We Are the Ashes, We Are the Fire

by Joy McCullough

  “You wouldn’t even know about Marguerite without me!”

  “You’re right. How can I ever make it up to you? But I did the work. I did the research. I literally bled for this story.”

  “I have been at your side, right up until you shoved me away. Now I have no part in it? Doing it alone doesn’t make you strong, Marianne, it makes you stupid. It makes you fucking Philippe, running wild all over the countryside with no chance of accomplishing anything for the people you love!”

  “You’re comparing me to Philippe?”

  “Stings, doesn’t it? When you fancy yourself Marguerite. I can see how you’d take offense, he’s such an asshole, because all the men are! He keeps chasing her down just so you can prove how much better she is. He’s lost his entire family too, you know.”

  “How are you sympathizing with Philippe?”

  “It’s not even subtle, he’s nowhere in the historical record. You went out of your way to add yet another douche-bro to your story because your tunnel vision—”

  “I had to make him up! I made Helene up too! There’s no record of Marguerite’s family!”

  “That’s what happens when a person doesn’t exist!”

  At first I think it’s another weapon meant to slice into me again because we’re angry and we’re hurling daggers, but when I throw a disparaging glance their way, I see a truth in their eyes, a chill.

  “Wait, what?”

  “Do a little poking around on genealogy websites. Look beyond what you want to find. It’s not that hard to see that the Bressieux line died out before Marguerite was born. She’s a legend. No more historical than the Lady of the Lake.”

  I grasp for something to hold on to, my dagger, and I find the handle of the cast-iron pan. I gasp at the searing pain, but also I focus on it. Burning flesh is nothing to the thought that I’ve built everything on shifting sand, mere stories.

  CHAPTER FORTY-ONE

  The stairwell of Nor’s apartment building still smells like weed and rat poison, but there’s also the distinct aroma of a simmering tomato sauce.

  When Wyatt opens the door, the smell wafts over me even stronger. “Hey, Marianne! Come on in!”

  “Hey.”

  “Come on in here, girl!” calls Tonika. “Do you have the Morales culinary touch? Because this sauce still needs something but I can’t figure it out.”

  Tonika grins and holds out a ladle when I step into the kitchen.

  I take it, even though I definitely don’t have the Morales culinary touch. But Tonika’s right. The sauce is more than a little bland. “I’m not sure,” I say. “Nor would know.”

  Tonika takes the ladle back. “Your sister’s at the pool and she’s taking her sweet time.”

  “Wait . . .” The word sweet jogs my memory. “Sugar! Not very much, like a teaspoon. It’s to cut the acidity of the tomatoes.”

  It had been a huge argument between Papi and Nor one late summer afternoon a few years back, when they were using up all the tomatoes in the garden for a sauce they planned to distribute to anyone who would take a jar.

  Papi argued that tomatoes are naturally sweet and he hardly believed Sicilian grandmas were adding white sugar to their heirloom recipes. Nor argued that the sweetness can get cooked out of the tomatoes as they simmer, and a touch of sugar would bring that natural sweetness back while also cutting the acidity.

  Mom and I stayed out of it. My favorite part of any dish that involved tomato sauce was always the pasta or bread, anyway.

  Finally Nor and Papi split the sauce they’d made into two different pots. Nor added sugar to hers. Papi’s confidence waned as Nor carried on happily, while his sauce was clearly not meeting his own standards.

  When they were ready, Nor felt Mom and I would be too biased as taste testers (though I don’t know who she thought we’d favor). So they each took a bowl of their sauce and a handful of spoons outside, where our neighbors, the Bianchis, caroused in their backyard dining area. (Complete coincidence that they happened to be Italian, but it was a fact Nor would not let Papi forget in years to come.)

  The Bianchis were happy to be consulted, and the spoons and bowls of sauce were passed across the fence with no explanation of the difference between them—only the assignment to taste test and report back.

  Papi has included sugar in his tomato sauce ever since.

  “Have you seen this place on Latona?” Wyatt asks from behind a screen. “Three bedrooms, plus a walk-in closet.”

  “Are you gonna sleep in the closet?” Tonika asks, emerging from the cupboard with a canister of sugar.

  “Are you guys moving?”

  “We weren’t going to.” Tonika adds a teaspoon to the sauce. “But we don’t want to kick Nor out when Lola gets back. So we’re looking for a place that’ll fit us all.”

  My face must betray something, because Tonika adds, “Oh shit, I hope I didn’t tell you something Nor wanted to tell you on her own. Nothing’s for sure.”

  Nothing’s ever for sure. And I don’t actually hate the idea of Nor living off campus anymore. Tonika’s great and Wyatt seems cool enough. If Nor is happy with them, I guess that’s all I really need to know.

  Not that it’s up to me.

  Tonika holds out the ladle again and I taste. We both nod at the same time. “Perfect, right?” she says. “You do have the Morales touch! Just like your sister!”

  Which prompts me to burst into tears, right there in the middle of this crappy college student kitchen.

  “Whoa, hey, what is happening?” Tonika drops the ladle in the sauce and leads me over to the kitchen table. She snaps her fingers in Wyatt’s face. “You, tea, now.”

  Obedient, he hops up and starts filling a kettle.

  “What’s up, baby sis?”

  I glance over at Wyatt. I don’t know Tonika any better than I know Wyatt, I guess, but still—

  Tonika jerks her thumb over her shoulder. “Does that boy need to make himself scarce?”

  He freezes, unsure whether he should keep making the tea or get out of the kitchen. But Nor feels safe here, so Wyatt must be okay.

  “No,” I say, sniffling. “This is your house. I’m just a mess.”

  “You sure are,” Tonika says. “Me too. Wyatt’s the biggest mess of all of us.”

  Suddenly I’m telling them about this story I’ve been writing and the pointlessness of it and then it turns into telling them about Jess and how horrible I’ve been to this person who’s been right by my side all summer, who has their own reason to care deeply about Marguerite’s story. They let me talk, nodding and offering supportive sounds.

  When I’m finally quiet, Tonika says to Wyatt, “Remember that time I made you swear not to let me drink at that Kappa Sig party and you found me with a drink in my hand and gently reminded me of my own wishes?”

  Wyatt grins. “It wasn’t the first time I’ve had a drink poured on me, but it was the first time I definitely didn’t deserve it.”

  I take a shuddery breath.

  “We’re all assholes to the people we love sometimes,” Wyatt says to me.

  “You own it,” Tonika says. “And you do better the next time.”

  They’re a family, this odd assortment of people who’ve moved their garage sale furniture in together and built a home where they take in strays and screw up and forgive and keep muddling through the mess of living in relationship with one another.

  A key clicks in the front door and Nor comes around the corner with wet hair and a gym bag over her shoulder. She pauses when she sees me, takes in my red, teary face, the tea in front of me, Tonika’s gaze trying to beam whole paragraphs of concern into Nor’s head via an exchanged look.

  “Em? What’s wrong?”

  “It’s stupid,” I say.

  “No, it’s not,” Wyatt says.

  Tonika grabs my hand and gives i
t a squeeze. “You’ve got this.” She jerks her head at Wyatt and they both disappear into her room.

  Nor holds up her car keys. “Want to get out of here?”

  * * *

  —

  I haven’t been inside Nor’s car since before.

  It’s been her one constant, from house to dorm to apartment, always she’s had Uncle Joel’s hand-me-down car. Even though the locks have never worked and the rear window is cracked, maybe the familiarity somehow feels safe.

  The car’s smell of chlorine tickles the back of my throat, ever-present reminder of what Nor has lost, but also of summers at the community pool, Nor flinging herself into the deep end before she’d even learned to swim and somehow figuring it out while I clung to the edge.

  Sometimes she’s the brazen one. I still can’t swim.

  She rolls the windows down and turns the music up. KEXP is doing yet another Kurt Cobain retrospective. I don’t know where we’re going and it doesn’t even matter. I’ve fucked this all up so enormously but she’s still here. She’s still my sister.

  We end up at the Fremont Troll. It’s been years since we’ve been here, back before Nor could drive, when we used to ride our bikes to this massive art installation, an eighteen-foot troll statue under a bridge near our house. Like no time has passed, we climb the troll together, helping each other up over the hand crushing a real VW Bug, and scaling the troll’s shoulder, where we perch together.

  “I talked to Jess,” Nor finally says. “And before you get mad at them, Mom was worried about what was going on between you two and I’m the one who reached out. If it helps, they feel terrible.”

  “For what?” The cars on the bridge above us rumble by, each one a self-contained world of people with their own fears and wounds and joys. “For telling me the truth?”

  Nor is quiet for a minute. “You guys were really serious about this story, huh?”

  Story. The word crushes me like the troll’s hand on the puny car below us. It was always only a tale. Legend or history, it was never going to change anything.

  “It was me being stupid. Making things my business that weren’t. Thinking I could tell someone else’s story, like that way I could make it end how it should.”

  “Wouldn’t that be something?” Nor says. “If by telling a story you could change history.”

  A couple of tourists appear, reading the plaque about the troll. In 1989, the Fremont Arts Council held a competition for proposals to rehabilitate the area under the bridge, which had become a haven for drug dealers. Changing the story with art.

  1989. Right around the time my mom was a student at Fremont High and there was a teacher who knew he could take what he wanted from a girl. Only that’s not my story, either.

  “Do you mind if we take a picture?” One of the tourists calls to us, holding up their phone.

  “No problem,” Nor calls back. “We’ll climb down.”

  “No, stay!” the other one calls. “It’ll show how massive it is.”

  Nor’s had enough cameras in her face. “You can climb off,” I tell her. “I’ll stay.”

  “It’s okay.” She gives a friendly wave to the tourists to go ahead. “They have no idea who we are.”

  Nor drops her head onto my shoulder, a mass of curls falling in front of her face. I plaster on fake cheer for the photo.

  This monumental thing that changed our lives, shoved us under a microscope, was barely a blip on the radar for the rest of the world. Even the rest of Seattle. Fremont. It was one girl, one family, an invisible fallen soldier in a war that has no end.

  When the tourists have gone back to their bike-shares, Nor sits up and says, “I don’t think you’re telling someone else’s story, though. Or trying to change history to suit what you want. For one thing, Marguerite didn’t leave any record of who she was or how she’d want her story told. Or if she did, it was erased by those with power. You’re illuminating, not erasing.

  “You’re going to mess up. You’re not perfect, and neither was she. But I think you’re trying your best to honor her story. And mine.” Nor takes my hand. “Ultimately, I think you’re telling a story about sisters. And violence. And being a girl in the world. That is your story to tell.”

  Maybe. But the existence of records or not and what that means won’t leave me alone. All those baby pictures of Nor and hardly any of me. If some historian tried to reconstruct my life years from now, would they see the lack of photos as an indication that I never existed? Or would they see the lack as evidence of a second child and harried parents and do the work to build the character they hoped I was? Would I even want that? So much would depend on who was doing the telling.

  “What if the lack of records means it never happened? Then what am I doing?”

  “Writing a novel?” Nor grins and nudges my shoulder. “This is about the genealogy, yeah? Jess told me it suggests the Bressieux line died out.”

  “Right before Marguerite was born,” I say. “Supposedly born.”

  Nor is quiet for a moment. “Who’s the villain in the story?”

  Chalon. De Gaucourt. Philippe. Every single person with power who built a world we can’t walk through safely. “Louis de Chalon, I guess. The Prince of Orange.”

  “Any doubt about whether he existed?”

  “No, he was real.”

  “How are you sure?”

  “There’s . . . history. Documentation. Of marriages, births, deaths. Battles. His existence is really well-established.”

  “Huh.”

  “What?”

  “Well, who writes the history books?”

  At first I think she’s asking, like, specifically, who authored the books I read for research. But then I see the glint in her eye that suggests she’s hoping for a certain answer.

  “It’s power again,” she finally says. “It’s always power. So it’s not especially surprising that no one questions the villain’s existence. With Marguerite’s family, something tells me not every single person’s name got recorded. Doesn’t the ‘family line’ mean male heirs? The ones who inherited the titles? So if her loser brother got killed in one of those battles, maybe the Bressieux line did die out? Doesn’t have to mean she didn’t exist.”

  A flicker of light in the darkness. I can’t even articulate why it matters so much to me that she existed. Even if she were legend, that wouldn’t have to be terrible. It could mean there were enough people who wanted so desperately to believe this could happen, a woman could stand up and have her say, that they passed the story on for long enough that it reached me, centuries later.

  “So maybe she existed,” Nor says. “Maybe she didn’t. Or maybe she existed, but the revenge part isn’t true. There certainly would have been a lot of obstacles—”

  “That’s why I need it to be true!” This part is crystal clear. “I found one mention that she existed but just, like, died after the rape. That’s the worst possibility. I need there to be a story—history, a precedent—where the monsters don’t win. Where the girl gets revenge. Where there are actual fucking consequences.”

  After a long while, Nor says, “We can still have that story.”

  “How?”

  “It doesn’t matter what happened historically. I mean, I get why it matters to you. But even if she was raped and killed, you’re the storyteller now. You tell whatever story you need to be true.”

  “But if we only tell the story we want to be true—”

  “I’m not saying we ignore Marguerite’s place in the world, or the fact that she was attacked, her family killed, all her obstacles. And if there were historical record, maybe it would be different. But in a case where the storyteller gets to decide which story to tell and how to tell it, maybe it’s really powerful to give her an agency she didn’t have in reality.”

  “To show her overcoming,” I say.

 
“Right,” Nor says. “Here’s the thing—let’s at least agree she existed. Shine some light on that. Because awesome women were erased from the narrative way more than they were invented.”

  “Okay.”

  “Then she did survive,” Nor says. “She did overcome. For however long she lived, whether she ever put on armor or not, she survived. So it’s your choice, but I think you should honor that by putting a fucking sword in her hand.”

  CONQUEROR

  For every time I’ve battled

  in my mind I’m unprepared

  for the clash of steel on steel

  the shriek of wounded horses

  hot spray of blood upon my face

  the way a person’s eyes can change

  one moment living organs

  that have gazed upon a child, a lover,

  wept tears of joy and grief

  to lifeless orbs like those

  we used to roll across the courtyard

  in games of Conqueror.

  The skirmish finds us

  well before Autun

  and though we are

  the greater army

  we are unprepared.

  Not only I but

  battle-hardened men

  go into panic.

  Not Zahra.

  She takes one moment

  to grab my hand.

  For Helene.

  Then she is in the fray.

  Minuit whinnies his dismay.

  Hooves thunder all around

  and someone on horseback

  grabs my arm—to throw me down

  I think, but it is Ismidon.

  Remove your helmet!

  He shouts to be heard.

  They will see your sex

  and you’ll be spared!

  They might be loath

  to run me through with steel

  but would not hesitate

  to eviscerate me in other ways.

  I shake him off