The Invisible Circus - Jennifer Egan [128]
“I’m—let go!” Phoebe said, unnerved by the pressure of his hands. He did, reluctantly, but hovered near her. Phoebe ignored him, trying to concentrate. This is the place, she told herself. It happened here. And she was rewarded, then, by a wave of clarity that seemed to lift her from the ground.
This was it. A ringing filled her ears.
This is it.
And so gigantic an event did not just disappear. Fossils, Phoebe thought, the earth’s shifting plates, everything left a print, no matter how stark or faint or deeply buried. She looked slowly around her, heart pounding. For it seemed now that she’d grasped the true object of her search: finding that trace, placing her hand upon some relic from the scene of Faith’s death. As if doing so would correct the accident of time that allowed her to stand in the very place her sister had jumped from, and not be able to stop her.
Phoebe leaned over the wall. Wolf seized her shoulders again, but she let him this time. She was looking down at the sea, thinking what an infinite number of times its tides had flushed and reflushed those rocks, how many kids had sat smoking on this wall, tossing their butts, making out—it was that kind of place, you could tell—and this offended her, the defilement, the effacement of what few traces might be left. It was more than wrong, it was inconceivable. The true place would be protected from it. Something wasn’t right, Phoebe thought, and the clarity she’d felt only moments before began to slip. She consulted the sky and found it empty, vacant as the silence following loud noise.
“I don’t think it was here,” she said.
“No?”
Phoebe shook her head. A pressure had risen inside her, a feeling of anger, expectation, so many years of waiting and how could this possibly be right? This. After all that. “No,” she said, “I made a mistake.”
“A minute ago you were sure.”
“It doesn’t feel right,” she said. The cracked plaster, the dust. She had to get away.
“It’s not that big a town.”
“What about another town? I mean, how do we know it was exactly this town? We saw lots of towns just on the train.”
“Phoebe, she was found here.”
“Well I never saw that report or whatever it was, did you?” Phoebe said. “Did you see what it said? Because I never did.”
Wolf took a long breath. “You can’t suddenly call every fact into question.”
“Believe me,” Phoebe said, making an effort to speak calmly. “If this were the place, I’d know.”
“But how? You were a little girl, thousands of miles away. Phoebe, come on! Listen to yourself.” He was pleading with her. He wanted to get away, Phoebe thought, that was all.
“I’d know,” she said, “because it would feel a certain way.”
Wolf seemed about to speak. Then he crossed his arms. “Okay.”
Phoebe looked around. The pressure began to recede. This wasn’t the place—this was anyplace, no place. South of Corniglia she spotted another cliff even higher than this one, jutting farther out to sea. “It could be that,” she said, pointing. “I bet it is.”
Wolf moved between Phoebe and the wall. He braced himself against it, taking both her hands in his own, and looked straight into her eyes. “You could spend the rest of your life running up and down this coast,” he said. “Next you’ll be saying maybe it wasn’t Italy, maybe it was Spain. But this has to end. Somewhere it has to end.”
“It’ll end,” she said.
But Wolf’s expression had clarified. There was something he wanted to say, something pushing