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Larry McCaslin thought often of his first wife.
With cold moths and pickle juices entombing her heart, and days long past haunting her eyes as they stared into the carskyblue sky (although he was unaware that there was a car that specific shade of blue,) always looking, looking, looking for that silent, missing piece of hers.
He never did guess just how deep inside of her the darkness went. (To the heart. The Heart of Darkness, where ancestors with tough toenails whispered and dreams were dreamed up and Love Laws were broken and gods were smashed to pieces.)
He didn't know quite where she went when she was not With Him when she was with him, but he knew it was not a nice place.
If it had been a nice place she would not tremble so at the sight of roses on the brink of decay.
If it had been an awful place she would not smile, at pickle jars and aeroplane models and strange songs when she thought she was alone and was humming.
All of her family had been Anglophiles, but she never really loved him at all. He was Convenient in the way a bench in a park was, and he had felt it sometimes.
But he thought of her often. Knowing her, that strange woman with beautiful collarbones and a hole inside of her in the shape of a thimble-drinker asking where birds went when they died (—no. No, she was a coffin-cartwheeler, she was dead, dead, all of the memories of her were dead), or maybe a little boy with his hand to his heart (Et tu, Kochu Maria? though he never talked, now, no, he never said anything at all), or was the hole the shape of a man who loved her, who could have grown to love her like her father didn't, who made little carvings and loved her mother, loved too much until it killed him— Larry McCaslin would never tire of thinking about her.
He had a new love now; Amy, who wrote poems and collected leaves and smiled with stars in her eyes and never looked twice at zebra crossings or rivers grown fat and swollen after rain. Full of Life to the brim, the same as Rahel had been full of Emptiness. He talked about Rahel with Amy, though it may have been a faux pas of some kind, but Amy didn't seem to mind. She must have known what Rahel seemed to Larry: a wisp more than a woman, a faerie, a dream. Something almost touching his fingertips but never in reach, dancing, laughing in the mist. An idea more than a person.
Funny how Rahel took after her Chacko in this way: their divorced partners saw them forever as someone fantastical, amazing. More Than.
Larry McCaslin wondered what she was doing now, Rahel Alone, and whether she was happy. Whether she could ever be truly happy.
He doubted it.
Blank eyes, always searching but never seeing, like hers, did not know happiness. They did not know fear, or hatred, or love, or anger. Not— not after Estha (Unknown) was taken into a room and shown a broken god, cracked and bleeding, and said 'Yes'. Not since three children clambered into the river, full of dreams, and only two clambered out. Not since a moth with unusually dense dorsal tufts wasn't named after the Entomologist who discovered it.
Those eyes only knew Loss, and knew Loss like a lover, like a friend, like a brother, like a twin.
Rahel Alone, empty. Although Larry McCaslin had never met Estha Alone, silent, he would have recognised him blind (not that he would know this, having never met him) from the way he moulded to all of the absences gouged out of Rahel. Larry knew Estha more intimately than anyone had, except for Rahel herself.
And so Larry moved on, a will-o'-the-wisp taking part of his heart, and mind, forever with her.
As for the will-o'-the-wisp?
She lived, in the way a plane in autopilot flies.
She lived, she moved, she ate, she slept, and passed all of the Regular Human Motions without stopping on Emotions.
She existed in this way until Estha was re-Returned. And then she went to Ayemenem. And from there, I believe, the story has already been told.