Sabine closed her eyes. “We were lovers for twenty-five years.” I looked at Sabine, her head that had not left my mother’s shoulder, the arm that cradled the neck still.
“Did Daddy know?” I whispered.
“Oh, yes, he knew all along. The only thing he ever wanted was that she be happy.”
“But wasn’t it hard to always love her from such a distance, Sabine?”
She gazes off. Her thoughts are in French. She puts on her coat. I am not really waiting for an answer. I see us differently now, not like before but from what I assume the real angle is, the angle my mother must see us from. I picture us from far above. Sabine and I are very small. I open the door; she kisses me in the hallway and says something that is inaudible from such a distance and turns to leave, looking back at me several times and waving as she saunters down the hall. From that angle we are laughable, pathetic, pitiable. From that angle we don’t have a chance. From that angle it is clear we are doomed.
“But wasn’t it hard to love her from such a distance?” The question lingers.
“No,” Sabine says, walking back to me, and the vision breaks, “it was not really so hard.”
There are other angles. There are other ways of seeing.
“No,” she says again. She takes my hand and holds it tightly, squeezes it. “Vanessa,” she says, and I see her straight on now. She is an enormous, brave figure, this small woman who holds my hand. She is a figure of extraordinary courage.
“Vanessa,” she says, and her voice is strong, fierce. “We must learn to love her from here now.” She hugs me tightly. “Oh, Vanessa,” she says, and a great tenderness floods her voice, her whole body, which I hold in my arms in this last embrace, “we must learn to love her from here.”
Marta did not see her at first from such a distance, in the great cold. She had forgotten what a person looked like and was frightened when she saw the ballooning head and heard the terrible scraping noise which came from an open, moving hole. Long, dangling strings fringed the balloon, moving, making noise too, she thought. Arms appeared and the strangeness of fingers. She watched their motion, concentrated on them. She tried to find her own corresponding finger and lift it, but she could not locate her hands and she wondered whether she looked like this figure at all. She was dying. The sounds faded, the mouth closed up, the balloon filled with helium and began to rise. What had been the neck became a long, white string. The fingers, too, floated off, detaching themselves from the hands. What came at her must have been hands without fingers, or maybe arms. Something warm touched her and, though she was bone-tired, she felt a slight curiosity at this warmth, and when she looked once more she saw the head again, the mouth, the teeth, the blue pools that were the eyes, the long blonde hair. And the mouth opened and the voice said, “Marta, Marta, Marta.” The sound began to make sense. It was her name. She was not thinking. She remembered nothing, but the word came anyway, automatically, outside time, memory, outside all history; it came anyway.
“Natalie,” she said.
“Marta,” Natalie said again, and, with that sound — which was, she now realized, Natalie’s voice — her old features came slowly into focus and Marta began to remember.
“Natalie,” she said. It was the only word she knew.
“I’ve been waiting for you,” Natalie said in her delicious death voice, the voice Marta had tried to recreate in her head many times but could not, then tried to block out but she could not do that either. “Where have you been?” Natalie asked. “I’ve been waiting for you a long time.”
“Where are you?” Marta said slowly.
“Here,” she said, “I’m so close. But I can’t touch you yet.”
Marta must have only imagined the warmth, the arms, the hands without fingers. “Try to touch me,” Marta pleaded.
Natalie shook her head. “No,” she said, “I can’t. Don’t you remember? I’m dead.”
“Natalie, don’t go,” Marta whispered. She felt herself sinking back into her body where everything slowed.
“Look at me,” Natalie said. “Look at me.”
“Why did you have to die?” Marta whispered.
Natalie shrugged. Marta watched her light a cigarette. “You’re almost with me now. You’re so close. Come on. It’s like swimming,” Natalie said. “It’s so easy.”
Marta thought of swimming. “Help me, Natalie,” she said.
“I am dead.” She held up her palm. There were no lines in it anymore. “I cannot come into life for you. You must come to me. Do not be afraid.” She stared at Marta. “In death things fall into place. We could be happy here. We could be together forever. There’s nothing to be afraid of. In one second, as soon as you cross over, you stop missing the world. Believe me.”
“Are you lying even now, Natalie?”
“No.”
“It was so hard to know what was true. It was so hard to love you. Do you forget now everything that went on between us?”
“No, I haven’t forgotten, Marta, but it’s like seeing from a great distance, a trillion, billion miles away.”
“Natalie, you were always so distant.”
“I realize now how much living we missed together,” Natalie said.
“You are as beautiful as ever.”
“No,” said Natalie, “it’s only because you still see me with the eyes of the living. When you are dead and with me you will see that none of that ever mattered. I do not look the way I did. My body is green, decomposed, bones in a grave somewhere — I’ve forgotten now, somewhere in Europe. You see the memory of me, not me as I look now.”
“You were so distant in life, so untouchable. You were never really mine — though I tried so hard to hold you. I never knew what you were thinking. One minute you loved me and the next minute you acted like you did not know me. I wanted you to be happy. I would have done anything for you.”
“I’m not beautiful anymore. I’m different. Believe me. I realize now, Marta, all the living we’ve missed together.”
“I love you, Natalie. I have always loved you. I love you now. I am dying for you. I have spent so many months dying for you.”
Natalie began losing her human shape; the cells in Marta ‘s brain fell into disorder, and her body began to break down.
“Die now, then. Die.”
Marta ‘s pulse began to slow. It was almost over. She could feel herself leaving her body. She could view the scene from above. She was being pulled down a long tunnel, but there was no light at the end of it. It promised nothing. It felt like falling forever. She stopped falling somewhere midtunnel. She hovered suspended in midair. There was nothing there, only darkness, silence.
“It’s so easy.” Marta heard a voice from the other end of the tunnel where Natalie was. “It’s like swimming.”
Swimming.
A great warmth flowed through her system. She felt her blood for the first time in a long while. She felt her blood moving inside her.
Swimming.
She began to think of Venezuela with what must have been the last part of her brain. She went back to an early, early time. She folded herself around these sensations: a wave, a smile, a ray of light, a hammock, a baby crying — bananas, the tops of trees, the heat. She curled herself around it.
Natalie panicked. “Please, please.”
“What?” Marta said slowly.
“You don’t understand. I was restless. I looked everywhere for a way to feel better — in Florence, in Nice, in Paris. All of this I am sorry for. I loved you and you never knew it.”