Lyric demurred, rolling a papier-mâché pomegranate across the table so Hara had to catch it before it pattered lightly over the edge.
When Lyric left her, nights, Hara would retrieve a bottle of Zeke’s expensive wine from the cellar and scatter the family photos she kept in shoeboxes on the living room rug. It was not clear to her if a clean line could be drawn from the hipshot young girl in a bathing suit on the beach in Goa to the self-pitying wretch she saw gazing back at her in the glass of the French doors. Rather a lot had intervened, and yet certain patterns and casts of mind endured. If Hara wanted Lyric to stay, and she did, there were complexities within the impulse that did not submit to easy or entirely comforting explanation. The presentiment of abandonment, for instance, an understanding that the girl would leave, that Hara had nothing to make her stay, and a dread of this prospect that so upstaged the matter’s why as to eclipse it. As in, why was Hara so anxious that Lyric stay? In the way of one disinclined to look square at a thing, Hara nonetheless sensed the connection between her fury and her hurt, her feelings toward Lyric, toward Robert, and then of course toward Zeke; or, further still, saw the netting of connection cast out to embrace that girl on the beach in Goa, out alone at night, with her parents sleeping and Daeva holed up in their room calling some boy, that girl wandering the white bow of sand where diminutive waves fizzed through the night and the sounds from bars garlanded in lights were lush and ugly with the mysteries of adult happiness. And as she drifted in the furling breeze, even then she had tended the implausible hope that someone might know to come out and find her and lead her inside, not to a bar, not to any one room, but to the sanctum of shared reality where a mind took its form in another.
When Lyric had gone to Robert’s, Hara removed pieces from the puzzle. Not so many the girl would notice, but a few here and there. On the nights Lyric stayed in, they might replace exactly these. Sometimes Hara would trace the composition of the girl’s tattoos. She knew them by now, the sinewy thicket of green tangles on the girl’s shoulder, bursting here and there in a red corolla, the ox-eyed nymph washing fruit in a brook; the brook that flowed beneath the flowers, ran out into a river and shimmering ocean, crossed Lyric’s back and washed up below a fishing village, an outpost of sand and stilted huts. Above the village a city rose into the ocher sky, sunlight spilling onto the clouds, where a pair of naked angels embraced and an amazon warrior with one breast and a sword occupied a throne. Then on the girl’s neck errant rays of sunshine fed a painted vasculature, turned from gold to red, merging back into the flowers and carrying crimson blood along green stems to the calyxes where the roses bloomed.
Sometimes it seemed to Hara that if she looked hard enough she might find herself there, a timeless fixture in the fretwork prophecy, and then she would know that this life was all a joke, subject to an extraneous order, and that her suffering and happiness, by implication, had meaning. Other times she thought, Enough of that. You could measure the line between craziness and isolation on a day’s shed eyelashes. The flakes of an early snow fell softly on the ocean, dissolving into it, and Hara thought, Maybe I can live here and dissolve into the ocean myself.
“You feel like real life is going on somewhere else,” she told Lyric. “You’re young. You think if you keep looking you’ll find the place you’re meant to be.”
“I don’t think that,” Lyric said. “I’ve been to Morocco.”
Oh, sometimes Hara wished Lyric would leave. The girl’s presence, having become the very augury of its absence, could seem at times the worse of the two. It wasn’t only the pleasure you took in a person’s company that made you covet it, Hara knew. Just as often it was the compulsion to ensnare something elusive, fleeting, the urge to establish a state of permanence, if not of happiness, and then too the fear of what solitude permitted, the flights and phantasms of inner life, of unuttered thought, and the terrifying possibility, absent the correlative of another person, that you were not at all the composite of your past, but merely the confused nerves of the present, ever-supplanting moment.
And it was this fear, this possibility, when you got down to it, that Lyric did without.
* * *
Hara begged off the night of Robert’s party. She begged off, and she implored Lyric to stay in with her, a demand as reckless, it seemed, as a straight last-dollar bet on a roulette game, and she might have bared her soul, she thought, if she knew how to do that and where a person began. The party sounded ghastly, though. The idea of hearing Robert’s band play made her expectantly ill. And she had less than zero desire, really, to rummage around for fellow feeling with locals, mutual curiosities, feeling old while Lyric made friends easily.
They drank in joyless fashion, sorting puzzle pieces, until Hara asked Lyric whether she hadn’t given it more thought.
“Given what more thought?”
“The Church’s views on women,” Hara said. “What do you think? About staying on.”
Was it possible Lyric was pouting? Hara wouldn’t have believed it, but she had never seen this reticence in the girl, her lower lip thrust ostentatiously forward. It was hard to remember sometimes that the girl was just that, a child, subject to emotions all her own and yet emotions she could not have lived with long enough to understand in all their unoriginality and predictable rhythm, their mendacity, their worthless force.
“What about Robert?” Hara said, hating herself a little as she said it.
“Robert and I are friends,” Lyric said. “I’ve told you that.”
“Okay, God. Did you ever hear about the lady who protested too much? But let’s go to the party if it’s going to be like this.”
“Don’t you think it’s strange,” Lyric said, “you’ve had the house, what, six years and you don’t know anyone who lives here?”
“I know Gerry. Now I know Robert,” Hara said. “I know people who come here in the summer.”
“That’s not what I mean.”
“I’m not an adorable sprite like you. I don’t like people nearly so much. What do you want from me?”
“A minute ago you didn’t want to go to the party because you said someone named Dwayne was going to sneeze type-two herpes in your cornea.”
“I don’t think I said that, and anyway,” said Hara, “I can’t be held responsible for every dreadful remark that escapes my mouth.” She affixed a puzzle piece and sensed a bit of humor stealing back into the girl. “Look, I’ll take the risk.”
“It’s late,” Lyric said.
“Oh, it’s barely ten. I’ll bet we’re just in time for some chip detritus or whatever they eat.”
“They?”
“I’m joking. The Morlocks.”
Perhaps Hara had misunderstood. Perhaps Lyric merely wanted to bring her two worlds together. Perhaps she wanted to help Hara make friends. She seemed to have enough of them, Lyric did. And the girl was right, the party was outside, although why Hara had disbelieved her she couldn’t quite say. It was next to the site of a new house going up. There was a fire at least, a faint hint of rippling heat coming from the crowd dancing at the foot of a platform on which a few underdressed young men were trying to damage some instruments. Hara shivered and pulled her jacket around her.
“I told you,” Lyric said.
“All right, you don’t have to gloat.” Hara took a shot of bourbon, then filled her plastic cup. “What? Oh Lord.” She drifted away from Lyric, toward the fire, catching in its sweet odor a second scent, bodily and intimate. A man pressed a small pipe to his lips.