by Rose Szabo
I opened up the big glass-fronted cabinet behind the desk. It was lined with wooden boxes, smooth from years of handling; she’d saved everything. They each had little placards on them with what they were. BILLS, TAXES. PERSONAL MAIL, one said.
As I dragged the box out of the cabinet, a cold breeze blew through the library, making me look up. None of the windows was open—there must be a crack somewhere. I set the box down on the floor and dug through it until I found what I was looking for: a stack of mail, all addressed to Saint Brigid’s. None of it postmarked.
The air seemed to get colder as I riffled through the letters. All of them were from various family members. None looked like they had been unsealed—just gathered from the mail and bundled up. The one on top was from Mother, from a year ago. I opened it.
Dear Eleanor, I know that you’ve been quite busy and maybe it’s foolish to ask but I do hope you’ll come home this summer at last.
The next one, a few years prior, Luma. I can’t believe you. You’re so selfish. Don’t you miss me?
There were maybe twenty of them, spread out over the eight years I had been away. Eleven from Mother, none from Father. Six from Luma, all angry. Two from Rhys, badly spelled. One from Grandpa Miklos, just a single sentence that took up the whole page: I miss you my beloved.
I stared at the pile of mail that had never gone out. For years, she’d stolen my only glimpses of home. Had they noticed that their letters weren’t getting through? If they had, why hadn’t they done something about it? Why had they left me to suffer alone? All they would have had to do to get past Persephone was go to the post office themselves, and they hadn’t even bothered to do that.
The stack of letters immediately underneath was much larger. It was all of the letters that I had written to everyone in the house, every month for years and years. These were all slit open. The one on top was the last one I’d sent to Luma, when I was twelve. That was when I’d finally given up on them all.
I wanted to talk to Arthur. I wanted to show him what I’d found, and ask why my family was like this, why they were so craven or so lazy when they had more power than I would ever have.
I scrubbed my sleeve across my face and bundled the letters back into their wooden box, and on shaking legs I went and looked for him around the house. But he wasn’t anywhere, and when I glanced outside, his car was gone from the driveway. Where had he gone in such a hurry?
It had been raining off and on, and the ground was soft. I could see two lines turning off of the driveway and onto the dirt track that led to our carriage house, where Margaret kept the truck.
I ran outside and followed the track. Something felt strange to me about this, and familiar. He’d left but not left. He was always doing that, now that I thought about it, pretending to do things. Not lying exactly, because it was so obvious if you were paying any attention at all. Eating but not eating. Smiling but not smiling.
When I got to the shed, he was just stepping out of it. He looked out of place outdoors, under the slightly overcast sky. Threadbare.
“You didn’t really leave,” I said.
“I wanted to put the car in the shed before it rained.”
“What aren’t you telling me?”
“That is an enormous question,” he said.
We stared at each other for a long moment. I couldn’t see his eyes. I knew if I could see them, he would open like a book and I would read him and he would be so relieved, so grateful to be read, as I had been when he had read me.
“Arthur!”
My father came jogging around the side of the house, his face red, his tie askew. I took a step back.
“Arthur,” Father said again. “Glad I could catch you. Come have a brandy with me.”
“Of course.”
Still thinking about the leaving, the eating, the smiling, I asked, “Are you really going to drink it?”
My father slapped me. It happened so fast that I didn’t have time to duck; I hadn’t even known it was coming. It caught me across the cheek. Tears sprang to my eyes, time slowed down for me, and I thought about boarding school.
When we were younger, a little after Lucy and I stopped being friends, she used to get a group of girls to help her back me into a corner to scare me. One day instead of letting myself be herded by her friends, I stepped toward her and punched her in the stomach. I didn’t know how to hit, and I hurt my hand badly, bending it back from the wrist so hard that my eyes filled up with the pain. But she had stood mesmerized, her body wrapped around my hand, with a glazed look of shock and shame. I imagined that was how I must look now. I knew it was what I’d said, but I had no idea why.
Then time contracted, as Arthur picked up my father by the collar and whipped him around with incredible strength. He held him out in the air as though he weighed nothing. Now my father and I were both staring dumbfounded: me at him, him at Arthur.
“I can’t let anything happen to your family,” Arthur said. “Do you understand?”
My father nodded, silent. Arthur set him back on his feet, let him go, dusted off his jacket.
“Miles,” Arthur said, “let’s have that drink.”
They walked off together, all seemingly well. I stood by the car, under the awning of the shed, while it started to drizzle.
I was shocked. Father had never hit me, not that I could remember. I was close to something that he didn’t want me to know, the same something that had upset him so much in the library. But what was stranger was that when Arthur had said “Do you understand?” he hadn’t looked at my father, but at me.
For the rest of the day, Father ignored me. When I came into a room, he left it, except at dinner, when he just talked to everyone but me. He seemed embarrassed, but then why didn’t he apologize?
I thought about talking to him, trying to apologize myself, but it was hard when I couldn’t quite figure out what I’d done. I’d just asked a question. Arthur had been right: I couldn’t trust anyone here.
* * *
The storm that had swept up the coast the night of Grandma Persephone’s death hadn’t really gone away. It hovered over us, gray and chilly and oppressive, occasionally spitting rain at us in dribs and drabs. On the day of her funeral, though, the sky broke open at last and it rained and rained.
Waking up that morning, I looked out at the mud running in rivulets down the driveway and thought no one would come. But at noon, a ragtag group came trudging up through the tree line. No car would have gotten up the slope in this weather, so they’d come on foot, huddled together, warily watching the woods.
It was mostly women, with a small handful of petrified-looking men. Almost everyone had a walking stick of some kind, or an umbrella with a beveled point. One old man clutched a fireplace poker. When they saw us, they lifted their black-ribboned envelopes like talismans.
Father met them on the porch and redirected them around the side of the house, toward the back garden. We, the family, went out through the kitchen and met them there. Grandpa Miklos and Father and Margaret and Rhys carried the coffin out through the back door, and all of us followed the pine box and its bearers down a narrow path into the birches.
The rain poured, surprisingly warm. Mother looked pleased. She’d put on some clothes, a dress of thin black cotton and a hat with a veil. She clung to Father’s arm to support herself on her weak legs, letting herself get soaked. I realized I wanted to do the same, but the people from the village were watching me, and I couldn’t bring myself to seem strange in front of them. I could hear them whispering about me. “Back from school,” I heard. And “Not like the rest of them.” I already knew that.
I scanned the crowd anxiously. Grandma Persephone had said not to let any strangers in the house, and I realized that a funeral might be just the moment when someone might sneak in. I started matching faces to names and invitations, and spotted someone I didn’t know at first: a skinny boy in black, his hair cut into a bowl shape. He had no umbrella or raincoat, but the rain didn’t seem to b
e hitting him. Beside him in a dark wide-brimmed hat was—Grandma Persephone?
No, I realized, as I hurried to catch up to her. It was my aunt Lusitania, all the way from Syracuse. And the boy was her son, my cousin Charlie. I remembered him. I’d had dreams with him in them, I realized. Somewhere in the night forest—
“Aunt Lusitania,” I said. She turned, and flinched when she saw me. No water hit her either—it spattered off of her hat and seemed to shun her body. “We’re so glad you could make it.”
She furrowed her brow. “What?”
“I said, we’re glad you could come.”
She stared at me like I’d said something stupid. I looked to Charlie for help, or for something else to say. He was about thirteen, I guessed. I hadn’t seen him since he was small.
“How are you doing, Charlie?” I asked.
“My grandmother just died.”
They both looked so much like Grandma Persephone that it made me embarrassed to be here at all. And they moved in concert, without touching, exchanging quick glances now and then that erased some of the tension from Lusitania’s face. Charlie was younger than me, and he knew how to do that for his mother, how to make her feel at ease just by being. My own mother was on the fringes of the group with Father, drenched, talking through her sodden veil to a stout fishwife with a yellow slicker on over her funeral black. The woman was edging away from the pair of them, and I didn’t blame her; up that close, she could probably see some of what was under the veil.
The path wound and zigzagged through the birches. Up ahead in the crowd I could see Luma sniffing the air and looking uneasy. It was her other body that knew this path. She kept starting forward, as though wanting to drop to all fours. Straining against herself.
Finally we came to a clearing, and a high stone wall with an iron gate. Father helped Mother to the front of the procession, and she took out a big ring of brass keys and unlocked the gate to the plot. The mourners funneled through after the coffin. I was jostled to the back of the procession. The funeral was starting somewhere up ahead of me—the pallbearers bringing Grandma Persephone’s coffin to the grave and lowering it in. Aside from the black-gated tomb that Grandma Persephone and Grandpa Miklos had bought for themselves, there were a handful of small graves here, some with names and some without, and sunken patches of scrub grass in front of them. Most of these were infant brothers and sisters of mine. A memory came back to me of a baby whose whole body was like my mother’s, just a mass of polyps, with no eyes and no mouth. Nothing to be done about her strange little body but wait. I knew that Mother had named that one Junia.
My mother had kept trying to have children all throughout my childhood, even though for every living child she’d had, two had to be buried. I wondered why anyone ever had children.
My eyes lit on another headstone, a black marble obelisk that stood in the shadow of the tomb. It was for another Rhys, Persephone and Miklos’s firstborn son. And there was our Rhys, beside the grave with his name on it, helping the others lower Grandma Persephone’s coffin into the ground. I wondered why they’d bothered to have a mausoleum, if they were just going to put the bodies in the dirt. It seemed like a waste of money. Maybe neither of them had known what a tomb was for when they bought it. Did they even have tombs in Grandpa Miklos’s silent country?
The coffin thudded into the grave, jarring me from my thoughts. After some shuffling, Father stepped to the head of the grave and started reading the selection he’d promised me he’d pick out. I couldn’t hear over the rain and the shifting of bodies. But a flicker of movement caught my eye—Rhys was moving quickly and deliberately from the grave to some destination. Following his gaze I found Arthur, with Luma leaning on his arm. Rain dripped from the brim of Arthur’s hat; his face, in profile, seemed hard and soft to me at once, and I wanted to touch his cheek and tell him that everything would be alright. Luma wore a dove-gray dress soaked with rain. She looked poetic; they both did. A perfect pair. And Rhys was barreling toward them like a bull.
I elbowed my way forward through a sea of lumpy dark coats, the thick mud sucking at my shoes. I caught snatches of what was happening through breaks in the crowd: Father was still reading, although I heard him faltering over some words. Rhys reached his destination and tried to embrace Arthur. I lost sight of them, and when I looked up again, Rhys and Luma were arguing, Rhys jabbing his pointer finger at her sternum, while she dragged Arthur behind her by his wrist. The people closest to them were pulling away, and I slipped in the mud as someone backed into me. I caught myself on his coat and used him to drag myself out. When I broke free of the mourners, Luma and Rhys were shoving each other.
“What are you two doing?” I said.
Rhys glanced instantly toward me, and Luma followed his gaze. I felt hot with rage.
“Rhys, leave them alone. Luma, stop slinging Arthur around,” I hissed. “And both of you, show some respect for once. You’re embarrassing us.”
Luma rolled her eyes at me, but Rhys began to shake; he looked like he might hit me, or cry. Instead, he turned on his heel and flung himself through the crowd, elbowing people aside, and disappeared into the trees. When he took off, people relaxed, although a few of them watched the woods for signs he might be coming back. I glanced up triumphantly, trying to make eye contact with Father, but he glared at me without pausing in his speech.
Arthur, standing behind Luma, was looking at me with his head tilted to one side, his mouth open a little. When our gazes met, he smiled and shook his head a little. He slipped away from us through the throng. Luma didn’t seem to notice he’d gone.
“Why’d you say that?” she said. “You really hurt Rhys’s feelings.”
“He was attacking you!”
“I can handle him.”
I thought about Rhys’s look when he’d fallen out of the closet, the murderous grin on his face. “I’m not sure Arthur can. We have to keep him safe.”
What did Rhys even want with Arthur? Half the time he acted like a girl with a crush, which made no sense to me. The other half the time it seemed like he wanted to kill Arthur. I thought of the fingerprints on the sides of Rhys’s neck. The closing door. None of it made sense, or lined up in the way that I wanted it to. And thinking about it made me feel like I was standing on the edge of a cliff.
“I don’t know,” Luma said. “Maybe I should just go talk to him. See how he is.”
“No!” I said. “Can’t you see that’s just what he wants you to do?”
“Yes,” she said sadly.
I was incredulous. I wanted to ask her what she’d expected me to do, how I, the one who’d broken up the fight, was suddenly the villain. Rhys was dangerous. Even if his intentions were good, he was too impulsive and rough to be safe. Arthur needed our help. He was already so frail. His poor leg. His weak eyes. But some worm was eating at the back of my brain, telling me that I was missing something, that I was leaving something out.
Father finished his speech, crumpling his paper up in his hands as Father Thomas stepped up to meet him. They shook hands, and then Father Thomas was standing at the grave, his head bowed. I focused my attention on him, trying to ignore Luma beside me, her body radiating warmth. I didn’t like knowing she was mad at me. It was like having a stone in my shoe.
Father Thomas bent to pick up a handful of ashy brown mud, then straightened and cleared his throat. The villagers shifted their weight and turned their attention toward him, although they still darted nervous glances over their shoulders.
A shiver ran through me as he turned his face upward. The lenses of his spectacles were dappled with rain, and his thin gray hair was plastered flat against his head. He was more composed than he had been in the churchyard the other day, but his nose was still swollen and pink.
“We gather here to commend our sister Persephone Palaiológos Zarrin to God our Father,” he said. “And to commit her body to the earth.”
When he said that, Grandpa Miklos burst into sobs. They reminded me of the ones
that Father Thomas had been wracked with outside the church a few days before. Father Thomas stopped and waited. After a long moment, Miklos looked up at him. Their eyes met; Miklos nodded, and Father Thomas continued.
After the rites, after everyone who wanted had thrown a handful of gritty mud onto the coffin, we shuffled out through the iron gate. Aunt Margaret stayed behind, shoveling with grim determination, doing the real work as always. When we returned to the house there was cold food in the dining room: funeral meats, pickles, saltine-crackers-and-cheese plates brought by village women, and strange jiggly custards; they were fruit colored, but underneath even my weak nose could smell horse. I skirted around awkwardly, shaking hands and smiling in a way I hoped was reassuring, until I found myself in the hall and realized suddenly that I was alone there. Not quite alone, though; Arthur was arranging villagers’ umbrellas by the door.
“How are you?” I asked.
“You sound like Miles,” he said. “How I am isn’t really that interesting.”
I bristled a little at that. “Then tell me something that is.”
A smile flickered on his face.
“Lusitania is searching the house,” he said. “I believe she’s looking for your grandmother’s tarot cards. All families are the same.”
“I thought it was all happy families.”
He quirked an eyebrow. “You’re right, of course.”
“It looks like Father Thomas isn’t taking it well,” I said. “He said he and Grandma Persephone were friends, but I don’t remember him ever coming to the house.”
Arthur turned his head slightly. I followed his gaze and saw Father Thomas standing by Miklos’s side. They had their arms slung around each other’s shoulders. Father Thomas had a drink in his hand. As I watched, he took a big slug of it.
“He and Grandpa seem close, though,” I said. “I didn’t know they even knew each other.”
Some little tic disturbed the calm of Arthur’s face. I was beginning to know what that meant: something he wasn’t supposed to say. “What am I missing?” I asked.