Date with the Devil (Crimson Romance)

by Jessica Starre

  Her brother, looming tall behind her, patted her shoulder with awkward compassion. “You would have suggested ears,” he said loyally. “You would have implied them.”

  Emma always remembered that event vividly; it was what impressed her most about Manhattan, the wooden rosary bead in the Metropolitan Museum of Art and her brother’s hand on her arm and him saying, “Look.” It was everything good about Paul, for whom life was always new, like he had never lived anything before, he never got old and cynical and wise.

  She saw dozens of works of art that day, including a Raphael Madonna; they were there for hours. Paul finally had to lure her away from the museum with the temptation of dinner at a real New York deli. They had pastrami on rye and strong black coffee. She ate as many pickles as she wanted, the smell of the garlic stinging her eyes but not stopping her pleasure, and he never said one word about it, not even when she spent most of the evening complaining about her upset stomach.

  “You’d think he’d know my address by now,” Emma said, turning the envelope over and sliding her thumb under the flap. She knew the probable explanation: he’d sent the letter from some place where he didn’t have his address book — the floor of a friend’s apartment — and he’d automatically defaulted to the address for their grandparents’ house, knowing the letter would eventually find her there. No one, not even Paul, ever forgot the address for home.

  Grandmother was drowsing over her knitting, a Sunday evening habit of long standing. It was one of the things Emma could count on, Grandmother falling asleep over her knitting. Another thing she could count on: Grandfather reading to Angela, slowly, painstakingly, because his glasses were always in another room. His voice, low-timbered and rasping, rumbled from the corner even now. The pattern, though slightly altered after Emma’s divorce, remained familiar and comforting. Emma gave her daughter a smile as she leaned next to Grandfather in the easy chair big enough for both of them. When had he become that frail and small? She was sure he used to fill the entire chair himself.

  “Yes, dear,” Grandmother roused herself to reply, her voice mild in the way that meant she hadn’t heard a word. She beamed at the envelope in Emma’s hand. “What does he say?”

  Emma hadn’t intended to read the letter aloud or even, necessarily, to share what Paul had to say. There were some things they agreed their grandparents did not need to know. But she could hardly tuck the letter away now and refuse to talk about it.

  She unfolded three sheets of paper covered with her brother’s readily recognizable handwriting. Emailing, text messaging, Twittering, Facebooking. And still this was how he reached out to her, dark words dug in across the page. She touched the notepaper he’d used. In his emotion — agitation, excitement, fear? — he had pressed the pen hard into the paper. In his more light-hearted missives, the words flew across the page, barely touching down. Sometimes she couldn’t even read them, so faintly did the words spill across the paper.

  “Emma?”

  Her grandmother’s voice made her focus. “He sent a poem,” she said cautiously. The words inked across the page were familiar; she’d seen them before. She gripped the letter tighter. Why this poem? And why now?

  “A poem.” Grandmother raised an eyebrow, and Emma could see the hope lighting her worn and weathered face. After all these years, she hadn’t given up either. “A new poem?”

  “Not a poem he wrote,” Emma clarified, not wanting to take away the hope but wishing she hadn’t raised it in the first place. “I’ve read this one before.” She looked at the words again. It was a poem Paul had been given to quoting when he was young, when all of them were young, and Emma, at least, believed they would be young forever. A teenager from another generation would have picked Dylan Thomas. It included the only Latin Emma ever learned: Timor mortis conturbat me. Out of curiosity, she’d once asked her grandfather to translate the words, his schoolboy Latin just up to the effort, the product of an education that had passed out of favor before Emma had even been born. That afternoon, she and her grandfather had shared a secret. A long time ago, now.

  The smile on Grandmother’s face faded, then disappeared. She would have liked a new poem. She wouldn’t have understood it, but she would have liked it. There had been no new poems for a long time.

  “He doesn’t say anything?” Her disappointment was palpable. But what did Grandmother think he would say? That there would be a wedding in the spring? A graduation, a job as a law clerk, a new house?

  “No,” Emma said. Then, out of some obscure need to defend him even after all this time: “Maybe he doesn’t have anything to say.” To you, she would have added when she was fifteen.

  Grandmother pursed her lips. “As if that boy could ever run out of things to say.” Forgetting that people changed, that life could lock away the words.

  All those years ago, Emma had said to Paul, “If you leave home this way, you’ll never come back.” He said, “This isn’t home anyway.” He never did come back. And yet he still knew the address by heart.

  He’d always written letters to Emma — sporadically but reliably — sometimes sending them to her house (when, she supposed, he had his address book handy) and sometimes here, because he knew that while she may have moved out years ago, she was never going to leave home, not the way he had.

  Lately he’d been making phone calls, short and cryptic. He laughed too much during those conversations and he said to hell with the expense. She didn’t get the impression that he’d carefully hoarded his pennies to purchase a long-distance calling card. She didn’t tell her grandparents about his calls.

  She set the letter aside. Later, she would pore over it, as if she might decode the meaning if she read it enough times. But now she tucked it in her bag, and picked up a magazine from the basket by Grandmother’s chair. Ordinary, prosaic, the bricks from which she’d built her life.

  That was when he died. He bled his life out on the rain-slick street as Grandmother knitted a shell-stitch afghan and Grandfather read Dr. Seuss to Angela, and Emma copied down a new recipe for low-fat brownies.

  She didn’t feel him going. She always assumed she would, because they were connected by a thread made of love and understanding and childhood, promises made by two orphans of the storm, a phrase Paul had heard their grandfather use once and which he’d reported to her with all the relish of a twelve-year-old recounting a long-past tragedy. But she didn’t feel him go, did not feel the connection rupture or even, as Paul would surely have appreciated, sense a disturbance in the Force.

  A long time later, when she knew more, she imagined that his last conscious vision was of a lovely pale-haired woman, but she had no way of knowing what had passed through his mind at the end. Maybe nothing. But she thought it was possible he had the woman’s name on his lips when he died. That he saw her and spoke her name and reached out his hand and died. She believed that, but she would never know if it were true.

  That night, they were just their ordinary selves, behaving in their ordinary ways; they would never be that way again.

  Grandmother made an impatient noise and suddenly spread her yarn across the scarred old coffee table in front of her. “What color is this?” she asked.

  Emma didn’t look up from the recipe she was copying. “You know perfectly well what color it is,” she said, checking to see if she’d gotten all the ingredients listed correctly. She wasn’t sure why she bothered. She rarely made anything that required a recipe. Maybe there was still the possibility that she could turn into that kind of person.

  Grandmother persisted. “I know it’s light blue. I was the one who picked it out. That’s not what I mean. You know what I mean.”

  Emma gave up the unequal struggle. In a battle of wills, her grandmother would always win. She had a lot more experience getting her way. “Serenity,” Emma sighed. “It’s the color of serenity.”

  “Thank you,” Grandmoth
er said, picking up her needles again. “I was hoping so, because it’s going into my sewing room and you know how I feel about sewing.” She fingered the yarn for a moment, then said, “Maybe I should paint the whole room this color.” She sucked in the corner of her lip and picked up knitting where she’d left off. Presumably she was planning new curtains and new carpeting as well; Grandmother was not a woman for half measures. If Emma had disliked sewing as much as she did, she would have given it up, rather like she’d given up vacuuming and most yard work. But Grandmother was of the generation that found virtue in doing things you didn’t like doing, so long as they were productive.

  Emma finished copying the brownie recipe and put it away in her bag, where it would probably disappear forever. With a sigh, she set aside the magazine she was reading. “Fall Fashion News” and “Will Your Love Last? 8 Early Clues” didn’t pique her interest, even if they should.

  Angela scrambled down from the easy chair and went in search of Grandfather’s glasses. She returned a moment later, climbed back up on the chair and gave him the glasses. Neither said a word. There was always a point in the proceedings when this event would occur, because Angela would get impatient at his dirge-like pace. Emma smiled as Grandfather adjusted the glasses and then began reading at a rate that Angela found more acceptable. When Emma read to her, Angela always took over and did the reading herself, refusing offers of assistance. If she didn’t know how to say a word, she would just make up a sound and usually a definition to go right along with it. With Grandfather, she was happy to let him do the work.

  Grandmother was murmuring under her breath again. Emma wondered if she were swearing imprecations about the sewing room. Finally she asked, “What are you saying?”

  Grandmother flushed a delicate pink, the tint as ladylike as she usually was. Emma knew full well that she could carry on like a stevedore, but the family pretended otherwise. The flashes of temper she showed were aberrations, not to be remarked on. So Emma knew if Grandmother were muttering imprecations, she was supposed to ignore them. But an imp of perversity made her press, even though she knew better than to let the imp have its head. “Grandmother?”

  Grandmother shifted in her chair, then blurted out, “Oh, I was just trying to remember how that silly little poem went. The one your brother wrote when he was a child. I don’t know what put it into my head.” But of course getting a letter from Paul naturally brought up memories of him, bright and sharp. “Something about dragons,” she said, and Emma remembered Paul working through a list of rhymes for dragon.

  Grandmother’s hands stilled in her lap, and she looked up at Emma, her eyes clear, her smile warm. Emma understood. Emma loved her, Emma was reliable, Emma came over every Sunday night. But sometimes Grandmother wished Paul were here instead.

  Emma smiled and said against her sadness, “He was going through an epic poetry stage then. Ten thousand lines of doggerel. It took him the whole summer.”

  “Oh, yes, I remember.” The rocking chair creaked to a halt. This was how they brought him home sometimes. Talking in the evening, they would conjure him up.

  “He elevated me to peerage that year,” Emma said, even though it hurt to remember. “That corner of the yard by the gate is mine by rights, you know. He granted it to me as my lands. I ought to insist you call me Lady Emma.”

  “He awarded Grant the gate itself,” Grandmother chuckled, “as if he always knew.” Then she flushed pink again and picked up her needles, trying to hide how flustered she’d made herself. Emma suppressed a knowing smile. It was harder on her than it was on Emma. After the divorce, Grandmother had made a little rule for herself, one of the many little rules she’d made for herself over the years. To save Emma any pain, she would never mention Grant’s name in her presence. However, since he’d been Paul’s best friend the whole time they were growing up, any talk of Paul was fraught with the possibility that Grant’s name might be mentioned. As if remembering the past wasn’t difficult enough.

  “It’s okay. Grant used to hang around a lot, didn’t he?” Emma said steadily. Proving something. What? How grown-up and mature and detached she was? How casually she could say his name?

  Grandmother turned to Grandfather. “Have we decided which weekend we’re going down to open up the lake house?” she asked him. That was her idea of unobtrusively changing a subject. But it was a mistake; that was a charged subject, too. Would Paul come this summer? Emma tried to lighten the conversation, making jokes out of the excuses he would give, getting Grandmother to laugh and shake her head. Grandfather frowned, disapproving. He didn’t understand about conjuring people; he thought they were making fun of Paul. In a way they were. Paul sometimes said he would try to visit, whenever Grandmother asked him What about this year? But he never made it. They knew he never would.

  He had once loved going. When they were kids she would collect the tiny green tree frogs that thrived in great colonies and throw them at him. Her brother would consider the philosophical implications of using tree frogs as ammunition and he would liberate them.

  They held séances in the cellar of the old cottage, the two of them and the cobwebs and the canned beets. Paul would intone chants while she closed her eyes and concentrated very hard. When they didn’t get messages from the dead, it was always her fault for not concentrating hard enough. Grandmother finally disallowed the séances, so Paul found a Ouija board, as if that were an improvement, and he would spell out messages from beyond for Emma. Like, “You will fail math this year.”

  Emma never did discover why he didn’t belong, why he didn’t have a home. She never understood his search. She never understood his leaving. She remembered the way he walked along the lakeshore the day he tried to explain, his shoulders slumped in discouragement. “I’ll never be what they want me to be, Emma,” and Emma, trying to explain that their grandparents loved him and just wanted him to be happy. The look in his brown eyes when he said, “When people don’t understand you it is like they are killing you.”

  She never understood his leaving. Still less did she understand his dying.

  In the mood for more Crimson Romance?

  Check out Love’s Secret Fire

  by Rena Koontz

  at CrimsonRomance.com.

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