MAIN    LIST    ABOUT    CONTENTS    READ

= Woman in the Moon =

Mona Lisa Novel, or: Nocturne in Paris

by John Argo

Page 3.

The one generation passes, and the next generation becomes master of the next…

So intoned the priest at Dan Wilson’s funeral, as the coffin was about to be lowered so that the deceased could rest beside his wife who had predeceased him in 2018. Now was summer 2020. Dan and Nancy had shared over thirty glowing years, during which they were graced with two fine children who made those passing decades time well spent.

The twins (brother and sister) Rob and Hannah Wilson had flown in from Europe for their father’s funeral—Hannah from Paris, Rob from Frankfurt. They stood together with two dozen other mourners in a gray, chilly cemetery, under massively weeping willow trees, near the foggy coast at Newport, not far south and west of Salem, Oregon.

Standing among the darkly dressed men and women mourners was an angel named Claire. The angel (a messenger, a ghost) looked like any other living, grieving friend or family member, and went virtually unnoticed. Hannah would remember her later, when the veil of memory was lifted over her father’s life and affairs.

Rob and Hannah were each still single. They were handsome, dark-haired, well-off young people of thirty, finely but conservatively dressed with belted and buckled tan raincoats over their charcoal suits. Their parents had raised them lovingly and intelligently, although there had always been a vague sense of something missing in that happy marriage of Daniel Wilson and Nancy Everol-Wilson. But then, Hannah figured, every life has those lost puzzle pieces, those morning-after what-ifs, the maybes and the wannabes.

Her brother Rob held a woman’s (their late mother’s, in fact) mauve umbrella over both of them, while Hannah huddled close, with her arm slung through his. Each stifled many a sob as they now buried their father in a grave beside their mother, who had predeceased him by two years.

The large granite rectangle before them bore twin plaques in greenish-gray slate, one of which read Daniel Robert Wilson 1950-2020 and the other Nancy Everol-Wilson 1950-2018. A dark iron banner on the broad slab, almost like a twin bed for Dan and Nancy, proclaimed: They rest in eternal peace. A precious little angel, molded in marble-dust Art Deco style, presided over the headstone, and seemed to weep as rainwater runneled down its blackened nose and cheeks.

Angel Claire had special reason to be there among the mourners, since Dan Wilson had been her father as well. Claire (or, in German, Klara) had become a ghost long before Rob or Hannah were born, so they had never met her—yet. She would be thirteen years older than the twins. She was, like Rob and Hannah, of slightly above medium height, slender, and elegant. Her hair was dark-golden blonde, straight and cut just above the shoulders, rather than dark-haired and bobbed like Hannah’s.

Claire brought with her a barely visible, otherworldly glow; it was not a halo surrounding her, but she appeared somehow faintly backlit. Claire had blue-green eyes like Rob and Hannah. The mourners could see her, but did not notice her or remember her. She wore a pearly gray raincoat over a plum-colored dress with low-heeled beige pumps. The well-dressed ghost seemed to signal that she was tall enough, and did not want to advertise her presence with stylish high heels. But of course one of her talents was to be in a crowd and not be noticed, despite being quietly, devastatingly attractive. She did not need an umbrella. Her hair and skin remained untouched by the drizzle that made everyone else soggy that morning.

Hannah was busy with her thoughts and memories. Another racking sob escaped her as she remembered how her father had been declining, and seemed to retreat into a fantasy world when she’d last been home with him. He would stare into space and mumble about some decision he’d made on a bridge, and it was time to make it all different. As if he or anyone else could go back, and change the past, or forge a new timeline somehow. And of course Hannah so regretted now that she had not spent more time with him these last months. What had Daddy said in his last sad, mumbling two years of life? “There are chapters yet to be written in this story, trust me.”

The heavy, rain-slick, glistening coffin went into the ground, lowered by wet-looking, bedraggled cemetery workers in rubber slickers, who were glad to get it over with and return to their dry office and workshop just inside the front entrance.

Heavy fog hung over the Pacific coast just west of them that morning. The air smelled fresh, of damp lilacs and sweet greenery. Somewhere, a dove cooed on a leafy-sheltered tree branch. Dan and Nancy Wilson had been laid to rest, and the ground would close over them in eternal peace. It remained now for the twins, each in their own city and life in Europe, to process these matters and seek closure; and they knew it would take time.

TOP  |  MAIN