“Gone?” I said. “How could she be gone?”
Henry shrugged. “I couldn’t find her,” he told me as the water drained through the floorboards, leaving dirty great marks on the walls and the skirting boards. I pictured Mum downstairs, seawater raining down on her in her new kitchen. I half expected to hear her call out, but she didn’t. The rest of the house was silent. The sky outside was blue and still. There wasn’t a leaf moving on the trees.
Novo let go of Henry’s hand. “And after that?” he said. “The next time?”
“It was here. I saw the back of her, going into this house. She was older. But I knew her instantly. I would have known her anywhere.”
The memory glowed on his face, warm as the sun on a bright wall. We all felt it. Henry closed his eyes again. “She went in and left the door open, and I tried to see something more in that brief slice of inside, but there was nothing there for me to see, just her disappearing into the dark. She looked like she was stepping out of one world and into another. I knew even then that before long I would go in, that a part of me already had.”
“So when did you?” I said.
“Not right away. I walked past, every day, for weeks, but the house looked so shut up and abandoned. I started to lose hope. And then, one day, there she was, at an upstairs window. This window, in fact.” He pointed. “This one right here.”
“And what happened?” Novo said.
“Well. I stopped. And I waved at her. And she went very still, as if she didn’t want to be seen at all.”
“Like you did,” I said to Novo. “Just like you did,” and he smiled.
“My heart went into a tailspin in my chest,” Henry said.
“And then?”
“And then,” he said, “she smiled. She ran downstairs and opened the door. And my heart righted itself and flew straight. I stood at the gate and she stepped out barefoot onto the path. She was wearing a thin black dress and an old black robe, and her hair was black and her skin was the color of honey. I hadn’t opened the gate yet. I hadn’t moved.
“‘Aren’t you coming in?’ she said. Just like that. I walked up that path and I took off my boots before I followed her in. It seemed like the polite thing to do. Outside I could hear sounds, birdsong and wing flap, a light wind in the trees, a passing car. Inside was silent. As if the house was holding its breath. She was already at the top of the stairs, smiling. She held her hands out toward me.”
Henry’s smile was bright with rapture, lost in the story that was so long ago and could be yesterday, could still be happening right now, for him.
“Did she recognize you?” Novo said.
He nodded. “She couldn’t think where from. I didn’t tell her about the boat. Not at first. I didn’t want to make her remember.”
“But you told her later,” I said.
“Yes. Of course. In the end, I told her everything.”
“Tell us about her,” Novo said, and I could see from his face that he was as bewitched by this story as Henry. That it was the stuff of legend now, for him.
Henry sighed. “Everything about her was spectacular. I remember watching her throw a ball into the sky until it disappeared. I remember her careering down the hill from the top of town on a cart she’d made from fruit boxes and an old stroller, heading straight for a tree, swerving at the last minute. I would have sworn an oath that the cart took off. I was utterly convinced that she flew. Dulcie was fearless. She really lived. She did everything better and everything first, before me.
“The morning after I found her, I woke up in a clean bed in a bright room. I felt alive, for the first time I could remember. I came downstairs to find her and she was in the yard. She didn’t look at me. But she always knew when I was there just the same.
“She had a huge kite and she was untangling the string. She said, ‘Hold this, and don’t move,’ and I held it and every muscle in my body as still as stone for fear of disappointing her. The smile stayed locked on my face, like rigor mortis, like a happy corpse. I did exactly as she asked, and Dulcie liked that. When she had finished untying the knots, she let me come with her to fly it—to watch while she flew it, at least. I can still feel the ache in my neck from looking up as it turned on the wind, free as a bird and still tied to her, the strings invisible, so it looked like it was just her deft hands anchoring it, strong and heavy, to the ground. For days afterward, I kept seeing her hands, and the look on her face, and the kite whipping and spinning above her. Pure magic.” He smiled. “Pure magic.”
He got up and went to a drawer in his bedroom and pulled out a box. His feet shuffled on the floorboards like they were tied together at the ankles. Such slow, small steps. He brought the box back to us and opened it and filled our hands with old photos, some black and white, some color, paled with age. The woman from the painting, her whole face, her wide smile. And Henry. Young and dark and clean-shaven, with fierce eyes. He hardly registered the camera. He was almost always looking at her.
Novo was quiet, and ran his fingers over their faces, and frowned.
“After that, we were never apart,” Henry said.
“Really?” I said.
He blinked. “Not once.” Then he looked at Novo and said, “Please. Can I see us?” and when Novo nodded, the bright room went dark, and Henry’s memory played out in front of us like old film, soft at the edges, scratched and jumpy. Dulcie, larger than life and sheer as a ghost, graceful and smiling, reached out from some ephemeral half-place for Henry’s hands, and part of him watched with us while another seemed to move before our eyes with the strength and power of his younger self, sweeping Dulcie off the ground, her black skirts turning in a circle, her bare feet. Images crowded the room in hologram layers, a chaotic slideshow. Her head on his shoulder. Their joined hands. A face in close fragments—the corner of her mouth, a tiny scar by her eye. A walk in the long grass. Stone beach by a river. The flat sea rolling from the deck of a ship. Cities and deserts. Mountains and palaces and canyons. Countless memories, speeded to a blur like the moving blades of a fan, passed over us like whipped air. And then, lastly, rooms in a house, this house, different but familiar. A painted chair. And Dulcie, sitting up in bed now, thinner, older, smiling at us all with a world of sadness spinning in her eyes.
She faded slowly, and then the room was bright again, the window open, the seagulls calling for Henry, crying for more.
“She always wore black,” Henry said. “Every day of her life. Black dresses. A black robe. Her wardrobe was like a funeral parlor. Look.”
He unlocked one of the giant wardrobes taking up space against the wall, and it jostled with the swing of black skirts—silk and wool and organza and lace. Elaborate and old-fashioned, they smelled of mothballs, and Henry ran his hand across them like a pianist, and bowed his head and closed the doors.