In the room three doors down, Brontë is alarmed by Lulu’s moans in her sleep. Oh jeez she’s going to die now, Brontë thinks to herself; she sits on the woman’s bed holding her, trying to calm her, but Lulu’s rant — stop her no no no stop, stop her, stop (in
realizing at first I was dreaming since I had never had a dream and didn’t
dreams of red) — grows from the depths of something else.Finally, not knowing what else to do, Bronte hurries from the room in search of Wanda only to find Barbrasita standing in the dark hall with her unnamed baby in her arms. Brontë can no longer see the fire in Barbrasita’s face but Barbrasita can, it’s right there in frontof her eyes, getting closer: “What are you doing?” says Brontë. She pulls the young mother back to bed. Then she starts back down the hallway knocking on doors like the night the baby was born, but this time Wanda doesn’t answer: “Where is everybody?” Brontë actually says out loud in the dark at one point. When she turns back to the room, Lulu’s ramblings growing louder and more agitated, Barbrasita is in the hallway again, with her baby in her arms again.
Brontë takes hold of the girl’s shoulders. “Go to bed,” she says.
Barbrasita answers, in what sounds to Brontë like remarkably good English, “I know what I know, and I must do what I must do,” and with that shoves the baby boy into Brontë’s arms. “Hey,” Brontë says, Barbrasita striding past her, and in the porticos of the pueblo the Indian girl pulls open the doors that then seem to blast apart in the storm.
“Hey, hey!” Brontë calls again, holding the child and running in confusion after the other woman, who stops only for a moment in the doorway. Only for a moment in the doorway, everything about Barbrasita’s ravaged life comes to a halt. She’s riveted by a calm that’s still secret to her. She’s riveted by a resolution beyond rationality, by some wisdom forgotten as soon as she’s seen it;’for a second, she lives in the red gazebo of her heart, standing at its placid center where her life surrounds her like a diorama. Brontë can hear her say very clearly, very calmly over the sound of the
know how to identify one or distinguish it from consciousness, rather in that
thunder, “Give him a good name,” and then the young mother runs out into the lightning.
“No!” Brontë screams after her. But Barbrasita runs for the burning railway car, not to meet the fire but to head off the storm’s advance and conduct up into her, between her legs, through the place she gave birth, all the sky’s electric rage. Just outside the blowing, slamming doors of the hacienda, ëronte is pelted by rain and wind, stopped in her tracks as she turns her back on the wet and cold to protect the baby; at her side Wanda has finally appeared, eyes wide, and Brontë goes on crying “No!” over her shoulder at Barbrasita now far beyond earshot in the dark distance splattered with wet light — until there streaks from the black sky a bolt that suspends the girl in a momentary glow. Then she’s gone. She’s stepped through a white rip in the sky to some other desert on the Other Side where mothers don’t fear for the loss of their children. Brontë thinks it’s her own cry that she hears until she realizes it comes from the other end of the pueblo, Lulu sitting up in her bed in her room tearing at the sheets around her.
Will they make a saint of her? Lulu wonders, collapsed back into her pillow and red dreams. Will they all come out and gather on the mesas surrounding the electric desert, revering the place where she went up in smoke, Saint Barbrasita of the Loud Light? Wherever she is now, on the Other Side of the cracked sky,does she wonder to herself, What have I done? What mad love made me abandon him, in order that I might believe I could save him from all the vagaries of life? Does she find herself burned into some place between chaos and God, neither within reach? Does she sing to herself if there’s a higher light, let it shine on me when it’s a higher light jagged like a knife she meant to take
first dream I believed that the small flicker of light I saw on the other side of
up into her womb and snuff out? Wherever she is now in the Other Desert, staring around in bewilderment in a place where the same storm seethes and everything is the same except that her child is gone, missing him she doesn’t even know what to call him.
For a while, all she knew she remembered was red. Here’s Lulu’s lie: that she would not die on the lake. It’s now been so long since that day when some other naked version of her left to sail back where she left her small son in that silver gondola that she can’t be certain anymore it really happened at all. She can’t be certain it wasn’t a dream or hallucination, she can’t be certain of anything she ever did or didn’t do, she can’t be certain of her own life except: the one thing she knows for certain was ever real is him—that she knows — and she also knows she wouldn’t die anywhere else but on that lake even if she could, as if she could leave her heart behind and forget where it was and then, having lost it, forget there ever was a heart. So as the lake stopped draining, because it would wait to die with its mistress, so the Mistress in return has laid suspended on the edge of death four hundred days waiting for the lake to die: Well no kidding, Lulu says to herself in her fever. Who’s the point-misser now. She waits for the lake, the lake waits for her. But now in the first vision she’s had in a long time, like those she used to have going back to her very earliest, when she would sit on her bathroom floor reading the patterns of her periods in the porcelain toilet, now as if she’s conducting one final ceremony and as if a melody-snake has wound its way up out of the desert from the ashen place where the lightning took Barbrasita, Lulu has a new epiphany.
In it she runs after Barbrasita to stop her, into the wind and the
the darkness, on the other side of unconsciousness, was the very dream itself,
rain. As she almost catches her, the girl stops and turns and the lightning rips the sky in two and, inside the radiance that Barbrasita becomes, the red that’s been the only thing Lulu could remember finally takes form: and she sees him standing there in the Chateau lair with the small red toy monkey in his hand, wondering how it is he’s been abandoned again. First confronted by this vision, she can’t face the question of whether she left the toy behind accidentally or, so to speak, accidentally on purpose, but once the memory of red takes the form of the red monkey, then in this ozone between living and dying, for the first time since motherhood, Lulu fights to live …
… and opens her eyes, and he’s gone. Opens her eyes and she lies in her bed in the pueblo and, outside, after four hundred days, the lightning has finally subsided. It flashes just enough that the snow falling glitters like glass — but that isn’t what she notices. What she notices is the bird beyond the window of her room, in the high black branches of a charred tree, very calmly unperturbed by the falling ice, as though the tree’s surrounding wisps might actually shelter it. “Look,” she says.
Rocking in a chair at the foot of the bed, resting with a brown baby in her arms, Bronte opens her eyes at the sound of Lulu’s voice, a little astonished. “Hello,” she brings herself to say.
“Look,” Lulu says again, weakly raising her arm to point through the window, and Bronte turns to look.
It takes a moment for Brontë’s eyes to communicate the color of the bluejay to her mind, or perhaps it’s the other way around: “It’s not a trick of the light, is it,” says Brontë. “That is, it’s not really just some strange shade of green and gray mixed together.