“Isaiah, it’s me,” Nyipir says.
“Sir?” Isaiah rubs his eyes.
“You had questions,” Nyipir reminds him. “I’ll answer them.”
Isaiah is swaying on his feet. “Now?” The odor of fear as Nyipir approaches him. He tenses, remembering the last night he had been here.
Nyipir sighs. “Sit down.” He, too, collapses on the couch, saying, “Before you speak, hear me out.”
The candlelight merges their two shadows so that on the walls, they are become one humped dark form.
Nyipir starts, “One day, Isaiah, I was on a boat in the middle of our lake. I saw neither east nor west, only water. Even though I had grown up close to water, it was only then that I thought to ask how boatmen saw passages on a sheet of water. How do you know where to go? The boatman said, You carry the way. I wondered, How can I find it? He said I should ask my eyes to show me where to look. I thought he was joking. Ask my eyes? How? He laughed at me, Isaiah. Said that question revealed my dense blindness.”
Isaiah shifts.
Nyipir continues: “But after he had left me on the shore, he shouted back: Go to the beginning. Every lake holds the memory of its mother, it is to her it strives to return, imagining roads that we follow home.”
Outside skittering, a strangled creak. Inside, silence.
Nyipir says, “Beginnings. That’s why you are here.”
Isaiah asks, “My father?”
“What do you see?”
“His house, his books, his art … his memories …”
Stillness
Then Nyipir says, “He is here.”
More stillness.
“Can I see him?”
Silence.
Isaiah is cautious. “Is he …”
Nyipir says, “Hugh Bolton is dead.” Pause. “Happened long ago.” He stands to point out the window. “See that grave? He is there.”
Isaiah had expected this. But he had also hoped. For what? He repeats, “Dead?”
“Dead.”
“What happened?
The look on Nyipir’s face suggests bleak pasts. Half whispered, “Accident.”
“How?”
“His gun.” Nyipir remembers the click, boom, the scorching.
“Where?”
“Near here.” Here.
“When?”
Like yesterday. “Before you were born.”
“How do you know this?”
“I … found him.”
“Gun accident?” Did … would his father … self-inflicted?
Nyipir touches the back of the couch, supporting himself.
Isaiah husky-voiced: “You knew my father?”
“Worked with him.”
“It was an accident?”
No reply.
Isaiah says, “My mother should’ve known. She waited for him. She cried out for him before she died.”
Nyipir lowers his head.
“She paid …” Isaiah suddenly understands that the only other person who could have paid to find Hugh would have been his stepfather, Raulfe, who needed to be a hero for Selene, and who, like everybody else, was haunted by Hugh Bolton — even if he was the beneficiary of Hugh’s absence.
“You found him.” Struggling for the question. “Was he … did you think he …” Did he kill himself? Isaiah is unable to speak the question aloud.
The sudden quiet engulfs both men. Shadows dance on the surfaces.
Isaiah says, “My father painted your wife naked.”
“Yes.”
“You let him?”
A small laugh. “She wasn’t my wife then.”
“What was she?”
“They were … close.”
“His mistress?”
Silence.
A grim thought. “My mother didn’t kill him, did she? After she found out?”
Nyipir’s abrupt, “No.”
“The painting … Was there a child?”
Silence.
Nyipir’s look is gaunt. Emptied. As the candle’s light stretches his shadow over the room, he now moves toward the door. “Go to your father,” he tells Isaiah. “Pray for him.” He ignores the cloying scent of decay, his and Hugh’s.
Hugh Bolton’s cairn thrusts out of the rocky earth.
Cicadas creak.
Questions that have held Isaiah’s life gather under the shadow of the coral house. Your legacy—Isaiah watches light make patterns on the house’s disintegrating walls—I’ll rebuild it for you.
He could unearth these bones. Request an independent forensic investigation.
Hugh Bolton is dead.
Blistering tears. Hugh, he says. Father, he corrects.
This stone grave.
This sorrow.
Weeping for Selene, with Selene.
Mother. And Raulfe, the man who could never measure up to a ghost, and for the idea of his father. He could also unearth his father’s bones. He could touch them and ask for answers. Hugh Bolton is dead.
34
THE LIGHT CHANGES AS ISAIAH, COUNTING STONES, SLIPS INTO a trance next to Hugh’s cairn.
Prickling of skin.
Presence behind him.
A scent familiar to him now.
Evanescence. The feel and taste and touch of her.
Inside his skin, infusing his cravings.
Her voice: “I’m so sorry.”
Ajany.
Isaiah refuses to move, to speak, to act.
Her hand on his head, fingers through his hair.
He is tempted to turn, clutch her, and cry.
He turns his face aside, lets her hand hang.
A croak as he wipes his face.
Her breath.
“What did you know?” he asks.
Ajany stares at the grave. “We saw a skeleton in a red c-cave.”
“We?”
“Odidi and me.”
“I see. That’s what you sculpt.”
She averts her gaze.
“Not the skeleton.”
“What, then?”
“The feeling.”
Isaiah rises. He touches her face because he needs to. He lifts her face so their eyes can connect. He wants to know. “You fooled me, Arabel.”
Her body quakes. “We were ch-children, Isaiah. We were so afraid.”
Behind them the house’s now emptied water tank groans. A piece of building crashes inside. “You hid my father from me.”
“That’s unfair,” she stutters. “We d-didn’t know who it was.”
“This death is so wrong,” says Isaiah.
The pieces of landscape gathered by winds tumble into their new fractured space.
Isaiah glowers.
She steps back, hands raised, turns and hurries stiffly away.
He raises his voice. “So wrong.”
Isaiah returns to staring at the cairn. I must leave. Kalaratri, goddess of death, again. He is drained, fed up of adventures into loss. He feels his chapped lips, swollen tongue, and a heart that was now a cutting knife. As he peers into the approaching darkness, sweat trickles down his back. But then his head drops. What am I supposed to do now?
Nyipir hears the courtyard gate creak as it swings to and fro. He is sure he had closed it earlier. Ah!
Ali Dida Hada turns.
“Her trail is fading,” Nyipir informs him. “You know how she gets lost.”
Ali Dida Hada is spellbound.
Nyipir notices. “Isn’t that what you’ve wanted?”
Ali Dida Hada hears the offer. He moves closer. “What are you saying?”
Nyipir looks at him. “She’s gone.…”
Ali Dida Hada’s heart palpitates. “So?”
Nyipir points to the ground. “Those footsteps lead her far from me.” His shoulders droop. “But you can find her.”