1. They Didn’t Dance
This is Neil’s bliss: this restaurant, these people—his hardworking staff who fill the kitchen with the aromas of garlic and tarragon and thyme, his guests who fill Beaumont’s with the sounds of clinking and laughter and cheers.
He walks past inverted glasses glistening beneath candle chandeliers, past four tables covered in white linen and fine silverware, past a serving tray from which his headwaiter, André, is extracting steaming plates of coq au vin and boeuf bourguignon.
Nine times out of 10, when a guest has asked to speak with Neil Beaumont, it’s to pay the restaurant owner a compliment; Neil has no reason to think this time will be any different. He approaches table seven expecting to find it occupied by smiling strangers sipping after-dinner aperitifs; instead, he sees his closest friends, Will and Julia.
Will stands and extends a hand. “Dude!” The men are 48, but when brought together they become schoolmates again. They grasp one another’s hands and clap each other’s backs. Julia rises and reaches for a hug.
Eighteen years is a long time for Neil to be in love with his best friend’s wife.
Her eyes are two shades of brown, like cloves. She lowers her lids as she always does when her gaze meets Neil’s. Recently, since reading Julia’s latest novel—Pendulum, about a woman who becomes obsessed with her husband’s brother—Neil has wondered if perhaps his feelings are reciprocated.
“We’re celebrating tonight, dude,” Will says. “Guess who made the bestseller list this week.”
“Pendulum?” Neil says.
Julia smiles. Her cheeks flush.
“This is huge!” Neil turns around and calls over to André. “Let’s get my friends a bottle of Champagne. On the house.” He holds out a hand like a game show host. “We have a bestselling author here.”
A few other patrons look over and make approving sounds. Neil didn’t mean to embarrass Julia. He knows how much her writing means to her. He knows more about her than just about anyone else, perhaps more than Will.
André arrives with two glasses and a bucket housing a bottle of Champagne. Will says, “Would you mind bringing a third glass?” He turns to Neil. “You have time to join us in a toast?”
“Of course.” While he waits on a glass, he wraps a napkin around the bottle and removes the foil seal. “So, any Hollywood buzz?”
Julia laughs. “No talk of a movie yet. I’m No. 16 in hardcover fiction.”
Neil twists off the bottle’s cage and releases a satisfying pop. “I read a review last week: ‘Manus has given us the word mastery we’ve come to expect from her, along with some raw honesty we did not know about.’ ”
Julia is beaming. “Good job memorizing that.”
“Way to go, Manus. You’ve got the whole package: word mastery and raw honesty. Do you have any idea how proud I am of you?”
“Hear! Hear!” Will raises his glass. “To No. 16!”
The threesome tap glasses.
They talk about the book, Will dominating the conversation, as usual, but showing no real understanding of the characters Julia created. Neil wonders if Will has even read Pendulum. He once confessed he hadn’t read any of Julia’s first four published novels. Maybe he will now that a bestseller list has validated his wife’s work.
“Tell me about Violet,” Julia says after she and Will have placed dinner orders with André. “What’s she been up to?”
Neil pulls out his phone, finds a recent photo that Siobhan sent of their 7-year-old and passes it to Julia.
“Oh, Neil, she’s gorgeous.”
“Gotta agree with you on that,” Neil says. Violet’s first sentence was: “Pick me up, Daddy.” The last thing she said, before he boarded a recent flight back east, was: “Do you have to go, Daddy?”
Julia has shared with Neil her regrets at never having had children. He sensed her longing whenever she was around Violet, during those two brief years his daughter lived under his roof, senses her sorrow now as she gazes at the little beauty on his cellphone screen.
When André arrives with dinner, Neil excuses himself. Later, he walks his friends out and lights a cigarette. Watching smoke curl toward the stars, his mind is consumed by a litany of what-ifs. What if Siobhan had never walked into his restaurant? Violet would not exist, so it’s hard to wrap his mind around that. What if Will hadn’t smiled at Julia first, hadn’t made the first move? What if, 18 years ago, when Neil Beaumont first laid eyes on Julia Manus, they had danced?
2. They Danced
Julia has always known she would end up here, on this section of sidewalk, standing in front of one of the biggest publishing houses in New York City, a tower so tall that the high-rises reflecting off its windows barely reach its midsection. She’s always imagined she would be preparing for an event like the one that awaits her tomorrow at noon, a reception honoring those who’ve received literary distinction in a national writing competition. What never occurred to her—at least not during the years of her youth, which seemed endless at the time but in retrospect passed far too quickly—was that the recipient of first prize in the category of original fiction would be someone who once fit into the crook of her arm. Julia is overwhelmingly proud of Katrina, who can put words together in ways that Julia has never been able to. She places an arm across her 16-year-old daughter’s shoulders.
Katrina wears a furtive smile; she already knows she’s headed for great things. So does Ansel, who is by now a block ahead with Neil, waiting to cross Broadway. Yesterday, outside the five-story brownstone that houses one of the country’s leading acting schools, Ansel stood with his head held high, his shoulders back, his eyes closed for a meditative moment.
When the family has cleared the crosswalk, Neil says to the kids, “You know where this pizza place is?”
They point down Broadway.
“And the theater?”
“We’ll be fine,” Ansel says, with ill-concealed impatience.
Neil kisses them on both cheeks, the way his own father used to kiss him. Julia hugs her kids and reminds them to send a text message when they’ve reached the theater.
Now it’s just the two of them. As Neil has reminded Julia recently, in a couple of years, both kids will be off at college and they’ll be alone all the time.
“So, what’re you hungry for?” Neil says.
“I’m not really hungry yet. Can we just walk a bit?”
They start to backtrack along Broadway. This time, as they walk in the shadow of the publishing behemoth, Julia is overcome by sadness. She sees her downturned lips reflected off the oversized sunglasses of a woman walking past. Car horns and a distant police siren play a suitable accompaniment to her melancholia.
“What’s on your mind?” Neil asks.
Julia tells him she’s fine and picks up her pace. Self-pity has no place here. She has no right to feel this way.
She and Neil are still in love, after 18 years. Their children are making imprints on the world. Their house is almost paid off. The music store that Neil inherited from his father still stands, and groceries will always be in demand, so Julia’s job as a supermarket cashier is secure. She and Neil can afford to provide for their children’s dreams, can even spend a few nights in New York City to celebrate their children’s accomplishments.
They’ve reached Rockefeller Plaza. Traffic sounds are now muffled by flags flapping overhead and by the trickle of a fountain down below. Julia leans against the wall overlooking dozens of pink umbrellas and thousands of pink flowers.
She sat at one of those tables in the plaza with Neil 18 years ago, shortly after they met, to celebrate her 30th birthday. They’d allowed themselves to imagine what it would be like to live in New York City. Neil would soon start training at L’Ecole des Arts Culinaires and pick out a prime location for his restaurant. Julia would get her foot in the door of the publishing industry as an assistant to an acquiring editor, a position her grad school adviser [SW1] had helped her to land. At night, she would write novels and eat gourmet meals that Neil had prepared. The last time they were here, 18 years ago, Neil’s father was still alive. They had no idea a child had been conceived.
Neil stands beside her now, stares at her, waits for an honest answer to his question. The sun makes his brown eyes look almost as golden as the statue of Prometheus just beyond Julia’s reach.
“You’ll think I’m the most selfish person in the world,” she finally says.
“Try me.”
The flags continue to flap. The fountain continues to cascade. Prometheus continues to shine. Julia cannot speak. Instead, she cries.
“Hey.” Neil wraps his arms around her and brings her head to his chest.
“In a year, Ansel will probably be going to school here,” she sputters.
“Right. I hope so.”
“And Katrina will be applying to colleges. She’ll probably be published by then, knowing her.”
Neil strokes Julia’s back. “I expect she will be.”
“And I’ll still be asking, ‘Paper or plastic?’ ”
A long pause follows, a long flag-flapping, fountain-trickling pause.
“And I’ll still be telling kids not to smack the cymbals with their bare hands,” Neil says.
“So where did we go wrong?”
“I’m not sure that we did go wrong.”
“I had dreams, Neil. I mean—I didn’t necessarily think I’d be a bestselling author, but I thought people might enjoy my books, and maybe be affected by them for a little while. And you thought people would be flocking into your restaurant, in this very city.” The sky has turned from cerulean to indigo and long shadows stretch from the skyscrapers across the cab-dotted, bus-blocked street. The flags overhead whack the air with intensified energy from a gust. “I feel like we wasted a lot of years.”
Neil’s been staring at her for several seconds, waiting for her eyes to meet his. “But we had fun.”
“Yeah, but—”
“No. Think about it. We had fun. Camping out on the bed right after Ansel was born? Taking the kids out on my Radio Flyer? Those backyard barbecues when Will and Pat would bring their kids over and they’d all splash around in the wading pool?”
“You made the best burgers,” Julia says, drifting for a moment.
“How ’bout reading to the children at bedtime?” Neil takes Julia’s hands into his. “How about the bike rides? And fishing and flying kites by the lake? Seems we were always detangling fishing lines and kite strings from trees.”
She gazes at the pink umbrellas surrounding the fountain and remembers 10-year-old Ansel as Oliver Twist singing “I’d Do Anything” with the little girl who played Nancy. They’d spun a pair of umbrellas across the elementary school stage, and for the duration of the song, had made the audience believe they were riding in a carriage. “I keep coming back to the elementary school plays, for some reason. Reliving those years.”
“We still have another year of school plays. And then who knows what lies ahead for all of us once Ansel comes here.”
For a moment, Julia envisions her son performing on Broadway.
“It was all so much fun and it went by so unbelievably fast,” Neil says. “Last September, at Back-to-School Night, when I introduced myself to Katrina’s English teacher, you know what she said? She said, ‘Aren’t you lucky.’ ”
“We are lucky.”
On the corner, a musician has unpacked a saxophone from its case. He raises his instrument to his lips and plays the first few strains of “What a Wonderful World.”
“It wasn’t just the kids who made the last 18 years fun, you know,” Neil says when the song is finished. “It was you, too. Whenever I’m with you, I feel—how should I put this?—I just feel right. Even when we’re mad at each other, I feel right. Does that make sense?”
“Yes.” Julia watches the water incessantly flow off the sides of the fountain. “We could’ve ended up with different people. We would’ve missed out on everything.”
“I think we would’ve ended up together, sooner or later. I think that’s just the way it was meant to be.”
She considers that possibility for a moment. Her sadness is dissipating. It’s hovering over her now, rather than pressing down on her. “Maybe burgers.”
“Burgers?”
“You asked me what I’m hungry for. Ever since you brought up those backyard barbecues—”
“Burgers it is.” Neil drops a few bills into the musician’s case and reaches into his pocket. Julia knows what he’s going for: the app that found them their hotel rooms, directions to the acting school, the perfect place for breakfast this morning, the show the kids are about to see. She doesn’t want an app to pick the restaurant where she and Neil will eat their dinner tonight.
“Put it away,” she says.
Neil slips his phone away, and wordlessly, they head toward the intersection of 51st and Fifth Avenue. Prometheus is illuminated now, as are the streetlights. The traffic signal turns green. Hand in hand, Julia and Neil cross over.
Every morning, Poppy makes tea. She puts the kettle on with just enough water for one cup—she hasn’t made tea for two in almost a year—and listens for its whistle as she butters her toast. Most days she takes it off the heat as soon as the water’s boiling, but some days she lets it go on and on until her ears ring, until it starts to sound like a voice of its own, filling the apartment with its shrill song.
Today is one of those days. She lets it boil for seven and a half minutes. It’s better than this endless quiet.
It’s been so quiet since Henry went away.
She spends those seven and a half minutes picking out a mug. It’s a tough call, but she finally settles on a blue one dotted with buttercups. She takes the wailing kettle off the heat and reaches for a teabag.
Poppy is a firm believer in the superiority of English Breakfast (but only when she makes it—Henry always over-steeps his tea). She’s tried 46 varieties of tea, from a pomegranate-rose rooibos to a smoky three-year-aged Pu-erh, but none of them compare to a steaming cup of Weatherby’s classic blend (an English import, smooth and refined, her mother’s favorite). She keeps the tea bags in an old Weatherby’s tin—the company’s cut costs in recent years, so they’re only sold in cardboard boxes now, but she always empties the boxes into the little copper tin on her kitchen table. Thirty-five bags per box. She buys another box on the eighth of every month, so the tin never runs empty.
But today, she peers inside and finds she’s taken the last one.
“Time to restock,” she says. Her words hang in the air, painted birds with nowhere to land. Suddenly aching, she addresses the tea bag instead, watching swirls of amber drift up as it sinks. “Poor thing. You must have been awfully lonely in there.”
She finishes her toast, grabs her purse, tucks her nicest cashmere sweater in the crook of her elbow. In the downstairs lobby, she checks her mail: a telephone bill, a book of coupons, this week’s New Yorker. No letter from Henry, and no news of him.
She squeezes into the sweater on her way out. It is September 15th, and there’s a chill in the air.
——————-
The 91st Street European Grocery is, as the name would imply, on the corner of 91st and Park, tucked between Silvio’s Fine Tailoring and Gold Fortune Chinese Restaurant. It’s 20 blocks away from the apartment, but Poppy doesn’t mind. She’s taken this pilgrimage a hundred times without tiring, each one different from the last. New storefronts, new people, new ink-black spots of sidewalk gum.
There’s nowhere else in the city she can buy Weatherby’s, not since the dingy little tea shop by the university closed. She had spoken to the tea shop owner at the clearance sale, a slender, crane-like woman with graying hair and a thick Oriental accent. My country is burning, the woman had said, busying herself with the jars behind the counter, a restless tremor in her voice. Everyone was restless then, the war still a silhouetted figure at the threshold, soon to step into the light.
Poppy had paid for a silver teaspoon with a hundred-dollar bill. Keep the change, she’d said, pressing the money into the woman’s hand. For your family.
Sometimes, when she prays for Henry, she prays for the woman too.
——————-
When she finally reaches her destination, her hands are cold and her knees are beginning to ache. She chalks it up to the nights she’s spent pacing around her living room until her feet grew sore, trying to ward off nightmares: gunfire and shadows and raw-faced, bloody corpses wearing Henry’s wedding band.
She steps into the 91st Street European Grocery, blinking hard to adjust to the harsh light. It’s brighter than she remembers. Larger, too, and cleaner, all gleaming metal shelves and freshly waxed tiles. The musty, spiced aroma of the cluttered aisles is gone, replaced with a strange sterile smell. No portly mustachioed man at the register. No wine racks. No Spanish ham.
“Can I help you?” says the lanky, mop-haired boy at the checkout counter. He looks about 20 or so, not much younger than Henry was when he proposed.
The memory strikes her like a blow to the gut—her dark-eyed darling kneeling in his best blue shirt, the top two buttons undone, taking her hand with impossible softness. She thinks of how he’d looked up as he kissed her knuckles, the gaze he reserved for her and only her, always warm around the edges. Then she thinks of the men she’s seen returning, all sunken cheeks and vacant stares. She thinks of the men who don’t return. The woman in apartment 408, wailing for her son, as a uniformed officer struggles to hold her upright. The twins, who play hopscotch outside the deli every weekend, left forever fatherless. And Henry, his brother’s dog tags slung around his neck, his mouth set with terrible certainty, turning away away away—
No. No. He’ll be home any day now. Any day now.
“Sorry, what?” the boy says, and Poppy realizes she’s spoken aloud. Her mouth is dry, and her breaths come quick and shallow. The light makes her temples throb. The quiet hum of machinery becomes a sudden roar.
She stumbles outside, head spinning, twisting her ring so hard it hurts. The boy calls after her, just barely audible over the panicked thrum of her heartbeat. She scans the street, frantic, searching for anything familiar, anything at all. There’s no Silvio’s, no Gold Fortune, no 91st Street European Grocery. Just her, adrift and alone.
The cool breeze makes her shudder. She sways, unsteady. The mop-haired boy bursts through the door just in time to catch her as her legs give out. His face looms close in her tear-blurred vision, but his voice seems to come from the far end of a tunnel. “Hey, ma’am? Hello? Are you okay?”
He’s warm. Solid.
God, how long has it been since someone held her like this?
“Hello?” the boy says again, jolting her out of her thoughts. “Can you hear me? Should I call an ambulance?”
Bracing herself against his arms, Poppy stands. She’s feeling better already, though her hands are still trembling. It takes her a moment to find her voice. “No, no. Thank you. I’m all right.” She blinks until the world comes back into focus. “Just a little dizzy.”
The boy frowns. “I can call you an ambulance?”
“That really won’t be necessary. I’d rather just go home.”
“Can someone come pick you up? Children? Husband?”
“No,” she says, sharp and bitter. She clutches the boy’s arm a little tighter. “My husband enlisted.”
“Oh,” says the boy. “I take it he didn’t return?”
Poppy’s stomach twists with sudden fury. She shoves the boy away, and he staggers backward, bewildered. “He will,” she snaps, turning to fix her sweater. “I know he will.”
Even to her, the words ring hollow.
The boy clears his throat behind her. “Ma’am? I, uh, I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to upset you. I think you’re just a little confused. I’ll call you an ambulance, okay?”
“Thank you for the offer, but I don’t need one. I’m going home.”
She starts in the direction of the apartment, but the boy follows, quick as a foxhound and twice as eager. It’s no use trying to lose him—he’s tall enough to match her stride with ease, talking as he goes. “I really don’t think you should walk there.”
“I’ll be fine.”
“Ma’am. Please. It’s cold out.”
“Then go back to your nice warm shop and leave me alone.”
“Look, I’m sorry for what I said earlier. I just want to help, and—”
“I don’t need help!” Poppy snarls. It comes out louder than she intended—several passers-by across the street stop to gawk—but she can’t bring herself to care. She whirls around to confront the boy, a bit too fast to keep her balance. Before she can even react, he’s there, his hands on her shoulders, holding her steady until she regains her footing.
“See?” he says, bending to meet her gaze. His eyes are the color of fresh-brewed Ceylon green, light and piercing. She looks away, mortified. “You shouldn’t be out walking, ma’am. Especially by yourself. Please just let me help you.”
“I… I don’t want an ambulance. I just want to go home.”
The boy sighs, letting go of her shoulders. “If you’re absolutely sure, I’ll drive you. Just give me a minute to lock up. And don’t go anywhere. Okay?”
Poppy takes a long, deep breath, drawing the sleeves of her sweater down over her ring. A shiver runs through her. He’s right—it’s getting chilly.
——————-
Poppy and the boy take the shop vehicle, a small white junker of a box truck with QUALITY PRODUCE emblazoned on the sides, accompanied by cheerful, chipped paintings of various fruits and vegetables. The ride is brief and quiet, the low grumble of the engine broken only by distant honks. Poppy watches the city go by—brownstones, bodegas and boutiques all blurring into each other. The whole world trickling away.
“Is this it?” the boy asks, pulling up outside of her building. She nods, and he double-parks, putting his hazards on.
“Thank you,” she says. Her purse feels heavy as a boulder in her lap, but she opens it anyway, rummaging for cash. She comes up with a fistful of ones. “Here. Take these.”
He laughs, shaking his head. “No, ma’am. I couldn’t possibly—”
“Take them,” she insists, stuffing the bills into the cup holder as she zips her purse. “Consider it an apology for lashing out. I know you meant well.”
“I don’t need the money. Really. But—”
“Too bad. It’s yours.”
“But ma’am—”
“Thank you again, and goodbye.”
“Wait!”
Poppy stops, already halfway out the door, and glances back. “Yes?”
The boy hesitates. He’s fidgeting with the steering wheel, his slender fingers tapping along to the beat of the blinkers. “There’s nobody I can call for you?” he says at last.
A thousand memories of Henry flash through her mind: the first kiss they’d shared at the top of the Coney Island Ferris wheel, the way only his left cheek dimpled when he laughed, the drowsy good morning he’d whisper into her neck every time she woke up by his side.
But above all, she remembers that night. How he’d kissed her forehead and squeezed her so tight it hurt, his brother’s dog tags pressing against her skin, cold as the moon. How stark he looked in the hallway light, like a man carved from stone, the harsh line of his mouth unmoved by her tears. How she’d fallen to her knees and begged him to stay and he’d left her there, sobbing on the hardwood floor, her heart hollow.
“No,” she says, closing her eyes. Her wedding band feels like a vise. “Not now. Not anymore.”
“I could walk you to your apartment?” the boy offers. “Make sure you’re settled in. Even leave you my number in case you need anything.”
When Poppy looks up, he’s gazing at her searchingly. His face is softer than Henry’s, rounder in the jaw, but handsome in its own way. As he reaches toward her, a few stray locks of shaggy hair fall across his forehead. She’s overcome with an inexplicable temptation to brush them away.
The boy takes her hand carefully, like she’s made of paper, his thick brows knitting together with concern. His palm is smooth and dry against her own. “You don’t have to do this alone, you know.”
She could invite him upstairs and tell him everything. It’s commonplace for military wives to seek solace in the company of other men—frowned upon, perhaps, but not unusual. An abandoned wife makes a more sympathetic character than the wife of a draftee, of course. It would be only natural for the boy to comfort her, to let her melt into the warmth of his arms. And from there, anything could happen.
Emotion rises in her, shame and rage and aching loneliness all knotting together at the base of her throat. For one treacherous moment, she allows herself to want.
Then she pulls away and gets out of the truck. “I’ll be all right.”
——————-
The boy doesn’t leave until Poppy is safely inside. She waves goodbye from behind the glass door and watches him drive away. The truck grows smaller and smaller until it rounds a corner and disappears completely. As if it were never there at all.
In the downstairs lobby, she checks her mail: a telephone bill, a book of coupons, this week’s New Yorker. No letter from Henry, and no news of him.
It’s warm in the building. She pulls off the sweater on her way up.
Her tangled emotions have faded to a bone-deep exhaustion. It takes a couple of clumsy tries to unlock her front door—her fingers are still numb from the cold. She puts her purse on the kitchen table, then pauses.
Someone’s made her a cup of English Breakfast.
She takes a sip. It’s cold and bitter. Over-steeped.
Poppy sinks into her chair, hope sparking in her chest, startling her with the breadth of it. She raises the mug to her lips again with shaking, age-spotted hands, eyes trained on the door, and waits for her man to come home.
It was deep winter the night the child came. If Grandpere hadn’t answered a call of nature, surely she’d have frozen to death.
“What is that? Is someone there?”
Was that a piece of dropped firewood? He squinted, and the black blur resolved not into bark but hair. It was a small girl.
Swiftly, he scooped her up and ran to the dining hut. The cook was abed, but the fire yet blazed for Sleipnir, down with fever in the sickroom behind. Kicking the cook’s assistant from his pallet before the fire, he placed the child as near the hearth as he dared. “Boil water,” he ordered, and went to fetch Axelrod, our carpenter and what passed among us for a surgeon.
I bunked near Axel, and when he went, I followed. The whole camp woke and crowded into the dining hut, craning to see the new arrival. Our din woke Au Jus, the cook, from his fetid nest in the storeroom.
“What’s all the racket, Hap?” he demanded, rubbing his eyes. I hate Happy, which mocks my scarred smile, but Hap I can live with. I told him what little I knew, and he grimaced, pushing forward toward his kitchen.
By now Axel had had enough. “Shoo! Back to bed with you! You’ll all hear in the morning. Go!”
So fierce was his aspect that we all left uncomplaining. Even Au Jus fled before his scowl, latching his door behind him.
+
Axel addressed us over breakfast. “We bathed her in hot water until she warmed. I think she’s safe from frostbite, and her breathing is regular again. Children often survive many things that would fell a grown man, but she’s so young, perhaps only five winters. She’ll need more care. I’ll stay with her.”
He was true to his word, nursing her while the rest of us went to work at the mine.
All day, we spoke together of the tiny guest fate had sent us. There were no villages up here in the high valley, and she was so small! She must somehow have made it through the pass despite the heavy snow.
“Perhaps she’s light enough to have come over the crust,” suggested Bosch, a stuttering, oft-silent German. Such was her effect even before she awakened that the most taciturn spoke freely. Only mute DuBois kept silent, though near enough to follow the discussion.
We marveled at her survival in the harsh weather and wondered what extreme could have forced her to venture here, deep in the Carpathians. We knew well what had driven us, though we didn’t speak of it: war at home, and the lure of easy wealth in this place the locals all feared.
We hoped she might be a sign of changing fortunes, a good omen long overdue. Six of our number had died this year, by accident or disease. Yes, there were fortunes to be made, but the price—! Yet now, perhaps….
After dinner, Axel told the assembled company he thought her out of danger. “Her cheeks are pale as snow, but there’s red in her lips now. I’ll sit with her in case she should stir.”
Eustace, the cook’s boy, was evicted for the night, and Axel set up a chair in his spot, feet outstretched near the hearth. Though exhausted, he would brook no other in his place. He was dozing when the last of us left the table.
+
Eustace found him the next morning when he went to start breakfast. He ran and got Au Jus, who sent him for the rest of us. White-haired Douglass and I arrived next.
Eustace brought the girl out into the main room and played with her while we tended to poor Axel in the back. He’d been found lying on the floor, a grotesque look on his face. A bitten apple lay nearby; perhaps he’d choked.
The child immediately took to the cook’s assistant, who talked softly with her and kept her by him as he prepared our breakfast. She stayed silent.
Ah, but Axel! I could not close his eyes, however hard I tried, and that grimace—
In the end, we covered his face with a cloth. To this day I think of him in the dark of his grave, eyes forever staring….
The winter had been brutal, and death had taken a third of our company. Axel, though, had been hale and healthy, and it came as a shock. We buried him in our small cemetery, breaking open the frozen earth with picks. Douglass, who’s older even than Grandpere, read a few words. Then we went off to work the mine. Sleipnir, though weak, was well enough to help, and Eustace now tended to our foundling. It was he who started calling her Bianca.
It was days before the wee girl recovered enough to be fully aware of her surroundings. She remained pale, with no roses in her cheeks. The only color in her face was the red of her lips, striking against the deep black of her hair. Yet she seemed sturdy enough.
I spent several days hiding my scarred face from the child, for fear I’d frighten her. Then, one evening at dinner, I looked up to see her standing by my table, staring. She reached her small hands toward my face, and I bent down to let her touch where my cheek had been cut through. When she was done, she nodded to herself, then climbed in my lap for the rest of the meal.
Bianca never did speak, though she had no difficulty hearing. I believed her voice had been frightened out of her. We learned through gestures that her father was dead and her mother had driven her away, young though she was. The least mention of her mother visibly terrified her, poor thing.
+
We were shorthanded, and every man was needed to work the mine. We’d assembled the Baron’s share of the ore, but now we needed as much again to cover our stake. Fortunately, Sleipnir was better, and the cook and his boy did double duty. Poor Eustace was unused to hard labor but did his best. Often, we sent him back at midday, worn out.
As the land was wild and untamed, we warned little Bianca to stay close to camp while we worked. Ever obedient, she did as she was bidden, and made herself useful by cleaning, carrying water from the stream, and performing such small chores as she was capable of.
It’s a strange thing, but sometimes the roughest souls can be the gentlest. Before long, her sweet nature had won over even the most antisocial among us—and our occupation does not drawthe genial. Stuttering Bosch sang lullabies, and DuBois the silent capered about and pulled comic faces to make her smile. Even scowling Grandpere, foul-tempered as they come, would have walked over hot coals for her. We found ourselves competing in small ways to please her, some offering a tasty treat, others carving small toys. In return, she bestowed on us her complete trust and the unconditional love of which only a child is capable.
We debated over Bianca’s future, worrying it between us like dogs with salt beef. Eventually, we decided to send her to the Baron with the first ore train. Our valley would be cut off by deep snow for weeks yet, though, so we gave her one of our barracks huts and crowded into the other two. The hardship was to us as nothing. She brought us such joy. She delighted in her own space, though she often left to be with her friend, the cook’s boy.
When Eustace died, she was inconsolable.
+
As with Axel, he was found on the kitchen floor in the morning, his face twisted with strong emotion. In his hand were the splintered remains of a hair comb he’d been carving, perhaps broken in a convulsion. Another grave was dug in the frozen earth as Douglass and I tended to his body.
“So young,” Douglass said to me. “Axel at least lived a full life, but Eustace… I don’t know, Hap, I really don’t.”
I was deeply grieved myself, but even so, I was amazed to see tears running down the seamed face of my old friend. We had become inured to loss these past months as our numbers steadily dwindled. Then I realized part of it was fear Bianca might be next—and of the unknown. Death without cause was a new terror.
We all talked after the burial and decided to post a watch for the next few nights. We had much to do and little time, but if something out there was killing our fellows, we had little choice. We would stand guard in pairs. Every man among us resolved to do with less sleep.
+
Open cliff-face mining is fundamentally unsafe, and we were pushing ourselves to make up for lost numbers. In hindsight, we should have expected it. One of our shorings, built without Axel’s expertise, collapsed, and Bart died outright in the rockfall. George and Corny were both badly injured. We did what we could, tending them in our sick room, but both soon succumbed.
All three were buried as soon as weather permitted. Again, Douglass said the words; again; we went straight back to our labors. Slowly, the ore piles grew, as did our profits, if such they could still be said to be. We’d paid a blood price for every rock.
In the beginning, we’d rested on the Sabbath, but now there was no time. The Baron’s man would come with the thaw to tally our haul, and without our pay, we’d never survive the summer. Instead, we took turns resting in camp to guard Bianca, preparing dinner while the rest worked the mine; for Au Jus was especially strong, and we could not spare him.
As the weeks progressed, first Dexter and then Ferdinand fell sick with a wasting ailment. When they could no longer work, they took to the sick room.
“It is some strega cursing us, sending poisons,” muttered Grandpere. “The child’s mother is out there, watching.”
We decided to search the valley, but that night the spring rains came. The cliff face that was our dig site flooded, and for better or worse our work was done. For three days the storm raged, and we stayed indoors, resting at long last. The morning of the fourth we went out in the mud to bury our fellows, both dead the night before.
+
Douglass stood once more at the stone that served as an altar, and read once more from our Bible. Bianca clung to the bier and cried freely, and so too did those few of us who survived. We had been 20 in the autumn; today we numbered but eight including the girl. The invisible specters of our absent fellows loomed large in our midst.
We had no warning at all. The child’s demented mother appeared as if from nowhere. She was soaked to the skin, frostbit, and dressed in rags. In her hand she carried a broad-bladed hewing axe.
Before any of us could react, she rushed into our midst, seized the girl, and slew her with one stroke.
+
Two of us bound the woman and locked her in the hut. She didn’t resist, a small mercy. She only wept piteously, her eyes wild and unfocused. So did we, grown men though we were.
Perhaps we should have hanged her as punishment, according to custom. Instead, we resolved to leave it to our betters, either Church or Baron. I think we’d all seen enough death.
Surely, this mother was mad. Looking at her, it was hard to imagine so slight a woman could have carried out such a brutal attack. Only that unnatural strength the insane possess could have driven the axe clear through her victim, burying it so deeply into the wooden bier that we’d broken the haft trying to remove it.
But was she the cause of the mysterious deaths of Eustace and Axel? Could the madwoman have somehow poisoned Ferdinand or Dexter? And if so, why had we seen no sign of her before now? We could make no sense of it.
“At least now we can stop standing watch of nights,” said Au Jus. I looked at him quizzically; he shrugged. “We’ve nothing left to lose.”
I could not argue with him.
Grandpere, weeping silently, did his best to make Bianca’s pitiful little corpse look presentable for her burial. Tenderly, he hid her wounds beneath cloth scavenged from coat linings and spare linens, tying a wide bow of scarlet ribbon to conceal the gaping wound that once had been her throat. The innocent beauty of her still form was a clawing agony, unbearable; yet bear it we did, somehow.
That evening we laid her out on a white bedsheet. On her chest, we placed the wooden cross from the storeroom door. Then we took turns standing vigil throughout the icy night.
The Baron’s man arrived with the dawn. Young, strong, and well-favored, he stood head and shoulders above the rest of us. By comparison, we looked soiled and uncouth; yet he treated us with respect. He listened closely as Douglass recounted the tale of Bianca, the child that had found us, the joy she’d brought to our miserable lives, and then her sudden awful death. He agreed to take charge of the madwoman and to see she faced justice for her crime before the Baron himself.
Then the lordling knelt with us in the mud by the small grave and sent up his prayers. He helped plant the wooden cross from her breast that would be her only marker. When the time came to lay her to rest, he bent over the small body to kiss her forehead.
At that moment a loud crash came from the shed where her mother had been imprisoned. While her guard was at the burial, she had burst free, and even now she ran toward the gathering shrieking. We stood still, watching as if transfixed.
Suddenly, the madwoman fell to her knees. Her eyes widened in horror, and she pointed. We all turned back and saw behind us what the mother had seen: tiny white hands reaching up to embrace the young nobleman as if his kiss had somehow miraculously returned her to life.
Then his body fell aside, life’s blood pooling on the muddy ground. The scarlet ribbon streamed away and up she sat, restored, her lips red with fresh blood and skin gleaming snow white against the ebon blackness of her hair.
“A mummified turd.”
That’s what my little brother called it, but I know that’s just boy-talk and meant to make me squirm and squeal and toss our family treasure into the fast-flowing river where the cornhusks and animal waste and women go.
It’s a tooth. An ebony cuspid from the Snallygaster that has been in the family for years and years, and if I’m wrong then our father is wrong, and so is his mother and her father and his mother, and if you don’t defend your family, you might as well be a mud-scrapper outside the town gates, even if you’re defending it from your own brother.
And anyway, you can’t mummify a turd because a turd doesn’t have a heart or a spleen or lungs or a soul, and anyone who ever knew how to mummify anything is long gone and buried, their graves washed over and their stones, engraved with one of the great dead languages, stand at the bottom of the sea.
My brother just wants me to feel bad. I’m not sure why. I don’t think he really knows why either. Here are the things that I do know for certain:
One. That the tooth is a tooth and that it came from the gnarled maw of the Snallygaster.
Two. That I am not allowed on the hunting trip today, nor tomorrow, nor tomorrow’s tomorrow, and that I’ll “be ready when I’m ready,” which is awfully confusing and awfully unclear, and clarity is the soul’s true cry (I think).
Three. That I’m not a child anymore. I see the children of the town, and I’m definitely not one of them, though I was quite recently. I thought, back then, that one day I would magically transform into an adult, that I would be tall enough to look down on everyone, and be cocksure and savvy and know about a hundred thousand things and have these marvelously stable opinions that would never bend or break like reeds in the wind but rather would stand unwavering, but instead I turned into what I am now, which doesn’t really have a satisfactory name, so I feel like some halfway creature, like the Snallygaster, just a bunch of mismatched components. I have to stand in the part of the river where the sandbars slow the current with the other women every month by the light of the mocking moon. No one ever confuses me for an adult. The Snallygaster has feathery wings, but no one ever confuses it for a bird; it has a scaly body, but no one ever confuses it for a lizard. Its tentacles don’t make it an octopus. Of course, living memory does not contain the beast. These reports and rumors of its appearances are older than the tooth that is 100 percent not a turd, and this tooth hung around my great-grandfather’s neck, so no, my great-grandfather who survived the end of mostly everything did not waltz around with a turd around his neck, thank you very much.
Four. I don’t have anyone to talk to about this, but if I did, they would appreciate the cool clarity of a numbered list because they would be like me. And no one is like me. And clarity, I think, died in the Flood.
The hunt is today. Hunt days make me feel small and worthless. I want to go. I want to be out there. I want to see the monster. I don’t, however, revel at the thought of holding the blunderbuss.
“Wouldn’t even fire if they tried. It don’t work no more, and anyway, they filling it with acorns and acorns isn’t bullets,” and on this point, I reluctantly agree with my stupid little brother. But Still: It’s a gun and guns are abhorrent things.
Getting eaten by the Snallygaster is an abhorrent thing too. So is having to wade into the river when no one is splashing or swimming, so are crimson eddies and how water sweeps away everything, and so is having to squeeze string-bugs all day instead of traveling to the edge of the known world to try—and heroically fail—to find and defeat the dreaded Snallygaster.
String-bugs are so sad and stupid, which is why I think I love them. Killing them for their strands of string is so awful, but no one cares but me.
The ways in which I’m like a string-bug: String-bugs are disposable little things with squishy pale bodies and hungry little mouths; they eat whatever is given them, and never ask for more or less. They never leave the town. Born indoors, they are squeezed by society and then left to die in a low boil to extract every last inch of the precious string that is used for everything from fishing nets to Sunday bests.
The ways in which I’m not like a string-bug at all: String-bugs have a purpose.
In the winter, when every other animal is smart enough to sleep. Instead, we, non-string-bugs, huddle in the hearth glow and whisper summer stories to keep ourselves warm. The adults in town get bursts of all-consuming boredom that blisters into either unutterable acts in the snow or arts-and-crafts. Last winter, it was the latter, and the collective energy of a people, of a people who have managed to survive after time stopped, after the world died, of a people of which I’m presumably part and parcel, created a statue to honor a bug. “The string-bug,” the Mayor’s speech started. I hate speeches so I left and didn’t hear the rest. Something about sacrificing ourselves for the greater good, I bet. The Mayor’s job is to give speeches and disappear for months on end; my job is to squish bugs.
The hunt is today, and I’m angry. My anger sits inside my throat, making it impossible to speak, so everyone enjoys assuming that I’m a daisy or the downy edge of a feather or a tiny pebble, taciturn. No one knows that I’m a forest fire, terrible heat and sound, and my throat is choked by blue-black ash.
I want to go a-hunting. Please don’t misunderstand me (she says to no one, she says to herself): I abhor violence. I abhor the blunderbuss and all its connotations and context, and I even abhor the acorns, though I know it’s not their fault. I abhor the looks on their faces: Martha Soot with her bandanna and blades, grinning; Albert Stone snarling, eyes forward like a picture of a tiger I saw once in a half-burnt book; Charity Lightheart licking her lips like a hungry cat; and my father with his straight little mouth and straight little gaze, a tight little determination to do today what his mother and her father and his father couldn’t ever do: find and kill the Snallygaster.
When the communal kitchen burned to smolders in the night, it was the demon-thing (and not the watchmen’s juniper gin and heavy eyes). When the rotting-egg rains blew in from the west and curled the leaves of the crops and stung the eyes of those unwilling to stay indoors, it was the demon-thing (and not the past). When sickness fouls the air, the demon’s breath is near.
We’ve never seen the demon-thing.
I want to a-hunting. I want to see the gummy stump where the night-black tooth around my neck once stood proud and shone in the starlight like an obsidian beacon before my ancestor ripped it from the mad beast’s mouth (or, at least, that’s the story I’ve curated for myself).
I want to rub it in my brother’s face.
See? Nah nah nah, you see it? The missing cuspid! How can you see something that’s not there?
he’d probably say in his sing-song voice. He is stupid but quick with comebacks.
After I squeeze my allotted bushel of string-bugs, I’m done for the day. I’m done for the day, and the sun is still rising, I’m done for the day, and the hunters won’t be back for weeks. One hunt lasted a month, and I’m done for the day.
I followed the path down to the edge of the forest.
“There is nothing beyond the edge,” a popular town adage. On clear summer nights, the light-showers explode and shimmer over where we all know other towns must be. Whether a warm invitation or a fiery warning, the light show is spectacular. Since there is nothing beyond the edge—except, of course, the hunting grounds of the Snallygaster—no one talks about the light-showers. Framed in the flares of many-colored fires, we all look up, and never into each other eyes. To do so would be the highest form of insult.
The hunters leave in the earliest spring, one step behind the melt line, hoping to catch the Snallygaster just waking up from hibernation, a vulnerable sliver of time. I’m watching them from the farthest point of my tether, invisible, tight as string-bug string. I’m bound here in the town that kept going after so much else ended. The hunters go on and on, and I’m jealous. I need to see it.
When I get like this, I clutch the tooth on its chain around my neck. It feels like a dagger. I don’t take it off anymore. After the anger often comes this shaking stillness, heartbeat in the tip of my toes, wobbling. And then a true silence, a true stillness, though without calm, without peace. I want to go a-hunting in the sylvan mist in the morning when the moon isn’t mocking, but rather beaming down an approving smile, a hymn for adulthood, amen.
The hunting party is gone. And the town has shrunk, collapsing in on itself like a bad redberry pie. The waiting is the hardest part. And I’ve been done for the day for most of the day, and the river fractals out to about a hundred thousand little streams, and the biggest of them winds its way past the edge of the town, and no one has told the water that there is nothing beyond the edge. The water doesn’t know that where it’s coming from and where it’s flowing to does not exist.
I dip my feet up to my ankles in theoretically impossible water, which is cool and smells like stone. I’m still in that state of sacred stillness after the rage of anger. It’s sacred because it’s mine and no one can take it from me.
Something moves in the bushes on the other side of the narrow stream, and I assume it’s a ground pheasant or a woodland rat. But it shakes the bushes too violently for me to be right. If I were to scream, I don’t think anyone would come a-running. I sit and wait for whatever it is to emerge.
I bet it’s my brother trying to scare me. I tell myself that over and over until I see a flash of scaly skin. Or, at least, I think I did. Lightening erupted in my legs and I ran home without looking back.
Home, holding the monster’s tooth against my body, I am breathing hard and heavy. I had to tell someone. I couldn’t keep this all inside.
So, I’m telling myself, the only one I can trust for now.
July in Boston was an ocean of heat that kept Mari indoors, on the couch next to the air conditioning, which hummed at a middle setting. Buses hissed down the street outside. Squirrels panted as they clawed up the trees by the window. She’d leave next week for a YMCA camp.
She looked at the dial on the A/C and thought of her mother leaving the apartment that morning. “If I find that thing on HIGH when I get home tonight,” she had warned. “I swear to God, Mari.”
Mari’s sixth-grade summer reading books, full of dull sentences that took her nowhere, lay on the table. She wandered in circles around the house, opening the fridge to its plastic-wrapped contents, eating a cup of Jell-O, picking at the hard stain of something spilled and dried on the carpet, and opening her mother’s closet and letting her hands run through her blouses, which stirred with the smell of perfume, a bitter orange.
In the back of her mother’s closet, behind rows of blouses and dresses and the rack of leather shoes with worn-down heels, three cardboard boxes sat stacked in the corner, “Perez” scrawled across them in permanent marker. Mari knew they held her grandmother’s things. Her grandmother, Wella, was, in her mind, both the old woman curled in a wheelchair, chewing her food so slowly that Mari couldn’t stand to watch, and the beautiful young one in the photo on her mother’s nightstand, posing in her wedding dress, an angel to pray to before bed.
When Wella died a year ago, Mari had tried to comfort her mother. She held her hand as she sobbed, the phone to her ear, hearing the news. The idea of losing a mother was terrifying to Mari. Like considering her own death, it opened a pit in her stomach. What could it feel like to be left behind without your mother, your only parent?
“Do you wish you could see her again?” Mari asked.
“More than anything,” her mother said. “I’d give everything for one more minute.”
Mari had grown up on family stories. Wella had been courageous, leaving Havana alone with her only daughter to wait in Boston for a husband who never followed. She left her life behind to create a better one for her daughter—and granddaughter. The sacrifices had been enormous, and Mari’s mother, Toni, reminded her of them, over and over, anytime her daughter complained about the bus that took forever, the gross food at her school cafeteria, her old sneakers.
“Think of everything Wella did for us,” she said. “Imagine having none of this. Nothing.”
Wella had earned most of the money that paid for the apartment Mari and her mother lived in, money Wella had saved for over 30 years working as a secretary in a dentist’s office. Her handwritten recipes for arroz con pollo, plátanos and flan peeked out of her row of cookbooks on the kitchen counter, recipes Toni never made. In death, Wella was a spirit larger than both of them, the one they prayed to for help finding lost keys, a parking spot, or passing Mari’s fifth-grade math tests and her mother’s nursing exams.
“Mami, Mami, Mami,” Toni would say under her breath, a prayer for whatever she needed.
It was Toni’s birthday, and when she got home from work, they planned to go to the Lucky Garden for pork dumplings and fried rice. Mari’s stomach rumbled. She wanted to do something special for her mother, a surprise better than a construction paper card, something that would get her attention, delight her, make her laugh, roll her shoulders down from where they stressed up by her ears all day. Mari wanted to show her that she wasn’t some demanding baby who needed to be scolded before she’d even done anything wrong. It was just the two of them—it had been since Wella moved into a nursing home—and Mari felt that she was growing up. She could be someone her mother could trust, lean on, even talk to.
The cardboard boxes peeked at her through the blouses. She bent down and slid them out one by one onto the carpet next to her mother’s bed. She looked at her grandmother’s wedding photo, in its silver frame, a rosary hung over its side, its wooden beads careful to overlap only over the train of the veil.
Mari had an idea.
She went back to her room to get the scissors from her desk. The tape cracked as she opened the first box to find a small blue vase wrapped in newspaper and a wooden cigar box full of paper cards, each decorated with its saint on one side and prayer on the other.
Dios te salve, Maria.
Llena eres de gracia.
Mari’s mother never spoke Spanish with her, so she couldn’t understand the words. She opened the second, which was packed with folded tablecloths. The third box had what she wanted. Inside a plastic cover with a long zipper, she could see its white lace and pearly buttons. She pulled it out by the hanger and laid it across her mother’s bed: her grandmother’s wedding dress, which Wella had always said would be hers one day.
Mari was named after her mother and grandmother, all three Marias. Her mother went by her middle name, Antonia, or Toni, and no one ever called Mari her full name either. She had curlier hair, a darker complexion, than both of them.
Mari was 11, still growing, but she couldn’t see how her short calves and round face would ever lengthen out into the graceful beauty her grandmother had possessed. There was a refined and delicate world her Wella had come from, a black-and-white Caribbean, that she couldn’t touch and even her mother said she couldn’t remember. It was lost, but maybe there was a way for Mari to bring it back, just for today, to show herself and her mother that she could be glamorous too. They were all so alike, the three of them, and wouldn’t it make her mom happy to see that?
Wella had a beautiful life when she was young. Married young to a handsome doctor, she lived in a white house near the ocean, with her own seamstress and fruit trees in the backyard. Toni remembered the mangos well enough to know that nothing in the US tasted nearly as good. And forget the guavas.
All up and down their sea-breezed block lived their extended family, Wella’s parents next door, sister and brothers, great aunts and uncles, all with names that sounded to Mari like children’s book characters—Tiki and Pollo and Chea and Juanpi—all of them dropping by for parties, games of tennis, drives for ice cream. Toni didn’t talk much about those memories, but all the photos mixed with Wella’s stories made Mari feel she had seen it, been there too and missed it awfully.
“Mi Cubanita,” Wella called her, letting Mari sit in her lap.
“Make sure that media-Cubana’s gringa bones don’t crush you, Mami,” Toni had warned, always nudging her to give Wella more space.
When the revolution came, Wella and her husband had decided she should take Toni to Boston, where he had attended medical school, to wait safely until it passed. Wella got a small apartment she paid for with the cash she had snuck out, rolled up inside a pack of cigarettes. They had only a few suitcases. It was supposed to be temporary.
But they stayed long enough for Wella to realize her daughter’s braces needed attention. She made an appointment with a dentist she found in the phone book, and when she couldn’t pay the bill, offered to work in the office organizing the files she saw were obviously a mess. The dentist laughed and accepted, not imagining she’d stay with the practice for decades, long after his son took over.
“What about your dad?” Mari asked, and her mother would shrug. There were rumors. He was in Mexico. He’d run away with a nurse from his practice. She heard things from her cousins.
“I didn’t need one, and neither do you,” her mom always said. Toni had never married and said she never would.
But Wella didn’t stop hoping her husband would arrive. The buzzer on her door read Dr. and Mrs. Perez until the day she moved into a nursing home. She never moved her wedding photo from her dresser. She was buried with her rings.
Mari unzipped the plastic cover and ran both hands over the dress’s bodice. Sequins spiraled all over the lace, hand-sewn in a pattern that narrowed at its waist. Its sweetheart neckline, rounded like the top of a pair of lips, felt stiff in her hands, its delicate piping yellowed. As she lifted it, layers of the tulle skirt unfurled under the silk. When she moved her hand, it left behind a red Jello thumbprint. She hoped her mother wouldn’t notice.
Mari checked the clock: it was just after three. Her mother finished her shift at the hospital at four, so she still had time. She stood in front of the full-length mirror and took off her clothes, staring for a moment at her white cotton underwear and training bra. Sweet Nothings, the tag said, which had made her mother laugh and laugh at the department store.
She turned the dress around looking for a zipper. Instead, a line of silk buttons ran down the back, each a delicate knot to be undone. She wiped her hands on her mother’s bedspread and got to work. Each loop a thin thread, several burst from the seam as she tried to untangle them, but she made her way carefully to the bottom, where the skirt began, and she saw with relief that she would likely be able to fit it, snugly, around her waist.
She put it on as she did all her dresses, over her head. She got lost in the skirt several times, its dusty citrus smell caught in her nose, but finally emerged, as if from underwater, and patted the fabric down around herself, smoothing it like sand.
In the mirror, there was too much dress. The hem tangled around her feet, and she saw that in several places it had torn slightly, despite her extreme care. The bodice hung loose, and she realized there was no way for her to button it up behind her back. She swiveled it around and did as many as she could, breaking a few more of the gentle loops, until she got to the top. She was pleased it wasn’t too small but now realized the two cups where her breasts should be were empty, sweet nothings. She walked carefully in half steps to her mother’s sock drawer and took two pairs, balled them up, and tucked them below her neckline. Perfect.
Back in the dress’s storage bag, the veil tied to its golden comb lay wrapped in its own layer of tissue paper. She raked it into the top of her head.
Her reflection looked back at her, a doll in costume. She wouldn’t be able to move very far without the dress shifting down her body, making her trip, or the socks wriggling out, but she didn’t look awful. She looked, actually, good. And how amazed her mother would be, to see Mari in the dress she prayed to every night. She’d laugh, of course, and the silliness of this unexpected vision, but then maybe she’d help Mari do her make-up, her hair, to complete the look. She’d send a picture to all her cousins, like, Can you believe this kid?
Mari looked back at the photo and tried to recreate Wella’s modest pose, her head tilted down over her left shoulder, eyes closed, her right hand resting gently on the silk of the skirt.
“Mari, what in God’s name?”
She opened her eyes to her mother in the doorway, home early. Sweat stained small circles under the armpits of her scrubs. Flowers leaned against the inside of a paper grocery bag, a present to herself. She dropped her purse and put both hands to her forehead.
“I wanted to surprise you,” Mari said, less certain, “for your birthday.”
Her mother looked around the room, to Mari’s shorts and T-shirt on the floor, the open boxes, and the Jell-O container on her dresser.
The sun leaned hard against the windows, the day nowhere near over. Sweat tickled Mari’s back, somewhere deep under the buttons she would never reach.
“What have you done?” Her mother asked, even though Mari had just told her.
Mari didn’t answer.
Her mother spoke slowly. “Take that dress off. Immediately.”
Mari thought her mother might help her, but she didn’t move. Instead, she stared at Wella’s photo, the most beautiful bride, in the pose Mari could never match.
Mari twisted the back of the dress in front of her chest so she could get to work undoing the tiny loops. Her mother moved toward her and ripped the dress apart down its middle, sending the buttons flying in arcs like grains of thrown rice, a few tapping against the mirror before landing on the rug.
“Not even on my birthday can you give me one day of peace, one day for me,” she shouted into Mari’s face. “Do you have any idea what this dress meant to your poor grandmother?” She pointed to the framed bride, who looked solemn now, frozen in her place.
Mari shook her head. “Wella said this dress was for me.”
Her mother’s eyes had followed the small shower of buttons on the floor, considering the mess, before she looked at Mari again. She shook her head. “There is nothing for you in that dress,” she said. “Mami had a terrible life. The selfless forever wife with no husband. Pining for someone who abandoned her. That’s no way to live.” She slapped her own chest, jolting the gold chains around her neck. “I’m not raising a daughter on some romantic tropical fantasy, so you—” She punched Mari’s chest with her finger, again and again. “You don’t even think about it.”
Mari stood in her bralette and underwear; the veil still light on her shoulders. She reached up and took it out carefully, handing it to her mother, who tossed it on the bed.
“Go take a shower,” her mother said, quietly. “With soap. That dress was filthy.”
In the bathroom, Mari looked at her own reflection, stripped back down to her bra, the temporary magic of the dress, and all the promise it had held all those years that she imagined it waiting for her, gone. She stepped toward the shower and felt something under her foot. It was one of the silk-covered buttons. She squeezed them in her hand, a small piece of Wella she could keep for herself. +
When Mari looked again, days later, the boxes were gone, broken down and thrown out. Her mother’s sewing kit was in the living room, maybe a sign of mending. Mari searched for the dress under her mother’s bed and in the hall closet, hoping to see it and touch in one more time, but she couldn’t find it anywhere. She had wanted it to be hers and now it was gone. Months later, looking for bobby pins on her mother’s dresser, Mari found two silk-covered buttons inside a small ceramic box, like pearls inside an oyster. She took them and hid the three surviving buttons together in her room, where she hoped her mother wouldn’t find them.
He sat on the edge of my bed with one long leg flung over the other, appearing bored while slowly stroking my dog, Lucy. She looked so relaxed I thought she might be dead. His frigid red eyes gave him away, although it took me a minute to bring him into focus. He’d woken me up, after all.
“What have you done to my dog?” I asked.
“Oh, silly girl! I could hardly gain your confidence by killing your precious little dog. I like her name, by the way. You named her after me, didn’t you? She’s just blissfully happy. I have that power, you know.”
He had luxuriously thick, curly black hair that hid his horns pretty well, so I didn’t see those until later. I didn’t notice his tail at all until he made his exit. I’m not sure how he hid it since he was dressed in black skinny jeans and a black long-sleeved turtleneck. He wore red Chucks on his feet with black laces, the ultimate hipster, excruciatingly handsome. Even the pinkish scales on his hands didn’t diminish his appeal.
“You’re not what I expected,” I said, still trying to rub the sleep from my eyes.
“It’s that dratted Bram Stoker and those inane New Yorker cartoons,” he sneered. “I have never greased back my locks or had a widow’s peak. In fact, my hair does whatever it likes. I couldn’t slick it back if I wanted to.”
“I know the feeling,” I said, amazed at how calm and safe I felt. In spite of the evident power of this creature, I still felt as though I was in control.
“You know,” he sighed, “I find this aspect of my first introduction to someone exceedingly tedious. I must always endure this weighing of my appearance against expectations; but you are a quick study, my dear. That’s clear.”
He produced a very long, curved ivory toothpick, curled back his upper lip, and began picking his teeth. He took it away and leaned toward me to display his perfectly white, dazzling teeth. “See? No fangs, either. People have a particularly annoying habit of confusing me with Dracula.”
“Wow,” was all I could say.
“So, let’s focus on you. Having quite a lie-in today, I see. It’s already noon! Rough night?”
“Don’t you have omniscient powers or something? I suspect you know all sorts of stuff about me already, don’t you?”
He rolled his eyes and shook his head in exaggerated exasperation. “I’m not here to give away the secrets of the ages for nothing, you know! I can answer all your questions, but I want something in return.”
How insidious, how dastardly, how fiendish was this? He was just going to pique my curiosity to the point where I would fall into his trap. This was clearly his playbook for English majors who couldn’t resist a good yarn—and dangerous territory for me. I’d have thought he was just going to offer me something I’d do anything to get, but no. He must have known I am particularly lacking in ambition, and so another tack would be required.
“Well, as much as I’d love to know why you’re here and what you want with me, I most want you to go away. Besides, I’m an atheist and I don’t believe in an eternal afterlife, heaven and hell, and all that stuff.”
He let out a terrific laugh, right from his gut. It wasn’t one of those horror film cackles at all; it was infectious, the kind that makes you smile in spite of yourself. “Ooooh! I love a challenge, my dear. Besides, true atheists are quick to work with me because they believe they have nothing to lose, so I’m game. Okay, I’ll give you a tidbit, because I know you’ll find this fascinating, and it’s clear to me you have a quick and curious mind.”
“Flattery will not work, okay? So just go away.” I was starting to feel less self-assured.
“I am an opportunist. I have my broader, long-range goals but I don’t have a detailed schedule. I’m not a glorified project manager after all. I can only visit someone when they are in the throes of sin, as you are today. Look.” As he had with the toothpick, he produced an object out of thin air and showed it to me. It looked like a gleaming onyx iPad, with a glowing red gauge in the middle of it. ‘Sloth-o-Meter’ was encrusted in rubies under the gauge, and a sparkling needle in it jumped wildly back and forth, especially as he brought it closer to me.
“Oh please!” I protested. “Sloth is a victimless crime. This is the 21st century if you haven’t noticed! Everyone is overwrought all the time. It’s ridiculous! I think some occasional sloth is healthy—everybody thinks that whatever they’re doing is so vitally important, and most of it is just bullshit! We need a little sloth from time to time to recharge and get our priorities straight. I think it can be a virtue.”
He arched one eyebrow, looking at me as he tilted his head.
“That’s my girl!” His eyes glowed a little redder and that radiant smile spread across his face. “And it’s Friday. You called in sick today. Are you sick? A little untruth thrown in with your sloth?”
“Things must be really tough for you if this is the best you can do. Aren’t there millions of people out there with murderous thoughts or dreams of world domination?”
“I have my minions to handle those. They’re just too easy. Even I can’t be in more than one place at a time, although I do have a bit more flexibility with time management. But let’s not digress. What about that report your boss wants on Monday? If you get fired, you’ll wish you hadn’t blown me off so quickly.” He glanced down at his perfectly buffed nails at the end of his long, tapered fingers. He obviously thought he was making headway.
“Was that a threat? Because if any of my literary instincts are correct, you have no power over me unless I crack. And I would think that would extend to the hard drive on my computer, so I can get that report done this weekend without any help from you.”
“Getting testy, are we? As I noted, you are a clever one. It’s true that I cannot crash your computer, but you haven’t even heard what I have to offer.”
“I don’t want to hear it. You can hang out here all day and it won’t matter. ‘They also serve who only stand and wait,’ and all that,” I yawned.
I must have hit a nerve because the corners of his mouth fell and his eyes became hooded. And then I understood—John Milton! He probably had the Bible quoted to him all the time and he could refute all that. But Milton, that’s another story. I spoke:
“’The mind is its own self, and in itself
Can make a heav’n of hell, a hell of heav’n’”
“Are you actually quoting that odious little prig Milton to me? You impudent sluggard!”
“Sluggard?” I laughed. “You are showing your age! And as for Milton, I may be a sloth, but I’m an educated sloth, and I did my senior thesis on Milton, so there’s more where that came from:
“‘He who reigns within himself and rules his passions, desires, and fears is more than a king’”
“This is beyond wearisome,” he said, stifling a theatrical yawn of his own. (Does he even sleep? I wondered.) “I thought you and I could have had a little fun together, but you are such a bore! Well, I’ll grant you your wish and leave you now, and you’ll never know what my offer was to be. You are correct. I do have some very impressive powers, one of which is to know what you really want better than you know yourself. So just put that slothful, little head of yours back down on your pillow and try to imagine the opportunity you missed. Adieu!”
With that, he sprung up from the bed, causing Lucy to jump. She and I watched as he disappeared into a foggy mist that had spontaneously appeared at the foot of my bed. The last thing I saw was a flick of his pointed tail.
I felt smug, believing I had cheated fate. I stretched and snuggled back down into the covers. It was only one o’clock in the afternoon. There was nothing pressing to attend to at the moment.
Still, I wondered what he could possibly have offered me that would have been so tempting….
Lucy settled back down and rolled over on her back so I could rub her tummy. She turned her head toward me, and I could swear her big brown eyes shone with a newly acquired reddish glow.
For more information on the Local Writer’s Showcase, please visit https://www.bethesda.org/bethesda/localwriters
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