The male White-backed vulture in the story had been perhaps the most troubled by their predicament. The nest he and his partner had built, in the nearest thing they could find to a tree in the EDS, was lined not with green leaves and grass, but with the hair of other animals, with electrical wires and strips of soft plastic. He had tried to get some of the other animals – in particular the other birds – to become part of a breeding colony, but nobody would join him. Nobody wanted to become the mother or father of a child who would have to be jettisoned into space.
“It’s not that simple. You’re making the same mistake as the others,” Clara said.
“What did the others say, about the story?”
Belle tried to nuzzle Clara, to draw her back into an embrace, but Clara moved away slightly. There was a tightness in her gut that wouldn’t allow her to look at her lover. “I didn’t mean them,” Clara said. “I meant the other writers. Godwin. All those men. It’s a false equation.”
“But you sent it to the others, didn’t you? To the other members of the Karen Joy Fowler Book Club? What did they say?”
Clara shook her head, appalled.
“You didn’t send it to them,” Belle said. “Just to me? Or... perhaps they don’t exist, those others,” she said softly, squeezing the flesh of Clara’s thigh. “Perhaps there’s only me. Perhaps I’m the stowaway in your spaceship to Walden.”
“Stop it,” Clara said, pushing Belle away. Her rough, insistent touch. “Why are you being like this?”
“Like what?” Belle said, sliding closer, curling her tail, pushing herself against Clara in a mocking, vulgar way. “I just want to get inside you. Inside your pretty head where all the other women meet.” She began to herd Clara against the wall, to wipe her horn on the floor with a terrible scraping noise.
Clara told her to leave. She said that if Belle didn’t leave now, then she would go herself. She moved away, stiffened herself. Belle pressed her horn into the ridge between Clara’s shoulder and her neck, pushed the point in with a soft, ugly curse. The same word she sometimes cried out when they were lying together. Then she pulled away, gave Clara a sour and pitying look, and left.
Clara stayed in the library for some time, wondering what had happened, exactly. What had gone wrong. When she thought about it afterwards – when she had become a solitary wanderer – she decided that Belle had been frightened of what it meant for the love they made to be incapable of producing a future. That was the whole point of love, for Belle, for it to create the possibility of lineage. To gesture towards Walden, when in reality whether they remained in the ship or arrived at some fantastical destination made no difference. What did it mean, to save Alice, when there was no future into which she might travel? Or perhaps Belle had just wanted to humiliate Clara because she was frightened. Or was it all just a part of loving a woman, after all, some ordinary consequence of lying down together?
A WEEK LATER, there was a knock at the door, and Clara was sure it would be Belle. She had been thinking all week that Belle would call to explain herself, to ask for forgiveness, to say that she had been frightened, or even uncertain, and that the uncertainty had made her cruel. Clara had rehearsed their conversation in her head. She would listen, she had decided, patiently and kindly, though she would not forgive her lover too quickly.
But when she opened the door it was only her daughter, Alice.
“Belle sent me a message,” Alice said. “Your Belle. How did she even know my name?”
“I don’t know,” said Clara.
She had told Belle about Alice, of course. She had offered up the story of her lost, wild daughter as a kind of intimacy. Or in order to make herself seem more interesting, more strange and unfamiliar than she otherwise might have seemed.
“She wants to come and talk to me,” Alice said. “What’s the matter with her? What does she want?”
“We had a fight,” Clara said, wondering if that was true, after all.
“Does she want to punish you, by talking to me? Or have me convince you to forgive her?”
Clara shook her head. “She’s not like that,” she said. But she wasn’t sure if it was true.
“I’m going to meet her at the café,” Alice said. “It’s closed, but Belle says we can sit in the garden and talk. I’ll send you a message afterwards and tell you what happens.”
Clara tried not to pay too much attention to the time. Several hours passed. The day ended. She sat in the library, not reading the book they were planning to discuss at book club. She turned the pages one at a time, then in batches, going backwards, going forwards. It didn’t seem to matter.
It was almost morning by the time she decided to walk to Alice’s house. She had no idea what she would do when she got there, but at least the walking would give her something to do.
As she walked, she tried to remember, and silently recite, the lines of the rhinoceros sutra. Only fragments of the already-fragmented text would come to her. She remembered that there was something about a kovilara tree that has shed its leaves. She could remember that one of the sutras was: Seeing the danger that comes from affection, wander alone like a rhinoceros. And another: Give up your children, and your wives, and your money, wander alone like a rhinoceros.
She walked down the long drive towards Alice’s house, which was lined on both sides with overgrown black bamboo. There were no lights on in the house. She could see that all the windows were open to let in any cool breeze.
Clara looked in at the windows and saw that Alice had left the children she cared for alone, and the doors unlocked. None of them woke and saw her looking in at them. Some of the creatures were unfamiliar to her; had they come from other reserves? Other continents? Were they all, like Alice, the last of their kind?
Clara found an open door at the back of the house and went in, closing it behind her. She lay on the cool stone floor of the living area. She lay still, listening to the snuffling and breathing of the children, until she heard the birds outside the house waking. She was stiff and tired. She got up and opened the front door, looking up the driveway for a sign of her daughter. Nothing.
She could not quite identify what she was feeling. She was restless, but wanted to be still. She was impatient, but did not want to hear what Belle and Alice had had to say to each other. She longed for the feeling she was already having trouble recalling, of being in the long, cool channel of the library. With light behind her, and light ahead, and this moment, this now, always just a thing she was passing through.
She went from room to room looking in at the children. How carelessly they slept, with the windows open and the doors unlocked. They lay tangled together, sleeping. So fearless. When had she last slept that way?
Alice appeared at the door behind her, looking in at the sleeping babies. “I told you they were beautiful,” she said.
Clara did not answer. She could barely remember the conversations they had had, so many years ago, about Alice’s decision not even to try to have children of her own. She tried to pretend that Alice had not come home yet, and that as the children woke – they were starting to turn and itch in their sleep – they would come to Clara, climbing up and over her. She would prepare breakfast for them, and watch them play on the wide back lawn.
“She didn’t say anything, really,” Alice said. “We had a bottle of wine and Belle said that she wasn’t sure what had happened between you, but that she hoped it would be alright again soon. She said she thought it was too late now, for any of us, to hold grudges or fall in love.”
She said. “Mum, listen. It’s nothing. It doesn’t mean anything. One day, you’ll forget her name. We’ll have to call her That Woman From The Café. We’ll laugh about it.”