by Lily Levi
The dark bedroom pulsed with their zealousness and the world knew only them.
Chapter Twenty-Two
He settled into the wooden chair beside Jolene and threw a glance back up to Maman’s curtained window. She’d grown sullen over the passing days and had said no more to him since that dark evening.
The night before had all but erased her from his mind. He tried to hold on to the warm glow of a life that didn’t include her and the reasons for her current state. He wished it could always be so, but because he knew that it could not, he did his best to push the ugly thing away.
Jolene insisted on wearing the blue dress out to the dock. “It makes me feel pretty,” she said. She held the mug of coffee in both hands and smiled up at him.
He considered her eyes, her upturned nose, her small chin. “Au contraire, my dear,” he said. “It’s truer to say that you make the dress feel pretty.”
She lowered her cup and rolled her eyes at him, smoothing the silk. “It’s very old,” she said. “Whose was it?”
Elise.
Laurie pushed back his hair and stared out over the bay. The waves chopped at themselves beneath a clear sky, just like they had in Southampton almost a century before. Elise had been so thrilled to leave that place and he’d been just as thrilled that she’d agreed to come back with him.
He’d ordered furs, jewels to glow against her skin, pointed shoes, decorated porcelain, silk gowns, and tasseled shawls. These things were to arrive at the manor before he did, with Elise in his arms, but they were only a start to the life he had planned for them together.
He would’ve given her the world, but the world took her from him before she could even set one stockinged foot upon on his dock.
Now, the blue dress was no more hers than it was anyone else’s. Still, he could remember a time when even the thought of anyone else wearing the dress meant for Elise would’ve sent him into a mood darker than any night. But, somehow, he was glad to see Jolene wearing it now and he couldn’t have put his finger on why.
If she wasn’t Elise, Elise had never been Jolene. They were too different to compare.
“I couldn’t say who it belonged to,” he said.
He scanned the waters until his eyes reached the five dark humps far across the bay. He pointed at them. “Do you see those?”
She squinted against the sun and followed the length of his arm. “Yes,” she said. “I think so. The islands?”
“Not just any islands,” he said. “You remember Beauty and the Beast, but do you know of Peter Pan?”
Jolene stared at him.
He wondered if she’d heard his question. “Peter Pan,” he repeated.
She peered at him, but her eyes didn’t search his as they normally did. Instead, they took on a new kind of dark glaze and she almost seemed to be looking elsewhere entirely.
“Are you all right?” he asked.
Her pupils refocused, snapping back into time and place. “Yes,” she said.
She took another long drink from the cup in her hands. “The islands. Peter Pan. You were asking if I remember Peter Pan. I do.”
He watched her for a moment to see if her eyes would change again, but she only smiled at him.
He pointed up into the cloudless sky. “Capricornus,” he said. “He’s the sea goat constellation.” He drew the constellation for her with his finger in the air between them.
“Capricorn,” she said. She looked from him to the islands, to the sky, and then back to him. “I don’t understand. Are you trying to tell a riddle?”
“Not so much as I’m trying to give you a map.”
She leaned back in the wooden chair and lifted her cup to him. “Please, continue.”
He waved his hand in the air. “Starting from the tail of Capricornus – excuse me, Capricorn – you’ll find the second star to the right. Now, there are two stars that branch off from the end of Capricorn’s tail.” He paused in a bid to remember how the old children’s rhyme went.
He possessed the very clear memory of Monsieur Marteaux, stepping up onto the dock behind him one warm summer evening. He’d pointed to the islands and rattled off the little riddle to him. Laurie seemed to remember thinking it wasn’t very good, but he’d used it more than once to come back from his small explorations into the forest behind the house. He’d even taken to telling it himself, but this was ages ago. He was not surprised when Marteaux’s cuffed riddle grew to become the center point of Neverpine, the small town his tutor would never see.
Doubtless he’d be pleased, if he weren’t dead.
Laurie licked his lips. “Follow fast the second star,” he said, measuring the words as Marteaux had done. He cleared his throat, remembering the rest. “Follow fast the second star to the right, the sunrise star will guide you through the night. Follow the sunset star, the one below, and you’ll find yourself lost in ice and snow, where red-maned beasts devour heads of goats, and even the strongest men are lost.”
Jolene shook her head at him but he saw the smile she tried so hard to conceal. “I thought you said it wasn’t going to be a riddle.”
He shrugged at her. “A little of both, I suppose.”
“Heads of goats? This isn’t for kids, is it? Please tell me it’s not for kids.”
“No,” he said. “It’s for you.”
She turned her face away from him to look out at the dark islands.
He admired the slope of her neck and the almost fairy-like profile of her round face.
“So,” she said. “What you’re telling me is that Peter Pan lives over there, on those tiny little islands, with the lost boys and all the rest?”
He took the cigarette tin from his pocket and struck a match. “It’s not impossible,” he said through the cigarette in his mouth. “Just very unlikely. But if he’s there or not, it doesn’t matter. See how if you find yourself anywhere but here, find Capricorn, follow the second star to the right, and you’ll find yourself on this shore no matter where you’re starting from.” He blew a light billow of smoke between them. “In case you ever find yourself lost, that is.”
“Like a lost boy,” she said. “Is it strange that I can almost halfway let myself believe it’s true, that they’re out there?”
“Not at all,” he said. “We all want a little magic, don’t we? But we forget how magical it all is, right in front of us. How are the stars not bright, magical balls? How are these trees not like ancient giants, moving so slow we never see their travels? Are you not magical?”
The corners of her lips turned upwards and she looked away.
“You are,” he said and he felt it to be true.
She said nothing and so he carried on excitedly, recounting stories from his childhood about the lost boys who were still rumored to live on the islands, about Peter Pan, and the little creature who had loved him, all while the sun rose steadily through the sky.
When her eyes wandered from his, he paused. He’d been talking too much and she was bored, but it had been so nice to find the things he thought he’d forgotten because he hadn’t cared to remember.
“Are you thinking?” he asked her gently, not wanting to startle her and shake whatever memories were in her grasp.
She opened her eyes slowly and he saw how red they’d become. Her cheeks gleamed with a sweat that he hadn’t noticed.
“No,” she said, breathing out lightly. “Not thinking. I just, I feel a little sick, that’s all. Please go on.”
His heart dropped at the dazed sound of her voice.
He stood. Without asking, he took her up in his arms. She was so light.
“I’m sorry,” she said. “I don’t know what’s wrong with me. I feel like I might throw up.”
“It’s okay,” he said. “You’ll be all right.”
He carried her up from the dock and towards the front of the house. It was no more than one hundred yards away from the edge of the bay, but in that moment, it was a thousand miles. He would never make it.
What happene
d?
He didn’t need to ask because he already knew.
She needed more blood – not her own – but there was no way to tell her the truth of things or to force her to consume it against her will. He’d tried to include the bloody meat in all their meals together, but she’d taken to eating less and less of it.
He’d known it, too. In so many ways, he’d neglected her.
He neared the front of the house.
Untouched, the double-paned doors swung slowly open into the dark maw of the entryway.
He swore the summer wind conspired to help him, but it was nothing of the sort. His eyes quickly found the hunched figure of Maman, holding the doors open with the slight weight her dry body.
His throat closed at the sight of her. There was little doubt that he’d left her bedroom door unlocked. Somehow, she’d found the strength to move down all four flights of stairs and stand there as she did now.
It couldn’t have been possible, but there she was.
“Maman,” he breathed, pushing past her and into entryway.
He moved into the parlor. He kneeled into the heavy carpet and lay Jolene out onto the green ottoman. Behind him, the sound of Maman dragging her feet across the marble tile made his heart quicken. She wasn’t supposed to be walking so soon and he wished she never would.
Jolene’s reddened eyes open. She stared first at him and then behind him. “Who is that?” she asked, nearly choking on her own breath.
“No one,” he said. “It’s no one at all.”
He turned from the ottoman and moved out from the parlor. He passed the slowly moving figure of Maman in the open hallway. “Don’t,” he warned her, not quite knowing why he said it or what he meant by it.
How fantastically naïve he had been, master and slave of time, how utterly depraved of thought, of foresight, and of recognizing the very fantasy he’d created. She couldn’t survive on affections and blood sausages alone, but he hadn’t wanted to introduce her to the deeper horrors of her new condition so soon.
He still didn’t want to and he wouldn’t, not if he could help it. She might be spared a little more time to believe she was still only a girl, a young woman, and nothing more.
He stormed up the stairs and searched for a clean needle among his effects.
Chapter Twenty-Three
He sat on the low table and pulled the needle from his arm.
From the corner of his eye, he could see that Maman watched him work from the doorway. He imagined her beaded eyes making slow circuits through the scene in front of her.
He quietly wondered if she remembered the Sunday mid-mornings spent there with no one to entertain. America was not France, not then and not now, but only Maman had cared.
Jolene woke slowly from the ottoman. She’d passed out momentarily, and as terrible as he felt for it, he wished she would stay unconscious until the transfusions were finished.
He wanted to give her more of his own blood, as much as he dared. He wanted to make sure.
“Laurie,” she whispered.
“Jolene,” he said, forcing a calm into his voice that he didn’t feel. “It’s all right.”
But he saw that she didn’t believe him and why should she?
Her eyes flickered wildly. “Who?” she asked.
He looked over his shoulder, though he knew what he would see.
Maman stood with her arms crossed over a yellow linen dress. She’d put it on herself. He hadn’t noticed.
“No one,” he said, turning back. He leaned in closer to her in an attempt to obstruct her view of Maman and the blood-filled syringe in his hand. “I see no one.”
Jolene’s forehead creased and her eyes glassed over with the monumental effort of speech. “Oh.” Her eyes wandered away from his and back to Maman. Her throat struggled to work. “Looks terrible,” she said, swallowing.
Laurie said nothing.
If she dies again, if she dies again, if she dies again. The thought whipped angrily through his heart. She couldn’t be brought back if she died again. She would be lost forever. As far as he could tell, the dead experienced their second death as more of a disappearing. There was no other word for it and there could be no return from it.
He wouldn’t let her experience a second death.
Her red lips were already taking on a lighter shade and dark circles formed beneath her watering eyes. “Blood?” she asked, breathing the word out slowly.
Laurie listened to the sound of Maman turning away from the doorway. The shuffle of her feet disappeared down into the dark foyer. He would move her back up to the fourth floor as soon as his work with Jolene was complete and not before then. He couldn’t lose her.
If she dies again.
He blinked back hot panic. He had come to care for her more deeply than he thought he would, or at all.
“Laurie.” Her chest heaved with the effort of breathing and a violent cough racked through her body. “Tell me, is that blood?”
He lifted the syringe. “It’s all right, Jolene, I promise. You’re a bit ill and this will help immensely.”
“That’s blood,” she whispered. “Is it my blood? Is that your blood?”
“No,” he said as calmly as he could manage, not knowing why he’d said it. Of course it was his blood.
“I can see it” She struggled to move off from the ottoman and doubled over onto the floor before he could set the needle down to grab her.
“No,” she cried. “Please don’t do this.”
His heart broke at her plea, but he couldn’t let himself be moved so easily.
A cold hand touched his and the rank haze of gasoline filled the air.
“We all suffer,” said Maman. “But this will help.” Her small black eyes sparkled sharply and she pressed a damp cloth into his hand.
He didn’t need to ask what it was meant for.
Kneeling onto the carpet, he lifted Jolene back onto the ottoman and held her shoulder firmly into the hard cushion. “Forgive me,” he whispered.
“Who is that?” she asked.
“I’m no one,” said Maman.
Jolene struggled frantically beneath his grip. “Laurie,” she said, her voice suddenly steady. “Please don’t, please don’t.”
“Forgive me,” he said, choking on the words. He pressed the cloth over her nose and mouth, even as she struggled to escape him.
Holding the cloth to her face, he pulled her close to him and held her tightly against his own body.
She cried beneath the ether-filled rag, squirming violently, fighting against him.
“It’s all right,” he whispered as gently as he could.
But it wasn’t all right. If she lived, she would remember.
Maman watched the struggle.
After a painful eternity of holding her in his arms, the tension in her body slowly began to subside. Her lids drifted moonily over her eyes.
He loosened his grip around her.
When her whimpers stopped and her breathing grew more regular, he moved her back down onto the ottoman. He stood from the table and took the syringe back into his hand. With all the precision of the young doctor he’d once been, he positioned the tip of the needle against her soft skin.
Maman shuffled to the large blue armchair beside Jolene’s body and sat quietly, watching him.
Hours passed. The sun set. Without needing to be asked, Maman found a gas lamp in the lower cabinet of the parlor’s curio. Jolene continued to breathe and Laurie applied the cloth whenever she shifted too much and seemed too close to waking.
Without moving from the table, he continued the painful transfusions, one syringe at a time. He wouldn’t lose her.
“She’s your bloodhound,” said Maman. Her crippled shadow played against the floral wallpaper.
Exhausted, Laurie searched for Riley in the corner of the room. She’d watched everything and had not made a sound.
“You wanted nothing more than to paint that dog,” said Maman, tapping her long fingers against the
chair’s arm. “For weeks you painted her and then for months after that, do you remember?”
“I remember,” he said quietly, not wanting to risk waking Jolene from her ether-induced dreams - or nightmares, as the case might be.
He said no more. Maman was finally speaking to him. He would not interject himself and risk cutting off whatever words she would share with him.
“She’s your bloodhound, yes. She’s a pet you can’t let go of.” Maman sighed dryly at her own words.
“She’s not a pet,” he said simply. He was tired.
Maman stopped tapping her fingers against the chair and Jolene’s ragged breath filled the silence.
“I’m not alive,” she said, just as plainly as she might say anything else.
“You’re alive, Maman.” But it was a lie.
She laughed at him. It was a horrible, cackling laugh that reminded him so much of the witches from the stories of old France that Monsieur Marteaux had liked to tell him.
“I know what I am,” she said. “And I know what you are. I know what she is, too, your little pet.”
He did not want to meet her eyes. Instead, he stared at her gnarled hands, clawed into the chair’s rough fabric. “Then what am I, Maman? Tell me.”
She tapped her fingers again. “Nothing you don’t already know. Oh yes, you know what you are. And me? I’m dead. I’m wilted and dead.”
He found her black eyes in the glowing darkness. “You remember your life before,” he said. It wasn't a question.
“Yes,” she said. She moved her black eyes to Jolene’s fallen frame. She took a long breath, as if she was preparing to speak at length. “Eventually the memories return in the dark mass of tall limbs, in the black sea, and the dead never forget.” She frowned at him. “You resurrect the past for a future you don’t have.” She stared at him and then at Jolene, splayed out on the green ottoman. “May God have mercy on your soul, if a soul is what you still have, though I think it’s not.”
Laurie said nothing because there was nothing to say. If she held the answers about his father and what had happened all those centuries ago – and she did, he was sure of it – then it would come with time.