Slide - Kyle Beachy [114]
It's easy to imagine a parallel world wherein she was there when I awoke in the hospital, her face gleaming above me, tanned and present. In reality, my mother, back home after a lengthy stay at my bedside, heard the cell phone ringing in the junk drawer, saw Audrey's name, answered, and explained. She had then gone to the computer in my father's office and booked her a ticket. Between waking in that bed, flanked by a parent on each side, and Audrey's arrival, I was given a week to prepare. On top of the entire summer. Driving to the airport was my first venture from the house, and I waited for her outside security. There were people all around me. I observed their shapes and motions, their interwoven desires and individual contingencies, and it made a solid kind of sense. She had lied about shaving her head. Funny girl.
When we made it into the mall, we approached a large display map surrounded by a crowd of the overwhelmed and stimulated. Squeezing through while I watched over shoulders, Audrey pointed one finger to a large purple square, then squeezed back out, and we walked as a pair to the toy superstore, through a great jingling maw of moving parts and gesticulating robots. I secured a shopping cart while she watched a man in a giraffe suit pose for photographs with frightened children. Pushing our cart along the aisles, I took time to read the backs of boxes and kept only the toys buttressed by what I considered sufficient narrative history, those with some role in a grander story, however ridiculous. Pieces to some whole, armies of good and evil and a war that crossed the galaxy to land on our planetary doorstep.
I had explained that I wanted to make a donation, and she had smiled, and nodded, and left it at that. I hadn't asked her many questions either, so the facts I knew were only those she had shared without prompt. She and Carmel were joined first by a writer and photographer from London, male, whom she referred to as the scribe. There were three Australians, trolls in disguise, from whom they were eventually forced to flee under the cover of Italian night. The search for the faeries began after meeting two South African witches, benevolent, who had tracked them (the faeries) across the better part of Europe, until finally uncovering a herd of them in Budapest. It was soon after finding the faeries that Audrey split with the robot and the others, spending the rest of her time alone, moving at will and whim, sometimes boarding trains for the sole reward of watching field and hills scroll by. She'd been home since the middle of August.
To make things fair, I told her of the covetous ogre driven by American myths of success and fulfillment, skilled in the equally American arts of manipulation and selective ethical disregard. I mentioned the wingless angel who lived in town (location ambiguous), who learned and taught the meanings of certain important words. And I spoke of a half-orphaned boy to whom I had spoken Audrey's name, and my failed hero's quest to locate and retrieve his mother. I mentioned a ghost only in passing. She allowed every abstraction, shrugging aside the euphemism and glaring holes of my story and focusing, instead, on what moral I could take away from the summer. If it was a story, she said, which it should be, then there would be a moral.
“Otherwise what's the point?”
“Alright,” I said. “One thing would have