A swirl of green in a dazzlingly blue sky: no one got a clear shot of it despite untold tourists’ cameras trained upward and gulping its leafy light. A swirl of green: history deflected with ricochet force as the unprecedented appeared, a sky isle, an emerald swirl suspended in a cerulean sky.
A swirl unfolded, that’s how it seemed to Jolie, who at nine did not question the sight of an island appearing overhead. She found joy in the sight and laughed delightedly as she bounced and pointed.
Her grandfather, Antoine, squinted upward and winced. His narrow shoulders encased in an old sweater he’d found in a better neighborhood’s dumpster, hunched as if the strange floating sky jungle had shouted a threat. “We should go.”
“But Granpa, I want to –”
“No, mon cher. It may fall.”
Her eyes widened even more by the idea, Jolie locked her gaze on the isle as her grandfather led her away by the hand.
They moved through a city brought largely to a halt by the miracle above. Antoine cast a dubious gaze at a fat old woman on a flimsy wrought-iron balcony. She stood with a huge pair of binoculars pressed into her doughy face. “Are they like us, Madame du Sault?” Antoine called up to her.
“Pretty tropical trees, even a narrow waterfall.” Her voice was strained, so high did she hold her head. “No people.”
“Yet.” Antoine gave Jolie one of his grimaced smiles, as if his lumbago hurt again. “Come, quick.”
They trotted around a corner and across the triangular square of bricks where Zofuss the baker had his shop.
As always Jolie lingered as they went through the shop, savoring the smells of fresh breads, sweet pastries, and huge cakes stacked taller than she could stretch. Her belly growled.
“No just yet, mon cher.”
Jolie nodded, knowing it was not yet lunch time and, more importantly, that they had not yet earned their morning’s pay. As she scooted behind the counter Madame Zofuss, a vague smile always in her eyes, slipped Jolie a marzipan circus bear, then winked.
Antoine, already halfway up the stairs, caught the wink and nodded a thanks that Jolie missed even as Madame Zofuss dismissed it with a shrug.
Crunching the sweet cookie, Jolie followed her grandfather up to the two-room apartment to the left of the landing. The Zofusses lived in the larger apartment across the landing; Jolie loved to help Madame Zofuss dust her collection of porcelain figurines. The dancing bear was her favorite, a brown bear with a clown’s red nose on which balanced a large striped ball. Madame Zofuss spoke often of the grand circuses that had once crossed the countryside season after season, her childhood having roots in one she called the best.
In their own apartment Jolie and Antoine kept no such collections, nor such glorious memories. There was a rickety table, a chair that shed its stuffing whether anyone sat on it or not, and a hot-plate on a counter by the stained sink. A scent of lemons, from Antoine’s occasional floor scrubbing, vied with dust and a faint odor of fish beginning to rot. In the far corner two cots comprised their bedroom; it was Antoine’s frequent wish that one day they might find a screen properly to block the view of their sleeping space from the rest of the room. Beneath one cot stood a chamber pot, which Jolie emptied now that she was old enough in the trough in the yard downstairs and out back. She used the back stairs for this chore despite the way they swayed.
Jolie offered half the cookie to her grandfather, who took a small nibble only before crossing the room to the door he always kept locked. This second room held their meager possessions; just a stagger larger than a closet’s lurch, the room was crammed with their trunk, many boxes, and his treasure.
Huddling ashiver on cold nights after their clutch of coal had burned away, Grandpa Antoine had spoken hushedly of his treasure. He had described not the treasure itself, never that, but only its affect on him; that it kept him alive — for her. That it kept him alert and alive for her made it magical and rare.
Now he found it amidst junk and debris from the years they’d shared and from many more before Jolie had come to him. He dug, rooted, sorted, moved, and stacked, his sweat dripping from wrinkled brow, hawk nose. “Here, no, there.” His muttering burned the dust from the air, burned into Jolie’s ears as she watched and heard and tried to listen. She knew she would always remember this and never wonder why, although she did not have a clue even as she absorbed it.
He backed finally from the little room, his rump and haunches skeletal beneath his worn trousers. When he turned he displayed to her as a magician might reveal the illusion an old cardboard box with faded symbols and scribbles all over it. It looked like a souvenir autographed by a hundred wizards, yet looked cheap and fragile, too, as did most souvenirs, Jolie knew, having peddled many at the cathedrals, or outside them.
“This contains my reason for living.” He carried it to their bare table. Placing it in the middle of the empty space, he sat by slow stages, exhaled, wiped beads of sweat fro his brow, and flopped his forearms and rough, gentle hands down as if protecting the box. The table wiggled.
“Show me, Granpa.” Jolie sat on her accustomed chair opposite him, eager and yet able to be patient, having learned from the street to be wary of the dangers of haste.
He opened the lid, set it aside, and drew from the box a faded Valentine’s heart, once read, now brownish pink and splotchy. “To the best Daddy ever: I love you.” He read this inscription aloud, reverently, translating the childish scrawl effortlessly, from memory cherished.
“Were you the Daddy?” Jolie gazed at him hard, trying to see him younger, trying to spot what was so obviously hiding in the wrinkled skin.
He nodded. “Yes, mon cher. Your mother made this for me when she was about your age, perhaps a bit younger. It is my heart. It keeps me going. Do you know why?”
She smiled. “Because you see her in me.” He’d told her so often. She knew this lesson; it made her proud.
He handed her the heart. “I want you to get a match, mon cher. From the box, there.” He indicated the sink, the tin box by the single faucet handle.
As Jolie rose to obey he added a quiet command that stopped her, that made her drop the Valentine, which fell leaf like in dips and arcs. He said: “I need you to burn it for me, over the sink.”
Picking up the paper, she held it against the tip of her nose and smelled it. Its touch was vaguely rough, a kitten’s tongue. As she inhaled the acrid, sweet scent of decaying paper there was no whiff of her mother’s perfume, no hint of her father’s tobacco smoke.
Lowering the heart from her face, a geisha flirting behind a fan, she looked into his eyes and frowned. It made her seem far older, and the traces of her mother came out stronger, especially in her dark eyes. “But why? I can’t burn this, my mother made–”
“You mother, yes child.” He lowered his face to his arms. “Where have I always told you she has gone?”
“With my father, to heaven.” “Yes, to paradise, to the eternal garden where all is green and perfect always, like their love for each other, their love for you.” He gasped. “Forgive me for lying, grand-daughter. How could I tell you they went away with the Other People?”
She understood none of this and concentrated on what she knew by asking, after a moment’s pause: “How can I burn your treasure, Granpa?”
“Because you are my true treasure, and now I have no need of that token. We must burn it to set free the heat of love it has held for me all these years, and to release the promise.”
Jolie began crying, not at recalling her parents’ deaths, not because her Granpa Antoine was forcing her to cut another link to the precious past, but because she knew simply that he was saying, the kindest way he knew how, good-bye. It did not matter that she did not understand how or why.
She struck the match on the stove. The lid of the tin box fell with a clunk. Fingers trembling, she held the old Valentine over the sink and then held the match so the tip of its flame kissed the point of the heart.
In an instant it was gone, leaving only a bitter smoke and a smudge of ash. Not crying anymore, Jolie turned to find her Granpa Antoine not on his chair at the table but on the floor under it, one arm stiff, the other clutching it as if he’d been silently shot.
She dropped to her knees beside him and didn’t know what to do, knowing he was stricken but not knowing in what way.
“Go. To them.”
“What is it, Granpa?” She leaned her ear close to his lips, pulling her hair back impatiently when it got in the way.
“Go to the isle in the sky. In the park where we saw it. Go there. They will come for you. They came back for you.” He closed his eyes. “They must have found a good place.” “Who? Oh, Granpa Antoine, I’m afraid. Please don’t die. Shall I run for help? Madame Zofuss–”
He shook his head once, face tight with both pain and compassion. “She thinks I’m a nut, a crank. She never saw the Other People. So few ever see.” He inhaled slowly, carefully, as if sipping air between molecules of poison gas. “It’s all right. We made it. They’re back now. Go meet them.”
Crying again, Jolie kissed his sharply whiskered cheek, then rose and left, as he’d told her, knowing only that she still trusted him to look after her, to tell her the right thing to do.
A swirl of green in a depth of dark sky: a swirl of green no one saw save one, deflected history again to yet another line of flow, and the park was empty then, as was the sky. Had it ever really been there? Most shrugged and laughed: Of course not.
Madame Zofuss found Antoine’s body in the small apartment and called for Jolie. Later she cried for Jolie, especially when one little girl’s shoe was found in the park. Later still, when she dusted her treasures or made marzipan circus bears from her mother’s recipe, she cried for herself and Jolie both, for different reasons.
The public wonder of the floating isle entered UFO lore and was quickly supplanted by another miracle few saw and fewer cared about.
For those who knew, each was enough.
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