Dove Keeper

by Emily Deibler

  Marcy exhaled, which made a short whistle through her nose. “I think they loved you. Your maman, Juliette, Roger. I think they’d be proud.”

  “Thank you. I suppose they could be, God willing.” Rosalie rubbed her thumb into the wool of Marcy’s gown, her daughter’s fingers twisting the dark fabric of her skirt. When it looked as if Marcy’s eyes would spill over, Rosalie gave her the crumpled handkerchief, for what it was, resting in her pocket.

  “What was your sister like?”

  How odd. Nobody had asked that after Juliette died. “She’d chew on her hair and stick out her bottom lip whenever she wanted me to do something. I called her Fat Lip.”

  “You made jokes like that?”

  Wryly, Rosalie said, “Yes, back when I knew what jokes were.” Pity stirred to the forefront, pity that Marcy never grew up with her only sibling. “Before Roger.” Because silence would sting, Rosalie let words flood out without direction. “I—my child, I want to say you’ll heal from Jehanne’s death, but—well, you may not, and that’s just as right as if you do recover. Your papa and I will help in what ways we can.” What those ways were, they’d have to discover.

  “It isn’t fair she thought she had to die for everyone else. She should be here and safe. I should’ve let her know I loved her too much for that.”

  The space behind Rosalie’s eyes tightened. “But love, you did. You said as much. I don’t see how she could’ve not known.”

  Marcy put her head in her hands. “I just wish I had something like a picture to remember her by.”

  “I know, poupée. I know.”

  “Do you have a photo of Roger?”

  Rosalie hesitated. “Why?”

  “Because, well, I always wondered what he looked like, but I was afraid to ask because it’d hurt you and Papa. But I thought it’d make him real, which doesn’t make any sense, I suppose, but, uh, forget I—”

  “I do.”

  “Can I see him?” When she received no answer, Marcy added, “Is that . . .”

  Too quickly, Rosalie replied, “Yes, you can. I’ll retrieve them.” She left Marcy and ventured to the master bedroom. She felt under the mattress, and she unearthed the damned key. With the care of a pallbearer, she stepped to the desk and knelt in front of the locked drawer. When she unlocked it and freed it of two small, gray photos, she squinted to blur her vision.

  When she returned to Marcy’s room, she found the handkerchief had fallen to the floor.

  Rosalie started, “In this one . . .” She swallowed. “I—I know to you it’s likely a bit morbid.” Roger was not alive in this particular photo, and she couldn’t imagine how such a thing must seem to her daughter.

  Marcy took the photos.

  “He looks nice.”

  “Yes,” Rosalie replied with a roughness in her voice, “he was handsome.” Even though she had never let Roger go, she had forgotten how beautiful he was, beautiful in his simple, sleepy contentment.

  “His hair is really dark,” Marcy observed, as if her brother were warm and pink in her arms now.

  Rosalie looked at herself, younger and infinitely sad, wanting to die and sure she wouldn’t survive to the next year. A premature weariness lined her eyes and mouth. She was grateful for the years she’d been given, even the ones she worried she wasted.

  The first picture was a grotesque parody because she was in the same position—

  The second picture was Roger alive and reaching out. She swore he was smiling, no matter what the doctor said.

  Rosalie in the photo had upturned lips. Happy, for lack of a better word, since elation didn’t quite describe it, yet still saddened. Even with Roger alive, her post-birth lull nourished a seed of melancholy, yet it was happiness all the same, feelings uninformed by the dismal future.

  Marcy gulped and wiped her nose with her knuckles. “Thanks for showing me. I know it isn’t easy.”

  Rosalie remembered to breathe.

  Marcy bristled, so Rosalie asked, “What is it?”

  “Jehanne didn’t deserve to die, and—but she gave up her life, and for what?”

  “For us.” A black, scorching hatred numbed Rosalie’s more positive emotions. “I would’ve killed that monster for you.” If she could’ve, but it was clearly futile when she had tried with the gun.

  Marcy rubbed her cheek with the back of her knuckles. “Don’t talk like that, please, not you too.”

  “Too?”

  “I need at least one of you not to kill someone.”

  Rosalie wrapped her arm around her daughter’s shoulders. Marcy leaned into her mother’s touch as a child should. After a minute, she breathed so slow and soft that Rosalie thought she was asleep, until she spoke—

  “Maman, I loved Jehanne like she was my wife.”

  Rosalie didn’t know what to make of that, but she didn’t say as much. “You’ll find others to love” would be dismissive, like telling a mother who lost her child that at least she could have another, so she didn’t say it.

  She hesitated before saying, “When I said what I did about death and you marrying . . .”

  “Better off dead than marrying André.” Indeed. Good thing her daughter and nephew had such pristine memories.

  “I—I meant I wanted you to live and be free instead of being trapped and miserable.”

  “Are you miserable?”

  “No, I’m not, at least not because of you, André, or your papa, not as much as I was because of my grief, but I know you’d be, and I wanted you to have more opportunities.”

  “You don’t know, nobody can, but I guess you’d know more about marrying someone who will . . .”

  Rosalie wasn’t sure she wanted to follow that thread of thought. “I love your papa, and I’m—I’m so sorry I hurt you. I only wanted you to keep away from public attention enough that you’d be able to walk around without judgment one day.” She added, though her skin prickled as she spoke, “I never wanted you to be like me. It would be humiliating.”

  “Why? I thought you weren’t miserable? I may not know many people—you know, outside of our family and Jehanne. But I look up to you more than any other person. You’re a hero.” Doubt tugged. Surely not.

  “The police are heroes. You and André are heroes. I only came after . . .” The worst, she wanted to say the worst, but all of it had been beyond reckoning.

  “You helped me after Jehanne fell. If you weren’t there, I don’t think I could’ve made it down.”

  Her girl’s eyes were glassy like the film over Adam and Eve’s eyes after they’d betrayed God. Rosalie’s heart quickened because she didn’t know what it’d take to uncloud Marcy’s eyes.

  “Maman, I’m sorry about your valise.”

  Rosalie blinked, pausing longer than she thought she should. “Pardon?”

  “The case I put my clothes in. It burned in the fire. Sorry, I just thought of it.”

  “It’s nothing to fret about. I’ll survive without it.”

  Marcy closed her eyes slowly before opening them and staring at the floor. Rosalie remembered one of the few times she’d left the house with her family. She waded through the sea as Marcy and André laughed and chased each other on the shore. With the salty crust of the ocean’s dried tears between her toes, Rosalie felt the water’s force, its austere darkness and the sun’s frosty glare. She saw that in Marcy now, that weight and searching as the tides pulled and threatened to thrash and steal her unsteady footing.

  That day many years ago, Rosalie had been lost, and it’d been the children’s laughter that guided her back. Ever-persistent, Marcy wrapped her arms around her neck, and their cheeks met before Rosalie shrugged Marcy away for fear of making her daughter ill from the wet cold.

  Rosalie struggled to compose herself. “You’ve carried the hurt my words inflicted for too long, and I’m sorry. I’ll do whatever you need.”

  Quiet swelled between them. I am more like Maman than I realized, but no more. Guilt followed for the sake of her mother’s memory. O
h, Marcy, if only you’d met Juliette and her. But Marcy could, in a way, if Rosalie continued to carry them with her in stories and gestures. In grief, she had absorbed every last song and prodding joke.

  “André’ll probably marry somebody else, in the end. But I don’t think, I don’t think I ever really actually liked him in the way I thought. Not like I liked Jehanne.”

  Rosalie didn’t know what to make of that; Marcy and Jehanne hadn’t known each other long, but she could only imagine if the subject of her childhood infatuations—who, well enough, became her husband—had died while she still pined after an ideal. That, and could it be that Marcy did love another woman as Maman had loved and grieved Anatole’s mother? Maman had lived in shame and silence for most of her life, and Rosalie would be damned if Marcy would suffer the same fate. Despite that, she didn’t know how to broach the subject now.

  “I’m sorry” was all she could say.

  “Did you ever love someone besides Papa? Love as in, you know?”

  “No. Our families and what we’re involved with, it makes it hard to form bonds. I did—I did have men who fancied me, but I hardly reciprocated.”

  A buzzing filled her ears, then passed as quiet as fireflies.

  “Did you want me?”

  “Pardon?”

  “When—after Roger passed, did you really want me?” From the start, Marcy was more difficult. She needed to be to survive in this world. A new exhaustion flooded Rosalie, but she resolved to speak.

  Rosalie let out a heavy exhale through her nose, then cupped Marcy’s flushed cheeks. Marcy closed her eyes and leaned into one of her palms.

  “I was scared, but do you know how happy your papa and I were to have you?”

  Marcy’s eyes were still shut. “Have I ever made you happy besides that? Proud?”

  Had she made her child so starved for validation? Rosalie wanted to say, “You are so precious to me,” but it swelled in her throat. She was terrible at sentimentality. If she said Marcy meant everything to her, “everything” would be too little a scope. Rosalie toyed with her own hair while she tried to come up with a more concrete sentiment, one based on experience. Instead, she only made a pitiful, strangled noise, but Marcy smiled a little, so the meaning must’ve stuck somehow.

  “There’s never a moment you haven’t. Made me proud, that is. You’ve worried me, but I was never disappointed.” Rosalie stopped fooling with her hair. “I thought I’d never carry another child, never see them survive.”

  “I expect you’d never let me leave the house again.” Marcy wiped the tears from her cheeks.

  “We can go outside and—enjoy activities.”

  “Like what?”

  “We could go cycling. We, or I, would need to purchase one.” Flustered, Rosalie corrected herself, “Or two, rather. It’s been so long, and I’m not certain I like the riding as much as I once did.” Marcy’s expression fell further, if it were possible. Right, she didn’t know how to ride a cycle. “But when your papa returns, we can go somewhere today. We could walk, whatever you prefer. Or we could—”

  Marcy righted herself. “Where?”

  “Wherever you like, though I suppose my purse will give us a limit.”

  Marcy grinned and lifted herself off the bed, eyes bright and clear, and it was the first time any of them had smiled since the horror they witnessed. Shared images that skulked like wraiths in the nightscape, strung together with painful, biting gold like Ariadne’s yarn.

  Rosalie’s knees ached, as did her wrists, those senseless ghost aches that dampened and weighed down her body. The day beyond the walls was, as many early autumn, posthumous summer days were, stubbornly bright despite the chill, though rain had come, and it would return, but they could face it.

  “You’ll really let me go outside after all that’s happened?”

  “I just—I didn’t want to expose you to the looks people would give you if they discovered who you are, if they pay attention. In my experience, they do.”

  “Help me prepare for it. I don’t care about people judging us, especially ones I’ve never met. I saw how they are, and I don’t care.”

  Thinking about Anatole’s work, Rosalie replied, “Best to wait until the day brightens more before we arrive at the square because of, well . . .”

  “The stones need to be cleaned first,” Marcy said, her smile carrying this aged bitterness that hurt Rosalie’s heart.

  The walk to the Rennes square took approximately thirty minutes. Marcy’s head stayed tilted toward the ground. It lolled to the side as she stepped on acorns and kicked pebbles into the road cracks.

  They passed curious people with clothespins in their mouths and damp bedsheets in their hands, but Rosalie, also in black to respect the dead, guided her daughter so she paid them no heed. As they approached Saint-Germain square, a wooden, rain-pocked sign postured the town motto:

  Live in harmony.

  Rosalie’s belly coiled in tension as they approached the square, yet the wind smelled of fresh bread. They passed the fountain, and there sat a man with trembling hands and bandages around the top of his head. He would be one of many when the war ended, if the war ended. The wind, as cold as it was, didn’t chill Rosalie, and Marcy didn’t tremble, though she wrapped her arms around herself until she needed her hands to keep her hat on her head.

  The more they walked, the more Marcy sauntered about, her eyes alight briefly as she inspected the shop windows, each beaming sweet tart and darkly grinning flower. A drowsy contentment washed over Rosalie.

  “Maman?”

  “Yes, poupée?”

  Marcy’s eyes were half-lidded again, and she crossed her arms over her chest. “When will I stop hurting?”

  The calm faded. Rosalie paused, not wanting to make Marcy more morose, as if she could blame her, for what little her daughter recounted would drive most adults to madness had they been in her position for a minute.

  Rosalie offered a hand, still sore from when her pistol recoiled, and Marcy unfolded one arm to close that distance. “I’m not certain the hurt ever stops.” She almost said it never stops, that all scars twinge, but she wasn’t her daughter. Maybe it would be different somehow, yet Marcy cared so deeply.

  “That’s what I thought. Thank you for being honest.” Marcy looked peckish, with little color in her cheeks, and Rosalie didn’t want her to fall ill on their expedition. When the girl stepped, she lurched forward.

  “We’ll find little blessings, I think.” She hoped.

  Marcy shrugged, not meeting Rosalie’s eyes. “If such things exist.”

  “Are you hungry? Would you like to go inside someplace? Do you need to sit down?”

  “I’d just like to look around some more.” Marcy eyed a parked auto, and though it didn’t connect to the previous thread of conversation, she said, “I’d love to learn how to drive.”

  Rosalie held her words too long for comfort; she was reluctant to have Marcy inside one of those loud monstrosities. She feared for Anatole, even, and hadn’t enjoyed her own one-time driving experience, but she forced her body to lose tension, which was counterintuitive and unsuccessful.

  “I’m sure your papa wouldn’t mind teaching you.” Rosalie focused on the stones beneath them, the reliable tread of footsteps rooting their thoughts to the earth.

  Marcy stopped and stared at the ground too.

  Rosalie squeezed her cold hand. “What is it?”

  Her daughter muttered, head bobbing back and forth, “Seven-five-one, seven-five-one, but there’s more, aren’t there? And I need to remember them all, seven-five-one.”

  “What do you mean?”

  Marcy pointed at the cobblestones. “Papa killed a man here,” Marcy said, her voice void of weight.

  “Ah, yes, well, let’s go look at one of the shops.”

  Marcy crushed Rosalie’s fingers. “It’s a good thing they built drains here, isn’t it?”

  Rosalie fidgeted, and Marcy came back enough to loosen her grip. “Is there anyw
here else you’d like to go?”

  “It looks so different now with the sun. I wonder how they clean the stains, everything that doesn’t go below.” Marcy’s voice rose a pitch, and she pulled away. “Where does all that blood go, what doesn’t drain away? Does any of it go under the stones?” She grew quiet and soft. “Do you think the dirt is hungry? Do you think there are ghosts under there, ghosts who can’t eat because they don’t have heads? It drips, their blood, and rises under our feet like hungry water; it rises to eat us.”

  Ignoring her spasming legs, Rosalie knelt in front of Marcy. The manor tragedy had made all her limbs weaker, and she hoped she’d be able to stand again at the soonest convenience. At first, she gripped both of Marcy’s hands and traced the open, clean palms with her thumbs. Then, with a palm on Marcy’s shoulder and the other on her cheek, Rosalie said in earnest, “Please, poupée, stay with me. Would you like sherbet? Flowers? Books? I know how you are with stories.”

  Marcy’s eyes cleared a little, pupils shrinking. “Can we sit down somewhere?”

  Rosalie moved to stand, but her ankles protested. Testing the strength of her feet, especially after a walk, was a hardship. When she grimaced, Marcy came to her aid, extending both hands and letting her maman lean against her. Marcy supported her as best she could, and Rosalie said, “Thank you.” Pride swelled in her, stinging like thorns barbing her lungs, but the pain made her warm. What a pair they were as they limped to the closest bench and sat as one, a slanted tower.

  The strolling people hardly afforded Rosalie and Marcy a second glance, consumed in the rigmarole of their own lives, and though the two of them would never be whole or normal (indeed, what a word), the day had its comforts: the incessant birdsong, the scent of fresh bread, the gentle, rosy touch of cologne in the air, and the heat of Marcy dozing against Rosalie’s shoulder.

  If only for an hour, they could forget what it was to be empty.

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  Thank you to Mom, Noah, my loved ones, and to those who encouraged me throughout this journey. This book would not have been possible without my critique partners and first readers: Kelsey, Marí, Conner, Katie, and Professor Tony Grooms. Thanks to August for her support, and I am immensely grateful for the astonishing work of my cover artist, Victoria Davies, and for the hard work of my editor, Kristen Tardio. The support of those no longer here also immensely assisted me, so thank you Grand, Grandpa, Angie, Cathy, and Grandma. Leonard Wolf’s Bluebeard: The Life and Crimes of Gilles de Rais inspired portions of this novel.