Dark and Deepest Red

by Anna-Marie McLemore

  The damp grasses prickle Lala’s ankles. She lets the feeling chase off the memory of that kiss, the way his mouth took hold of hers.

  The green ground offers a clean, sharp perfume alongside the stream. The ribbon of water catches the moon in time with its murmurs.

  Lala draws the earth from beneath her underskirt. Alifair hands her the roses and then keeps a respectful distance.

  This is the last of it, the ground she has kept, the packed earth she imagines still smelling of the lavender in her mother’s hair, and the knife her father kept in his boot, and the bitter salt of the fever that took them both. Every year, in the month that stole them, Lala has brought out a handful from the box, to loosen the world’s hold on their spirits.

  A few years ago, in a thoughtful moment brought on by the coming of autumn, Tante Dorenia told her about how they once did this for all their dead. And Lala couldn’t sleep until she had resolved how to do it for Maman and Papa. Tradition would have called for it once, on the day of their burial. But it had been so long since her mother’s and father’s deaths, she worried it would take more than the one time.

  She bends toward the stream and opens her hands. The flowers tumble away first, their sugar lacing the air. Then the earth twirls from her fingers.

  She releases a long breath.

  Now they will rest. Now her mother’s and father’s souls will be free from this ground, this life, from their own dream-troubled, salt-soaked deaths.

  Lala prays over the flickering water, over the river stones grown cold in the evening.

  As she opens her eyes, a flicker of motion draws her head up.

  At first, she cannot catch it. She sees nothing but the dark trees and the distant road, worn down by carts and horses’ hooves.

  But then Lala catches the streak of movement, the shape cut between the black trees.

  The figure—a woman, Lala can tell by the kick of her apron and skirts—flails and writhes. She runs a few steps and then thrashes out in a way that looks caught between skipping and running.

  Lala squints into the dark, trying to make out whether this woman is fleeing wolves or thieves.

  Alifair inclines forward, and Lala knows by his posture that he means to help.

  She lays a hand on his arm.

  “No one can know we’re here,” she whispers.

  “Then hide and I will help her.”

  “You can’t. If anyone…”

  She loses the end of the thought, both her and Alifair realizing, in the same moment, that the woman is not fleeing.

  The woman throws her hands toward the moon, spinning in feverish motion.

  “Is she…” Now it is Alifair who cannot complete his own thought.

  Lala nods, half in confirmation and half in wonder. “Dancing.”

  Emil

  The turquoise of copper chloride. The bright blue of copper sulfate. The cherry-Coke red of cobalt chloride. Sometimes the things Emil took from the lab seemed more like paint pigments than chemicals.

  He tapped the powders into glass vials. By now, he’d done this often enough that he knew how much he’d need for the week that school would be closed. And by now, Dr. Ellern had drilled him and his friends on avoiding contamination between compounds, so he could’ve done it half-asleep.

  Emil locked the door behind him. Tonight he’d hand the key back to Aidan. Among the four of them allowed into the lab closet, they’d voted him keeper of the single key they shared. Aidan was so organized that he alphabetized his family’s breakfast cereals, and he never lost anything, unless you counted titration bets with Luke.

  The back of Emil’s neck bristled with the sense that someone was in the hall other than Victor, his and his friends’ favorite school janitor. (After Ben Jacobs tried to stuff Eddie into a cabinet in the music room, Victor had helped Luke overwax the floor in front of Ben’s locker. They resined the spot before anyone could draw any conclusion but that Ben had, wildly and spectacularly, tripped over his own feet.)

  The sound of shifting ice came from the machine around the corner.

  Emil took slow steps down the hall.

  The noises stopped a second before Rosella Oliva appeared.

  Emil jumped, almost dropping the copper chloride.

  Rosella looked at his hands.

  Emil got his grip back. “I’m not stealing,” he said, halting over each word.

  It was a reflex, one sharpened by years of classmates looking at him sideways and their parents pretending not to. By the number of times he felt compelled to clarify Yes, this is my locker.

  By how easily gadje turned the word Romani into the word gypsy, with all the suspicions they tacked onto those two syllables.

  “I know,” Rosella said, in a way that was level and soft, like she both knew it was true and didn’t blame him for thinking he had to say it. She probably understood the impulse better than just about anyone else in Briar Meadow. For one November show-and-tell, she’d brought in that painting of skeletons dancing and throwing marigolds into a fountain, and it had only taken until lunch for the whispers to start about her trying to talk to the dead.

  Rosella adjusted the coffee can in her arms. “I know you’re one of Ellern’s chosen students.” She held up the coffee can, condensation dampening the metal. “I’m just here for ice.”

  “Ice?” Emil asked.

  “Yeah, it’s the best. It’s all fluffy and crunchy.”

  “You”—he looked at the coffee can—“actually eat that?”

  “What?” she asked. “It makes the best Diet Coke fizz.”

  “That’s the department ice machine. Do you have any idea how many trace chemicals end up in there?”

  “This is a high school lab, not CERN. I think it’s fine.”

  CERN? If he wasn’t already a little in love with Rosella Oliva, that would’ve done it.

  “Okay,” he said. “But don’t blame me when you glow in the dark by the time we graduate.”

  Their eyes met again, and he thought he felt some shared memory pass between them. How they used to see how long they could get lizards to sit on the backs of their hands before either they or the lizards flinched. Or when Rosella brought Gerta a stuffed mouse she’d made just to see her tear it to fabric shreds and quilt batting within a few minutes (she found this far more hilarious than upsetting).

  Or the first time he told her about Sara la Kali, and she told him about la Virgen de Guadalupe, these dark, sacred figures who both allowed reverence toward that which was so often despised.

  It could have been any of these things, but it also could’ve been nothing. Emil didn’t want to ask. He didn’t want to get it wrong.

  Rosella and Emil had been friends once, in the way girls and boys were only ever friends before middle school. She had spent so much time at his house, she’d heard his mother’s fairy tales more than he had, asking for them after he’d long grown bored. The ones she liked best were ones about dancing, or cursed or enchanted shoes. Go figure. She was an Oliva.

  She loved all those stories, even the bloody ones. The little mermaid on land, feeling like there were knives beneath her feet as she danced. Cinderella’s glass slippers cracking under her. A girl in red shoes that made her dance until she died.

  Rosella looked at his hands again, and Emil wondered if she could see them going clammy against the glass vials.

  “So what are you doing with … whatever you’re not stealing?” she asked.

  “Flame tests mostly,” Emil said.

  “You keep a Bunsen burner in your room?”

  “I have a sort-of lab that lives in my mother’s gardening shed?” he said, and it turned out as a question. He set the vials in his backpack. “You can come over and see it sometime if you want.”

  He cringed, instantly.

  If there was a worse way to ask out a girl, he couldn’t think of it.

  “Maybe,” she said. “If I’m not too busy eating all the ice in this machine.”

  She said it in a way th
at was such a confusing mix of familiarity and flirting that it made him dizzy. He’d barely shrugged it off by the time he got home.

  The second he was through the door, his father shoved a piece of paper in his hand.

  Emil stared at the printout of a photo, a square of frayed blue cloth on a wooden table. “What am I looking at?”

  “What are you looking at?” his father asked. Almost exclaimed. “Do you listen to anything I say?”

  “No, not really.”

  His father frowned and knocked the spine of an academic journal into Emil’s forearm. “That”—he jabbed a finger into the paper—“is the exact kind of woad blue your ancestors dyed in the sixteenth century.”

  Emil stared at his father. “That’s wonderful.”

  “How are you my son? You have no appreciation for history.”

  “History.” Emil shrugged off his backpack. “As in, it already happened. There’s only so far you can get if you’re always looking back.”

  “Thanks a lot,” his father said.

  Emil sighed. “I didn’t mean it that way.”

  His parents, both history professors, had a marriage that seemed half-built on finding the same things interesting. They’d met during a conference panel, and as far as Emil could tell, that was the academia equivalent of a fairy tale.

  “I just meant it’s what you and Maman love,” Emil said. “And you’re good at it. But I don’t, and I’m not.”

  His father gave a smile that was equal parts fond and wry. It always made him look like a grandfather, older than his sprinklings of gray hair warranted. “Yes, yes, you and your chemicals.”

  Emil breathed out. You and your chemicals. At least they were even. Emil’s father had about as much interest in Emil’s favorite subjects as Emil had in his. His father’s desk perpetually held old records, two-tone pictures, age-yellowed papers kept in plastic sheets, wood-cut prints of old churches. Some were pages fallen out of long-misplaced family Bibles, the names in ornate, back-slanted script. Some were copies his mother had made on her last trip to le Bas-Rhin. Tourists went to France for Paris and Nice. His mother went for les Archives Départementales, with its centuries-old documents in barely legible Middle French and High German.

  “You know.” His father’s eyes drifted toward the floor. “You can’t go where you want to go without knowing where you’ve been.”

  Emil’s back tensed.

  The burning of ancestors’ vardos. Words stricken from their vocabulary. Being forced from villages, or fleeing in the dark fold of midnight, because there was so often a relative who could feel the threat coming before anyone else, like smelling snow in the air. Fighting back with iron shards and pipes and whatever there was to be found when there was no warning, and there were the old and the small to protect.

  What he’d put up with in Briar Meadow—the ignorant questions, the word gypsy said in a way that felt like it was sticking to his skin, the pointed looks whenever something went missing—it was so small compared to what those before him had endured. But that made him more, not less, ashamed of it. He couldn’t help thinking of it as some kind of failing on his part.

  Outside of this house, he couldn’t be who he was. He’d known that since the day his parents got that call home. But the more he knew about his family, the harder it was to leave his Romanipen behind every morning.

  “I know where we’ve been,” Emil said. He started up the stairs, saying, more to himself than his father, “and I kind of wish I didn’t.”

  Strasbourg, 1518

  At daybreak, Lala burns the wooden box, turning to ash the last of her parents’ belongings.

  She watches the wood crumble, the shade of the oak trees dulling the flames’ gold. She offers a prayer of thanks to Sara la Kali, She who watches over Lala and Tante and all like them.

  Once the embers have gone as dark as her hair, Lala draws away from the wattle fence.

  Alifair is up in the oak trees. He never flinches, not even when wasps crawl along his wrists.

  He slips a hand between their buzzing clouds to reach the darkest oak galls. They whir around him but never sting, even as he steals the growths they have laid their eggs inside.

  Ever since the day Alifair first appeared in their crab apple tree, this has seemed as much a kind of magic as Tante knowing how long to keep linen in the woad dye. The wasps do not mind him, for some reason as unknown as where he came from. Both his French and his German carry a slight accent, like two kinds of grain mixing in a sieve, so no one can guess which side of the Zorn or the Rhein he was born on.

  When she catches his eye, they share a nod, a signal they know as well as each other’s hands.

  Within minutes, he is down from the tree, she has set aside the bay in her apron, and they meet behind the cellar door.

  Lala pulls him to the stone wall. He throws his hands to it, bracing as she presses her palms into his back. His mouth tastes like the lovage he chews after each meal, like parsley but sweeter.

  Lala has never asked him whether that first kiss was because they had both gotten older, or because he had grown less skittish about his own body, a body that once tethered him to the girl’s name he was given when he was born.

  Now Lala knows not only the facts of his body but the landscape of it. She knows where there is more and less of him. She knows where he is both muscled and soft, full-hipped and full-chested, strong in the shoulders and back. The strips of binding cloth beneath his shirt give him the appearance of a heavier man, rather than one laden with a girl’s name at birth.

  Lala hears footsteps coming in from the lane, and goes still.

  “I should go,” Lala says, almost moaning it, eyes still shut.

  “Later,” he whispers, the word coming as a breath against her neck.

  Lala squints from the cellar into the light, looking for a stout form—Geruscha—and a second figure with a tight-woven bun, the seldom-talking Henne.

  For months, Lala held her breath over the two of them, fearful that any day the magistrate’s men would come to Tante’s door on the report of these two girls. But their efforts at friendship have only persisted, despite the frosted politeness Lala offers them (cold, so as not to encourage them, but cordial, so as not to offend these two girls who saw her with the woman in the dikhle).

  Lala shields her eyes from the sun’s glare.

  The approaching figure does not turn toward the back garden, but takes the crabgrass-roughened path to the door.

  Not Geruscha. Not Henne.

  A man.

  Lala distinguishes the colors of his garb, white and black.

  Her heart quickens.

  The robe and cape of a Dominican friar, one trained to root out witchcraft.

  Alifair is alongside her, his approach quiet as a moth’s.

  They listen at the weather-warped door.

  They hear the friar’s voice, his greeting to Tante Dorenia. His words, however polite, cannot veil the contempt in his tone, his disdain for the fact that Tante is a businesswoman, never married, trading in the richest black and deepest blue.

  Lala cannot catch all the words, but hears enough to make out a name, a phrase, a stretch of time.

  Delphine.

  She has been missing.

  Two nights and a day.

  Delphine.

  The woman whose silhouette Lala and Alifair glimpsed just beyond the trees.

  The woman they saw dancing.

  Lala feels Alifair’s shadow incline forward.

  “Alifair,” she says.

  “We saw her,” he whispers. “What if we can be of help?”

  She takes hold of his arm. “And don’t you think he will wonder what cause we had to be out in the thick of night?”

  “I won’t tell him about that,” he says. “And I’ll leave you out of it. No one will even know you were there.”

  As though that is any comfort. One word to the magistrate that Alifair was the last to see Delphine, and to see her dancing like some wild
spirit at that, and they’ll blame him for it. He’ll be brought to the scaffold or the stake before he finishes his testimony. The rumors that he appeared out of the woods like some fairy’s child will not help.

  Lala grips his arm tighter. “Please.”

  Alifair looks at her, his eyes turning to flint, his jaw hardening.

  He shrugs off her hold, and nods.

  Lala knows him well enough to recognize this not as agreeing, but as relenting.

  He is simply giving in.

  Rosella

  In Briar Meadow, our small, loosely gathered set of houses bounded in by woods and highway, the glimmers were as much a part of our calendar as the seasons. But I was the only one always dreading another year of blood on rosebushes, and all the slashed cloth and scattered beads that might come with it.

  It never came.

  Not when I was eight, when daughters who’d given their mothers nothing but silence for months suddenly wanted to spill their hearts out over late-night freezer cake. Not when I was eleven, when congregation members who, according to their choir director, “couldn’t carry a tune in a bucket” sang like angels. Not even two years ago, when the glimmer brought Mexican coywolves out of the woods; cute as puppies, they had an annoying talent for getting into houses—even ones where all the doors and windows were locked—and chewing on the nicest shoes they could find.

  By the time I turned sixteen, I had almost forgotten to dread the glimmer, so I wasn’t even thinking about it when the red shoes started appearing around town. They showed up on sofas and bedroom floors. Instead of resting in attic trunks, or on the high shelves where they’d been stored, they appeared in the open, as though airing themselves out. They were found propped up in corners, heels against baseboards, toes resting on carpet. Or in cupboards, with broom bristles grazing their delicate beading. Mothers stumbled over them in hallways, pausing to yell to their daughters to pick up their things before realizing the red shoes on the floor had been wrapped away in tissue paper for years.