The Secret Language of Stones

Chapter 15

Once I’d recovered from my fainting spell, Anna made me tea laced with cognac and lavender honey and served me little Russian tea cakes her cousin had left for us and insisted I try to eat. But I couldn’t. She sat with me and encouraged me, but all I could do was cry. My tears of frustration flowed freely, and she tried her best to comfort me, but I was inconsolable. I’d put so much faith into our session. I’d expected to walk away with the ability to be in control. Instead, nothing had changed. I’d only learned that if I tried to close the portal, I might never be able to open it again.

“It’s a gift,” Anna said, smoothing down my hair. “And you need to embrace it and trust we will find a way to help you live with it.”

“It’s not a gift,” I insisted. “It’s a nightmare.”

“Part of the secret to being able to control it is not being so frightened of it… not hating this ability quite so much.”

“Anna, the war is right inside my mind. I hear these men who have died. Some are still caught up in their pain, haven’t forgotten it yet, are traumatized by it. Others are so worried about those they are leaving behind, they can’t sever the connection. Lost, missing their families, they are in some terrible limbo.”

“But they don’t stay there, do they?”

“What do you mean?”

“Let’s agree you are receiving messages the soldiers leave in the passage vortex between life and death. That these final thoughts linger in some kind of psychic tunnel waiting for you to retrieve them so the soldiers can take their last step out of this realm.”

“Yes, fine.”

“And once you listen to the messages and pass them on, the soldiers move on?”

I nodded.

“So if you focused on that, maybe you would be more accepting. After all, none of them stay with you, do they? Once you give a mother or sister or wife her talisman, that soldier’s voice is gone, isn’t it?”

“Yes…” I wanted to tell her about Jean Luc, but something stopped me.

She didn’t notice my hesitation.

“So your actions relieve them of all their pain and suffering. You unhaunt them, if you will. Do you see?”

I nodded.

“That’s why it’s a gift. You give them the permission they need to move past the pain and step into the light.”

“And if I were to keep hearing a voice, what would that mean?”

“I’m not sure. Has that happened?”

If I told her about Jean Luc, would she think there was in fact something wrong with my mind? That I was making him up? What if she called my mother in Cannes and my parents came to get me? Would Jean Luc come with me? What of my work at the shop? The help I was giving the women who came to see me? Could I abandon them?

“No, it hasn’t,” I lied.

“So if you look at the process this way, wouldn’t the burden feel less onerous?”

“I suppose. I just wish…” I shrugged. “I still wish I didn’t need to bear witness to their agony.”

Once again, she smoothed down my unruly hair, and then bent down and kissed me.

“Let’s go home. We won’t give up, Opaline. We’ll work it out.”

I lay in bed after Anna left, my hand creeping up to my chest, cupping the talisman. I kept thinking about the ramifications of what I’d undertaken. If I closed the door and couldn’t open it again, I would be letting go of Jean Luc.

The gold began to heat against my skin. I turned on the light, and I pulled out the book of Jean Luc’s columns I’d borrowed from Madame Alouette and opened it to where I’d left off. The next column after the one about Héloïse and Abelard.

Don’t read that one.

Jean Luc’s voice.

“Why?”

It’s too sad and you’re already so very sad.

“How do you know?”

I was with you today.

“How does this work?” Suddenly shy, I put my hand up to my chest. I hadn’t yet gotten used to the idea of him being able to see me without me realizing.

I’m not totally sure myself. I’m not always cognizant of you. But when I am, I have a feeling I’m warm. Which isn’t how I feel the rest of the time.

“Do you try to see me or does it happen without you making an effort?”

I have to make an effort.

“Can you hear me too? What I’m thinking?”

If you direct a question to me in your thoughts, but it’s far easier for me if you do speak out loud.

“How do you do it?”

I don’t know.

“How does my voice sound to you when I’m just thinking?”

The same. As if we are connected by hollow threads that allow sound to travel back and forth. But I’ll always let you know I’m there. I won’t spy on you.

“How?”

The warmth.

“Where are you the rest of the time?” I asked.

I don’t know. My awareness isn’t constant. But when I am with you, I’m in the least amount of discomfort. Not that I’m ever in acute pain. Oh damn, I’ve spent my life using words precisely and now I can barely figure out my state of being.

I laughed. Then thought how odd-either I was laughing at an invention of my own mind or at a ghost. And if he was an invention of my mind, then I was ill, wasn’t I?

You aren’t.

He’d read my thoughts.

I may not be quite real the way people in your life are, but I’m myself and not someone you invented. Just think, Opaline, if you were to invent a fantasy lover, wouldn’t you make him much more exotic than me? I’m just a bourgeois journalist who can’t even dance well.

And then he laughed. I’d never heard him laugh before. A joyful sound, it reminded me of the time before the war when young men drank champagne with women in cafés and bought them violet posies and the sound of cabaret music lingered in the air, mixing with the perfume women wore, all making the very streets of Paris, like the lives lived there, seductive and delightful.

I loved the sound of Jean Luc’s laughter and tried to memorize it, for I feared this strange experience would not last. The dead do not linger for long. Jean Luc would do what he must and move on.

I’d been sitting up in bed, my back against the pillows. It seemed one of them had slipped down and I reached to prop it back up. But the pillow sat in place. What was I feeling?

“Jean Luc?”

Yes.

“Is that you?”

Yes, I’m trying to get the hang of this. So you can feel that, can you?

“I can.”

I heard a soft chuckle.

And this?

He’d moved his hand to my shoulder and stroked it. Though I wasn’t quite feeling a hand. The warm breeze seemed to have coalesced into a form.

“Yes. Do you feel anything?”

No. I don’t seem to be whole. I don’t get hungry or thirsty either. But I have emotions.

“You’re upset about your men.”

More than upset. If I’d been smarter, I would have realized we were walking into a trap. I would have-

“Stop. Please. It’s pointless. Regret isn’t like grief; it never lessens, just stays the same. A little hard ball in the pit of your stomach.”

What do you have to regret?

So he hadn’t listened to the whole story I’d told Anna.

“A boy went off to war, and all he wanted was my promise to wait for him.”

You didn’t give it?

“No.”

Why?

“I should have, even if I didn’t love him. Realized he needed me and it wouldn’t hurt me to just tell him. But I didn’t love him. Not the way you wrote about love in your column. A grand love, you wrote. Did you have a love that grand?” I asked him.

No. I never did. Did you?

“No, and I wouldn’t want to. It would be too painful if it failed.”

But to experience it once-even if it is painful-don’t you think it would be worth it? Wouldn’t you want to know what that kind of intensity is like? Wouldn’t you want to feel that deeply?

“I don’t think most people can. Not the way I imagine it.”

Tell me what you imagine.

Leaning over, I shut off the light. If we were going to have a complete conversation, it wouldn’t be as peculiar in the darkness. I’d be less conscious of the empty room.

“I wouldn’t think it happens easily or often. Never for some people. I imagine a love like that is like a fire… starting with a spark and growing into a blaze… becoming an engulfing passion too hot for most people to withstand.”

But don’t you think a passion that strong would last? Even as glowing embers. Always illuminating the blackness. Always giving some warmth in the cold.

“It seems so tragic to me, but you make it sound wonderful.”

And it would be… to always possess the memory of what was possible. Of what could be. Tell me, what do you think it takes to make that first spark?

“What does it take to make a grain of sand become a pearl? They say the sand is an irritant. Maybe love starts that way too. You’re alone in yourself and then meet someone who upsets your balance, who you can’t quite explain away or put in a comfortable place. Someone who shakes your very soul. Who has ideas that jar you and make you think. Who does more than understand you, who understands what you need.”

Who shakes your soul. That’s lovely.

The warmth around my shoulders slipped down my back. Encircled my waist. I’d been kissed before, often enough by Timur, by Grigori, but Jean Luc’s kiss wasn’t like theirs. It began dancing on my lips, pressing on my mouth, and at the same time on my breasts and then at the same time between my legs. Creating sensations all over my body in the one instant. I became the spark about to combust. I smelled his scent of pungent limes, verbena, and myrrh. So intoxicating, at once forbidden and teasing. Like the ghost who now lay on top of me, beckoning me to slide into his dark embrace and get lost within sensation.

How was he stroking me? How could he be moving me to distraction? How was this ephemeral being making my heart race and my breath come in shorter and shorter spurts? A force building deep inside of me beat to a rhythm I couldn’t hear but my blood responded to. A spark burst into tiny tickling flames, the flames licking the cleft between my legs, my legs pressing together as the gathering tightened and tightened more and then exploded into fragments of fire… a hundred tiny pinpricks of sensation reaching up and up and then finally slowing, easing, so nothing existed but the feeling of my heart pounding with excitement and the sound of the blood rushing faster and faster.

And then it ended. As I caught my breath, I waited to hear what he would say. How he would describe what had occurred.

“Jean Luc?”

No response.

“Jean Luc?”

I waited, but still no response. If he’d been there, he wasn’t any longer. The tears came then and surprised me with their intensity. I wanted him to be real. He made me feel as if I belonged to someone and someone belonged to me. As if I’d found my place in the world. Except he wasn’t in this world with me. His body had burned in a terrible explosion that destroyed dozens of lives. Ash on a field at the front. He wasn’t supposed to have died there like that. I was sure of it. He was supposed to come home. So we could meet. So a true spark might have ignited. So when he kissed me, he’d be able to feel my lips on his. I fell asleep with tears still flowing, clutching the talisman, wondering into what darkness my phantom lover had disappeared.