Then the woman walked toward the water until she was a shadowy figure at the bank of the river, until she jumped in headfirst and disappeared.
Opal again studied the stars above her and considered how thissame sky spread over the entire world. She listened to the sounds of the night. Owls. Crickets. Coyotes howling in the distance. The night teemed with life one missed when sleeping. She watched a barge move down the river in the distance, its flatbed carrying a pyramid-shaped mound of coal. The first Europeans to settle Ohio were French and, upon initial sight of the Ohio River, had called it La Belle Rivière. She always felt an instinctive pull to its water. As a girl, she used to wade into its shallow edges or swim across the bank at its narrowest point, paddling until she touched the shores of West Virginia, which felt like a different world to her altogether, even though it had the same shaggy trees, the same mossy rocks, the same waves that lapped at her feet as she looked back toward the other side.
After a few moments, the woman still hadn’t come up for air, and now Opal hurried to the bank, calling her name, worried she had snagged herself on a tree root or hit her head on a rock. She pulled off her shoes and her stockings and her skirt, and waded into the water to her knees. “Madame de Fleur?” she yelled. “Are you there?” She drew her hands beneath the surface of the water, feeling for her. Reaching. The moon popped out from behind the clouds. She spun in a circle until she was dizzy and breathless, until finally the woman’s head breached the surface, her hair clinging to her face.
Madame de Fleur gulped air and laughed.
“I thought you were dead!” Opal said, and when she spoke, a frantic sadness passed over her body, like the woman was already gone from her life.
“I plan to live forever,” Madame de Fleur said. She smoothed her wet hair and water dripped over the bony ridges of her shoulder.
Years later, when she’d remember this moment, Opal would swear that time had slowed, that the world around them ceased to exist. Time cracked and expanded and contracted. There was no time. Only the two of them in space. The woman waded closer to Opal, and Opal to her, and they drew together, aligned until they fell backward, their lips and hips touching, their bodies pressed tight so it was impossibleto tell where one woman ended and the other began. In that timeless space of free fall, before they landed on the bank, Opal knew. Sheknew. What she’d lost had returned to her.
The next day, Jagr, too, had returned, earlier than expected. In Wheeling he’d learned of some new medical advancements. He’d brought home with him some herbs. He busied Opal with chores. He’d asked her to separate the stems from the leaves. He’d instructed her to grind the seeds to powder with the mortar and pestle. He told her to weigh milk of licorice on the balance scale and add it to the pill press as he took notes in his formulary. When he caught her crying, he said she was not acting like herself. An unusual episode, he’d determined, and he’d forced her to drink that elixir, bottom to top, and she was thankful, in a way, because then he would not touch her.
Finally, a few days later, he was called away to check on a patient. Opal stood on the hill above the fairgrounds, where for more than a month the circus tents had billowed like a breathing, living thing. Before she even crested the hill, before she allowed her gaze to affix itself below, to the brown grass of the field that held the memory of posts and stakes, before she discovered the note Madame de Fleur had left for her—attached by a peg to the small square shed that once served as the admission booth—she knew. Again she knew. Madame de Fleur was gone.
She pulled the note from the post and read it. One sentence:I prefer rump roast.
Beneath it, her forwarding address. France. An ocean away.
The world shrank, until the sky and the ground formed a little box around her. For a moment, everything went silent.
1986
Husbands grow cool when wives grow careless…
—LIFEBUOY SOAP
Like Rome, Cincinnati is called the City of Seven Hills, but I know there are more than that. Wyatt and I bought our first house together atop one, in Mount Lookout, an area so named because of the old observatory located there, its property line backing up to ours. Beyond the fence, the rounded dome rose like a giant breast through the bare trees in the winter. When we first moved in, I asked Wyatt why men always design things to look like boobs, and he reminded me that men never use the wordboob, not ever, and so we made a joke of it, called it the Boobatory, which wasn’t funny at all, except to us, because marriage is an excuse for stupid jokes.
It was winter, and the trees could hold no secrets, and I stood in my driveway with a bag of groceries. Have you ever seen a bag of groceries on TV or in the movies that didn’t have a baguette poking out? My bag contained no bread. It was filled with sugar and wine.
“Nona Dixon,” Mr. Longworth said. He climbed the hill thatwas my driveway. “I was in the neighborhood. Let me help with that.”
“Oh,” I said. “Where’s your car?”
“Parked down the street,” he said. “That’s an odd question.”
“You startled me is all.”
He took my bag of groceries. Mr. Longworth’s teeth were perfectly straight and appeared too big for his mouth. They reminded me of windup teeth that chattered when wound and set on a table. “I heard you and Charlie were heckled at lunch. Things are heating up.”
“I’ve noticed,” I said. Outside the factory, the protest had grown. Now news trucks were permanently lined along the drive. Now women filled the sidewalks and lingered in the parking lot, throwing Earthshine products—tampons and toilet paper and toothpaste—at anyone who appeared to be a worker. Police officers had to be stationed near the gate to ensure nobody blocked the entrance.
“It’s a marketing nightmare for sure.” He walked to my door with me and waited while I fumbled with the key. Inside, my house was a mess. Dishes stacked in the sink. Unopened mail cluttered the counter. Shoes in the middle of the room where I’d suddenly decided to step out of them. I’d become the kind of person who used the clothes dryer as a dresser drawer.
Mr. Longworth set down the bag on the counter, next to several weeks’ worth of unopened mail. “Working much?”
“JustStars and Shadowsright now.”
“That’s right. My wife’s been wanting Celeste and Victor to reunite for a decade.”
“Vincent.”
“Right. Vincent. Say, Nona. I stopped by because I wanted to talk to you about something.” He smiled that denture-y smile. I’ve never met a lawyer I trusted. I think some part of you must be broken if you choose to go into corporate law. “I—” He paused. He began withdrawing items from the bag: ice cream, Tab, banana taffy, discounted Lambrusco.
“I can do that,” I said.
