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“Read to me.”
Ava’s voice startles Beatrice out of the book of poetry she was enveloped in; a vice, she thought sometimes, to read simply for the beauty and the comfort of it, rather than to learn. It's not exactly the worst vice she's indulged in recently, though, and they have some time here for leisure. Some afternoons that neither of them work, if they train long enough in the morning, she and Ava lounge during the hottest few hours of the day, sometimes in the comfort of their tiny apartment, more often in the shade next to the sparkling lake, where they are now.
She has been laying on a blanket next to a sheltered inlet while Ava alternates practicing walking on water and then swimming back to shore. Unlike most days, when she studies heavy language or theology texts while Ava unwinds, she has a tattered copy of Mary Oliver’s Thirst, a gift from her (only) friend at boarding school, who thought she might find comfort in its pages after Beatrice had disclosed why exactly she had been sent to a boarding school a thousand miles from home in the middle of the year. Beatrice had shied away from her after the book quietly appeared in her bag one day between classes, ashamed that someone knew her secret. Eventually the girl had stopped reaching out.
The book had been comforting, though, and it was one of the few things she had managed to keep all these years, through all her travels. She felt herself in the pages, the yearning to find her proper place, the desperate and endless wanting interspersed with forced contentment, the push and pull between disappointment in herself and those around her, the occasional anger that she always did her best to fold up and carefully put away. It remained a favorite, some of the poems reading almost like prayers. She had been too absorbed to notice Ava’s approach, carefully stopped outside the radius where cold lake water would drip from her newly cropped hair onto the pages.
“Hm?”
“That looks much better than what you usually bring. Read to me while I dry off?”
She spreads a towel in the bright sun a few feet from Beatrice’s shady spot, and lays down on her back, eyes closed.
“Alright, I’ll find some of my favorites. Give me a moment.”
She thumbed through the well-worn pages, trying to find some of the pieces that might resonate with Ava, or maybe explain something about herself to her that she hasn’t been able to articulate. One in particular had always given her hope, even in its melancholy tone. A feeling that she could always continue, that she simply needed to learn to adjust how she carried herself.
“This one is called, ‘Heavy.’
That time
I thought I could not
go any closer to grief
without dying
I went closer
and I did not die.
Surely God
had His hand in this,
as well as friends.
Still, I was bent,
and my laughter,
as the poet said,
was nowhere to be found.
Then said my friend Daniel
(brave even among lions),
‘It’s not the weight you carry
but how you carry it—
books, bricks, grief—
it’s all in the way
you embrace it, balance it, carry it
when you cannot, and would not,
put it down.’
So I went practicing.
Have you noticed?
Have you heard
the laughter
that comes, now and again,
out of my startled mouth?
How I linger
to admire, admire, admire
the things of this world
that are kind, and maybe
also troubled—
roses in the wind,
the sea geese on the steep waves,
a love
to which there is no reply?”
She’s proud of the way her voice rings out clearly, even as she wants to choke on the last few lines. Ava is frowning slightly.
“Didn’t you like it?”
“It’s beautiful,” she turns toward Beatrice, her hand shading her eyes. “But it’s so sad. Are they all so sad?”
She flips through again. Most of the poems she has marked wouldn’t necessarily be recognized as cheerful, but she wouldn’t say sad.
“I found them comforting. Like being known. I suppose for much of my life, what there was to be known about me wasn’t a particularly happy story.”
Ava’s eyes soften and she rolls over to sun her back, propping herself up on her elbows.
“Well, I want to know you, the happy and otherwise. Choose another one. One that you love.”
Beatrice knows exactly the one she wants, and flips straight to the end.
“Well this one isn’t happy either, but I do love it. I’ll find a happy one after this, I promise.”
Ava lays her head down, pillowed on her arms, dark eyes intent on Beatrice’s face. She avoids her gaze by keeping her eyes fixed carefully on the page, though this one is memorized and she could simply recite it, like a prayer.
“Another morning and I wake with thirst
for the goodness I do not have. I walk
out to the pond and all the way God has
given us such beautiful lessons. Oh Lord,
I was never a quick scholar but sulked
and hunched over my books past the
hour and the bell; grant me, in your
mercy, a little more time. Love for the
earth and love for you are having such a
long conversation in my heart. Who
knows what will finally happen or
where I will be sent, yet already I have
given a great many things away, expect-
ing to be told to pack nothing, except the
prayers which, with this thirst, I am
slowly learning.”
Ava peeks an eye open, but she avoids the gaze.
“I like that one better, but you promised a happy one next.”
“Of course. Actually, there’s one in here that reminds me of you,” she replies with a wry smile. “Give me a moment.”
“Ahem.
You’re like a little wild thing
that was never sent to school.
Sit, I say, and you jump up.
Come, I say, and you go galloping down the sand
to the nearest dead fish
with which to perfume your sweet neck.
It is summer.
How many summers does a little dog have?
Run, run, Percy.
This is our school.”
“Did you just compare me to a dog?” Ava scoffs, then laughs, unable to fake outrage convincingly, “Well then…”
She sits up suddenly and shakes her head, flinging cold spatters of lake water from her wet hair all over them both. Beatrice gasps as they hit her face, lunging toward Ava and knocking her backward to stop her before she soaks the book.
She suspects from the glimmer in Ava’s eye that she had hoped for just that reaction, and she doesn’t even attempt to escape from where they land, Beatrice straddling her hips and holding her down by her shoulders.
“You asked for it.”
“Maybe.”
“You should let me pick one.” Ava reaches over for the book, but Beatrice keeps her pinned.
“You have to apologize for getting me wet first.”
Beatrice doesn’t register what she’s said until Ava raises her eyebrows and smirks.
“Now why on earth would I apologize for that?” She rolls her hips up suggestively, and Beatrice’s brain short-circuits.
Taking advantage of her distraction, Ava pushes her off and lunges for the book, settling in the shade on Beatrice’s blanket as she flips through, carefully scanning each page. Beatrice watches the way her lips move as she mouths the words to herself, finding it endearing how focused she is on each poem. She stops about a third of the way through and grins to herself.
“This one. Read me this one.”
As she hands the book over, Beatrice realizes that she rarely comes to this page, really, and if she does, it’s for the poem on the opposite page. This one she had usually skipped over. Ava points at it again, as if she thinks Beatrice was unsure of which she meant. She takes a deep breath.
“From the complications of loving you
I think there is no end or return.
No answer, no coming out of it.
Which is the only way to love, isn’t it?
This isn’t a playground, this is
earth, our heaven, for a while.
Therefore I have given precedence
to all my sudden, sullen, dark moods
that hold you in the center of my world.
And I say to my body: grow thinner still.
And I say to my fingers, type me a pretty song.
And I say to my heart: rave on.”
Beatrice’s cheeks flush as she closes the book.
They had danced around what they did in the dark for days. Not much had changed. Ava was a bit more demonstrative than usual without being pushy. Beatrice had largely kept her feelings organized and under lock and key in the daylight, allowing a bit of leeway at home, with the lights out and the curtains closed. Then she allowed herself the indulgence of skating her fingers across smooth skin, planting kisses along Ava’s neck, clasping their hands together. They hadn’t gone any further than that again.
Now, though, Ava gazes at her with open adoration in broad daylight. Beatrice stares at the cover of the book of poems, wonders what her younger self would say about the situation she’s found herself in. Back in Switzerland, on the shores of a lake ringed with snow-capped mountains, with the sunshine warming the top of her head and a beautiful girl fixing her in place with just a look as she moves in to brush her lips against Beatrice’s cheek. Breaking her vows in a way that feels more like a different way to worship than it does sin.
Ava peppers her face with kisses until Beatrice crinkles her nose and looks up, laughing.
“There you are. You’re cute when you blush.”
Ava’s dark eyes have golden flecks in the sunlight, and she’s close enough that Beatrice could count the freckles sprinkled across her cheeks, steadily growing darker as she spends more and more time at the lake as the weather warms. Everything about her glows, bright and alive, and for just a second, Beatrice allows herself to let the daylight flood every feeling that she normally keeps locked away for the safety of the shadows.
She leans in and kisses Ava slowly, just pressing their lips together, once, twice, a third time.
“And I say to my heart: rave on.”