25

On the morning I left Cabo, my plane sat on the tarmac for an hour. The storm had caused cancellations and delays, and now that the sun was shining again, planes were baking in line on the runway like fish laid out to dry. I glanced repeatedly at my seatmate, trying to ascertain if he was less human than he looked in his Bermudas and flip-flops, until he dropped his head back, let his mouth fall open, and started snoring.

Gazing out the window, I stared at the gray cement until I, too, dozed. I woke, dry mouthed, just before the plane began its descent into the Dallas-Fort Worth International Airport. I wondered if I should have kept Sheila on the phone longer or called Helen, wondered where Lucian had been these five days, what the committee thought of my book.

My book. Sometime in the last few days it had evolved from my manuscript to “my book.” I had already decided that if Brooks and Hanover didn’t take it, I would submit it elsewhere. Maybe I would ask Katrina to represent it, to take it to one of the Titans—Random House, perhaps, or Hachette.

But I needed to know how it ended.

Sitting in a bank of seats at my gate in Dallas, I reached for my cell phone but hesitated before turning it on. Pushing that button carried so much finality; either there would be a message waiting from Helen, or there wouldn’t. If there were, I might know now, before I even boarded my plane, the fate of my book. Or at least whether I should be calling Katrina.

What I would not know is how to finish it.

I didn’t turn it on. I told myself that I should welcome this limbo. I had languished in purgatory through my separation, in between appointments with Lucian, nearly every moment of the last three months. Now, perhaps on the cusp of something—some new direction—I should sit here during this layover and savor the feeling of truly being in transit. In between.

I put the phone in my bag, shoved it toward the bottom, pulled out a pen and the last few pages of one of the manuscripts I had taken with me. My legs felt swollen again, the skin tight across my calves. I had meant to walk around for a little while, but they would only swell again on the next flight, and I had promised myself I would return home with every piece of work I had brought with me finished. Every piece except my own.

My pen hovered above the page as, with the same apprehension with which I noticed Aubrey’s increasingly frequent absences in the months leading up to my discovery of her affair, I wondered where Lucian could be, where he went when he was not with me.

That’s so pathetic.

Someone was staring at me—a woman, sitting in a row of boarding area seats across from mine and one row over. Her legs were crossed beneath a long, stretchy skirt. Her brown hair was slightly frizzy, pulled back into a ponytail that gave her a girlish appearance, though a closer look at the lines around her eyes and mouth put her, I guessed, in her forties. She wore one of those fabricated pieces of jewelry they sold at women’s stores, the kind Aubrey used to disdain for looking like an antique or an art piece, though they were mass-produced and sold at exorbitant prices. Except for the jewelry, she would have fit in perfectly in Boston; she was wearing all black.

“Look at that sunburn,” she said to me, the furrow above her lip marred by a thin scar. “The committee loved what we gave them, by the way.”

I almost dropped the pages on my lap, so great was my relief. It was quickly followed by anger. “Where have you been?” I hated how transparent I was, how desperate I sounded.

“Roaming.” She pursed her lips into a little kitten mouth. “I thought you deserved a vacation before things got busy.”

“Busy? What do you mean busy? You said our time was short.”

She came over to sit next to me. She was broad-hipped but not ungainly, her nails manicured with those square, white tips, the appeal of which I had never understood.

“They called it compelling, brilliant. They compared you to Poe, to Blake’s Urizen.”

I exhaled a silent exclamation, unable to speak.

“I’d ask for a slightly larger advance than what they’re offering, but otherwise, I think we’re almost set.”

It was happening. It would happen. I fell back against the seat, papers sliding to the floor around me. And then I lowered my head to my hand. And laughed. It bubbled out of me, grew in volume until I was laughing so hard that the sound came out with the same near-hysteria I had noted in Lucian—and then I laughed harder.

Long moments later, that wild, roiling laugh still in my ears, Lucian regarded me with patronizing calm before reminding me that my story was not finished.

“You’re right. And I have”—I checked my watch, which struck me as so ironic I almost laughed again—“a half hour before I board.”

“Then calm down and listen.”

I was going to publish. The advance didn’t matter. But I would negotiate anyway.

“As you’ve noticed, I’m something of a philosopher. Now, after the ascension of the God-man and the conversion of these believers, I thought perhaps he was tired of being abandoned by the strongest of his creations, the most favored of his people. Who can guess the reasoning of El? I only know this: He is the author of the paradigm of the unlikely. Clay, listen!”

“I’m listening.” I could buy a new table. I would get some new pants. I would go out on dates. Would Aubrey hear? Would she call to congratulate me?

“I’ve said Israel was special to El. But now something happened. Up until those days there was a great separation between the Jews and everyone else. The Jews were set apart by law and favor of El, and the rest of the world was on its own unless someone converted. El was a faithful lover of his people. But now these new believers were going out and giving this message indiscriminately to anyone they met, Jew and non-Jew alike. The rich man, the widow, the priest, the fishwife, the orphaned beggar on the street.

“Let me tell you something, these non-Jews, upon hearing and believing and accepting this new grace, this new gift, looked exactly the same as the other believers to my eye. All those shining stones like luminescent pearls in the muddied waters.”

I recalled my vision on the beach. I had thought it a daydream.

“I saw this with appalled fascination. I laughed like a fool, much like you just now, and heard something wild in my voice. Why not? Why not. Tell them all. How like El to be so extravagant and so longsuffering. Why limit his affection—and now it had grown to a great and totally undeserved gift—to any one race? Soon enough the entire ball of earth would be populated with pardoned, shining souls, a great deposit of glowing stones, imperfect yet brought into the fold of that relationship as only that first man and woman had experienced so long ago.

“I was manic, despairing. El had bestowed upon these believers the rights of his own children, authority over all fallen things, if they wanted it. Over me.” She shoved a square-tipped fingernail into her sternum. “Imagine! And now I was being ordered about, told to leave, cast out of homes and presences by an authority belonging only to El himself.”

I had never, in a thousand years, thought of this. And now my thoughts returned to Mrs. Russo, to the steeliness about her the day at the co-op, at the seeming sanctuary of our apartment building.

“I had found my place with Lucifer, and among you. How could I bear to be ordered about, ruled over by humans so frail and filthy and base?” At some point she had gripped my arm, and now those square nails dug into it. I remembered again the sight of her on the T, pulling at her skin as though it were covered with fungus.

“But I need not have worried. Lucifer, clever prince, had a plan. His efforts until then were paltry by comparison. We had been a haphazard force at best, only tenuously united—if you haven’t noticed, loyalty and devotion are not our strong suits. Now Lucifer unleashed a great storm of demons, myself among them, a battery of guerilla assaults, and attacked the children of El with every imaginable weapon.” Her eyes were mad, her lips animated by a terrible smile.

“How he hated these new children of El! They might be assured of a future, but they were mortal yet.”

“What did you do?” I sat very still.

“We killed many of them. A dead believer is a believer who cannot spread the word of redemption to any others. And I’m certain their ends made a good many humans think twice about making the same choice.”

In my mind I saw the slain woman, the blood mottling her blonde hair on the pavement. My jubilation over my manuscript sobered.

“Lucifer conscripted us all. He would show the Almighty how quickly the redeemed would forget him, how little this covenant would change anything. The clay people were a miserable disappointment, and so they would continue to be, redeemed or not. They would scoff at El’s great act of grace, and Lucifer would see to it. Lucifer, the accuser called Satan, declared war.”

A rustle of gray passed in the periphery of my vision. Two nuns in orthopedic shoes and stockings were looking for seats. Lucian stood up and, with a gracious smile and flash of a white watch face on her wrist, indicated her seat and the empty one next to it. “Sisters, please.”

The nuns thanked her, and Lucian, demurring, glared at me over a perfect smile.