by Rose Szabo
“It’s no problem,” she said. “I like an honest man. We can catch up and then I will see myself out.”
“He is a fool,” Grandmere said. “Eleanor, would you go to my room and wait for me while I say good-bye to our guest? And then I want to talk to you about some things.”
I nodded. Upstairs, I sat down on the bed, wondering what I could possibly say about any of this when Grandmere inevitably asked me.
It was strange, I thought, Rhys walking out of the room like that. He didn’t walk anywhere, generally. He strode, or he stormed, banging open doors, bolting down hallways. His walk just now had been calm, almost mechanical.
After a few minutes, Grandmere swept in and sank onto the bed. She looked exhausted.
“Are you alright?” I asked.
“It’s so hard to keep things running smoothly,” she said. “Especially with your cousin. He is difficult. And Luma won’t listen to me at all. I really need help from you, Eleanor. I need you to take charge more. I’m not as young as I once was.”
“I know,” I said. “I’m so sorry.”
“It’s not your fault. I just can’t believe the way he treated that poor girl.”
“Who was she?” I asked.
She paused and looked at me strangely.
“It is no matter,” she said. “After the way he behaved, she will never return to this house.”
I wanted to ask more, but she seemed devastated.
“Grandmere,” I said, “forget Rhys. He’s too stubborn. Why don’t we start by finding someone for Luma?”
“So you can have your Arthur, of course. I see.” She sighed and rubbed her temples. “I have a headache, child. I’m going to go make myself some tea.”
“Do you want me to get it?” I asked.
“No,” she said. “But do you know how you can help me? Do not let Rhys out of his room again. I know you meant well, but it’s for his own good.”
She patted me on the hand and glided away, out the door and down the stairs.
What a strange, nonsensical day it had been. I wished Grandmere would talk about it. Maybe I should try reading the cards, I thought. Maybe I could make some sense of it.
At the door to my room, I paused. It was open just a crack, when I was sure I’d left it shut. I slid inside and felt so uneasy that I ducked down to check under the bed. Nothing was quite right: my wardrobe was open, my bed hastily remade, but without the hospital corners I’d learned at Saint Brigid’s. Someone had been in here. Someone had gone through my things while I was out.
I knew before I looked that the journal was gone. And so were the tarot cards.
At first, I felt a chill, fragile calm. I must just not have looked properly. I glanced around the floor, anywhere they might have fallen by chance. I checked between the mattress and the bed frame, under the pillows, behind the broken dollhouse, and in every other corner I could think of. Nothing. A bubble of panic started forming in my throat.
Margaret could have done this. I shut my eyes and listened, the way Grandmere had taught me. Margaret was downstairs in the scullery, washing clothes. Why had she opened up the vulture, if not to look for the cards? And she had never liked me. She’d called me a traitor.
I started down the hall, but as I passed Luma’s room, her door opened and her hand shot out. She grabbed me by the wrist and pulled me inside.
“What’s going on?” I asked.
“We need to talk to you.”
I looked around. It took me a moment to spot Grandpa Miklos. He was under the bed, wrapped in Luma’s comforter. There was a leaf stuck in his hair.
“Shut the door,” Luma said. “And be quiet. Grandpa has something he needs you to hear.”
“What, that he thinks Grandmere is here to kill him?”
Luma glowered. “You knew about this?”
“I told her,” Grandpa Miklos said. “This is why I came to America.”
“He’s confused!” I said. “He’s got Grandmere mixed up with something else. Something that happened to him a long time ago. It happened to him the night of Grandma Persephone’s funeral, too—he thought the bells in town were the church bells back in the old country.”
I looked at Luma as though to say, “See?” She rolled her eyes at me and turned to Grandpa.
“What is she?” Luma asked. “Not a wolf, like us? She doesn’t smell like us.”
He shook his head no.
“Grandpa,” Luma said, “why don’t you tell us what happened?”
Grandpa Miklos looked reluctant.
“Your grandma, she didn’t like that story,” he said. “She said it was in the past. She said not to tell the kids.”
I could tell Luma thought I’d been hiding something from her. I hadn’t, though, not really. I had to turn this around. Figure out what Grandpa was talking about. Not that I thought it was Grandmere. Just …
“Before she died, Grandma said I was supposed to take care of things,” I said. “You remember me telling you that?”
Miklos nodded.
“So tell me what you saw,” I said.
“You will believe me?” he said. “Do you promise?”
Luma glared at me until I said, “Alright, I promise.”
Miklos sighed.
“When I was young, I lived in a silent country,” he said. “We were afraid of a thing that lived in a castle near us, but we did not have words for that. All we had were the bells, to tell us when to run from the crows.”
He told us about the day that he had run, the day he had been late. I sat paralyzed, terrified that he would become the wolf, that he would attack me out of fear. But Luma stroked his hand, and held him by the shoulder, and kept her eyes on him while he told us about being picked up by the crows and carried away. They tore at his clothes and his hair, flinging him between them to keep him airborne, while he remained terrified that at any moment they would drop him and he would die.
“They carried me away, over the fields,” he said. “Over a forest so thick I could not see the ground. In the middle of that forest was a ruined castle. They flew with me through a hole in the roof, and dropped me. And then, all the birds flew backward.”
“Backward?” I asked.
“Backward,” he said. “Into the mouth of an old woman.”
He stopped speaking and gazed at me solemnly, as though I should understand exactly what that meant.
“I don’t understand what this has to do with Grandmere,” I said.
“It was her,” he said. “She told me to stand still, and I couldn’t move. And then she opened up her mouth so wide, and inside it wasn’t a mouth, it was a deep hole.” He closed his eyes. I realized he was breathing hard, straining with the difficulty of describing. “She tried to swallow me. That was when I turned inside out. That was when I became the wolf the first time. The wolf could move when I could not. I ripped her in half, and she fell apart. And then”—he paused—“and then I left.” He seemed surprised to have come to the end of his tale so easily. “I have told no one that but your grandmother in my whole life.”
I tried to imagine that, a mouth like a deep hole. My jaw ached.
“Did she turn you into the wolf?” I asked.
He shook his head.
“I found the wolf,” he said. “I went deep in me and found a way out.”
I sat with that for a long time. I thought of every person I had met, wondering how many of them had wolves inside them and just had never pulled them out. Or perhaps more horrible: how many of them, in a moment of fear, reached inside themselves for something to save them, and came up empty.
“But Grandpa,” I said, when I could shake the thought, “how could Grandmere be the same woman? That was a long time ago. And you killed her!”
“No,” he said. “All I did was rip her in half.”
“But she was old,” I insisted. “You were a child then. Grandmere’s old now.”
He and Luma exchanged a look. Did they think I was stupid?
“Grandpa,”
I said calmly, “do you remember the night when the bells rang in town?” He nodded. “Do you remember how confused you got? How you thought they were the bells of your church in the old country?” He nodded again but more warily.
“What are you getting at?” Luma asked.
“I think you’re confused now,” I said. “I think that you’re very upset about Grandma Persephone, and it’s bringing up old memories. You thought the church bells were the same as when you were young. And an old woman came to stay with us and you think she’s the same old woman from when you were young.” I felt like I’d solved a mystery; I felt almost giddy. “Don’t you see? You’re getting things mixed up.”
“I believe him,” Luma said. “I think we should get rid of her.”
“Get rid of her?” I said. “Aunt Lusitania wanted you and Rhys to get rid of me. Is that what you think we should do with our grandmother?”
“Calm down,” she said. “It’s not the same. You’re one of us.”
“It doesn’t always feel that way. Grandpa, you promised to leave this alone.”
“You made me promise,” he said.
Luma froze.
“You can’t do that to him,” she said.
“Can’t do what?”
“Make people do things,” she said. “You promised me you’d stop when we were little.”
I felt suddenly very cold and grew very still, the way you might on a warm day when the wind sweeps a cloud in front of the sun. I wanted to tell her she was making things up, that I couldn’t remember promising, but it felt familiar: I couldn’t remember, but I could almost feel the place where the memory had been.
“I didn’t mean to do anything,” I said. “I don’t know if I did anything at all.”
“You have to fix it,” Luma said. “Tell Grandpa he can do what he wants.”
I looked at my grandpa, half under Luma’s bed. His hair was sticking up at an odd angle where Luma had mussed it with her hand. He seemed young, looking up at me like that.
“Grandpa,” I said. “You can do what you want. You don’t have to keep your promise to me.” I turned to Luma. “There, are you—”
He shot past me, out from under the bed, and leaped up at the door. He grabbed Luma’s dressing gown from the back of the door and ran down the steps and into the front hall. I followed after, stunned, with Luma right behind me. We reached the bottom of the stairs and I ran to the side table to get the candy dish. If things went badly, I wanted to have something heavy in my hands.
Grandmere was coming around the corner from the kitchen, holding a teacup. Grandpa Miklos planted himself in front of her.
“You get out of my house,” he said. “Get out of my house!”
“Miklos,” Grandmere said. “Surely, we can—”
I felt time slow as he leaped at her, changing into a wolf in midair. He was going to kill her.
“Grandpa!” I yelled. “Stop that right now!”
He twisted violently in the air, as though his back had been wrenched, and hit the floor at a bad angle. He scrambled to a four-legged stand, and looked at me, and looked at her.
“Now,” Grandmere said. “Miklos, I insist—”
He bolted directly at me, and I screamed, drowning out Grandmere’s words. As he came toward me, I thought dimly that I was not a Zarrin, because a real Zarrin would have fought tooth and nail, or at least hit him with the dish. And I just stood and let him rush me, shut my eyes against my impending death as his paws struck me in the chest hard enough to knock me to the floor.
He bolted down the hall into the kitchen, and I heard Margaret fling the back door open wide for him. And then he was gone.
My vision was red around the edges. I realized I couldn’t breathe. Panicking, I gasped a few times. Slowly, the air came back into my lungs. I lay there on the hall carpet for a moment, stunned, staring up into the gloom. The chandelier was missing a strand of crystals. Strange.
Grandmere rushed to my side. She stooped and felt my cheeks, and touched my shoulders and hands.
“Can you feel this?” she asked. I nodded. “Are you hurt? Can you move your toes?”
“Yes,” I said, or tried to. I coughed. “Yes, I’m fine.”
She helped me sit up. My head hurt, and I was dizzy. My back hurt where I’d hit the floor. My chest hurt where Miklos had hit me. I felt like crying, but I couldn’t get enough air in me to cry.
“You saved my life,” she said. “I knew it, I knew you were one of my own. I knew I had to come back for you, after all these years.”
She embraced me, more heartily and more carelessly than she ever had before, overwhelmed with emotion. And I felt something move, under her dress, under her skin.
It moved like an eel—started in her side and wound its way out into her arm, where it disappeared. I was still stunned, and that made it easier not to flinch. So she was hiding something, although I didn’t know what. I didn’t know what to think, or rather, I had so many thoughts all at once that they were turning into a kind of soup.
I pulled away from her embrace. She had a wound in her neck where Grandpa Miklos had attacked her. A long straight rip, like in fabric, but it wasn’t bleeding. Instead, the edges were beaded with funny orange stuff, like tree sap. Like my blood, but thicker. Stranger.
“I’m very tired,” I said. “I think I should lie down.”
She helped me upstairs to my room, and folded back the sheets for me, and tucked me into bed. She kissed the top of my head.
“I cannot tell you how long I have waited for you,” she said. “You aren’t my granddaughter. You are my child, my only living child.”
She shut the door behind me, and I was alone. Grandpa Miklos was afraid, and had fled into the night from her. And she was more than what she seemed. These two ideas chased each other around and around my head, while my chest got tighter and tighter, as though they were winding me up in rope.
Just because she wasn’t a human grandmother didn’t make her bad, I told myself. Luma wasn’t bad. Grandpa wasn’t, either, or at least, not completely. Maybe I could talk to her. She didn’t have to hide, not with us. And maybe if she didn’t have to hide, she wouldn’t be so mean to Luma, so cruel to Mother.
I was exhausted to the bone; the fight, and the panic after, had taken something out of me. And so I slept.
I dreamed that Mother was standing over me, dripping from the tub, watching me sleep. A drop of water fell from her forehead and landed on mine, and I realized it wasn’t a dream, and sat up. She started to leave.
“Wait,” I said. “Why did you come here?”
Since Grandmere had arrived, I had barely spoken to Mother. When she wasn’t demanded for dinner or an event, she spent more time than ever hiding in her bathroom.
“I just wanted to see you. I like looking at you.” It sounded like an apology.
“Come back,” I said. “I miss you.”
She came and sat down on the bed beside me, a little damp spot spreading out around her. She was wrapped in a bathrobe, but it too was soaking wet. She looked better than she had in months, all her tendrils alert and waving. They were pretty.
“You can’t be out of the water very long, can you?” I asked.
“Mère always hated that about me.” She looked away from me, turning her eye and her polyps toward the floor.
“Grandmere hated you?”
Her expression changed. She looked afraid.
“No,” she said, laughing nervously. “Not ‘hated’! I mean she was sad for me. She wanted better for me. No, no, not hated. Goodness, Eleanor.” She started to stand up. I caught her left arm and smoothed down the agitated polyps on the back of her hand.
“Shh, it’s alright,” I said. “I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to say that, Mama. I’m sure Grandmere loves you very much. I was just surprised.”
She sat and let me hold her hand for a moment, but she didn’t say anything else for a long time. She kept taking little breaths, as though she were about to begin a sentence, and
then letting them out again. Finally, she turned to me.
“I really love this house,” she said at last.
“I know you do, Mama.”
“And our family.”
“Me, too.” It wasn’t a lie, I realized. I wasn’t afraid of them anymore. “I think Grandmere helped me see that.”
Mother stood up and smiled at me.
“I’m glad she’s done that for you,” she said. “I really am.”
I understood something about Mother then that I hadn’t before: that she was willing to give up just about anything about herself to make someone else happy. And with that, I understood that having Grandmere here was hurting her—in little ways, maybe, but hurting her nonetheless. I wanted to tell her, but I was terrified that if I started talking about it, I’d start crying and never stop, like Margaret, weeping until I wailed the house down. So instead I leaned against her damp side until the brush of the polyps through her dress didn’t unsettle me quite so much.
After she left, I couldn’t sleep for a while. I heard the kitchen door open, and Rhys’s heavy tread climbing the stairs and slamming the door to his room. Outside, Grandpa Miklos was wailing in the woods. I wanted to run to him, to say—what, that I was sorry? But I wasn’t sorry that I’d stopped him from killing Grandmere, and when I tried to sit up, my chest and back hurt more than I could bear. I wondered if this was how Grandma Persephone had felt when she’d sent me away. She must have thought she was protecting them from me, from what I could do. For the first time, I wondered if she was right.
EIGHT
The next morning, Grandmere brought me breakfast in bed. She carried the tray up herself and sat next to me on the edge of the bed while I ate. She couldn’t stop looking at me, and sometimes she reached over to stroke my hand.
“I cannot believe what happened yesterday,” she said. “What nearly happened to me—terrible!”
I nodded. It was hard, in daylight, to believe what I’d seen and felt the night before. She didn’t seem like someone who could scare Grandpa Miklos so badly that he would run from his own house. She had a bandage over the wound on her neck, and when I asked about it, she shook her head.
“Oh, it is hardly anything,” she said. “A scratch.”