The Ring

Along the banks of the river, at a small coffee shop called The Cherry Tree, with sprinklers in a flower garden making ghostly rainbows in the fine mist like a gentle reverie. And there she was. Loren, sitting all alone on the terrace, reading.

Her dark hair was longer now than it had been when they were together nearly a year ago, her fingernails white, playing with earrings that tinkled with their own music, wind chimes for her and her alone. She was sipping tea, reading he saw as he neared, The Unbearable Lightness of Being – an unbearably painful book, but uplifting to the soul. Her blue eyes were pursed in concentration.

Her dress too was white, with traditional handwoven flowers in the East European style. She had a new tattoo on the delicate hand that flipped the page, he noticed, birds escaping from a cage. She didn’t look like she was waiting for anyone but his chest still stung to see her.

The last time they’d met was in a dream. She was a little girl who could fly through space and time. With her memories she could transport herself across worlds, and, like a castle filled with secrets, she could wander down the corridors at night peering into what ifs, if onlys, what might have been, what should have been and what never was.

The world she had discovered was within, and so she retreated from her world without, to better explore her castle. But the further and longer she explored, her parents feared the worst. From every institute they sent her, she would escape, fading from view like a wisp of cloud and appearing in another place, dressed differently – sometimes with a different accent or clothes, blue or green eyes, ornate hair that changed colour in the sunlight.

She was, as the people of her village called her, a Faerie, and as word spread about the Faerie girl who could be seen in two places at once, travelers and pilgrims began to visit the village, pouring in from distant lands. And each would tell a different story, even having met Loren in the same sitting, as if alternate timelines and worlds were seeping through her very being.

Why Owen should dream of her so, when she had betrayed him so brutally that night with his teddy bear and his wedding ring, was not something he understood. Perhaps there was something eternal about her, inevitable, an ending and a beginning tied together into a larger pattern, repeating itself, branching like a tree across time, intersecting with his life, the past generating the future and the future they’d dreamed generating the past that must precede it.

Not wishing to startle her, he opened the wooden gate to the terrace gently, slipping past two French ladies chatting over french toast and strawberries. She felt, rather than saw, him coming and when she looked up the tears were already welling inside her. The cafe was playing the plaintive music of reed flutes, filled with the grief of having been separated from the mud, longing to return. He sat down opposite her, his lip throbbing with memory. It was hard to speak at first, for both of them, but he went first.

“Meeting here, now, it’s almost like fate.”

She didn’t know what to say to that. She clutched the book to her chest. Then she put it down.

“I’ve wanted to tell you forever.” she managed at last standing up, holding herself. “Oh Owen, I’m so…. I’m so… I wished I could take it back, I’ve wished in another world that…”

Gold flashed on her finger. He saw it now.

“You’ve found someone?”

She sat down again, letting go of the novel. “Yes. But I still…. I have…” She reached down and picked up her blood-red handbag. She fiddled inside, tears coming down her face. A part of him wanted to hug her but it hurt too much. She was so thin, shaking.

“Loren.” he said.

“No, give me a second, here…” she took something out of her bag. “I have it.”

She looked different now, suddenly, like a Faerie her eyes had changed, like another time stream was coming into play and it was making her more alive. She held out her hand and there in the centre of her palm, the same circle he had traced upon his own in the Counselor’s room, was the ring he had brought to propose to her with. It was chipped from the fall but still beautiful, a simple band of gold and silver intertwined, curled together into the center.

“I found it, at the bottom.”

Owen remembered the day he’d bought it in Tokyo, the proud Japanese jeweler who’d given it to him with such formality after a walk in the Zen garden and then said something in warning, and his wife translating it as “Understanding nothing takes time.” They’d bowed to each other, then. He’d put the ring in his pocket, clutched his teddy bear and flew home for Loren. It had come to pass. He’d climbed all that way up the fire escape, to understand nothing.

“You don’t have to explain.”

But she did anyway. After his father was found up in the mountains, a young detective had come to interview her. After he heard her story, which told him little, he had confessed his bewilderment. He said there were things he couldn’t tell her about the case, things that were making his spirit sick. After Owen began disappearing for long periods, they began seeing each other to cope and eventually to clean themselves.

But that it wasn’t true, she said, that she told herself these things were setting her free but they were never letting her leave. That the devil was there and he smelt like freedom. That she had been good her whole life and she wanted to know what it was to fall. That she wanted to choose for herself, she was curious, and what Owen heard but she couldn’t quite articulate was that she had wanted to destroy herself. And he loved her so much for that that it hurt.

“Let’s go for a walk.” he said.

She nodded and put her book away, leaving some money next to the tea pot. They walked along the terrace and he opened the small wooden gate for her. They walked together along the bank past the flower garden, the fine mist from the sprinklers wetting their cheeks, and up the bridge that spanned the river.

He took her hand and opened her palm. The ring still lay in the center.

“There’s a game we used to play in drama,” he said, picking up the band, “called Now.”

She looked up at him, her blue eyes glowing, wonderful, shocking him.

“We would all stand looking in the same direction and someone would shout, Now!” The corners of his mouth lifted, maybe, in mischief. “The goal was we would all do it together, at the same time, with one voice.”

“How did you know when to say it?” She asked, her voice thick and grazing. The wind caught her hair so that it played along her chin.

“We had to feel it.” He seemed very strong to her then, even in his shabby homespun clothes and gaunt face. There was something so strange about him but it comforted her.

He took the ring from her palm and held it out over the bridge. The river below was dazzling, gold streaks leaping into white caps, indigo depths rushing into deep blues and greens. In the sky was a bright straight line of cloud, that might have been Icarus if he’d wished only to fly and nothing more.

“Here, hold it with me.”

She reached out over the river. He could feel her fingerprints touch his against the ring. There was still electricity between them.

“Close your eyes.”

He could feel her body next to him, a presence in space, connected. He could hear her breathing, short, labored. Her balance was off, slim calves shaky.

“Breathe.” He said.

He felt her nod. She took it in the cold air, and held it in the pit of her stomach. Her fingers were still vibrating. He sensed the tears squeezing in the corners of her eyes. He let the people go past behind them, the children and the lovers and the grandparents making their way along slowly, holding hands.

“Keep breathing.” He said, his voice husky. She wanted to cry and it made him want to cry too. “And when you’re ready…”

She took in another breath.

“Let it go,” he said.

The ring tumbled through the sunlight.