by Rose Szabo
Well, I shouldn’t be upset about it, if it kept Rhys away from him. Rhys frightened me. I hadn’t liked that look in his eyes in the hall earlier. It reminded me of Grandpa Miklos’s eyes when he’d sprung at me, all raw intention.
“Did he like you?” I asked. “Did he kiss you?” It was like picking at a scab. I’d barely spoken to him, I told myself. Anything I thought I knew about him was wrong, so why was I so upset?
“He didn’t try,” she said. “He wanted to talk.”
“What did he want to talk about?”
“Funny stuff,” she said. “Poetry. He wanted me to tell him what all the noises in the forest meant, all the ones he couldn’t hear. It was nice.”
“I’m tired,” I said.
She leaned over and kissed me on the forehead.
“Thank you,” she said. “I never could have done this without you. I’m so glad you’re home.”
She slipped out. Her side of the bed cooled rapidly without her.
Maybe it wasn’t too late to leave. I could ask for some more money, go to another school in another town where no one knew me. I could start over. But the thought of doing that chilled me, too. There was the thing I’d nearly done to Lucy Spencer to consider. I thought about how elastic and soft her neck had felt, and about Luma’s ringed scar.
I fell asleep with racing thoughts, wishing I had any kind of clue of what to do next. When I finally drifted off, I dreamed about the greenhouse.
THREE
It didn’t really feel like a dream. It felt like getting up sleepy for a glass of water, that shambling feeling. I drifted across the upper gallery that overlooked the ground floor to the back staircase, the one old houses have for servants. The stairs led down to the laundry, and to a rickety porch that had been walled in to make a hallway. It led across the yard to Grandma Persephone’s greenhouse.
I was heading there to meet with the other children, Luma, Rhys, and Charlie. We were going to play a game. We’d often meet up there to play, the four of us. Rhys and Charlie were the biggest and the smallest so we always put them on a team together. It balanced it out. I think that was my idea.
Moving along the corridor, I could already half see in my mind’s eye the greenhouse, packed with rows of orchids and other exotic plants, the battered wingback chair where Grandma Persephone liked to sit and drink tea while she contemplated her deck of cards. It was a bright place, a daytime place. I was happy when I could get there.
Thunder rolled somewhere in the distance. When had a storm come in?
I opened the door and found the greenhouse shattered.
Shards lay everywhere, the ceiling and walls still raining down in places onto the bodies of crushed plants, intermixed with smashed pottery. Overhead the sky was red and thick as blood. Dim shapes stirred in that heaven. I didn’t like it. I opened my mouth to speak and found that I could not make a sound. I woke up choking on words.
A loud crash of thunder came, and I screamed.
I sat up in bed and looked out the window. Nothing but a heat storm. Dim lightning flashed on the horizon over the water, no specific strokes, just an illumination of the sky. The sea below looked calm, but I could tell it churned beneath the surface, gathering force.
Someone knocked on my door. I went and opened it. Grandma Persephone stood outside, carrying a candelabra that threw her face into sharp shadows. It took me a few seconds to realize I wasn’t still dreaming.
“The lights could go out any minute,” she said.
“It’s not raining here.”
“Somewhere down the coast, the storm’s breaking. Winterport’s electricity has a long way to travel.” She tipped her head back, and for a moment I could see the mysterious smile I’d loved and feared when I was little. For a moment I felt eight again, like she’d never sent me away and no time had passed at all.
“It’s the perfect weather for what we will do,” she said.
She moved on down the corridor, the light receding with her. I ran after.
The house with its vast open spaces had the feel of a jungle. I felt safe from ambush in her circle of light and nowhere else. Around any corner could be Miklos, or Rhys. I realized I wasn’t certain if Grandma Persephone had any power of her own, or if she was just a mad old woman who played at magic to make herself feel better about being surrounded by beasts. To make herself less afraid.
“How did you know I was coming home?”
“I read the cards yesterday, early in the morning,” she said. “I saw you traveling and knew you’d come here.”
“Not because you got a call from Saint Brigid’s?” I asked, both skeptical and afraid of the answer.
“Have you seen a telephone in this house?”
She took me down the route I had followed in the dream. Down the back stairs, through the laundry, across the long crude corridor. I had a terror of what we would find at the end.
“We added this room and refitted the upstairs for a bathroom when your mother moved in,” Grandma said. “After the War.”
I nodded. I didn’t know what any of this had to do with the middle of the night, or if she was just making conversation.
It was almost too dark to see in the hall, but when Grandma Persephone threw open the door to the greenhouse, a bolt of lightning split the dark and illuminated the room: the forest of palms and hydrangeas, the hothouse roses and African violets and so much of this one strange plant, a black orchid.
“Draconis vulgaris,” Grandma Persephone said. “On Crete we called it drakondia, snake lily. Prepared one way it’s a love potion; another way, it’s poison. It’s the backbone of our fortune, but it mostly takes care of itself. It’s very hardy, under the right conditions.”
“Why are you telling me this?”
“Sit,” she said, waving me toward one of the armchairs, the velvet streaked with droppings from the birds that sometimes got trapped in the greenhouse. I remembered Rhys and Luma trying to catch them, when we were young. But I’d always been more interested in these chairs, and in the little table where Grandma Persephone laid out her cards.
The tarot deck was there now, in the middle of the table.
I perched on the edge of the chair, not wanting to lean back, resting my hands on the clean spots on the table in front of me.
“Eleanor,” she said, “why did you come back?”
“This is my home.”
“You barely remember it. You barely remember us.”
“I had nowhere else to go.”
“What did you do?”
That stung. “What makes you think I did anything?”
“Because I know you,” Grandma Persephone said. “You were always doing something. Always up to something.”
It sounded like she was talking about someone else. “I’m not like that. I’m a good student. I never get in trouble.” Except that wasn’t true anymore.
“I suppose that might be so,” she said. “You’ve lived outside of the family. You have some sense of what the world is like, and you haven’t killed anyone, which says good things about your character. Sister Katherine even says you look after people. Younger girls at school. She says you’re never cruel, even to people who mistreat you.”
That definitely wasn’t true anymore. I cringed. I hadn’t known I was being tested, all those years. I’d just been trying to survive. I thought about all the things I’d done because I hadn’t known I was being watched.
I thought of Lucy Spencer’s neck.
“Was Sister Katherine spying on me?” I asked. She’d been my favorite of the nuns, quiet and bookish like me. She used to let me read in her office.
“I wouldn’t call it that. She just told me how you were doing.”
This all felt so unfair. If I’d known, I might have behaved better.
“And now you’ve seen us again,” Grandma Persephone said. “Have we satisfied your morbid curiosity? You certainly don’t seem happy here.”
“I don’t want to leave,” I said. I didn’t. There w
as so much I still wanted to know. And I didn’t want to let go of Luma. And I needed to keep Arthur safe from Rhys. And I—
“I can’t go back, Grandma.”
“And why not?” she asked. She sat up a little straighter in her chair, her body angling toward me like a knife. “I told you to stay put, and you still came back here. Why? Why are you here, Eleanor?”
I could barely breathe. I told myself I would say it on the count of three. I counted down twice before I managed to say, “Because I did something bad.”
I told her, as best I could. I told her what I’d told Arthur: about Lucy Spencer, our friendship, her hating me. I told Grandma Persephone about the other day, when Lucy had pushed me down the stairs. And then I told her the rest of it. How her shoving me wasn’t a surprise, or it shouldn’t have been. Lucy had always bullied me, pinching me and taunting me about my strange webbed thumbs and my buggy eyes, my worn-out clothes and how I had no family. I’d learned to avoid her. I should have seen this coming, I thought, and that made me angry.
And so instead of catching myself on the railing, I’d tucked my head into the cradle of my shoulder and rolled headfirst all the way down. It hurt a lot, but I let myself go limp and knock about until I sprawled at the bottom in a heap among the books. I made it look worse than it was, letting one leg jut out oddly as though I’d broken it. I held very still until I could see Lucy’s feet in front of my face through slitted eyes. And then I lunged.
I grabbed her ankles, and she let out a startled gasp and sat down hard on the floor of the stairwell. I sank in my nails and dragged myself up and over her by her legs, and pinned her arms to the floor. She started kicking at me, so I dropped my weight onto her so she couldn’t move. I used my forehead to bash her face to one side, and then I bit into the soft skin where her neck met her shoulder. I bit until it snapped like a rubber band, and warm blood gushed into my mouth while she screamed, while she pulled at handfuls of my hair, while she kicked her legs under me, trying desperately to get me off of her—
“Stop,” Grandma Persephone said. I stopped. “Did you kill her?”
I shut my eyes. “I don’t think so,” I said. When I’d fled the room, she’d been sitting upright, hands pressed to her neck, screaming. “No. I didn’t.”
She sat back in her chair, still gripping the arms.
“So you’re dangerous,” she said. “I knew that already. What I need to know is: Are you dangerous to my family?”
I wanted to cry. I realized that I had been hoping she’d like me better after I told her. That she’d see me and think of Luma, of Rhys, of the others. That I’d be one of them. Instead, she seemed unmoved. What was she so afraid of?
“No!” I said. “I don’t want to hurt anyone. It all just happened so fast. And I didn’t know where else to go. I don’t have anyone else.”
And at last, she softened.
“I want to be sure,” she said gently. “Will you let me read for you?”
“Why?”
“So I know whether you’re here to help us or to hurt us.”
“Why would I hurt you?”
“Will you let me do it?”
I nodded.
She shuffled the deck, and the cards leaped between her hands. She’d drawn them all herself, I knew, years ago. The cards were soft with wear, edges blurred. She handed the deck to me and had me cut it, and then she laid out an elaborate spread. She turned over the first card, at the center.
“This is you,” she said.
My heart leaped when I recognized that first card: the Page of Bones, the card that had always come up first when she read for me when I was younger. A young scholar, not clearly a man or a woman, peering at the skull of a bird with a magnifying glass. Maybe I hadn’t changed as much as I thought, if this was still the card that meant me.
I watched Persephone, too. Her eyes unfocused as she worked, as though she were seeing something near and far at the same time.
“A young person of great intelligence who relies on their wit,” she said.
She turned over the rest of the cards, following the old pattern, narrating as she went.
“Covering you—doubts and fears. Are you good enough? Strong enough? Crossing you—a great crowd of people, yammering different things in your ears. Who do you listen to?”
She looked up at me. “Well,” she said, “you’re not much of anything yet, it seems. Not this or that. Not sure what you’re going to become. You could be anything right now. You could be like me. Or you could be something … very different.”
“I could be like you?” I asked. “You mean, read cards and do magic?”
“That’s only some of what I do. Mostly I manage the family.”
“How?”
She sighed.
“I keep them from killing people, mostly,” she said, “and deal with the damage when they inevitably do. I keep them healthy, and make sure they understand right from wrong as much as they can. I tend to the plants and distill the extracts and sell them to distributors. And I keep Winterport happy, as much as I can, so they don’t turn on us and burn the house to the ground while we sleep.”
“I could do that,” I said. “You could teach me, and then I could help you.”
She frowned.
“Eleanor,” she said, “you already have enough talents. I’m not sure it would be a good idea for me to teach you anything.”
I didn’t feel talented. I had no sharp teeth or secret second body hiding under my skin. The least I could do was learn how to make myself useful. And maybe, I thought with a little hope, I could learn how to see the future.
“Please,” I said. “I really want to learn.”
“I’m not giving you an answer tonight. Let me finish reading for you, and I’ll think about it.”
She flipped over the next card. “Behind you: imprisonment, restriction, restraint. Just before you: freedom, but a kind that makes you nervous.” She paused here to smile at me. “You’re perched on the brink of a decision. Mine, or yours, I suppose. Still want to stay?”
I looked down at the cards, trying to puzzle them out. My card appeared to have vanished, until I realized it was under the card she’d said covered it. Oh, it was that simple. And then across it, a card with a group of people crowded around a heap of bones, stretching like they were getting ready for a dance. And a picture of a woman kneeling in a barren cell, holding a viper to her breast, and a picture of a great wheel with a blindfolded girl in spangled tights strapped to it and the word FORTUNE printed on it in large type. I wondered how she could see the future in all this chaos.
“How do you know what the cards mean?” I asked.
“Metaphors.”
“Metaphors?” I was stunned. I’d only ever heard the word metaphor used in class, and never heard of one doing anything useful.
“You triangulate,” she said. “Between your own knowledge, the images, and the words. And for a moment you can escape your own perspective, and leave the present, and you can see a little more widely.”
My eyes went wide. “I want to learn that!”
She shuddered as though trying to shake something loose.
“Stop that,” she said. “I can’t make a decision tonight. Let’s finish this.”
I found myself excited at the prospect of learning to read the cards. It was one of those things that was easy to learn but would take a lifetime to master. I wasn’t like Rhys or Luma because I wasn’t supposed to be. I’d be something else, something just as good. And it wasn’t something I’d gotten through dumb luck. I was going to earn it.
Persephone turned over the next card. I paid attention to the way her hand flicked the card, the way she slapped it down on the table.
“Above you,” she said, “your best possible future.”
It was a card that read Ace of Blood. It showed a chalice pouring red out over a landscape, splashing over a horde of dancing figures below. It frightened me the way Grandpa Miklos’s teeth did, the way Rhys’s embrace did.
It was a feral card. It didn’t seem best to me.
“This card tells me that you might save our family,” she said. “Save us, restore us, put us right—I don’t know what it thinks it means,” she said, giving the card a little tap, as though chastising it. I felt a twinge of fear. Fear would pass, I told myself. I had to hold steady. She said she wanted to know what I was. I wanted the same thing.
She flipped the next card. It was a rough drawing of the Chrysler Building in New York. People leaped from the windows, their faces contorted with pain and fear. “And this card tells me that you might ruin us.”
“Grandmother,” I said, “I’ll do my best, I promise. Whatever it takes. I won’t let them get hurt.”
“You can’t make promises like that,” she snapped, and then took a breath and softened her voice. “I believe that you’ll try. But it’s important that you not take this lightly. You’re at a crossroads. There are two ways that things can go, if you stay. And one is ruin. Do you understand me? This is not a game, Eleanor.”
I felt like the worst creature ever to have lived. Everyone knew there was something wrong with me. Lucy’d known it, and look what I’d done to her. Margaret knew it. Grandma Persephone and every single card in her whole deck seemed to know it.
This wasn’t what I remembered from my childhood. We used to play in the greenhouse while Grandma Persephone called us over one at a time to read for us, any question we asked. She’d lay out the spread and talk us through the problem, and then she’d turn over one last card and tell us how it was supposed to go.
“You haven’t done the last card yet,” I said. “The one that gives us a clue about the outcome.”
She glanced up. “You’re correct.”
She reached for the top card of the deck. Her hand hovered, hesitating. The sky flashed.