Prodigal Summer - Barbara Kingsolver [36]
Lusa felt emptied out. “You’re young, too, Jewel. The same as me.”
“No,” she said. “Not the same. For me it’s done.”
“Why?”
“Shhh.” She put her hand gently across Lusa’s mouth and then stroked her hair. “You need to sleep. You have to give in sometime. You get to a point to where you just start wishing you wasn’t living, and that’s worse than being scared.”
Lusa put out her hand and felt for Jewel’s, felt it open the bottle and place one weightless dot on her palm. If she looked just off to the side of it she could see it there, like a distant, guiding star.
“You go up and take that right now. Drink you a glass of water with it and go lay down. Sometimes you just need a little help.”
She lay on her side watching the red numbers on the digital clock on Cole’s side of the bed. First she feared to feel the effects of the pill in her limbs, and then, slowly, she arrived at the much more dreadful understanding that there would be no effect. When the clock downstairs chimed twice, Lusa felt pure, bleak despair. Jewel was right: this body of hers was crushed with the waiting. Her mind was longing for death.
And then it was over.
Sleep took Lusa away to a wide, steep pasture cleared out of the forest. A man spoke to her by name:
“Lusa.”
He was a stranger to her, no one she thought she knew. She could hear his voice but couldn’t see him. She was lying in the dewy grass, on her side, wrapped up completely in a dark blanket that even covered her head.
“How did you know it was me?” she asked him through the blanket, because suddenly she understood there were women lying all over this field, also wrapped in dark-colored blankets.
He answered, “I know you. I know the shape of your body.”
“You’ve been looking at me closely, then.”
“I have.”
She felt an acute, erotic awareness of her small waist and short thigh bones, the particular roundness of her hip—things that might distinguish her from all the other women lying under blankets. The unbearable, exquisite pleasure of being chosen.
“You knew me well enough to find me here?”
His voice was soft, reaching across the distance to explain his position in the most uncomplicated terms conceivable. “I’ve always known you that well.”
His scent burst onto her brain like a rain of lights, causing her to know him perfectly. This is how moths speak to each other. The wrong words are impossible when there are no words.
She rolled toward him and opened her blanket.
He was covered in fur, not a man at all but a mountain with the silky, pale-green extremities and maroon shoulders of a luna moth. He wrapped her in his softness, touched her face with what seemed to be the movement of trees. His odor was of water over stones and the musk of decaying leaves, a wild, sweet aura that drove her to a madness of pure want. She pushed herself down against the whole length of him, rubbing his stippled body like a forest between her legs, craving to dissolve her need inside the confidence of his embrace. It was those things exactly, his solid strength and immensity, that comforted her as he shuddered and came into her.
She woke in a sweat, her back arched with simultaneous desire and release. She touched her body quickly—her breasts, her face—reassuring herself of her own shape. It seemed impossible, but here she was after everything that had happened, still herself, Lusa.
It was daybreak. She curled onto her side and stared for a long time out the open window at the solemn poplars standing on either side of the hollow, guarding the mouth of the mountain that still breathed gently into her window. Above the trees stood a pale white sky where the waxing moon must have hung just a little while ago: morning, with its tangle of work and choices. A day of her own, faintly scented with honeysuckle. What he’d reached out to tell her that morning, as she sat near the window, was that words were not the whole truth. What she’d loved was here, and still might be, if she could find her way to it.
She pulled up the sheet and closed her eyes,