The Elementals Read online

  “Four of them,” I said. “Two men, two women. Why is it always groups of four?”

  “Tania started it. She has this thing about everyone in the group representing a different element. Fire, earth, water, air. It’s one of her fancies, as she calls them. Everyone complies because it’s kind of interesting.”

  “Kind of weird.”

  “That would probably be an accurate description of us.”

  He leaned over and kissed my neck, his lips pressing against the tendon, then down into the pool of pulse. I was instantly hot. I ran my fingers along his wrist, pulled up his sleeve and traced the letters of his tattoo.

  “John?”

  He stopped kissing, held my chin in his hand and looked at me. “Are you cold? Do you want to go somewhere else?”

  “No. I want to know about the name on your wrist.”

  There was a pause. Sound of wind and sea.

  “My daughter’s,” said John. “Camille.”

  I pulled away from him and looked into his eyes. Aqueous, I thought. Sad water eyes. The waves crashed against the rocks. He had said the name on his wrist belonged to someone who had died.

  I put my arms around his shoulders and pulled him close to me. I didn’t know what else to do. I pressed my face into him, clung to him. I didn’t know how to make it better but he made me feel better every time he touched me.

  “I’m so sorry,” I said. I thought about the graveyard, the grave of the little girl we had seen. I still remembered her name: Lucy. He had brought me there. Maybe he was trying to tell me then.

  “What happened?” My fingers touched the marks on his wrist. “Can you tell me about her?”

  “It’s hard for me to talk about,” he said.

  “Can I ask you one question?”

  He didn’t say yes and I could feel his body tense but I kept talking.

  “Do I know who her mother is?”

  John shook his head. “I can’t talk about it, Sylph. Sorry. Not now.” His voice was firm.

  I dropped down so that my cheek rested on his chest and my breast pressed into his abdomen. I shut my eyes, wishing I could disappear.

  “I’m sorry, baby,” he said. “I don’t want to upset you.”

  But I didn’t have to ask John; I already knew who Camille’s mother was. I saw her perfectly pouting, always ravenous-looking lips on his. His hands grasping her flowered shoulders. They were younger then, even more beautiful, if that could be possible. Perry was there, too. John’s hands in his faunish curls.

  I knew the answer to my question.

  Camille’s mother was Tania; that I knew.

  I remembered Tania coming into the room, sitting on the bed with us, talking about loss. We’ve all had losses. She knew grief, Tania did. Maybe the loss of a child, maybe that was what had messed with her, besides the fact that she’d been abused as a kid. It was her baby, too. And Perry’s, somehow.

  I could have pressed the point but I let John keep his silence. Part of me didn’t want to know. More sadness, always sadness. I was relieved to have found him—that’s what I wanted to focus on. I had him. I was living in the house with him. Tania slept in bed with Perry and John was with me every single night. Now, with this secret, I had been initiated; I was one of them.

  “Ariel, it’s all right now. I can’t talk about it right now but it will be okay now that you’re here.”

  A chill went through me, maybe coolness from the sand penetrating the cloth of his jacket. He sat up and opened his arms. I wriggled myself into the familiar space, my head under his chin, my shoulder against his chest.

  “Can I tell you a story?” he asked.

  “Of course.”

  “There was a man who captured his true love by holding onto her as she shape-shifted into a dog, a snake, flames.”

  “What does it mean?”

  “In order to have bliss you have to be able to accept all the parts of the other, all the wildness and the darkness. You have to be able to hold on.” He paused. “I can hold on.”

  “I can, too,” I said.

  “I want to be inside you,” he said. “Please. I brought protection.”

  I nodded; holding onto his T-shirt I slid onto my back and pulled him on top of me. He was hard through his jeans and his breath came in gasps. I could feel his heart beating, too, almost frantically against mine. The flower wreaths we wore were crushed in our embrace, releasing their peppery scent. John pulled up my skirt and slid my underpants off my hips, tugged them off my legs. His fingers stroked me almost prayerfully but I was wet already. Then John undid his jeans and held himself rigid against my opening, one hand lightly massaging my clitoris. As he unrolled the condom along his length with the other hand he closed his eyes, bent his head and filled his chest with breath.

  “I have been waiting for you, Ariel,” John Graves said as he pressed inside.

  Blue kaleidoscope butterflies made a sound like shaken bits of glass and refracted beneath my eyelids. I felt a tight squeezing sensation and then rings of release, like those on the surface of the water when a stone is thrown. I grabbed his hand and opened my eyes so wide I thought I might consume him with them. My whole body trembling.

  “John John John. You don’t understand! It’s happening. You don’t…”

  “Yes, my baby,” he said.

  The portals to the otherworlds were opening.

  * * *

  There was once a different world before this one. Eve’s hidden children, the fallen angels, lived in houses made of willow branches with earthen floors. They ate fruits ripe from the trees. Roses grew wild, melons and gourds strewn along the ground with their curling vines. Animals roamed freely. We understood their language. The air was clear; it shone blue. At night the stars told stories in clear voices. There were bonfires and dances. The trees were sacred then. The wine was sacred. Sex was sacred. Sacred music played. Nights came and then dawns and noons and nights again, all a rush of light and dark and work and sleep and prayer.

  This wasn’t another planet; it was Earth. What more enchanted land than this? And then somehow all that had been, was gone.

  The devastation came.

  But there are still daughters to be found.

  * * *

  John and I continued to make love almost every night after that one, after he got home from wherever he went. When I asked he told me that mostly he just liked to walk around in the dark and think, make up stories. These he told me while he kissed and touched and entered me. A buck and a deer making love by a stream. A man stroking the crevice of a eucalyptus tree until it changed into a dryad. Elves weeping in a field where trees had been cut down—hundreds of will-o’-the-wisps on the hillside weeping for the dead tree spirits and finally making love in an orgy of sorrow and desire. A strange woman who took a sleeping man and made him her horse, riding him through the night as he slept; he woke with sore muscles, an aching back, tangled hair and a quenchless desire. A beautiful girl dressed in bells and crystals with the hooves of a goat instead of feet. Because I was half-asleep they seemed like dreams I’d had.

  I lived for that time of night, those stories, our bodies finding each other in the warm bed, sliding together so easily, all the nerve endings responding. I hadn’t known what it would be like but I had sensed it since those first kisses with Jeni. I had known I would love it when the time was right. I wasn’t afraid with John, not the way I’d been after Jeni disappeared, when I thought I’d never make love with a boy without fear.

  I thought of Jeni, that strange summer, I thought of her often. I hadn’t forgotten her and I told her so. I asked her what I could do to help her besides passing out the flyers John and I made but she was silent. And though I asked, if I am honest, I will say that I did not demand an answer nor make any real promises.

  Part II

  Sophomore Year

  22. Because I am

  I wasn’t ready to go back to my classes when the time came. The air was cooling just a bit but to stay warm I had to swa
ddle my bones in layers of clothes that itched my hypersensitive skin. It was hard to concentrate on what the professors were saying. I doodled through the lectures—large staring eyes and swirling leaves, flames and raindrops and flower petals scratched in ink around the margins of my notes and then encroaching over the things the teacher said so they became illegible. My favorite words written over and over again. Effulgent. Radiant. Illumine. Scintillate. Pellucid. Luminous. Mellifluous. Lunatic. Aquatic. Gloaming. Mercurial. Infinitesimal. Beryl. Vernal. Amulet. Anthropomorphize. Corinthian. Columbarium. Eldritch. Elvish. John. John. John.

  As if these words might ward off the words I dreaded: Phlegmatic. Unctuous. Holocaust. Immolate. Conflagrate. Decapitate. Disembowel. Dismemberment. Sever. Renderer. Murderer.

  My grades were dropping. In every class, it seemed, was someone I wanted to avoid. Kyle Langley snickering in English. Lauren Barnes gossiping in abnormal psych. Coraline Grimm in women’s studies.

  Yes, Coraline Grimm was back after her breakdown, calling herself Rebecca now. She had gained some weight, cut off all her hair and stopped wearing the goth eye makeup, but she still looked just as sad.

  When I asked how she was doing she came and took my hand in both of hers. They were even colder than mine were. I fidgeted and tried to pull away but she held on.

  “I was in the hospital.”

  “I’m sorry,” I said.

  She bit her lip as if she was trying to keep words inside her mouth. Then they came out, a bit too loudly. “I heard you moved in with them.”

  “Who told you that?” I tried unsuccessfully to keep any defensiveness out of my voice. “And who are they anyway?”

  “You tell me.” She flicked her eyelids open and closed like a plastic doll’s. “I spent some time with them myself and I still don’t know.”

  “Really? What happened?” I tried to sound lightly bemused but my heart was beating faster, like a wind-up toy monkey with a drum. I pulled my hand away.

  “They invited me into their lives. Well, it was only one party, but still. I loved them. But I wasn’t the one. They told me I wasn’t the one and they let me go. I was so sad. What’s the word? Bereft. Like I wanted to die.”

  “I’m sorry to hear that, Coraline, Rebecca.” I spoke each word deliberately, like I was speaking to a child. “But there isn’t a problem, really.”

  She shook her head quickly back and forth. “I’m trying to help you. Don’t you see that?”

  I winced a fake little smile as I backed away from her. “Okay, thanks.” I turned, blinking my eyes in the harsh, cool light of the day and looked around. The campus was crowded with students hurrying to classes. A man wearing clown shoes was shouting about the thousands of troops being sent to Afghanistan. Sky and trees and buildings and the round memorial called Ludwig’s Fountain, in honor of the campus canine, spouting its jets. The bell tower chiming. Everything was normal—except for Coraline.

  But them? There was nothing wrong with them. She was just jealous that she had been cast away. They weren’t trying to be mean; she wasn’t the one.

  No offense, Coraline, you can’t be.

  Because I am.

  23. Giantess boudoir

  One day John picked me up from school. It was already getting dark and the sky was streaked with brilliant, foreboding blue light. The air smelled bright and electric. We drove back to the cemetery where he had taken me once before. The ginkgo trees were turning swarthy autumn colors and in the light that promised rain the crypts on the hills looked like bewitched mansions whose glamours had been removed so we could see them. John took my hand and we ran up the hillside and into the sky-lit columbarium, where the ornate shelves were lined with glass boxes full of ashes; it looked like a giantess’s boudoir. The air was pale with chill and the light there was marble-white. John noticed I was shivering and drew me inside the folds of his wool coat. His body was hot though his cheeks were colder than mine. His unshaven chin scratched my face like the finest sandpaper. I closed my eyes and he pressed his lightly chapped lips to my eyelids almost prayerfully.

  “I am yours,” I whispered.

  I thought I heard him murmur, “You are all of ours,” and I opened my eyes, startled, and asked, “What?” sharply, I guess, because his eyes changed for a second.

  “What did you think I said?”

  “I’m sorry. What did you say?”

  “I said, ‘You are all I want.’”

  “I’m sorry.” I buried my face in his collar. He smelled of sage, smoke and rain. “You are all I want, too.” But it wasn’t entirely true; I wanted Jeni, though I wasn’t proving that to her much anymore.

  “Come with me.” He took me by the hand again and we ran outside. The sun was setting and the strange blue tints in the sky had changed to the lurid reddish pink of certain lilies. We stared out across the grounds and I remembered how we had come here months ago, how nervous I had been with him, how we had seen the grave of the little girl. Lucy, her name was. He had been trying to tell me something, then, and I hadn’t been able to hear him.

  Now he led me past some muscular wisteria vines, barren with the coming of winter, and knelt down in the dirt and leaves. I joined him. He reached into his book bag of cracked black leather and took out a small bouquet of slightly wilted pink and white roses. He laid them on one of the graves.

  OUR CAMILLE. IN LOVING MEMORY. That was all it said on the plaque.

  I didn’t want to look at him too closely, see the pain that I knew was carving his face. I didn’t want to hear him weep. How could I comfort him? But I made myself look.

  His features resembled the angels that guarded the cemetery—chiseled and smooth as ever. But his eyes were burning with tears I’d never seen in them before. He shook his head so that his hair fell across his face and bit his lip. “I’m sorry,” he said.

  “No. No sorry.” I flung my arms around him and felt him stiffen for a second, then melt into me, his chest heaving quietly against mine.

  “I don’t understand it,” he kept saying. “I don’t understand why.”

  “Maybe there is no why. It’s just how we manage to survive it.”

  He nodded against me. His tears were on my shirt. I kneaded his shoulders through his coat, trying to loosen the knots of hurt. Then, in moments, his lips brushed mine; then, in moments, it changed.

  John was kissing me, fierce as a beast so that I felt the edge of his teeth under his lips. I took his head in both my hands and tried to calm him by stroking his temples with my thumbs. He had me on my back in the earth and I felt the pressure of him forcing between my legs. Desire shot up through my groin. I groaned and he reached down and undid my jeans, then his own. I didn’t tell him to stop. He was so large and hard I almost couldn’t take all of him. He didn’t ask me if I was okay the way he usually did. He didn’t have to. Sparks of light shot through me; I was panting so hard I thought I might faint. His fingers, jammed between us, rubbed so that I tightened even more around him. Tighter tighter tighter like a bud ready to explode. Then I was a flower in time-lapse, opening my petals all at once. Big, pink, velvety tongue-like petals dusting his sex with their russet pollen. And then he was coming and coming and I could feel all of it without any barriers between us, just John inside of me as the sun set and we clung to each other and wept on his baby’s grave.

  * * *

  John apologized immediately after for not using a condom and I told him not to worry; I’d been just as carried away, I said.

  But what if I were pregnant? What then? I’d always had a silly fantasy that if I accidentally got pregnant too early I’d have the baby and my mom would help me raise her. Of course, now my mom couldn’t do that at all. I imagined living in the house with John, Tania and Perry. Raising the baby with all of them. I had a sudden, disturbing image of sitting in a bathtub with Tania, passing the child back and forth between our breasts.

  Even so, the blood that came brought some disappointment, because I felt pregnant, pregnant with feeling for J
ohn Graves. It formed deep in my belly. It swelled my breasts with pleasure. It pressed up against my heart. I remembered my mom telling me that she had read somewhere that having a baby was like walking around with your heart outside your body. I felt that way about John. I also felt that way about Jeni, though. So what did it mean if that heart, that missing heart of mine, no longer beat?

  24. You’d better change

  On Halloween the rain came down. Not the kind of rain that makes you want to snuggle under the covers and read and dream but the kind of rain that feels like the end of the world. It beat on my brain. I didn’t understand how my housemates expected anyone to come to their party in that storm but they didn’t seem fazed by it; they went about getting ready—or Tania and Perry did; John was out—as if it were a balmy spring evening while I sat huddled on the sofa in front of the fire, nursing my tea, my socked feet tucked up under me. I smelled something sweet and warm coming from the kitchen and went to see.

  “The fees danced on it in the night!” Tania exclaimed, showing me the pockmarks dotting the surface of the cake she had made.

  “The what?”

  “Fees. Another term for fae. It’s lucky! They wore high heels.”

  I looked at her blankly and sank into a chair. She didn’t sound charming to me, then. My head hurt and the smell of the cake was making my hands shake and my mouth water. I wanted to eat the whole thing all by myself right then and there. I’d been losing weight again, sustaining myself mostly on my housemates’ wine, but occasionally I’d get ravenous.

  “Sylph!” Tania said. “You’d better change. You’re not wearing that, are you?” She had on a long vintage gown of cream mesh encrusted with bronze, gold, silver and red sequin flames. On her back were a pair of large angel wings made of precisely layered red feathers.

  I ignored her and she came and sat beside me, took one foot onto her lap. She massaged it gently but strongly enough that I could feel the pulses rise up to meet her touch. “What’s wrong, love?”