The same, uninterrupted ground, step after step. Well, I tried.
And then—my foot touches the end of a tree limb. Balanced atop its other end is a pile of pine needles. At my touch, they teeter off the limb’s edge and fall down into … nothing. They don’t land on the forest floor because there is no floor below them. Just a mouth in the ground, waiting for anything to swallow. I keep going. I make my way toward it. Don’t let him see. Don’t let him know. How lovely, to slip down inside and never have to think about another thing. Never to have to carry any hope you might return, or wonder how my life might have been different if I’d made a different choice. If I’d held on.
“Saskia,” Abraham says, “Saskia. Please. You’re taking this too seriously. It is quite funny, you know.”
I’m almost there, and then, aha, I see how the mouth of the chasm gapes wider on one side, but is only a little open on the other, small enough for someone to step over. I step over it in one stride, so he doesn’t even know I’ve done so. I don’t listen as it tempts me to sink down into its damp air, cool and musty. Now the hole is between us, and I step sideways, pretending to look up at the Dryobates pubescens pecking at a maple, so that Abraham doesn’t see that in between him and me now gapes the widest part of the ground. Ten feet across, I’d say. There’s a bush blocking his vision, and leaves, but if he was looking, he’d see it. Of course, Marta might have told him about it; he might have been the one to tell Marta it’s here. Well, only one way to find out.
I stop and turn and wipe my cheeks.
“I failed you,” he says. “I know how it hurt you to set you apart. I never meant to make you so feel so lonely.” He thinks I am crying because of him. He steps toward me. “I thought I had to make you strong by telling you that you were, so that you’d believe it. I didn’t see how strong you could have been if I’d let you be yourself.”
“I was myself.”
“A killer?” He laughs. He shakes his head. “You needed the others to do it for you as much as they needed you to convince them.”
He doesn’t know.
“I didn’t need them.”
He tips his head back and out of his mouth comes the song:
She loves to laugh and when she smiles
You just see teeth for miles and miles
And tonsils
And spareribs
And things too fierce to mention.
He wrinkles his nose in delight. “Such a fierce little thing.”
I understand then. I am his Thing. Abraham can never be Unthinged. Neither can I, not as long as he believes he can tell me what to do. He wanted me to kill him and I was going to do it, just like that. He was going to own my story to the end, take what made me special and use it.
“You aren’t the one who made me a murderer,” I say.
Confusion flares in his eyes.
“I killed long before you met me.” Maybe if I finally say it out loud, you can help the others, you and the story of your death.
“I killed my brother.”
My truth hits him. His face gapes in curious awe. He can’t help himself. He wants to know more. I step back. He steps forward. I step back again as he asks me a question, it doesn’t matter what question, the most important part is to keep him talking, keep him going, even as the pain becomes unbearable again. He takes another step, and then another, closer and closer and then—he isn’t there anymore.
Then Abraham falls into the earth.
140
I supposed poisoning would be clean, easy. But it was puking and shitting, a terrible stench, moaning, gasps, gags, and pain that wrenched Marta’s small body in awful ways. It lasted far too long, into the plunge of night and then back into the thin light of dawn, when the spiderweb was lit up again, in the window, thrashed by wind, bug laden.
It was not friendly.
Marta begged for the doctor. She asked me to go to JimBob’s and call Sal. She thrashed. Ben took her by the shoulders and held her down, until she was quiet again. Not dead yet, but quiet.
Xavier paced the room. “How long is this going to take?”
There was no reason to make them stay.
But Ben and Issy stayed, Issy shuffling those cards over and over again so that they became steady as a heartbeat. When Marta grew still—her breath drawing in and out, but her voice gone forever—Issy set down the cards and went outside. When the sun rose, Ben said he needed to check on his mother—Sarah would wonder if no one came by.
Then it was just Marta and me. I thought of her up on that ridge. How she had told me that if I could feel you close to me, and you were kind, that meant I felt remorse. Remorse meant I was not crazy, or bad. Remorse meant I had made a mistake. In my half-delirious state I experienced, for a split second, a selfish overwhelm of joyful relief—until I remembered that the fact that I was currently engaged in the act of murdering the person who’d told me this probably meant that she was wrong.
At any moment, there would be a knock on the door. Sal. The police. Sarah. Gabby. Jim.
But no one came.
Well, that’s not the whole truth.
You came. I looked up, across that room, and there you just were, standing near the wall, plain as day, the sweet crop of your white blond hair, your apple cheeks, the sawing rasp of your breath. Your little mouth, puckered. Your eyes, blink blink, watching me. You weren’t afraid of who I was. You knew it already. You’d come back when I forgot to look for you anymore. Isn’t that always the way?
141
When Abraham falls, I look for you. I grip my stomach. He yelps as he goes, and then there’s a sudden, sharp end to that sound. He’s hit his head, I think. I wait. Any moment, he’ll come out again, climb up, laugh. But he doesn’t. No hands. No eyes. I can’t even see any trace of him down there. Just darkness. I push that tree limb over the edge and it slips into the darkness, too. There’s not so much as a peep from below. No trace.
So then, down the hill. Back to Marta’s. Or at least away from here. Sound is growing strange, my feet hardly work. I stop to vomit two or three times. But I keep going. I look for you. I look for you as I make my way back to the clearing, trying to keep upright. I have been patient. I have felt you gathering near. I have imagined this time, this sweetness, the expression on your face as we see each other again, as you choose me once again.
But you do not come.
I can hardly think anymore, the pain becomes like nothing else, and my insides hurt so much that I do truly wish I’d thrown myself in that hole after Abraham, but still I search for you, even as Issy’s face appears over mine. She says my name, she holds my face, she says something but I can’t hear, my stomach is a hundred thousand lurches, she calls out to the rest of them. I want to speak but I can’t find the words to say the feeling of being held in her strong arms, of knowing she and Cornelia and Ben and Xavier and all the ones they love—Sekou, most of all—are free. Free from the story of Abraham, and what he would have us do.
Then I know why you did not return: because I chose the living.
LAST:
Seven A.M. The kitchen tumbles with light-tossed dust. Outside, Cardinalis cardinalis harangues, a bird so proud they named him twice. I sip my Ceylon tea. I check on the Mother. She’s ravenous, and I sate and mix her to a tangy slop and shroud her in linen by the window. Next, I marry last night’s leaven with a pile of flour and a splash of water. And so the Mother and I begin again what we began yesterday and the day before, and most of the days before that, since the very day seventeen years ago that I made Grandmother’s grand, white, shuttered house my own: tomorrow’s loaves.
“You overslept.” Issy’s lying on the floor of the parlor, a London Bridge of Magna-Tiles built over her body as if she is the River Thames herself.
“Did not.”
She grins. “You’re so easy to piss off.”
“Woof woof.” Sekou crawls toward me on four legs. “Woof woof.”
“Oh, meet my new dog, Macramé.”
“Macr
amé?”
Issy cracks up. “Yup. No idea. Macramé.”
“Well, it is a very lovely word.”
“Woof woof.” He sidles up to me and whispers in my ear. “That means is there any toast. In dog talk.”
I nod. “Woof woof.” Macramé doesn’t need me to translate, because he is a dog.
Later, after they’ve gotten on their galoshes and raincoats and packed a backpack with toast and cookies and apples because you never know where the day might take you, I find myself alone. They go out across the southern lawn, into the light. He turns and waves madly at the house, looking for me. I know he can’t see me but I wave, too, both of us frantic to be seen, until Issy convinces him to come along. It’s a good arrangement, this new life we have, my fridge covered in finger painted drawings, the extra boots in the hallway, the pink bedroom no longer pink because the boy adores the color orange and I cannot deny him anything, which drives Issy, in equal parts, to madness and euphoria.
I know she’s watching me. I know she promised the others. She has taken up residence after what they refer to as “the attempt.” On paper, we say we are helping each other, but I know she believes I need her more than she needs me. I can’t tell anyone why I know, for sure, I would never try such a thing again, because I can’t tell them that the only reason I ate the destroying angel in the first place was that I was planning to murder Abraham with a hatchet to his head, and I didn’t want any of them to pay the price for that. I would kill him and then myself, one two, and they’d be left out of it completely; all blame on me.
But then the earth swallowed Abraham, which none of them saw, and it occurred to me before I passed out they’d never have to know about his end if I didn’t want to tell them. Once they found me on the trail it seemed to not matter much since I was so obviously on the path to dying, and it was a full week after that—once the miracles of science had saved me—that they managed to gather into my hospital room, without a doctor or nurse within hearing, and ask me where the hell Abraham was.
“I talked him out of it,” I said. “I said he needed to leave, so he left. Did Teresa send the letters?”
They looked at each other. Issy said, “Well, Cornelia’s to thank for talking her out of that. Said if he wasn’t there to tell her one way or the other whether to send the letters then at least we had to hold off until you got better, so we could ask you.”
Cornelia said, “But if you knew Abraham was leaving, why did you take the mushroom? Why did you try to kill yourself?”
This was where things got tricky. I couldn’t tell them the real reason, because then they’d know Abraham was lying at the bottom of a cavern and spend the rest of their lives bound up in a new swirl of drama, guilt, self-recrimination. But if I told them the reason that I tried to kill myself was because he’d left, then they’d consider me a fanatic, and steer even farther from me than before. Nor could I whoop with joy and say that despite the hospital bed, despite having lured someone to their death, and having stared death down myself, I felt more alive than ever, not because I was the sociopath I always feared I was, but because I finally knew I had it in me to choose the living, or love, or whatever this grand feeling is called, of wanting to keep my people around me, gather them close, protect their bodies and minds, tend to them, know them.
“Because I’m sorry,” I said. “Because it’s my fault you killed Marta, which got you into this mess.”
No, they said, no. Ben paced and Xavier’s chin quivered and Issy took my hand. Cornelia brought me a bouquet of freesias. But we all knew. We all remembered.
The night before we killed Marta, I went down to our cabin, where the others were playing Spit. “Abraham’s right,” I said. “All along, Marta’s been plotting with Sal. They’ve got a plan to kill Abraham.”
They were incredulous, infuriated. Afraid. Cornelia wanted to know how I knew. Abraham was right—she would doubt me, and it would make me stronger.
“Because Marta told me,” I said. “Up on the ridge. But don’t worry. I have a plan, too.” I looked at Ben then, because if he walked out the door in a fit, we’d lose valuable time. “I need your help.” I drew open the bag at my waist. Inside, were seven inky cap mushrooms. “I need you to take care of these.”
He looked at me like I was crazy. “Why?” I took the destroying angel out of my jacket pocket. “Because we have to keep them apart from this.”
“What’s your plan?” Cornelia asked, trepidation creeping into her voice.
To Xavier I said: “We don’t have anywhere else to go. Your father abandoned us here, and neither of us has a mother anymore. No grown-ups except Abraham give a shit about us. We have to do whatever we can to stay here. You know that, right?”
He said, “You’re scaring me.” But he didn’t disagree.
To Issy I said: “She’s sick, Iss. You know it, and so do I. We will have to think of her as if she’s not Marta, not all the way. And she’s not, not really. She can’t go outside anymore. We will have to think of her as someone who has forgotten who she is, and know that we are sending her somewhere she will be happier.”
“What does she mean?” Cornelia said.
“She means kill her,” Issy said.
“Every single one of us has lost at least a mother or a father. Abraham is all we have. Abraham’s our father now. And now she’s going to kill him? You think we can figure out how to stay at Home if Abraham is dead?” I looked at Cornelia, finally. “You don’t have to figure out the details. I figured it out for us, okay? It’ll be quick and easy and once it’s done, we’ll get to stay.”
Cornelia was the first one to agree.
No one living knows that Marta died by our hand. Sheriff Sal suspected us—suspects us still, if he hasn’t kicked the bucket yet, but even then he’s locked in that old folks’ home. As far as locals who even remember Marta know, she was that crazy old forager who accidentally ate a poisoned mushroom. Issy and I have agreed, without agreeing, that we’ll put the conversation about all this aside, but I know she knows something is up. She looks at me out of the corner of her eye, trying to untangle it, but then Sekou bounds up and demands our attention, and neither of us can deny him that.
Meanwhile, Jenny updates me via monogrammed stationery, on Ben and the dogs, and the updates on their wedding plans, which I’m going to have to be far too sick to attend, even though Sekou is to be the ring bearer. Cornelia sends our household matching pajamas for every single holiday—even St. Patrick’s Day—and plans to bring her family for Thanksgiving. Xavier and Billy text me pictures of the sourdough they’ve made from the Mother. There is occasional news of Teresa and Tomas; it seems they’ve joined another commune, this time in upstate New York.
Sekou takes his sweet time across the lawn. He’s back down on all fours, so I suppose I should be calling him Macramé again. They’re making their way toward the Devil’s Ramble, and Grandmother’s Japanese maples, and the dense forest beyond. I won’t tell Issy it’s where I spent the day of your death. I don’t want her or Sekou to live on this land as though it is a museum to your slaughter. I want her to raise her son free and unfettered. I think that is what you’d want, too.
The morning you died, it was too hot. You gave me that folded-up paper and the feather and made me pinky promise for your story, and there was that brightness in the Devil’s Ramble. Daddy and Mother were at war. You dropped Topsy onto the roof, I had to go inside for a broom to reach him, a glass broke in the parlor—you know all this, but I keep telling it. One last time, I’ll tell it, then. All right? One last time.
I’d hoped Miriam would have forgotten the broom on the third floor, but diligent as ever, she had returned it to its rightful home, so I’d have to risk getting to the broom closet, which lay just off the mudroom. Mother and Daddy were in the parlor. She was making a horrible sound, one I tried not hear as I made my way down through the house, dodging the creakiest stairs. I’d have to sneak past them twice: on the way to get the broom, and then when I had it in
my hand.
As I reached the foyer, I could hear the crimson in Mother’s throat. I should cut away, back through the dining room and kitchen. They’d never know I was there. But I couldn’t help myself. I looked, for just a moment.
Daddy said: “Your children ruined our lives.”
Mother said: “They belong to you, too.”
Daddy said: “Olivia, I wouldn’t give a shit if they died.”
He saw me. He became Polyphemus, one-eyed, gigantic, blocking the door. He stepped into the foyer. She lunged onto him from behind. As she pummeled him, I wanted, more than anything, to ruin him. I wanted to end those fights forever, set Mother free, have her to myself. He claimed to hate us, but I wanted to put him in a world when he’d look back on this day and envy the life he’d had.
I didn’t know how to destroy him, not yet, not quite, but I knew it had something to do with the widow’s walk. I ran up the stairs two stairs at time. I knew he’d shake Mother off him soon enough. On the second flight of stairs, thighs screaming, I heard her cry out as her body thumped the wall, followed by his feet thudding up the stairs. It was a race to the roof then, Mother chasing Daddy; Daddy chasing me.
I burst into the open air. You were perched again, on the banister, feet dangling over the world. You swayed at the sight of me. You caught yourself. You frowned. “Where’s the broom, Saski? I want Topsy.”
“Come down from there.”
“I want Topsy now!”
“Come down or you’ll fall.” I took your wrist. You began to howl. Daddy burst through the door. He was moving slower then, like a storm, his face gray and determined. He was making a sound, wordless, yet it held a kind of story, like an answer to a question I’d never thought to ask. The wind again. Mother climbing the stairs, calling to me. Daddy and me in the sun, and you crying for your stuffed bunny. Your wrist squirmed in my hand. You had stopped doing the balancing yourself as soon I touched you. You trusted me to keep you steady—expected it, without asking. They all did, as if it was my job. All the while, Daddy moving in, that horrible sound, the meanness on his face.
Fierce Little Thing Page 30