Shadow Show: All-New Stories in Celebration of Ray Bradbury

BACKWARD IN SEVILLE Audrey Niffenegger

Helene stood at the front railing on the upper deck in the dark, watching as the ship maneuvered at a funny angle too close to a low stone bridge. A few people stood near her, all watching quietly as the crew worked on the deck below them. The band was playing Ellington at the other end of the ship; couples would be dancing neatly, persistently. In the cabins below, most of the passengers were asleep.

Helene’s father, Lewis, had been sleeping when she left their cabin, his face collapsed without the dentures, his mouth open, snoring. In sleep he frightened her. Let him wake up tomorrow, she prayed every night, though she was not religious. Don’t take him from me yet.

The Persephone wasn’t very large for a cruise ship. There were 300 passengers and 150 crew members. Helene had never been on a cruise before and had braced herself for bingo, seasickness, and enforced camaraderie, though her father kept assuring her it wasn’t that kind of cruise. “It’s low-key, mostly excursions to churches and lectures on Matisse. You’ve never been to Rome or Barcelona; you’ll love it. The Mediterranean is very calm in June. Don’t worry so much, Sweet Pea.” She had nodded and smiled. Of course she would love it; he wanted her to love it.

The ship moved backward and then sideways, away from the port and the bridge. They were in a canal; they had been docked in Seville for two days. In Seville, Helene had gone on an excursion to a convent, a very sad convent run by an order called the Poor Clares. All the nuns were from Africa and had been cloistered until recently, but then the Poor Clares had become too poor and now they sold baked goods and let tourists come inside for a few euros each. Helene felt bad for them. She thought of the Sistine Chapel and St. Peter’s, which had been her first excursion. “You’d think they could redistribute the wealth a little,” she said to her father when she got back to the ship. “I don’t imagine nuns are too high on the food chain,” he replied. Storks were nesting in the chimneys of the convent. They made Helene want to cry.

The canal was narrow and the Persephone had to back her way out of it. Seville was serene and yellow under the artificial lights strung along the canal. The ship moved slowly. Seville receded. Helene tried to remember where they were headed… Lisbon. Then home. They would fly to London and then back to Chicago.

Lewis had been tired before they began the trip. At the airport he’d said, “Just a minute, Helene,” and stood gasping, leaning on his cane in the middle of the security line as she realized that he should have had a wheelchair, her heart sinking as she remembered that he always refused to use a wheelchair. She screwed up her courage and asked him anyway and was surprised when he nodded, still breathing heavily, eyes closed. A wheelchair arrived and Lewis sank into it and folded his arms across his chest, his cane sticking out like a shepherd’s crook. Helene didn’t travel much, but Lewis always had; it was all familiar to him, but she felt nervous as the attendant pushed Lewis along and eventually deposited them at the gate. She watched her father sit, chin sunk into chest, and she finally admitted to herself that he was terribly old. When did this happen? He was always fine, and now…

Her mother had died in February. It was her mother’s place Helene occupied here on the ship. She slept in the narrow bed her mother should have slept in, ate the bland food her mother would have eaten. Lewis accepted Nora’s absence with grace; he might say, “Your mother would have liked that,” or “Your mother always did this,” but he never made Helene feel that he would have preferred his wife’s company to hers. When Helene was small she had stolen her mother’s lipstick and gone down to breakfast with scarlet lips. Her parents had smiled at each other and pretended not to notice as she left lip prints on her juice glass. It was like that. Helene was forty-five years old, by far the youngest passenger on the ship.

The other passengers at the rail were all in pairs. They were white-haired and bent but exceedingly compatible, each husband inclining toward his wife when she spoke quietly into his ear, all of them dressed for dinner with care, all leaning on the rail for support with a glass of wine or a cocktail clutched in one hand. Helene thought of Evan. Is that what we would have looked like in forty years? She had met Evan when she was twenty-eight and he was thirty-six. He’d always seemed on the verge of marrying her; she’d been patient. When he broke up with her fourteen years later and married a girl half her age, she understood that she’d been gullible and that he was a jerk, but oh well, and so she had lapsed into a quiet permanent rage.

It would be nice to have a drink, but lethargy kept her at the railing. The canal unspooled backward around the ship. It gave Helene the feeling that time was reversing, that things might be undone. Daddy wouldn’t be old, Mom wouldn’t have died, Evan would come back and we’d have kids, it would all be different, I would change everything. I would change. Trees and houses came from behind her; little boats began to appear in the water as the canal widened. Soon they would turn the ship and sail forward. Everything flowed away into the distance and the darkness.

One of the women at the rail dropped her cane, and her husband bent painfully and retrieved it for her. How he cares for her, Helene thought. No one takes care of me; it’s always me taking care of somebody. When she was a child she had been very timid, scared of strangers, thunder, the poodle next door, escalators, anything new or loud, anything that moved, pretty much. Her mother had kept her close, kissed her on the tip of her ear, whispered encouragement. Her father had brought her funny presents—a tiny silk umbrella from Paris, a tin of green tea from Kyoto. “It’s okay, Sweet Pea, I’ve got your back. Now go get ’em.”

I wasted my life.

She imagined the Poor Clares, tucked into their neat beds in their cloister, secure in the night, in belief. How good it must be to believe. Lewis and Nora were indifferent to religion. When Helene was nine she had asked about God. Lewis had taken her to synagogue and Nora had taken her to church, once each, and they had asked very carefully if she wanted to go back and she’d said no thank you, sensing their lack of enthusiasm. Now Helene wondered what her father believed, now when he was so close to death, when death had already claimed her mother. He was never afraid. He’d watched the couples dancing tonight with a smile. “Want to?” he asked his daughter. “Your heart,” Helene replied. “Not me, you—you should dance. Go on.” She shook her head and continued to sit by him.

Helene looked over the railing. The water was down there somewhere, she could hear it churning. The first day they were on the ship there had been a muster of all the passengers. They had been instructed in how to use their life jackets and where to gather if the alarm sounded. They had been told never to even think of diving off the ship; it was a long way down, you could break your neck, you could drown. Sharks could eat you. You might never be found.

I wish I could give the rest of it to him, Helene thought. Daddy would know what to do with another half a life. To me it’s just a burden. Helene closed her eyes and tried to pray. She opened her eyes and felt foolish.

The canal was wide enough now, and the ship began to turn. The world revolved around Helene and she saw the way ahead; they were about to pass under an enormous bridge. She tilted her head back to see the silhouette of the underside of the bridge, menacing and close in the dark. She felt dizzy. She looked down and saw her hands on the railing, hands suddenly unfamiliar, knobby-knuckled and spotted.

Oh! she thought. Is it really that easy? She put her hands to her soft, wrinkled face, looked down at her now-loose clothing. Her heart pounded; her vision blurred. Aches and pains beset her. The sounds of the world were suddenly muted. The ship sailed on as before.

Helene began to creep along the railing, back to the cabin, joyously certain of what she would find there.