Opal’s vision expanded, then tunneled, until it was like she was looking through a keyhole at the woman.
“Hello, kid,” the woman said again, softer now, and so quiet Opal leaned even farther forward. She remembered when Oren was sick, just before he passed, she’d visited him.Hello, kid.He could only speak in a whisper, like his voice was the first part of him to cross over.
Now Madame de Fleur pressed her forehead to Opal’s. “Can you sense his presence?” she asked. Opal could hear the woman’s breath; she could feel each dewy exhale. A warmth enveloped her, a familiar energy. That’s how she’d describe it: energy. Like she could light a room with it.
“Oren?” Opal said. She hadn’t spoken his name out loud in years, and to speak it now brought him there. She could feel it. Madame de Fleur squeezed her hand in acknowledgment; Opal squeezed back. How could she ever describe the truth of that first moment? The depth of it? She didn’t care what she’d heard of spooks and spiritualists, what she understood then—what she felt—was as real as anything she’d ever experienced.
“Yes,” Madame de Fleur said. “It is me.”
Now they both stood, their hands still clasped, their foreheads still touching. The women moved together. Madame de Fleur seemed to lead and follow at once. Outside, Opal heard the boom of a cannon, then the band started up. Inside, the women swayed. They were dancing.
The next day, Jagr had called to say he’d been delayed another ten days, and that evening, Opal waited for Madame de Fleur after her show. Outside her tent, she didn’t know what to expect from the woman. That night, and the week that followed, they walked through Mound Hill Cemetery, so close together they brushed arms, then shoulders, then hips, and Opal felt suddenly aware of her body, how tensely she held it. The cemetery appeared more beautiful at night. Pebbled paths wound past rows of gravestones. Madame de Fleur stopped to read the names and trace her fingers along the carvings, those dates and dashes the sad summaries of their lives. One night, they came upon it—Oren’s grave, a rectangle of sandstone already tarnished at the edges.
Opal hadn’t been here in years. She stooped to pick a mum from a patch that grew at her feet and placed the flower on his grave. Madame de Fleur laughed, not meanly, but even so, Opal felt foolish, like she’d broken a rule she hadn’t known existed.
She must have looked hurt, because the woman draped her arm across Opal’s shoulder and told her there’s no comfort to be found in stone. The dead don’t want for flowers and condolences.
“Then what?” Opal had asked.
“My dear, those on the Other Side crave what we all do: contact. Touch.”
Afterward, they lay on the sloping bank of the river, making a blanket of the grass. They looked for shooting stars, meteor showers from the comet still months away, but they found only bright, stationary light.
“What is it you want from this life?” Madame de Fleur had asked her.
Nobody had ever asked her that. She hadn’t known she could have desires of her own. She ran her fingers through the grass beside her, as though she were searching for something. The summer air was bathwater. In Madame de Fleur’s presence, she felt submerged.
She’d told the woman the stories she’d tucked away—about the person she was before now, a different self altogether. The stories were so old, they arrived like lies upon her lips, but as she spoke they hardened into truth: how she carried Oren’s baby, how her mother had taken her to see a doctor who would soon become her husband, how her husband forced her to take medicines, perpetually worried about her weakened state. Wanting, for her, had never proven useful.
“Sometimes the smallest decisions paralyze me,” Opal admitted. “I stand in front of the icebox, and stare into it. Rump roast and potatoes or beans and salted pork? I can’t even decide. Isn’t that ridiculous?”
“I asked you what you want from life—not for dinner,” Madame de Fleur said.
“My point is, how can I even know that answer, if I can’t choose between rump roast or salted pork. Which do you prefer?” Opal asked.
“I don’t want to influence you either way,” Madame de Fleur said, smiling.
She belted her arm around Opal’s waist and held her there in a way that didn’t ask for anything more than closeness. “When we’re like this—I can feel what you two shared. He wants so badly to get through to you.” They stayed like that for a while, then Madame de Fleur turned, until she was flat on her back staring up at the sky. She drew her arms behind her head.
Opal did the same—she studied the sky and felt diminutive beneath it. She searched the sky for a little trail of light. When the comet arrived, the circus would be long gone. Madame de Fleur would be long gone, too, and Opal’s world would shrink. So small again. So ordinary. Sometimes she imagined her life like a winding path through the dark. She could see lantern light up ahead, but she didn’t know how to reach it. She could barely make out her own feet.
Opal rolled onto her stomach. Her body inched closer to the woman. She studied Madame de Fleur’s eyes, which looked like pools of ink in the moonlight.
“I want him to get through to me,” she said.
“So, there, you can choose,” Madame de Fleur said, then she quieted. “Listening is a choice. Shhh.” Opal heard insects and a train whistle in the distance, but nothing else. She had lived to be older than Oren ever was, and it made her sad to think of him so pristine, so young, so untouched by time. She considered what kind of man he might have grown to be. Would he have been so tender with her still? Accepting of the woman she’d become?
Madame de Fleur propped herself up with her elbow. Her dress fell away from her shoulder, and Opal followed the slope of her neck. Her heart thumped everywhere inside her at once. In the distance, the town’s lamplights flickered like fireflies. If she tried, she could find her house. It was late.
Opal touched the woman’s lips and felt the waves of her breath. Then, the woman caught Opal’s hand and pressed it to the bone of her chest. She could feel the thudding. “Is that what you want from this life? Oren?” Opal hadn’t known what she wanted until that very moment when she faced it. The moon tucked behind a cloud. The world around them fell away.
She wasn’t surprised when Madame de Fleur kissed her. Or was it she who leaned in first? They drew to each other, all at once; they magnetized. It felt different from kissing a man. Madame de Fleur’s lips were soft and her breath was light and she smelled of cottony perfume. She grazed Opal’s neck with her fingertips, encoding a message onto her skin. Opal breathed it in, all of it, the presence and the memory of it, the pleasure of it, the exhilaration of it, until Madame de Fleur pulled away.
Then the world returned again, unchanged. Cicadas chirped in the distance. Neither woman spoke.
“Now, for a swim,” Madame de Fleur finally said. She stood. She removed her shoes, then her shirtwaist, then her belt, then her skirt. Her slip fell away like skin; her body limned with light. Opal had never seen another grown woman naked before, and she studied Madame de Fleur with curiosity. The hair between her legs was trimmed. Her hips drew wide and round. Her breasts were shaped like bells, fuller at the bottom.
As a final act, she removed her moonstone necklace and bent to fasten it around Opal, telling Opal the powers of the stone—that it could draw two people together, if the celestial conditions were right. Opal hadn’t known what she meant by that. Still, the moonstone offered cool relief against Opal’s skin. Even in the night it appeared to glow.
