Terrible Praise

by Lara Hayes

  “A transient in the tunnels nearly severed his hind leg. The rogue stabbed Macha twice in the chest before Erebus arrived.”

  “Where is Macha?”

  “Bård and Crogher are with her. She will survive, but she was badly maimed.”

  “And the transient?”

  “There was barely enough of him left to fill a thimble.”

  A fond smile spreads across my lips, and I scratch along Erebus’s jaw in silent praise. His unblinking black eyes shift between Fane and myself. He has never cared for my Lord, and his body is tense in my arms. Aware that we are speaking of his heroism, Erebus draws up with his weight solely on his front paws, and positions his torso in front of me. His posture is distinctly protective, and his head—even seated—towers a half a foot above my crown.

  Fane rises, and takes a single step toward me to fix his radiant blue eyes on Erebus. The hound stamps his foot between my legs, but has the good sense not to growl. Fane forces a smile that does not reach his eyes and resumes his place on the worn leather arm of the sofa. “He nearly ripped Bård’s hand from his wrist when your brothers attempted to bandage the wound, so Crogher let him go. He was certain that Erebus would retreat to your quarters.”

  Gently, I rub the soft, long fur that falls in dark charcoal sheets down his chest. Erebus presses his long snout against the side of my head, shifting his weight uneasily. “He has not come to me for comfort in many years. He startled me.”

  “Your tardiness startled me, my dove.” Fane wraps his thick hands around the leather armrest, but does not ask what kept me. He prefers an indirect approach when he is certain the answers will displease him.

  “A long night’s hunt.”

  “So, it would seem.” He trails the words along in marked disbelief, and tilts his head expectantly.

  I occupy myself entirely with comforting Erebus. Fane crouches by my splayed legs, his face a breath from mine as he glares venomously at my fearless protector. Erebus rears his head back, utterly silent as he pushes his chest out in defiant loyalty to his mistress. Fane’s hand curls into a fist and I know he considers striking the animal. But Erebus is our most loyal and formidable hound, and Fane needs him fit to guard the tunnels.

  “Mr. Collins reports that you failed to deliver a corpse to him this evening,” Fane begins casually. He is tugging at the threads of my conscious, tracing the seams of memory with greedy hands. He pulls the affairs of my night taut like a sheet spread around our shared space. I see Elizabeth’s face buried in my deeds, as clearly as if her likeness was projected upon a screen, and snatch the images from his sight, tucking them away. I leave behind memories of the cremator where I discarded our soiled clothes, an image of the embalming table before I laid Elizabeth down and Derek’s timid face. I meet Fane’s relentless scrutiny with feigned ignorance.

  “I must have arrived too late for Mr. Collins, my Lord. Derek saw to the disposal of my feed.” Hungrily, Fane picks over the scraps of event, turning them this way and that, but seeing no trace of misdeed he rocks back on his heels—granting me a momentary reprieve.

  “And this feed that kept you so long from me?”

  “She proved a difficult mark to win over, my Lord.”

  Fane has not finished his assault, but I cannot withstand another round. I turn to Erebus and busy myself with the tidying of his hackles, now raised in Fane’s presence. Slowly, I slip the remnants of my remembered evening from Fane’s grasp and fold them back on themselves, shutting him out as delicately as I can. Fane’s frustration is palpable, the air itself is charged as he straightens and towers above me.

  “You do not often hunt women,” he remarks, and it is both observation and accusation.

  “No, my Lord. Not often.”

  Fane makes his way beneath the hatch, moving idly, taking his time. He turns with a satisfied grin that shakes me to my core. “She must have been quite the prize for you to take a trophy.” His smiling blue eyes trace the faded lettering across my breast, and I stare down at myself in a horror I can barely conceal. I hadn’t removed Elizabeth’s shirt. My jaw sets, and my composure returns, but Fane does not wait for my floundering explanation before taking his leave. Silence is all the answer he needs.

  Acutely aware of my turmoil, Erebus holds me in place with a paw flung across my legs and another behind my back. He playfully pushes his long, narrow face between my crossed arms. I have not seen this behavior in him since he was very young. Despite my growing alarm the familiar gesture earns him a smile.

  I retrieve my mobile from my pants pocket and type the letters emblazoned on my chest into the search bar. ISYM 2004: Illinois Summer Youth Music, a program for senior students. Elizabeth Dumas is among the list of attendees, so easily found that I grow cold with concern. All Fane has to do is search those letters. He will know she was a local. The year will give him an approximate age. And he will search, chances are he already has.

  VI

  Symbiosis

  The clanging of curtain rings rips me from a fevered sleep, and my mother’s disapproving scowl is the first thing I see.

  “It’s almost eleven,” she warns, shuffling back over the threshold. The first words she’s spared me since our argument in the kitchen about her ongoing care. I haven’t slept this late since childhood, and that was due to a particularly vicious flu.

  The bright white sun spills across the floor and drips down the walls with an optimistic glare. I close my eyes against the onslaught and roll over on my stomach with my head buried under my pillow, bracing for the impending hangover. Instead, the answering discomfort is sharp, specific, and not at all the malaise and nausea I’d expect from a night of heavy drinking. The pain is localized, radiating behind my eyes like two hot spikes pressing against the backs of my pupils. I squint into the late morning light. The ache in my skull has color and sound—a high pitched hissing I can’t drown out.

  Shielding my eyes, I shuffle toward the window and pull the drapes closed. Carefully, I take in the room. A bone-deep throb in my left arm halts any attempt to move. The ache gnaws my elbow with dull teeth, sending jolts to my fingertips and I cradle my forearm protectively. My mind swims as I find that the shirt I’m wearing isn’t mine.

  Inching in front of the mirror, I make slow one-handed progress with the shale-colored buttons, and shake off the shirt cautiously. I find exactly what I feared: a closed, angry wound bruised purple and green. The skin has already scarred, knotted and raised, a pucker in the middle of my bicep. I run my fingertip over the ridge and marvel that the skin itself is not hypersensitive—in fact the skin is completely healed. My mind floods with memories of the night before, memories I might have brushed off as psychotic, or a liquor-induced nightmare were if not for this parting gift.

  “This isn’t happening…”

  Despite my limited mobility, I tear open every drawer looking for my damned ISYM T-shirt. Proof of a gunshot wound I can accept. Proof that Stela is real, that she was here in this room, that she…No. I can’t accept that. Frantic, I upend my laundry basket on the bed. The shirt isn’t anywhere.

  I sink down onto the mattress and fall back into the heaped pile of my soiled work clothes. Stela wasn’t a nightmare. She found me in the club, she killed that man. She stood at the foot of my bed and spoke to me. She sat beside me, so near I could note the absence of her breath between us as she traced the lines of my face. And I let her. I stared into those black eyes and leaned into every touch, pulled toward her, like the blood she gave me missed her terribly. The draw was so strong that every hair on my body stood on end and seemed to reach for her.

  And what if I did? Reach for her? Will I end up like the man in the alley, my hands wrapped around my punctured jugular? Instinctively, I rub my neck.

  A low buzzing brings me back to myself and I sit up, scanning the room for my cellphone. I find it exactly where it should be, on the nightstand. I crawl up the length of my bed, one-sided, scared to touch the device and half expecting to see a message from her whe
n I do. Six missed calls and twice as many texts, all from James.

  10:52 p.m.: Liz where you at?

  11:07 p.m.: Come on, I’m not that bad a dance partner.

  11:39 p.m.: Liz, where are you?

  12:02 a.m.: Elizabeth this isn’t funny.

  03:31 a.m.: Please text me back. Tell me you’re safe.

  I text a hasty reply to confirm that I’m alive and will explain later, though I have no idea how.

  Do I shower now? Do I brush my teeth, and put on makeup? Make breakfast? Go to work? How? Just the thought of stepping out into the hall feels like gambling with my life. And how do I hide something like this? That Stela has to remain a secret is a forgone conclusion, no one would believe me anyway. If I told someone—Mother, the authorities—I’d be committed, or tried for the murder of a man I’d never even met before last night. The worst part is that they’d be right, not about my being insane, but that it’s my fault he’s dead. I shouldn’t have run off like that. She was after me, not him. Part of me welcomed her.

  The curtains drift apart in the cool breeze but the glare still presses against my eyes, sharp, but less forcefully. Watching the curtains flutter, an eerie sensation ghosts over me, not quite a touch or an embrace. A calm follows on its heels, flowing through me in a soft rush and replaced by an inexplicable numbness—everything detached and automatic—but nothing I recognize. And then I’m on my feet, surveying the room for a clean shirt, putting one foot in front of the other and abstractly stunned by my resilience.

  Closed in the bathroom as the mirror clouds with steam, I wonder briefly how I got there. This close, my reflection isn’t what I expected. My pallor has regained a healthy glow and the skin around my eyes, though dark, is less sunken. A shower is exactly what I need.

  I watch the water run down my body and pool onto the floor. I don’t remember stepping out, or turning the shower off or scrubbing myself clean, but the ache is my arm is much less pronounced so the heat must have helped. I grab a towel and as I dry off, another symptom of last night’s misadventure makes its presence known. At first, I’m convinced it’s residual fear, an adrenal manifestation of stress. I picture Stela’s face as she towered over me, the blood of that man coagulating on her chin. The memory is gruesome, but the panic is just beyond my reach. I recall the moment I sat up in bed and saw her standing there, black eyes and mussed hair, stained fingers. My heart raced then, but not the way it’s galloping now. When she leaned over me, my pulse quickened. The blood rushing through my veins, calling her body into action, begging her to finish what she started. I was terrified.

  Securing the towel under my arms, I hold two fingers to my wrist. My pulse is normal. I press the pad of my index and middle finger to my carotid, which is also steady. I hold the heel of my hand over my heart and expect to find it hammering, but no. There’s an arrhythmia, a random beat every few seconds, like a shuffling step. For whatever reason this barely troubles me at all.

  Downstairs, Mother pointedly pours the last cup of coffee from her morning pot into her own mug. There is no mug laid out for me. No breakfast. She keeps her back to me as she walks over to the kitchen table in front of the patio doors, open to welcome the breeze. The chill wraps around my ankles. I retrieve my mug from the cupboard and start a fresh pot of coffee. I don’t take my seat beside her at the table. I have the distinct feeling that it’s her territory today and I’m not welcome. Out the back door, beyond the privacy fence, a dense line of heavy storm clouds push their way across the otherwise cerulean sky, shading my mother’s immaculate emerald lawn.

  Would Mother have me committed if I confided in her? She flips through the pages of this month’s Vogue, sipping cold coffee, stalwart in her resolve to ignore me.

  “Mother.” That’s as far as I get. I know I need to tell her, someone, anyone. I brush my fingers against my lips, as though they’re being moved and molded by invisible hands.

  Then there’s a carton of eggs in my hand, olive oil sizzling to life in a frying pan.

  Breakfast. Right…Sure.

  Mother, immune to my inner chaos, responds with a drawn sigh, sliced in half by the quick, aggressive flipping of a page. She knows how much her silence unsettles me, her relentless criticism is the white noise of my life.

  Everything seems so unreal. It’s like I never left my bed this morning, and I’m watching a woman who looks and sounds like me get my mother’s breakfast. Two eggs over medium, fresh strawberries, and two pieces of turkey bacon burned to a cinder. I cross No Man’s Land and drop the plate on top of the open article she’s pretending to read.

  “Cute, Elizabeth.”

  “Don’t let it get cold.” I pour myself a bowl of granola as she taps her fork against the side of her plate.

  “These eggs are overdone.”

  Bowl in hand I curl up cross-legged in the chair to irritate her with my heathen posture. “Overdone is how you take all your meals, Mother.” I’m not even angry with her.

  “Helen always made them over easy,” she baits. “One must adapt to survive.”

  “Any other symptoms of Stockholm Syndrome I should be aware of?”

  She breaks a strip of charred bacon between her frail fingers and I can see the effort she makes not to smile. “None that come readily to mind, dear.” Mother returns to her magazine, poking her eggs in distaste and taking small miserable bites. Round one to me this morning.

  When she stands to place her dish in the sink she staggers toward her left side. There is a noticeable lack of grace in the way she steadies herself against the table to lower herself carefully back into the chair. I correct my own posture, planting my feet on the floor and push my seat up to the table. In between small mechanical bites, my concern gets the better of me. “Something happen to your knee?”

  “No.”

  My breakfast bowl becomes the most interesting thing in the room, because I honestly don’t remember deciding on granola. I wasn’t particularly hungry this morning either, but the bowl is almost empty. Mother stares out across the patio, taking inventory of her azaleas. Gardening is just one passion that fell by the wayside when she was diagnosed.

  “You’re favoring your left side.”

  A scowl distorts my mother’s face, aging her ten years. She’s near enough to touch, but as unreachable as ever. “May I see your knee, Mother?” The angry lines dig ditches across her forehead, but I keep my attention focused on her leg she twists out from under the kitchen table. She parts the bottom of her robe to reveal an ugly black bruise covering the entire kneecap. My hand lingers in the air above her leg, fingers curling into a fist that lands in my lap. “What happened?”

  “Nothing,” she snipes, pulling the robe closed. “I slipped in the bath.”

  “Does it hurt? Have you iced it?” I get as far as the freezer door, but her vicious laugh is enough to curb my incessant need to fix.

  “Some good that degree has done you. Yes, it hurts. Yes, I’ve iced it. I’m sick, Elizabeth, not simple.”

  I must be some special kind of damaged, because her barbs are a balm compared to her stony silence. I lean against the sink, one hand holding the countertop. She’s deteriorating. “I’m going to hire another nurse.”

  My mother answers with a sigh that sounds like a hundred dreams abandoned all at once. She pushes herself away from the table, the legs of her chair scraping sharply over the tiles. Shuffling, she lands beside the island, directly across from me and crosses her arms over her robe, whipping a wayward strand of hair back into place with a flick of her bobbing head. My mother, so commanding that even her hair is frightened of her. And yet, her body has grown clumsy and awkward. This is not the first time she’s fallen, but she believes that I count the accident in the bath as such. Like I haven’t noticed the bruises on her forearms, or the one on her temple she’s caked with concealer. These little accidents happened under Helen’s careful eye too. Why doesn’t that help?

  “I’m sure you’ll do exactly as you like,” she says. “But if y
ou think I’m going to allow a stranger to watch me bathe perhaps we should take you for e—examination.”

  The retort is clunky and we both know it, lacking her usual punch and poise. She fumbled for the word and I don’t think examination was the term she was fishing for. Sometimes what she begins to say isn’t what she intended at all.

  What will I do when she can’t even string a proper insult together? This isn’t a fight she can win, and that is the only first here. Some mornings it’s a fight just to breathe around her, the weight of her disease is more than I can bear. I want to say something reassuring, give her an out, sweep that clumsy sentence under the rug and pretend I haven’t noticed. When did I turn away from her?

  “I have to get ready for work.” Cold and careless, and painfully indifferent. One foot after the other, all the way up the stairs without a look back.

  What am I doing?

  * * *

  The whole morning is a blur. Waking, showering, cooking, eating, Mother. I remember walking away from her, but I don’t recall dressing. Readying my face in the mirror, I caught myself humming midway through a tune I’ve never heard before. I left the house without my lunch. Mother had retreated to her bedroom before I left.

  I’m standing on the subway platform, swaying dreamily on my feet. A cautionary glance confirms that I’m correctly dressed for work, phone in hand, purse hanging from my shoulder with a light jacket to ward off the chill. My heart thumps irregularly, just as it had this morning in the bathroom. Did I run to catch the L? My cheeks are cool to the touch, not flush from exertion.

  On the train, I put my headphones in and turn the volume up loudly, disregarding the disgruntled utterances of the older woman seated beside me. It’s rude, but I don’t want to think. Not about Stela, not about James and how I’m going to explain myself, and especially not about my mother.