Dove Keeper

by Emily Deibler

  The moment she stepped onto the trellis, it felt like it’d give way, but she climbed and climbed. The smoke wouldn’t leave her nose and mouth. Before she registered the ground at her feet, she stumbled, blood thudding in her ears at the pace of a horse’s run. Even then, an eerie calmness invaded her, and hands steadied her.

  Lurching, Marcy could not free herself of the stench of smoke, of cooking meat, or the sight of Jehanne falling. She curled deeper into Maman as the world was smoke. The sky, threatening rain with its intense violet, shunned them, and she rocked against her family.

  When the rain hit, it clup-clopped at their knees. Marcy was only aware of one presence: the lead weight of a full burlap sack spilling needles down her thighs and her belly swelling like a rot-sweet apple. Maman motioned toward the auto (had she really driven it here?), but Marcy didn’t have the nerves to climb the auto. Maman carried and settled her into the backseat with André.

  “I didn’t know you could drive,” Marcy mumbled.

  Maman set a hand on her temple and brushed the sticky hair back. “I’m adjusting, poupée.”

  As her vision blissfully faded, a heavy slosh pooled in her until the fiery chill gave way to wheels unsteadily beating down the road and the mourning banshee wail of sirens.

  27

  Rosalie

  With a newspaper in both hands, Rosalie sat on the front porch and collected her thoughts. The ash-gray photo of children huddling together by an officer’s car stirred her attention. In the dying dawn, crow caws and birdsong mingled. The leaves skirting the trees and scattering across the chattering lawn were as scarlet and gold as the tips of waxwings’ tails, yet the wind had the taste of winter to it.

  A week, it’d been a week since she, Marcy, and André were scrubbed clean at the hospital and interrogated one by one about their experiences. André snarled and broke when anybody, from the gentle nurses to the soft-spoken doctor, touched him. All except for Rosalie and Marcy. Even Anatole, released within a day of the manor’s collapse, couldn’t go near him.

  “What happened, my heart?” Anatole had asked Rosalie last night when they found themselves alone in bed, which felt both more welcoming and more alien than it had in decades, this little cradle for all her sadness. They each kept taking turns watching over their silent daughter and nephew, and sleep seemed a long-deprived dream, the water after a forty-day desert journey.

  “Can I tell you? It’s all too much and too little. God, it’d be better if you never hear everything we saw, all of us. I don’t even . . .” Rosalie didn’t know exactly what was under the manor beyond André’s fractured account and eventual refusal to speak, Marcy’s stunned silence, and newspaper reports of the national police investigation and the solving of missing children cases.

  “Anatole,” she whispered, “in the wine cellar, I saw blood and rot. I thought Marcy had died, and I couldn’t move.”

  He rested his hand on hers.

  “You saved them. Marcy and André would’ve died without you. And the children too.”

  “Oh, I’m your hero now, am I?” she teased, though her fatigue sapped away the lightheartedness.

  “You never stopped being my hero.”

  “Flatterer.” Rosalie huffed and spent a second too long straightening a loose curl. “I’m sorry. I’m sorry for being such a, as my sister would say, femme chiante.”

  He rubbed his thumb between her knuckles. “You never were.”

  “Then I’m sorry for my hurtful words.”

  “You were grieving.”

  “So were you, in your own way.” She swallowed. “If you ever think you can’t cry or act strange with me, please know you can because—because you’ve always let me break. You’ve always let me be strange.”

  “I should’ve told you the truth about André’s daughter,” Anatole conceded, and they clung to one another; he smelled of his cologne and faint petrichor, and they fell asleep like that. Before the dreamless rest, she thought sourly of Jehanne and the man who alleged to be her father, their black, crumbling limbs webbed in the cold grave of the fire.

  In the morning, Anatole left her side for a job, and she supposed then he had gone to the Rennes square alone, given André’s trouble walking. When she looked in André’s room, before she picked up the neglected newspaper, its date going three days back, her nephew’s dozing form confirmed her suspicion. It was just as well because the cold only agitated André’s recent injury, and the last thing he needed was the onset of illness.

  She needed to go inside now and face the chronic dread in the house. How strange for her haven from the world to seed fear, but she supposed the shadows had been alive all along.

  Most importantly, more important than her fear, Rosalie didn’t like how close Marcy, her body like stone, had come to the fire.

  Had come toward the balcony’s edge.

  I had only held her moments before, when she smelled of death and urine, when I thought she’d died and was unsure she wasn’t but a fading vision—I haven’t held her that close since her birth. And I almost lost her again.

  Even then, they had established a trust, no matter how meager; she had trusted Marcy and André to find their ways out, and she had promised to catch and guide them.

  When they returned home after their stay in the hospital, Jolie capered about and celebrated, and neither Marcy nor André afforded her a glance as her tail went back and forth like a frenzied clock pendulum. Despite the distant reception, Jolie hardly left either of them, but rather alternated between the beds and only reluctantly padded away to mess outside or eat at Rosalie’s command.

  And it was in Marcy’s room where Rosalie often found her daughter and the dog resting together, refusing to part.

  Rosalie went inside, the front door shutting softly as she glowered at the newspaper crumpled in one clenched hand; the rest of the police force. On that gray day, just after the police, the cameras arrived on that patch of earth Rosalie, Marcy, and André found themselves on after Jehanne and the monsieur, that bastard, had died and the manor had burned to expose the worms beneath its carcass.

  On the paper she held, the words and blurry faces had their own little black heartbeats and sped together. The dead children, some in odd clothing unfit for the times, others nude, all had their tongues and hands removed.

  Rosalie tossed the folded newspaper into the fireplace.

  When she went to André and asked how he was, he spoke of anything but his time below the wine cellar. He had a fading red mark on his wrist where Rais had clutched him, another on his shoulder, which she’d seen when his clothes were torn at the manor.

  He was careful not to show anybody his injuries. Rosalie didn’t know how many burns he had, and she feared asking would provoke a sobbing fit or uncontrolled violence against himself or the furniture.

  And it was while thinking on this that Rosalie stood outside André’s door. His room was simple and clean.

  Resting on his side, eyes bloated strangely like a tired frog’s, he waved carelessly. “Salut.”

  She went to sit by him, making sure not to knock against the chair André balanced his horned cane against. As she settled beside him, he moved awkwardly to join her. André’s breath reeked of wine, and his voice cracked.

  “Do you want a piece of candy? There is some in the oven.”

  Looking lost, André asked, “Is that all you came for?”

  “I didn’t make them.”

  “That’s not what I asked.”

  “I wanted to see how you were. I suppose it’s stupid to ask.”

  “Did I tell you about my journey to the appliance factory? I think I may be hired there.”

  Rosalie patted his arm and smiled, though she was unsure how to feel, having never been familiar with factory work. “I’m glad for you, if that’s what you want.”

  “I think it’ll go better than past endeavors.” André rubbed his hands together.

  Rosalie shook her head. “Don’t worry over that today. Just rest.�
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  His gaze flickered around the room, as if scouting for hidden threats.

  To comfort him, she said, “If you want, I’ll bring you milk.” It sounded foolish once she heard herself.

  André released a small laugh. “I’m not a boy any longer.” He was once a soldier, and now he was a father, and he likely believed she saw him far removed from the little boy who’d follow her around the house once he’d learned to hobble.

  It was a mistake on his part.

  André may never, as long as he lived, reveal that he needed someone to care for him while he recuperated, somebody to give him what he couldn’t ask for. In time, André may decide to reveal every aspect of his trauma, but she couldn’t force his willingness. He could snipe and deflect, but she wouldn’t be so easily deterred in helping where she could.

  He offered a faint smile that reflected the remnants of her sister’s cheerful son, the child always so eager to please, whose energy turned to anger and a need to surpass, to wipe out his insecurities and the fear that he was potentially not enough no matter how much he worked to uphold his uncle’s legacy in the future.

  “Coffee will likely not help.” She briefly touched his cheek with the back of her hand.

  André clasped both her hands. “I’m not ill.”

  “Your temperature says otherwise.”

  “Tante?”

  “Hmm?”

  He squeezed her hands. “Thank you. I’ll do the best I can to repay you and Oncle. I know I’m a pain, but I’ll make a worthy nephew out of myself.”

  “There’s no need for repayment. We took to the duty of raising you, not requesting a loan for your life.” She exhaled through her nose. “I’m sorry.”

  His wandering eyes settled on hers. “For?”

  “For telling you your choices were stupid.” She, out of anyone, should’ve known what it meant to shrink in a mother figure’s shadow, to think nobody thought her worthy despite any reassurances of the contrary.

  André laughed, and it was hard and empty. “You weren’t wrong. After what I did, I ended up in a nightmare.”

  “I was cruel. You didn’t deserve that, nor did you deserve for me to call you a whore.”

  André scowled and corrected, “Less than a whore.” With biting joviality, he spoke in what may’ve been an attempt at lightheartedness. “Look at me now. I probably couldn’t find someone to pay for me.”

  “You don’t think you deserved what happened in the manor, do you, whatever it was? Because you didn’t. Nobody deserves what that monster did.”

  “Forget what I said.”

  He was withdrawing. In time, maybe, he would trust her. She would wait. After all, it had taken her two decades to find what words she could.

  “I’ve never despised you, neither you as my sister’s son nor you on your own.”

  His smile was watery. “That’s good to hear.”

  “Do you mind if I ask what happened in the pit?” Because of the stains and the comment Rais had made, she could assume, as much as she wished her thoughts were hyperbolic. She didn’t want to dredge this up, but she thought if she didn’t, such trauma would be neglected.

  “I was dragged there after I tried to stop a child from being kidnapped.” André dragged his palms down his face. “I—he . . . I can’t, I’m sorry.”

  “You don’t have to speak about anything that hurts you. It’s all right. I’m sorry to have brought it up.”

  “Part of me wishes I had died there so I don’t have to relive it. If it weren’t for Marcy or Oncle or you, I might’ve just let myself die.”

  Stunned, Rosalie stared at the floor and let a burgeoning silence pass. “It would’ve ruined us if you died.”

  André’s voice was ragged, the dark hair on his face deepening the shadows of his scowl. “I’m ruined. I was less than nothing to him.”

  Catching his reference to the monsieur of the manor, Rosalie insisted, “He’s nothing, not you.”

  “He—he took me, and nothing I knew could stop him, none of that hay I sliced, all those times I saw Oncle pull the rope. Nothing prepared me.”

  Rosalie’s eyes burned, but she didn’t interrupt him.

  He continued, “And that bastard took all his victims with him. Except for those few children.” He swallowed. “Except for me.” He clung to her and apologized for a sin sloughed on his faultless body, faultless for what he had suffered.

  “Listen to me, whatever happened, you are blameless.”

  Roughly, André asked, “Am I?”

  “Yes.”

  Rosalie let André cry against her, harsh drawls making him tremble, and she touched his head like she had done when he fit into her arms after she fed him. When he was a baby, she’d rub his scalp and his eyes would roll back in contentment. She settled her hands on his head and back and stayed that way.

  Sitting by her nephew, she wanted to take his pain and discard it where he’d never find it. She imagined if she had been shackled and endured what he did, she’d be in the very same state. For the first time in years, she sang her nephew to sleep, even when he requested no such treatment. Besides the children, only he and Marcy could say what they witnessed beneath the wine cellar, and rage spilled through her thinking of it.

  Deeper into the excavation of the manor’s ruins, the police discovered two of many bodies, described to be holding each other in a shadowed, webbed embrace, a ghastly, splintered mirror before they settled into one another as ash to blacken headlines. Lurid visual evidence to pore over, an abundance of details gathered in the myriad chambers, both open and concealed, but it was all collapsed blackness. Part of that felt right; she felt as if the victims didn’t need to be in the papers, as if the world needed more black-and-white atrocities to greet them as they awoke.

  Her heart cramped as she read the newspaper reports of the bodies found both above and below the ashes. The men who sacrificed their lives to save her daughter, the children, the sheer, callous waste of it all.

  Leaving André, Rosalie went to the kitchen and retrieved candies from the oven. They dimpled and caved on the cloth napkin. Pain came to her then, and she leaned against the stove.

  Again, Marcy—red, blue, and purple against a moony frown of white, the black smoke veining behind and around her, and the scarlet of her almost-fall, the dim, accepting gray of her brow.

  When Rosalie knocked on Marcy’s door with a free hand, her daughter twisted her head, eyes swollen and half-lidded from lack of sleep, tears, or both. A precarious tower of books obscured the lamplight, making her eyes dim. Her hair was an upturned basket of unraveled yarn. Jolie raised her head and, as if intuiting Rosalie’s purpose, padded off the bed and past her, likely moving to join her other patient.

  Rosalie paused, unsure and reminded of when Marcy had almost spilled over the balcony. Even from that height, she had noticed Marcy’s eyes were entranced with a force that curled her bones. That moment had taken at least a decade off Rosalie’s life, thinking her daughter as bewitched as she had been during her early sleepwalking episodes.

  Worse, as a week passed, Marcy refused to look at her papa. With a shaking voice, Anatole recounted how she would always feign sleep when he tended to her bedside, and not even a good-hearted joke stirred her to relent. Rosalie didn’t understand it; Anatole had nothing to do with the atrocities an undead man created.

  “I brought you candy.” Marcy took the napkin and stared at the debased chocolates. “They were more intact when I fetched them from the oven.”

  “Thank you.” Purple circles formed shadows under Marcy’s eyes as she rubbed a finger along one glossy, round shell before setting the gift on her nightstand. The nightmares, the grotesque nightmares. Rosalie brushed her thumb against her daughter’s knuckles.

  “I’m sorry about Jehanne.” Bad idea, too direct. She should’ve let Marcy mention Jehanne first. Swiftly, she added, “I’m so glad we didn’t lose you or André.” The room had a thickness to it, a rank heaviness like their last seaside visit
; the weedy air was heavy with salt and she imagined the shells in the water, tangled with siren hair and fishing wires, love knots.

  Rais and Jehanne. How many years of little cadavers were in that horrid place? No, Rosalie couldn’t believe that man’s story about being alive for hundreds of years. A madman, that was all he was, all he could be, a man who thought himself old, the original Bluebeard. An elaborate refraction, and he had manipulated his daughter, caused her to doubt her identity. Jehanne had martyred herself rather than leaving her mad father and living a fulfilled life.

  “I’m glad we didn’t die too.” Marcy seemed to force herself to laugh, but it came out as a hoarse croak. Her smile didn’t match her eyes, and it cut Rosalie. An untouchable ache claimed her, a piddly desire to return to the oceanside, the half-formed shore that haunted her dreams, a dreamy solstice veil with strings of seaweed and crab eyes and hair.

  Then, Marcy darkened in a way that could only be felt. She said, “I just hate that he won, that demon All he wanted was to die with Jehanne.”

  “How do you know?”

  “Because of his eyes during the fire. He didn’t want to die alone.”

  “He didn’t win. Listen to me, darling, you can keep Jehanne’s memory alive, and she’ll matter and go on, even if she’s not by your side.”

  “Maman,” Marcy croaked.

  “Hmm, poupée?” Rosalie worried her words had hurt more than she intended.

  Marcy’s eyes flitted between Rosalie and the floor. “I don’t want to be broken for love. I don’t want it to be like in the stories. I don’t want to end my life or marry some man and forget.” Breaking because of love, that agony that smelled of a hot summer when the lilies were in full bloom and the air tasted of pollen and smoke. Rosalie remembered a faint, misty little scene of Juliette snoring, her hair sprawled on a book of Baudelaire poetry. “Do you ever think what things would be like if we didn’t lose anyone?”

  “I do.” Rosalie thought for a long time. “I do often wonder, if things had been different, how everyone would’ve gotten along.” But the remorse hurt too much, the phantom never-images of Maman and Juliette holding a newborn Marcy and patting her hair.