"But you didn't stay with me," I said. "Gisela…"
"Yes, Gisela came to take care of you. She looked after you for the next six or seven years. So now you know," Cesaria said. "I don't know what good it does. It's all so long ago…"
A long silence hung between us; each of us, I suppose, in our own thoughts. I was remembering Gisela, or at least the Gisela I imagine in my dreams. First I hear her voice-she had a thin, reedy voice-singing some lilting song. Then I see the sky; small white clouds passing over. And finally her face comes into view, smiling as she sings, and I realize I'm lying on the grass-it must be the first summer of my life; I'm too little to do anything but lie there-and she lifts me up into her arms and puts me to her breast.
Perhaps I bawled and complained when I was with Cesaria, but I think I was happy with Gisela. At least I remember it that way. I don't know what Cesaria was remembering, but I think it was probably my father. Quietly cursing him, most likely. And who could blame her?
•"I'd like you to go now," she said.
I got up from the table, and thanked her again, but it seemed to me I'd already lost her attention. She was gazing into middle distance, remote from me. Was it the past or the future that had her attention? The husband who'd been lost to her, or the son she was going to find? I didn't have the courage to ask.
Very quietly, I made my exit, a little part of me hoping she'd call after me, tell me to take care of myself; but a greater part preferring to go unnoticed.
Rachel needed help to get out of the city. The death of Cadmus Geary-and the bizarre circumstances of that death-were headline news the following morning, and the journalists who'd appeared after Margie's murder were back in force, gathered around the entrance of her apartment building, photographing just about everyone who came and went. Determined to slip away quickly, without being quizzed by the police (what was she going to tell them anyway?) or worse still detained by Mitchell and Garrison, Rachel turned to Danny, who was happy to return a favor and assist in her escape. He went to her apartment, packed a suitcase for her, picked up some money, credit cards and the like, and met her at Kennedy Airport, where he bought her a ticket to Honolulu. By noon, she was off on her way back to Kaua'i.
As she and Danny parted, he said:
"You're not planning to come back are you?"
"Is it that obvious?"
"Something about the way you were looking at things as we drove. As if you thought you'd never see them again."
"Well, if I'm lucky I won't."
"Can I ask…?"
"What's going on? I can't tell you, Danny. It's not that I don't trust you. It would just take too long to explain. And even if I had all the time in the world I'm not certain I could make sense of it all."
"Just tell me one thing: is it Garrison? Are you running away from that bastard? Because if you are-"
"No, I'm not running away from anything," Rachel said. "I'm going to go meet the man I love."
By a curious coincidence she'd been allocated the same seat in first class as she'd had on her first flight out to Kaua'i, so there was an odd moment of deja vu as she accepted a glass of champagne and settled back. Only once it had passed did she allow herself the luxury of indulging her memories of the island. The conversations she'd had with Jimmy Hornbeck as they drove to Anahola, talking about mystery and Mammon; then the house, and the lawn and the beach, and Niolopua; later, the church on the bluff the day she'd been caught in the rainstorm; her first sighting of the sails of what she'd later know to be The Samarkand, and the fire on the beach, and finally Galilee's appearance at the house. It was just a few weeks since all this had taken place, but so much had happened to her since then-so many things she wanted to put out of her head forever-that it felt like a memory of a dream. She would only believe it all completely when she was back there, in the house. No, when she saw the sails of The Samarkand, that's when she'd believe it; when she saw the sails.
Out in the unforgiving waters of the South Pacific, the boat Rachel longed to see was a pitiful sight. It had been uncaptained for eleven days now, its sole occupant allowing it to take the brunt of whatever the waves and the wind brought along. Most of the equipment on deck, which in normal circumstances Galilee would have stowed or lashed down, had been washed away; the main mast was cracked, and the sails tattered. The wheelhouse was chaotic; and the scene below deck was even less pretty.
The Samarkand knew she was doomed. Galilee could hear the sound in her boards; the way they moaned and shuddered when she was struck on broadside by a wave. She'd never made noises quite like this before. Sometimes he thought he could almost hear her speaking to him; begging him to stir himself from his stupor and take charge of her again. But the last four days had seen such a vertiginous descent into frailty that he had no reserves of energy left. Even if he'd wanted to save himself and his vessel now, it was too late. He'd let go of his desire to live, and his body-which had survived so many excesses-quickly fell into a state of decay. He wasn't even visited by deliriums now, though he was still drinking two bottles of brandy a day. His mind was too exhausted to hallucinate; just as his limbs were too weary to bear him up. He lay on the pitching deck, staring up at the sky, and waited.
Toward dusk, he thought the moment had come; the moment of his death that is. He'd been watching the sun drop into the ocean, the clouds it burned through as molten as the water below, when The Samarkand suddenly fell absolutely silent around him. The boards gave up their complaints, the tattered canvas was stilled.
He raised his head off the deck a few inches. The sun was still falling, but its descent had slowed. So had his pulse, as though his body-knowing it was close to the end-had become covetous of every sensation, and was turning down its flame so that it could burn just a little longer. Just until the sun disappeared; until the sky lost the last of its color; until he could see the Southern Cross, bright above.
What a mess his life had been, what an ungainly performance. There was scarcely a part of it he didn't have reason to regret. Nor did he have any excuses for what he'd done. He'd come into the world with all the blessings of divinity, and he was leaving it empty-handed, every gift he'd been given wasted. Worse than wasted: turned to cruel purposes. He'd hurt so many people (few of them true innocents, of course, but that was no comfort now); he'd allowed himself to be reduced to a common assassin, in service of mere ambition. Human ambition; Geary ambition; the hunger to own stockyards and railroads and plains and forests, to govern people and states; to be little kings.
They'd almost all of them passed away, of course, and many times he'd been there to witness their last moments: their tears, their pathetic prayers, their desperate hope for redemption. Why hadn't he learned the lessons of those departures? Why hadn't he changed his life, seeing what death was like? Defied his masters, and dared go home to look for forgiveness?
Why, in the end, was he alone, and frightened, when he'd been born into certainties the faiths of the world would have given all their dogmas and their holy books to taste?
There was only one face he could bring to mind without agony; only one soul he hadn't betrayed. He said her name as the disc of the sun touched the sea, and the last phase of its descent, and his, began.
"Rachel," he murmured. "Wherever you are… I love you…"
Then he closed his eyes.
Garrison Geary stood in his grandfather's bedroom and surveyed the scene before him with a tic of exhilaration in his belly. It was hard to suppress his happiness, but he was doing his best. He'd made a brief, somber statement to the press, explaining that nobody yet knew the precise circumstances of Cadmus Geary's passing, but that it hadn't come as any great surprise to anyone. He'd then gone on to spend a frustrating hour with Loretta, in which he'd attempted to get her to tell him what had taken place in the house. There were plenty of rumors flying, he told her; the din of destruction had been audible a block away. Wouldn't it be better if she told him the truth, so that he could present the facts to the authorities and the press in a suitably doctored form, rather than their being reduced to speculation like everyone else? She couldn't help him, she said; she simply didn't remember. Whatever the nature of the cataclysm, it had driven all recollection out of her head. Maybe it would all come back, given time. But right now, he and the police and the press would have to invent their own answers to whatever questions they had.