THE LAST NIGHT

Day 99 of 100

CAL

He had thought it would be a night of speeches.

He had spent four days preparing them. He had walked up and down the shore of the lake with his hands behind his back and composed, in the manner of a barrister, a number of eloquent addresses. One on the injustice of the Act. One on the duty of the strong to the weak. One, very short, on the subject of his own unworthiness, which he had delivered to a heron and been ignored. He had intended to say them all to her, one after another, in the firelit cabin, on the last evening, before the end of the world.

He sat on the edge of the bed in the loft with his boots in his hands and could not remember a word.

Below him in the room she was washing her face.

He could hear it: the small plain domestic sound of water in a basin. A splash, a pause, the rustle of a towel. She hummed under her breath as she did it, a thin wandering tune, half a lullaby, which he did not know and thought he would have known anywhere. He held his boots and listened to it and thought: four days.

They had been the best of his life.

It was an absurd thing to say. They had been spent in hiding, in a cabin the Director could find with a postcard. He had slept with a revolver under the bolster. Josie had come and gone with her bag and her sleeves rolled, and Okafor with the news, and the news was never good. The Dean had wept in the chapel. The Bureau had posted a reward. And the woman downstairs, whom he had carried out of a hole in the ground like a handful of ash, had lain in the lower bed under three quilts and slept for two days, and woken, and asked for soup.

She was better.

It was a small improvement, and he did not trust it. But Josie had looked at her, on the third morning, with her healer's face, and said, in a low voice, "It isn't the tonic. I stopped that. It's something else. I think it's being somewhere that isn't cold." And the color had come back into her cheeks, a faint pink, like the first thin tint of dawn. She could stand. She could walk, a little, to the window. On the fourth day she had gone out and sat in the sun on the step with a rug round her shoulders, and the light had lain on her hands, and they had been hands: pale and thin and opaque, with bitten nails.

Not much, he thought. But enough.

Enough for a night.

…

"Cal?"

"Yes."

"Are you coming down?"

He set the boots by the bed. He went down the ladder, in his stocking feet, into the low red light of the fire, and she was standing at the table with a towel in her hands.

She had unbound her hair.

It was short, and brown, and ragged, with the dye growing out; at the roots, a half-inch of the true chestnut. It stood out round her face in damp curls. She wore one of his shirts, a coarse gray linen thing, with the sleeves rolled to the elbow and the collar open at her throat, and her feet were bare. She looked about sixteen. She looked as if she had been drawn by someone who loved her.

"I have decided something," said Mara.

His heart did something unwise.

"Have you?"

"Yes. Sit down. I'd like to say it properly."

He sat. He put his hands on his knees. She did not sit; she stood across the table, with the towel in her fingers, and her face in the firelight was grave and rather pale, and her eyes were a clear steady gray-green.

"I am not going to ask her to go," said Mara.

…

MARA

She had practiced it in the lower bed, in the dark, for two nights, and it came out nothing like.

"I have been thinking about what Pryce said. About the three conditions. About what happens to her, if it works." She wound the towel round her wrist and unwound it. "He said she would be joined. Not erased. As a river joins the sea. And I thought, that's a fair way to say a hard thing. A river does not end. It only stops being a river."

"Yes."

"But I don't think I can ask it."

He said nothing. She was grateful. She went on, quickly, before she lost her nerve.

"I've had a great deal of time to think. In the cell, in the white. I lost a good many things, but not that. And what I came to is this. The Doppel isn't a copy. She isn't a mistake. She is every single thing that I put down at fourteen, because I could not bear it. She's my rage and my grief. She is the part of me that wants wine, and red silk, and to be looked at. She's the part that dared to walk into the Dean's dinner and make Dr. Veldt laugh." Her voice shook. "I have been so good, Cal. For ten years. So careful. And she is everything I wasn't allowed to be."

"Mara—"

"She is also a woman who asked me, in a boathouse, whether I wanted her to be alive. And I couldn't answer." She looked down. "I was ashamed. I've been ashamed for ten days. Because the true answer is yes. It was always yes. I wanted it more than I wanted my own hands. And I could not say it, because I knew what it meant. I knew that if I said it I would have to find another way. And I was afraid there wasn't one."

"There may not be."

"No." She drew a breath. "But I'd rather die looking, than live having asked her to be quiet."

The fire cracked.

"I don't want to erase her," said Mara. "I want to keep her. I don't know how. I don't know if it's possible. Pryce says not. But if there is any way at all, any, in that room, with the sun going out, I mean to find it. And if I can't—" She swallowed. "If I can't, then I'll not be the one who ends her. I'll refuse the Rite. And we shall all go into the dark together."

It was very quiet.

She raised her eyes.

…

CAL

He had risen.

He did not know when. He was standing in the middle of the cabin floor with his hands at his sides, looking at her, and his face was wet. He had not noticed it begin. He stood there, in the firelight, in his stocking feet, with the tears running down into his collar, and thought that it was the second time in a month that he had wept in front of her and that he did not care in the least.

"Say something," said Mara.

"I can't."

"Please."

"I'm afraid."

It came out of him very low.

"I'm so afraid, Mara. I've been afraid for four days. I wake in the night and I put out my hand to see if you're there, and the bed's cold, and I think, it's happened. I think, she's gone." He drew a ragged breath. "I haven't the words. I'm no good at it. But I have been a coward all my life, about the one thing that matters, and I want to tell you the truth."

"Tell me."

"I'm afraid to lose you. Not to the Director. Not to the Rite. To any of it." His voice cracked. "If it goes as you say, and you refuse, and we all go down together—it's the end. And if it goes the other way, and you're joined, and she's part of you, and you come out whole, then you'll be a woman I've never met. You'll have every memory, every wound, every wish. You'll be stronger than you are. And perhaps you won't—"

"Won't what?"

"Want me."

She stared.

"You were cut in half for ten years. I was the knife." He did not look away. "You've loved me with half a heart. The good half. The careful one. And when the rest comes back, the fire and the anger and the rest, you'll look at me, and you'll know. All of it. Everything I did. And I don't think I could bear it, if the thing that comes back to me in the morning has her mouth closed."

"Cal."

"I'm sorry. It's a mean little thing to be afraid of. With the world on the edge of—"

"Cal."

She had crossed the floor.

She came round the table, and she was close before he saw it, and she put up both her hands and took his face between them. Her palms were warm. They were solid. She stood on her bare toes with the fire behind her and her eyes level with his, and her thumbs brushed the wet from his cheekbones.

"You great fool," said Mara. "You absolute, glorious fool."

"I—"

"Do you think I haven't known?"

"What?"

"Which of us fell in love with you?" She was laughing, a little, with the tears running down her own face. "It was the Original who stood on the dais. She's the one who looked up at you and felt the floor go. But who do you think has been following you about for ten weeks, to the library and the dinner and the Hall? Who stood at your elbow in the Gala and flirted?" She shook him gently. "It was both of us. It's always been both. She's the one who dared. I'm the one who stayed. And if you think that I could be joined to her and love you less—"

"I didn't—"

"You did. You do." She kissed him. It was brief and fierce. "I shall love you with everything. Rage and all. I'll shout at you for leaving your boots on the stair. I shall throw crockery. I will be hungry and furious and wicked and very very loud." Her eyes shone. "Does that frighten you?"

"Terrified," said Rooke.

"Good."

"Mara—"

"No more speeches," she said. "You've made enough. I heard you rehearsing to the heron."

He laughed. It broke out of him in a great helpless gasp, half sob, and he gathered her in, and she was solid and warm and shaking in his arms, with her face in his neck. He held her. He held her so hard that she squeaked. He felt her laugh, a small warm rumble against his collarbone, and then felt her go still.

She lifted her head.

"Cal."

"Yes."

"I'd like to be with you tonight."

He did not breathe.

"Properly. I don't want to be careful. I've been careful all my life, and tomorrow there may not be anything to be careful for." Her voice was low and clear. "I'd like to have it. This. Just once. Whatever comes."

He bent his head, and rested his forehead against hers.

"Yes," said Rooke.

…

It was a long night.

The fire burned down. The wind came off the lake, soft and warm and smelling of rain. Outside the window the stars wheeled, and the moon, a thin white sickle, went down behind the pines. In the loft under the rafters the quilts were turned back, and two lamps were put out, one by one. There were no words for a while. There was only breath.

He was gentle. She had expected it, and was not prepared. He touched her as he had kissed her the first time, with a careful, grave attention, as though she were the most precious thing in the world and he had only just been told. She found that she was crying again, quietly, and that he kissed the tears away, and that neither of them minded. She found, too, that she was not afraid. That her body, which she had thought a cold and failing thing, had somewhere in it a great warm unexpected fire, that she'd never known she kept. It woke slowly. It burned.

This is her, she thought, with a wonder that went through her like light. This is the part that she kept.

She felt him hesitate, and drew him down.

For a long time there was only the rise and fall of the dark; the warmth of skin, the weight of a hand; the sound of his name, over and over, in a voice that she knew and had never heard. She thought nothing. She felt, and was felt. The world narrowed to the width of a bed, and then to the width of an embrace; and in the heart of it, in the quiet, she saw as clearly as a lamp a pale blue light and a gold-red one, circling, drawing together, rising through the roof of the cabin to the stars, and she thought, so this is what it would be.

If we were whole.

…

CAL

He woke before dawn.

It was gray in the loft. The window at the gable showed a square of pale, cold, colorless sky. A bird was calling somewhere in the pines, one thin note, and then silence. She lay beside him with her cheek on his arm, her hair across his chest, one hand open on the quilt. She was asleep.

He lay and watched her.

He did not use the Sight. He had told himself he would not. For once in his life he wanted to see a thing as it was, with his plain eyes, in plain light, and he looked at her face. The curve of the lashes. The faint blue vein in the temple. The line of the mouth, soft in sleep, a little parted. Her breath moved against his skin.

I will remember this.

Whatever comes, I will remember this.

He eased his arm from under her head. He found his shirt. He went down the ladder in the cold gray light and built up the fire, and put on the kettle, and sat down at the table with a pencil and a sheet of foolscap from the drawer.

My dear Mara, he wrote.

He looked at it.

I have written this twelve times. I have burned eleven. I am not good at it.

He wrote for an hour.

He did not know afterward what he said. It poured out of him, plain and unadorned, in his square Warden's hand, with no corrections. The dock, and the Stone. The first look on the dais. The way she laughed at the pond. He told her that he had been a fool, and a coward, and a Warden; that he had never in his life been so afraid or so glad. He told her what he saw when he looked at her. He told her that if she woke tomorrow with a hundred other voices in her head, he would love every one of them. He signed it Cal, and then, after a long moment, Callum, and then, in smaller letters, yours.

He folded it, and wrote her name on the outside, and set it on the table beside the lamp.

When he looked up she was standing at the foot of the ladder in his shirt, with her hair rumpled, and a sheet of paper in her own hand.

"I wrote one too," said Mara.

…

MARA

They sat at the table with the kettle singing and did not read them.

"Not now," she said. "Not unless."

"No."

"They're for after. If there is an after, and we've forgotten how to say it. Or if there isn't—" She stopped. "Then someone ought to know."

"Okafor."

"Josie." She slid hers across. "She'll weep on it. It'll serve her right."

He took it. He turned it over in his fingers, and then, with a grave and tender air, tucked it into the breast of his shirt, against his heart. She took his, and tucked it into hers.

They drank their tea.

It was the finest she had ever tasted. It was hot and black and sweet with honey, and the light came up gray and then gold in the window, and the first sun touched the water. She saw the lake turn from slate to pewter to molten silver. She saw the pines come out of the dark, one by one, dripping, each with its crown of mist. A heron stood in the shallows, thin and gray and quite motionless, with its head cocked.

"That's my heron," said Cal.

"Is it?"

"I've been rehearsing to it."

She laughed. She was still laughing when she saw, over his shoulder, through the glass, the figure by the woodpile.

…

It was a woman in a dark cloak.

She stood at the edge of the clearing, a little way from the cabin, in the shadow of the pines, and she was quite still. The hood was thrown back. Her hair hung loose and long and dark over her shoulders. She held something in her arms, against her breast, a small flat dark shape; and she was looking in at the window, across the thirty yards of wet grass, with an expression that Mara could not read at that distance, but felt as one feels a hand on the shoulder.

She did not wave.

Mara rose. She stood at the table with her fingers on the edge, and her heart began to pound.

"Cal."

"I see her."

"Is she—"

"She's alone." He had risen too, quietly. He did not reach for the revolver on the shelf. "She's been there a while, I think. I didn't feel her come."

"Should I go out?"

"I don't know."

They stood together and watched.

The woman by the woodpile did not move for a long time. She stood with her burden against her breast and her pale face turned toward the window, and the morning came up golden and soft behind her. Mara thought she saw her lips tremble. She thought she saw her bend her head.

Then Vesper stepped forward.

She crossed the grass in a dozen steps. She went to the sill of the window, with her skirts darkening in the dew, and she laid on it, with great gentleness, as one lays down a sleeping child, the thing she'd been carrying. She did not look up. She turned. She walked back across the clearing, without haste, without a backward glance, into the pines; and the dark trees took her.

Neither of them spoke.

After a minute, Mara went to the window and opened it.

It was a book.

It lay on the sill in a bar of the early sun: a small flat book, soft brown calf, rubbed pale at the corners. On the cover, in a neat row, sewn with a double knot of cream silk, were seven little pearl buttons.

…

She took it in both hands.

It was warm. It had been held against a heart. She stood at the window with it, with the cold dew on the sill and the sun in her eyes, and her fingers found the middle button as if they had always known the way.

The one that counts.

She turned it.

She had expected resistance. She'd been told the thread was too strong. But it turned under her fingers like a screw: a quarter-turn, a half, with a faint gritty click. The pearl came away in her palm. It was hollow. It was a tiny shell, no bigger than a pea, lined with silver; and in the hollow, rolled tight as a cigarette-paper, lay a scrap of the thinnest onion-skin, closely written in a hand she'd have known in the dark.

Her mother's.

She unrolled it with a nail.

For Mara. If ever you need me, and I am not there.

I have written the second half of the working here, since there was no other place that they would not look. It is not long. You will understand it, because you always did.

The Third Condition is consent. Pryce will say that consent means surrender: that the lost half must give herself up, as a stream gives itself to the sea. This is wrong. I thought so once. It is the commonest error. The soul that was lifted out has grown. She has her own heart. To ask her to cease is to ask her to die, and a soul that dies in the Rite will take the other with it.

She must not be asked to cease. She must be asked to come home.

There is a difference between a river and a guest. A guest is welcomed; she is not absorbed. She comes in, and sits down, and stays. She brings her own chair. She is still herself. And the house, which was one, is two voices under one roof.

Do not tell her she will be you. Tell her she will be with you.

That is all. It is the whole of the secret. It is the only thing I did not dare to put in the book.

I love you. You were always braver than you thought.

—M.

…

She read it three times.

Her hands were shaking so that the paper rattled. She stood at the window in the golden light with the pearl in her palm and the little scroll between her fingers, and she was aware, as from a long way off, of Cal's hand on her shoulder, and of his voice saying her name.

Not absorbed. Welcomed.

She brings her own chair.

She began to laugh.

She laughed and wept at once, silently, helplessly, with the tears running down and the sunlight blazing in them; and Cal took her in his arms, not asking, only holding. She pressed the scrap of paper to her breast. She felt her mother's hands, as plainly as if they lay on her hair, and her mother's face, small and sharp and clear, with a pencil through the knot of hair, rose up at last out of the white and smiled.

There you are, thought Mara.

"What is it?" said Cal. "What does it say?"

"It says I was wrong."

"About what?"

"Everything." She lifted her face. It was radiant. "It says that it's possible."

…

They stayed in the cabin until the afternoon, because there was nothing else to do.

Josie came at noon, with her bag and her eyes red, and Okafor behind her with a sack of bread and ham and bad news. The Wardens had been pulled out of the Academy. The Dean had been sent to his sister's. The town was full of strangers in gray, and a telegram had gone to Washington, and the astronomers from the Smithsonian had set up their brass tubes on the lawn of the Athenaeum with a crowd of gaping farmers round them. Totality was promised for seventeen minutes to five. Nobody in Merrow Falls was talking of anything else.

Mara showed them the scroll. Josie read it twice and burst into tears and had to be given a glass of whiskey. Okafor read it once, slowly, moving his lips, and handed it back without a word; and then he blew his nose with a sound like a trumpet and went out to see to the horses.

Pryce did not come. He sent a note. It said only: I shall be in the chapel. I shall bring what I can. Forgive an old fool one last time. —A.P. Mara folded it into her pocket beside the pearl.

At a quarter to four Cal went out to harness the gig.

She saw him from the window, a tall dark figure in the long grass, with the mare's bridle in his hand. He stopped. He stood quite still, with his head back, looking at the sky. Then, slowly, he turned and looked at the lake, and at the pines, and at the long shadow of his own body on the grass; and he lifted his hand and shaded his eyes.

She went out.

The light was wrong.

It lay on the lake like brass, deep and strange: a yellow-bronze that she had seen before only in engravings of storms. It had a quality of stillness. The shadows of the trees stood out on the ground with a hard, thin, unnatural distinctness, as though cut with a knife. The heron had folded its wings. Somewhere in the pines a thrush began to sing, and broke off, puzzled, like one who has started a hymn in the wrong church.

"It's dimmer," said Cal.

"It's the haze."

"There's no haze." He looked at her. His face was very calm. "It's begun. The sun is not yet gone, but it's thinking of it."

She felt it then: a small cold drop of dread at the bottom of a warm well.

The hundredth day.

She put her hand in her pocket and closed it on the pearl. Overhead the sky, which had been the plain bright blue of June, had gone the color of an old coin; and across the lake, from the Academy's hill, thin and faint and far, the chapel bell began to toll.

"Then we'd better go," said Mara.