“The parakeets,” she whispers. “Do you hear them? Jarry, are you there?”
“I’m here,” says Ransom, shaken, shaking, praying, Let me wake up, please, God, if You’re there, let me not have killed my wife, let this not be Claire.
Addie sees him now. Jarry’s sitting on the floor. Her head is in his lap. He’s weeping.
“Dearest…”
“Shhh,” Ran whispers. “Don’t talk. Please.”
“I’m dying, aren’t I?”
“No,” he tells her. “No.” His tone is warm and fierce.
And now Addie knows she is.
Against the window, Jarry’s silhouette is black against the sun, which resembles a steel disc. Addie can see the edge, not blurred with radiance, but definite, serrated, like a coin. There’s black soil in the crenellations, and she can’t remember why her aunt said not to look at it, why humans should be afraid of such a common thing. Addie, now, can stare straight into it.
“I must tell you something….”
“Please, don’t talk.” Ransom, weeping, strokes her hair.
She puts her finger to his lips. “No, please, listen, Jarry, please. I loved my life. I loved my family, my friends, I loved this place, my work, I loved it all, more than I ever loved myself, but you were my true happiness. You were the only one who ever looked at me and saw me as I truly was, not even who I was but who I wished to be. The joy you took in me made me take joy in myself. I had forgotten who I was. I needed you to show me. You loved me as I hope God may love me now. I was just that person once, with you. I’m not sad. Jarry, don’t you be.”
Ransom shakes his head, agreeing. His face his face is streaked with tears. “No, I won’t.”
Footsteps approach over the carpet now. The shadow falls over the lovers. Ran looks up at the silhouette against the light. He knows the bearded stranger now.
“Harlan.”
“Yes, it’s me.” Harlan’s voice is soft, but his ginger eyes are red with weeping, and besotted.
I dreamed that I was you and you were me, Ran thinks, but I was wrong as wrong could be, as you were wrong before me, so who was I, and who were we? Through the window, he can see the oaks and the magnolias in the park…Not the peak, no, not the peak…So this is how the story ends, and how else should it be? Now Harlan puts the Purdey to his brow, and Ransom gazes down at his black arm and understands. I feared and hated what I envied and could never be; I thought I was the killer, but the thing I killed was me. Ransom, seeing through himself, is going, going, gone, and Jarry bows his head to it, and Harlan fires the gun.
The second shot rings out. The birds disperse. Their twittering fills the skies, and he is with them now, Jarry’s with them. Far below, the boat horn blows, and Jarry hears the clank of metal pots, the musical thunk-tink of bones. “Hu eh eh! Hu eh eh!” the children cry in an ancestral tongue his mother’s mother had already forgotten how to speak. There’s a tremendous fluttering of wings, and all around them are the birds, a great invisible flock, hemming them in on every side, guiding him, guiding them, away over the roof, over the trees in the old park, and Jarry, with Addie now, flying with the parakeets into the checkered sun, is free.
Like spindrift from a breaking wave, the birds hang a moment, a curtain of bright green high in the air, and then they veer and vanish as though never there. A green feather falls. A wind blows through the park, and it is blown, that feather…under the old oaks and the magnolias, through the dappled sunlight, onto the piazza, into the pages of a book, and in that book a poem, and in that poem, a man, the old leech-gatherer, staring down into a pool of water he stirs with his staff and he is gone…and, at the bottom, finally, when his self is shattered, overcome, there, he sees…so long longed for, finally so small…
“Ransom!…Ransom!”
Still standing on the threshold, he comes to with the Purdey trained on Marcel Jones…. All this is a dream, thinks Ran, I dreamed that I was you, and you were me. But who am I? And who is he?
Nothing exists but empty space and you, says Nemo. Go on and pull the trigger, Ran. Life, death, it doesn’t really matter, does it?
But the woman who was once upon a time and is no more no more his wifewifewife, says, “You aren’t going to do this.”
And Ransom, having died already, says, “You’re right,” and puts the gun beneath his chin.
“No, Ran…”
A denial is the final thing he hears before he pulls the trigger and his blood and brains jet up against the chandelier and drop back down in bloody drips, and Hope and Charlie see their father there, they scream and scream and grow to man- and womanhood and have children of their own and pass it down, the bitter, bloody wounds, as Percival passed his, on and on, and round and round, the carousel spits out the same black bag and starts the same sad trip again….
But, no, Ran merely sees this in advance. When he opens his eyes, his finger on the trigger, Shanté is in front of him.
“I understand it now,” he says, and he is weeping now, and wild. “I know why he agreed to go into the pot, Shanté.”
“Why, Ran?”
“He wanted to atone. And so do I. I want to be a tree,” he says, “I want to be clean and do no harm and turn sunlight into life. I’m tired of all the mess, Shanté, tired of all the mess I’ve caused, and all the mess I am. I’m tired of being me. I’m
