“You’ve always been strong to me.”
“And you to me. There’s no reason Marcy shouldn’t look up to you. You’re strong, brilliant, resilient.”
Rosalie snorted. “I’ve ruined everything without trying.”
“It’s not ruined if we can mend it.”
“Marcy and André will come back, won’t they? Please say they will.”
“What happened? Is there something else that went on that I didn’t see?”
Ah, so she proved herself a hypocrite with her own secrets. Rosalie blurted, “Marcy heard me say that I’d rather she be dead than marry an executioner.”
She refused to see his reaction; she couldn’t bear his disappointment.
It wasn’t until her tongue bled that Anatole said, voice careful, “Did you mean it?”
“I only meant I would want her to be in any position but mine, but I’d been frustrated at André and—it’s no excuse. My words were wrong, and it seems with Marcy, I only let her hear those wrong words.”
“Dead. Would that really be better? Would you rather be dead than here with me?”
“No, God, that’s just—we have this, and Marcy has what we give her, but I want her to have more options than hiding away.”
“Isn’t she already hidden? For her own protection?”
“Yes, until she’s old enough to know how to elude the cameras.” Those weighty, wood-and-nickel things. “And those eyes, all those damn eyes.” Rosalie’s mind soured, turned inward again. “God, Marcy. I always say the wrong words. I’m always her enemy when you tell her ‘yes’ and I have to tell her ‘no.’ Do you understand what sort of position that puts me in?”
Anatole said softly, that shade of soft only Rosalie could detect over the past two decades, “Darling, why do we tell her what she can’t do? Us, of all people? Won’t the world do enough of that?”
The world, the sick world, with its weaselly denizens. “Because we keep her safe, like you said.”
“The world isn’t safe, and our house is a part of the world.”
Rosalie wanted to yank at her hair. “But we’ve said for so long that it isn’t.” No blood in the bed, no death past the threshold. No war, no world.
Keep blood out of the bed, out of the house. Keep the dead where they rest.
“I know, but we, especially I, have lied to her. It’s a lie to think what I do out there won’t influence us here. And the world, it’ll tell Marcy what she can’t do because of her blood or my work or because of what she wants or how she looks. It’s just like when you were told you couldn’t ride a cycle, and what did you do? You were France’s first woman to race on a cycle. And you won, again and again.”
Rosalie couldn’t help her sadness, but it was a warm sadness. If life was a cycle race, one hundred wins couldn’t reverse one knee-breaking fall. “And you loved me for it.”
“I loved you before that, and I love you after.”
“But Marcy isn’t us, and this isn’t that decade, that century. I don’t want her to be us.”
“Are we really that terribly off?”
“Are you truly happy with a madwoman for a wife who shuts herself in and a duty you were forced to do despite all your’ attempts to escape it?”
“You aren’t mad.”
Yet there had been a time when they agreed to consult a doctor, a doctor Rosalie could only think of as Dr. _____, a shrew-eyed man who diagnosed her with “the American disease.”
Dr. _____ ordered her to rest in bed for months at a time, and she and Anatole hoped her head-moths would lessen. It made no sense, given her constant stays in bed anyhow, but the doctor said if she committed to isolation and stayed in bed alone every day, her mind would clear. After six months, everything was yellow like the fuzzy center of a wildflower. After a year, it still made little sense, but she smelled yellow, the yellow of old books and rain-ruined wallpaper. Dr. _____ instructed Anatole not to be with her at night, an order that gave him as visible an agony as the sticky, black turmoil inside her.
Anatole delivered her food at the door until the silence spoke too much. Rosalie called for him, and he was at her side in less than five seconds. Against the doctor’s orders, he was there, smelling of his cigars and roses and newspaper comics.
The muscles in her right arm spasmed when she sat up, and her legs were numb. Her fingers tingled. Sweat prickled her brow. She was sick with a tuberculosis of the mind, and it consumed her, killed her. “I’m going insane. I’m insane.”
She was dead.
“You aren’t insane.” Anatole’s gaze lingered on her nail-worried palm, and he clasped her hand to his lips. When the only thing between them was breath, she leaned against his shoulder.
“Not here, not here in this bed. Not where he . . .”
“I know.”
“I can’t go outside, not for long, but I can’t stay in this room forever. Not anymore. I’m afraid I’ll die. Please call Dr. _____.” Rosalie did her best not to cry, but it was hard. “He won’t believe me. He’ll tell me I’m paranoid, manic, stubborn, but he’ll do what you say.” Despite being the only soul to live in her own mind, Rosalie’s opinions about her psyche wouldn’t be trusted more than those of her husband. Dr. _____ likened her mind to a compass always pointing south. In a terrible way, she was fortunate Anatole would listen to her, that he had. That was, in that moment, the only way she could seize control.
Until she lost everything, Rosalie hadn’t realized she’d been happy. She wanted to be normal—like Anatole was desperately normal. She needed to recapture herself, the bright girl who loved cycling and feeling the breeze on her neck more than anything. But that image was like snow on hot fingers, gone as soon as she caught it.
Anatole settled beside her. “Would you like to go cycling while André rests?” Not outlandish; that was how they fell in love, after all.
“No.” Rosalie didn’t move her gaze away from the ceiling and its wooden ribs.
“Would you like to go to the garden?” She pitied Anatole. Though he wouldn’t say as much, he needed a regular, pleasant home life to offset his work. He needed a regular, pleasant wife.
Still not shifting, Rosalie whispered, “I can’t move. I don’t think I can move.” The pain in her lungs had a weight to it, and it was insurmountable. Even if she did move, she couldn’t absolve what she lost. She hated the world outside, hated the people who would gladly have lunch with an esteemed judge who ordered death sentences, but not the man who carried them out, the man denied another path in life because of his father’s occupation.
She hated the quiet house, and she hated the tense seconds before peering into André’s crib when she did bring herself to leave the bed. She’d snap if she left now, even when she wanted to. Even if she stayed still, she’d die because of the constant ache in her chest.
She wanted to move, wanted to follow the Vilaine where it met the Atlantic and allow the restless water to drift her away as if she were a trembling and soggy plank of deadwood.
Anatole set a hand on her forehead. When Rosalie finally looked at him, he was struggling to speak without crying. He said, “Would you like me to carry you, or hold your hand?”
Rosalie swallowed. How weak was she that she needed her husband to guide and carry her? But then, it took momentous effort to accept help at all. It took every bit of strength left in her bones and muscles.
Several minutes passed before she reached for his hand, and when she rose and went to the stairs, Anatole didn’t lead her, but rather followed as she stepped down at her own pace.
Despite being aware, she was a husk of herself as, on the hot, tickling ground, she rested her head in Anatole’s lap, and he smoothed his hand down her back.
Blinking away the memory, Rosalie asked, “But are you happy?”
Without hesitation, Anatole said, “Yes.” Oh, how she hated and loved that incorrigibility. She had to be silent and normal, painfully normal. Not too much blood or bile, no hysteria, no infectious words haunting t
he air like chanting flies, yet she couldn’t oblige
“Are you truly happy with Marcy gone? Or André?”
“Marcy will come back, and André will come around. There’s a bond there.”
“With you, perhaps. I don’t begrudge you his fondness, but he outgrew me.”
“I know he didn’t receive his sense of humor from me. He loves you, Rosie. You raised him since he was not even a year old.”
“What else could I do, leave the poor boy on his own?”
“He’s the son we lost—”
Rosalie cut him off. “Stop, now. Don’t say that. No, he’s not. He’s our nephew. He’s Juliette’s son, not ours. Don’t take that from her.”
Anatole asked with that soul-reaching stare of his, “Why have you never considered him to be like a son to us?”
Shouldn’t Rosalie treasure her sister’s only baby? Didn’t she? She didn’t hate André, of course not, and she didn’t hate Marcy, yet they both left. As they grew up, Rosalie kept away as much as she could, so she wouldn’t poison them, yet she managed to do it anyway.
Just what she had tried to avoid. It wasn’t fair for André to think of himself as a replacement for Ro—her son. It seemed obvious that a boy—her nephew, the son of her sister and dearest friend—would be like the son she lost, but it was cruel. Not just toward her son’s memory, but to André. He didn’t deserve to be the stand-in with the same shoes and crib.
But if André wasn’t a replacement, what was he? A nephew, yes, short-tempered and hot-tongued and sharp, but always with a hint of concern and this keen need to please. So like Juliette and her way with people, but with a bitter undercurrent.
How terrible was it that even when he fed from Rosalie, she trembled, yet she felt nothing toward him because she was mired in memory? From her, André drank the dead like gods drank ambrosia. No wonder something curdled in him. It was a mistake, feeding André and Marcy from herself, but it was the only closeness and selfish fulfillment Rosalie could afford. Besides, a milk bottle too could seethe with unclean, infectious things, so even that wasn’t a safe alternative.
Rosalie said, “I did it for André’s sake, so he wouldn’t think he was only meant to be a replacement, a consolation. That burden, that empty pit—André was just a baby. It wasn’t his responsibility to be that for us, to exist to fill another’s place. It still isn’t. Only our—only Roger could fill Roger’s place, which he…” Rosalie’s voice broke, and she cleared her throat. “I wouldn’t think it fair for Roger to fill André’s place if it’d been Juliette who lost a sister and son.”
“I suppose you’re right.” Anatole wiped his cheek, and Rosalie shook to the point her teeth rattled. “I still think of him every day, you know.”
Rosalie faced her husband so they were trembling and exposed together. “Don’t tell me that, don’t . . .” If she pulled away now, bolted away and locked herself in the washroom, she could maybe keep her resolve. Stiffen, inhale, lock herself away. If she hid and continued running, grief couldn’t find her. Despite stewing in concern after concern, she told herself if she didn’t wear mourning colors, she’d mourn less. Her insides would match the outside. That wasn’t a rational thought, but if she believed it enough, it could be, one distant day.
She said, swerving to another angle of the living room. “I killed him, Anatole.” She stood as far away from her husband as she could manage. “I killed him.”
12
Marcy
Marcy’s eyes opened, and white feathers snowed from the festooned bed canopy, as if the bed’s wings relented their down. She lifted the sheets off and went to the door. As she stepped out, a pall of purple-gray dappled with feather-snow and silver lights draped both sides of the hall, the ground cold and downy beneath her.
Someone was crying; she measured distance in sobs. Her steps thundered in her ears like a train beating its tracks. A pitter-patter of words marked her ribs like ocean winds on white whale bones.
Eventually, she found a figure on the floor, and it took a moment for her focus to clear. Moreau slumped himself against the wall and wiped at his eyes. His palms attempted to iron his cheeks.
“I’m not ready,” he murmured in a distraught, mucus-y way, over and over. His hair was disheveled like a disgruntled finch after an autumn rain. Was it raining? The sky hadn’t unfrowned last she saw it, but Marcy didn’t check the weather all that much.
“What is it?” she asked. “What’s wrong?”
Moreau startled, and he stared at her like she’d explode the moment he spoke. “You need to go back to bed. You need to leave before you’re taken.”
“By what?”
He buried his nose in his cupped hands. “I’m hungry.” That didn’t answer her question, but it was okay because she forgot what she had asked.
“Then why don’t you eat? You know where the kitchen is, don’t you?” If he didn’t, it was bad because Marcy had no idea where it was. She would’ve guided him if she did, though.
Her questions made Moreau cry harder, which bemused Marcy. She meant to help.
She asked, “Do you need a touch or—something?” Maman would have a nervous fit if she knew her only living child went around offering strange men embraces, but it was all she could suggest.
He stared at her like she’d sprouted horns and wings, and Marcy noticed him more. More colors came to her. As well as that, with half his tunic unbuttoned and collar in disarray, Marcy saw Moreau’s flesh better than when they had met, and he had reddish pink and purple marks like segmented moons on his neck and left shoulder.
Marcy pointed at the red marks. “What are those from?”
Marcy’s attention trailed down to his splayed hands, his ghost-white fingers, because his answer came in twitches. Three rings, that was what caught her fancy, and they looked like a little sapphire-ruby-opal centipede close to his creamy knuckles. He unlodged the sapphire ring with a thumb and forefinger, and it left a pink, depressed circle. He skated it up and down his marriage finger.
Before Moreau could answer, the door before them gave light and angled open. The monsieur of the manor stood in a robe.
“There you are,” he said to Moreau. “Have you recovered?” He wasn’t angry when he locked eyes with Marcy. His countenance dimpled in concern. “Dear, are you awake?”
Her brain tickled. “I think so.” She played with her hair like she twirled the pig-tailed telephone cord around the creases of her fingers as she talked to Jehanne.
The monsieur’s eyes grazed her body where her nightgown hung like hoary moss. They made her scalp tickle, and his lids fluttered for a moment, as if deciding the answer of an arithmetic problem. “If you don’t mind my saying so, your eyes are like glass.”
“I don’t mind,” Marcy replied, and he laughed under his breath. She saw moving shadows around his neck, the skin there pebbled and red, but when she blinked, they disappeared.
He continued, voice gentle like a father comforting a colicky infant, “Do you need help finding your way back to your room?”
“No, I’ll go. I’m sorry I interrupted.”
Jehanne’s father asked, “Interrupted what?”
“Your night.”
“Oh, you have nothing to apologize for. Are you quite sure you can find your way back? I don’t want you to have an accident. It’s a terrible thing for girls to wander alone in strange places.”
Parents were so worrisome. “Yes, monsieur. I know the way.”
“In that case, have a restful night, my dear.”
Moreau stood, and as Marcy pivoted around, a soft click came after her sixth step.
After her thirtieth step, Marcy snapped awake.
Where—all she had were the small wall lights. A hall, all right, so she hadn’t gone far.
It’d been years since she sleepwalked, since Papa or Maman had guided her to bed and, when they told her what happened in the night, she remembered none of it. Before the war, she’d have night terrors where she screamed, Oh God, Oh God,
Oh God, and it bothered everyone but her because she never remembered whatever she panicked about as she slept.
In that regard, she’d been blessed. Horror kept a respectable distance from her.
She should keep it that way and go back to bed, but curiosity gnawed at her like a jackal with a meaty bone. She wracked her brain for what she’d seen as she glided through the dark halls, and she inched back from where she must’ve come. With any luck, this path would lead back to her room, but all the halls looked the same, and when she happened upon an impressively large bedroom door, she realized she was lost, no doubt about it. Lost and alone.
All except for a noise, a noise she mistook for dripping water, and when she crept closer and froze, she leaned against the door.
Slurping, that was what it was, the slurp and smack of a feeding mouth.
She dared a look in the near-dark, and a guttered nightstand candle gave her half a picture. A figure on its knees, head moving as it gripped something like fingers—an uncurled fist. It was chewing at someone’s wrist.
It paused and slanted its head toward her.
Marcy ran. She flung herself as far as she could until her legs spasmed and the hall became more familiar. When she recognized the door Jehanne had gone through with her servant, Marcy didn’t even knock as she swerved inside. Her ankles protested the swiftness, but with no stopping, no hesitance, she threw herself on the bed and shook the closest leg.
That drew a shout, and someone clicked a lamp on so swiftly it was almost knocked off the nightstand.
Clair stared at Marcy with a tangled rat’s nest perched like a rook on her head. So did Jehanne, her eyelids slitted.
Marcy said, “There’s something wrong.”
Jehanne sat up and rubbed her eyes. “What?”
“Something’s wrong in your papa’s bedroom.” To Clair, the most adult of them, Marcy begged, “Please go check. Please. There’s something in his room.”
“What is it?” Jehanne asked.
“I couldn’t tell. It was too dark.”
Her friend asked, the skin around her eyes pinched, “Are you sure you didn’t imagine it?”
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