by Susana Aikin
Praise for Susana Aikin and
WE SHALL SEE THE SKY SPARKLING
“Vivid and compelling—an exceptional woman on an extraordinary journey.”—Livi Michael, author of Accession
“A vivid, thoroughly absorbing account of one woman’s struggle to break from the rigid roles her social class and time period impose on her. Drawing from her family’s history and a series of fascinating letters, Susana Aikin crafts a marvelous tale of adventure, rebellion, and romance, taking readers on a captivating journey from the theaters of Edwardian London to tumultuous St. Petersburg and beyond. She weaves the character of actress Lily Throop Cable with a deft hand. Lily shines as a heroine of uncommon strength, determination, and passion. Her struggle to protect and foster her independence, even as she navigates through great loves and treacherous times, is one to be relished and remembered. It’s a pleasure and privilege to read this sparkling debut.”
—Suzanne Nelson, author of Serendipity’s Footsteps
“Readers of Pam Jenoff and Eva Stachniak will appreciate the strong-willed and artistically driven female character who finds her own way through difficult times.”
—Library Journal
“Susana Aikin’s directorial eye is much in evidence in this sweeping saga. Her attention to period detail transports the reader on a filmic journey that is both astonishing and tragic. We Shall See the Sky Sparkling is a powerful meditation on the sacrifices women have made in pursuit of their dreams—sadly, as relevant in the early 21st century as a hundred years ago.”
—Helen Steadman, author of Widdershins and Sunwise
“Satisfying . . . Aikin’s novel is expertly plotted and rife with historical details in both its English and Russian settings, making for a rich story of the prejudices women faced at the turn of the 20th century and how the class disparity in Russia ignited the flame of revolution.”
—Publishers Weekly
Books by Susana Aikin
WE SHALL SEE THE SKY SPARKLING
THE WEIGHT OF THE HEART
Published by Kensington Publishing Corporation
THE WEIGHT OF THE HEART
SUSANA AIKIN
KENSINGTON BOOKS
www.kensingtonbooks.com
All copyrighted material within is Attributor Protected.
Table of Contents
Praise
Also by
Title Page
Copyright Page
Dedication
CHAPTER 1
CHAPTER 2
CHAPTER 3
CHAPTER 4
CHAPTER 5
CHAPTER 6
CHAPTER 7
CHAPTER 8
CHAPTER 9
CHAPTER 10
CHAPTER 11
CHAPTER 12
CHAPTER 13
CHAPTER 14
CHAPTER 15
CHAPTER 16
CHAPTER 17
CHAPTER 18
CHAPTER 19
CHAPTER 20
CHAPTER 21
CHAPTER 22
CHAPTER 23
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
THE WEIGHT OF THE HEART
DISCUSSION QUESTIONS
This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, and incidents either are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons living or dead, or events, is entirely coincidental.
KENSINGTON BOOKS are published by
Kensington Publishing Corp.
119 West 40th Street
New York, NY 10018
Copyright © 2020 by Susana Aikin
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any means without the prior written consent of the Publisher, excepting brief quotes used in reviews.
To the extent that the image or images on the cover of this book depict a person or persons, such person or persons are merely models, and are not intended to portray any character or characters featured in the book.
Kensington and the K logo Reg. U.S. Pat. & TM Off.
ISBN: 978-1-4967-2515-8
ISBN-10: 1-4967-2516-6 (ebook)
ISBN-13: 978-1-4967-2515-8
ISBN-10: 1-4967-2515-8
To N.J.A.
I open for thee thy mouth.
I open for thee thy two eyes.
I have opened for thee thy mouth with
the instrument of Anubis, with the iron tool
with which the mouths of the gods were opened.
—Egyptian Book of the Dead: Papyrus of Ani
CHAPTER 1
It’s only nine in the morning, but the sun is already sizzling over the skin of the city. Its blinding rays reflect off every angle and shoot into my eyes, making me squint. In the absence of sunglasses, which I’ve forgotten at home, my head is beginning to throb with heliophobia.
I’m about to turn the key in the old metal gate lock when my cell phone rings and Julia’s voice breaks through. “We’re almost there. Can you check that everything we need is in the kitchen? Also, please come up to the gate when I honk. We’ll need help getting out of the car.”
“Sure,” I say, and she hangs up.
I push the rusty metal frame open as the thought hits me that I’ve no distinct memory of the last time I stepped through this door. Could it be more than six months, one year even? I peer at the row of dry lilac bushes that border the path leading up to the old house, and remember how we decided to not fix the failed automatic watering system and let the garden go. It now feels like genocide. But I’ve been living in a fog for the last two years, just trudging along from one day to the other. It’s also true of my sisters, Marion and Julia. The three of us are still struggling to adjust our lives in the aftermath of Father’s death. As if we’d been stunned. I close the gate behind me and make for the shaded porch. The heat is mounting by the minute.
August in Madrid can be an experience close to that of a North African desert. Dry, burning winds teeming with fine dust sweep through the empty streets and avenues during the long hours of insufferable, blistering sun. Only the night brings relief. Meanwhile, the masses have fled to beaches and mountain villages, and those left behind take refuge inside air-conditioned buildings or in the older-style shaded apartments during the hours of sunlight, like desert critters hide under rocks and sand away from the blazing sun. Those are the hours when only mad dogs and Englishmen roam the streets, as Father used to say.
For the last weeks I’ve been entrenched in my apartment, secluded away from the swelter. Agreeing to take my vacation in September has landed me with unending reams of correspondence, while Marcus, my indulged business associate, travels along the Baltic coast of Western Pomerania with his family. What on earth would drag me out of the comfort of my air-conditioned sanctuary to come spend a hot day inside an old, abandoned house?
Remorse shoots through me as I catch sight of the beautiful, faded façade at the end of the path. Its granite walls hang with ivy and honeysuckle, like a forgotten oasis of green creepers ensconced away from the surrounding yellowed garden that has been guzzled by drought. The proud, nail-studded door under dark wooden rafters stares out to me from the deep porch, while adjacent tall windows steal shy, opaque glances through wrought-iron grilles. I step onto the salmon-tiled portico and walk around the patio chairs where we used to lounge at night by garden lanterns. Their once red-and-gold striped cushions are now bleached by the sun and covered in grime.
A rush of trepidation takes over as I consider what I will encounter when I step inside the house. I think of the closed, dark, dusty rooms, of the silent corners full of books, pieces of furniture and multifarious exotic objects that lay quietly waiting for something to happen, for someone to save them from the mass
grave of an abandoned house. Julia has a point about the place having become a bit uncanny. The last thing I remember was it being full of strange noises, creepy with mysterious footstep sounds and disquieting creaking, particularly after dark. It could be that there’s plenty of wood in floors, beams, and bookcases, which might be contracting and expanding with temperature changes. There was also a moment when the wanderings of country rats under the rafters could have explained the noises; only that the din remained after a team of exterminators accomplished a mass execution. It was then that Julia started to joke about it being haunted; and her jokes turned to eerie suspicions of unresolved issues that are still affecting our lives. Are we then associating commonplace phenomena of closed-down houses with our memory of the heartache and rage that has swept through this one particular abode?
I follow the path up the stone steps that lead to the veranda. Around me the garden is a sorry mass of dry grass, ropey weeds, and thorny thistles over a bed of cracked earth. It used to be a classical British garden, an extension of perfect lawn surrounded by shapely rose bushes tended around the clock by a gardener under Father’s strict supervision. But we have let go of everything, my sisters and I, buried our heads in the sand hoping that our grief for the past, for our loss, for the house itself, will dwindle away with sustained neglect. Our carelessness is also reflected in the swimming pool, once a sparkling blue basin of water, and now just a dirty pond of dark green scum bubbling with mosquito larvae and other aqueous vermin. The statue of the flute-playing faun boy standing to its side is also weather-beaten and pockmarked, with eye sockets covered in patches of yellowed lichen.
How strange that once much-beloved objects, structures, or places can end up in states of such forsaken wastefulness. Luckily some things are impervious to the slack of human beings, like the chain of mountains I’m now gazing at from the veranda. Their longevity is so much more enduring than ours. I’m only thirty-three years old, but for them it’s been around two hundred and fifty million years since they first erupted from the belly of the earth.
I lean on the iron rail and gaze at the smooth line of blue peaks wrapped in wreaths of clouds. Why is it that from this point I can turn around and look safely at our family house? When we were girls, we used to talk about its magnificent French windows as being the eyes of the house, and the paneled door, the mouth, always gaping toward the mountain range on the horizon, and drooling at the sight of our beautiful garden. That patch of lush green surrounded by restless trees peering inside windowpanes into long rooms with terracotta floors and whitewashed fireplaces.
My phone vibrates in my pocket, startling me. It’s Julia. “Anna?” Damn, I’ve forgotten about her request. She says, “Listen, I’ve had to stop at the shop to buy more flowers for the ceremony, so it will be ten more minutes before I get there. Did you check the stuff in the kitchen? If something’s missing I need to know now.”
“Got it,” I say, hanging up and rushing inside the house. The large butcher block sitting in the middle of the old kitchen is clumped up with all sorts of plastic bags and boxes containing the various articles Julia brought in yesterday and that I’m supposed to check on now. I spot a torn piece of graph paper with a list scribbled in wavering, ornate handwriting. This is not Julia’s, so whose is it? It resembles something like the calligraphy of a child from a past century. I go down the list and check that all items listed are somewhere on the table. Twenty candles, at least eight of them white; three bottles of wine, can be the cheapest; two bottles of rum, preferably Cuban; any other two old bottles of liquor you might have around the house; a box of cigars, preferably Havana; lots of freshly cut rosemary; one or two whole coconuts—this is very important. One large bag of salt—coarse sea salt. White flowers, at least five dozen. A white tablecloth, well ironed. Sage, as much as you can get. And finally, we will need a new mop and bucket. And a broom, an old-fashioned straw broom. Footnote: Best not worry about the broom and coconut, we will provide it. And lots of love as always, signed D. Who on earth is D?
I’m checking and rechecking that everything is on the table, when my eye catches the second footnote. PS. Oh, and two kilos of lamb chops. And this is where I stop. What kind of madness am I getting into?
It happens frequently that I give in to my older sisters’ wishes just to avoid their tantrums. Julia, in particular, can be very difficult when antagonized. She’s unable to rein in her explosive anger when things don’t go her way, and can become a human steam engine in seconds. So, unless I’m totally determined to put my foot down over a life-and-death issue, I just humor her as if I were the older sister and she a distraught little girl whose needs better be satisfied in order to keep peace in the house. And when it comes to Marion, she’s become such a volatile personality that navigating her moods is equivalent to walking on a field packed with landmines.
This time, though, Julia has gone over the top. She’s been hammering me about bringing in this woman to cleanse our haunted house. And insisting that this person whom she calls a santera, an energy healer of sorts, and whom, mark you, she is picking up from a nursing home this morning, has supernatural powers capable of overcoming today’s conked-out real estate market and propitiating a sale. What word did she use? A limpieza?
Sometimes I wonder at Julia. She’s always been a mercurial personality, swinging from dreamy states of mind to episodes of fuming rage, from sullen moods to mischievous tomfoolery. And in addition to her bristling diatribes having become more frequent of late, there is also that other trait that seems to develop further as time goes on, that other interesting but also dangerous side of her: her uncanny fascination with the superstitious, with the outlandish, with the dark and strangely beautiful, as she would put it. Although I can’t say it’s a unique trait of Julia’s, since it’s widespread in the family. Father was obsessed with Egypt and dark art at the end of his life; Marion’s passion for bullfighting and matadors is intense enough to be considered an exotic superstition, and Julia’s love for anything and all Cuban is a near religion. Sometimes I think I’m the only one in our lineage who’s been saved from losing her marbles.
I reconsider my decision to go along with this absurd scheme. A cleansing of the house? A magical ceremony to expedite its sale? Do I even want to sell the house at a time when the market is collapsed, when we would have to give it away for peanuts?
A honk shakes me out of my absorption.
They’re here.
I walk up to the gate through the garage. Julia’s car is parked outside on the street. She winds down the window. “Everything okay? Please help her out, while I gather the rest of the stuff.”
I walk around and open the car door. Two immensely swollen feet clad in oversize sandals drag themselves out onto the pavement followed by a pair of elephantine legs under a long white linen dress. A small hand reaches out and grips mine with unexpected strength. With a few firm, gentle tugs, I help her get on her feet. She’s not as heavy as could have been anticipated by her volume. As I stand beside her, I get a scent of her flesh, a heavy odor like treacle, sweet and intoxicating. I’m taken aback for a moment. It reminds me of membrillo, or quince jelly, that dark, sugary, solid marmalade that Nanny used to serve with soft cheese for dessert on Sundays. Something in me relaxes.
Julia hands me a walking cane from the back of the car, and the old woman threads her arm through mine and holds on tight, hugging me closely in her grip, as we walk slowly through the gate, down the garden path and into the house.
“Aren’t you going to say hello?” The suave Cuban accent whispering at my side rings a distant bell in my head. I turn and look at her for the first time and instantly recognize the dark slit eyes with their hypnotic stare, the thin smiling lips, the oval head framed by waves of obsidian hair falling down to the shoulders. The memory of that one afternoon some fourteen years back shoots through my mind, razor sharp. Nothing seems to have changed in her face; only the body has muted, being now hugely bloated in the abdomen and extremities. But the
head hasn’t changed a bit. And then, those eyes! A strange feeling wells up, an unease, as I reflect that no time has seemed to elapse since we last saw each other, as if there was no gap between past memory and present encounter.
She smiles, watching me closely with penetrating eyes. “It’s been a while, hasn’t it? But I’ve had you in mind—as I always do with those I feel drawn to.”
Yes, I too remember her very well.
“Hello, Delia,” I say.
CHAPTER 2
It had been hot, torrid, as that infamous summer of 1995 crawled toward its end, and I found myself at the house in yet another blistering August afternoon that can only be imagined in remote deserts, the air so stifling there was nothing to do but collapse into a slumber in some shaded corner of the house. The legendary siesta of the Mediterranean provinces; inevitable, when even lingering about the house is unbearable, never mind the streets. Father was abroad, probably sweating profusely under a different sun that would return him home red as a lobster and full of outlandish objects to add to his exotic collections. Marion was in London, and Julia lost somewhere in the vicinity with Alina, her lover. I was alone in the house. Exhausted, I crept onto my bed and stretched out, belly down, over the mattress. My eyes lingered on the stripes of light blazing through the drawn venetian blinds dancing with particles of dust; only the buzzing sound of a trapped housefly disturbed the hefty silence as I descended into unconsciousness.
All of a sudden I was jerked out of my slumber by a flutter of voices followed by a loud shriek and a huge splash. The pool! Someone falling in the water! I scrambled to my feet, limbs drunk with sleep and mind edging on panic, and dragged myself toward the window. As I pulled up the blinds, the image of a woman fully clad in white, floating belly up in the pool, made me gasp. The body was still, with the afternoon breeze steering the white drapes of the long dress around her shape and spreading out the strands of her long black hair away from her head like a black star. Her eyes appeared tightly shut, resisting the bright sparks of light glitzing over the water.
