We Are the Ashes, We Are the Fire

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We Are the Ashes, We Are the Fire Page 9

by Joy McCullough


  LARDER MOUSE

  We must go to Salette.

  No one looks up.

  The young master

  has appeared then vanished

  like so many times before

  but now they feel his absence

  in their open wounds

  in the creak of the castle.

  The stones will forget.

  We women will not.

  Ladies!

  I summon Mother

  when she instructs

  the staff before a feast.

  Betsy and Matilde

  make no move,

  but the younger ones

  turn glassy eyes my way.

  Gather cloaks and provisions—

  only what we can carry.

  We must reach

  the convent by dusk.

  Dawn is breaking.

  On my own I could

  make the trip in a day.

  Weighed down

  with so many others?

  I’m not sure

  we’ll make it

  at all.

  The women don’t argue

  nor move with any speed.

  I am glad of a task. In motion

  I barely notice the blood.

  I send the young ones

  to check the stables,

  saddle any horses

  the soldiers haven’t stolen.

  If there is one bit of grace

  there’ll be a nag

  to carry old Matilde.

  Betsy and Zahra

  will find makeshift cloaks

  in blankets, table linens

  anything to keep us warm.

  Whatever they find

  in these quarters below

  for I will not send them

  to the morgue upstairs.

  That leaves me

  to find provisions.

  Zahra points me to the larder.

  I push through a heavy door

  then down a flight of stairs

  to yet another door.

  Who knew we kept our vegetables

  and salted meats so well protected?

  The room beyond the door is dark

  and cool. It ought to frighten me

  and yet there’s something in this place

  that feels like safety. I hear

  the voice before my eyes adjust.

  Your sister.

  Your sister has come!

  The voice belongs

  to a kitchen girl armed

  with a fire iron

  and a ferocious gaze.

  Your sister, she said.

  Your sister has come.

  But that must mean—

  I push past the girl

  and find behind her

  folded into almost nothing

  my sister. Alive. Helene.

  She doesn’t want to be touched,

  the girl insists.

  Helene, I’m here.

  She’s silent

  and still as stone.

  I clutch my sister

  to my breast,

  feel her heart race

  in time with mine.

  The girl hovers,

  grip still fierce

  on her makeshift weapon.

  I’m here, love.

  I cannot say

  it will be all right.

  It won’t.

  Emilde is my sister’s

  champion. I didn’t ask

  her name but she informed me

  as we carried Helene

  up to the kitchen.

  Young mistress!

  Betsy wraps Helene

  in the warmest blanket

  they’ve found.

  Oh, thank the saints.

  Our little larder mouse!

  Larder mouse!

  She is the eldest daughter

  of this estate, nobility

  they serve. And yet—

  Zahra tugs me aside.

  She means no harm.

  Your sister is wont to

  hide away from parties,

  revelry, inside the larder

  with her books.

  A seed of hope unfurls—

  perhaps she was in the larder

  the entire time. Perhaps

  she never knew the horror.

  But there has been no revelry here.

  And my sister’s silence shrivels

  the seed before it can take root.

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  Around the frat house.

  For once Jess isn’t sprawled on my beanbag chair or my bed and I’m glad to be alone now that I’m the one shaking, heart pounding, falling apart.

  I’d been sitting there in a coffee shop, doing something important to me, hanging out with a friend, working on my story, and that asshole thought he had the right to flip the tables. On me and on Jess. And the thing is, he does have the right. He was born into it. There are never any consequences.

  There need to be consequences. Not only for Craig, but for Phil with his threats and entitlement, and all the football players and fraternity brothers, fans and alumni who rallied to defend a monster. Not because he was like them—scholarship water boy who didn’t even get into a frat. But because they’re like him. If it was criminal to take what you want from a girl, there wouldn’t even be a football team. A Greek system. A university.

  How many girls on that campus are now afraid of what would happen to them if they spoke up? If they stood up for Nor? If they told their own stories? They have stories. This was a heinous thing, but also it happens constantly.

  And not just girls. Anyone with less power, representation. The ones who are overlooked, shouted down on the most basic things—why would they risk speaking up when they know how that turns out, even for the privileged?

  I could have written survivor profiles until the end of time, if I wanted to. If they’d made any difference.

  The ones who stay quiet, thinking about speaking up, have seen what happened to Nor and now they’ll never speak. So the ones with power keep doing whatever they want. And the cycle continues.

  Survivors need to know someone is in their corner. They aren’t alone. Football players don’t have all the power. Frat boys don’t have all the power. Or they shouldn’t anyway. And the only way to change that is to change that.

  I grab my phone, scroll through several Husky hashtags for inspiration.

  It’s so obvious I almost laugh. These dawgs deserve to be shamed. I compose a Tweet.

  Everyone’s so quick to blame the victim, but maybe we should do some #DawgShaming. Craig Lawrence isn’t the only rabid predator at UW.

  I look at it, knowing it’ll bring some trolls to my account, but hopefully it’ll get people talking. Survivors can share their stories. Predators will feel what it’s like to have no control. Of course, only my followers will see it. I built up some platform throughout the trial with everything I posted, but those are mostly people who are already on Nor’s side. I have to reach the others, the ones who are hiding, alone, the ones who most need a sword.

  If I’m honest? I want to reach Craig’s supporters too.

  My muscles finally unwind, like I needed to get this out, and now that I have, my body melts into the mattress. I add #PurpleReign and #GoHuskies and click Tweet.

  * * *

  —

  The knock on my door the next morning is too insistent to be either of my parents. They’d come in if they really needed to wake me up.

  “What?” I call, squinting against the light that
means the makeshift blackout curtain I put up to keep out news cameras has fallen down again.

  “It’s Jess. Are you decent?”

  Jess always texts first. And never before noon. I don’t know what time it is, but it’s not noon.

  “Yeah?”

  The door bursts open and in an instant, Jess is on my bed, their phone in my face. “I am not sure you thought this all the way through,” they say.

  I sit up and grope for my phone on the nightstand. My notifications are out of control. Texts, DMs, Twitter mentions. I feel a little dizzy. I’ve written a few pieces that got a lot of attention. Not viral, per se, but shared by enough people with big platforms to make my notifications erupt.

  Those were a fifth-grade science-fair eruption. This is Mount St. Helens.

  “What is going on?”

  “Does #DawgShaming ring a bell?”

  Then I’m awake. My hashtag caught fire. This is what I wanted—attention on the issue, on the injustice. Light shining on the dark, festering places.

  I scan through the hashtag. I see what I hoped to see—survivors opening up about their experiences. Some at UW, some at other universities and high schools. They’re not naming names, but I get it. That’s scary.

  It’s all good, though, because the more open people are, the less stigma for victims, the more consequences for perpetrators.

  Every now and then some (white, male) rando is in my mentions, calling me a bitch or a cunt.

  Cunt: a word for “vagina” that originally appeared in anatomy texts as a clinical term. Only later did it become obscene; in 1785 it was defined as “a nasty name for a nasty thing” in Francis Grose’s A Classical Dictionary of the Vulgar Tongue.

  But I’ve seen worse on the internet. It’s worth it to open up the conversation. So why does Jess’s face look like that?

  “This is what I wanted,” I try to explain. “Openness, discussion. I don’t care if I get called a few names.”

  Jess types something into their phone and shoves it at me. “Do you care if Nor gets dragged into it?”

  My stomach flips.

  There’s the familiar hashtag—#IgNorTheWhore—but there’s a new spin on it.

  Obviously we can’t #IgNorTheWhore—she’s like an STI that keeps coming back! So I say we send her #ToTheDawghouse!! #PurpleReign

  They go on like that, blurring into one another, piling into a tangled heap, all focused on punishing Nor, making her pay, turning what I thought was so clever, so thought-provoking, right back around so it terrorizes the victim yet again.

  Only this time it’s definitely my fault.

  * * *

  —

  “Sentáte, mija,” Papi says with a firm pat on my shoulder. “I’ll make some tea.”

  I sit. Tea isn’t going to fix this. But at least he’s doing something, instead of scrolling endlessly through Twitter, like Mom.

  “I don’t understand,” she says. “Why would you do this?”

  “I was trying to help!”

  “How does this help? Who does it help? Not Nor.”

  “All the girls in this situation! This isn’t only about Nor, you know! We can’t just move on now that we got a guilty verdict and go, oh, that was justice! Because the sentence wasn’t justice! Not even a little bit.”

  “Getting to trial was more justice than most victims see,” Mom says.

  “And that’s supposed to be enough?”

  “You take the win you get and you have a little gratitude! Nor is alive. We could have lost her. So yes! It’s enough that I still have both my daughters.”

  “Well it’s not enough for me.” I’m on my feet. “But you just keep teaching fucking F. Scott Fitzgerald and Hemingway and whatever other goddamn toxic male shit you teach to reinforce this idea that boys are entitled to whatever the fuck they want!”

  “Marianne,” Papi says.

  “Don’t bother.” Mom takes her phone and flees to the bedroom.

  I collapse at the table and drop my head to its cool surface. I feel like I should cry, but mostly I still want to scream. I want to rage and hurt someone, even if that someone is my own mother who’s done the best she knows how to keep our family together over the last year. Even her. Because everything she’s done? It hasn’t been enough. It hasn’t been enough for Nor. It hasn’t been enough for me.

  Papi sits next to me, but I don’t look up. He strokes my hair.

  I used to get these terrible tangles, and when my mom would try to brush them out, I’d throw fits and jerk my head away and generally be impossible. Finally she threw her hands up and said fine, look like a feral child, I don’t care. And I did, for a few weeks. Until I got tired of the matted hair and the looks from teachers and as a final straw, Zach Stein called me pube-head.

  I wasn’t about to go back to my mom and admit that. So I went to Papi, working on a leak in our kitchen sink, his tools spread all over the linoleum. I brought my sparkly purple hairbrush and asked him to help.

  He used to do his sisters’ hair, he told me later. When his mom got sick and couldn’t anymore. His friends saw him once, braiding the little girls’ hair and never let him forget it.

  I didn’t know that then. All I knew was Papi wouldn’t need to talk about it. He would clear a spot for me on the floor and get to work. It was rough going. He got out a jar of coconut oil to help work through the tangles, but it was still a spectacular mess. Most parents would have given up. Better to haul the ornery kid to a salon and chop it off.

  But I’d asked my dad for help and he was going to help me. We sat there together—it felt like hours—working at the knots, undoing what I’d done. Mom didn’t say a word the next time she saw my smooth, sleek hair. Who knows what happened behind closed doors. After that, my dad was the only one who ever did my hair. French braids, fishtails, big poufy bangs for ’80s day.

  His touch on my hair is what undoes me now.

  I only wanted to fix this but I’m making it worse. I’m a four-year-old with a hammer, trying to be Daddy’s assistant, destroying the intricate dollhouse he’d spent months building for Nor. Only this time it wasn’t a dollhouse.

  Papi keeps stroking my hair until I finally stop sobbing.

  “You need to apologize to your mother.”

  “I know.” I hiccup. “How do I keep hurting everyone so badly when all I want to do is help?”

  Papi covers my hands with his callused ones. “Creo que . . . we’re figuring this out as we go along. For the longest time I felt completely frozen. I knew if I let myself do anything, it would most definitely make things worse for Nor. Para todos nosotros.”

  “How do you keep from storming the frat house with an AK-47?”

  He passes a weary hand over his permanent five o’clock shadow. “A completely developed cerebellum helps. Also fairly inflexible views on gun control. And the fact that as much as I want to destroy that pathetic waste of oxygen and everyone who stands behind him, I can’t bring myself to put this family through any more than we’ve already endured.”

  If I had more self-control. If I thought before I acted. If—

  “When I met tu mamá, we were going to change the world with words. Me with poesía, her with novels. Grad school was this bubble where everyone believed words would be enough to save us all. But we got out and figured out words weren’t even enough to pay the rent. Forget saving the world. The thing was, I was okay with that. I realized I could still write for myself, I could still read and enjoy poetry. I could learn a trade that would support a family. It was enough for me. Es suficiente para mi.

  “Pero mija, my lovely, headstrong Marianne, you act because to do nothing would crush you. I don’t think that will ever change. Espero que no. You won’t be satisfied by enough, and you shouldn’t be. You’re going to fail spectacularly in your life. You are going to crash and burn, mi vida, per
o, ay dios, what you’ll make of the ashes.”

  His eyes fill with tears and he doesn’t try to hide them. He holds my gaze for a moment, then stands and kisses the top of my head. “I’m going to check on tu mamá.”

  WIDE-OPEN NIGHT

  Do you know

  how to reach

  the convent?

  Zahra insists on walking

  through the wide-open night

  at my side, despite

  her obvious pain. Despite

  the space behind Matilde

  on Minuit, the horse

  I learned to ride on

  as a child.

  She leans on my arm,

  her weight a welcome

  tether to the earth.

  I believe

  the convent

  is south.

  I am

  almost sure

  we’re headed

  that direction.

  This I know:

  each step carries us

  farther away from the place

  we’ll never truly leave.

  Times I have left the castle:

  To visit cousins

  in Avignon.

  To attend a wedding

  in Anjou.

  Times I have left the castle

  without my father’s escort:

  Some hours later

  we enter a village.

  The servants breathe

  more easily in the world

  they know but the walls

  on either side close in on me

  with only room for the stench

  the waste, the mangled creature

  rotting in the road.

  At any turn a man

  could ambush us.

  I force down

  panicked breaths.

  Mademoiselle?

  I do not answer Zahra.

  I cannot explain.

  She slips her hand in mine

  and I don’t let go.

 

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