The Book of Blood and Shadow

by Robin Wasserman

  My parents flanked me, both of them in dark-hued work clothes, their hands at their sides. It was the first time the three of us had been in any kind of religious building together since Andy’s funeral. That day, at the insistence of my grandparents, we had sat in the front row of Temple Beth El, holding hands and mouthing the words of the kaddish, the traditional Jewish mourning prayer that ignores the dead in favor of paeans to the God who took him away, all of us, my Jewish grandmother, my lapsed Catholic father, my Buddhist-when-and-how-it-suited-her aunt, all of us except for my mother, who pressed her lips together, shut her prayer book, and later, despite the epic fight she’d waged against my father to get Andy a bar mitzvah, let my thirteenth birthday pass unnoticed.

  I only had one dress that was dark enough and conservative enough to be appropriate for the campus memorial, and I chose it with regret, because—shallow as it sounds—it was one of my favorites and I knew that after this, I would never wear it again. I didn’t cry.

  13

  The door to the dean’s office swung open on my second knock.

  “Can I help you?” He was younger than I’d expected, probably in his early thirties, though prematurely balding.

  “I’m Nora Kane? I was supposed to, uh—” I stopped, realizing there was someone else in the office, sitting in one of the mahogany armchairs facing the dean’s desk. “Sorry. I’ll come back.”

  The dean shook his head. “Please, come in. We’ve been expecting you.”

  The other half of “we” stood and faced me. “So you’re her.”

  “This is Eli Kapek,” the dean said.

  I waited to hear why I should care.

  “Eli Kapek,” he said again, like it was supposed to mean something. Then, when it obviously didn’t, “Christopher’s cousin.”

  Something stretched across Eli’s face, something approximating a smile, but not quite getting there. “Forgive me if I’m not particularly pleased to meet you.”

  I searched his face, wishing, weirdly, that I were blind, as that would give me the social leeway to cross the room and press my fingers to his sharp cheekbones, his narrow chin, his nose that, while crooked and slightly too large for his face, fit the asymmetrical arch in his eyebrows and quirk at his lips, and maybe my fingertips could detect something my eyes couldn’t, reveal what I was looking for, which was: Chris.

  But it wasn’t there. Chris took after his mother’s side. His dark skin, his kinky, wild hair, his round, open features, none of it was here in this stranger’s sharp, pale face.

  I couldn’t hate Adriane for whatever had happened to her, for failing to protect Chris and herself and letting a strange toxin take its course; I couldn’t hate Max for whatever had happened to him, for trusting me to defend him, maybe somehow save him, when he couldn’t do it himself. And I couldn’t hate the Moores for leaving town, and leaving me along with it, because any obligation they had to me had died with their son, and you do what you need to do to survive.

  I couldn’t hate Chris.

  But Eli was a stranger, and there was nothing to stop me from hating him on sight, for who he was and what he wasn’t, for his failure to be what I needed him to be, and mostly for the fact that he was alive and Chris was not. It would have felt good, having someone to hate, someone other than an imaginary God.

  “Can we do this now?” Eli said, not looking at me.

  “Nora, Christopher’s parents asked me to tell you they would be very grateful if you could help Eli sort through Chris’s belongings. He’ll take care of the shipping and such.” The dean handed him a key.

  I already had a key.

  The dean ushered us out of his office. “You’re not coming?” I asked.

  “We find it’s best to give close friends and family their privacy in these matters. Unless—?”

  “We’re fine,” Eli said, closing the door on the dean. Then we were alone. “You don’t have to come, either.”

  “Yeah, actually I do. The Moores wanted me to.”

  He shrugged. “Suit yourself.”

  I could have let myself into the room anytime I wanted; I’d been tempted. I’d spent a whole morning planted in front of the dorm, trying to will myself to go in.

  But then I’d gone home.

  Maybe I was afraid that once I stepped inside, I would never be able to leave. That I would wrap myself in a blanket that smelled like Max, curl up on the couch scuffed by Chris’s sneakers and reeking faintly of dirty socks and stale pizzas past, barricade myself inside in perpetuity, like an Egyptian bride burying herself alive in her pharaoh’s tomb. It would be easier with a stranger, I told myself. It would be a simple procedure: Unlock the door. Sort through closets and drawers and shelves full of memories.

  Dismantle my safe haven sock by sock.

  “I didn’t see you at the memorial service,” I said, trying to keep up as he sped across the quad. I had to take two steps to each one of his.

  “I saw you,” he said. “You didn’t seem too broken up.”

  “What’s your problem?”

  He still wouldn’t look at me. “My cousin is dead. Maybe you heard.”

  “You know, Chris never even mentioned you.”

  “And?”

  “And if you want to pretend that you were someone to him, and I was no one, that’s your business, but I think it’s kind of sad.”

  “I guess you knew everything about him, and everyone that ever mattered to him?”

  “Actually, I did,” I said. “You weren’t on the list.”

  “And you were.”

  I didn’t answer.

  “So were you, like, secretly in love with him or something? Deep, unrequited passion?”

  “I have a boyfriend,” I said. I did not say asshole. But he got the point.

  He muttered something.

  “What?”

  “Your boyfriend,” he said. “You wanted to know my problem. That’s my problem.”

  Of course. Max was everyone’s problem. “He didn’t do it.”

  He offered another of his mutant smiles. “I guess I’ll just take your word for that. What a relief.”

  I stopped abruptly, in the shadow of a large stone building, its somber gray face streaked with drying bird crap. “We’re here.”

  14

  The room was in ruins.

  “Your boyfriend’s a slob,” Eli said, stopped in the doorway. I pushed past him. The mattresses were on the floor, stuffing oozing from their ripped seams. The drawers had been pulled out of both desks and bureaus; a thick layer of T-shirts, sheets, underwear, books, and notebooks blanketed the dingy linoleum tile.

  I couldn’t breathe.

  “Sit down,” Eli said.

  “On what?” A strangled laugh. One wooden desk chair lay on its side, the other sat akimbo, one leg missing, its back snapped in two.

  Eli took my arm and guided me to Max’s bare metal bed frame. We sat.

  I swallowed hard. “The cops.” My feet were on Max’s navy sheets. I’ll get mud on them, I thought distantly. Max would hate that. He washed his sheets more often than most college students, or at least more often than Chris—though still not often enough to suit me. It was something we liked to argue about, when we were in the mood, Max politely pointing out that if I wanted his sheets cleaner, I was welcome to clean them, me politely pointing out that he was a sexist pig, him countering that if I really cared about cleanliness, I’d go take a shower and forgo putting all my dirty clothes back on.… Now I wished I’d taken him up on it. Just once.

  Eli shook his head. “Uncle Paul talked to the cops, to make sure it was okay for me to be here. They said they just looked around and took the laptops. They left everything else the way it was.”

  “So they lied.”

  “Or someone else was here. Looking for something.”

  I thought again of what the cops had told me, about Chris hiding something in his family’s safe. I thought again about the letter, and where holding on to it fell on the stupidity scale of
one to death wish.

  “He’s contacted you, hasn’t he?” Eli said.

  “What? Who?”

  “Him. The boyfriend. The cops think he’s halfway across the country by now, but maybe you know better. Maybe he’s still here until he gets what he came for?”

  I stood up. “You think he did this?”

  Eli shrugged.

  “So he tore up his own room, looking for ‘something,’ because, what, he couldn’t remember where he put it?”

  “He tore up Chris’s stuff,” Eli said. “Then maybe his own, as a decoy.”

  Chris kept a bunch of flattened cardboard boxes at the back of his closet, a collection he was too conscientious to trash but too lazy to recycle. They were still there. I pulled one out. “Let’s just do this,” I said. “We don’t have to talk.”

  I picked through the ruins, folding every stray shirt, smoothing out wrinkled history notes, putting scattered paper clips, staples, stamps, and pens neatly back into their containers. Eli didn’t question my judgment on which things belonged to Max and which to Chris, nor did he ask why the Moores would want a stack of index cards from a first-semester paper on the Glorious Revolution or a collection of stolen shot glasses, one from each frat. He just took what I handed him and put it into a box. I gave him everything, because if I were Chris’s parents, I would have wanted everything.

  I wanted everything.

  Eventually Chris’s side of the room was stripped, bare as it had been on the day we’d moved him in and sprawled out on the empty bed, wondering whether his unknown roommate would mind he’d been summarily assigned the crap bed under the broken window. Max’s side was as clean as it was going to get, waiting for his return.

  But when I let myself believe in that return, when I tried to imagine it, the screen inside my head went blank. There was no Max without Chris. And I was pretty sure there was no me without either of them.

  I would not cry in front of a stranger.

  I’d set Max’s Voynich notebooks on the side of his desk, and, with my back to Eli, I started leafing through them, anything to distract myself from the rising panic.

  They distracted me. Not the scribbled stabs at translation, which I’d seen several times as I hunched over the pages with Max, trying to make sense of the nonsensical, but the bottom notebook: a small, blue, college-lined, spiral-bound notebook with most of the pages ripped out. I’d never seen it before, as I had never seen what lay inside its manila inner pocket: a brown, weathered page of Latin that looked even older than the one I had hidden in my bedroom.

  Max didn’t even like to make photocopies without express permission from the archival librarian, for fear of damaging the least rare of books. He was mostly oblivious to the demands of the outside world, but when it came to this kind of thing—rare books, manuscripts, letters—he did what he was told. He followed the rules. So if he had something, it was because he was allowed to have it.

  Whatever it was.

  “You can, you know,” Eli said. “If you want to.”

  Shielding the notebook from him, I pulled out the page and slipped it into my pocket.

  “Can what?” I turned around, keeping my face blank.

  He gave me a strange look. Like maybe he’d seen me. “Take something.”

  Maybe he had.

  “Something that belonged to him,” he said. “I can tell you want to.”

  He held something out to me, a framed picture. I didn’t have to get any closer; I recognized the frame. It was the picture of the four of us on the green, the one from the news. “I don’t want that.”

  “Something else, then.”

  “Is this you trying to be nice?” There had been a roll of packing tape under the pile of crap spilled out of Chris’s desk. I started sealing up the boxes.

  He didn’t say anything for a long time.

  “You’re right, I didn’t know him,” he said eventually. He joined me by the box, holding the cardboard down tight as I ran the tape across. “We hung out when we were little, but I don’t even think we liked each other that much. Then he moved, and that was pretty much it.”

  “So why are you here?”

  Eli looked up. We watched each other across the sealed box. His eyes were a startling blue. “Truth?”

  “Why not?”

  “They made me.”

  “Your aunt and uncle?”

  “Them. My parents. Everyone. It was too hard for them, or something. It had to be me, because I didn’t know him.”

  “Because you don’t care.”

  A hint of red flushed his pale cheeks. “Someone murdered my cousin,” he said. “I care about that.”

  Something about the way he was kneeling over the box struck me as too familiar. “Was it you the other day on the green? Watching me?”

  “What are you talking about? Someone’s following you?”

  “Forget it.” Wishful thinking, maybe. Creepy cousin beat murdering psychopath any day of the week. “Let’s get out of here.”

  “I can go,” he said. “If you want to stay awhile.”

  “Just to be clear—”

  “Yes. This is me trying to be nice.”

  “I think I liked you better honest.” I wanted to stay behind. I wanted to curl into Max’s newly made bed and close my eyes, inhale the leftover Max scents, lemony detergent and the cinnamony shampoo that he used under protest because I loved it. There, just maybe, I would finally be able to sleep.

  “At least take this.” Abruptly, looking like he was thinking better of it even as it was happening, he extended a sheaf of papers to me.

  “What is that?”

  He shrugged. “I found them in a folder, taped under Chris’s desk. While you were in the bathroom.”

  “And you weren’t going to tell me?”

  His expression had a hint of something, but it wasn’t shame. “I’m telling you now.”

  I ripped the pages from his hand. They were faded and stiff. Old. Maybe, I thought, forcing myself to tuck them away before I could get a better look, as old as the page I had stolen from the Hoff’s collection, old as the page I’d found in Max’s notebook, older, far older, than anything Chris should have had in his possession. Taped under his desk, like he was hiding them from Max. From me.

  Nothing made sense anymore.

  “What makes you think I should take these?” I asked.

  “They won’t mean anything to Chris’s parents.”

  “And they’ll mean something to me?”

  “If you don’t want them—”

  “I want them.”

  “Suit yourself. Now let’s get out of here. I’ll send someone for his stuff.”

  I’d wanted to escape his presence all afternoon, but now I lingered, knowing in all likelihood I would never see him again. One more piece of Chris gone. It occurred to me I would probably never see Chris’s parents again, either. Or his house. And thanks to me, his dorm room was officially gone.

  I understood, suddenly, why my parents were so determined to keep our house. Sometimes shrines served a purpose.

  Eli paused on the steps of the dorm. Maybe I wasn’t the only one who wanted to linger. “So let’s say, for the sake of argument, your boyfriend didn’t do it, and he’s hiding out somewhere for perfectly innocent reasons, or he’s … you know.”

  “Or he’s. Yeah. I know.”

  “Then who did it?” he asked.

  “How the hell should I know?”

  “So what are you doing to find out?”

  15

  I call on you, Max’s stolen letter began.

  I call on all my brothers, to join my struggle.

  We will reclaim that which has been stolen.

  That which is ours by right will be ours by blood.

  We will rout the foreigners who tear down our proud city and rebuild it in their own image. We will topple the Churchmen who proscribe our worship and consign the holiest among us to death. We will reclaim our land by the grace of our Lord. We will destr
oy the one who seeks to steal our birthright.

  We seek this power not for evil, but for what is just, and what is right. Join me, and swear this oath, by our Lord, that the search will never end until our triumph is at hand.

  It was signed V.K., which meant as little to me as the short paragraph just above the signature, a language jammed with accents and consonants that could have been Czech, or could have been Klingon. There was nothing to explain why Max had it, or whether it meant anything more to him than it did to me.

  The letters from Chris’s side of the room were unsigned, but it seemed unlikely their shaky words had been scrawled by V.K.’s steady hand.

  You have no need to worry, read the first one, also in Latin.

  The girl has no suspicion we are watching. And I believe you are wrong. She has no volition of her own. She once followed her father’s orders. Now she follows Groot. It should be no trouble to switch her loyalties. The mother is here in Prague. She pushes the girl to be more practical, to find a household position, or find a husband. The Emperor has taken all their possessions. The girl thinks herself a philosopher. Or perhaps a poet. But these are dreams, and she knows that. She will do what you need, if you pay.

  15 November 1598.

  The girl was Elizabeth. It had to be. But that didn’t matter. Not as much as the look on Chris’s face when I’d confessed to him about my stolen letter … while all this time, he’d had a sheaf of them taped under his desk, like the handiwork of the world’s most wholesomely boring spy.

  They were just letters, I told myself. They didn’t have to mean anything.

  16

  The Whitman Center didn’t look like a hospital. Temporary home, over the years, to New England’s most famous depressive artists, manic poets, schizophrenic geniuses, and a high percentage of the region’s wealthiest worried well, it had long ago embraced the moral therapy reforms that dictated genteel patients with decidedly ungenteel conditions should nonetheless be treated like gentlemen, and as a result, it looked more like a college campus than a mental institution. Building C, a three-story yellow colonial at the top of a hill, sported brightly polished columns along its wide facade, which endowed the place with a certain dignity and made it easy to imagine its patients decked out in their finest nineteenth-century petticoats and top hats, sipping tea while dapper, goateed doctors etiquetted the madness right out of them.