by Zoje Stage
Greta wore black and green velvet with great aplomb and hobbled on her ruined feet.
“I need to get to Seraphina’s,” she said. “I have an appointment.”
Seraphina was known in certain circles as an expert and expensive dominatrix.
Suzette grasped that the apartment belonged to Greta, and she and her friend were merely guests, or squatters, because only Greta had means—wealth acquired through a lawsuit from the devastating fire.
“Can I call you a taxi?” Suzette asked, remembering her friend’s instructions. She was glad Greta couldn’t see her face. It was a struggle to hide her confused thoughts. Why would a girl who had obviously suffered immeasurable pain, and maybe still did, seek the services of a woman who inflicted pain for a living?
“No, I’ll walk,” said Greta. “I just need the address. And then point me in the right direction.”
Suzette looked it up and Seraphina’s was more than a mile away. She offered again to call a taxi, unable to imagine Greta hobbling on her stubs for a mile, up and down concrete hills. Greta, again, declined. Suzette followed her outside, noticing that Greta didn’t hold a hand in front of her, but walked without hesitation, as if she could see.
Suzette pointed her in the right direction and bade her farewell. Greta headed away, limping but determined.
The dream troubled Suzette, and she’d thought about it many times throughout the day. Why would a girl who’d suffered through so much seek the services of a woman who promised to hurt her more?
The fire popped, sending up a spray of glowing bubbles. Alex and Hanna both gazed into the fire as they ate. It had a mesmerizing effect on everyone.
And then it dawned on her.
Greta needed her pain to become pleasurable.
It was the only way she could face the future.
The timing of the dream was obvious; fire had been on her mind. Witches’ Night. And the wrongful killing of a once-innocent girl, Marie-Anne Dufosset. Her subconscious was always working in the background, and the dream rekindled an awareness that she preferred to suppress: except for Alex, she’d remained nearly friendless as an adolescent and an adult. But it was Greta, the inspiring centerpiece of the dream, who gave her the most to ponder. Something horrible had happened to her, but she refused to be a victim. She sought to overcome the bane of her existence, and possibly even make it a source of joy.
“Need anything else?” Alex asked, breaking Suzette’s reverie, as he got up with his empty plate.
“It was delicious, thank you. We owe Daddy a big thank you, don’t we,” she said to Hanna. “He did all the work. And you helped.”
“Happy to do it.” He took her plate. “Should I leave everything out in case we want to nibble a little later?”
“Sure.”
Hanna scampered after him as he carried all their dirty plates into the kitchen. Suzette watched them through the glass. She’d always felt of vital importance, with her shopping and cleaning, laundry and cooking, the maker of lists and the runner of errands, the hand-holder for the occasional crying girl or fretting man. But they were managing so well without her.
When Hanna came back out she headed straight for the fire, which she poked, more confidently, with her stick. Alex brought over the bottle of wine and refilled their glasses.
“What do you think? Before it gets too late, should we say our goodbyes to Marie-Anne?” He spoke the words to Hanna, who, for the first time all day, didn’t spring to his suggestion.
Suzette was relieved he was still determined to follow through with it.
“You don’t need her anymore,” he said, reading Hanna’s hesitation. “Go get your drawing, and we’ll have a goodbye ceremony.”
She obeyed, but the lowered angle of her head, the lack of zip in her walk, revealed her doubt.
Suzette waited until Hanna disappeared inside. “I was afraid you’d forgotten.”
Alex sighed, his face heavy with worry. “No. Trying to keep things light. I don’t want her to know. What I really think.”
“What do you really think?” He only shook his head, and though she was desperate to know, she loved him too much to poke at his tender places. “It’s been okay. The weekend. I took a picture of the drawing.”
He nodded, but he was still inside himself, maybe regretting that he’d hinted at having negative ruminations about his daughter. The mood between them turned funereal. They sipped from their wine and didn’t speak again until Hanna returned, holding the picture.
“Ready?” Alex moved his and Hanna’s chairs out of the way, so they could stand but still be safe from the lapping flames.
Suzette set her wine on the ground and used the chair arms to help her balance as she pushed onto her feet.
“Älskling!” He rushed over to her.
“I want to stand too.” What she really wanted—what she’d wanted all evening—was to move back from the fire. Her feet, still bandaged and in padded socks, weren’t as sore as they had been, and it felt good to stand. Stretch her legs. Alex moved her chair aside, then picked up her wine. She took it as he held on to her elbow.
“Okay?”
“Yes, I’m good.” She could flee if she had to. It felt much better than sitting.
He went back to his place on the other side of the fire, stick in one hand, wine in the other. Hanna gripped her picture, looking at her father for instructions.
“We gather here on valborgsmässoafton to send Marie-Anne back to her realm…”
He spoke in a deep, priestly voice. Suzette fought a deranged urge to grin; it was no longer clear which of the three of them was most in need of professional help. Alex was a better actor than she’d ever guessed—what they were doing was lunacy—but he played it straight and somber. It would be worth it if Hanna really dissolved her attachment to Marie-Anne. Suzette held out hope that someday the girl would speak in her own voice.
“Marie-Anne tried to be a friend to our dear Hanna, but she is too mischievous a girl, and Hanna doesn’t need a friend who gets her in so much trouble…”
An execution and funeral for their daughter’s invisible friend. Suzette masked her snort of nervous laughter with a cough. Everything swirled for a moment, too much champagne and wine, but she steadied herself. It seemed proper that they should stand and be solemn and she didn’t want to ruin the ceremony.
“And so we say goodbye to Marie-Anne, and in doing so we embrace Hanna—who can think for herself, and do things for herself, and speak for herself, and doesn’t need a naughty witch for a companion.” He gave Hanna one of her signature singular nods, and she nodded back.
“Can you poke your stick through the paper and hold it over the fire?”
This was the part Suzette had been dreading. She half expected, when the paper ignited, that it would burst into a fireball, or that a smoke-enshrouded demon would emerge from the flames.
But Hanna handed the stick and the picture to her father and let him puncture it. While he did that, Hanna reached into her pocket and brought out a handful of what looked like confetti. After tossing it into the flames, the girl reached out and took her stick back. The bits of paper burned like a meteor shower. Suzette only half-questioned their purpose, enthralled for a moment by the specks of light.
She thought it should have been a hot dog or a marshmallow dangling over the blaze, not a girl sentenced to burn for the second time. But nothing monstrous erupted as the edges blackened and singed. Then the fire caught it and ate around the paper’s margins.
“Goodbye, Marie-Anne.” She prayed the witch would really leave them.
The paper started to curl, engulfed, and Alex stepped over to help Hanna free it from her stick. He knocked the stick against the side of the copper bowl, making a tolling sound. Hanna grabbed for it, eager to have it back. As the thick paper turned to ash, succumbing to the flames, shrinking into feathery pieces, Hanna banged her stick against the pit’s rim, gonging out the death knell.
It was as if she were speaking. Good
. Bye. Good. Bye.
Alex sank back in his chair, tugging it closer to the fire. Suzette read exhaustion in his body, and understood then how hard it had been for him, pretending for days that he wasn’t upset or worried, and trying to keep everyone calm.
She took a sip of wine. Her feet howled with pain and the prolonged pressure of standing. As she stepped back—bending her knees, ready to sit—her foot encountered something unexpected. It was just a bit of twig, but her foot protested and she lost her balance. She tumbled onto the ground beside her chair, uttering a surprised yelp, spilling her wine down the front of her clothes.
Alex was at her side in an instant, his hands under her arms, lifting her.
“Are you okay?”
“Yes. Stepped on something.”
He helped her back into her chair. “Did you hurt your feet?”
“They’ll be okay. I just tripped.” Splotches of dark wine seeped into her jacket and down one of her pant legs. “I made a mess.”
“I’ll get you a cloth.” He dashed into the house.
“And a bowl of warm water, with a little salt in it,” she called after him.
She angled herself in the chair, partly to keep all the weight off her feet, and partly so she could examine the stains by the light of the fire. Out of the corner of her eye, she spotted Hanna, gazing at her in an intense, unsettling way. The girl crept forward.
She extended her arm, pointing at Suzette with two fingers.
Hanna mouthed silent words, over and over.
A chill radiated from Suzette’s spine, prickling her skin like a million tiny scorpions. She pressed herself into the chair, wanting to get away. Suddenly the girl was beside her. When Suzette looked in her face she saw the whites of her eyes. In dead sockets.
And the fingers. Pointing. Accusing.
Marie-Anne was not gone.
HANNA
ACCELERANT. THE RESEARCH she’d started at school had been cut short, but she knew alcohol was an accelerant. The fire had its taste of Mommy—yummy, yummy, mumsig—and wanted more. The fire wanted to eat her!
It was clear now. The spell of Vengeance and Attack made Mommy stumble. The spell coated her with alcohol. Fire accelerant.
It was up to her to do the rest.
Mommy pulled up her feet, shrinking into the corner of her chair, eyes big and afraid. Hanna kept her spell focused, directed at Mommy through two outstretched fingers, and mouthed the words. Suffer and cease to be. Suffer and cease to be.
She prodded the flames with her stick. Fished for a burning branch. And flung it out of the copper pit.
Mommy screamed as it landed in her lap. She scrambled out of her chair. Fell. Pushed the burning branch away with her bare hands.
Hanna used her stick like a shovel, gripped in both fists, scooping out burning embers. They landed on Mommy’s legs. Her foot. Mommy squealed and kicked, trying to wriggle away.
She swept more embers out of the fire, hurling them at Mommy.
They attacked her like vampire lightning bugs.
Mommy howled and cried.
The tip of her stick glowed a molten orange, and Hanna knew just what to do. Mommy’s hands were flapping at her pants, trying to extinguish some burning threads. Hanna aimed the stick right at Mommy’s eye, but at the last minute Mommy looked up and Hanna’s aim went awry. She plunged the fiery stick into her cheek, where it made a sizzling sound. Mommy screamed, and wrenched the weapon from her hands.
In the next instant Daddy was there, a bowl in his hands. He tossed it on Mommy, on the fluttering, enflamed bits.
He picked up Hanna. And threw her.
She came back to herself, as the cool air sailed past.
Had she gotten too close to the fire? Was Daddy saving her?
She landed splat on a muddy patch of grass and rolled. Stunned. Something tore inside her wrist, the one that she’d held out to break her fall. Her thumb was going to come loose and fall off. She screamed.
But Daddy and Mommy didn’t run to her.
Instead, Daddy ran to the table and grabbed the Brita pitcher. He poured it on Mommy and stomped on the embers. Mommy wailed and curled up in a ball.
“Where does it hurt?”
“My face! More water!”
Daddy lifted Mommy into his arms and dashed into the house. Hanna held her left arm against her chest, still sobbing, and trailed after them. She almost whimpered “Daddy,” but it sounded like a broken-up, tear-filled squeal.
She couldn’t understand what happened. The spell had gone so well. And she did it all herself, without Marie-Anne. It was almost finished, Mommy had been squirming on the ground, about to catch fire. And then Daddy ruined it. It wasn’t possible he could love Mommy more than her. Was it? He threw her. Threw her away.
“Why?” she cried through her tears, her French accent abandoned, but neither parent heard her.
Daddy put Mommy on the big table and wiped at her with wet dish towels while Mommy held a wet cloth to her face and wept. Her head fell against the table and Daddy yelled, “Should I call nine-one-one?”
Mommy shook her head, but couldn’t stop crying.
The drama of it scared Hanna a little, her parents in such disarray, their movements so out of control. She blinked and blinked while hugging herself with her one good arm.
As Mommy started to wiggle out of her ruined pants, Daddy helped and yanked them off.
“This spot here.” She pointed above her knee. “And my hands.” She used her elbows to push herself into a sitting position, and let Daddy wrap the wet cloths around one hand, then the other.
Daddy scrambled in the cabinets until he found more dish towels. He plunged them under the kitchen tap, moving in clumsy jerks, like a strange creature she’d seen on Star Trek, jolted by bolts from a laser gun. He looked nutso whacko and she didn’t like it.
He wrung the wet rags over Mommy’s exposed skin, then draped them on her leg. “Are there more burns?”
What a mess he was making. Mommy wouldn’t like it. Even Hanna felt the urge to rush in and sponge the water off the floor. She jumped up and down a little—look at me, look at me! Another whimper escaped her throat, but Mommy and Daddy still acted like she wasn’t there.
“My face.”
“We should go to the emergency room.”
Mommy shook her head. “Urgent Care, it’ll be faster, and it’s not … I don’t think they’re too bad…”
Hanna crept in closer. Mommy wasn’t crying so much anymore; she lifted the compress off her cheek and showed it to Daddy. “Is it okay?”
“Holy shit…” Daddy couldn’t stop zip-zip-spazzing. “We need to get to the doctor’s!”
“Is it that bad? Oh God! I’m not going anywhere without pants—grab me some shorts?”
Daddy charged up the stairs. That’s when Mommy finally noticed her. At first Mommy froze, big-eyed and ready to flee. Hanna inched over, mewling a bit, clutching her arm beneath the swollen part.
“Hanna? Are you hurt?” Mommy swung her head around, like she couldn’t decide which way to go—she looked up the stairs, toward the front door, and finally back at Hanna. As she gazed at Hanna her face went from frightened to concerned. “What were you doing…? Is it broken?”
Hanna stood beside the table and extended her arm. Her wrist had fattened into a plummy bulb.
Mommy’s mask slipped off and her gaze turned hard, mean, like she couldn’t pretend anymore that she wasn’t really Bad Mommy. “That’s what you get … Hurts, doesn’t it?”
The stairs rumbled as Daddy thundered down.
“Hanna’s hurt,” Mommy said. Her face flipped back to normal then, the way she got whenever Hanna had a fever or a tummy ache.
“What’s wrong?”
“Her wrist, I think it’s broken.”
Daddy’s eyes and mouth popped like an alarm.
“Get her an ice pack…”
As he handed Mommy the shorts, she had to put down the cloth she’d kept against her face. Hanna gap
ed at the wound on her cheek as Mommy shimmied into her clothes. A big fat circle, black and red, and Hanna thought of the erupting mouth of a volcano. Daddy, poor Daddy, couldn’t stop the panic mode. He leapt to the freezer and grabbed up a dry dishcloth that had slipped onto the floor.
“I’m so sorry—”
“What happened?” Mommy asked.
“I wasn’t thinking, I just … I had to get her away from you.” He turned from Mommy to Hanna. “Baby, I’m so sorry!” Daddy gently wrapped the towel-covered ice pack around her wrist. “Holy shit, I can’t even believe this is—”
“Honey, it’s okay, we’re okay … But we can’t leave with the fire going.”
Daddy, all-a-shambles, hurried out back and used the hose to put out their little fire. He scrambled back in, carrying a few plates of food that clattered when he shoved them on the counter. Hanna still didn’t like how zonkers he looked, out of control and barely aware of what he was doing.
“Okay, everybody ready? Hanna, lilla gumman, I’m so sorry…”
Hanna wanted him to pick her up and carry her to the car. But he carried Mommy instead. She whimpered. The ice pack made it worse; her wrist still throbbed but now it pulsed in sharp, frozen shards.
“Come on, Hanna,” Mommy said over her shoulder. “I know it hurts, but we’ll be at the doctor’s really soon.”
* * *
It only took a few minutes to get there, and Mommy spent most of that time being rather good Mommy-like and saying over and over that everyone was going to be okay, take some deep breaths, and she didn’t sound mad or even like she was hurting. Sometimes Daddy had to brake really hard because he was driving very fast.
The sign—Shadyside Urgent Care—looked bright against the darkening sky. The parking lot was pretty empty.
In the waiting room, Daddy put Mommy in one of the very ugly olive-green chairs and rushed to the desk and spoke so fast about “his wife” and “his daughter” that Desk Lady asked him to slow down.
Desk Lady said it would just be a few minutes. Daddy sat on Mommy’s other side, filling in paperwork, leaving Mommy in the middle. Her eyelids fluttered as she pressed the folded cloth to her cheek and gripped Daddy’s forearm with her free hand. She was as colorless as the cloth.