Epilogue

Hey, Stranger

The sea, to me, is only the sky reflected, inverted, and melted into water. It's the sky on earth—something you could actually feel slipping through your fingers. If there are clouds up there, the sea would have them, too, in the same places as the ones above, only more blurred and less recognizable; it's like a fogged-over mirror that keeps moving even in the gentlest winds. Or an earthbound twin, denser and uglier.

I feel sorry for the sea sometimes. Then I remember that there are living things in the sea, but none in the sky. Then I feel bad for the sky. But there's nothing I can do except stare and stare.

So I stare at the sea.

I like walking. Many people do, I suppose, but what I do isn't much of walking. Sometimes I just stand in a single spot for a very long time doing nothing. I don't look at anything in particular, and I don't even think—you'd be surprised at how peaceful it is when there are no voices in your head, those little voices that pretend to be thoughts; the kind that you won't know aren't yours until you start talking to them. Small doses of solitude are healthy.

There are also times when I just stare. I could go on and on staring at things. I think people don't put much time really seeing what's around them. They just glance at this and glance at that and go Hmmm without appreciating the beauty hidden to those who look but don't see.

Today I'm staring at the sea. It's what I do every day, except right now I'm not standing and my mind isn't blank. And Denny is with me.

People think I'm on a break from performing, but the truth is I don't want to perform anymore. It feels better to sing when there's no one to hear me but me, and when I stop and listen very carefully, I could sometimes hear the silence singing back.

I don't know how to describe Denny. Nor can I define exactly how he makes me feel. For example, I could say that he's tall, and that he's lean, and that he laughs a lot and makes sarcastic comments and takes special solace in solitude. But if I did, it wouldn't be Denny I'm describing: I would be describing the person he wants people to see, which would be part of him, too, but flattened out, pressed down to the essentials, the things that matter the most stripped away.

I could also say that he makes me feel happy, or that he infuriates me from time to time in the most wonderful ways, or simply that I'm in love with him. But that wouldn't be enough. I could be fussy if I want to.

I think September is romantic. Even the name rings faintly of a soft sweetness, like wind chimes on a lazy day, or the wet ring on a polished table left behind by a glass of iced tea. November is orange, December is white, but September is romantic.

Even I don't always understand the way I think.

"Cold out," he says.

"It is."

"Winter's around the corner."

"I like winter," I tell him.

"You like everything."

There was a time—this being many years back—when I fell off the stage singing an aria for some tragic opera. I had been invited to perform, and I said yes right away. So that night I was wearing a corset and a heavy-skirted gown and a pair of blue gloves and a stiff wire crinoline and a big floppy hat, which were very difficult to move in; in the middle of the song I accidentally tripped on the skirt and went tumbling down the stage in a rustle of skirts and taffeta. It was embarrassing, and sometimes when I think of it now I turn red and hide my face even if no one can see me.

I managed to get up and dust myself, the stagehands grabbing my shoulders and asking me if I was okay, if I was hurt, if they could get me anything, miss, talk to us, please. I couldn't talk. I could only stare at the audience, at every face, realizing for the first time that they were people, and that they have homes waiting for them, children, maybe, or work at the office, in a printing press, in a glove factory.

A woman stood up. I thought she was going to leave. But she didn't—she started clapping, slowly at first, and then quickening as others stood to join her. Soon everyone was on their feet and clapping. I was receiving a standing ovation for tripping. I finished the song with a smile.

That's how he makes me feel.

"Not fishing?" I ask him.

He shakes his head. I like his nails. They're always neat, filed down to the quick. "Got a good haul yesterday. I can take it easy today."

"You always work too hard."

"There's no such thing as working too hard when you love what you do," he says.

If you throw a sheer handkerchief into the air, it wafts slowly downwards, tipping, edges splayed.

That's how he makes me feel.

I stare at the horizon. From where we sit, the world is reduced to horizontal lines stacked on top of another: a slab of deep blue for the sea, and a lighter one for the sky, marbled with white for the clouds. If I could see the shore, it would be a thin line of tan below the deep blue. But I couldn't see the shore without turning back; we're sitting on the pier. Light blue, dark blue, gold: the world's nautical flag in miniature.

I want to sail with the world, hand in hand, across the universe. Just me and the world with no people in it, with the stars around us twinkling their last rays. And Denny, too—I want him with us.

This little thing that happens when you leave a book open and the wind blows and rifles through the pages—that papery rustle of a perfect cream arc, pages turning one after another, one side thickening and the other thinning—that's how he makes me feel.

Seagulls circle overhead, noisy white specks in the sky raining feathers from above. They remind me of the squiggly things in your eyes that float away when you try to look at them directly. I don't like seagulls, but Denny does, so I tolerate them.

I start humming an old song, and Denny whistles along. It's a nice feeling, this—knowing that I can still make music for when that day comes, that day when my voice dies with the seagulls.

"Are you gonna sing again someday?" he asks.

"Yes, but only if there's nobody listening."

"Will you let me listen?"

"But you're not a nobody."

"But I am."

"Not to me."

Am I making sense? I don't make sense most of the time. I've never been good with words. I'm a singer, but I don't write songs. It's my job to sing songs written by other people; in a way, I'm their living mouthpiece. Turn your heart inside out like a sock and spill the contents onto paper, and I'll sing the words for you, for the whole world to hear. And that special person might catch her name somewhere in the melody and clasp her hands and say, I feel the same way.

"I caught a trout yesterday," I tell him.

"Nice. What'd you do with it?"

"I released it back into the ocean."

"Kind of you."

"I caught it again afterwards. It's a stupid fish."

"Well, it's just a fish."

"It reminded me of myself."

"Oh? How so?"

"I never learn."

My hands are small and pale compared to Denny's. They are so sickeningly dainty that when I put on white elbow-length gloves, it hardly makes a difference. The fingers remind me of plain birthday candles, the tiny ones with rounded ends where the wick shoots up. They are what you'd call the hands of someone who doesn't have to lift a finger for a glass of water—which is true, or at least, it used to be, back in the days when I had people to do all sorts of things for me.

Denny's hands are large and rough, like sandpaper, the skin at the palms thickened by fishing rods, and his fingers long and skinny with knobby knuckles. If I look hard, I could make out dark hairs growing at the base of his knuckles. His nails are smooth and rounded, a little yellowed at the tips.

Still, I like his hands better than mine.

I look back over my shoulder. Little kids play in the sand, shrieking, making sandcastles, splashing water at each other. It's much livelier here now that there are more children around. I like children.

There's Charlie who hasn't quite outgrown boyhood yet, and a sweet-faced little boy with abnormal gray hair—Chelsea's first, I should think—and Pierre's clone Luc who cries a lot and laughs a lot, and a tot who looks so much like Lily but has blue eyes, and Sabrina's twin blond girls. Julia's daughter is too young to run around at the beach, so she isn't here.

"I like children," I say to myself, but Denny hears it.

"Never pegged you as the type." He looks over at me, frowning a little.

"What makes you think that?"

"Oh, I don't know." His mouth stretches in a grin. "Maybe because you never play with kids. And your hands were shaking when you held Julia's baby."

"That doesn't mean I don't like them." I don't know why, but what he said annoys me.

"I don't steal. Doesn't mean I don't like stealing, does it?"

This annoys me more. "Stop it," I tell him. "You're being mean."

He laughs and shrugs and looks out into the distance. I hate it when he teases me—I'm not short-tempered, but when it comes to him, my emotions become unstable, wobbling from east to west. He could make me laugh and cry in the same minute. That's why I said before that I couldn't aptly describe how he makes me feel, because it's too complicated to describe.

When I think of home, I think of Denny first, and my house on the beach second. I don't know why that is. It's as if my mind doesn't know what home means anymore, and it simply points to the biggest thing that occupies my thoughts and labels it 'home.' I bet that's it: either I don't know what home means anymore, or I finally know what it truly means. If Denny hears this, he'd never talk to me again.

This will sound silly, but these days I often find myself wishing I could trade places with Popper. I wonder why that is.

"Why are you still here?" I ask.

He laughs again. I like his laugh. It's deep and unforced, and raw, like the waves. "If you're trying to get rid of me, you've got to try harder than that."

"No, I mean in this place. In the islands. Why are you still here? Nothing's keeping you here."

"Got some good toilets here," he says, his face oddly solemn. "Do you know how hard it is to find good toilets out there? Harder than Calculus and Philosophy's love child. Don't tell me you don't appreciate the toilets. They have feelings too, you know."

He's teasing me again, and I scowl at him. He grins.

"You really don't' know?" he asks me. I shake my head. He frowns and says: "And here I thought you were smart. I stay because of you, genius."

Now this takes me by surprise and I feel my heart beating away in my throat. I hope I'm not blushing. "Me?"

"You. What would you do without me?"

Something starts growing inside me, right beside where my heart is. It's warm and liquid and fills me up and pulls my mouth wider and wider and I know I'm smiling like an idiot: that kind of smile that makes a person look uglier instead of making them look nicer. But I can't stop smiling.

"You mean," I say, in a voice that hardly sounds like mine, "you mean you love me?"

The question startles Denny, and the look on his face is the look you make when you open the fridge and take a carton of milk and realize it's spoiled. "Hey, don't get ahead of yourself," he says. "I said no such thing."

The thing that inflated me bursts and sputters. Now it's dead, and I finally stop smiling. I feel very stupid. "Oh." It's the only thing I could think to say. "Oh. Of course. I was just… just, you know, joking." I smile to show him so.

His face grows blank, but his eyes, I see, are smiling. Eyes couldn't smile, of course, and I don't know why I think they're smiling, but I know they are. That's just how I see things.

As a child, I watched a cartoon where a woman sat on a boat floating on a river. She just sat there and stared at the sky and the clouds whose bellies bulged out like pregnant ladies'. Then she heard waters roaring and realized too late that the river led to a waterfall, and as she fell, her life flashed before her eyes: the things she'd done and the things she should've done, the things she never did and the things she never should've done, all flashing before her, like blinking neon signs on a roadside, as she fell towards the mist and rocks below.

That's how he makes me feel.

I think I'm just about ready to cry, but I don't cry. I can be strong when I want to.

"Hey," he says, gentler this time. "Listen. The earth revolves around the sun, doesn't it?"

I don't see the point in this question, but I'm sullen and in no mood to argue. I nod.

He smiles a little. "But the earth doesn't go around yelling about it, does it?"

I nod again.

"Because everyone already knows it revolves around the sun and it doesn't have to say the obvious, does it?"

Suddenly he starts making sense. I look at him, but he just has this little smile on that tells me nothing. Still, the thing that inflated inside me and died stirs and stands up, and starts swelling again. It reaches my fingertips and makes them tingle; it's like I touched an electric socket and the current still runs through me. My throat feels tight. "Are you saying…"

Denny clears his throat and looks at the horizon, where the deep blue and light blue meet in a line. "I'm saying that the earth can't talk." He laughs. "Planets can't talk. Silly you."

He's joking again, but I see in his face the full meaning of what he said. I hold it in my hand, in both my hands cupped together; I keep it in a broken cabinet in my mind. I feel like I can jump into the air and fly straight up. I start laughing and crying at the same time—I told you he makes me feel complicated. "You—you mean little thing." I find it hard to talk like this, through tears and laughter, but he seems to understand what I'm saying. "You have a way with words, don't you?"

He smiles and takes my hand in his. "Well, this mean little thing's spent years bottling them up. Now stop crying—you look ridiculous."

This makes me cry even more. But while I'm crying, I'm also laughing.

That's how he makes me feel.

Fin.

a/n:

I don't know why I wrote the epilogue like this. To quote our narrator (who accidentally remains unnamed the whole time, but you know who it is): "Even I don't always understand the way I think."

Thank you, all of you, for reading, for reviewing, for generally supporting the story and sticking with it all the way. Thank you, from the bottom of my heart.