But sometimes she would start to feel the death in things again, and that old doubt would come washing back over her, and she would fill with the terrible familiar fear that nothing had changed at all. She could never be whole in the eyes of anyone else. No one else could ever be whole in her own eyes. She had known it all along.
'Are you okay?' Luka asked her, and when she nodded, he said, 'You seemed to be someplace else there for a minute.'
'I'm all right,' she said.
She wouldn't ask him the question. She wouldn't let herself.
The traffic had picked up again, and there was no longer enough silence in the air for them to listen for the beating of the heart. They handed out the last of the newspapers. Then they walked back home over the wet sidewalks, the flattened grass, and the heaps of melting snow.
It was another day of reading and staring out the window for Minny, cut off entirely from the world. Usually Luka would ask her to come along with him while he scouted the city for reports he could use in the newspaper, but she had come to sense when he wanted to be alone, and today was one of those days. It could be a pleasure to walk the pavement with only your own thoughts for company. She understood that.
After he left, she opened the window to air out the room, and the trickling sound of so much ice and snow melting seemed to enter the apartment from all directions at once. If she had closed her eyes, she might have imagined that she was standing in the middle of some tropical cave, the moisture of the forest percolating down through infinite layers of stone to drip into a hundred little pockets of water. But her eyes were wide open. A few people were walking by down below with their jackets slung over their shoulders. Clumps of snow fell from the trees and the hoods of the cars, astonishingly white in the light of the sun. A couple of birds had landed on her ledge and then flown away. She could see the hieroglyphs of their footprints in the snow.
She must have gone back to the couch and fallen asleep after that, because soon Luka was standing over her with his hand on her forehead. Occasionally, in the middle of the day, when all of the pressure had fallen away, she would sit down to relax for a few minutes and open her eyes to find that she had dozed off for half the afternoon. It was one of the side effects of her insomnia.
She kept her eyes closed. She knew without thinking what Luka was going to say, because he had said it so many times before: 'Wake up, Sleeping Beauty.'
'What time is it?' she asked.
'Early,' he said. 'It was a light news day – just the heartbeat and the weather. Speaking of which, I thought we could go outside and enjoy the sun for a while.'
She felt a breeze on her skin, and she propped herself up on her elbows to see where it was coming from. 'I left the window open,' she said. Then she turned to Luka. 'Can I ask you something?'
'Uh-oh.'
'No, no, it's nothing like that. You have birth and then you have the car accident, right? So what's the third most important thing that ever happened to you? You never told me.'
There was a pause as he sat down, lifted her gently by the shoulders, and put her head in his lap. It was as though she had asked him her question again – why do you love me? – and he had decided to answer her as he always did, by not answering at all.
He spent a few moments stroking her hair with the back side of his hand, then flipped it over by the roots so that it covered her face in a thick curtain.
'Now you look like a caveman,' he said.
It was so ridiculous that she had to laugh. He was always saying things like that – at the least expected times, in the least expected places. No one else had ever been able to make her laugh like he could. No one else had ever tried so hard. No one else had ever known her well enough.
Not a soul.
FOURTEEN. THE MARBLES
And the spring came, with the sun breaching the horizon and the wind lifting the snow off the ice and the bay popping and cracking like the frame of an old house. Shoals of fish traced the open water, and flocks of skua followed close behind them. Great chunks of glacier thawed and broke off into the ocean, carrying the blue-green ice of a thousand years ago. For a few hours each day the snow glistened like rubies in the drawn-out light of the sun, and for a few minutes, as the light grew stronger, it glistened like diamonds. No other spring in the world was anything like it.
It was a kind of twilight, though not the real one. The air was surprisingly warm, and for once Laura did not have to thrash around inside her sleeping bag to force her way out, because it had already melted down to the thinnest mesh around her. She lifted herself onto her elbows. Ten thousand loose threads slipped over her arms and shoulders and pooled together on the floor. They fell so softly that she could barely feel them moving over her skin. When she ran her hands through the threads, they rippled and separated, bending away from her fingers like water. A fish swam by beneath her. She had the notion that she could dive through the surface of the tent, parting the threads with her body, and wheel around to watch them close back together, that she could sink through the material until she forgot she was sinking at all, an anchor plunging deeper and deeper, but instead she opened the tent flap and stepped outside onto the crisp white snow.
The penguins were nowhere to be seen, nowhere even to be heard, though when she thought about it, she realized she could indeed hear them chattering hectically to one another, so they were somewhere to be heard after all, and she could see them huddled together at the base of the cliff, so they were somewhere to be seen. They had hatched their chicks and were warming them beneath the folds of their bellies.
The sun described a thin arch at the very edge of the sky, the moon a slightly larger arch at the opposite edge. The wind played softly over her skin. She was not wearing her jacket or her gloves, her boots or her socks, her pants or her undershirt – was not, as she understood it, wearing any clothing at all – and yet she had never been warmer or more comfortable. She wondered why she had ever been cold in the first place, why she had ever decided to be cold. Such a strange choice, she thought. And the world, this world, was all about choices.
It felt good to stretch her muscles. She flexed her fingers, combing them through her hair. There was still a trace of frostbite on the index finger of her left hand, a small plum-colored circle as perfectly formed as an adhesive bandage, and she peeled it off by the tail of red string that protruded from the top, dropping it at her feet, where it sank immediately into the snow and disappeared. She held the finger up to the fading light. Much better.
Scattered over the patch of wind-polished ice that surrounded her tent were the same delicate little puffs of white snow she had seen when she was sledging across the ice so many months ago. Why she hadn't noticed them before, she couldn't say. They were the size of marbles, the largest of them no bigger than a quarter. Some of them even seemed to present the same whorled feathering pattern as marbles, spreading open into blurred segments inside the glass. She tapped one of them with her big toe and it fell apart, spilling into its nearest neighbor, which also fell apart. They seemed so insubstantial that she wondered how they had ever managed to hold together at all.
A light wind came twisting through the cove, and the marbles drifted lazily about before settling back into the snow. It seemed as though they were regulated by a weaker gravity. One good gust was all it would take to carry them away, she thought, and the thought alone was enough to do it, for it wasn't long before she heard the wind sighing down from the cliff, picking up speed as it worked its way toward the rookery. She watched the marbles shudder as the first few hairs of the breeze brushed up against them, and then they floated up off the ice and began to tumble forward. Within seconds they were on their way. They moved with the same strangely purposeful spontaneity as a flock of birds, tacking from one side to another, crowding together and then fanning apart, yet always pressing forward. Where were they heading with such deliberation? she wondered. Where would they come to a stop? She wanted to know, and so she followed them.
The marbles guided her along at a brisk walk. Soon she had left the rookery far behind. The metallic quacking of the penguins faded slowly away until she couldn't hear them at all anymore, just the dimmest rasping sound at the furthest limit of her perception.
