Dove Keeper

by Emily Deibler

  Clair slipped a gossamer-thin robe over her cream-colored shift. “What were you doing outside his door?”

  Marcy straightened. “I don’t know.” To the second question, she answered, “I woke up from sleepwalking, and when I tried to find myself back to my bed, I got lost.”

  Jehanne reached out to her servant. “Let me go with you.”

  Clair replied, “Please, stay here. I’ll return shortly.”

  “He’s my father,” Jehanne persisted, following Clair step-by-step. “I should be allowed to go see him!”

  “I’m begging you, stay here. Your friend needs you.” Clair rushed out, the thud of the door leaving a swell of quiet.

  Jehanne huffed at the wood and twisted around to look at Marcy. “You really didn’t see it all, what really was happening?”

  “No, it was so dark. I didn’t know what else to do.” Marcy bothered her fingers together and hoped she didn’t send Clair into harm’s way.

  As if feeling Marcy’s concern, Jehanne sucked in a cheek. “We should’ve gone with her.”

  “She told you, us, to stay.”

  Ambling to Marcy’s side, Jehanne scoffed and flopped face-first on the bed. When she lifted her chin up, she blew away strands of crinkled brown. “I hate her orders and her rules. If I wanted a big sister, I would’ve asked for one.”

  “Typically, you only ask for a younger sister,” Marcy joked. It would’ve been nice, having an older sibling, but thinking about it was like listening to a sullen violin on a gramophone, except a thousand fold, so she put it away. Growing somber, she said, “It was strange. I sleepwalked, and when I snapped awake, I heard the chewing sound. I saw . . . maybe it was this waking dream, but I don’t know.”

  Jehanne held Marcy’s hands, twining their fingers together while she hummed in thought. “I’ve never sleepwalked, but I’ve seen strange things in my dreams, the—what I told you about. But I can’t imagine walking around while I did it. I can see why that’d bother you.” The validation livened Marcy, this late-night female camaraderie. “Do you think you need to go home?” Jehanne’s grip was twitchy, and she shifted her attention to the door.

  Marcy considered this, considered how she had waded through oppressive darkness once she snapped awake, but there’d been lights, and nobody had hurt her, if she’d even met anyone along the way. It wasn’t as if this was a new occurrence, though it was the first in a long time. And, at the same time, this was her first overnight stay in an unfamiliar place—at least, besides the oceanside trip.

  When she was smaller, that overwhelming darkness crept in and woke her from her sleepwalking. The shadows would breathe, and she would always feel as if they’d grab her and take her to a place of eternal night.

  Yet, the sun rose, the rose garden bloomed, and life continued.

  Marcy beamed. “I think I’ll live.”

  Jehanne tapped her elbow. “What is it?”

  “What if I came across your father, or one of the male servants, and they saw me in this gown?” Marcy tugged on the nightgown where it tucked into her panties, and she smoothed out the fabric.

  Jehanne eyed Marcy’s hands. “Does that mean something?”

  The gown was white and showed nothing beneath the linen, but still, no men but Papa and André had ever seen her dressed like this. With her menstrual cycle on top of it, Marcy’s angles rounded out and swelled in places they normally wouldn’t.

  “It’s just that it’s not proper.” By God, she sounded like Maman. “I could’ve made them uncomfortable.”

  “Father is a good man, and he wouldn’t think anything of it. Besides, maybe nobody saw you.”

  Marcy must’ve been as red as Papa’s roses by now. “I didn’t mean to imply your father is—”

  Jehanne elbowed her and laughed. “I know.”

  They both startled when the door creaked open, and Jehanne shielded Marcy with an arm.

  Mlle Clair stood in the doorway. After a pause, she staggered in. Her left cheek was red.

  Pushing herself off the bed, Jehanne asked, “What happened?”

  The woman straightened. “It is nothing, everything is as it should be.”

  “Did you speak with Father?”

  “Yes, he was asleep, and he was quite displeased I woke him. Now, if you don’t mind, he instructed me to return to him after I informed you that he’s in good health.”

  “Was anyone else there?” Marcy asked.

  “No.”

  Marcy persisted, “There was more than one person—er, thing in there, and I know what I heard.”

  Mlle Clair tilted her head, holding back the ghost of a sneer. “And what was that? Snoring?”

  Marcy bristled. She wouldn’t be mean to the woman, but she wouldn’t just be insulted either. “No! Noises like someone eating. Or drinking.”

  “Indeed, well.” To Jehanne, Mlle Clair said, “Your father asked me to return to him, and I likely won’t be back tonight.”

  Jehanne leaned forward, the balls of her feet touching the floor. “I want to go with you.”

  Mlle Clair hung her head as she hunched in the doorway, supporting herself on the frame. “Of course you do.” None of the servants Marcy met (all two of them so far) looked like they slept well, but Clair embodied this fatigue as if her soul was hundreds of years old and withered.

  “Please just tell me Father’s okay.”

  Mlle Clair said curtly, “He’s perfectly well.” She left in the same way as she did before, disappearing like a ghost. Jehanne groaned, turned, and reapplied her face to the bed.

  Marcy hesitated until she dredged up enough words to string together. “Is there something wrong here?”

  “No,” Jehanne said, muffled.

  “Are you sure? What about Mlle Clair? She didn’t look well.”

  Jehanne shrugged and crossed her legs, sitting by Marcy so their knees grazed. “She always looks worried.” Worried and sad, yes, Marcy had that impression.

  Jehanne looked to the side, squeezed her hands together, and pursed her lips.

  “But what about her cheek?” Marcy persisted. “It was red.”

  Jehanne frowned, brows working in thought, lips tighter together. She rubbed her palms over her eyelids. “Maybe it was just heat rushing to her face. She did have to walk a long distance.” Jehanne leaned into Marcy’s shoulder, which made breathing hard. “Everything is fine, trust me. Tell me one of your stories.”

  Can you be this dense? No, no conflict. She went away from home because of that.

  Marcy obliged, but not without a wiggling doubt that wouldn’t leave, like a cockroach skittering into a crack whenever she put her foot down.

  H

  She awoke close to dawn with Jehanne’s cheek still on her shoulder. Lifting her head, Marcy couldn’t help but admire how peaceful her friend looked. It was good knowing if she sleepwalked again, someone would watch over her. It was with reluctance that she returned to her room, careful not to disturb her friend. As she crossed the hall, silence pattered the walls like a heartbeat. The thudding rhythm burdened her bones, but no voices called to her.

  She dressed and decided to go to the dining room, hoping for company and, most of all, food. Comforting herself with food worked at home after she batted her lashes at Papa. She wouldn’t mind any room she found, so long as there was food.

  Traveling down the hall, she found herself distracted by all the religious paintings, and the silence broke. Raised voices. She flashed back to Maman and André before her cousin had run off.

  When she found a half-opened door and peeked in, she recognized Moreau and Clair, their profiles a harsh chiaroscuro with the angry fireplace behind them.

  Though eavesdropping was wrong, of course, Marcy knelt behind the door and looked in.

  Moreau finished whatever he started, “—climbed on the others’ backs and escaped. I can’t believe it ran so far, and the little devil’s tongue—” It was all incomprehensible to Marcy.

  Mlle Clair crossed her arms. �
�I don’t want to hear anymore.”

  “But this’ll all be over soon. After this, I’ll be free, and you could be free.” M. Moreau’s expression knotted. “Don’t you see? This is all a new beginning, a better one.”

  Mlle Clair shook her head. “I couldn’t.”

  “Be free?”

  “Do what you’ve done.” That piqued Marcy’s curiosity, and she instinctively leaned forward.

  Moreau clasped his hands together, and Marcy realized he was shaking. “Milla, do you think I enjoy it?”

  “Enjoy what?” Mlle Clair’s eyes widened like sauce bowls. Her hair was like a disrupted briar patch, and her clothes were rumpled, as if she had slept in them, or as if they had rested wrinkled on the floor and then were re-worn. Maybe she enjoyed sleeping nude. Marcy wouldn’t pass judgment, regardless. “Hurting—Christ, Tristan, do you actually touch them?”

  Touch them? Touch what? Touch whom?

  Moreau’s fingers threaded together, and he took great interest in them. As far as appearances were concerned, he looked about the same, though finding a point of reference was difficult, since Marcy had only known him for less than a day. “I . . .”

  “Damn you, look at me. Tell me, do you touch them?”

  Moreau stuttered for what seemed like a minute. Sweat pooled under Marcy’s dress. “The master makes me. Do you think I want to? That I want to feel unclean and unholy every single second of the day?”

  Clair snapped, “It seems to me you do!” Her tone could split a tree. Marcy wished she knew what “them” was. It could range from monsters, which was outlandish, to feral cats, which was more likely, but boring.

  Moreau snarled. “Aren’t you the same?”

  “You bastard. I’d never—”

  Moreau broke and flailed his arms. “But you don’t stop all the evil, do you? But by God, you’ll judge me for trying to find some sort of salvation from it, for doing what I have to, so I can live.”

  Clair shrunk and stepped back. “Do you see what you’re becoming? You’re dying. You’re letting yourself become tainted.”

  “Letting myself?” Moreau’s voice was strained. “I don’t tell you what you’ve endured is your fault, but should I? Should I tell you that if only you were sweeter to the master, he’d give you more?”

  “This is what he gives me.” Clair pushed her sleeve up, but Marcy couldn’t see why. She could only see the blue shadows playing on Moreau.

  He said, softer, “You don’t think he hurts me too?”

  Marcy’s blood turned to ice, and Moreau stepped toward Clair with open arms.

  She exploded like a cornered cat. “Don’t touch me, you beast! You’re filthy!”

  “Milla, please, I—I’m begging you—”

  “Leave! We’re both disgusting, ruined.” She paced and tugged at her hair so hard Marcy winced. “We’re damned filth, filth.” Like her legs were two crumbling wax pillars, Clair collapsed by the hearth and heaved with sobs. She muttered Nonononono until it became a hoarse Whywhywhywhywhy.

  Failing to start a sentence despite multiple tries, sputtering like an engine before stalling, Moreau rushed to leave.

  Marcy hurried away from the cracked door and squatted behind an empty decorative table. Her heart thundered in her ears.

  Moreau stormed out and, thankfully, went in the opposite direction. After his back shrank enough, Marcy found the courage to breathe and lift herself up.

  She needed Jehanne.

  13

  Rosalie

  Anatole stared at her as if she had caught fire from a stroke of lightning on a cloudless day. “Love, my heart, how could you’ve known the dosage was wrong? The medicine was supposed to help. You did as the chemist instructed.”

  But it was poison, like Rosalie. She poisoned Roger, then she poisoned all else. A goddamn cough, that was all his sickness was, a tiny cough, but he’d been hungry and squirming and alive and hers. If she hadn’t gone to the pharmacist, if the pharmacist hadn’t made the error, if she hadn’t listened to his instructions and hadn’t done just as the paper said.

  When Rosalie snapped back to herself, Anatole approached, and it should’ve been comical, the way they circled around the living room. She stared at the lamp table, the couch, the curtains, anything but Anatole. He stepped close, and she swiveled away so she didn’t have to see what she’d done to him. They’d avoided speaking like this for so long. Maybe, just maybe, she could preserve herself. Lock herself away, lock Roger away as he was before that winter morning–when she woke up with him dead beside her and she screamed.

  And yet, it was almost a relief for Rosalie to tell Anatole her doubts and worries, but not relief enough. Enough, that elusive bird.

  “It wasn’t your fault, remember? I told you, I said, that day.” The strain in his voice broke whatever he wanted to say, yet Rosalie understood and lost herself in another unwanted memory.

  Still sore from birth, Rosalie couldn’t bring herself to leave the bed most days. The bed, the marriage bed, Roger’s grave. He was born in our bed, and he died there. Both she and Anatole neglected the house’s cleanliness. He would try to hang his coats, they would fall, and he didn’t bother to pick them up, so when Rosalie went downstairs once a week, black puddles of cloth marked the floor.

  She and Anatole both stunk something rancid and, when he thought she was asleep, Anatole paced, tapped his pen against his journal, sat on the edge of their bed, smoked his pipe, and wept to himself. Her husband never smoked too close to her, and Rosalie feigned sleep, though despair paralyzed her enough. They should’ve been clasping one another, but Rosalie couldn’t speak to let Anatole know she was awake, so she mourned the abyssal depth that yawned between them, that hopeless stretch of bed that reached on and on like a lightless canyon.

  Then, Rosalie watched her sister give a last heave of breath, and she was the one who called Maman, despite Anatole’s offer to do it. André became theirs. During their nearly mirrored pregnancies, Juliette fretted that André would be stillborn like her daughter, Albertine, two years before when she was still in late adolescence. That death startled Juliette away from having children for a long while, and when she conceived again, Jean Baptiste died of sickness, leaving her a frightened widow. Still, Rosalie and Juliette were pregnant at the same time, so they carried each other along.

  Rosie, I can’t take it if this one dies. Juliette cried into her sister’s sleeve, their swollen bellies pressing together. It’ll end me. I need another pretty girl so our little ones can play together. Rosalie caught her tears; she always did.

  After watching Juliette die, after hearing her mother sob on the telephone for an hour about the funeral and how Juliette loved roses and carnations, the truth didn’t register in Rosalie’s mind as she set the telephone down. Her sister was dead. The consumption had gotten her. She had had a funeral.

  Her sister was dead.

  Juliette loved roses because they reminded her of you.

  When Anatole had moved to her side, his fingers brushing her back, she fled to the bathroom they shared and sat on the commode. With her head in her hands, she couldn’t bring herself to cry. She wanted to because Juliette was her sister, and crying would mean Rosalie was alive, that she was normal.

  But no, she was dead in all but body. God had killed her; Anatole had killed her. Blame came easy and hot like bile. Instead of unmoving despair or nothingness, rage bubbled inside her and threatened to overwhelm her sight. She dug her nails into her palm, and she wanted to hurt someone, hurt herself. She hated the pendulum of emotions from crushing melancholy to numb resignation to overpowering fury.

  Nightmares assaulted the pale hours she slept. At Rosalie’s request, Anatole suckled her after Roger’s death and before André’s arrival. It was a bizarre state of grief they were in, the odd sort of aching, joyless intimacy they shared. When they wouldn’t speak, that was all they had. His drinking from her relieved, though only a little, the strain of carrying milk. Still, the more Anatole obliged Rosali
e, the longer she’d keep her breasts full, which seemed contrary to moving on, but she wasn’t ready to be empty.

  While grieving Juliette, Rosalie held André with milk still in her. That was bitter luck, her ability to feed him. She was surprised she could have milk in her at all, with how dead she was.

  Maman visited one afternoon, sitting with her mapped, spindly hands primly in her lap. Rosalie spoke to her in the living room, herself strewn across the couch, sinking down into the cushions, head on a pillow. Maman had a miscarriage once, awoke to a sea of blood in her marital bed, and this was her attempt to breach the distance between her and her surviving daughter.

  Rosalie sat up to make room for Maman. André, heavy yet little in her arms, sucked on an unbrushed length of hair.

  She said to Maman, “Isn’t this what you wanted? You once told me you’d rather see me dead than married to Anatole.” Here it was. Anatole had killed her. So Maman could rejoice now. Everything in this life was posthumous, the postscript of an all-too-drawn-out letter.

  André sniffled, and Rosalie stiffened. No, he couldn’t be sick, not like Juliette or Roger. Could God be crueler than He was already?

  Maman had replied, “I should’ve never spoken to you that way.”

  Rosalie found all her grievances with Maman had no stopper. “I’d rather you never speak to me at all.”

  André wailed.

  In tears, Maman said, “Roger wouldn’t want you to be so lost.”

  Rosalie sneered. “He can’t want anymore, can he?” Her voice cracked when she tried to say his name. “He was too young to want for anything but milk and for someone to clean him. And what happened? The hospital cut into him before he could talk or hobble, much less want me not to mourn for him.” A more bitter thought consumed her: No son of theirs would ever find happiness.

  Instead of calming herself or weeping, Rosalie lashed out until Maman wept, “I can’t bear this.”

  Maman was right. She couldn’t. You were supposed to be the one comforting me. It was all a succession Rosalie couldn’t keep up with at the time. Rosalie birthed Roger, Juliette grew ill, Roger died, and Juliette died. Maman succumbed to a heart attack a few days after Roger’s death. Because Juliette was gone, Rosalie and Anatole took in André. Maman had touched Rosalie, and Maman died, and Anatole clung to their nephew as they discussed preparing the nursery. (It had all been Rosalie’s fault.)