"Electra. Electra! Wake up."
But I can't seem to separate her voice from the cobweb fabric of the dream. Neither can I separate the roar of the wind from the roar of my own blood, or tell which is real and which imagined.
"Wake up!"
Fairfax crosses the dark room, grabs my shoulders. In my dream, I kneel on the rain-swept deck of a wooden ship, a ship with many sails, huge and dark. Waves crash over the bow, and the masts groan as if they are about to splinter. In my dream, the wind shakes me until my teeth clack. It tears at me, and it laughs, and it says, A bargain is a bargain, part and parcel.
Then I realize that the bow of the ship is really the chapel of the orphanage in San Francisco where I grew up. I am taking part in the celebration of some skewed Mass. A canticle response rises to my lips. It is part of no prayer I have ever heard. I do not know where it came from. My days are swifter than a weaver's shuttle, and are spent without hope. O remember that my life is wind.
At once, the chaos of the dream falls away, a black mirror shattered by words, and I am sitting up, staring into Fairfax's face. Dim light from a street lamp seeps through the window. In it I can see the disheveled spikes of her hair, like a fiery halo, which I have envied since we were children, and the wrinkled impression her pillow has left across one of her cheeks. The orphanage and the chapel and the ship have disappeared. It has happened just the same way almost every night for two months.
"Shit," says Fairfax. "I can't take anymore of this. Either get some help, or I'm moving out."
I press the sheets against my forehead to soak away the dream sweat. I look around the room. It takes me a moment to realize that I'm not seeing the adobe walls of the dormitory at Our Lady of the Harbor. It's been almost two years since Fairfax and I left the Catholic orphanage. Now we live on the campus at Las Piedras University, in a "temporary dorm"-really just a trailer with several sleeping cubicles and a big bathroom.
Outside I hear the night wind rushing from the land to the sea, prowling around beaverboard corners, scrabbling at the cheap window frames. This little box of a shelter feels like paper compared to Our Lady of the Harbor, with its thick walls, oak beams, and heavy, nail-studded doors.
"I don't want any help," I say. "I've made up my mind this dream is never coming back again."
But Fairfax knows me too well.
She sighs and switches on my chipped bedside lamp. In its comforting yellow glow, our room is a perfect illustration of the differences between us. My side is cluttered with treasures I have gathered at random from secondhand stores and flea markets, while hers is stark and clean as a monk's cell. I buy wobbly tables, hats with holes in them, and boxes full of crystals and buttons. Fairfax prefers modern European prints and slim watches with no numbers on their faces.
She sits beside me on the bed, naked except for a pair of kelly green satin bikinis and a thin gold necklace. She refuses to wear nightclothes. They get tangled around her like ropes in the night, she says, and they're good for nothing.
She hugs herself in the cool night air. Her skin is covered with freckles and goose bumps. "Nobody, not even you, can just decide not to have a dream. You know as well as I do it'll be back again. This isn't normal, Electra. Something's wrong."
She looks down at the linoleum floor, looks up again, her chin held very high. "I think I really mean it. You and your nightmares are driving me crazy. If you don't talk to somebody about this, I'm moving out."
She turns off the light. I listen to the slap of her feet on the floor as she walks back to her bed. I pull the covers up and stare out the window at the thrashing treetops. In her own way, she is just trying to help.
The next morning, a Tuesday, Fairfax is sitting in her bathrobe playing her cello when I leave our room. I wave good-bye, as usual; she nods vaguely, as usual, without taking her eyes from the music.
I have an early class on Tuesdays, number theory, the only course I am taking this quarter. In June, when the summer term opened, the elegance and purity of number theory delighted me-made the world seem acute, well formed, and larger than humankind. But now it is August. For two months, dreams of wind and ships have robbed me of sleep. Often, the concepts our professor introduces make no sense to me, and sometimes proofs that would have seemed obvious before escape me.
This morning, just as I expect, I doze through the class. When the hour is over, the professor takes me aside. "Electra, I regard you as one of our most promising mathematics majors. But lately I've noticed a certain…shall we say…lack of concentration. Is anything wrong?"
"No. No, nothing at all," I say, staring at my feet. Some men, most men in fact, make me nervous. In front of this male teacher, I'm an even more inept liar than usual.
He frowns and rubs his neck.
"Sorry," I mumble. "I'm late. I really have to be going."
I hurry out of the classroom toward the cafeteria, where I usually eat breakfast after class. On my way, I pass the campus chapel and hesitate there, trying to compose my rattled nerves. In its distant beginnings, Las Piedras was a Catholic school. Now it is secular, but the chapel remains for those who wish to use it. I have been inside it often for Mass.
I stop on the terrazzo plaza in front to look up at the gilt mosaic on the chapel's facade, of Christ walking on the water after he has calmed the storm. For no reason at all, goose flesh rises on my arms. It is a cloudless, brilliant day, and a warm breeze drifts inland from the ocean, heavy with the smell of seaweed. It blows my hair across my eyes so that all the world becomes the color of sand.
In that moment, everything reels and folds, and I am plunged into my nightmare without warning. This time, I seem to be looking down on the black ship from midair. It is the same ship, wooden, with seven or eight square sails. Towering waves ram her broadside, and she heels and screams. I gasp for air, afraid that I will die if she dies. I have had the dream many times before but never like this, wide awake, in the middle of a daily routine. I try to claw my way back to the solid reality of the plaza and the glittering mosaic.
But when I come to myself, I am not on the plaza as I expect to be. I am lying prone on a broad stairway with my arms wrapped around a wooden post-a communion rail, I slowly realize. I look up. I recognize the shape of the vaulted arches above my head and the stained glass depictions of the stations of the cross. I am inside the chapel.
I stumble to my feet, dizzy and disoriented. Beyond the rail, the altar stands bare. The altar cloth lies on the floor beneath it, a heap of embroidered laundry. A huge Bible lies beside it, stricken from its stand, pages bent and torn, spine broken. I turn and face the pews. Missals lie scattered in the aisles. Smoke rises in ghostly ribbons from the wicks of a dozen extinguished votive candles.
My days are swifter than a weaver's shuttle, and are spent without hope. O remember that my life is wind. The words echo inside my skull.
A cold draft moans through the nave, ruffling the pages of the scattered missals; or is it someone laughing? The hair on the back of my neck stands up. My heart quickens, a hundred beats a minute, a hundred and ten, two every second. I bolt from the chapel, through the double doors, and into the sunlight.
I am halfway across the quad before I can overcome my panic enough to stop running. I pant and glance around to make sure no one has seen my windmilling flight. After a moment, I force myself to walk slowly, deliberately toward the cafeteria, repeating in a low whisper, "I am tired. I must have imagined it all. I am tired…"
When I reach the cafeteria, I buy a sugar doughnut and black coffee. While I stand in line at the cash register, a hundred wild thoughts jostle against each other in my brain, trying to dislodge my careful concentration on the mundane matters of napkins and correct change.
It doesn't matter what I tell myself. I know what I saw was real. The chapel looked as if a gale had been set loose inside it. It looked as if my nightmare had come to life. But this is childish nonsense, and I am not a child anymore. I am twenty years old, twenty-one in November-too old to be frightened by dreams, especially dreams like these. I have never been on a ship in my life. And as for the wind, I have always loved being out in it-flying kites, or even just walking, wrapped up in a snug coat and hat. I cannot recall any reason to fear either wind or ships.
But while I count out two quarters, a dime, two nickels, and place them in the cashier's hand, the great fact of my life runs its bony fingers up my spine, as it has countless times before. I will never be an entirely known quantity to anyone, even to myself. I may never know where the nightmare came from. I am no ordinary person. I am not even an ordinary orphan. I am, in fact, a foundling.
I sit down at one of the tables outside and watch analytically while tears splash into my steaming coffee. I can't bring myself to look up and see who is pulling out the chair across from me.
"Hey."
It is Fairfax. She places the palm of her hand on my forehead and pushes gently, until my face is tilted up toward hers.
"What's the matter?" she says.
I shake my head. I'm not sure I can talk yet, not even to Fairfax. But an instant later, the words come out in an unexpected rush.
"I…I was walking across the plaza. I had the dream." My voice cracks and I stop, feeling helpless.
Fairfax wrinkles her forehead. Is it concern or incredulity? "About the wind? In the middle of the day?"
I nod miserably. "I had the dream and when I woke up I was inside the chapel. It was a mess. Fairfax, the wind had been blowing inside. It blew out the candles. It tore the cloth off the altar. What am I going to do?"
She smiles. It is incredulity. "Naw," she says. "It's just a dream. How could a dream do that? Come on, now. You know you were imagining things."
"But I wasn't. You don't know what it was like. I couldn't have imagined it."
Fairfax presses her lips into a thin, determined line and takes me by the arm. "All right. Show me," she says.
Tension arcs between us as we walk silently back toward the chapel. When we reach it, Fairfax pulls open the big wooden doors, and we peer into the nave. Even before my eyes adjust to the dim light, I know I was right. The chapel is alive with voices-high, angry, frightened. "You're certain you didn't see anyone? Who would do such a thing?"
Fairfax's eyes grow huge as she surveys the damage. She grabs my arm and hustles me back across the plaza to a bench beneath a palm tree. "Electra, I think we should talk," she says.
"I told you," I say. "It really happened."
She shakes her head violently. "This couldn't possibly have any connection with your dream. Be rational. There's got to be some other explanation."
"No. It has something to do with me. I know it."
"Don't be crazy. It's just a coincidence. Maybe it's vandals. Or somebody playing a practical joke."
"No. It's me. The wind is trying to get me."
"Fine. If that's really what you think, then you should go see a doctor." She almost shouts it.
"A doctor can't help me!"
Fairfax closes her eyes and silently mouths the numbers one to twenty. Her temper is quick and terrible. Sometimes even the counting doesn't keep it from getting out of control.
When she reaches twenty-one, she gets up, still red-faced, and slings her book bag over her shoulder. "I'm late for my class," she says, biting the words off and spitting them out. She spins and stalks off across the plaza, leaving me alone beneath the tree.
I don't see her again till after dinner, when she shows up at the trailer dorm with a familiar grin on her face. I have seen this grin before-the broad one that means she is pleased with herself and bursting to tell me about it.
"Sorry about this morning," I say. I am sitting cross-legged on my bed, working proofs and watching a talk show on my television, an old black-and-white with all the dials missing.
She flounces down beside me. "Oh, forget about that. I've got a great plan."
I look at her warily. Her last great plan was for me to sell my collection of comic books and put the money down on a used Alfa Romeo.
"I've spent the whole day getting all the details worked out. Look, this flimsy trailer is a terrible place for anybody who's having nightmares about the wind. I think we should both get out of here."
I frown. She is so impulsive. "Where would we go?"
Fairfax opens her book pack and pulls out a folded sheet of binder paper with a message neatly printed on it in soft pencil. "Room and board, reasonable rates. Dr. and Mrs. Axelrod Desmond, 713 Melville Street, 322-1732."
"What's this?"
"You know my physics instructor, Tony DiMarini?"
I nod. She has mentioned him once or twice, mostly in connection with his niceness. Fairfax, a music major, is in the midst of struggling through a required physics course. She told me when she signed up for it that she thought summer would be the best time to take it because instructors have more free time to work with students then.
"Well, I ran into him after class today," she says. "He mentioned that there are a couple of rooms open at the place where he lives. It's an old house near campus. Interested?"
I chew on my pencil eraser. The whole thing sounds to me like some kind of ploy on DiMarini's part.
"It belongs to a retired English professor and his wife. They rent out the rooms on the top story for practically nothing, to any students who are willing to help with chores and yard work."
"Sounds suspicious," I say. "It's probably a real dump or something. Either that or the yard work's a full-time job."
Fairfax breathes loudly through her nose. "Electra! Don't be that way. I wouldn't get you into anything like that. It's a wonderful place."
I squint at her, suddenly aware that she's holding something back. "How do you know it's a wonderful place?"
"Look…uh…I telephoned Mrs. Desmond. I went over to see it this afternoon. Oh, Electra, you'll love it! It's huge. It's made of solid stone. And the Desmonds are terrific. They didn't want to take the deposit at first, not till they'd met you…" Her voice trails off. "Uh-oh," she says. She touches her lips with her fingertips.
"You mean you rented it? Without even asking me?"
"I knew you'd love it, I just knew it, and if I didn't take it right then, somebody else would. Tony had to put in a good word for us, as it was. Oh, Electra, won't you at least try it for a while?"
Fairfax is glowing with excitement. Her eyes shine like the sun on a green sea. At times like these, she is practically irresistible. I don't suppose I can really blame DiMarini for trying to get closer to her.
I look at the address again, trying to be critical. 713 Melville Street. In spite of myself, I picture a high, bright room with a view. 713. Seven for good luck, thirteen for bad. I think of the way our dingy, cramped trailer shudders in the least breath of wind. I really do hate it. Fairfax is right. It is a very bad place for someone with dreams like mine.
"Oh all right," I say at last.
Fairfax and I spend the next morning at the university housing office, getting out of our dorm arrangement. In the afternoon, we make the short trek to Melville Street, up a hill north of campus. True to Fairfax's description, number 713 is a three-story house with thick fieldstone walls and a broad porch. An ancient willow tree guards the front yard, its roots buckling the sidewalk into tilted plates. We walk up the steps and rap on the heavy front door but get no answer.
"I guess the Desmonds aren't home, but trust me," says Fairfax. "You'll love it."
I nod. "Probably right," I say, with a faint sense of discomfort. I don't like being pushed into such a big change. But as far as I can tell, Fairfax has been completely truthful about the house. It looks huge, sturdy, and inviting. Besides, now that the paperwork with the housing office is finished, it will be easier to move than to stay in the dormitory.
The following Saturday, Fairfax and I collect cardboard cartons from supermarket trash bins and pack our belongings in them. She fills six boxes; I fill fifteen, even after I have thrown away everything I can bear to part with. I wish possessions were not so important to me. Sometimes I suspect myself of trying to build a past with them, article by article.
Fairfax sits on the floor, tossing items from my "must keep" pile into the open cartons, stopping now and then to examine something that catches her interest. She tries on a sequined black glove, crooks her little finger as if she were drinking tea, and laughs.
"Where's the mate to this?" she asks.
"As far as I know, it's never had one," I reply.
She opens an old cigar box and holds up one of the many sand dollars she finds inside it. "I remember the day we gathered these!" she says. "On that beach up north where Sister Michael and Sister Mary Rose used to take us camping." She half smiles and tilts her head. "We were just little girls. You've saved them all these years?"
I smile and nod. Though I'll never really know, I imagine that Fairfax and I are a lot like blood relatives.
Tony DiMarini has offered to help us move. I've been thinking about him off and on, in a cranky and distrustful way. I imagine him as a handsome young professor in his thirties, neatly attired in an Oxford-cloth shirt with the sleeves rolled up just so, like the men in aftershave ads. Someone suave and unscrupulous who is probably after the body of every pretty redhead on campus.
It is late afternoon when he taps on our open door. He clears his throat, says, "Hi, is this the right place?" and trips over something invisible as he walks into our room. While Fairfax and I help him up, my rakish image of him dissolves into one of herons, mostly their legs, knobby and impossibly fragile. He has frizzy blond hair, and there are holes in the seat of his jeans, through which I catch a glimpse of plaid boxer shorts. The collar of his rumpled shirt is buttoned, and his Adam's apple jumps up and down above it like a skinny, hairless mouse every time he speaks. I like him almost immediately, perhaps because he is not at all what I expected. If he is attracted to Fairfax, he will have to work hard to get her.
Tony's car is a convertible with a dangling front bumper and an engine that sounds like a freight train. "Nineteen sixty-four Bonneville. They don't make them like this anymore," he says, proudly tapping the hood. The car is so huge that all twenty-one of our cartons fit easily into the backseat and the trunk. There is plenty of room for the three of us, and Fairfax's cello, on the bench seat in front.
When we reach the new house, Lavinia Desmond, tiny, platinum-haired, and dressed in summer woolens, greets us at the door.
"Roddy. Roddy!" she calls, as she leads us through the vestibule. "Mary Fairfax and her friend have arrived."
Roddy pokes his head around a corner, plucks a briar pipe from his purplish lips, and waves it gleefully. "Hello, Mary." He gazes in my direction and lifts a bushy eyebrow. "And you must be…?" he says.
"Electra Thorpe."
"Of course. Lovely, lovely," he cries, clasping my hand in his.
"I've already listed the house rules for Mary, my dear," says Lavinia as she leads us up the polished hardwood stairs. "But for your benefit I'll mention them again. No parakeets. I can't stand cleaning the little doo-dahs off the walls. Try to keep the noise to a minimum after two in the morning. And no group baths."
"Lavinia, my dear, you're so priggish," says Roddy.
Lavinia rambles on, unperturbed. "Clean sheets and towels once a week, meals included, $250 a month, cash please, and we'll probably ask you to do a few things around the kitchen and the garden."
We have reached the third floor. We stand in a narrow hallway with two doors on the right and two on the left. It is a warm day, but even this close to the roof the house is cool. Through a small, round window at the far end of the hall, I can see the branches of the willow tree shifting in the afternoon air, dappling the walls with green shadows.
"Bathroom is the last door on the right," says Roddy. "This is Tony's room." He raps his knuckles on the first door to our left, grins at Fairfax and me, winks broadly at Tony.
Lavinia clucks, rolls her eyes, and says, "Men."
She points out the remaining two rooms, one on either side of the hall. "These are yours, my dears, though you'll have to decide for yourselves who gets which."
She holds up identical keys, the old-fashioned kind with a hollow handle and a wide, intricate prong at the bottom. "House keys," she says, and hands one to each of us. Then she presses her index finger to her cheek. "Let me see. What have I forgotten?"
Tony smiles. There are prominent dimples in his pale cheeks. "The list of hours, maybe?" he says.
"Ah yes. Breakfast at seven, supper at eight. You're on your own for lunch. But there's tea in Roddy's study every day at five. You're invited, of course."
Then she plucks at Roddy's shirt sleeve. "Come along now. I need you in the kitchen to open some jars for me."
"Lovely, lovely," he says, waving as she tugs him toward the stairs. "So nice to have you here." His voice bounces off the hardwood as he disappears. The sound of it fills me with the same kind of pleasant warmth I used to feel at the orphanage when Sister Mary Rose rocked me after bad dreams.
Tony and Fairfax and I stand grinning at each other in the dusky hallway. Maybe everything will be all right.
I choose the room next to the bathroom, which is just as high and bright as I imagined. The walls are pale green, and the ceiling is slanted. The window is made of small, square panes of beveled glass and has a wide wooden seat beneath it. If the room has any disadvantage at all, it is a view of the sea. In past years, I would have liked nothing better. But since the dreams began, the ocean makes me uneasy at times. I would rather take the other room, the one next to Tony's, which faces the street. But I'm afraid that if the nightmare comes again, I'll disturb Tony, and I would rather he never found out about it.
At first, I live on edge, waiting for the first bad night, anticipating it every time I turn out the lights. But days flow past, and the dream does not return. I begin to relax in spite of myself. We help Roddy patch the roof. I laugh and hammer shingles. I stand square-shouldered and look down on Las Piedras, feeling like the queen of the mountain.
As August turns to September, we help Lavinia pick pomegranates. We crush half the berries in sterilized stone crocks, and Lavinia adds yeast and sugar to start them fermenting into wine. "The finest ritual of the year," she says. We stand in a row at the sink, all of us spattered with crimson juice, tapping feet, knives, and wooden spoons to the beat of rock music from Lavinia's portable tape deck. Tony grins wickedly as he reaches over to dab my nose with his dripping red finger. The kitchen is filled with delicious steam and the smell of boiling stoneware.
The fall semester begins at school. I embark on predicate calculus and non-Euclidean geometry, once again eager and excited by the elegance of mathematics. Time softens the edges of my recollections. Perhaps the nightmare has gone forever; perhaps it wasn't really so bad after all. Only once in all this time does a faint echo of the old terror rise up. One afternoon as I walk home from classes, I notice street names impressed in the concrete curb at the corner just before the house. I'm surprised to discover that the name on the Melville curb does not say Melville. It says Loma de Viento. I don't speak Spanish. I don't know what the words mean. Yet as I stand looking down at them, a tingle runs over my scalp. I shake myself and walk home quickly, feeling foolish.
On a chilly evening in mid-October, Tony and Fairfax and I don sweaters and drag wicker chairs from the porch to the front lawn. Warming our fingers around mugs of hot chocolate, we watch an eclipse of the moon. Through shoals of broken clouds, the moon shifts slowly from silver egg to red fingernail, and Tony talks. In a low, drowsy voice, he tells about his work at the physics lab, where they are experimenting with niobium balls, trying to prove the existence of free quarks. We argue, smiling, about whether physics is a field of mathematics, or mathematics is a field of physics. Fairfax asserts that music is the essence of them both.
I keep waiting for him to move closer to her, put his arm around her, idly play with her hair the way men do in paperback romances. But it never happens. In fact, he seems so intent on our discussion of physics and mathematics that he hardly notices anything else. Matters of the heart seem mysterious to me. I am nearly twenty-one years old and still a virgin. Sometimes I wonder if I should have stayed at Our Lady of the Harbor and joined the Little Sisters of Saint Camillus. Joining a religious order has never been very far from my thoughts. Often, I perceive it as the only right and natural course. It is always Fairfax who convinces me that I should wait a little longer before deciding.
Later, alone in my room, I fall asleep thinking of Tony, his face animated in the glow of the stars and the red moon, the smell of cocoa on his breath, like a little boy. And as hour moves into hour, the nightmare comes again.
This time, the order of the dream events is subtly different from before. I huddle in the black chapel on the deck of the pitching ship. But now one wall of the chapel is a chain-link fence like the one on the orphanage playground. Beyond it stands a man, familiar somehow, clinging to the fence. I can't see his face, but I think it is Tony, bearded, hunched in a sailor's peacoat.
"Electra!" he cries. And he chants the words. "My days are swifter than a weaver's shuttle, and are spent without hope. O remember that my life is wind." Suddenly, I remember such a man from my childhood. It's not Tony. Not Tony at all.
Coming from his lips and not mine, the words have no effect. The wind laughs at him, howls at him. A bargain is a bargain. And something else, something new. Almost of age. Almost mine now. And it grabs me and spins me around till I scream.
I fancy I can hear the echo of that scream as I awaken. My window stands open, drifting slowly back and forth on its hinges. Under my nightgown, rivulets of sweat run down my ribs. That man. All these years he has lain buried in the clutter of other events, other people. How could I have forgotten about him?
Someone flings open the door. "Electra!" Tony stumbles into the pale rectangle of the doorway. "Jesus…" The word comes out of him in a long whisper. "Jesus!"
The horror in his voice makes me look around. Nothing is where it used to be. Pictures have been blown off the walls. Books and papers are strewn everywhere. My bed is upended and lies, frame and mattresses separate, on the floor behind me. My bedclothes stretch in a twisted rope from one corner of the room to the other. Feathers from my pillow fall through the air in lazy eddies.
"What's going on?" Fairfax appears behind Tony, hastily tying the belt of her robe.
I hear urgent footsteps on the stairway and Roddy's voice. "Put that thing away, Lavinia! You'll kill us all." Someone flips the light on. Lavinia lurches into the room, breathless, waving a dusty pistol, and Roddy grabs it from her. Then everyone stands in shocked silence, staring at the wreck of my room.
Fairfax is the first to move. She runs to the window, sticks her head out, looks up and down the backyard. "I don't see anybody," she says. "We must have scared him away" She turns and helps me to my feet.
My head is still spinning from the dream. "It was nobody," I say. "Just the wind. The wind did it." I watch the color leach out of Fairfax's cheeks, and I start to shake. My teeth chatter. It is cold in the room. Without speaking, Fairfax untwists my blanket and drapes it around my shoulders. I feel her trembling; her hands are moist and chilly.
Tony, dressed in pajamas with tiny, faded fleur-de-lis all over them, scrubs his knuckles across his hair. "The wind? How could the wind do this? It's not even blowing."
Fairfax snaps at him. "Can't you see she's half asleep and scared out of her wits? Of course it wasn't the wind. It was something else."
But Lavinia picks her way across the room and shuts the window. With great authority she says, "Well, it's possible. We do get freak winds up here on the hill sometimes. They used to call this street Loma de Viento, you know, before they decided everything in the neighborhood should have a literary name. So silly."
My scalp prickles again, just as it did when I saw the words in the curb. "Loma de Viento. What does that mean?" I ask in a voice thin and quavery.
Roddy snorts. "It was a bad day indeed when they discontinued the Latin requirement." He emphasizes his words with the barrel of the pistol.
"For heaven's sake, watch where you point that thing," says Lavinia. She turns to me. "Loosely translated, it means Windy Hill, my dear."
In a daze, I watch them put my bed back together. Everyone agrees the question of how it happened is better left for the morning. When Tony and the Desmonds have gone back to their own rooms, Fairfax takes me by the shoulders. "It was the dream, wasn't it?"
I nod.
"Have you ever thought…you know, there are people who can move things with their minds. I don't even know what they call it. Psycho-something." She leans toward me. There are fine lines of tension in her forehead. "Electra, I'm afraid for you. You've got to do something about this. Talk to somebody. Please."
I struggle to keep my balance on the wire between laughter and tears. "Who can I talk to? Just tell me. Who knows how to stop the wind?"
"I'm trying to tell you it's not the wind! It's something inside you."
"And I'm trying to tell you it is the wind. Crazy as it sounds, it is the wind."
She lets go of my shoulders and heaves a sigh, one I have heard often before, the one that says, all right for now, but this isn't settled yet. "The least you can do is let me stay with you," she says. "I don't think you should be alone tonight."
So we climb into bed together, as we often did when we were little girls. With my head next to hers, I float on the surface of exhausted sleep, thinking about our address. Loma de Viento. 713 Windy Hill. The rational part of me assures the irrational part that it's just a coincidence, that predetermination is an outmoded notion, that nothing from my dark, unknown past has manipulated me into moving to a part of town where there are "freak winds."
These thoughts lead to others, about the man in my dream. I know where the words of the nightmare response came from now. I can almost relive the incident, moment by moment. It is a foggy day on the orphanage playground. I am six years old. I see a man on the other side of the chain-link fence. He is hunched into a big, dark coat. He has a lovely, wild beard and a fisherman's cap with a bill on it. I wander toward him, fascinated. He looks so flat and unreal in the fog. He calls my name. His breath is strong and sour. His voice is strange-husky and broken and wet. He is crying. He whispers the words. "My days are swifter than a weaver's shuttle, and are spent without hope. O remember that my life is wind!" Then he half runs, half stumbles, away into the mist.
Now the dream has brought to mind other forgotten incidents, other times when I have noticed a strange man in a dark coat and a fisherman's cap. Six, seven, a dozen times perhaps. Interspersed throughout my life. The same old seaman watching me, almost always from a distance.
When I wake up the next morning, Fairfax has already slipped away. I hear her practicing the cello in her room down the hall, making a lot of mistakes. She replays the same passages again and again, loudly and impatiently. The day is clear and still, and the sun pours through my window while I pick up rumpled papers, rehang pictures, and replace my battered belongings in their usual cluttered order. There is no permanent damage. Everything looks just as it did before-perhaps a little less dusty.
At breakfast, I dutifully chew and swallow, chew and swallow, and assure everyone that everything is all right. Roddy embarks on a detailed story about the big storm of '58, which uprooted trees, snapped power lines, and left half the houses on Loma de Viento without roofs. Not number 713, he assures us, smiling and stabbing at the yolk of his fried egg. There's not another house in Las Piedras as well built as number 713.
That afternoon, we gather for tea in Roddy's study, my favorite of all the rooms. Its walls look as if they are made of books. A single leaded-glass window and a stone fireplace peek out from among the gold titles and leather bindings. A threadbare Oriental carpet, mostly red, covers the floor. We mill about among the overstuffed chairs, sipping Earl Grey and Lapsang Souchong. Roddy munches gingersnaps and lectures Fairfax on the origins of her name. Nobody says anything about the wind.
"Such a happy quirk of fate," he says. "The name Fairfax comes from the Old English fyrfeax, meaning 'fire-haired."'
A little smile drifts across her face, for the first time today. Fate, of course, had nothing to do with her name, not in the usual way, at least. At Our Lady of the Harbor, Sister Jude, the mother superior, had the duty of naming foundlings. When she was not at prayers or locked away in her office, she spent her time poring over copies of Beowulf or the tales of Alfred the king. At vespers, we used to whisper jokes about her. "Sister Jude speaks Old English like a native. Pass it on." "Grendel is Sister Jude's boyfriend. Pass it on."
Roddy turns to me with animation. "You've an interesting name, too," he says.
"What-Thorpe?" I don't know anything about my surname except that Sister Jude chose it, probably on one of her less energetic days. I have always imagined her closing her eyes and pointing, by accident, to the name Thorpe in an open phone book.
"Well…Thorpe's interesting, but only vaguely. Comes from thearf, meaning 'need' or 'distress."'
How appropriate for an infant found in the dark on an orphanage stair, with nothing between her skin and the fog but a sailor's tattered peacoat. Maybe I have sold Sister Jude short all these years.
"No, I was thinking more along the lines of Electra," says Roddy. "Now there's a truly fascinating name, don't you agree? I would guess it figures somehow in your family history."
I take a long swallow of hot tea. It seems to go down my throat in an irregular lump. The Desmonds don't know yet about my background or Fairfax's. I wish I could tell Roddy that I am named after my maternal grandmother or a special friend of the family. But the truth is I am only called Electra because that is the name the nuns found scribbled on a bit of soiled canvas in the pocket of my coat-blanket.
"There's not much of a history in my family," I reply, hoping Roddy will become discouraged and move on to some other subject.
But his eyes are bright, and he will not swerve. "Outside the obvious places, the myths and Freud's books and such, I've only come across the name once before. Quite a story. There was an old ship, the Electra, used to sail up and down the coast around San Francisco. She was an antique-a barkentine, built to carry cargo, I suppose, but they'd redone her for passengers. Sort of a tourist attraction. She was a lovely sight heading through the Golden Gate. Quite pretty. Doesn't matter if she was old. A lot of old things are pretty." He winks at Lavinia.
Suddenly, the tea is swirling around inside me. It's too hot in the study. I glance toward the window. Maybe I can open it.
Roddy puffs at his pipe. Clouds of sweet-smelling smoke billow in the sunlight. "Quite an amazing story. She got caught in a terrible storm out near the Farallons and actually went to the bottom. November it was. Must be twenty years ago. Let's see. I believe it was the year Sartre declined the Nobel." He studies the ceiling as he works a mental sum. "So it's actually twenty-one years ago now."
He shakes his head. "They should never have had a ship like that out so late in the season. That's what everybody said. Could have been a real disaster, but against all odds, against incredible odds, I might even say, the captain got the passengers and crew into lifeboats and saved them all. All but one, that is. A newborn baby, who was lost in the panic somehow. Quite a heroic story. You can imagine what a field day the newspapers had."
A ship with my name, sunk the month I was born, the only fatality a newborn baby. Just a string of coincidences. That's all. A string of coincidences. I repeat the words, but they are empty.
I don't feel very well. My cup slips from my hand. I hear it break as it hits the edge of the table, a distant sound, like the tinkle of wind chimes.
I wobble across the room and unlatch the window. Before I can even push it open, a brutal gust of wind tears it from my hands and flings it outward. The window smashes against the rock wall of the house. Terror roars down my spine in an icy wave.
The carpet has turned into a roiling ocean. I see the ship, masts splintered, sails hanging in rags, wind driving the rain in horizontal sheets. Rain. The air seems full of it. From this wall of black water, Sister Jude emerges, holding out something rectangular and white. But the wind steals my breath, whirls me around like a leaf, and whatever it is she offers me, I can't seem to reach it.
"The window's broken!" Fairfax cries.
Dimly I sense that someone has a strong grip on my arm. I think it is Tony. Or is it the wind? Or is it both of them?
Then the world degenerates into noise. The wind howls. A bargain is a bargain! Part and parcel! Beneath that, there is an undercurrent of thuds and crashes, paper tearing and fluttering, the further shattering of glass, and Fairfax screaming my name over and over again.
Then the dream closes in around me, and nothing else seems real.
It's a very long time before I can get the order of the words right. "My days shuttle past, windy life without hope, O remember I am a weaver…" Thousands of possibilities, none of them right, till finally one concatenation slips into the darkness like a key into a lock, and I wake up, gasping.
I am lying on my bed, a heavy wool blanket thrown over me. Fairfax dozes on the window seat, her head nodding forward. Tony sits beside me, reading a thick green book, Paranormal Psychological Phenomena. It has library reference numbers printed on the spine. There's a purplish bruise beneath one of his eyes and a Band-Aid stuck in his hair.
"What happened to you?" I say.
He looks up, startled at first; then his dimples appear and his cheeks turn red. "Oh nothing," he says. "Hey, Fairfax. She's awake."
Fairfax snaps upright, her eyes full of sleepy confusion. Through the window behind her, I can see that it's dark outside. I hear the distant braying of the foghorn on Las Piedras Point. The house has a peculiar, muffled feeling about it, as if it's wrapped in cotton.
"How long have I been asleep?" I ask.
"Hours," says Fairfax. "Do you remember what happened?"
"No. It was noisy. I opened the window. I've been dreaming, haven't I?"
"It was more than a dream," says Tony. "The library's a shambles. Roddy and Lavinia are still downstairs putting books away and sweeping up glass."
I imagine Lavinia's china teacups pounded to shards, the beautiful leather books lying bent and torn on the Oriental carpet, and kindly, whimsical old Roddy picking each one up and dusting it off like an injured child. What have they done to deserve this?
I sit up and test my feet against the floor. I feel as if I've been beaten with a board. "I'm going to the orphanage," I say. "I've got to talk to Sister Jude." But when I try to stand up, my knees buckle and I fall back onto the bed.
"Take it easy," says Tony. "Here. You've been tossing and turning so much your pillow's like a rock. Let me fluff it up for you." He bats at the pillow clumsily, his worried gaze never leaving my face. "Fairfax told me all about this orphanage of yours. One thing's for sure. It's too far to go in the fog."
Fairfax rises abruptly, hands clenched, thumbs inside her fists. "Electra, there's a professor in the psychology department who's interested in problems like yours. I think we should go see him. The orphanage can wait till tomorrow."
I take a long breath. I remember how we used to argue about the difference between that which is incomprehensible and that which is impossible. I could never make her believe in the square roots of negative numbers, or in infinities, or even in the empty set. "Even nothing is something," she would say. Perhaps the notion of wind as a conscious entity is just as difficult.
"I don't need a psychologist, Fairfax. I need to see Sister Jude."
"How the hell do you know?" She is trembling, and the veins in her neck stand out. "Do you realize that Tony almost got killed this afternoon shielding you from flying glass and books? And here you are, blabbering about going to see some half-witted nun who's so far away from the real world that she probably doesn't even care what year it is. You know, there are other people's lives in danger here! It's not just you anymore." She almost screams the last sentence.
By the time she finishes, I am trembling, too, and working my fists around inside my pockets to keep from lashing out at her.
Tony touches my arm. "Look, Electra. I don't know anything about parapsychology." He gestures toward the thick green book with the library numbers. "I'm not sure I even believe in it. But I am a scholar. And I do know that when you've got a specific problem, the best way to start on a solution is to track down every lead you can find-even the wildest. Maybe Fairfax is right. Maybe this guy can help you figure out what's going on. How will you ever know if you don't go see him?"
Track down every lead, even the wildest. I almost smile at the irony of Tony's words. I look out the window at the gray wall of fog. Somewhere beyond it, beating the waves into foam, whistling among the offshore rocks, the wind is waiting for me. The marrow of my bones is cold with eerie certainty that the wind means to kill anyone who tries to keep it from getting what it wants. There is no time left for pride.
I sit up very straight. "Take me to the orphanage. Just take me up there, and I promise I'll go see the psychologist tomorrow."
Fairfax sticks her jaw out. "What can anybody at Our Lady of the Harbor possibly do that a psychologist can't do better?"
"They can tell me about my past."
Fairfax swallows, and is silent.
Roddy and Lavinia watch from the porch as we slide into the front seat of Tony's car. "Won't you reconsider? It's a terrible night for driving," says Lavinia.
Roddy rubs her gently on the back and waves to us. "Be very careful," he says.
Tony calls out across the misty yard, "Don't worry. We'll be home before you know it." Then he turns the key in the ignition.
"Sorry," he says, as the engine rumbles to life. "The top has been stuck in the down position ever since I bought it. I haven't had time to fix it yet." He flicks the heater switch to high.
It's not far to San Francisco. On a clear day, it takes only thirty or forty minutes to get there. But tonight is different. The fog is so thick it even diffuses the dashboard lights. For all I can tell, we are sitting in a parked car with a fan blowing on our faces. Tony assures me we are moving at a steady twenty miles per hour. I don't know whether to curse the fog for slowing us down or to pray that it won't disappear. It is an omen. A signal. As long as it surrounds us, I know the wind is far away.
It is almost ten-thirty when we reach Our Lady of the Harbor. Adobe walls loom out of the night, full of dark windows. The hour of the compline is long past, but the Little Sisters of Saint Camillus never turn away visitors in need. There is always someone on duty. Tony, Fairfax, and I huddle before the massive door and ring the night bell.
We wait a moment, listening for footsteps, hearing only the creak of moorings on the nearby wharf. I wonder how many nights, as a child, I lay in my bed and listened to this very sound.
It seems hours before a voice comes from behind the tiny, barred door-window. "Who rings our bell?"
"Electra Thorpe, Mary Fairfax, and a friend," I say.
"Electra? Mary Fairfax?" Bolts are shot back, the door thrown open, and there stands Sister Michael. A smile creeps across her pale, abstracted face. We have probably pulled her from some private prayer. She hugs us and draws us through the vestibule toward the library. "You look so cold, poor dears. But how wonderful to see you! Come, come. I have a fire lit. I was just reading Saint Augustine. Are you familiar with him?"
Tony laughs softly. "Philosophy 101. He tried to prove that good is more powerful than evil."
"Yes. And he succeeded. At least as far as the Church was concerned," says Sister Michael. She smiles at him with increased warmth and a curious tilt of her head.
Fairfax flounces into a patched and worn chair near the fire. She's so cold her lips are blue, and it takes her a moment to work her face into a sarcastic grin. "See, Electra? You have nothing to worry about. Good will eventually triumph."
"What do you mean, my child?" says Sister Michael.
Fairfax crosses her arms and slouches deeper into the chair. "Ask them."
Sister Michael raises inquiring eyes toward me, face half shadowed by her brown wimple.
I meet the gaze steadily, as I have done few times in my life. "I'm sorry, Sister. There's no time to explain. I've come to see Sister Jude. It's urgent."
She looks at me quizzically. "What an odd coincidence. She's been trying to find you."
I attempt to swallow the dryness in my throat. "I didn't realize."
She nods. "Sister Jude is ill. She had a mild stroke last month, you know. Unless it's extremely important, I'd rather not wake her. I could take your address and phone number…"
Panic spurts through me. "A stroke? Will she be all right? It's not serious, is it?"
"There's no real need to worry. She was only in the hospital for a few days, but it has slowed her down. You know how these things go."
"I understand, but…please, I…please. It is important."
She contemplates me for a moment, touching the tips of her fingers together, moving them apart, touching them together again. I wonder what she sees in my face. I wonder if the fear moves under the skin of my cheeks in visible waves. She nods once more. But this time she rises and walks toward the door. "Wait here," she says.
She is gone a long time. We sit in silence, listening to the clock on the mantel. It's an expensive one-an antique, probably a gift from some successful parishioner. Its intricate workings click away in plain view beneath a glass bell. I remember the stream of gifts that used to come through the orphanage door every Christmas. Half a dozen lovely trees. Cases of wine and olive oil and wheels of cheese. Boxes of nuts and dried fruit, crates of brilliant oranges.
The clock strikes eleven, and we hear the shuffle of slippers on the stone floor. "Here we are," says Sister Michael as she guides Sister Jude into the room.
Sister Jude has always been old, but now she looks truly ancient. Her spine is bent. She watches her feet with great concentration as she hobbles along, leaning on a knobby black cane. She is wearing a frayed brown bathrobe. Silver hair peeks out from under her wimple.
When she is settled in one of the chairs by the fire, she tilts her head up with an effort. A smile whispers across her face. "Greetings, Electra. Have you come to join us after all?"
I look down at the floor. My cheeks burn.
"How did you know I've been thinking of you?" Her left eyelid droops, dead and unmoving, but her right eye shines in the glow of the fire.
"I had a dream," I say. "In the dream, you wanted to give me something."
Sister Michael makes a small sound-almost a whimper-and presses her fist to her mouth. She sways slightly, and Tony reaches out to steady her.
"What's wrong?" I ask. "Are you all right?"
The good half of Sister Jude's face tightens into a look of vague and lopsided pain. "Perhaps we have witnessed a miracle," she says. "I tried to contact you, but the university has no record of your current address. I prayed that God would send you here." A soft, dry laugh whispers from her throat. "I have spent my life believing that the age of miracles was past."
She reaches into the pocket of her robe and pulls out a white envelope, torn open along the top. She hands it to me. "Forgive me for opening it. It was marked urgent, and when I couldn't reach you…"
I turn it over and over, struggling against a rush of déjà vu. I read the front. Electra, c/o Little Sisters of Saint Camillus, Home for Children, San Francisco, California. It's the kind of envelope you can buy in any drugstore, ten for a dollar. The return address says Jimmy's Tavern, Mission Street, San Francisco. The word urgent runs in capital letters along the bottom edge. The writing is shaky but clear.
Inside the envelope is a sheet of binder paper, buckled as if it has gotten wet somehow.
"Dear Electra," it says. "Time is getting short by now. Nearly your twenty-first birthday, and that was the bargain. I've got no right to ask you favors. But it chews at my soul, what I did, and I can't go to my grave without telling you. If God has any mercy, you'll find me at Jimmy's in the Mission. Any night this week. Ask for Captain Fletcher."
The paper flutters out of my hand.
"What does it say?" Fairfax springs from her chair and snatches the letter from the floor. Tony reads over her shoulder.
"What's the postmark?" he says. "When was it mailed?"
I am still holding the envelope, forgotten, between the fingers of my left hand. Tony takes it from me, glances at the stamp, then at his watch. "This is dated Monday, October thirteenth. Today's the fifteenth-almost the sixteenth. He'll still be there." He looks up at me. There are lines in his face I have never seen before. "Who is this guy, anyway?"
I try to make some answer, but I can't think of any. My chin is quivering, and the only communication I can manage is a shrug.
"I'll bet he's her father, the son of a bitch!" says Fairfax. "How could he be so cruel?"
"Why is it cruel, Mary?" says Sister Jude. "If he is her father, it is not cruelty that makes him write this letter. It is only human nature, and one of the better parts at that."
I kneel down beside Sister Jude's chair. "Please," I say. "What do you know about me? About him? Tell me about that night, the night they found me here."
She smiles. I remember that smile, surprisingly small for all the love it contains. She strokes my hair. Her hand is rough and bony. "I'm sorry, Elecrra. There is little to tell about you-about any of our children."
"There must be something. Something."
She lifts her chin just slightly, and the creases in her forehead deepen. In my mind an image of her appears, a small brown figure gazing up at mountains of dust, each speck of dust a memory. I have never felt as minuscule as I do at this moment.
"I remember the way we named you," she says. "You were wrapped in a seaman's coat, and in it we found a scrap of sailcloth. 'Electra,' it said. We believe you were named after a ship. A ship that sank. Did you know that?"
I shake my head. I wonder how fast the hearts of mice beat, or hummingbirds. No faster than mine.
"Well. It seemed so fitting. The Electra sank just before you came, and a child aboard her was killed. We thought of you as a living memorial to that child's soul."
I rest my throbbing forehead against the arm of the chair. The wood feels cool and good.
"You arrived in November. During the storm in which the ship was lost."
"My birthday is November seventeenth. It must have been after that."
"No…no, we celebrate a foundling's birthday on the anniversary of his arrival. So although you came to us in the middle of November, your real birthday must have been well before that. As much as a month, I'm sure." She smiles distantly. "I have never seen a baby before or since whose eyes were so bright. The world fascinated you."
I barely hear the last part. I'm busy developing several meticulous proofs. They all conclude the same way. If Sister Jude is right, I'm a month older than I thought. My twenty-first birthday might be today, or yesterday, or tomorrow, instead of next month.
"Sister Jude, do you have any idea who wrote this letter?" says Tony.
She shakes her head. "None. As Fairfax says, her father, perhaps."
Slowly a thought has been percolating its way through my subconscious. Now it flows into place among all the other thoughts. "He's the man in the fog," I say. "The sailor outside the playground fence. I'm certain of it. I've got to find him. The sooner the better."
"What man in the fog?" says Fairfax.
"A man I saw when I was a little girl. I dreamed about him the night of the eclipse. And now I remember seeing him more than once. Watching. Just watching."
Tony turns toward me, his face oddly soft in the firelight. "Electra, you know there are some pretty crazy people hanging around the Mission district. Why don't you let me find him for you, talk to him, make sure he's not planning to…to hurt you somehow."
I lay my hand on his shoulder, touching him for the first time, thinking about it only after I have done it. Even through his shirt and his tattered sweater, he feels warm. Maybe it's just that my hands are so cold. "Thank you. But I don't think there's time." I almost whisper it.
Fairfax takes two steps toward me, stops, clenches her fists. "Don't go, Electra. I'm afraid. This feels all wrong."
I smile at her. I can feel it on the inside of my face, like the heat of a tiny flame against a wall. "You know how it is, Fairfax. I know you do. He can tell me who I am."
She never cries. Not even now. But her eyes are very bright as she nods slowly.
I take Sister Jude's hands between my own. I have known her all my life and now I am leaving. What can I say that will not be inadequate?
But she speaks before I can. "I think you'll be back," she says.
My throat is so tight I can barely answer. "I will if I can. I promise."
She gazes at me with her one piercing eye. "Take my crucifix," she says, leaning forward so I can unfasten the chain around her neck. Her voice is full of hard, icy authority, the kind no one denies.
"Yes, Sister," I say automatically, as I have countless times before, when the lessons and commands were not as important as now. I reach out and release the catch. The crucifix is small, made of dark wood, hand-carved with intricate designs. I fasten the chain around my own neck.
"There is a line in the poem of the Wanderer," she says. "'Til bith he-the his treowe ye-healdeth.' It means, 'Good is he who keeps his pledges."'
I nod, scrubbing my eyes on the sleeve of my coat, and Tony and Fairfax and I walk away toward the heavy door and the fog beyond it. The clock strikes twelve.
"I will if I can," I murmur.
I count the street lamps as we start down Mission Street. Three, five, seven. In the fog, which seems thinner now, they begin as nebulous clouds of light and grow to bright spheres with halos. I see fewer and fewer of them as we get further east, closer to the piers where the big ships tie up. Twenty-one. I turn the number over in my mind, wondering what makes it so special. Not a prime. Not a square. Three sevens. Three for the trinity, seven because it is magic and has been magic since time began.
Jimmy's is a single-story dive on a deserted corner. Above the grimy front window, a neon sign blinks on and off, first a naked pink woman, then a green palm tree. We don't even have to look for a parking spot.
Tony presses his palm lightly against the cracked plastic doorplate, then looks at me worriedly.
Fairfax clutches my sleeve and says, "Are you sure about this?"
The faintest whisper of a breeze tickles my cheeks. The fog is lifting. "Hurry," I say.
Tony pushes through the doorway into the darkness of the tavern. At first I can't see anything. The smell of stale beer and rum is so powerful that it makes my stomach squirm. There's a jukebox playing softly, something nondescript, a female vocalist singing about how she can't get along without love. I hear Tony trip over something-probably a wooden stool-as he makes his way up to the bar.
There are candles in round red glasses on each table. By their meager light, I can just make out the bartender, a huge man, wiping a mug on his apron. "Whadya want?" he says.
"We're looking for someone named Captain Fletcher," says Tony. "He said we could find him here."
The bartender snorts and inclines his head toward the back of the room.
We make our way among the rickety tables where scattered patrons drink alone or in pairs. In an isolated corner, far from the door, a wild-haired figure sits hunched over a shot glass and a pint bottle of whiskey.
"Captain Fletcher?" says Tony.
"Who the hell are you?" says the man, wrapping his arms around his bottle as if to protect it.
"I've brought Electra."
There's a sound of indrawn breath, then a sigh, almost a sob. "Figured she'd be gone by now," he says.
I push a chair out of the way and sit down opposite him. I stare at his face, trying to match it with the face outside the playground fence. There are too many wrinkles and not enough light. All I get is an eerie sense of the familiar, without being able to pinpoint it.
I take a deep breath. There's a simple test that will settle the matter. "My days are swifter than a weaver's shuttle," I say, "and are spent without hope."
In the glow of the red candle, tears spill over his cheeks, and he hides his face with his arms. He moans softly. "O remember that my life is wind: mine eye shall no more see good."
"What does it mean?" I whisper. "I've been dreaming it for months."
He gazes at me miserably. "Sweet Christ. In the last twenty-one years I've nearly memorized the whole damn Book of Job. That's where it's from, if you want to know. They might as well have written it for me. God only knows how many times I've asked Him to either kill me or forgive me and be done with it."
"Forgive you for what?" says Fairfax, leaning toward him, teeth bared as if she would like to grab him by the collar and shake him till his neck breaks. "You've done something to Electra, haven't you! Is that what needs forgiving?"
Tony pulls her away. She jerks herself from his grip and stands trembling beside me, glaring at the old seaman.
Captain Fletcher throws back his head and laughs. "I've done something to Electra? That's a good one. Which Electra? There are far too many in this piss hole of a world."
Suddenly I notice a small sound, barely audible except to one who is listening for it-a breeze gently scrabbling at the window of Jimmy's Tavern. My mouth goes dry.
"Are you my father?"
He's still laughing, almost helplessly, at some joke nobody else can see. "Your father?" he says. "If I were your father, this would all have been much simpler, wouldn't it now?"
I realize I've been holding my breath. I let it out now, embarrassed at the relief I feel. My father is a better man than Fletcher. I can still dream of that.
"You said if God had any mercy, I'd find you. Well, I have," I say. "And I want to know what you meant about bargains, and time getting short."
His laughter stops as abruptly as it started, and his eyes cloud up. He's full of booze, I tell myself. A soppy, pitiful drunk. I try not to despise him for his weakness. Whatever he's done, he hates himself for it. That should be enough.
"Twenty-one years ago, I was the captain of a ship," he says. "A ship named Electra. A fine, stinking ship that went to the bottom in a storm. Nobody died. Not a soul! You want to know why? Because I made a bargain with the wind."
I sit at the table, frozen, as the story of my beginnings comes out at last.
"I took you from your mother's arms. In the confusion, your parents never knew what happened. I told them you were washed overboard, but I hid you in the bow of a lifeboat, underneath a sail bag. And I used you to buy our lives. Used you for a bargaining chip. Every sailor knows. The wind is always interested if there's a soul involved. Especially a child's soul. Something new and pretty it can gloat over."
For a long moment, while it all soaks in, nobody speaks. Then Fairfax leans across the table and says in a voice too thin to be convincing, "That's a lot of bull."
Tony, his face tight, scrutinizes Captain Fletcher. "I don't believe you. If you're telling the truth, why didn't the wind take her then, on the spot? Why wait until now?"
The captain flashes him a crazy grin. "Wind can't take a person's soul against his will. Or so the story goes. It's a matter that can't be decided till the age of majority."
"You mean all Electra has to do is say, No, you can't have me?" says Tony, his voice breaking with anger and incredulity.
The captain shrugs and starts to lift his bottle. Tony reaches out and stops him.
"You're making all this up, right? I mean, what kind of bargain is that?"
The captain answers softly. "What do you take me for? Listen for yourself. Does that sound like an old man's imagination?"
Tony turns his head, just slightly. He hears it, too-the wind again, more insistent this time, whistling at the keyhole, curling around the garish sign outside, making it tap against the bricks.
"It made me promise she'd be brought up right-kept clean and perfect till the time. That's why I gave her to the nuns," says Fletcher, his dazed eyes focused on something far away, something none of us can see. "The wind has its ways of stacking the deck. Just like anybody else. It's been sniffing around her all along, whispering about how she should like some things and hate others, trying to persuade her she's got nothing to lose. But that's not the worst of it."
He lifts his bottle with trembling hands and takes a long pull. This time, Tony makes no move to stop him. "What do you think will happen to me if she says no? What do you think will happen to you and everybody else she gives a damn about? Ask her. I'm sure she knows by now" He shakes his head. "You can't imagine the kinds of death the wind can think up for a man, even if you've seen them with your own eyes."
Fairfax is on her feet, flailing at the air while Tony holds her back. "You son of a bitch! What gave you the right to gamble away somebody else's soul? Your soul. It should have been your soul!"
"My soul? You stinking brat. You don't know much about bargains, do you? Why should the wind take mutton when it can have lamb instead?" This time when he laughs it fills the whole room, a horrible, deranged hooting sound, almost a cry of pain. When it's over, he wipes spittle on his sleeve and takes another long drink. "And as for what gave me the right, it was numbers. Simple, stinking numbers." He winks at me as if we are members of the same conspiracy. "You know all about numbers, don't you, my girl. Think you love 'em, eh? Think you know all about them. Well look what they've done to me!"
I push back my chair, rise from it unsteadily, too numb to feel the floor beneath my feet. "What do you mean?"
"I mean it's all in the numbers. A hundred and twenty-nine to one. A hundred and twenty-nine men, women, and children, sunk to Davy Jones. Or one baby girl…one baby girl…"
I back away, tipping over the chairs, bumping into tables.
Outside, the wind has risen to a shriek. The walls shake. The windows rattle in their frames.
"It's a lie!" Fairfax screams. "Everything he said is a lie!"
How I wish I could believe her.
The other patrons, mostly sailors and whores, have begun to rise from their tables and grope toward the walls with the edgy jerkiness of impending panic. The bartender glances up at the ceiling, raises an arm to shield his head from bits of falling plaster, then whirls toward me and shouts, "You! Get outa my bar!"
"Stop!" says Tony. "Don't go any closer to the door." And he throws himself over the clutter of tables and chairs to seize me by the wrist.
I am lost in a wasteland of fears and confusions. I want to live. I want to find my mother and father. I want to feel what it's like to be someone with an inherited past, long and complicated and rich. It isn't fair. It isn't fair.
At the same time I think of the way I used to look up at the stars and wonder why I was different-an introvert, cold and frightened at a man's touch, ecstatic only at the laws of mathematics. I held the hope of change inside me like a candle in a lantern. Now I see the truth. I am different because my soul has never been my own. Maybe I will never change. Maybe I cannot.
I stare at Tony's fingers curled tight around my wrist, and I cry, "Don't let go of me! Oh God, yes, let go of me!"
"Electra!" His eyes are rimmed with tears. "People care about you. All of us care-Fairfax, Roddy, Lavinia, me. You can't just give up. I love you, Electra! I won't let you go."
I have only an instant to feel astonished at his words, only an instant to wonder at the way they rekindle the candle in the lantern. Then the front window splinters into a million pieces. Tony's face is suddenly speckled with blood. He closes his eyes tight and staggers backward with a cry of surprise. As if from a great distance, I hear the other customers shouting, screaming. My clothes are plastered flat against my body. The wind is pulling at me, and the inside of my skull vibrates with the message I have come to know by heart: A bargain is a bargain, part and parcel.
Fairfax launches herself at me, wraps her arms around one of my legs as the wind drags me toward the door. "Don't go! He said you don't have to go," she shrieks. The mirror behind the bar bursts outward in a spray of deadly shards.
The pieces of my life hang in the air before me. Bits which have always seemed random before coalesce now into something whole, something with a shape-not elegant or beautiful, but pleasing nonetheless, and powerful somehow. I think of Sister Jude bent over her books, of Fairfax practicing the cello with her eyes closed, of my dusty hats and boxes of pretty buttons, warm days spent on windy beaches, Roddy's suspenders and Lavinia's pomegranate wine, the completeness theorem, Tony DiMarini, who says he loves me, smiling and sipping cocoa by the light of a lunar eclipse. Every person, every place, every event, speeding toward one point in time: this moment of choice.
I look down at Fairfax, clinging to my ankle, her hair like a mane of flames, streaked now with dark blood. Behind her, Tony has fallen to all fours, shaking his head as if to clear it. With a fresh spurt of terror, I understand exactly what the wind wants. It wants me to believe that Captain Fletcher is right. That it's a simple matter of numbers. My life in return for the lives of those I love. But it's not just my life the wind is after. It's my soul. And if I succumb, it will be worse than death. Much worse.
Tony climbs back to his feet and tackles me like a football player, grabbing frantically for a hold the wind can't break. But slowly, slowly, I feel myself slipping away from him. "Don't let go, Tony, oh God, don't let go!" I scream, and I squeeze my eyes shut. The darkness magnifies the sting of plaster and bits of glass peppering my skin. But it's better than seeing.
I am already far beyond surprise when, through the blackness and the incredible din, I hear a whisper. "I think you will be back." I almost feel the brush of lips against my ear. The voice is Sister Jude's. In that moment, the chaos of the external world recedes, and I think, Of course. Why didn't I see it before? And I remember that any equation can be solved in a number of ways and that often the most elegant paths to solution are the least obvious.
I open my eyes, and the chaos roars in again. I throw up an arm to protect my face, and the words come to me as if I've always known them. I cry into the wind. "Mary, Mother of God, intercede for me. To Our Holy Father I offer my life in service as His bride!"
The wind stops completely, as if my words have shocked it somehow. But only for the barest instant. Then it rises again with a noise like a freight train, a howl that makes me clap my hands to my head. The air pressure in the bar drops abruptly. The roof's blowing off, I find myself thinking calmly. There's a shower of concrete and an oddly inconsequential wash of pain, mental or physical, perhaps both, muffled and diluted by the gradual loss of consciousness.
In our mountain valley, the sun is rising. I pause, kneeling at matins, to look out through the window of the chapel. The peaks above the convent, already touched with copper brilliance, stand out hard-edged against the deep blue sky. The upper reaches of the forest shimmer in a golden halo of light. I like this view, an orderly one, full of God's own formulations. It is far removed from the sea, a good place to make a new start, especially when one is named after a ship.
My hand goes to my neck and Sister Jude's crucifix, one of the few worldly possessions I brought with me when I came here. I ask for strength. I still can't think of my past without a stab of yearning, as if I have cut myself on a small, sharp jewel that will never wear smooth. No one died at Jimmy's Tavern except Captain Fletcher. He, and only he, lost his life when the roof blew off, while the rest of us were spared. All of those I love in that other world remain.
Letters come at intervals. Sister Michael writes that Sister Jude spends her days dozing in the sun. From Roddy and Lavinia I receive news of good books and the condition of the garden. Lavinia never fails to mention the two boxes of small treasures I asked her to keep for me in the moments before I left, unable, though I tried with all my might, to assign them to the trash bin.
Fairfax and Tony write seldom. They are more likely to appear at our door every few months, bearing gifts of pomegranate wine, warm scarves for the snowy winter, or varieties of fresh fruit we cannot raise ourselves at these elevations. If the day is warm, I walk with them in the woods. If not, we sit together in the public room, where a fire keeps the chill away.
Fairfax talks about her music, which consumes her now as it never did before. On each occasion, she has discovered something new-a special technique, the name of an unknown composer, or the fresh interpretation of a particular phrase.
But Tony never talks about his work. Instead, he always asks, the look in his eyes a little less hopeful each time, "Will you ever leave this place?"
And I always reply, "No, Tony. I won't."
It is then that I feel the most pain from the little, sharp jewel of yearning and I push it away, wrap it in the protection of rationality, and seize the truth. This life is right for me. And even if it were not, a bargain is a bargain, part and parcel.
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