Mistwalker

TWENTY-THREE Charlie

After two days cocooned in my inn, I had to get some air.

Surrounded by electricity, lit by a moving-picture box, I gorged myself on visions of the world as it had become. I sat beneath hot running water that never seemed to fade. The rhythm of motorcars and people coming and going lulled me to sleep.

But I’d been asleep a hundred years. I’d had enough of it. The realization that I had no one left pained me more in skin than in mist. It was an agonizing solitude. And a hundred dollars didn’t last nearly so long as it might have done once.

My only thought was to catch a boat headed for Boston. There, I could search for the remains of my life interrupted.

Packing my meager belongings took but a moment. Then I let myself out and smiled at the sun and the sky, at lungs that took real breaths. To be sure, bittersweetness ruled each moment. But I was alive again, and sometimes life was suffering.

Turning myself to the shore, I hurried on my errand. It seemed entirely improbable, as I walked through the morning sunlight, that the first face I saw was Willa’s. Nevertheless, it was so. Not a memory of it, nor a replica. No hallucination or wishful thinking.

It was she, standing on the wharf with a blanket wrapped round her shoulders.

Some sort of uniformed officer put a hand on her back and guided her to the pavement. A deep-plucked emotion stirred in me, a bewildering concoction of both fear and longing. Past her, in the distance, the lighthouse cut a fine silhouette against a clear sky.

There was nothing there anymore.

If I said that I simply knew it to be true, it would be a lie. There were signs—I could gaze at Jackson’s Rock and had no inclination to look away. Once shrouded by mists, the island was clear and bright. Birds flew over it. Waters flowed to it. There was nothing there anymore.

Rubbing at the ache in my chest, I turned to watch Willa. I’d been made flesh with her sacrifice. Humiliating, indeed, that she’d denied me until the end. But as I followed her with my gaze, I blushed. Shame, for my madness. My desperation. For failing to realize that every curse has a breaking point.

True love’s kiss, or the tears of an innocent. Neither applied, in my estimation. Folding my hands behind my back, I watched as a woman leapt from a motorized horse cart. A man slid from the other side, and he was familiar indeed.

Silvery hair, but shot with red, I’d seen him sleeping in that very horse cart, his shotgun at hand. Willa crashed into him, burying her face against his chest. His hands wavered uneasily, then finally fell on her back. The woman closed the circle around her.

Reaching for a nearby bench, I had to sit down.

This was Willa’s family.

The one left gaping with her brother’s death, the one that drove her to beg at my feet to become the Grey Lady. In a hundred years, I hadn’t felt the pain of a knot in my throat. Nor the sudden burn of tears that somehow also occluded a good, deep breath.

It was never the kiss or the tears that broke the curse. It was the pure heart behind them. A pure heart I’d never had. A selfless longing I’d never felt.

Even at that moment, watching Willa’s reunion, I had not a bit of selflessness in me. I wanted her to raise her head so I could meet her eyes, and she, mine. She was the only soul left in the world who knew me.

But she never looked back.