is invented? How can we move forward if what passes for reality is only a matter of perception? This is a novel for our time, as the conflict between what we choose to believe and what is true plays out in modern American life.
DISCUSSION QUESTIONS
1. What passages stuck with you the most?
2. How would you characterize Fallon’s relationship with each family member? Which family members are most strongly connected, and how does this change?
3. How does travel to other cultures shape Fallon, her family, and her perception of reality?
4. How is nature a healing force in the novel?
5. What does Bobby symbolize in the novel? Is she right about Fallon? Are they similar? Why and why not? What is her impact on Fallon?
6. Why does the story of what happened with George come up right after she meets Bobby? How does her understanding of that event change?
7. What is Teal’s impact on Fallon? Is she the same as the blue woman Ovid saw?
8. How does Fallon change as a result of her stay with Kaela and Jacob?
9. Why does Jacob tell Fallon the story of “The Moon Palace” at that juncture?
10. In what ways are all the main female characters in the novel either the blue woman or the burning woman? How many different things might the “blue woman” symbolize?
11. What role do magic and/or coincidence play in the novel? How does that role change?
12. How does Fallon ground herself in a reality she can depend on toward the end of the novel?
13. In what ways does Fallon both conform to and rebel against feminine roles? How does this play out in her relationship with Will and with herself?
ACKNOWLEDGEMENT
Many thanks to my writing friends who have supported and encouraged me, to my SUAWP group (Shut Up and Write—Please), Anntonette Alberti, Karen Bjornland, Jackie Goodwin, Elaine Handley, Darla Miklash, and sometimes Bob Miner, and to the WMD’s (Women of Mass Dispersion), Nancy White, Marilyn McCabe, Kathleen McCoy, and Mary S. Shartle. Thanks to Katie Bowen, who never stopped believing in this novel and calling it forth, to my husband Charley Brown for his wise love and support, to Kate Moses for helping make sense of the “palimpsest,” and to my childhood writing partner who started me on this journey, Catherine Ambrose. Thanks also to my family of origin for adventures in distant lands, arguments and inspiration and⎯their forbearance⎯ as I borrow family stories and likenesses, and change them wildly. Thanks also to my acquisitions editor Nika Rose, and to the Head Penguin, Stephanie Larkin, whose generosity and good cheer never fail to amaze me. Thanks, finally, to all who wrote blurbs, tweets and reviews. There are more to thank, too many to name. I only had three things on my bucket list, a beloved partner, a healthy child, and this.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Lâle Davidson is a distinguished professor of writing at SUNY Adirondack and recipient of the State University of New York Award for Scholarship and Creative Activities. Links to her published short stories can be found on her website, laledavidson.com. Her other novels include Against the Grain (2022), an environmental thriller about saving the redwoods in Northern California with a mystical twist, and Beyond Sight (2023), a ghost story that includes true Saratoga Springs, New York history. Her collection of experimental and fabulist short stories Strange Appetites (2016, 2021) won the Adirondack Center for Writing’s People’s Choice Award in 2016. She is also a seasoned performer/storyteller who coordinates the storytelling open mic at Caffè Lena in Saratoga Springs, NY, where she lives with her husband and two cats.
PREVIEW “BEYOND SIGHT”
Chapter 1
Out of Place
SEPTEMBER 2016
I blame my college English professor. She’s the one who assigned us the autobiography. My father had died of an aneurysm when I was only four years old, or so I was told. As far as my mom was concerned, the topic was verboten. There were no pictures, no fond memories. Just. Don’t. Ask. Not asking was part of my DNA. I was so used to obeying unspoken messages, I didn’t even know I got them. I did look, though. When I Googled him, very little came up. On Facebook, Peran Sykes got no matches. None. And “Sykes” turned up a few different families, but it was impossible to tell if we were related, and I wasn’t about to ask. It would have helped if I knew his birthday, or where he was born, but I didn’t. And Skidmore College no longer listed him as faculty, of course. His absence was a palpable presence in my life.
