Wildalone

by Krassi Zourkova

  “I had done this in my head a thousand times, but you taste so much better than I could have imagined.”

  The words flooded my body. There wasn’t an inch of me left that didn’t crave to be his, completely his, or that could be at peace unless it felt him. I wanted to keep kissing him, to do anything for him—to him—that would turn him on and make him come, but he was moving away already.

  I pulled him back. “Take me. Take me any other way you want.”

  He struggled with his decision for a second, then stood up to pour himself a drink. As the empty glass was landing on the table, I began to kiss him—neck, shoulders, chest—but as soon as I reached his stomach, he stopped me. I held his hands down, until they closed around the edge of the table and stayed there. Then I kissed him one last time:

  “Now it’s my turn. Let me.”

  LATER THAT NIGHT, WHILE FALLING asleep in his arms, I wished for the first time that he would never find out about me and Jake.

  THE WHISPER IN MY EAR woke me up, but I couldn’t figure out the words. Something about a trick.

  “So which T is it?” Rhys was lying next to me, already dressed. “Just pick one.”

  “Trick or what?”

  “Cute. It’s your first Halloween, isn’t it?”

  I nodded, eyes half shut with sleep.

  “Or treat. Meaning you’d have to feed me candy. Except I don’t see any lying around.”

  “And the trick?”

  “I’d steer clear of the trick, if I were you. Where we come from, tricks are a serious business.”

  “We?”

  “My family. I’m Irish.”

  We had met more than a month ago, and there was still so much I didn’t know about him. Part of it was my fault. I had seen other girls spy on their boyfriends—searching the Internet, checking the guy’s phone, reading his e-mails, everything Rhys had called “background checks” and more—so I had sworn never to be obsessively curious. But with him, even healthy curiosity wasn’t an option. Or was it?

  I rolled over on the bed, closer to him. “When did you leave Ireland?”

  “I didn’t. I’ve never lived there. Always wanted to, but never did.”

  “Why not?”

  “Because not everything is up to me, Thea.”

  It was hard to picture him wanting something and not being able to get it. “You sound as if you’re grounded in New Jersey.”

  “Maybe I am . . . grounded. But let’s leave my wish list alone. The point is, that’s where trick-or-treating began.”

  “In Ireland?”

  “Of all places. They didn’t call it trick-or-treating, of course. The Irish word is souling.”

  “As in baring one’s soul?”

  “Ha, never thought of it that way. But no, as in praying to the souls of the deceased. The Celts believed that on the night of October 31, the boundary between the living and the dead disappeared. So if the poor knocked on your door that night, you gave them food and in exchange they prayed to the dead souls for you.”

  I tried to imagine the dead listening, on an October night in Ireland. Gaunt. Wide-eyed. Haunting the rainy Dublin streets. “And if you didn’t give them food?”

  “Then you got very, very badly tricked.” He sneaked under the sheets and began kissing me all over.

  “Rhys, wait. It’s my turn.”

  “What turn?”

  “To soul you.”

  “Me?” His head popped out: hair a mess, cheeks flushed. “I don’t think so.”

  “Because you aren’t a soul-baring kind of guy?”

  “That too. But even if I were, you don’t get to trick me if the treat’s on me anyway. I’m going to fix us breakfast.”

  Breakfast wasn’t exactly what he could fix, given that it was already one o’clock. While the smell of fried eggs and some sort of meat crept throughout the house, I waited for him in the living room. The place was impeccably furnished. Steel. Glass. Leather. Flowing into one another in clean, minimalist shapes. The fireplace itself was a line of river stones stacked under a hanging wall—one touch to a remote control, and flames sprouted up directly from the stones. There was no other decoration; the walls were completely bare. Except one of them afforded a brief indulgence. A sign that, somewhere, the house nonetheless had a heart—

  Books.

  About twenty of them, on a single shelf. It looked like someone had enlarged a cardiogram, mimicked its curve out of steel, then nailed the resulting shape to the wall, slipping into each inverted peak as many books as would fit there. Shiny little volumes, nestling perfectly inside their slots. Only at the very end, where the heartbeat had dropped one last time, a book with a cracked spine and worn corners leaned at an angle, all by itself.

  I picked it up. Rainer Maria Rilke. The two words on the cover, New Poems, were so generic that I wasn’t sure they were even a title. But another title was waiting, a few pages in, made up of three names: Orpheus. Eurydice. Hermes.

  The poem was long and I didn’t get to read it, because at the bottom, under the printed text, was a splash of red. Two more lines, added by hand, the letters tiny but still legible, beautifully beaded over long slanted loops:

  I will know you

  even in my death

  What kind of a promise—or threat—was this? And who in their right mind would make it? Maybe one of the inexplicably missing parents had written a love note to the other, years back. Or what if the handwriting was Jake’s? This was his house too. His books. He had probably figured that I might browse through them, once Rhys brought me here. And so, just like that open Chopin score on the piano, the Rilke volume had ended up strategically at the end of the shelf, where I was most likely to find it.

  “Food is served.” Rhys pulled the book from me and slipped it back among the others. “You must be starved to death.”

  “Death seems to be the theme today. I just read about—”

  “I know what you were reading.”

  “Even the handwritten note?”

  He shrugged. “Books go through many hands. People scribble.”

  “It was more than just a scribble.”

  “We collect old editions, Thea. And old editions come with baggage.” Everything about him seemed to come with baggage. He kept dodging my questions, even now. “By the way, I didn’t know you liked poetry.”

  “Some of it.”

  “Who are your favorites?”

  “Neruda, Rumi, E.E. Cummings.”

  “You’ve read my namesake? Cummings would have been pleased to know he’s big in Bulgaria.”

  “That’s your last name?”

  “Rhys Cummings? No, God no! It’s Estlin.”

  I recalled the second E in E.E. Cummings: Estlin. Brief and stunning, like the sound of icicles clashed together by a wind.

  “How about your favorites?”

  “We’ll save those for dessert. Now let’s eat.”

  Eating wasn’t in the stars that day. We had barely started when the doorbell rang.

  “Carmela is here! Come, she’s been dying to meet you.”

  Everything about the woman radiated cheer: the flowing clothes, wrapped in blocks of color around her bursting figure; the wrinkles projecting laughter away from the quick black eyes; and more than anything—the bubbly exuberance of an accent that carried her voice to every corner of the house.

  “¡Hola! How are you, Señor Rhys?”

  “Very well, thank you, Carmelita.” He plunged into her arms for the longest hug I had seen him accept from someone, then turned to me: “Carmela is a very dear friend of the family. She was born on the Costa del Sol, but now lives here on the island. Keeps an eye on the house for us, which we greatly appreciate.”

  “Then stop chasing the pretty college girls and come to see us more often!” Her smile grew into a wide crescent as she looked me up and down. “Ay, Señor Rhys, she is so beautiful, your girlfriend!”

  Girlfriend?

  He didn’t correct her, just put his arm around m
e. “Yes, isn’t she? But now it’s up to you, Carmelita, to make her look devastatingly Spanish for me tonight.”

  “Claro, she’ll make a perfect bruja.”

  “And that,” Rhys snapped, as if she had committed a sin known only to the two of them, “is exactly what I don’t want.”

  “I’ll make a perfect what?”

  “A perfect you.” He kissed my cheek. “Now go get ready. I’ll be back at six.”

  THE MAKEOVER FROM “SO BEAUTIFUL” to “devastatingly Spanish” was a challenge. It involved not only matching all the requisite visuals, but also feeding Carmela’s curiosity.

  “What is your name, niña?”

  “Thea.”

  “¡Muy bonito! Thea . . . like breeze over the Mediterranean.”

  She filled up the bathtub and lifted the soap to her nose for a quick sniff before handing it to me:

  “Pure castile, made from olive oil—the green gold of Andalucía. When you are finished, your skin will carry the aroma of olives.”

  “How come Rhys has original Spanish soap here?”

  “Because he sometimes listens to what I tell him!” Having given Rhys advice on soap seemed to make her genuinely proud. “I’ve been his housekeeper for many years; he knows he can trust me with anything . . . But now hurry, take your bath! I’ll go get a glass of wine and then we can do your makeup.”

  The glass must have included refills, because she came back with a bottle already half empty.

  “So tell me, how did you meet Señor Rhys?”

  “At school.”

  “You met at school and fell in love?” She watched while I twisted my hair to squeeze the water off. “Don’t be shy, you can tell Carmela everything. It was love at first sight, no?”

  “For me at least.” Technically, it wasn’t true. Not unless “first sight” included Jake.

  “Only for you? Ay, pero, niña, it’s written on his face! The boy is finally in love. It’s been a long time since—” She sat me down in front of the bathroom mirror and stood behind me, holding a comb, hesitating.

  “Long time since what, Carmela?”

  “Since I gave my big mouth a siesta!” The comb finally risked its way through my hair. “Old people, we dwell inside the past; it dulls the sound of death approaching. But things that are far gone shouldn’t worry a young girl like you.”

  I had heard this speech before—from my parents, from Giles, from everyone who dwelled inside the past but didn’t want me to be curious about it. Yet if those “things far gone” were so harmless, why was I constantly shielded from them?

  “Have you known him long?”

  “Who, Señor Rhys?” She brought her hands together, palms almost touching. “Since the day he was this small! I was his niñera. How do you call it . . . nursemaid.”

  “So you also know his parents?”

  “Of course.”

  “What are they like?”

  For a moment she looked stumped, as if my question was a trick one.

  “I mean, is he at all like them?”

  “Those we come from, niña, are always who we are. And that boy was born from love like no other I have seen in this world.” She poured herself another glass of wine, pulled up a chair, and sat down next to me. “His father, Archer, was the devil. Old noble blood, rich as a king. And handsome. Ay, Dios mío, was he handsome! Women fell at his feet and he laughed at them. Only one thing existed for him: cars.”

  “He collected them?”

  “No, he was a racer. Those car races were his one true love, and he had won all of them.”

  This explained why Rhys was so confident at the wheel, even when driving way too fast.

  “Then he met my Isabel. Went crazy. ¡Abso-luta-mente loco! Chased her all around the world. Every capital, every concert.”

  “What kind of concerts?” I was already beginning to guess. “Piano?”

  “The piano obeyed her the way those cars obeyed him. After the wedding, she still played. But he never did another race.”

  “Why not?”

  “No longer had it in him. On the racetrack you must be ready to go to hell, he used to say, and how can I settle for hell once I’ve been to heaven? It made her laugh. She begged him to put her in one of those cars, at least once, so she could feel like the two of them were flying. But he wouldn’t hear of it, that’s how terrified he was of losing her. As if, in this life, you can ever cheat fate . . .”

  “Why, what happened?”

  Her eyes vanished from the mirror: a sudden wind had robbed the last two olives from a tree, leaving it barren.

  “What did fate do to them, Carmela?”

  “One day, Isabel stopped sleeping.”

  “Just stopped?” It sounded simple, like someone deciding not to wear a certain color. “How can a person stop sleeping?”

  “The same way a person stops laughing, or hoping, or dreaming. It just happens. And changes everything.”

  But it hadn’t just happened, it had been happening for generations. I listened in dismay as her tale went back, all the way to a man in eighteenth-century Venice who stopped sleeping and, a few months later, was dead. After him, records began to list deaths in that family as epilepsy, meningitis, schizophrenia, dementia. When, in fact, it would turn out to be something far worse.

  “At first, she was just exhausted. Then it became agony. Pain, every part of her body aching. And deliriums. Like having nightmares while you’re still awake.”

  “What about sleeping pills?”

  “It was all useless. An uncle had died from the same thing, not long after little Jake was born. The doctors said when they opened his brain, part of it looked like this—” She pointed to a powder sponge in her makeup kit. “The part that lets you fall asleep. That’s when they started talking about a cursed gene, a disease that runs in families.”

  Her hands began to shake and she slipped them between her knees, locking them still.

  “Every doctor told her the same thing: once it starts, you die very soon. The body shuts down, you can’t even speak, but the mind knows—all the way to the end. A brave girl she was, my Isabel. Kept asking little Jake to play the piano, couldn’t get enough of it. I love my boys so much, Meli—Meli, she used to call me. If music can reach to the other side of those clouds, I will be able to hear them from up there, won’t I? Won’t I, Meli?

  “The last doctor they saw was in San Francisco. From there, a road winds like a serpent down the coast, high above the ocean cliffs. Archer laid his wife next to him in one of those racing cars. And they flew, just as she had always wanted—all the way across the clouds . . .”

  I wished I could say something. Anything, to comfort her. But nothing felt right after what she had told me. At that moment, all I wanted was to see Rhys. To be able to touch him and know he was well and breathing.

  “Let’s finish you up. I almost forgot why I’m here!” She jumped from the chair, the sadness now folded back in, deep into the locked drawers of her heart. “We will need more black around the eyes. And the hair . . . what shall we do with the hair?”

  She rolled it up and pinned it in a simple low chignon. Sprayed a few drops of lavender over my shoulders. Took my chin and turned it—left, then right—pleased with her own creation.

  “¡Qué linda! Do you like it?”

  I told her I did, but I wasn’t so sure. The makeup was too much (thank God it was Halloween), and the glamorous, sexy gypsy I expected to see in the mirror looked more like a tired ballerina under the glare of the bathroom lights.

  While I was trying to get used to my Spanish face, she asked me to wait in the living room and promptly joined me, bringing a big red box.

  “A present, from Señor Rhys. Go on, open it!”

  Inside was a dress—an exquisitely layered white silk dress. In a heap next to it, a fringed black shawl exploded with flowers, all of them red poppies.

  “This is your costume. A flamenco dress carries power. The fire of the gypsy blood, of Andalucían br
ujas.”

  “What is a bruja?”

  “Witch. One flip of the skirt”—she kicked back with her foot, pretending to catch a load of fabric in the air—“and you can do anything to a man.”

  I slipped the dress on and the silk poured down to the floor: a one-shoulder gown, tracing the body to just above the knee, from where it spilled into a wild cascade of ruffles.

  “My country has its own brujas, whose power lies in the dress too. Long white dress, a bit like this one.”

  It was my favorite part of the samodivi tale (or “wildalones,” as Giles would have called them). The lovestruck shepherd sneaks up to the lake for a closer look at Vylla. She hears steps. Turns. And the treacherous moon reveals the young man to her. But it also reveals what he has already found on the shore and taken: a dress made of pure silver, woven with moonthreads. The dress that keeps all of Vylla’s power.

  “Claro, sí.” Carmela listened and nodded, as if everything in that story was turning out the way she expected. “The man steals the dress and wins his bruja forever, no?”

  “Well, forever is not exactly how it ends—our fairy tales don’t always have happy endings. But yes, he does steal the dress and they are married for some time.”

  “Something is telling me your man will steal your dress tonight!” She winked at me before glancing at the clock. “We have just enough time for one more drink, and then I can leave you to your Halloween night. Noche de Brujas, as we call it in España.”

  We went outside, on the patio. She poured wine for both of us, lit two candles on the table, and handed me a few floating ones. “Here, take these to the pool.”

  I dropped them in, one by one.

  “Ay, niña, nothing like real fire when you need to warm the heart . . .”