by Nina Malkin
Nice, but never. “Pen, please. Marsh leaves at dawn; you’d sleep till the crack of noon every day if you could.” I pull Saint Michael from my shirt and give him a pat. “No worries. I got my boy here.”
A faint whisper of boom from town. The sky in that direction turns a hazy pale. A celebration of freedom is under way. It rallies me. “Look, you guys, you have my official blessing, so why don’t you toddle off. Really, it’s cool. I’m safe for the moment, with Antonia at the fireworks with Sin, and after the day I’ve had, I wouldn’t mind being alone awhile.”
They scope me skeptically. Neither one moves.
“Tell you what. Go to the green and plaster patriotic Swoonies with Bruise Blue flyers, then swing by and pick me up for practice.”
That gets them. With a squeeze of my knee, Pen says, “Okay. See you in an hour.”
I watch them go. Pen and Tosh. Tosh and Pen. Go figure.
They make me smile. Sitting by myself, expecting to seek my own counsel, I find myself singing aloud instead. Absently at first, then with greater conviction and volume. A special sort of song. A spiritual. Learned it at the neighborhood kids’ choir Momster enrolled me in—I must’ve been what, seven?
“Gonna lay down my sword and shield . . .” It lifts me up, in that light-at-the-end-of-the-tunnel sort of way. Trouble is, I’ve yet to catch the merest glimmer of light.
My sword and shield are around my neck, the only defense I’ve got. I don’t see myself laying them down any time soon.
L
The time is nigh. Antonia had left a deposit on some seven gowns at Buckley’s Bridal Warehouse, and now she must make her decision. Pen will serve as chauffeur and fashion consultant, but Pen is running late. As Antonia, dressed and ready, reels into the kitchen with her newly skewed stomp, I tell her so, then add casually, “By the way, after breakfast, you’ll need to pack a bag.”
An eyebrow wings. “I beg your pardon?”
“Just for a few days. My mother’s driving up from the city.” This is true. In Star affiliates with the Hamptons Film Festival every Fourth; Momster spent the holiday in serious schmooze mode and desperately needs R & R. Or so she insists—I’m betting she wants to check what’s stalling the sale of the house.
Maybe the agent told her I’m running a home for wayward demons up in here, so not a plus for property value.
“Pen suggested you stay with her.” Got to love the girl for stepping up, faking friendship with our monstress. And with my mother and cousin running interference, I expect to breathe a bit easier. “You’ll like it at the Leonards’,” I say. “It’s far more posh than this old place.”
Absorbing this, Antonia sits at the table for her Cocoa Puffs fix. “Very well,” she says. “But I do wish you wouldn’t denigrate this house, Dice. I find the quaint environs ever so charming.” She pours a bowl. “The decor is rather shabby, of course, but the structure itself is sound. At least, I do hope so, since Sinclair and I agreed last night that we shall purchase it.
Properly appointed”—she sweeps her hand—“it ought make a lovely honeymoon cottage.”
My house? The site of and shrine to the most incredible night of my life? That. Cannot. Happen.
“Indubitably, we’ll import everything from France.” She lets her glance survey the space. “Cabriolet chairs . . . a chandelier. . . oh, if only we could find a virginals like the one I used to play.” Then she looks at me, lips pursed and chin high. “And upstairs, certainly, the most sumptuous bed . . .” Baiting the enemy isn’t smart, but sometimes a girl can’t help it. “Certainly,” I say. “And considering these brutal Connecticut winters, don’t forget the Louis XV bed warmer. You’ll need it.” Antonia hasn’t got a retort—I’m not even sure she got the implication. Instead she says, “Such details are inconsequential.
What’s important is, once our offer on this house is accepted—and surely it will be—we can pick a day and engage the justice of the peace.” Pout in place, she upends the milk container over her bowl. Too bad it’s empty.
An insignificant victory, but I mug smug nonetheless.
“Please do forgive me,” I say. “I must have taken the last drop.” Antonia regards her still-dry cereal, then looks at me and sighs. “Dice—dear, dear Dice—I do so wish you and I might reach a truce.”
This ought to be interesting. I lean back and let her bring it.
She extracts a single ball of puffed corn from her bowl, pops it in her mouth, and chews pensively. Then she begins. “I was raised in a pious era and led a sheltered life, but I am not a fool.” That’s one thing I never took her for.
“These last several days, I’ve become immersed in the ways of modernity. The morals of your age—or should I say the lack thereof . . .”
Another chocolate morsel as she carefully composes her phrases.
“Ergo, much as I disdain the thought, I accept that you have had some sort of . . . liaison with Sinclair.” I grit my teeth. If she calls me a slattern—that’s eighteenth-century for “slut”—she’ll be picking Cocoa Puff crumbs out of her hair for days.
“Yet in many ways you seem so decent . . . a lady.”
Gee, thanks! I think.
“So you must agree that a crude, brief encounter—the sort a man of many appetites might easily fall prey to—cannot compare or compete with true, abiding love. A love that transcends time. A love to endure for eternity.” Oh, cue the strings!
“A love that has been sworn to me.”
Again with the sworn! Antonia pops another CP, shakes her head. “Can you imagine, that in the weeks that followed upon my death, there had been speculation that I deliberately caused the conflagration in the east wing? Captive wraith that I was, I heard my parents bemoan this tawdry rumor.” Pale lashes reach for the ceiling as reflectively she goes on. “An errant cinder caught my quilt, and it is true, I failed to immediately douse it—seeking, I suppose, to draw attention to myself, alone in my room while a ball was under way in the great hall.” She pauses, for effect or regret. “A fatal error, for soon the roaring red display engulfed me.”
I gulp down a lump hearing the specifics of her mortal end.
Yet Antonia can shrug, blasé about it now. “Alas, it was my fate to meet the flames,” she says. “But take my own life? Perish the notion! No girl with so great a love and rich a future would do such a thing.”
With her next contemplative Cocoa Puff, Antonia glances off. “Of course, my parents had no knowledge of Sinclair and I. He being common, they would never have approved. Indeed, from the day he pledged his troth, I began to amass my dowry, pilfering it gold piece by gold piece from my mother’s coffer.” Her eyes get a nasty glimmer, ice on slate, as she offers this illicit info—and then they grow misty with remembered misery. “I knew not what kept Sinclair from claiming me, as days went to weeks and weeks to months. My garden fell to seed, the rosebush branches barren, yet I’d pull on my cloak and wander therein, waiting for him. It did baffle me; it did pain me greatly—but I knew he would come.” What’s prompting this confession, I can’t be sure. Maybe Antonia just wants me to understand her before she does me in. Her revelations have got me mesmerized. Groundless as it is, her love was— is—solid, hammered in the forge of her heart. Yet all those months of waiting surely planted that flaw of doubt in her otherwise steadfast conviction.
Now she lofts her chin to declare, “And I was right, for here we are, centuries later, set to wed.”
Summoning sympathy, I gaze at her across the table. “I appreciate your sharing all this, Antonia,” I say. “But actually, Sin told me he can’t recall pledging—”
She throws me a glare. “Surely whatever he told you was to quell your prying. Sinclair respects that what exists between us is none of your affair.”
Okay, I expected a rationale along those lines. And now Antonia regards me as though weighing whether to go on.
Which she decides to do. “I will allow, however, that you played a pivotal role in bringing Sinclair and I together agai
n. And it is my hope that if I convey to you what that was, you’ll quit your salacious attempts to . . . to distract him.” I breathe. I blink. Antonia assumes this to mean I bid her continue.
“You see, Dice—dear, dear Dice—were it not for you, I mightn’t have conceived it possible that he and I could be reunited . . .”
I still breathe. I still blink. Only what Antonia delivers in that needle-on-a-chalkboard scratch is starting to mess with my motor functions.
“For centuries I wandered Forsythe Manor bereft, a lost soul in my own home, one among many tortured, aimless spirits . . .”
Where had I heard that before? Right, in the letter to Sin we found on her escritoire. She’d described her loneliness, her yearning . . .
“Then one evening you came, and you sang, and with your voice you channeled my beloved.”
The letter went on—how she then felt his essence calling out to her . . .
“Such a silly trifle of a song, so loud and brash. Yet you evoked him.”
Did I? I did. Damn right, I did. When I sing, Sin is there.
Sin is always there. That first time in the studio, Tosh checking me with those gold to green to honey eyes, Sin was no doubt extra there. I felt him. I wasn’t the only one.
“I sensed his presence powerfully.”
The dull glimmer of Antonia’s dead gaze. The strained intensity of her tone. Am I still breathing? Still blinking?
“And then . . . what is the expression? Oh, yes, I took it from there.”
Though she’s stopped gnashing cereal, Antonia shows her teeth—vicious, tiny, relentless thorns. How can I breathe? How can I blink?
“With the fissure opened, the sorcery proved simple. The scent of my roses, the lilt of my waltz, and Crane Williams belonged to me. After that, the magic gained momentum. My flowers entrancing. My music beckoning. Again you came to the house—in your short skirt, that bruise upon your leg. I could not help but note how it bound you to him.” So that’s how she got the idea. Now her bitter pink bitten brand jails my man as effectively as a ball and chain.
“I was imbued!” Antonia carries on as her fingers flex and clench. “I could do anything! And then there he was, my Sinclair, swinging the iron gate, come to me, come for me, come to fulfill his vow.”
Antonia rises from the table, her fractured frame and contorted face as repulsive a loogie as hell ever spat. And now I cannot breathe; now I cannot blink.
“The love so long denied finally mine! Everything I ever wanted is coming to fruition. A beautiful gown of flowing white, a home of my own, and my Sinclair, more handsome and noble than I even recall, soon—soon!—to be mine, body and soul.”
The truth hurts, they say, but that’s all they say—they don’t say how it hurts. That’s because each painful truth has it’s own unique recipe for agony. This one—the ugly, undeniable truth that I’m responsible for setting Antonia’s game in motion—is an eaten-up-alive sensation. From the inside, from the outside, a rapacious force devours me. Except it doesn’t. Because I’m still here. Breathing. Blinking. Knowing.
Knowing that my voice turned traitor in the worst possible way. Knowing that again—again!—some misbegotten kernel of magic rose up in me to lead me astray. Knowing that Antonia Forsythe was my sinister silent partner in summoning Sin. Knowing that the partnership has been terminated, with her still holding the all-important trump card: Crane Williams stashed away in the spectral cyclotron beyond the gate.
What an illuminating morning this is proving to be. My brain bulges with new knowledge, a helium balloon. It lifts me from the table, lofts me from the room, and leads me out the back door. Angry red wrecking balls, tomatoes burden their stalks. Cucumbers threaten like truncheons from their vines.
Herbs conspire in a potpourri of flagrant fragrant mockery. Et tu, vegetables? I wonder vaguely as I drift toward the perimeter of the riotous patch.
“Oh, Dice. Dear Dice.” She has pursued me to the garden.
“My confession has disturbed you.” She moves toward me, gesturing with a spindly, spidery hand.
“You . . . you violated me . . .” It’s all I can manage.
Antonia doesn’t exactly smile. “Lambs are for slaughter.
Horses are for . . . for sport, yes, nowadays. And people like you, so sensitive, so susceptible to those beyond the grave—
surely you accept your purpose.”
My purpose. And now, purpose served, I’m supposed to step aside? Apparently.
“So I must urge you to stop imposing yourself between Sinclair and I. I urge you most strongly.” And if I don’t? She’ll maintain her murderous agenda against me, that’s for certain. She might even mess with Charlotte (climb that ladder, little girl; sip the stuff under the sink; play with matches . . .) or renege on her promise to release Crane.
A moment passes, and it’s as though I can see the garden ripen, drawing off her evil energy.
“I truly am sorry for you, Dice,” Antonia says. “I’m well aware that you love him. But he is mine.” A skeletal shackle—frigid, rigid, horrible—her fingers fall on my wrist. I wrench away. Yet I do see sorrow in Antonia’s eyes, porous charcoal flecks of it. Then she breathes, and blinks, and all that’s there is the hard, gray granite of her determination.
“Goodness, Pen shall be here shortly,” she says. “I must run and pack my bag. Indeed, it ought be pleasant, visiting with my neighbors across the lane.”
LI
Antonia’s revelation has me shaken up, but with Momster in the house, I’ve got to play it down. Aside from a CliffsNotes version murmured to Marsh in bed last night, I haven’t said a word about it but of course can think of nothing else. My voice—that contralto renegade, that melodious turncoat. My magic—much as I try to bury and obliterate it in my quest for Average American Teenhood, those pesky paranormal traits find a way to bite me in the butt. My love—Antonia implied that if I back off Sin, she’ll spare my life. Only what is life without the one you love? Before long my mother will notice something’s wrong and want to “discuss” why I’m so “evasive” and “sullen,” and no way can I get into it with her.
Fortunately, she’s awakened this morning by a call from the Realtor that fully occupies her mind.
“Really?” she says. “Really? Really! ” Apparently, the Realtor got really, really real. We have an offer on the house. Quite a healthy offer, for the full asking price. In cash. No mortgage, no muss, no fuss.
“In today’s market—incredible!” she marvels. “The deal is going to happen fast; we’d need to be out within a month. We can do that, can’t we, sweetie?”
“We” meaning “me,” but I nod dumbly. By mid-August, Marsh will have to suck it up and rejoin her sisters in Torrington, and I’ll be safely ensconced on the Upper West Side. Ample time to prep for Columbia—do some shopping, scope my schedule, definitely book a hair appointment. Beauty salons in the land of silken blondes are incompetent with natural curls.
I’ll cop to it: I’m glad my spiral glory makes me stand out here.
Only it’s gotten so raggedy lately, I’ve been wearing it up a lot, or in two long braids—the ’do I do for a cookout chez Leonard tonight.
Soon as we arrive, I see that Antonia’s been busy. Bouquets abound, and they’re all wild. Having left her hosts’ carefully tended annuals untouched in their boxes, she must have combed the fields of Swoon for daisies, Queen Anne’s lace, thistle—weeds, basically—to weave the ingenious constructions that adorn the patio.
Uncle Gordon presides at the grill, slabs of steak on a platter beside him. My kid cousins and some buddies wage war with water guns while the playmates’ parents sip sangria. Lainie urges Momster to regale her guests with insider gossip from the Hamptons. She does, but seems more fascinated by the revolving teenage contingent.
She picks right up on the body language between Pen and Tosh and throws me some sympathy—she’d been sure I had a thing brewing with him. Her expression turns to flummoxed when Pen introduces the timid, clodd
ish Antonia. Then she loses it completely when one of her favorite Swoonies rolls up.
“Sinclair!” Okay, the woman is just in from hanging with Brad and Angelina and Quentin and Woody, yet here she is, all a-gush at the sight of my boy.
“Ms. Reagan!” He clasps both her hands, but that won’t do—Momster moves in for a kiss on both cheeks, and I mean cheeks, not air. “It’s wonderful to see you—lovely as ever.”
“Oh, stop.” She swats him, then beams at me, assuming that if Pen’s with Tosh, I got the better deal. “Candice didn’t tell me you were back in town.”
Her smile is soon to sour. Spazzy stomp in full effect, Antonia approaches to lynch Sin’s elbow. For a second it seems he’ll shake her off like a mosquito, but he composes himself, stonily intoning, “May I present my fiancée, Ms. Reagan?” Good thing the Leonards lit citronella torches, since if there were mosquitoes, an entire swarm could fly into Momster’s gaping maw. “Your . . . yes—no,” she stammers. “We’ve met.” Dinner, fortunately, is served, my mother deliberately chewing her steak as if that could engender clarity. In fact, the entire meal proceeds mechanically, the mood wound tight.
Though Sin does sit beside his betrothed, he chats mostly with Momster, inquiring about Daddy and how both their careers are faring, before segueing into the New York music scene. Tosh joins for this part of the conversation, my mother relaxing to reminisce about the glory days of CBGB.
“The bathroom? We dubbed it the Toilet Seat of Death,” she says, swirling her sangria. “And the backstage graffiti you would not believe. But it did have the city’s best sound system, and of course everyone paid their dues there.” Much as I enjoy the oral history of punk rock, I’m taken by the most delicious fantasy: Sin and me emigrating from Swoon, living together in some sixth-floor walk-up, taking the clubs and coffeehouses of NYC by storm, a girl/boy vox/harp blues-based sonic sensation. He sits directly across from me now—looking so fine, speaking so earnestly, laughing so warmly—so close yet so far. Hmm, well, maybe not so far . . . I do something. I can’t resist. Slip off a sandal. Extend a leg.