by Rose Szabo
“Here,” he said, and helped Arthur to a chair. He was courteous with him in a way that surprised me, and I wondered if it was because Arthur had a bad leg. It was definitely a little stiff, especially when he walked, but it was hard to imagine him needing help. I thought about how gracefully he’d helped me into my own chair.
Arthur got caught up in a conversation with Mother. Father’s chess game with Grandma Persephone ended, and Arthur climbed out of his chair, the two of them switching places as though they’d done it a hundred times—Father to Arthur’s chair, Arthur to chess table. Luma sat down next to me and talked to me about hunting bears and this new color of lipstick she liked, but my mind wasn’t there. I kept thinking about my conversation in the dining room—what Grandma Persephone would do for her family, what to do about the new electric feeling in my core when I thought about Arthur touching my hand. I ignored her and half listened to the chess game. Eventually Luma stood up and left.
“… had some luck with the plants this year,” Grandma Persephone was saying. “The heated floor is working out well.”
“I wouldn’t say that taking my advice counts as luck,” Arthur said.
“I was just tired of dealing with that odd little woodstove in there. A disaster.” Persephone frowned at the board. “Check.”
“You distracted me,” Arthur said. I couldn’t tell where his eyes were. I felt like a child, perched on the edge of the sofa, my hands folded in my lap. Mother was trying to show Father something in the magazine, but Father was watching the game, too. I realized that both of us were trying not to look too obvious about it.
“How did you meet my father?” I called to Arthur.
He turned from the board, but Grandma Persephone spoke first.
“He’s been a family friend for some time,” she said.
“So you and Father grew up together?”
“In a way,” Arthur said.
I studied him. He didn’t look nearly as old as my father. His eyes would have told me how old he was, but he’d kept those smoked glasses on all evening. I wondered if he was blind. Maybe that was why my father tried to hold his arm. Why he watched him so attentively. But then how did Arthur play chess if he was blind, or pull my chair out for me, or drive his Model T?
“Checkmate,” Arthur said at last.
“Ah,” said Grandma Persephone. “I didn’t see that.”
His lips peeled back into a smile. “I know.”
I studied him. In the warm light of the parlor, he looked less pale than he had in the dining room, the fire casting a glow on his almost translucent skin. What kind of thing was he? Just a man, or something less or more? If he was my father’s friend, where had they even met? Generally, no one from the family left town until they’d grown up. I tried to imagine Arthur as one of the ruddy children of Winterport, a wool scarf around his face clotted with frozen snot. It didn’t seem possible.
Arthur must have noticed me staring, because he shifted in his chair to face me.
“Did you … want something?” he asked. It had no malice in it, but I flushed.
“I was just wondering where you were from,” I said.
He smiled with his lips sealed shut. Grandma Persephone shot me a look. Something else I wasn’t supposed to ask about.
“Arthur,” she said, “will you play piano for Eleanor, since she’s home?”
He glanced up from the board. “If that’s what you want.”
I knew, somehow, that that meant he didn’t want to.
“Please do,” she said. He began to stand up.
“You don’t have to,” I said from my place on the sofa. “You’ve been working all day. Please, don’t do anything you don’t want to do right now.”
I was surprised by how vehement I was. A glance around the room told me that everyone else was, too.
Arthur pushed in his chair. “Excuse me for a moment.”
As he left the room, I saw Grandma Persephone’s eyes follow him, and then look at me. I was starting to get annoyed with her constantly studying me. Even the nuns hadn’t paid this much attention to every little thing I said and did.
“Let’s play, Mother,” Father said as he began to set up the board. Grandma Persephone humored him for a few minutes, but I could see her mulling something over.
“Eleanor,” she said, when a few minutes had passed. “Would you go see if your aunt needs any help with the dishes?”
I stood up and left the room without saying anything. I wanted to scream at her, but I knew that would do no good. You couldn’t let people see you were angry; they’d only use it against you. It was better to hold it in and wait for your moment to retaliate. I’d done it at boarding school more than once. Like with the girl who held me down while her friends rummaged through my trunk and took turns reading parts of my diary in an imitation of my voice. Back when I still kept a diary, with little bits of poems stuck in it, little notes to myself about things I wanted or dreams I’d had. I’d waited until that girl was shopping in town and cut the quilt her mother had sewn her to ribbons. I’d heard the scream from my dormitory room.
Of course, her mother had just sewn her a new one at Christmas. That was what it was like to have a family that wanted you.
I was so wrapped up in my own thoughts that I was halfway down the hall to the kitchen when I heard a scrabbling inside the wall.
I stopped under the portrait of Grandpa Miklos with the horses and listened, my ears pricked. It was coming from the opposite wall, the one under the staircase. What was making the noise? Rats? Ghosts? If there were such a thing, they’d be here. And when I looked at that wall more closely, I could see a crack, a seam, where I had thought there was solid wall. A door, I realized. For a moment, it rattled in its frame. And then it exploded open, and Rhys came flying out.
He hit the wall opposite, and I saw his head snap back. His lips were so red they looked bitten, and there were red marks like handprints on either side of his neck. When he lowered his head again, his eyes were wild, his grin wide, and I saw his teeth grow sharp. He started to lunge back toward the doorway, but then he saw me and stopped in his tracks, stumbling forward. He caught himself on the wall, glowering at me.
“What did you see?” he asked.
I shook my head. “Nothing,” I said. Out of the corner of my eye, I saw the door moving—being pulled shut from inside. What had I seen?
I forced myself to look at Rhys instead. He was angry. And something else, too. He was worried. About what I’d seen, or what I’d say. To whom? Who had pulled the door shut?
“What are you looking at?” he snarled.
“Calm down,” I said. “I don’t know what you’re talking about.” I looked right into his eyes. That was the trick, when you were lying. Stare them down. It worked on nuns, so I prayed it would work on Rhys.
He became the wolf all at once, his body stretching and snapping, and my head swam with the impossibility of it as he sprang away into the shadows of the kitchen. The back door slammed. After a minute, Margaret came out and gathered his clothes, which had fallen to the floor. She hung them up in the real closet, the one whose door wasn’t just a crack in the wall. Glowering and muttering, she backed away from me and vanished into the kitchen.
When she’d gone, I ran my fingers along the crack—it looked like little more than a seam in the wallpaper. If I got my fingernails under it just right, I could pry it up a little ways. But after the first inch I could move it no farther. There was something on the inside, a latch or a chain, holding it shut. A secret passage? I didn’t remember anything like that from when I was a child. Someone had latched it from the inside.
Luma wandered around the corner, and I turned on her.
“What’s this?” I demanded, pointing at the wall.
She frowned. “I don’t know,” she said breezily.
“Were you just in there?” I asked. “Were you and Rhys fighting in the closet? Is he bullying you?”
“No,” she said. “I just came from
upstairs.”
“Well, someone was in there with Rhys. And then shut the door again.”
Luma’s eyes narrowed. “I’m going to kill him,” she said. “Which way did he go?”
“Luma, what’s going on?”
She looked at me like I was stupid. “Rhys is trying to be with him,” she said.
“With who?”
“With Arthur,” she said.
I felt a little ringing in my ears. “What?”
“Oh, you know. Wanting to spend all his time with him. Wanting to be alone with him. Grandma told Rhys to stop playing with him, but he won’t listen. He does whatever he wants,” she said, tossing her head.
My mind reeled. It explained a lot—the preening in the hall, the mad attempts to impress him. And it was clear to me that Rhys was dangerous. I could see him cornering Arthur in the closet, shoving him against the wall. I imagined the look on Arthur’s face, cool and reticent, in the face of my cousin’s raw malice, and felt a little shiver that I liked. Maybe I’d like to shove Arthur against a wall.
And of course, that made me think of Lucy Spencer. What I’d done. What I was running from.
“We can’t let this go on,” I said. “What if Rhys hurts him?”
Luma grabbed my hands.
“You’re right,” she said. “And anyway, it’s not fair for him to be keeping Arthur to himself like this. Arthur is the family friend, not his. And I hardly see Rhys anymore.”
My thoughts were racing. This didn’t seem right, somehow. Some piece was missing. I thought of the red marks on Rhys’s neck, and imagined Arthur grabbing at Rhys, trying to push him away. I had to protect Arthur, I thought. Rhys was determined, and whatever he wanted with Arthur, he’d get his way.
“You can’t make Rhys stop doing anything by force,” I said. “He’s too strong.”
“Oh, I could fight him,” Luma said. “He’s a bigger person, but I’m a bigger wolf.”
“No, we can’t just attack him,” I said. Why was this always her first answer to a problem? “He’s family. But maybe he’d leave Arthur alone if he was with someone else.” I could spend all my time with him, I thought. Whenever Arthur was here, I could be with him. Rhys didn’t want me to tell anyone, so he wouldn’t do anything in front of me. Probably. It scared me, but I was excited, too, to think I could help Arthur. After all, he’d already helped me. I thought of his laugh as Luma clasped my hands in hers.
“Of course!” she said. “You’re so smart, Ellie.”
Behind us, the front door opened. Arthur stepped inside, straightening his collar. For a moment, I doubted myself. Maybe I’d been wrong. Maybe he’d just been outside. He stepped lightly toward the parlor. My brain itched. Was I imagining things?
“I’ll do it,” Luma said. “For Arthur.”
She strode toward the archway to the parlor. I followed along behind, more slowly, not sure what she was doing. By the time I got there, Luma was already taking Arthur by the hand and pulling him to his feet.
“I want you to take me on a romantic walk,” she said. “In the moonlight.”
For a moment I saw a ripple of anger pass across Arthur’s face. He turned it, somehow, into a smile.
“Miles,” Arthur said to my father, “Luma’s told me she wants me to take her on a romantic walk. In the moonlight, apparently.”
From her chair by the fire, Grandma Persephone gave a small irritated sigh. Father stood, looking worried. “Arthur, really?”
“What the lady asks for, I must obey.”
He took her by the arm. As they passed me, Luma flashed me a radiant smile and a shoulder shimmy. Arthur gave me a smaller, conspiratorial smile, one that turned my guts to spiders. And then they left through the front door, disappearing into the night.
“Mother,” Father said to Grandma Persephone. “Are you really going to let this happen?”
“She’s a woman, Miles,” Grandma said mildly.
“I think it’s nice,” Mother said from her washtub. No one responded.
They didn’t come back for a long time. I sat and watched my father nervously try to converse with my mother while Grandma Persephone stroked Grandpa Miklos’s belly with one foot. Someone put the record player on. Still they didn’t come back. Father stood up and began pacing, but everyone else ignored him. Grandma Persephone asked Mother if she wanted a game of chess. Mother said no. Father sat back down and huffily pretended to read a book. Finally, I couldn’t stand it anymore, and I stood up and made for the hall.
Margaret was in the dining room. She had the silver coffee service spread out and was polishing the pieces before putting them back in the cabinet. I looked to the room of warm idleness I’d left, and back at her, angrily scrubbing tarnish off of a pointless pile of junk used by one person who would have probably been fine with just a single cup. And that was the moment I couldn’t stand it anymore.
“Why do you let them treat you this way?” I asked.
Her eyes narrowed, her brow furrowing over them.
“I know you can understand me,” I said. “I know you can talk. You called me a traitor, remember? So what here did I betray? Did I ask too many questions, like about why you let them sit and relax and laugh and talk while you get nothing? Don’t you get that? All your work is for nothing!”
She opened her mouth, and for a moment nothing happened. I knew that silence, though. It was the long silence of a child who’s fallen down and hurt themselves. And then from deep in her throat came the groan.
At first, I thought she was just trying to scare me. But as the noise went on longer it got louder and climbed in pitch, until the silver on the table was rattling and the pictures jostling on the walls, and still it climbed. I felt frozen to the spot. The sound was going to rattle my bones out of my body, shatter me and turn me to jelly, bring down the rickety rafters of the high towers and then nothing would—
The sound stopped. I looked up to see Margaret slumped over. Grandma Persephone was kneeling on the floor beside her, cradling Margaret’s head in her arms.
“You know you’re not supposed to talk to her,” she said evenly. “Now you’ve upset her.”
“That’s crazy,” I said. “Don’t you see how crazy that is?”
“Eleanor,” Grandma Persephone said, her voice full of warning.
“What are you going to do?” I asked. “Abandon me again? Make me cook and clean for you?” I laughed, a little drunk on my own stupidity. “You can’t just tell me to stop. After everything you did to me, I don’t care what you think of me anymore.”
Persephone straightened up and squinted at me. I felt suddenly cold. She studied me for a long moment.
“I don’t think that’s true,” she said.
I’d had a thousand things to say lined up, but when she said that, they fled. I wanted to get away from her, so I started walking quickly toward the stairs. That was a mistake.
In the parlor, Miklos’s head shot up. He clambered to his feet and started for me, stumbling toward me, his long wolf teeth already sliding into place. His shoulders had dropped, his eyes fixed on me.
I looked at the front door, but on open ground he’d catch me almost immediately. So I bolted left up the stairs, as behind me Grandma Persephone yelled, “Miklos! Stop it!”
I didn’t dare glance behind me. I heard his claws clacking on the stairs, and then I felt something swipe the back of my ankle, stinging hot. I ran until I reached my room, then slammed the door shut, locked it, and shoved the rocking chair under the door handle. From the hall came the clicking of toenails on the parquet, and then shoes, and Grandma Persephone chastising Miklos softly. I held still until the sounds receded.
I looked down at my leg. He’d only scratched it, but blood was welling up along the back of my calf in bright beads, oddly yellowish, not red the way blood should be. Stupid. I wanted to cry every time I looked at my own weird blood. No matter how strange the rest of the family was, I bet even Miklos bled red.
I couldn’t go get a bandage, n
ot now. I went to my old wardrobe and got down a nightgown that was far too small for me now, then wrapped it around my leg, pressing it against the bleeding. Let Margaret clean this useless thing, if she wanted.
I was angry, but once that subsided, I was terrified. I climbed into my bed and sat listening for any sound of a tread on the stairs, any scratching at the window. This door between us couldn’t keep me safe, I realized, if Grandma Persephone decided I wasn’t welcome.
Eventually I heard footsteps in the hall outside, light and fast, and then a knock at my door. I sat up in bed. Was it Miklos, come to kill me? I’d shunned his family, and now I was like the men on the boat. I’d treated my grandmother with unkindness, and he was there to—
“Ellie?” Luma’s voice sounded tentative. I breathed out, my heart still racing.
“One second.” I scrambled to un-wedge the rocking chair and unlock the door, and climbed back into bed. “Come in.”
She slipped in through the door and crawled under the blankets with me. I could smell the lavender water she splashed on her hair, the rank stink of meat on her breath. Her body was warm and downed in hair, like a cat’s. I felt snug with her here. She sighed.
“It was so hard,” she said. “Rhys saw us out walking and he looked so unhappy. I thought he was going to start a fight, but he just ran off into the forest.”
“Luma, what I said earlier—I didn’t mean you had to do it.”
“Oh, I wanted to,” she said. “There’s something about him. It feels like I want to rip him to pieces, but I don’t. I don’t know, I kind of like it. Do you know what I mean?”
I did. And now I felt sick.
“You’re in love with him?” I asked, not sure I wanted the answer.
“I don’t think so,” she said. “But I don’t want Rhys to have him, so maybe I do love him?”
I’d never been good at talking to boys—even when we’d had school dances, I’d hid in a corner in a borrowed dress. But I knew about boys from watching them with other girls, and from listening to the gossip afterward. So I knew that no matter what you were like, or who you preferred, boys liked you best if you were beautiful. My chances weren’t good here. Fish-face, the other girls had called me. I was funny looking, with protruding, heavy-lidded eyes and a wide mouth, to say nothing of the ugly web of skin between my thumbs and forefingers. Luma was beautiful. Even if I did say something to Arthur, he would choose Luma anyway.