Other Words for Smoke

by Sarah Maria Griffin

  “James, if I offer you something, will you leave the girl alone?”

  Bevan made a spoiled, angry sound. “Who are you to him anyway? This is mine, all of this, not yours!”

  Audrey sighed deeply. She let Bevan’s protest die in silence, let the indignation of it turn childish in the quiet. How she remembered that feeling. How badly she wanted to possess the thing that possessed her. That hum under her bones rang again, that owl-shaped gap in the fibers of her. He already knew what she was going to say, he was already laughing.

  surely you have nothing to give me now that you have gone out and beyond, he said, knowing full well that she did, the same offerings she had made him time and time again all those years ago.

  “You leave this one alone, stop what you’re doing to her, and anybody else who comes through this house—and I will visit you once a week and give you exactly what you need. She’s weak, James. She hasn’t seen what I’ve seen. She won’t last like this. And . . . there are others in this house too—they deserve a chance at a life without whatever it is you do. I’m past it, but I can still feed you.”

  Bevan made a noise of protest, but she was ignored.

  And aren’t you going to try to stop me, Audrey? Bobby asked, swishing his tail, a sneer curling his maw.

  “I don’t care what you do,” Audrey said to him, not faking her bravado now. “Rita can have you. You deserve each other.”

  The owl and the cat laughed the low roll of those who had known Audrey for too long.

  you will make a far better feed than anyone else in this house. even with such a long time passed, it is all so fresh in you. i feel fuller already.

  “Then come back with me, James. I will come to the neon room on Sunday mornings and I will tell you five things and they will satisfy you more than the small tragedies of this house. Seal up the door behind you. Do not darken the world of this little one, or the children upstairs, again.”

  “He’s not yours to take,” said Bevan, brandishing the empty cup.

  “Well, he certainly isn’t yours,” replied Audrey, turning around and heading back into the hallway. She knew this was torture for the girl. That this taking away of her poison and power was a looting of the highest order, but better a stickup than a grave robbery. It wasn’t too late for Bevan. She could let Sweet James go and move on with her life in this world. Audrey loved her corridors, but she wouldn’t wish a departure like hers on anyone else. She never knew how long they searched for her; she never would.

  Up the stairs Audrey strode, away from the kitchen in the eldritch freeze of the house. Sweet James followed her, a great wrong lump in the ceiling, in the walls. A parasite under the skin of the house, up along the landing that felt too long, like there were too many doors, too many identical radiators punctuating the sprawl. Too many little tables where clusters of tiny Virgin Marys stood, and Audrey could barely look at them because she knew well why they were there, what Rita was trying to call with their presence. They had not spoken in decades and decades, but that woman in the blue cloak was one of their coven, too. As she walked, Bevan was roaring drama and calamity after her, following her like this wasn’t an inevitability, like there was anything she could do or say that would change a damn thing. Poor girl didn’t realize that it wasn’t all about her. She would, in time.

  At one bedroom door stood a gawky, skinny little teenage girl. Audrey met her eyes in a flash; the girl’s mouth hung open in terror. At the bathroom door, on his hands and knees, a boy who looked just like the girl. Were these Rita’s children? There was Frost in them, but they weren’t quite like her enough. Where was Rita, was she hiding? Here Audrey was, leading a procession of fear out of her house, having stepped back in, having done something she swore she would never do, and Rita didn’t even have the decency to sense her presence, wouldn’t even come out and greet her—until, doorway after doorway in the freezing rumble of the hallway, there she was. Old, thin, gray—but undeniably her. Audrey stopped a moment, as did the swelling paper rot in motion that was Sweet James as he followed her.

  Audrey looked in Rita’s eyes, and Rita looked back and they were silent. Audrey opened her mouth to say something, but Rita caught her first.

  “You didn’t give me enough time.” Her voice was ragged from adulthood and smokes, but under it was the cold bright spring that Audrey recognized, the freshness of Rita that she once wanted to drown in. Funny how you can come face-to-face with a conversation you’ve needed to have for your entire life and not be able to find language for it, how all of the imagined arguments you have with the ghosts that broke your heart fall to silence. So she didn’t reply. She just turned her head and walked on, the great rumble of the owl following her, Bobby and Bevan far behind—the house warping in response to their parade.

  The room she had come in through, Rita’s old bedroom, stood before her. Sweet James rumbled into the room and Audrey said, “You’ll seal up this place, now. Not just the door to the neon gate, this whole room. Hide it away. Make it wall. You won’t need it: you will be strong and fat from my pain.”

  promises are for humans, said Sweet James.

  “I’m not sure I am one anymore,” Audrey replied, and he laughed, because he knew it was true.

  The corridor slowly flattened back to itself. Bevan and Bobby—still the size of a lion—reached the spot where the door to Bevan’s bedroom should have been: but it was gone, wallpapered up. Bevan placed her hands on the wall and jerked away with a yelp—her palms were seared a bright and terrible red, glowing with a hot poison. It hurt deep like a burn, but the ache of it traveled up her wrists and arms and shoulders and down right into her chest. They almost illuminated the corridor a second with their heat, like something had been transferred into Bevan’s hands. The house had taken her room and she could not even touch where it once was.

  Audrey had taken Sweet James. Bevan’s nerves flashed a merciless electricity, her hands roared with pain, he was gone, he was really gone. He had offered her access to the universe and she had done everything he said and now he was gone. She had betrayed Rita, harmed the twins—she had talked to him in worship and prayer. He had made her powerful, clairvoyant, removed her need for anyone else in her life—he had given her so much. She opened and closed her fists, her mouth hanging open. Her whole life had been in that room and just like that, it was no more. The house was freezing and it was July. Her heart was not a heart but a cannon firing rage and sickness through her body.

  Before she knew it, Rita and the twins were standing around her. Bobby began to shrink, and the world began to drain of that huge, wild energy and her hands dulled red to pink to almost opalescent scarred white.

  Rita’s voice was clipped and careful, void of the soft majesty she usually sang into the world. Bevan knew she was calculating something. A truly unmagical spell, to protect the twins. A lie.

  “Mae, Rossa—it is no secret this house is strange. The world here is weakened by old tragedy, and things come and go through that weakness. Things like what you just saw. You will not see the likes of that girl or that beast again, and perhaps neither will I.”

  Bevan thumbed the bottom of her shirt, looking at her fingernails, the floor, anywhere but the strange space in front of her where her room used to be. Her eyes looked too big for her head. Rita placed a hand on her shoulder, sympathetic for a second.

  The twins exchanged intense glances with each other, the kind of looks that wanted to be a silent language, one they had long lost in their growing up.

  “Bevan, we will need to get you some new clothes. I am sure there will be another bed for you, somewhere around here. This room is gone, now—and we will all be better for it.”

  There was a fragile silence in which the twins did not ask any questions, in which Bevan did not scream, though she looked very much like she needed to. They all just stood there.

  “We should take breakfast,” said Bobby then, a brittle olive branch of a suggestion. As the five walked back down the corridor, Rita p
roduced a fat wand of sage from her dressing-gown pocket and lit it with a cigarette lighter. Thick, medicinal smoke billowed from it, and she held it aloft as she walked. A tiny cleansing over the corridors, the twins shoulder to shoulder, confused and scared, Bevan on a hard comedown, Bobby silent, and Rita mourning.

  The kitchen looked as it had when they had all gone to bed that night. The stove was cold, but Rita promptly lit it again, as though nothing had happened. As though it were any old fire, not a sacred flame, not a wasted protective source. The twins sat down side by side, silent and shook—and Bevan noticed that they were holding hands under the table.

  There were pancakes, talk radio, and eventually, conversation—though none of it about the girl in the black-and-white suit or the sickening beast that had followed her through the hallway. The only questions were the ones thrumming through every vein in Bevan’s body, the desperation of “What am I going to do, what am I going to do?”

  Vignettes from Other Summers

  Question:

  What Is a Summer?

  ANSWER:

  A summer is not as simple as a band of good weather when school is closed and the days are longer. It can reach all the way to October, or be as shining and tiny as a midday to three o’clock stretch. When we talk about summer, we are not talking about time. A summer is a bright wound that splits the year open like a hinge and leaves you exposed for who you really are, in the heat and pause and stretch of it. A summer is an agreement whereby something happens between people, between us. Something changes, something comes alive, only to die by winter. You will know it when it comes, you will be sure of it when it is gone.

  Mae, One Summer Later

  Mae had no idea what it was that came over her and gave her the courage to lean into Orla and kiss her for the first time. It could have been the fact that they were sitting by the ocean and the whisper rush and salty air was enough to make just about anyone a little braver, a little more elemental. It could have been that they were seven hours away from home, cloistered away with two hundred other strangers speaking the Irish language day in, day out: so even the act of sitting on a wall by the sea speaking English felt like a conspiracy. Especially because it was ten p.m. On a Friday. While everyone else was at the disco. And Mae hadn’t even told her brother where she was going.

  So call it oceanside bravery, being somewhere nobody else knew they were: whatever it was, it was the most gorgeous first kiss Mae could have asked for. Jackpot. Both girls laughed, and kissed again, cold fingers locked together. It felt to Mae as though the waves were roaring in celebration of them. How lucky this particular skirt of water was to be spectator to their romance. How lucky the girls.

  Orla, early in the morning, waking Mae up and dragging her out of bed before breakfast. Orla, trying to cartwheel on dewy grass and slipping and falling, raising sleeping birds from trees with her laughter before the rest of the world had woken up. Orla, who let Mae out of herself little by little, who grabbed her wrist and dragged her to the discos in the parish hall and the film screenings in the old handball court because she had a song she wanted Mae to hear, a movie she wanted Mae to see, because she wanted to talk to Mae. She wanted to be with Mae. And Mae wanted to be with her, her heart a live creature in her body every time Orla’s hand grabbed hers. This was the opposite of the sickness Bevan had filled her with. This was fun. This was what love was supposed to be, and Mae knew it the second it rose under her rib cage. Unmistakable, love.

  Just once, after her evening shower, when the crush had gotten too big for her to contain, Mae caved. She sat on the bathroom mat wrapped in a bright yellow towel, her hair in sopping ringlets over her forehead, and drew herself a three-card spread.

  The card on the left would represent her, the card on the right would represent Orla, and the card in the center would determine whether or not she should actually kiss her that night, or at all, or ever. Risk severing the hilarious kinship she’d been lucky enough to find. She’d take the cards as the signifier; she had nothing else to go on. She had no idea if Orla liked girls. She was far too shy to ask. They didn’t talk about that kind of stuff: they were too busy laughing to ever be serious. Mae didn’t want to be serious. She just wanted to kiss Orla. She would like to continue everything she was doing with Orla and also kissing. That wasn’t a lot to ask.

  She pleaded with the cards. Let this work out. Her damp hands turned them over one by one.

  The Chariot.

  The Ace of Cups.

  The Wheel of Fortune.

  Mae shrieked a little to herself, clasping her hands over her mouth. Chariot for courage, that was her. Ace of Cups for abundance of emotion, between them. The Wheel of Fortune was by the very nature of the thing, a wild card: Orla all over.

  One of the other students hammered at the door to get her to hurry up, and she hurriedly shuffled the three cards away, hid the deck in her toiletries bag, and made her way back to the dorm, light on her feet, a chariot in her chest. Mae would take her chances.

  That chariot, maybe, was what pulled Mae’s body closer to Orla there on the wall. Maybe it wasn’t the ocean or the sneaking away or the nighttime. Maybe it was a golden chariot of bravery, a destined thing. Mae would take it, either way.

  For a year after that night, she barely thought about Bevan at all. It was only when Mae knew things with Orla were over, when love was a promise she could no longer keep—when the absence of love was as stark as the first rush—did she hear the footfall of the older girl in the background of her dreams.

  Forty Something Summers Previously

  Audrey, Deborah, and Rita lay on their backs in the glade up in the woods near Rita’s house—not quite a meadow, but a place wide open, empty of trees. The one with the grotto in it. The Virgin Mary was the fourth of them, though none of them really believed in God or Jesus Christ—though they would only tell each other this. It wasn’t a proper—or even particularly safe—thing to be rolling your eyes during the constant, droning hourly prayers at school.

  But it was summer now, and the trifecta could talk at will about whatever they wanted. Not that the girls came out to the glade to be blasphemous or anything of the sort; they had a kind of love for the Mary. They were, of course, being educated at a convent, the classrooms of which were pocked with almost identical blue-robed girl figures with sad faces—sometimes one up above the blackboard at the front, and one above the clock at the back. With four mournful eyes on a classroom of gray-smocked teenagers, Mary seemed omniscient. So even weeks after school broke up, here in the thick of July, the three girls went over Rita’s parents’ garden wall and down to the woods to see her. This Mary was wilder. Unconfined by the convent walls, out of the long shadow of the laundry, this Mary’s cloak was bluer, lips redder. She was one of them, had been accepted into their coven despite her chastity.

  Whenever the three gathered out in the woods to talk, Rita always felt like they were daring Mary to listen. To report them back to God for being bad, awful girls who wore black nail varnish and lipstick. Rebellious, occasional thieves who listened to punk rock. Very un-Catholic. By the small-town standards of Dorasbeg, downright dangerous. That kind of behavior was fine for the crows down in the city, but up here in the hills the air should be purer and the girls better behaved. Surely nothing they did could be that bad.

  This was the precise thought Rita was having when Deborah told them that her period had stopped. Not just stopped recently, stopped four months ago. Stopped. Rita’s head spun. The Mary would hear Deborah’s soft posh-end-of-the-village voice and then would somehow tell the Mary in the church, who would tell the Mary in the convent, and then her gray army of hard-faced sisters would come and scoop up Deborah and put her away. Probably Audrey, too. Probably even Rita herself.

  The girls lay there in the bad quiet that fell: something had been breathed into the air that had changed their whole reality. Worse, when Audrey said, “We have to tell someone,” it was as though the clearing split open beneath them.

>   None of them moved. Three girls breathing in the glade, quiet until finally Deborah said, “I don’t want to. Unless it’s someone who can, you know . . . fix it.”

  Audrey sat bolt upright, glaring down at Deborah on her back. “Fix it? Who the hell do we know who can fix it? You need a doctor, Deb.”

  Rita looked over at Deborah. How had she been stowing away a little creature in there, how had she held her silence? Who was the man? But there was no time to ask these questions, the burden shared suddenly became something else, something worse than burden: danger. Audrey stood up, ferocious.

  “We’ll get it sorted,” she spat. “We can’t do this on our own.”

  And before Deborah could talk her down, Audrey was gone, back out of the forest, downhill, toward the houses. Her panic was a loaded gun. Deb’s eyes flashed with terror. Rita took her hand. Both of them knew everything was about to change.

  Rossa, Two Summers Later

  Rossa was sitting on Sam Batra’s couch, eating a heaped bowl of jasmine rice with a spoon. The rest of the Batras were out at some family affair, and the boys were left to fend for themselves. They were waiting on pizza, but Rossa was famished, so he went through their fridge for what could be eaten and not particularly missed.

  “Does your family not feed you?” asked Sam, landing down next to him and handing him a cold, cheap beer (acquired via Sam’s older sister, Diya, in return for two neatly rolled joints), “You could eat for your country.”

  Rossa shook his head and swallowed the rice. “I’m sure they would if I stuck around there long enough for them to try.” On this particular Friday night, Rossa had not been home in four days.