Let the Dark Flower Blossom

by Norah Labiner

  430.

  If Julian or Chet Stone had awoken and crept along the hallway toward the door, ajar; he might have seen Mother in the room they called Father’s; seen Mother knotting and unknotting a green ribbon; Mother opening a desk drawer; Mother holding a tin box in her small hands.

  431.

  There was something else in the bottom of Eris’s bag.

  She had taken from his house a memento more meaningful than Salt’s pen.

  432.

  Olga was in the kitchen baking cinnamon bread. Won’t it be nice to have warm with butter in the morning?

  433.

  Louis Sarasine, thoroughly convinced of the validity of his own position, was trying to persuade his fellow members of the Mnemosyne Society that memory was a game.

  They were inclined to believe that she was a goddess.

  434.

  The ruined fountain in the doctor’s garden was constructed of stone and had been fed by a now-barren cistern. Once it held a water so cold that the original settlers had claimed that it healed their woes. That it was a poison to dark spirits. That men who bathed in it spoke the truth. That birds who drank from it would never die, and flowers that grew around it were a honey for bees and a balm for heartbroken girls; it was said that the perfume of the garden led one into a sleep whose dreams foretold the future.

  435.

  Eloise watched the snow falling.

  436.

  It was snowing. And it was going to snow.

  437.

  Eloise Sarasine in a black nightdress sat at the executioner’s table among relics, indulgences, and treasures: winter apples, a silver knife, a cedar box, a fountain pen. She rested her face in her hand. In the other hand she held a red ball.

  438.

  Eris had stolen Bruno’s little plastic dinosaur.

  439.

  The cistern had gone dry.

  This is only a metaphor.

  Or at least it is metaphoric.

  440.

  Inj wanted to finish the brandy.

  She took the bottle into the bedroom.

  Schell followed her.

  She sat on the bed.

  She drank.

  The room was warm.

  With the woodstove in the corner.

  A heap of kindling, a bundle of newspapers.

  The door to the stove was open.

  The fire was the only light.

  Schell added wood to the fire.

  She was so close to him.

  Her hand on his arm.

  There was a burning sweetness to her skin.

  She said, “Roman told me that you lie.”

  She shrugged her shoulders.

  “I don’t mind liars,” she said.

  She said, “He told me that you married a girl with a lot of money. And when she died it came to you.”

  “It’s true,” he said.

  “Troo troo troo,” she said.

  She laughed.

  She stopped laughing.

  “He said that you killed her,” she said.

  “Who?” he said.

  “Your wife,” she said.

  “Why would I do that?” he said.

  “Because you couldn’t stop yourself,” she said.

  “Because you are tragic,” she said.

  “Your life is a Greek tragedy,” she said.

  “You are Sisyphus,” she said.

  “Pushing a rock up a hill,” she said. “As punishment.”

  “Is that what you do?” she said.

  “That’s not so bad,” she said.

  “Hey,” she said, “at least you have a rock. And a hill to push it up.”

  “That’s something, right?” she said.

  “Some people don’t even have that,” she said.

  “Nothing terrible will ever happen to me, will it?” she said.

  “No one will ever murder me,” she said.

  She seemed disappointed.

  A log shifted in the stove.

  “Did Ro tell you,” said Schell.

  He drank from the bottle.

  “—How he stole my story?”

  She laughed.

  “No one can really steal a story,” she said.

  “No?” he said.

  “Because every story is—” she said.

  “Like a snowflake?” he said.

  “You’re making fun again,” she said.

  She closed her eyes.

  “Oh well,” she said.

  “Tell me,” she said.

  “Have you kept the key all these years?” she said.

  “What key?” he said.

  “To the box,” she said.

  She turned toward the stove.

  “What a nice fire,” she said.

  “What a nice fiery fire,” she said.

  “Is this the story?” she said.

  “Are you telling your story right now?” she said.

  “Is it happening now?” she said.

  “Am I in it?” she said.

  “Am I prettier in the story than in real life?” she said.

  “Is it an old story?” she said.

  He was thinking about the black cat.

  He was thinking about birds.

  “People like them,” she said. “The old stories.”

  “Don’t they?” she said.

  “I do,” she said.

  “This is what I would do in the story,” she said.

  She kissed him.

  She was beautiful.

  Or maybe she wasn’t.

  It was only that so many other things were ugly.

  The fire burned in the stove.

  The room was warm.

  The fire was fiery.

  She overfilled the glasses.

  She was naked on the bed.

  She said, “Do you think that the novel is dead?”

  And she laughed.

  By the light of candles.

  441.

  Eloise rolled the ball across the floor.

  Zola chased after it.

  442.

  Eloise followed Zola.

  Or Zola followed Eloise.

  Each time that Eloise rolled the ball.

  Zola brought it back to her.

  Eloise went from room to room, rolling the ball.

  Round and round, past her clocks—

  Her vases—

  The weave and weft of tapestry—

  The floral, the plum, the shadow, the umber.

  Her tables and chairs and lamps—

  Her paintings and photographs.

  Her cedar box.

  Her desk, an escritoire.

  The statuettes, the gods and goddesses.

  The unsmashed idols.

  The unread books—

  The ball rolled.

  Her pearl-handled letter knife.

  She picked it up from the desk.

  It was a gift from her daughter.

  Sent from far away.

  Eloise held the knife in her hand.

  There was a reassuring solidity to it.

  It was small and feminine and fit nicely in her hand.

  What a terrible thing for that boy to stab those girls in the woods. One girl had lived. She had crawled along the road—

  Louie had disproved the girl’s testimony at the trial.

  He had made her doubt herself.

  Made her doubt more than her memory.

  Made her doubt her own broken bones.

  Her own blood.

  How could Louie do such a thing?

  That boy had been found not guilty.

  There was another word for it.

  The ball bounced.

  The girl was not a reliable witness.

  Guilt was not tangible.

  Innocence was not relevant.

  Girls were not reliable.

  They showed those girls over and over on television.

  From home movies. From videotape—

  In school plays, ballet recitals, in pageants and
prom dresses.

  Bloody faces and broken bones.

  One face after the next.

  One girl after the next.

  Eloise took the knife.

  She took the stairs, one by one.

  Zola chased the ball.

  Eloise held the banister.

  And went up the staircase.

  One step after the next.

  She stood in the doorway of her bedroom.

  Zigouiller lay sleeping.

  He wasn’t real.

  Or maybe he was.

  Then the shadows shifted.

  And he was real.

  Or at least real enough.

  He was Zigouiller, as she had named him.

  She stood watching him sleep.

  443.

  All at once, without regard to sequence or consequence:

  A glass swan fell to the floor and shattered.

  A sleeping dog woke.

  A remarkable thing happened to Beatrice.

  Salt had a sentence in his head.

  Dr. Lemon dreamed a dream, and, lo, a cake of barley bread tumbled down.

  Beatrice collected the broken pieces of the swan.

  The last light in the doctor’s house was extinguished.

  A bird flew from a branch.

  Snow lay white in the woods.

  Snow fell upon the ruined fountain.

  Inj lay naked on her hip.

  She lighted a candle.

  Inj asked Schell, did he? had he really killed his wife?

  How did he do it?

  Did he plot? Or was it done in anger?

  Schell laughed.

  The roses on the wallpaper trembled.

  The black cat leapt upon a table.

  The waves crashed upon rock.

  Eloise stood in the doorway looking at Zigouiller asleep in her husband’s bed.

  Eloise was thinking about the burning roof and tower.

  And Agamemnon dead.

  Bruno cried out in the night. He woke from a dream in which he was being chased by a flock of geese. He called for his mother. And when she came to him, he asked her for a story.

  While reading to her son from his favorite book—the one about an impossibly curious little bear who gets his head stuck in a honey pot—Elizabeth Weiss paused upon the page.

  Bruno tugged at his mother’s sleeve.

  She began reading where she had left off.

  The bear cracked the pot. And ate the honey.

  When the last page of the book had been read—

  Bruno turned back to the first page.

  And Liz began again.

  Olga, in the kitchen, covered a pan with a dishcloth.

  Dibby sat on the floor in her husband’s study with her legs curled beneath her. In the desk drawer, she found the tin box.

  She turned the box over in her hands.

  Chester, no, it was Julian, no, it was Chet, nearly opened his eyes. A thought, an idea, a desire, almost woke him. He wanted scrambled eggs for breakfast.

  Dibby lifted the lid.

  And then she stopped, as though waiting to be stopped.

  No one stopped her.

  Just like in the movies.

  She was small.

  She was dressed in black.

  Dough began to rise.

  Dibby opened the box.

  It was empty.

  Except for.

  One photograph, blurry.

  A picture of Roman and a dark-haired girl on a beach.

  Dibby didn’t recognize the girl.

  Dibby sat on the floor.

  Looking at the photograph.

  The girl was not beautiful.

  Dibby reached into the desk drawer.

  Her hand found—without looking—

  Her fingers rested upon the scissors.

  Dibby took the scissors.

  She cut the photograph into two.

  And she cut each piece into two.

  Until there were many tiny pieces.

  There was no Roman. There was no girl.

  Dibby threw the pieces into the fireplace.

  She rose from the floor.

  She stood at her husband’s desk; the monumental mahogany desk—and then she sat in his Herculean chair.

  She took a blank sheet of paper.

  She rolled the paper into the carriage of the typewriter.

  Dibby set her fingers to the keys.

  For a moment she faltered.

  Like a branch after the bird has flown.

  And then her heart fluttered upward.

  And she knew just what to say.

  She knew how to finish Roman’s story.

  The bear found the honey.

  And a train chugged up a hill.

  Bruno fell asleep.

  Elizabeth kept reading.

  A spider spun silk in a bathtub.

  Eris held the dinosaur in her hand.

  Inj was naked.

  Like a girl painted on a Grecian urn.

  Inj kissed Schell.

  Snow was falling.

  Everything fell.

  The snow.

  The blankets from the bed.

  The bottle from the table.

  The bottle spilled.

  Knocking over the candle.

  The flame caught the path of brandy.

  And followed it—

  The fire crept along a strand of green twine.

  The green twine bound a stack of newspapers beside the woodstove.

  The newspapers caught fire.

  The fire spread to the wallpaper.

  It burned the flowers.

  It climbed along the curtains.

  The fire spread to the kitchen, where it ate cake.

  To the study.

  It read every book.

  It read each letter.

  It crawled. It crept.

  It roamed.

  It ran.

  It wasn’t afraid of anything.

  The fire ran along the walls.

  And took hold of a painting.

  First the swan.

  Then the girl.

  Then the dark woods burned.

  Susu Zigouiller before the mirror in an airport bathroom studied her face.

  On a mantel over a fireplace a broken clock began to tick. And kept up time for eighteen minutes before suddenly, and perhaps even reluctantly, giving up the ghost.

  Eloise stood beside the bed, holding the knife.

  Louis was arguing the rules of the game.

  Susu was boarding an airplane.

  A red ball rolled.

  The knife fell.

  Eloise let the knife fall from her hand to the floor.

  So no one knew.

  No one suspected.

  Except a French bulldog.

  That time could stop and start.

  Of its own mechanism.

  Of its own desire.

  Of its own free will.

  Such miracles will happen now and again.

  CHAPTER 19

  Eloise lets the dark flower blossom

  ROMAN TOLD HER ABOUT THE WOODS. It was the night when he and that girl, the actress, what was her name? Harlow—had that fight and she fell into the champagne fountain in her white dress and the picture of her ran in the tabloids. He pushed the girl into the fountain. The photographers kept snapping flash after flash, and Ro was laughing. The girl lost it. They had to drag her away into an ambulance. Ro was talking about the actress, how stupid she was. How stupid actors were. He said, he asked her, “Why’d you have to go and marry an actor?”They drove home through the dark night. He said—

  “Eloise.”

  He had a story.

  Maybe it would be the beginning of his new book.

  Did she want to hear it?

  “The story starts in an old farmhouse,” he said. “They went out into the woods, three of them, that day. Two boys and a girl.”

  “It was snowing,” he said. “One on each side of her, they walked, and the girl between th
em. She was carrying ice skates. They walked toward the frozen pond. And when they returned in darkness, there were only two of them.”

  She said, “Shut up please please please, will you?”

  He said, “Something terrible happened in the woods.”

  He said, “The girl was dead.”

  She said, “Stop it.”

  He said, “No one ever found out about the girl. And so the boys never talked about it or her again. They never talked about the girl or the woods.”

  Did she like the story so far?

  At first he had been sickened by it.

  Then horrified.

  Then guilty.

  And then the story had taken hold of him.

  He thought about it.

  He imagined it.

  He tried to understand it.

  “Envy,” he said.

  “What?” she said.

  “The girl,” he said.

  “What about her?” she said.

  “The gods must have envied her,” he said.

  She wanted him to stop talking, but he didn’t stop.

  Or wouldn’t.

  He talked of gods and girls.

  He was talking.

  The car stopped.

  They were home.

  Home?

  The house by the water.

  It was a hot night.

  He took her arm.

  In the dark.

  It was quiet.

  They walked to the house.

  He said something about the sky, about the stars, about the constellations.

  Wasn’t the sky beautiful?

  Wasn’t Discord the most beautiful of the gods?

  Or was she a goddess?

  He said Fate was a girl with scissors.

  They sat in the kitchen. And wasn’t the light the sky the world beautiful then? They drank. She drank. He kept filling the glasses. He smoked. He said that he hadn’t written a word of the story. He liked to know how a story was to end before he began writing it on paper. He said that he didn’t know how it ended. Her dress was black. The green typewriter was on the table. He said, “If you were writing it, how would it end?” He picked up the clock. He said that he was going to write a book about what happened in the woods. He was winding the metal clock. She told him that Zig would be back soon. “Fatherland,” she said. “What?” he said. She said, “Zig’s movie, they’re shooting it at night.” He said, “Who the hell would want to be in a movie?” He said, “Wouldn’t you rather be a character in a book?” Then he would always know where to find her. He said that he would like her to be a girl in a novel. He said that he would always know just where she was in the world.