Spectacle

by Jodie Lynn Zdrok

  “Brigitte tried to take her own life this morning.” The courier stood with his hands at his sides. “She’s alive but badly wounded. I’m afraid the asylum did not ask me to relay any more than that.”

  Maman’s face turned as white as her bonnet. “Mon Dieu!”

  Papa thanked the courier and showed him out. His hand lingered on the doorknob. After a pause, he shook his head. “She—she seemed well enough during my visit the other day.”

  “I thought she was long past that,” Maman said in a heavy voice as she settled onto the sofa.

  “Past that? This isn’t the first time?” Nathalie took a step into the parlor. “You never told me.”

  Maman shot her a look of disappointment. “Do you think talk of suicide is appropriate for a child?”

  Nathalie blushed. “Non.”

  “It happened shortly after they took her in at Saint-Mathurin,” Papa said, joining Maman on the sofa. He put his arms around her. “She made thirteen sets of rosary beads into a rope of sorts, and … fortunately someone heard her kick the chair away. They found her in time.”

  Maman buried her face in her hands. “Poor troubled, sensitive, unpredictable Brigitte.”

  Nathalie hesitated, wanting to choose her words carefully, then spoke. “I understand. Why you kept some things from me. About our family, about being Insightfuls and what all of that meant.”

  She studied them, her hardworking parents who’d given her a home of love and happy memories, when she knew all too well many girls had no such thing. The Henard experiments had changed their lives and hers forever, and yet they didn’t crumble under the weight of their memories. They were fatigued and genuine, burdened and good. She was proud, so very proud, to have them as parents.

  * * *

  As soon as they stepped through the doorway to Aunt Brigitte’s floor, rosemary and juniper pervaded their nostrils. “To purify the air,” Maman had once explained. Sometimes the asylum staff used it to cover up accidents, like the time a patient threw up in the hall, or the day one of Aunt Brigitte’s roommates dumped every chamber pot she could find until the nurses restrained her. So it was rarely just rosemary and juniper. It was usually rosemary, juniper, and some horrid, not-quite-masked stench.

  Today there was no repulsive odor. The air was, if not quite pure, fresh. Rosemary and juniper wafted through the hall.

  Nathalie wondered if it was intended to cover up the smell of would-be death.

  Nurse Pelletier, lips pursed and strides brisk, approached Papa. They conversed briefly, and then the nurse walked away with steps as rapid as before.

  “They put Aunt Brigitte in a different room for now, alone,” said Papa, pointing to a room farther down the hall than Tante’s usual room. “She woke up screaming from a nightmare. Nurse Pelletier calmed her down, and when she returned later to check, Tante was chewing on her wrist and bleeding.”

  Maman gasped and Nathalie winced. Maybe it was her imagination, maybe it was the visions, but she pictured the terrible scene all too sharply.

  “Also,” Papa continued, “she claims a demon dog came to her in her sleep, attacked her, and left her bleeding. That’s the story Aunt Brigitte is telling, and … they don’t want us to acknowledge it as a suicide attempt.”

  “We’re to pretend it’s just another visit?” Maman’s hand flew to her throat.

  Papa shrugged. “The doctor thinks that’s best for now. I’m going to meet with him before we go.”

  They walked into Aunt Brigitte’s new room to find her bundled up and under the covers. She looked small, so very small, in that bed. Every time Nathalie saw her, Tante seemed tinier and tinier, like someday she would disappear into the bed altogether.

  Aunt Brigitte held up her bandaged wrist. “One of the hounds of Hell got me last night.” Then, in a whisper: “It isn’t safe from them here.”

  They approached the bed slowly and greeted her. Aunt Brigitte thanked them for visiting, as she always did. “Last night I dreamed I walked through the halls of this place and everyone was dead, mauled by an unseen creature. I knelt down to pray and a red-eyed demon dog appeared. ‘Your prayers mean nothing,’ it said, then attacked my folded hands. I woke up and…” She extended her wrist and let it drop.

  Quiet settled among them all, and after a while, Maman coughed. “Because Augustin is humble, I suspect he didn’t tell you: Not only did he heal me, but he healed our neighbors’ daughter. She had some unknown ailment that had her feverish most of the summer.”

  Aunt Brigitte’s face brightened as she beamed at her brother.

  Nathalie observed Maman, impressed by how she excelled at helping Tante shift moods. Papa patted Maman’s hand; he was probably thinking the same.

  Aunt Brigitte launched into a story about how Papa had tried to teach her to skip stones, but she never did master it. “Of course it’s too late now,” she lamented. Her expression abruptly switched to concern. “Augustin, take the box home. The demon dog is a sign that the box shouldn’t be here anymore.”

  “What box?” asked Maman. She began to look around Tante’s sparse area, hastily remade from her other room. A set of wooden rosary beads without a crucifix. A worn prayer book. A stuffed cat Nathalie had given her one Christmas years ago, back when Aunt Brigitte lived at Mme. Plouffe’s, because it resembled Stanley. “There’s nothing here.”

  “Ask Nurse Pelletier,” whispered Aunt Brigitte. “She put it in the vault years ago.”

  “Where they keep patient possessions?” Maman darted a look at Papa. He glanced away.

  “And goodness knows what else,” said Aunt Brigitte, waving her hand. “I don’t trust anyone here.”

  “I’ll get it,” said Nathalie. Before anyone could object she left the room and found Nurse Pelletier feeding someone two rooms down. Once she finished up with the patient, she acknowledged Nathalie’s request. After muttering “Now, where’s the key?” several times to herself, she disappeared.

  Nathalie watched the woman who’d just been fed, an elderly woman. She stroked a filthy rag doll as though it were a child. Another patient shuffled down the corridor toward Nathalie, murmuring. She stopped beside Nathalie, who pretended not to see, and stood on her toes. The woman leaned in to Nathalie as if to tell her a secret, and spoke in a whisper. “Where’s the key?”

  The woman shuffled away. Nathalie stared after her, suddenly recognizing her and contemplating the filter of madness.

  “Here you are.” Nurse Pelletier, returning sooner than Nathalie expected, handed her the box. “One of your parents needs to sign a document attesting to its receipt. Have them see a nurse in that office.” She pointed to a room at the end of the hall and disappeared into another room to feed another patient.

  Nathalie strolled back toward Tante’s room and removed the box cover to see what was inside.

  The papers.

  The papers, the ones Nathalie had searched for, the ones scattered all over Aunt Brigitte’s room at Mme. Plouffe’s that day. The papers Papa so fiercely guarded. The papers Maman said had been burned.

  MY STORY was written across the top of yellowed paper. Nathalie picked up the box and began to read.

  My name is Brigitte Catherine Baudin and I am an Insightful. I am blessed, I am cursed, and I am proof that magic is real, beautiful, and devastating.

  45

  Nathalie’s grip on the box stiffened. This could be it. Finally. Answers no one else could or would provide, to questions she’d never had until this summer. Questions she didn’t think existed.

  She heard footsteps behind her and instinctively closed the box. A white-bearded doctor with glasses muttered a greeting as he passed; a nurse holding bandages trailed him. They turned into Aunt Brigitte’s room.

  She leaned against the concrete wall and resumed reading in the hallway.

  I was twenty-six when I got the transfusion, and the magic transformed me, made me love life and Paris and God Himself more than ever. After twenty-five years I was ALIVE. The gift bestowed on m
e was clairvoyance through dreams. It was like a little surprise each day … which of my dreams would I see in real life the next day? Sometimes it was a scene in the park, sometimes it was a meal I enjoyed, sometimes it was a conversation with a stranger. Every day something from my dreams became a piece of my reality.

  I gave birth to a dead baby when I was twenty. His diminutive corpse haunted my dreams for five years. I received magic and the haunting stopped.

  No. It changed forms.

  When there were whispers of CONSEQUENCES, I pitied those who had them, including Augustin. He heals people and takes some of their sickness into himself for a time. I believed myself to be fortunate. I didn’t suffer from any effects.

  Until I did.

  It happened slowly. I think. Perhaps. I realize now as I write these words these words these WORDS that madness is stealthy and comes like a thief in the night (1 Thessalonians 5:2). Isn’t that what Saint Paul said or meant or wrote nonetheless?

  My dreams became reality and reality became dreams and violence came to me in dreams and then I came to violence when I woke up. BUT I HAD TO BECAUSE I HAD TO. I know what I saw. Babies, innocents. Killed. Being killed. Killers killing innocents. And I tried and tried and tried to save them and I tried I did to save them.

  No one believes. No one believes. No one no one no one no one no one no one no one no one no one no one no one no one no one

  Then the words became even more nonsensical—they were arbitrary and ill-placed, as if someone who didn’t speak French had taken a list of phrases from a language book and copied them at random. That went on for another couple of pages and then the handwriting became sloppy, too. Soon the letters themselves became meaningless loops and lines and curves. By the fourth page it was utter gibberish.

  Another twenty or so pages of senseless writing followed. Then, on the last page, Aunt Brigitte signed her name in large, clear script.

  Nathalie lifted her eyes from the papers. Tante had borne a dead child? She realized then that she didn’t know much at all about Aunt Brigitte other than what she saw during asylum visits and what she remembered from childhood. Nathalie would never pretend to comprehend the entirety of Tante’s madness. These words offered a sliver of understanding for Nathalie to perch upon, something authentic in which to root her empathy.

  She fanned the pages between her thumb and index finger, marveled and horrified by what they contained.

  “That’s probably the last thing she ever wrote,” said Papa, appearing in the doorway. His voice was sad. Nostalgic.

  “Maman said you burned them.”

  “I intended to,” he said, lowering his voice, “because it was a difficult time for Insightfuls, and I didn’t want any record of Henard’s work in our home. When the time came, I couldn’t do it. Out of respect.”

  Nathalie placed the cover on the box. “You told me you took Tante to see Dr. Henard because she’d become melancholy. Is—is this why?” she asked, hugging the box.

  Papa nodded. “She’d been ashamed that the child was out of wedlock and was convinced its death in the womb was punishment. The man who fathered the child left her. The sorrow never did.” He gazed over his shoulder, his expression forlorn. “Henard’s magic was going to give her—us—a new path to take. I wanted her to feel alive again.’”

  “She did.” Nathalie saw the guilt in his eyes. “She wrote that, Papa. She did feel alive again.”

  “For a while,” he said, his smile bittersweet.

  She gazed into the room at her aunt, withered beyond her years.

  Will that be me? Papa? M. Patenaude? Do we all become you, Tante?

  Or were you just unlucky?

  If magic and science had never met in Dr. Henard’s laboratory, who might you have been?

  “Augustin?” Maman called from inside the room.

  They returned to the room. Aunt Brigitte had her eyes closed as the nurse gathered the old dressing. Papa spoke to the doctor, who addressed him in a stiff voice and led him out of the room.

  “Maman, Nurse Pelletier said we have to sign a document for this,” Nathalie said, holding up the box. “I’ll show you what’s in it later.”

  “You can come with me to do that,” said the nurse. She rolled up one last bandage and motioned for Maman to follow her.

  Maman was no sooner over the threshold than Aunt Brigitte sat up. “It was about you, Nathalie. She sought you.”

  Nathalie’s heart leapt. “Who? Where?”

  “In my dream. You were sleeping under a tree in a park. The woman in black had a bloody knife in one hand and a little glass bottle in the other.”

  “Woman in black?” Nathalie felt her chest contract, a bow string pulled back. Was this more madness? Or was this … somehow real?

  Aunt Brigitte beckoned her closer. “Her hands were so full of splinters, it hurt her to hold the knife. She stabbed a man on her way to you—near Augustin’s age, splayed on a gray-striped blanket. He was face down so I couldn’t see him. And from here to here,” Aunt Brigitte said, dragging her hands from Nathalie’s elbows to fingertips, “she was soaked in blood.”

  She quivered. Aunt Brigitte was more lucid, more clear-eyed than she’d ever seen her. Not tempestuous or angry.

  Authentic.

  “This woman,” Nathalie began, fighting the dread that clawed at her throat. “What—what did she look like?”

  “Stunning visage, dark braids that sat high on her head. She wore an unusual headpiece, red and gold, that looked like a fan. Height like yours.”

  The room spun around Nathalie like a carnival wheel.

  Why hadn’t she put it together before? It was all right there. All of it.

  Splinters.

  Red-and-gold fan.

  Red-and-gold prayer card. To a saint whose conversion story involved blood. Of course blood. Always blood.

  She’d seen Mme. la Tuerie not once. Not twice. Three times.

  And once had been with the Dark Artist.

  Nathalie sat down on the floor. She didn’t care if was filthy or smelled like chamber pots. Her legs wouldn’t support her. She hugged her knees as she thought it all through.

  The woman who’d talked to her in the morgue about splinters, the day she fainted. My beau gets splinters all the time.

  The couple in Père Lachaise, the day she followed M. Gloves. Asking her if she was lost. A handsome clean-shaven man who’d had a beard when he was on the slab at the morgue. That’s why he seemed familiar. She’d seen him. Talked to him. About the lovers statue in the cemetery.

  The lovers, like the tarot card. Like the photograph at Medici Fountain that Louis had seen.

  But one lover killed the other. She alone killed the Dark Artist. The man in the dream on the blanket. It represented the Dark Artist.

  Somewhere on the edges of Nathalie’s mind she heard Tante call her name, but she couldn’t respond.

  46

  Nathalie trembled and made her way to her feet, using the wall for support.

  “Why did you sit on the ground like that?” asked Aunt Brigitte. “There’s a chair in the corner.”

  “I just—just needed to for a moment.” Nathalie looked in the hall to see if either of her parents were on their way back yet. “Tante, did the woman kill me?”

  “I don’t know. I ran toward her and grabbed her wrist, but my hand slipped on the blood,” Aunt Brigitte said, mimicking an elusive grasp. “You woke up in time to see her coming for you. And then you did the strangest thing.”

  She positioned her hand for a handshake. Nathalie tentatively met Tante’s hand with her own.

  “After you shook her hand, I woke up.” Aunt Brigitte heaved a sigh as she gently let go of Nathalie’s hand.

  Nathalie stared at her own hand, as if it could tell her the rest of the story. “What about the—the demon dog? How was that part of the dream?”

  “It wasn’t,” Aunt Brigitte said in a low voice. “That was a dream from days ago. An excuse. I bit my wrist as hard as I could to
make this dream go away. To make them all go away. Forever.” She closed her eyes. “I don’t trust the people here. They never understand. No one does. Except your father. Where is he again?”

  “With the doctor, remember? He’ll be back soon.” Nathalie stole a look over her shoulder. Should I?

  I have to, and I have to now. I should have long ago.

  “Tante. I need to tell you something. Quickly,” she said in a soft voice. “Somehow I—I was born with Dr. Henard’s magic. I have visions, too.”

  Aunt Brigitte’s eyes shot open. She stared at Nathalie as if terrified of her. She screamed, a powerful bellow from a petite, bony body, and tugged hard on her braid. “No, no. NO! Not you. NOT YOU!”

  Moments later the doctor and nurse hurried into the room with Maman and Papa close behind. The nurse asked Aunt Brigitte what was wrong.

  “Protect her. Protect that beautiful child. Take care of her, Augustin.”

  “I will,” said Papa. He tucked the blanket neatly around his sister. “Please don’t worry yourself, Brigitte.”

  “She’s free from danger,” Maman added, brushing back Aunt Brigitte’s unruly hair. She gave Nathalie a questioning glance.

  “No. She’s not.” Tante moved her head side to side like a child refusing food. “The woman wants her dead.”

  Nathalie started to shake, even though the room was warm. “I’m—I’m well, Tante. Truly,” she said, despite being nothing of the sort. She whispered to her parents that she’d explain later.

  The nurse massaged some chamomile oil on Aunt Brigitte’s temples and neck, then left the room. Maman sat on the bed and held Tante’s hands as Aunt Brigitte closed her eyes with a moan.

  Nathalie folded her arms to stop the shaking. How long were they going to stay? She needed to go tell Christophe. He might even want to come talk to Aunt Brigitte himself.

  Her shaking got even worse. She folded her arms tighter.

  “I’m afraid I’m going to have to ask you to leave,” said the doctor, with a nod to Papa. “Brigitte needs her rest.”