Things I’ll Never Say

by Ann Angel

  Grandmama glanced across the yard, her eyes following Lord Lin as he bade a graceful farewell to my father, his black hair shining almost blue in the low sunlight. “Keep that pin hidden from His Lordship,” she said very quietly. “It’s your secret, understand? If he’s not all he seems, you prick his pretty skin with it and he’ll learn not to fool with any granddaughter of mine. May God watch you, Little Wolf. Better a gambler’s chance than you starve.”

  I let Grandmama chafe my hand between hers, wondering if she had taken leave of her senses and how much Lord Lin would laugh at me if I pricked him with a tiny iron hairpin. Grandmama was old and wise, but she believed in too many fairy tales: Lord Lin was just a strong young man like any other, not some elf-lord from a story who could be killed with an iron pin.

  As we rode, Rosamund kept up a stream of chatter with her courteous new husband, and he made no sign of feeling the cold, even though the leaves beneath our horses’ hooves crackled with new hoarfrost as the setting sun bled fierce red across the sky. All I could do was cling to the mare’s mane, shivering in great convulsions, and yet I was not jealous of Rosamund, sharing a saddle and warmth with her lord. At last, flecks of light twinkled between the oak branches, and we came upon a handsome manor house standing alone in a clearing with the windows lit up, golden and welcoming.

  Grandmama, I thought, your travelers’ tales were wrong. She might have had foolish ideas about fairy tales, but I had never known Grandmama to be wrong about gossip. Never. A slow shudder spread through me, as if I’d just swallowed a bucket of mashed ice, and I trusted Lord Lin no further than I could have thrown him, starved as I was.

  “My lord, your house is hidden well,” Rosamund said. “This must be the reason we’d not heard of you before today.”

  “Perhaps, my lady,” he said. “Perhaps.”

  I wanted to drag Rosamund away through the trees, for every drop of blood in my body and every shard of bone shrieked at me to run, but she gripped me hard by the wrist. “Hold your courage,” she hissed. “In such a house there will be food. We can send it home — don’t you see?”

  Dizzy with hunger and yawning behind my hands, all I could do was follow Lord Lin and his bride up the wide steps to a front door that swung open as we approached. I felt for Grandmother’s iron pin tucked into my crown of braids, and — oddly — I was glad that it was still there, still secret, although what good she thought it might do me, I could not say. It was only a hairpin — just an iron pin — and a scratchy one at that, digging into my scalp like a cat’s claw.

  We came into a long, wide hall lit with flaming torches, with no servant to greet us. Lord Lin smiled his pretty smile, leading my sister and me across the floor to a table piled with golden loaves of bread and platters heaped with fruit. Rosamund stared and so did I, and there was such a silence as I had never heard, and all the while Lord Lin watched us, still smiling that pretty, pretty smile, and the only words he spoke were “Eat your fill.”

  My mouth filled with spit and my starved belly ached with longing; we neither of us had touched anything but sour pease pudding since the morning before. But I hung back even though my empty stomach groaned.

  “For God’s sake, what do you wait for?” Rosamund tore an end from one of the loaves, and her eyes closed as she chewed.

  I turned to Lord Lin. “My lord, I’m here as a maid: my place is in the kitchen. Where must I go, please?” I fought to keep my voice steady, to sound innocent and unafraid. The land was choked by famine, and so where had my lord found new-baked bread and fresh fruit?

  He smiled at me over the rim of his silver wine cup. “Take the door at your right hand and follow the corridor,” he said. “Open the last door you see — but no others. Do you understand?” He turned to Rosamund. “You may do as you please here, sweet, but never open the doors along the kitchen corridor.”

  Rosamund only shrugged.

  I nodded, heart pounding. “No others, sir.”

  As I walked, I kept my eyes fixed on the heavy wooden door at the end of the corridor, praying that leaving Rosamund with her strange and beautiful new husband had not been a mistake. Before the famine, when our house was full of servants, there had always been noise coming from the kitchen: the hiss of a kettle, Cook shouting at one of the scullery maids. Here, all was quiet.

  “What is your secret, Lord Lin?” I whispered, and my voice filled the corridor. I stopped by the closest door, listening to my own heartbeat. I watched my very own hand reach out, my fingers clasping the nearest forbidden polished-brass doorknob. It was cold beneath my skin, the true cold of the frozen woods beyond Lord Lin’s domain. I turned the handle and stepped into a dark chamber, hardly more than a cupboard, but stepped back again as the smell rolled over me — the warm round scent of a bluebell wood on a hot day — just like perfume a girl might have worn in better times, but all mingled with the sweet stink of rot.

  I wanted to run then, but Grandmama had called me Little Wolf.

  Then I will be as a wolf. I reached up and lifted one of the flaming torches from a sconce on the wall; it lit up a room draped with odd-shaped swaths of fabric. Leather? No, skins. A pile of hair like so many discarded wigs: some golden, some red, some raven dark. I remembered the soft white leather of Lord Lin’s saddle and reached out to lift a bolt of hide. It was so soft — so very soft — still flecked with golden freckles, dotted with tiny golden hairs. The skin of a girl: a wife? I dropped the skin, shuddering all over, and all I could hear above the drumming of my own heartbeat was Lord Lin’s voice in my mind: I’m a widower.

  No widower, I thought, but a murderer. And I’d left him alone with my sister.

  Still holding the torch, I fled down the corridor back toward the hall, shedding a shower of sparks alight in my hair, and in my flight I put my hands up to my crown of braids, remembering the iron pin. Keep it secret, keep it safe. Oh, Grandmama — were you right all along? Clutching the pin, I burst back into the hall, only to find Rosamund and my lord dancing in a shaft of moonlight, their bodies twined together, even though there was no music.

  He saw me first and stopped; Rosamund looked around, annoyed.

  Lord Lin spoke before I could. “You disobeyed me so soon?” he asked. “I so hoped you would.” And he laughed.

  “Run!” I screamed at Rosamund.

  “Which girl shall I have first, Little Wolf?” he said, his smile still so sweet. “Now that I have one to spare?” He tangled his long white fingers in Rosamund’s hair, and she screamed at me to run, but I did not, for it is true they call me Little Wolf. Instead I thought of my grandmama, and I ran at Rosamund’s murdering, beautiful husband, and I rammed the iron pin into the milk-white skin of his forearm even as he held my sister. Rosamund shrieked and stumbled toward me, and Lord Lin was nothing but a drifting whirl of milk-white dust, settling at our feet like new snow as we clutched at each other. I buried my face against Rosamund’s starved breast, and I felt her warm breath in my ear, and when we both finally dared look up, only a moment later, Lin Hall had crumbled to ruins all around us as if all that magnificence had never been, and we were alone in the frozen forest, my sister and I.

  Rosamund sobbed, clutching at my hand, but I knelt down to the ground, to the green shoots poking up among the blackened, cursed stones of Lin Hall, to the rich, dark earth showing through melting snow.

  “Don’t cry,” I said. “Rosamund, spring is coming — look. It’s coming at last.”

  “Now that he’s dead,” whispered Rosamund. And I’ll never know if she was right or not, my sister, that it was Lord Lin himself who cast a spell of winter upon this land so that we might all starve and suffer and bring him one desperate wife after another. But the winter died when he did, all the same. There would be no more wives for Lord Lin. Never again.

  Hand in hand, my sister and I fled for home, running toward the rising sun as the forest thawed around us.

  I watch my mother waltz by herself. She is leading an imaginary dance partner, her hand convinci
ngly pressed against the air in front of her. I watch her body as it swooshes. Her waltzes always have style, though her arms keep getting bonier, tattooed with smudgy bruises and raised, welted burns. She tells everyone she’s clumsy. But she looks pretty coordinated now, waltzing around our tiny living room.

  I came home from the last day of marching-band camp twenty minutes ago, and she was already waltzing. My entrance warranted a deep curtsy. I could hear the record player warbling out notes before I was in the door. The walls of this apartment building are moth-wing thin, which is unfortunate for my neighbors, because my family is that family.

  “Come dance with me, Imogene,” Mom says. She is done letting me watch. She reaches out her hand and I stand there, still. It is one thing to watch my mother but another to actually step (one and two and) forward, break the spell, enter into her dreamworld.

  “Please, Imogenie,” Mom says. I hate when she calls me that. “You never want to dance with me anymore.” She pouts. We have the same over-exaggerated Cupid’s bow. I’ve heard this is bad for flute playing, but luckily I never wanted to pick up a woodwind instrument — woodwind players are much like actual woodwinds: breathy, high-pitched, unable to stand without support from the rest of the band. It’s strictly brass for me. Trumpets are natural-born soloists. Tears are forming in my mother’s eyes. “None of my children love me anymore.”

  “All your children love you,” I say. I move closer, stretch out my hand. I haven’t figured out how to harden myself completely. My mother is like some sort of skinny, waltzing cyclone, cycling her moods, sucking me in.

  Bobby, my older half brother, said once that our mother has a “profound sadness” to her. That was in his philosophy phase. Bobby has a lot of phases. Nearly all of them involve smoking pot on our living-room couch. He has a short attention span and is on his fifth year of a four-year degree. This week he’s been in an “I want to be a director” phase, so tonight his boyfriend, Shane, took him two towns over to the independent cinema to watch a foreign film.

  Profoundly sad or expertly manipulative. Either way, I take my mother’s hand, feeling the fragile fish bones inside. She is like a little kid, her wrists almost as skinny as my eight-year-old sister Magda’s.

  “Nobody learns to waltz anymore,” Mom says. She nudges my foot with hers, guiding me. I step backward easily. I know how to waltz.

  “Waltzing is all you do,” I say. It comes out too harsh.

  “All the best songs are waltzes,” she says. “It’s the most versatile dance.”

  One, two, three, one, two, three. We step.

  “This song is not a waltz,” I say. “This is . . . I don’t know. Rock opera.”

  My mother only waltzes, and she only listens to Meat Loaf. She shrugs.

  “Meat Loaf wrote exactly zero waltzes,” I say.

  Mom is moving faster now, doubling her steps, two paces for each beat. One and two and three and.

  I guess I don’t know for certain that Meat Loaf wasn’t secretly a waltz composer, but I’m pretty sure he wasn’t. Although Bobby, when he was in a dancing phase, short-lived, said that Journey’s “Open Arms” (he was also in a “music that Imogene wishes would disappear” phase) is technically a waltz, so who knows.

  “Meat Loaf transcends categories,” Mom says. She stops waltzing and flips the record over. “Bat Out of Hell” starts playing.

  I think about how fast my fingers would need to move to play this intro. I listen to the runs of music as if I haven’t heard this song an uncountable number of times. Definitely isn’t in 3/4 time. I listen. It must be in 4/4 time, aka “common time.” Not very clever, Meaty. Maybe he was so busy trying to figure out how to make a song as long as humanly possible that he didn’t even think about time signatures. My fingers move over an imaginary trumpet. One and two and three and four and one and two and three and four and. Over and over. No rests. Actually, maybe the song is in cut time. Twice as fast as 4/4 time. Like a march. Marches are almost never in 4/4 time. Too slow.

  March on, Meat Loaf, march on. Take Mom. I bet you love waltzing.

  My mother holds her hand out to me again. I grasp it. Her fish scales are clammy. My mother is never warm. When I was little, I used to think that her blood ran cold because she spent so much time out on our tiny balcony, smoking her cigarettes, drinking from her plastic bottles. She used to let me throw the bottles over the side of the balcony when they were empty. I liked that.

  I guess she didn’t want my father to see the bottles, but they stayed down there, in the dirt-lot yard, littered about like fallen birds pushed from their nest. Maybe he never went down there. Or maybe he did. All I know is he went. And went. And went.

  One and two and three and.

  “I have real waltzes I could play for you,” I say.

  She shakes her head. “We’re waltzing to this, aren’t we?”

  Technically, yes. We are waltzing and the music is playing, but no — not that there’s any use explaining that.

  My best friend, Ingrid, said once, “Your mom is like the biggest Meat Loaf fan ever.” She’s been subjected to many Meat Loaf dance parties. “Possibly the only one left.”

  “Meat Loaf still sells a hundred thousand albums every year,” I told her. “Mom is very invested in his career.”

  “What career?” Ingrid said. “Did he get a sweet gig in the cafeteria?”

  I don’t know what it is about Meat Loaf that Mom loves, besides his flair for the dramatic and his rugged good looks, obviously. Maybe he reminds her of being young.

  I feel something sharp, and I wince. Mom is digging her fingers into my back now. “Not you, Imogene,” she says.

  It takes me a second to figure out what she is replying to. Mom has a tendency to say sentences that don’t follow one another exactly. It’s like trying to keep track of all of the key changes in Verdi’s Requiem.

  I think. Oh, right. About none of her children loving her.

  “Of course I love you,” I say.

  I don’t say, Maybe if you were sober more often, or if your memory wasn’t cut up like the paper snowflakes Magda and I used to decorate the house with, maybe then . . .

  Mom likes to say that I care more about marching band than her. Not entirely true, although on most days I’ll admit that I like marching band more than I like her.

  “You used to love me best,” she says, “and now you don’t ever come home.”

  Mom likes to say that I spend all my time with Ingrid and Greg. Greg is my boyfriend, except his name is actually Gano, but for some reason Mom can’t remember that and just keeps calling him Greg instead.

  Mom surprises me by dipping me low. She giggles. I love her laugh. Sometimes I forget that there are things about my mother worth loving, that there are moments worth remembering. It’s because every good moment is really just a pause, a rest, a beat before the cacophony of the rest of her crashes in.

  “I came home tonight,” I say. Meat Loaf has moved on to “You Took the Words Right Out of My Mouth.” Also not a waltz. “All my friends went out, but I still came home.”

  Marching band starts two weeks before school, so while other kids are busy sucking up the end of summer, I am standing in a perfectly straight line, holding my trumpet (three pounds doesn’t sound like a lot until you’re all feet-together-stomach-in-elbows-out-shoulders-back-chin-up for eight hours), trying to memorize the notes, the steps. School starts tomorrow, and everyone else in band is at the end-of-marching-camp party that Big Thunder (a ridiculously popular, ridiculously huge tuba player–football player hybrid) is throwing.

  I wanted to go. Parties make you forget. They let you forget that your mother is at home, profoundly sad, expertly manipulative. They let you dance regular dances, zero waltzes, zero heavy implications of participating, and they make you think that making out with your boyfriend in front of everyone is okay and they make you feel like you have friends.

  But I don’t say “party” to Mom because parents don’t like “parties.” Correction
: Ingrid’s parents and Gano’s parents don’t like “parties.” They have “rules.” Mom doesn’t seem to care much what I do. But I don’t tell that to Gano. Parents are supposed to have rules. I’m supposed to have a curfew, like he does. A parent that worries, like his do.

  So I pretend.

  I look over Mom’s shoulder and there’s Magda. When did she come in? I should’ve paid closer attention to the time. Ended this sooner. Magda stares, her head tilted, assessing.

  One and two and three and.

  Think and think and quick.

  This is not a place where Magda should be, not a time when Magda should be here. I’ve worked hard. I’ve worked so hard to keep all this away from Magda. To tell her that Mom is sleeping. To act like the things Mom says are funny and not scary. To shut her out from the waltzing. To never let her become Mom’s unwilling partner.

  I stop waltzing and hug Mom. Magda steps forward and I shake my head. She waits a second, then walks down the hallway.

  I just want to protect her. I bring her with me whenever I can. Set her up at Ingrid’s kitchen table, coloring, while we do our homework. Get a neighbor to watch her after school.

  “Oh, you never hug me anymore,” Mom says. She grips tighter, and her icicle fingers give me prickly goose bumps.

  I pull away. She smiles.

  “You could have invited Ingrid and Greg here,” Mom says. She reaches her hand out. “You lead now.”

  Mom almost never wants to let me lead. I switch to the dominant position easily, putting my hand on her back, feeling the sharp knots of her spine, guiding her legs gently. I don’t want to break her. My mother always feels like she is on the verge of shattering.