“You said something about Rhys in there, about it being long since his heart got warmed.”
She remained quiet. A wind ran through the water and the entire pool started shivering in a web of light.
“Carmela, I need to know. Was he really in love?”
“Almost.”
“How can someone be almost in love?”
“Like that, like any one of these—” She kneeled down and reached for the nearest candle. “Such a small flame, not a fire yet. Push it even a little”—her thumb pressed, just enough to let the water seep in—“and it will drown. Leaving behind only smoke. Brief but poisonous smoke. Yet I told him—”
The past stole her again and took her far, through the darkness of the ocean in front of us.
“What did you tell him?”
I was worried that my questions might open the drawers of sadness again. But she turned to me and smiled:
“I told my boy that love will come to him one day. Beautiful, complete—just like the sun. And pure like the sun. That it will ask for nothing. Expect nothing. It will simply exist for him. I think he believes me now.”
I wanted to believe her too—that Rhys was in love and not just chasing the next college girl. But hearing it from her wasn’t the same as hearing it from him. Not by a stretch.
When she left, it was already a quarter to six. I went back to blow out the candles, but didn’t get to any of them. One glance at the pool, and I thought I was hallucinating. Too much wine. Too many witch stories. Unless, in an attempt to play a trick on me, water and sky had decided to switch places?
There was no sapphire blue this time. Only yellow—the fevered yellow of the burning flickers. I had lit them without keeping count, yet they had ended up exactly seven. And now, far from reach in the middle of the pool, was a figure I had last seen through a telescope: a triangle over a diamond, the seventh candle strangely mute (the one extinguished by Carmela), just as the youngest Pleiad had been barely shining, shamed for falling in love with a mortal man.
I ran back inside. Was I losing my mind? After all, anything was possible on the Night of Witches. Maybe the house was really haunted, with Carmela being one of its many ghosts?
Then I remembered the book I hadn’t dared to open all week—the Star Atlas—and its index led me to the Pleiades in seconds:
The brightest stars in the cluster were named after the seven sisters who had nursed the infant Dionysus. Known also to the Celts, these stars were linked to funerals and mourning and remembrance of the dead. Because, as the border between the two worlds thinned on Samhain (the Irish word for Halloween or All Souls Day), the Seven Sisters rose in the northern sky, aligning themselves exactly overhead by midnight.
A car came to a stop outside. The Atlas slid back under the coffee table. The shawl of poppies swirled its fringes around my shoulders, and down.
Then I noticed a small envelope at the bottom of the dress box. Not a letter, something else. In a distinctive, exquisitely controlled handwriting:
Like concentric rings
on the water,
your words
in my heart.
Like a bird that collides
with the wind,
your kiss
on my lips.
Like fountains unleashed
on the night,
my eyes
on your skin.
“Federico García Lorca, the voice and heart of Andalucía.” Rhys had walked in, dressed in black, with a red bandanna around his neck. “You wanted to know my favorites.”
“Yes, but that was literally right before you left. How did you—”
“Shhh . . .” He pressed a finger to my lips. “I could tell you how. But what would be the magic in that?”
With his other hand, he was already pinning a poppy in my hair.
GETTING TO NEWBURY STREET ON Halloween meant driving through half of Boston and then walking straight into the epicenter of madness—a pandemonium of creatures come back to life. Fluorescent skeletons. Coiffed zombies. Promiscuous corpse brides and debonair vampires. Even a mummy, flying on a skateboard past everybody else. By the time we arrived at the restaurant, my own head was ready to roll off on wheels.
“Welcome to Tapeo! Sorry, we are fully booked tonight.”
A ravishing buccaneer-hostess recited the greeting without lifting her eyes from the computer, but as soon as the name Estlin rippled through the air, she looked up, blushing. In an even higher falsetto, she apologized to Rhys for not recognizing him right away and instructed a nearby pirate to take us to our table.
The ground floor was a mishmash of costumes, noise, and food vapors. People had come for the carnival spirit as much as to eat or drink, and many of them had abandoned their tables, crammed in the tightly packed space—singing, shouting, sweating, yet somehow managing to balance a tapas plate or a wineglass or both.
We made our way through, and up a staircase.
“Welcome, Señor Estlin. Señorita.” The pirate took off his hat and bowed. “I hope everything is to your liking?”
By “your” he probably meant Rhys’s, because I realized that the adventure had been planned in advance: the restaurant was fully booked, yet we were the only ones upstairs. Tables were lined up along the walls, already set for dinner but with no one sitting at them. In the middle waited a table for two.
“Why did you book the entire place?”
A kiss on my shoulder, the one not covered by the dress. “You’ll see.”
We sat down. A waitress in matching pirate costume brought a tray with food and a large pitcher. Rhys explained each dish to me while pouring our drinks.
“Their sangria is out of this world. Can you taste the pomegranate? They throw it in fresh and crush it, to bring out the wine.”
The buzz was just getting to my head when voices rolled up the staircase. At first I thought people from downstairs had assumed the second floor was open. But Rhys greeted the newcomers—hugs, handshakes. It was a fascinating bunch. A guitarist. A younger man wearing a black velvet suit. And two women. One still a girl, in a red ruffled dress. The other so old she could pass for everyone’s grandmother.
“They are gypsies, from Granada.” He sat back down next to me. “I wanted you to experience flamenco at its best: authentic and in private.”
The old woman approached our table. I noticed only now the clusters of jewelry, the heavy black eyeliner, the beaded pins trying to tame her thick white hair. She sank to the floor, spreading her skirt over the tiles in front of me, and lifted her hand—palm up, as if expecting money.
“Go ahead.” Rhys pointed with his glass. “She is the most trusted palm reader one can get these days in all of Spain.”
Everyone was looking at me, and I realized he wasn’t joking. “I don’t think that’s a good idea, Rhys.”
The woman flashed a gold-toothed smile at me. “I can tell you things. Things you have been dying to find out.”
I didn’t want a stranger poking around my life, pretending to know anything about the future. But there was no polite way to refuse, so I went along with it.
“Which hand do I give you?”
“The dominant one always reveals more.” She took my hands, flipped them up, and stared. “Strange . . . They both dominate with you.”
Of course they did, otherwise how would I play the piano? I wondered what else Rhys had told her.
“The line of your heart is deep . . .” Her nail traced a horizontal trajectory that curved up toward the index finger. “But you tread a path not entirely your own. An old path. More than a decade.”
I pulled my hand back. How could she possibly know this? Even Rhys had no idea about my family, or the “old path” that had led me to Princeton.
“You make your own fate, child, so don’t be afraid of it.” She reached for my hand again. Big metal rings clasped each of her fingers. “I see you with him, in front of a mirror—vast, dark mirror, like a sea of night. But only one reflection in it: h
is. The man is double, the girl is only one. And the two are looking at you. Same face, same heart.”
She lifted her eyes, waiting for me to say something. Palm reading is a scam, I reminded myself. She can’t be “seeing” things, least of all about Jake or Elza. Still, I felt anxious. There had to be a logical explanation. The woman obviously knew Rhys, and that he had a brother. The rest was just bluffing, a job she had been paid for: to throw “clairvoyant” guesses at me and take clues from my reaction.
“This has been very . . . interesting. Thank you.” I tried to pull my hand out again, but she wouldn’t let me.
“You wanted to ask me something. About the choice waiting for you down that path.”
“Actually, it sounds like I’ve made my choice already.” I looked at Rhys and smiled. “Two identical men—that’s just another way of saying I’m dealing with one very complicated guy. A guy with a dual nature.”
“Not so fast, child; don’t dismiss my words so fast.” Her finger touched the middle of my hand, drawing two lines away from it in opposite directions. “I see a white path spilling one way, while a red path spills another. Love will walk away from you, unless you make a choice. The hardest choice of all. It may require—”
“I think Thea is right, that’s enough future revealed for now.” Rhys jumped in, probably sensing my unease, and helped the woman off the floor. “If there’s more, we can find out by living it.”
He gave the guitarist a nod and the music began. A few quick chords. Heavy silences in between, each wave of sound broken by syncopated handclaps. The woman who had read my fortune opened her mouth to sing. Sudden, desolate agony crept out of her throat and through the room. It ignited everything. I had never heard a woman’s voice so deep, deeper than the howl of a man after years of drinking and sorrow. Angry, her heart thundered up and sobbed—words that could open wounds just with their wail, magnified by the guitar’s anguish.
The man in the velvet suit stepped forward. His heels slammed the floor. He glided in a semicircle, facing us—slowly, as if taking his time before a bullfight. His arms flashed through the air. His body froze, arched like the sinew of a bow. Then the guitar brought him back to life: fingers first, then wrists, then arms—chest—hips—until the music swept him and he stormed across the floor, stomping the beat with fury.
When the girl in red took her first steps toward him, everything turned quiet. The guitar was just a humming. The old woman’s throat sang with barely more than knots of breath.
Rhys leaned over and began to whisper the words to me:
If one day I called you
and you didn’t come,
bitter death could descend on me
and I wouldn’t feel it.
The girl hit the floor with her heel, only once, then leaned backward—shoulders sinking, still high above the floor, baring her neck for the guitar to crawl over it. Her right foot flashed to the side (a single warning), throwing the train of her dress back in place. Her arms broke and unbroke their exquisite spirals: enchanted snakes, drawing the man in. Then the two of them stepped into each other—filled with grief, as if the world had long ago come crashing down around them—and fell in love inside the music, through it, even though for the entire dance their bodies never touched, not once.
When we walked out of Tapeo, the chaos on the streets continued. Rhys checked the time.
“Are you ready for the rest of Halloween?”
“How much more is there?”
“The best part. It’s not even midnight yet.”
Midnight. My eyes searched the sky, I couldn’t help it. Somewhere up there, four hundred light-years away, a cluster of stars was already rising . . .
THE “BEST PART” TURNED OUT to be a posh party—masquerade ball—in a loft overlooking the Boston harbor. Everyone had to put on a mask at the door and was then ushered through a pair of heavy black curtains.
“May I have the password?” A male Grim Reaper nodded at us ominously from behind a velvet rope.
I glanced at Rhys, half expecting the magic word to be, once again, Estlin. But he smiled, lifted the rope, and let me go in first.
“Don’t worry, the guy is just kidding. They should have opted for a Kubrick theme but didn’t.”
“They” were probably the undisclosed hosts who owned the venue. It was enormous. A massive cube of windows with an internal suspended bridge, giving you the illusion that a gondola was about to glide across the floor and whisk you on a tour of a steel-and-glass version of Venice.
We took drinks from the bar and walked over to the nearest window. Rhys had wanted to show me the harbor, but something behind me distracted him.
“What is it?”
“Nothing, false alarm. For a moment, I thought I saw Jake.”
My hand became unsteady and I swished my glass, to hide the real reason for the sound of ice clinking. “What would Jake be doing here?”
“He’s involved with the charity organizing this. Comes every year, yet this time backed out at the last minute.”
“Why?”
“No idea. Something happened to him in New York. But whenever I ask, he blanks out like a dead man.”
I suspected the reason for Jake’s absence: he had probably found out that Rhys and I were coming.
“It has to be a woman, Thea. Just has to be. Although I can’t imagine why anyone would break Jake’s heart. How the hell does it get any better than my brother?”
I took a sip from my vodka tonic. Jake’s heart—broken. I no longer had to guess, from hints or errant words or piano scores he happened to leave behind. Still, knowing only made me feel worse. What if I had made the biggest mistake of my life? Losing the guy who could have been my soul mate, while I let his brother parade me in front of him like a trophy doll. Dinners at their house. Vacations on the Vineyard. Even here, in Boston. At Jake’s own party.
When a group of people accosted Rhys to hear his take on some recent scandal involving the charity, I went to get another drink. The bar was crowded. Noise. Dense heat of bodies. Bottles and glasses flying about, from the hands of bartenders who rushed as if a fast-forward button had been jammed to a permanent “on.”
Suddenly, a hand placed an empty glass next to me.
I recognized the long fingers instantly—their shape, the slow shift through the air as they made their way from the glass, down to the edge of the bar, and rested on the marble. I was afraid to move. Jake. Standing behind me, so close I could probably feel his chest if I leaned back an inch—
Then he was gone. I turned around but there was no one, only a costumed crowd of strangers.
Later that night, I saw him once more. Like everybody else, he wore a mask. Yet I knew it was him, the way he leaned against the wall—lost in shadow, arms folded over his chest, head tilted back, observing. I felt his eyes across the room. This time they watched his brother dance with me, claim me in the music as he did in everything else: with his hands, with his lips, with every part of his unrelenting body. From their distant place in the dark, they looked on as Rhys bent me back and kissed me—long and hard, as if nothing was to be left of me after that kiss—and they took it all in, quietly, like poison they had come to seek on purpose.
I wanted to run over to him. Tell him that I knew everything, how he felt. That I felt the same way and at this point the only solution would be to talk it over, the three of us, and decide who stays and who leaves. But once again, he decided on his own. Took off his mask, then turned around and left.
Rhys, of course, saw nothing. It was always going to be like this. Jake might be sitting at a table with the two of us. Or watching us from a distance. Or even not be there at all—some subtle sign of his presence could simply emerge in the room, and everything would be ruined.
Unless—
“Take me somewhere and make love to me.”
Rhys froze. “What?!”
“Anywhere, it doesn’t matter.”
“I thought we agreed to wait?”
&nb
sp; “We didn’t.” Only one thing could free me of Jake, and I needed it to happen right away. “Make love to me.”
“Don’t ask me again, Thea. I won’t be able to say no.”
“Don’t say no.”
He grabbed my hand and dashed out—running down the staircase, storming through the front door, and crossing the street so fast I could barely follow. Another door flew open and I realized we had entered a hotel. He went straight to the reception desk, throwing an ID and a credit card on the granite.
“I want your best one. Hurry.”
His hand reached out just as a keycard was landing in it, and he rushed into the elevator, leaving his ID and credit card behind. The doors hadn’t even closed when he started kissing me, pulling the dress off my shoulder.
“Rhys, what are you doing?”
“Giving you what you want. Quick and anonymous, right? I didn’t think you’d be into this.”
“Into what?” As I said it, I realized we were still wearing our masks and pulled mine off. “If you mean anonymous sex, that’s not what I want.”
“No? Then what’s with the sudden rush?” He pressed me against the mirror and its cold surface singed my back. “I’m guessing there are many things you think you don’t want. But we’ll have to change that.”
I had no idea what he was talking about, whether to be excited or scared. The elevator stopped. He headed for the nearest door across the hall, while I told myself that I needed to relax. That it was too late to change my mind. That even if I did, Jake was never going to change his.
We walked into the dark room. Someone had left the heat up and the air was hot. Unbearably hot. His mask landed on the floor; getting us both naked took him only seconds. Unstoppable, an avalanche, his body crashed over mine, sweeping me back, then down on the bed, bursting with impatience from what he had wanted for so long. I stiffened up, drowned in his heavy breathing. His weight. His sweat. All I could do was close my eyes and imagine it being different. Completely different. The way it could have been with Jake.
“What’s wrong? Hey . . . are you crying?” He turned on the light. “Why are you so upset?”
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