The Fortress

by Danielle Trussoni

  “Sit down a minute, guys,” I said.

  Nico took a cookie and said, “Are we going to have another one of your talks?”

  “Are there so many?”

  “Like so many,” she grumbled, biting into the cookie. They were her favorite, and we always had a box or two in the cupboard.

  “All the time,” Alex agreed. “You’re always asking how we’re feeling.”

  I hadn’t realized I’d been doing that, but now that they mentioned it, I could see I’d been checking in with them about their feelings a lot more than usual, like every day.

  “It’s a good question to ask,” I countered. “It’s important to be able to talk about how you feel.”

  “I feel like going back upstairs to play Sims,” Alex said.

  “Actually,” I said, “I just want all three of us to be able to talk to one another.”

  Nico and Alex exchanged an Oh, my God, Mom look.

  “I know this isn’t easy. You’re brother and sister,” I said. “You two need to stick together.”

  “Actually,” Nico said, “Alex is not my real brother.”

  I stared at her, stupefied. We’d never made this distinction in the past, and Nico had never said anything even remotely like that before.

  Alex looked hurt. “I am too your real brother,” he said.

  “My dad is not your dad, and so you’re not my real brother,” Nico said. “You are my half brother.”

  I couldn’t help but wonder if this was Nikolai’s doing, his new strategy. Divide and conquer. If he could sever the connection between Nico and her brother, he could take her more easily. It would be easier for her to leave her brother behind. It seemed to me that he was ripping apart the seams of our family, stitch by stitch, until all connections were gone.

  “Do you know, Nico,” I said, “when you were a newborn baby, Alex was one of the first people to hold you after we came home from the hospital. I have a picture of him with you in his arms. And do you remember who helped you learn to ride your bike? It was Alex. And who shared a room with you in Providence, before we came to France? Alex again. He’s always been with you, Nico. That makes him your real brother.”

  “What if I told you that you’re not my sister, Nico?” Alex said, and the pain in his voice shot through me. She had really hurt him. “How would you feel then?”

  Nico gave Alex and me a confused look.

  “The people who love you and who are here for you are your family,” I said. “That’s what’s important.”

  Also important was that I didn’t re-create my past in the present. I found myself comparing my divorce with my parents’ divorce more and more, trying to tease out lessons and wisdom from what I’d witnessed as a child. I didn’t want to repeat their mistakes. When my parents separated, it felt like being pulled apart, stretched between my mother and my father until my ligaments snapped and my muscles ripped and my limbs tore. After the divorce I had collected my damaged self and stitched her back together, but I was always weak at the scars. I didn’t want that to happen to Alex and Nico. I would do anything to protect them. Even if it meant giving them up.

  —

  WHILE THEIR FATHER was living downstairs, and our life was veering off into the strangest of territories, I tried to make things seem as normal as possible for Alex and Nico. I took refuge in our routines, the ones I had worked so hard to establish. Every day they sat at the upstairs kitchen table and finished their homework, ate le goûter, and read Le Petit Quotidien. Every night I made sure they had baths and kisses at bedtime. We played board games and read stories as Fly, our stubby guardian, sat by the Paris-Lyon door, his ears prickling up every time he heard something in the stairwell.

  Alex and Nico needed a normal life, and a normal life meant that there could be no crying in front of them, no speaking on the phone about the divorce within their hearing, no bad-mouthing Nikolai in front of them. Normal meant keeping up appearances—keeping myself clean, well dressed, and functioning on a basic level—while in reality I felt incapable of getting out of bed every morning. Normal meant no phone calls with Hadrien when the kids were around, no mention of Hadrien, not even the slightest hint that there was someone in the world named Hadrien. Normal meant being strong for them when I barely had the strength to keep myself going.

  The Saturday afternoon in the fourth week of the standoff, I’d shut myself into the bedroom and was talking to Hadrien. Nico and Alex were out in the courtyard playing Ping-Pong, and so I thought it was safe to give Hadrien a call. We spoke every day, often for hours at a time. He called late at night, after the kids had gone to bed, and I would be hurled into another dimension, one of understanding and friendship, one filled with jokes and tenderness. We talked about everything and began to know each other more deeply. I discovered in these long conversations that he was caring and emotionally articulate. He could voice what he felt and help me express what I felt, too. But above all he was warm. And this warmth was what I needed after my long, frozen marriage.

  Normally I would have waited until after the kids went to bed, but we had something important to discuss. Hadrien had called my lawyer for an update. I had finally hired a lawyer in Montpellier, and as my French was not good enough to allow me to understand all the legal language, Hadrien had begun to translate the finer points of the negotiations as they progressed. What I wanted remained the same: for everyone to stay in Aubais, or at least in the general area, so that Alex and Nico could live with both parents, keep their friends and their school. Nikolai didn’t want to stay in France. At first he said he wanted to move to Bulgaria. Then he told me he was planning to move back to Providence. Then he changed his mind again. Now he planned to go to Sofia, as originally planned. He wanted a lump-sum payout for his part of the house, plus alimony and child support.

  Recently Nico had come to me to say she wanted to live with her dad. He had already promised her a big room in an apartment by a patisserie, and a dog like Fly, and a wide-screen TV, but now he was taking a new approach. “Daddy says he can’t live without me,” she said, her eyes wide with concern. “You have Alex. If I don’t go with him, he won’t have anyone.” Nico was nine years old, and she should have been spared this kind of emotional blackmail, but there she was, telling me her father wouldn’t make it without her.

  I knew firsthand how powerful, how magnetic, the allure of a wounded parent could be to a child. My father had been deeply hurt by my mother, and the twelve-year-old Danielle had made a calculation similar to the one Nico was making: My dad needed me more than my mom did. It hadn’t occurred me to that my mother had a different way of suffering, that she hid her pain from me. My father had put on a bigger show, and he had won my sympathy. Now, years later, my daughter had been put in the same position.

  “Nico says she wants to live with her dad,” I said to Hadrien.

  “Do you think that’s best for her?”

  “No,” I said. “Of course not. He isn’t equipped to care for her. But what choice do I have? Drag her through a custody trial? It’s too much for anyone, let alone a little girl. What a nightmare.”

  “Well,” Hadrien said, “your lawyer thinks you should give him what he wants financially. And if you let Nico go with him, he’s ready to accept a buyout of the house. It is important to note that a custody agreement can be overturned. The financial agreement, however, cannot.”

  “So,” I said, thinking this over, “if I agree to his terms and let Nico go to Bulgaria now, I can come back and reopen the custody case later?”

  “Yes,” he said. “And you will have stopped him from destroying you financially. There’s always the option of going back for Nico later.”

  Suddenly I heard something push against the bedroom door. I walked over and opened it. Nico jumped, her big brown eyes going wide with wonder. “Mama!” she said. “You scared me!”

  “Call you later,” I said to Hadrien, and disconnected my call as I steered Nico inside my bedroom. “Hey there,” I said. “Were you wa
iting for me?”

  “Yes,” she said. She looked at the floor, and she held herself very straight, very rigid, as if she were preparing to dive into a deep, cold swimming pool. I’d noticed that her posture changed when she was with Alex and me. She became stiff, unnatural. My exuberant little girl would become deliberate, careful, as if her words were memorized, her gestures rehearsed. Maybe it was the strain of the divorce. I didn’t know. I only knew that Nico was not the same child she’d been two months before.

  “Were you waiting for me a long time?” I asked, wondering how much she’d heard.

  Nico nodded, recondite, but didn’t say anything.

  “Why didn’t you just knock?”

  “I don’t know,” she said, shrugging. She sat on the edge of my bed.

  “I was on the phone,” I said, sitting next to her. “Did you hear me?”

  She looked at me, wide-eyed, and shook her head. Then, realizing that she’d been caught, said, “Well, a little.”

  “Did your dad send you up here to listen to me?” I asked.

  She shook her head again, with less conviction. I was sure she’d heard much more than a little, and I had to wonder if Nikolai had sent her spying at my door.

  “It’s okay,” I said. “I won’t get mad if you tell me.”

  She looked up at me, and I knew I could push her to tell me everything that was going on behind the death-mantra door. I knew, with just the right words and just the right looks, with a few promises and hugs, I could extract the enemy plan. She wanted to please me, just as she wanted to please her father. But could I go that far? Could I use my child as an instrument of war? Was anything in the world worth that?

  “No,” Nico said. “Daddy didn’t send me.”

  I took her in my arms and hugged her. Her father and I had always been the ones there to keep her safe. But now it wasn’t outside forces that threatened her. Now I needed to protect her from us.

  —

  THE SPELLS THAT had begun with the burning of my hair on his altar and progressed to the Tibetan mantra knifed into his door continued during our standoff. I would look at my phone and find messages like THE GYPSIES WILL HAVE YOUR SOUL! and I WILL MAKE SURE YOU ROT IN HELL FOR ETERNITY! I would find, interspersed between these messages in English, the Tibetan symbols that Nikolai had carved into his door:

  When these symbols first appeared on his door, I had no way to understand them. But now Nikolai sent them to me in a digital format, and I could translate them for the first time. Using my iPhone, I copied the symbols from the text message and pasted the phrase into an online Tibetan dictionary. The definition that came up was: “The seed syllable for the Body of all Buddhas. Die, lifeless, dead, deceased, depart, expire, passed, appeasing, death, quietude.” Maybe these symbols could have been interpreted in a number of ways, but to me they were nothing less than a message of death and destruction. They were threats, death threats, curses and dark spells, incantations for my death. He wanted me to die, to become lifeless, to decease, to expire. He wanted me dead.

  Every time one of these threatening messages came to me, I went into a tailspin. Had he actually paid Gypsies to put a curse on me? I remembered what he’d told me in Bulgaria—that people often got revenge by hiring Gypsies to cast spells. What did it mean that he would make sure I rotted in hell for eternity? Were these curses something he’d learned in India? What could they do to me? What if it were more than a curse? Maybe he was sending these threats with a more literal intention. Maybe he was planning to kill me himself.

  I went to my computer and began searching for statistics, hoping to calm myself down. There was nothing to worry about, I told myself. People got divorced all the time without actually murdering each other. My parents hadn’t killed each other. In fact, they’d never touched each other, just yelled a lot. I reminded myself that Nikolai and I were both educated human beings, both with master’s degrees, both with many books published, the parents of small children. We were the type of people who used words to solve our problems, not the type of people out to slaughter each other.

  But what I found only served to make me more anxious. According to the Web site of the Department of Justice, around 30 percent of women murdered each year are murdered by a husband or boyfriend. One-third of all women murdered! Men, it turned out, were murdered by their wives or girlfriends around 4 percent of the time. One man out of twenty-five! According to these numbers, Nikolai was much more likely to murder me than I was to murder him.

  But statistics could not describe us. We had never believed we were like other couples. That was why we’d fallen so hard for each other to begin with. We believed we were special. We didn’t need to play by the rules. We made our own rules. We were reckless, hurting the people we loved—Z and Sam and Rada and Alex and Nico—to get what we wanted. I had always believed we were exceptional, but now I saw that we were just your run-of-the-mill egotistical assholes.

  —

  LATE ONE NIGHT, after the kids were asleep and before I called Hadrien for our nightly talk, I ran a bath, undressed, and sank deep into the hot water. It was the only time of the day that I felt removed from the battle, when I put down my shield. I turned the lights off and lit a candle in a corner, letting it cast a low and inconsistent glow across the porcelain tub, the stone floor, the large, liquid mirrors. Running my fingers over my body, I felt the bones jutting through the skin, sharp and unnatural. One foot floated up, rising like an iceberg in a sea, then the other foot. The big nail of my right toe hung askew, loose and blue. Two small nails on my left foot had already fallen off. I didn’t know if I’d stubbed my toes or if stress and malnutrition had caused them to fall off, but my toenails were peeling away, as if they no longer wished to remain part of my feet.

  After my bath I looked in the mirror and saw the woman I’d become in the past weeks. There were two deep moons of blue under my eyes. My skin was pale, parchment white, nearly transparent. I was sleep-deprived, underweight, and frazzled. Later, after I’d left the fortress, I had a series of blood tests at the Georges-Pompidou Hospital in Paris and found that I had become severely anemic. I would take iron supplements, start sleeping through the night, and eventually my strength would return. But at the time I didn’t believe that the transformation arose from a physical problem. I believed it was a spiritual one. The toenails, the dizzy spells, the bruises, the thinning hair—these were signs that I was under psychic attack. The words “die, lifeless, dead, deceased, depart, expire, passed, appeasing, death, quietude” worked their way into my consciousness, and I found myself whispering them, repeating them, as if praying. Praying for my own death. I was sinking under the weight of the curse, growing weaker every day, withering away under his black magic. Of course the spell had no objective power. Its only power was in its ability to work its way into my head and infect my thinking, to make me believe that it existed, to spook me. If I didn’t believe in its power, it would disappear in a puff of smoke.

  But in the bath I didn’t want to think about curses and spells. I just wanted to float in the warm water and imagine that I was far away from the fortress, far away from my life and the seemingly insoluble problems that lay ahead. Far away from the quickly unfolding divorce and all the back-and-forth between his lawyer and my lawyer as they negotiated an agreement under Article 230 of the French Civil Code, divorce by mutual consent, divorce amiable. Far from the guilt I felt about what I was doing to Alex and Nico. Far from the judgment and condemnation of people—Lord and Lulu and Jules and Yana and Ivan and everyone else—who didn’t understand that I had been pushing a boulder up a hill for years and who now, as it rolled back and flattened me, blamed me for the reverse momentum.

  I didn’t want to think about any of that. I wanted to think about Hadrien, the man who made me laugh, the person whose voice helped me forget everything. He was clean of this mess. He had never been to the fortress, had never walked over the cracked tile in the kitchen. Had never seen ghosts. He didn’t even believe in ghosts, and�
�come to think of it—neither had I until I’d stepped into this house. He was sane. He was kind. He was free of this poisonous place.

  I sank deeper into the water, the heat lapping at my chin. The room was still, tranquil. I put a washcloth over my eyes and leaned back against the cool porcelain, rubbing the knots out of my neck. My mind drifted through the house. I imagined each room, envisioning the kids’ rooms, the attic playroom, the piano in the salon, the Paris-Lyon door, the stone stairwell with its steps as smooth as river rocks. I saw myself walking down the steps. My feet were bare and, suddenly a hundred little hands slipped out from the darkness, tiny translucent fingers straining to grasp my ankles as I walked. They were trying to grab me, to trip me, so I would tumble down, down into the shadows.

  A strange sensation, cool as a breeze, swept over my skin. The mistral, which often slipped through the edges of the old casement windows and cut through the steamy air, wasn’t blowing. No, the night was still and tranquil. It was something else, a presence, a consciousness lurking in the ether. I opened one eye and saw a leg. I opened an eye a little more and saw a hand. Opening both eyes, I found Nikolai standing above the bathtub, gazing down at me, his black clothes cut from shadow, the whites of his eyes glowing in the candlelight.

  I gasped, terrified, and sat up. I clutched my knees to my chest, covering my body, sending a wave of water splashing over the edge of the bathtub. How long he’d been there, staring at me as I floated in the bath, I didn’t know. It could have been thirty seconds or five minutes.

  “What are you doing in here?” I asked, holding my legs tighter to my chest.

  Caught in the candlelight like an otherworldly creature, Nikolai stared at me. “I wanted to talk to you,” he said, his voice gentle, sweet. It sounded like the voice of the man I’d met long ago. “Can we talk?”

  “What in the hell are you doing?”

  “You’re so beautiful,” he said. His expression was pained. He found me beautiful, and this hurt him. “I wanted to tell you that.”