by Rose Szabo
“Don’t do that,” he said. “You’re saying I can go, but you want me to stay.”
I closed my eyes, and swallowed, and thought.
“I do want you to stay with me,” I said. “But I want you to do—what you want.”
“Then I’m leaving.”
He stood for a moment longer, as though he were waiting for something. When he left, he cast a glance backward at me, and I gave him a little smile, hoping I looked brave. As soon as he shut the door, though, fear crept back in. Without Arthur here, I was alone with a ghost.
Well, if she could try to communicate, so could I.
“I know you’re here,” I said, feeling both silly and terrified. “Are you giving me these things? Do you want me to learn magic?”
A thump came from behind me. I spun around. On the floor was a slim volume. I picked it up.
“Sheep Husbandry,” I read. “I don’t think this is—”
I glanced up. Next to the place where Sheep Husbandry had been on the shelf was a large leather-bound book. Something about it looked familiar.
I had to stand on a stool to reach it; Grandma had been a tall woman. When I pulled it out, the weight of it in my hands felt familiar. I’d felt that weight before. It was the journal I’d had in the dream, the one where the woman had tried to kill me.
“This was yours,” I said.
A breeze blew on the deck of cards, scattering them. I clambered off the chair to pick them up, and then I froze.
The one that had blown face-up was the same card I had seen the night that Grandma Persephone died. The curling, swirling vague shapes, the pair of yellow eyes. There was no text on the card, no hint of what it represented.
I held it up, perplexed, and tipped it left and right. It never seemed to change when I was looking at it, but if I looked away, it seemed different when I glanced back. It seemed closer.
I heard footsteps on the stairs outside and held very still. I thought about the thing on the cards, imagined it oozing down the stairs, and the hairs stood up on the back of my neck—
“Eleanor?”
I sighed with relief: it was just Grandmere. Still, I didn’t want her to know I was up this late. I held still and waited.
“I thought I heard you calling me,” she said. “Are you in there?”
I didn’t answer. She must have heard my voice, I told myself. I must have said grandma, and she must have heard it, and thought I meant her. That was all. I felt a chill run down my back and wondered if it was just the ghost, or something inside me.
“Hmm,” she said, as if to herself. “Strange.”
Her footsteps receded up the stairs, and I waited in the dark, holding the book to my chest, until she was gone.
The room had gotten warmer, and somehow I knew that meant that Grandma Persephone was gone. I grabbed the journal and the tarot cards and fled up the stairs with them as quietly as I could.
SEVEN
I’d planned to spend the entire night reading the journal and learning its secrets. But when I got back to my room my fear had dissipated, and I was exhausted. I curled up on my side and fell asleep almost immediately, and when I woke up, someone was knocking at my door.
“Eleanor, darling?” Grandmere. I shoved the book and the cards under the covers, feeling a little guilty, and went to answer her. She was wearing a sky blue dress and a white sweater, and her soft gray hair was piled on top of her head like a little cloud. She looked like a grandmother from a catalog.
“You slept later than usual this morning,” she said. “I hope you don’t plan to miss breakfast.”
“I’m sorry. I had a hard time getting to sleep last night.”
Her face clouded. “I’m sorry to have bothered you,” she said. “I know you have your own life and your own plans, but I hoped to spend the morning with you.”
I gave her a smile. The ghost might not like her, but what did I care what Grandma Persephone thought, anyway? She could be wrong about things. She’d been wrong about me.
“I’ll be right down,” I said. “I just want to get dressed.”
I took my time picking out clothes and heading downstairs. I didn’t know why: I was excited to spend more time with Grandmere. But I kept returning to my mirror, arranging my hair, smoothing the collar of my blouse, wondering if I looked perfect, too. And I kept waiting, also, to see if anything would appear in the mirror. But there was nothing but my own worried face.
Before I left, I tucked the journal and the tarot cards into the drawer of my nightstand. No sense leaving them lying around, I thought, although I wasn’t sure exactly who I was hiding them from, or why.
“I’d like us to have a dinner party,” Grandmere said, when we were eating breakfast with Mother and Luma. Father and Rhys had retreated into the woods to check on Grandpa Miklos, who had not been back to the house since the night before. And Luma and Mother were mostly silent. Mother picked at her food in between dabbing at her face with a damp handkerchief, and Luma worked at the same piece of bacon fat indefinitely, staring moodily out the window.
“A dinner party?” Mother asked.
“Just a small one,” Grandmere said. “I want to invite the woman who is the most important in the village and her husband. Who is that? And perhaps your Arthur?”
I blushed at the “your Arthur.” “I think it’s Mrs. Hannafin,” I said. “She runs the post office. Her husband owns the general store.”
“Is there no mayor? No elders?”
“It’s too small for that,” I said. “Mrs. Hannafin is the only person I’ve seen tell anyone else what to do. Other than Grandma Persephone.”
Grandmere looked sad.
“I know I should not speak ill of someone who has passed,” she said. “But it troubles me so, the way she treated you. It makes me angry to think of you alone like that.”
Luma growled in the back of her throat.
“It doesn’t matter now,” I said. “I hope wherever she is, she’s happy.”
“Well, the house cannot stay closed to company forever.”
“Miklos isn’t well,” my mother said. Her throat sounded scratchy. “I’m not sure he’s ready for company. He can be a little hasty around people he doesn’t know.”
Grandmere sighed.
“I had noticed that,” she said. “I barely see him, and when I do, he seems upset with me. Maybe I should have a word with him and find out where we stand.” She stretched and shimmied her shoulders a little in anticipation; for a moment she reminded me of Luma, and I remembered that she was her grandmother, too. “We can get that arranged, and then we can have people over. Maybe someone for Luma to meet.”
“I have a boyfriend,” said Luma. Grandmere speared a piece of fruit with her fork.
“You know,” she said to me, as though Luma hadn’t spoken at all, “all my daughters met their husbands at my salons. All except for your mother.”
“You have other daughters?” I asked. I had aunts! Aunts who didn’t already hate me. I imagined them, different, older versions of me. But Grandmere looked downcast.
“Lost, now,” she said. “The War took so much from us all.”
“They died?”
She nodded. “Excuse me,” she said, and stood up. “I need a little time to be alone.”
She left the table, her long skirts swishing behind her.
I glanced over at Mother.
“Did I upset her?” I asked.
Mother looked bewildered. I realized that she had tuned out the whole conversation, and I was summoning her from far away.
“What? Oh, no,” she said. “You didn’t do anything wrong.”
“I didn’t know you had sisters,” I said.
“It was a long time ago.”
I wanted to ask her more, but she stood up from the table, took her cup of water, and splashed it over the side of her face. Her polyps quickly sucked up the water, and strained down toward her empty cup.
“I’m going to take a bath,” she said. She stumbled
from her chair and dragged herself along the picture rail toward the door.
“She’s scared of Grandmere,” Luma said glumly, when Mother had reached the stairs. “I can smell it.”
“That’s silly,” I said. “She’s her mother.”
“She’s not staying wet,” Luma said. “She’s dressed up. And she doesn’t talk much anymore.”
“Maybe she’s just worried,” I said.
“About what?”
“About embarrassing us.”
Luma frowned. “That sounds like something she would say.”
“Grandmere’s not cruel,” I said. “She’s a long way from home and out of her element. We can try to make her comfortable.”
“By making Mother miserable?”
“Since when do you care who’s miserable?” I said. “You know I found all the letters that I sent to you? Grandma Persephone was stealing them.”
“Why would she do that?”
“I don’t know, but why wouldn’t you even check? You just gave up. All of you gave up.”
She flipped her hair over one shoulder. So much hair, the color of white gold. She looked good when she was angry, imperious. It was annoying.
“Well, I’m sorry,” she said. “But how was I supposed to know? You’ve always just done what you wanted to do. How was I supposed to guess you were writing to me?”
“Because you’re my sister,” I said. “And you didn’t even try.”
“That’s not what we’re talking about. You’re here now.”
“I’m supposed to be happy you all forgot about me?”
“You don’t really care if I say I’m sorry, you just want to be angry. Why?”
“You’re imagining things,” I said. “Now, I need to go do some work in the greenhouse, so if you’ll excuse me—”
“‘If I’ll excuse you’? You even sound like her.”
Her eyes tunneled holes into my back as I left. It felt like she wanted me to do something. But what? Throw out our only living grandmother because Mother seemed a little nervous? I didn’t have time to worry about Luma’s every whim, I told myself. If she wanted to be in charge, she could make an effort. Like me. I was doing everything I could to save this family. Could Luma say the same? No.
When we were little, Luma and I had been inseparable. We’d looked the same when we were small: the two of us floating around the house in matching nightgowns, sitting on Grandpa Miklos’s knees, begging him to show us his other face to make us jump and scream. And then one day Luma did it back.
The next morning she’d woken up and showed me her bed littered with her baby teeth, her pillowcase streaked with blood, and her new bright wolf’s teeth gleaming in her mouth like pearls. And then I’d bitten her, hadn’t I? Grabbed her arm and sank my dull flat teeth as deep into her flesh as I could, hoping that if I bit down deep enough, my teeth would fall out and my real ones would come in.
When they pried me off of her, Grandma Persephone had taken her to one side, cradling her, shushing her. And Grandpa Miklos, I remembered, had taken me and hoisted me up by the armpits. He’d looked proud, almost.
“My girl,” he’d said quietly, “your time will come. She is older. Someday, you too will become the wolf. I can feel it. You are as powerful as my firstborn son.”
And he’d put me down and clapped me on the back.
“Do not bite your sister,” he’d said. “You are lucky to have each other. In my country, I was the only one of my kind.”
And then, all at once, I was not in my own memory anymore. I was watching myself and Grandpa Miklos from a distance. My arms were wrapped around something. I looked down and saw Luma looking up at me, a handkerchief clamped over her arm, blood soaking through it in a ring. Looking back up, there was my husband, tousling Eleanor’s hair—
I shook my head to clear it. At once, I was myself again, and everyone else was gone. I was alone in the hall of portraits. I wondered if I’d somehow dozed off on my feet. That had felt like one of those strange dreams I’d been having, but I’d never had one during the day. I looked around warily. The ground felt unstable now, as though at any moment I might find myself in the past. Feeling unsettled, I fled to the greenhouse.
It was bright and hot inside, with birds chirping up in the girders over my head. I breathed in the smell of the soil—it felt like clearing my head, like escaping.
Grandma Persephone was somewhere in this house. She was trying to tell me something—after all, she’d given me the journal. I had better find out what, and soon. I sat down in one of the battered armchairs, opened the journal, and started in.
It opened with tight, crabbed handwriting I didn’t recognize in a language I couldn’t read. I flipped through that, and came to Grandma Persephone’s familiar loopy handwriting, but still in another language. Italian, maybe? I squinted at it. Between French and Latin, I could pick through it, getting every other word. Something about picking herbs, something about doing laundry. Her mother was sick. I thought about the woman I’d seen in my dream, her foul breath, the hatred in her eyes. That didn’t seem quite like sickness to me. But why should that surprise me? Persephone was a liar.
I skipped ahead to the pages she’d dog-eared, and eventually came to a drawing of the drakondia plant: I instantly recognized its long black tongue and frilled leaves. Next to it were a series of notes about where it grew. Rocky hillsides. Something about the soil not holding any water. Dry earth. For the first time in my life, I was grateful for my years of Latin grammar drills.
I went over to the long row of plants and looked down at their roots. The soil was dark and damp to the touch, not at all how it should be, according to the book. I’d overwatered them; the flowers had fallen off of the stems and littered the floor, and the leaves were yellowing. I’d been treating them like orchids, when they were really something else. I almost wanted to laugh. I’d been trying to take care of them, and what I should have done was leave them be. I just hoped it wasn’t too late.
I skimmed through the instructions for preparing the extracts of drakondia: the poison came from the oil in the leaves when distilled down, and the love potion from the flowers’ nectar. That sounded easy enough, once the plants recovered. Absorbed in reading, I must not have heard the door from the house open. I glanced up when I heard a cough.
Grandpa walked in slowly on two legs, dressed in his smoking jacket and trousers. He seated himself in the chair across the card table from me. He didn’t speak at first, just watched me. He had his hands folded in his lap. He looked as though he was trying to be on his best behavior.
“Yes?” I asked.
“I have something bad to tell you, my child,” he said. “This woman who has come here is not what she seems.”
I furrowed my brow. “What do you mean?”
“She has come for me at last,” he said. “She means to kill me.”
I almost laughed. Come to kill Grandpa Miklos? I’d like to see anyone try.
“No,” I said. “Grandpa, you’re confused. She’s Mother’s mother. She came to visit us.”
“You are wrong about that,” he said. “She is the reason I came here. She almost caught me once. She is here to catch me again.”
The door behind us opened, and Grandmere waved cheerily at me from the doorway. Without turning around, Grandpa began to growl.
“Oh, I’m sorry,” Grandmere said. “Eleanor, come find me when you have a chance. Apologies, Miklos.”
She left, but the growl persisted even after she’d gone. I was getting frightened that he’d lash out at me like he’d done the night of Grandma Persephone’s funeral.
“Grandpa,” I said. “Grandpa! Stop it.” I must have said it in a firm enough voice, because he stopped growling. He looked up at me and gave a little whine.
“You don’t understand,” he said. “You must let me chase her away.”
“I know you’re upset,” I said. “I know you miss Grandma Persephone and that everything feels strange right now. But Grandmere
is here to help. Please don’t drive her away.”
He shook his head at me, uncomprehending. “Don’t ask me that, please,” he said.
“I’m telling you,” I said. “Don’t ruin this for me.”
He stood up, and left. A few minutes later, the howling started again from the woods, and the kitchen door banged open and shut as Rhys ran out to meet him. They had each other, I thought. Must be nice.
Well, I wasn’t alone anymore. I had Grandmere. I should go find her.
I found her on a settee in the parlor with a notebook on her lap and a stack of catalogs spread out on a side table. When I came in, she positively beamed at me.
“I am starting to plan our little party,” she said. “Tell me about the Hannafins. What are they like?”
“I don’t know,” I said. “Do you really want to have them to dinner? Mrs. Hannafin is a little … mean.”
“Oh, the Hannafins do not matter,” she said. “This is a chance for us to practice having guests. Eventually I want to start entertaining more important people. In France I was quite the hostess. Everyone came to my parties, even minor royalty.”
“Really?”
“Really.”
“And you think we could do something like that here?” I asked.
“Of course! It’s a lovely little town, and a beautiful large house with many rooms. We could set up some of the ones upstairs for visitors. It would be no trouble. And we could start your introduction into American society. Those kinds of connections are very valuable to people like you and me.”
“Like you and me?” I asked.
She furrowed her brow, perplexed. “Yes,” she said. “It is essential to be well connected. It makes your life so much easier.”
“I’ve never been good at making friends.”
“I cannot believe that,” she said. “You are so charming! Here, come sit by me. Look at this menu.”
She patted the spot next to her on the settee. When I sat down, she draped an arm around my shoulders. I almost flinched at it. It was so cozy, and so foreign to me.
“We will have to get into the kitchen, you and I,” she said. “Margaret is excellent at meat, but I have never seen her prepare a dough.”