The boardwalk was not crowded, since it was only May and a work day, too early for the tourists to swarm in earnest. But there was salt taffy and small shops that sold cheesy t-shirts and painted shells and hermit crabs that allegedly made excellent pets.
Elizabeth dragged Vimbai along, laughing, stopping at every store that caught her attention. She bought Indian lapis-lazuli jewelry and canvas bags that said nonsense like “Visit Ocean City.” Vimbai passed on the jewelry, but made up for it in cotton candy and funnel cake—the latter invention Elizabeth had been woefully unfamiliar with, and Vimbai did her best to remedy the situation. They quickly got covered with powdered sugar and Elizabeth complained that her hands dripped with oil and she couldn’t possibly clean it off with napkins. All in all, it was the best day of Vimbai’s life, even though she was too inexperienced to realize that it was due to the fact that she held hands with Elizabeth, rather than the boardwalk and the funnel cake.
The memory of that golden, sun-drenched day was her most precious one, and as she recalled the sun and the red and white stripes of the shops’ awnings, the smell of salt from the ocean and the fried dough on the boardwalk, the overwhelming sense of freedom and happiness at being allowed to break out of the museum—just the two of them, marked as special enough for such privilege by the teacher—and to roam the town instead of doing dull and educational things. Oh, how she missed Elizabeth now, how she missed her magic.
The magic was never far from Vimbai’s skin’s surface—the scars, the sigils glowed again. Not with a red hot protective fire, not with the hidden lava of painful love magic Vimbai had not realized she knew so well—but instead they burst open, split like the seams of a pea pod and released not some prosaic seeds but sunbeams, the light Vimbai had drunk in years ago, like the tortoise who did not know what he was doing—he thought that he was just slaking his thirst, just like Vimbai used to think that she was just cutting school and eating funnel cake. The acts of great personal replenishment went unnoticed and unrecognized, and their significance could only become apparent in retrospect.
Vimbai’s skin split and narrow sunbeams shot out. The horseshoe crabs, the undead ones running below and the little ones encrusting the ropes as if they were Christmas ornaments stood out in bright relief, in their true color—emerald green concentrated into dark khaki by the water. The beams crossed the thickness of water and sliced into the oily darkness floating on the surface, and Vimbai let go of the rope and swam after them, trying to keep inside the narrow road of light that seemed to lead—somewhere.
To her surprise, she did not reach the house or the surface. To make the matters worse, the vadzimu’s mind inside her grew stronger and louder, jamming her memories, chasing away the perfect recollection of a perfect day in adolescent love. The light pouring out of her opened cuts grew dimmer and the skin, held open and taut by the sheer intensity of the light stream, sagged and wilted, closing the open scars and diminishing the light further. Oh, this was not good, and Vimbai scrambled for more.
The only trouble was, there was not enough in her love for Elizabeth to sustain a long examination or contemplation—surely, there was plenty of material for navel-gazing if she was so inclined (and she had been in the past). But the simple truth of the matter was that Vimbai’s first love was an exercise in cowardice, where she never dared to say anything first, and expressing her feelings remained entirely out of the question. She had failed by clinging to this one infatuation well into her college career, as the means of letting herself escape any other kinds of entanglements—she was even too afraid to find out whether she only liked girls, or if boys were an option as well. I lied to you, grandmother, she whispered, mournful and dimming, almost lost in the darkness that approached from all sides, engulfing her once more. I’m sorry for lying—I don’t really worry about boys, I worry that I would never be able to love anyone for real, and this is what I’m afraid of.
Don’t worry, granddaughter, the vadzimu replied. We all have fears, and none of us knows a perfect way of dealing with them. But maybe you just need to take a look at the person you love now, and learn bravery there.
Vimbai felt neither outrage nor shock, just weary acceptance, and she had no strength to deny. There was no point—from the first day she sat in the (now unrecognizable) living room of the house, from the moment she watched Maya sling her long legs over the armrest of the worn chair, she knew that she wanted to stay. Yes, the house pulled her in—but so did Maya’s voice and face, so did the prospect of having a roommate such as her, seeing someone as breathtaking every day. And she thought of Maya’s lonely tower, where she slept like a fairytale princess, among the crumpled candy wrappers and empty soda cans, her sleep guarded by an unmoving and dead grandmother. She had nothing left but to coax this reluctant love (those who had lost, she remembered now, those who were honest were the most delusional) into its real form, and she tried to coax herself into admitting what it was and why it mattered.
Vimbai’s grandmother did her best to help as well—she pushed on Vimbai’s eyes from inside, forcing forth the visions of her daughters, of them growing up. She lamented the deaths of her friends with the same quiet clarity as she lamented the passing of the country she once knew—she did not miss the British, but she found a total collapse frightening. She pushed forth the memory of independence and the jubilation in the streets when the Land Reform was first announced. She grieved about the failure of the ‘willing seller, willing buyer’ paradigm. Then she thought about all the strength and all the love she had seen in her life, and it filled Vimbai’s heart with hope, and her scars with light. The light pulsed and pushed them open, forcing Vimbai’s own confessions out of them.
Maya poured out of Vimbai’s scars and her eyes, and there was darkness parting before her. The little eddies and layers of darkness floated and separated, and tore like stormy clouds in the November sky. Through the holes she could see snatches of the real sky above and the shingles of the house’s roof. With one final thrust and a kick of her tired legs Vimbai pushed herself through one of the openings and came to the surface, just a few feet away from the porch.
Balshazaar was nowhere in sight, and Vimbai swam up to the porch in quick strokes. Her vision doubled, and she feared that the vadzimu would become too entrenched to ever be separated from Vimbai. Her own hands already looked strange to her—pruned from being in the water for so long but young, too young, with pinkish full moons of fingernails and the skin that was lighter than what it was supposed to be—and it took her a while to remember that she was neither eighty nor dead. She clambered onto the porch, simultaneously panicking at her grandmother’s insidious presence and addressing herself as sahwira, trying to talk herself down and thinking that young people spooked entirely too easily nowadays. Despite her confusion, she felt the cold in the air, and the sticking of heavy wet clothes, and she crouched on her hands and knees, shivering violently and vomiting gallons of salt water—now that there was air to breathe, the water in her lungs become heavy and unwelcome, and Vimbai remembered that it was unnatural for human beings to breathe underwater like that, even though spirits could.
Somewhere along with all this salt water and an occasional tiny fish, Vimbai managed to expel the spirit too—or perhaps the vadzimu had extricated herself without Vimbai’s help, and now she stood by her, patting her back solicitously, as if burping a baby. Vimbai spat out a couple more mouthfuls and stood up, her legs trembling under her, and queasiness filling her stomach.
“It’s all right, sahwira,” the ghost said, seemingly unperturbed. “Go change your clothes, I’ll make you some tea. And then, then you better go and set things right—poor baby still doesn’t have his tongue.”
Maya had returned from her expedition, and reported on the successful stashing of the horseshoe crabs’ souls. Vimbai felt almost relieved that Balshazaar had chosen to turn his questionable attention to Vimbai and away from Maya—the fact that the crabs were safe and undiscovered by him made it almost worth the blind, panicked flailing underwater, with nowhere to go but the oily dying space off Felix’s head.
“Oh, poor Felix,” Vimbai said out loud. “Should we check on him before we go looking for Peb’s tongue?”
“This is an awful way to pose a question,” Maya said, her voice teasingly scolding. “I can’t say either ‘yes’ or ‘no’ without agreeing to go look for Peb’s tongue. And I have to say, I don’t like these weird quests. What’s with the body parts, anyway? Can’t we go looking for some Book of the Dead or Amulet of Awesome Power?”
“No,” Vimbai said. “Looks like for us it’s all about Felix’s Hair and Phantom Limbs and Peb’s Tongue. Speaking of which . . . ”
Maya heaved a sigh. “I know. Don’t nag, please. We’ll go as soon as I get a chance to take a nap, okay? I’ve been climbing stairs all day long. And you’ve been drowning, so maybe you should do the same. Then we check on Felix and go looking for the tongue.”