The Daughters: A Novel

by Adrienne Celt

  For despite its obscuring of everything else, the rain revealed Greta. The cotton of her gown became translucent and sticky, luminous against her flesh. The townspeople could see the curve of her shoulder blades, feel their fingers aching to run keystrokes down her spine. They wanted to pinch her thighs, bite her thumbs, suck the water off her hair. They wanted to blow warm air against her belly and unbutton her clothes, feeling the pop of each release. Greta shook her head and shot silver spray in all directions, a halo of movement and mercury. People everywhere opened their doors and walked out into the storm, carrying flowers.

  At the border of the woods and the road, Greta paused, halting the crowd that had formed behind her. Everyone was soaked, and solemn. Beyond Greta was nothing but the same gray water, hanging like a curtain that roared and reared. But then there came a light.

  It seemed to those looking that Saul had opened a door in the very rain. Behind him glowed the warmth of golden wood, the scent of a cookstove. He stood, perfectly dry, in the doorway and looked out at his bride: a living wave. She bade him come forward and he did, the rain plastering his hair against his head and turning his clothes as dark as pitch. Standing in the space where civilization melted into the trees, he wrapped his arms around Greta and kissed her until she almost wasn’t there. The crowd’s ears were full of the howl of the storm, their stomachs gnawing with joy and envy. Greta pulled away and placed her thumb on the bruise of Saul’s bottom lip. I choose you, her eyes said. You only. And if it was a half-truth, still hungry for the child lost at the dance, it didn’t seem so at the time.

  Saul picked Greta up in the driving rain and ascended the unseen steps to their home: just a rectangle of warmth in the storm, an outpost on the edge of the forest. When he closed the door, no one could see where the couple had gone, and they could only throw their flowers to the ground in the hope they’d be found when the sun reemerged.

  All day I’ve been walking into things. My toe slammed so hard into the leg of a chair that I had to set Kara down and grab on to it—I was sure the nail had split, but it did no more than blush purple. I knocked another bruise onto my arm just walking through a doorway, and scraped my tailbone against the corner of a dresser drawer while picking out clothes after the shower. That one bled, red blooming through the flakes of skin as I bit my lip and contorted my spine to get a look. I can never resist inspecting an injury, although until recently I almost never had any to look at. Perhaps wounds have gravity, and draw their own kind. Like the sun draws the Earth, and the Earth draws the moon.

  What would Baba Ada think of my sense of presentation today? I laugh even to imagine it, which hurts just a little below my navel. Yes, I put on makeup and blew my hair dry, but my face is only a veneer. I have no control over my body at large, the instrument I’ve spent my whole life honing. Did Ada know that giving birth would be so disastrous? She must have guessed, must have had some sense of it—after all, she herself was Greta’s only daughter, come after three sons and a number of miscarriages.

  Proximity between birth and death runs in every family, but it seems to run especially close in ours. Ada didn’t like to tell the dark side of a story though. As far as presentation goes, that was her method, her modus. Still, I wish she were here now. I could tell her things that would make her hair curl, and she would listen. I could ask her what comes next, how scared I need to be that these little cuts and bruises aren’t the end of my troubles.

  Old habits: I half look for her, my baba, perched on a chair or leaning against the door. But there’s only Kara, lying on a blanket on the bedroom floor. Burbling as she moves her head—it would be wrong to say she turns it, but it bobs a little, gives a healthy jerk. Her limbs move too, spasmodically. This is what she’s been doing all day, either in my arms or laid out somewhere. I almost resent her calm unawareness, the blank canvas of her. She doesn’t know that my heart skips every time the phone rings from the other room, as if it were always John, calling to accuse me. Kara could still be convinced to become anything. Anyone’s. Whereas my life is scribbled over, a garbled language with no one left to understand it. I miss Ada. Ada, who knew me.

  “Let’s go outside,” I say to Kara. “Hmm?” Making my voice soft.

  I pick the baby up, and her back bends gracefully under the pressure of her own weight, muscles too foreign to themselves to support the bones. It’s exquisite, how close my attention adheres to the details of her body. One false move and I could snap something, tweak some tender part of her so it grows awry. Carefully I bundle her, trying to meditate on each piece of clothing. The soft knit cap into which I tuck Kara’s hair fits snugly down over her ears, so tight that it seems to promise a bit of extra skull for these days of early life, as well as a barrier against cold air.

  Good thing, too. A gust of wind roars against the window, which audibly strains. The day is still stormy. A part of me knows we really shouldn’t go out in it at all, but then again, my phone is still ringing. I think about Greta and Saul, married in a rainstorm. I think about my own husband, turning up his collar this morning against the cold.

  I think about myself, and when I can’t anymore, I think about my daughter.

  Supposedly infants can’t see well. The world to them is made up of dim shapes and vague shadings of light. Not unlike a surgery patient wrapped up in gauze. Or a theater patron, once the house lights have gone down, who can half sense that places have been taken onstage but doesn’t know where, or who, or why. Is that how things are for you? I wonder to Kara. She seems to be watching closely enough, more so as she unwrinkles from her time in the womb and her eyes lose their perpetual sleepy squint. I touch her cheek and she immediately sniffles towards my finger. I snap on the other side of her head and she wobbles around trying to get a look.

  Not so gauzy then. She is already a creature of sound and scent, full of anticipation and eagerness. She wants to hear. And if she hears enough, someday she’ll want to speak. To see. To know everything.

  But not yet. For now, there’s still just one person I can whisper my secrets to, even if they don’t quite reach her. One person who can tell me if the face I’m showing to the world is the right one. I need that today, if I ever want to be strong enough to hear Kara’s secrets in turn. Otherwise I might keel over, a ship in a gale, no help in sight. I pull the cap more carefully around her ears and enclose her in a downy blanket the color of the sea. Out we go. We’re on our way.

  To the only place I can think of worth going, right now. To the only person I’ve ever known who could always see light when faced with darkness.

  Greta and Saul were early with their sons. First was Andrzej, towheaded at birth but later dark as dirt. Then Fil, who tagged after his brother and begged to play; Fil who was smattered with freckles and stomping with mischief. Finally came Konrad, blond as a bell ringing.

  “My brothers,” Ada said, “were a tribe. Always together. They moved with one body, like a herd of deer. They sniffed in the grass, and they butted their heads together, pushed each other around in the yard. Sometimes they nibbled food from the vegetable patch. Just a bite here or there.” She slit her eyes at me, sidelong. “Like some other people I could mention.”

  We were walking along Lake Michigan, summer wilting the grateful city around us. I wore a pink dress, my favorite color when I was eight, and sandals that left white lines on my feet through the tan, as if I’d been born palomino. It had been more than a year since I saw my mother sing at the Green Mill, and in that time I’d developed a sense that my opinions were powerful and important. At school a girl I despised had announced that her favorite color was pink too, and I took her aside at recess and talked to her using my sweetest tones. She leaned closer to me with every word, and by the time the bell rang her new favorite color was gray.

  In Edgewater, a few blocks from the lakeshore, there’s a grand pink hotel, wedged like a slice of cake. We never went inside, but that summer I insisted on taking our walks up north so I could watch the water glint off the windo
ws. I was waiting for an opportunity to get closer to the ground-floor doors; I imagined finding one mysteriously open and slipping through without Ada noticing. Inside would be a society of magicians who would recognize me as one of their own by examining some insubstantial element of me. The color of my bones. The weight of my lungs. I’d run through the empty hallways, waited on by eager and animate pushcarts, brooms, and pieces of cutlery.

  But we never got close enough. Instead we crossed Sheridan, maneuvering around a complicated freeway exit, and then strolled along the large, cracked concrete stairs that border the lake.

  “They were good boys.” Ada held my hand and stared out into the waves, which smelled like bathwater and diesel. Farther down the shoreline lay a beach dotted with towels and studded with white lifeguard chairs. “Did what their mother asked, mostly. And loved her very much. Very deeply. They were her champions.”

  “What were their special gifts?” I hopped carefully over the seams in the concrete. If I was going to be denied my hotel, I wasn’t going to miss out on the best part of the story. “You said they had gifts.”

  “Well, lalka.” She didn’t shift her gaze. “They were spirits of the forest. They could disappear into the trees, camouflage themselves in leaves. That kind of thing. Just for starters. But they each had a particular talent. A gift, as you say.

  “Andrzej could hear footsteps from twenty miles away. Sometimes we would be sitting on the porch talking and he would tilt his head to the side”—she cocked her ear towards the water—“like this. As though someone were whispering something to him. He could tell the direction a person was walking, and the weight of their body, and even what kind of mood they were in just by the sound of their feet on the earth. Smak smak, if you were angry; flek flek, if you had something to hide. Anyone else would make themselves crazy trying to hear what he heard. But Andrzej didn’t even have to try. Listening came to him as naturally as a heartbeat.

  “Fil was shiftier.” She smiled. “He could smell anything, taste anything. He’d have made a wonderful knight to a king, because he could have detected poisoned food without even having to take a bite. It made him a fussy eater. But it was useful.”

  “How?”

  “Planting, for one thing.” Ada squeezed my hand. “He could always smell water in the ground. And his father, Saul, of course, was a woodsman—he cut down trees to make his living. Saul was already very clever at picking out which trees to cut, to harvest, but Fil could smell an infestation of ants. He could smell a bird’s nest in the top branches of an oak and would climb up to pick it out before the tree was felled. The thing about Fil, though, was that he was always looking to play a trick. If he wrinkled his nose and you asked him what he smelled, you had to be ready for him to say it was you.”

  We walked along the steps for a ways, coming close enough to the beach that I could hear the jingle bells of an ice cream truck. “C major,” I said, not to anyone in particular. “What about Konrad?”

  Ada stopped at the edge of the concrete stairs, where a series of smaller steps led down into the sand. At the lake’s edge, a group of children were throwing buckets of water at one another and shrieking with laughter. For a moment I felt a tug behind my navel. I wanted to run down the steps and onto the beach, letting the dirty sand get in my shoes. I would head straight for the water and dive in, soak my dress, float on my back, and look at the sky. But Ada’s fingers were still interwoven with my own.

  “Konrad was a beacon,” she said finally. “He called things to himself.”

  I stared at the gang of children. “What kind of things?”

  Ada blinked in the sun.

  “Light. Animals. If Konrad sat still, he would be surrounded by birds. They fluttered out of the trees and landed all over him—on his shoulders, in his hair, on top of his feet. And he called rabbits. Not”—she looked pointedly at me—“by shouting or whistling. Not anything like that. I mean they came to him. First the smallest creatures, but then larger ones too. Once Greta walked into the woods at the edge of our land, looking for Konrad. She wanted to bring him in to dinner. And she didn’t see him in the first clearing, so she went a little farther, and then ahead of her there came a sound. A rumble. A growl. On the path stood a bear the size of a house, and right next to it stood Konrad. His fingers were wound up in the bear’s fur, and the bear’s eyes were closed. It was, well, purring.

  “Greta ran towards her son, and the bear’s eyes snapped open. The three of them looked at each other for a long moment. Then Konrad whispered something to the bear and scampered into his mother’s arms. Greta watched the creature lumber away, but it never turned around.”

  We ourselves turned to walk back the way we’d come. I stole a last glimpse at the children over my shoulder, as they played on the beach, sunburned across their noses. Loud and ordinary, not one of them looked up at me, content as they already were with one another.

  The one thing Greta didn’t have in her family of strong sons was a creature of songs. That is to say, a creature like herself. She had never minded living apart in her small town, hearing the whispers of those who said she was a witch, a water spirit. That the songs she hummed everywhere she went would draw men to her so she could drain them of life.

  But after the dance at the piano factory, she couldn’t shake the memory of the girl she’d held there—a child who had blinked into existence to the tune of a piano. And then blinked back out again, disappearing with the gray man to who knew where. Greta loved her sons, but when she held them she could feel the girl’s absence.

  She hated being alone in her own home. Saul was a gently giant man, hunched over at the table as he ate his soup, back bent in the woods to avoid hitting his forehead against low-hanging branches. But with his softness came his silence. He regarded his wife with an always-quiet admiration and never got caught up in her humming. In fact, he seemed not to hear it at all: the rhythms, the buzzing, the vibrations in her throat were as nothing to him. They were too insubstantial. He loved her for her weight and heft and hands.

  The boys ran relays around their home. They pitched war games and threw mud balls and called up storm clouds and held congress with foxes and elk. Saul dragged trees down and planed off their rigid bark, and the boys queried wood larks, teased the nanny goats in the yard. Inside, Greta baked bread, and to herself she hummed. She took pride in her household and family, but she knew deep down that there was something missing from it, without which she would never be satisfied. Behind the cottage was a small plot of land fenced off near the trees to protect it from wildlife. The grass was so green it was practically purple, and dabbed here and there were spots of white, which, from a distance, could easily have been flower bushes. Saul carved each slim cross himself, after the wood was consecrated by the church.

  Greta vibrated with music, so much that it was hard for her to believe that neither her husband nor her sons noticed it. Sometimes Konrad paused in his games when she walked by as though he had been struck by an idea. But he never sang a note, never hummed along with her; for all his affinity with animals, he never caught a small bird and brought it to his mother trapped in his hands, singing. To even want this, Greta knew, was selfish. He was his own child. He had his own path to follow.

  The cottage that the family shared was built of redolent pine, the walls always dripping slowly with sap. It seemed to be a sturdy and impenetrable structure, but when Greta was alone and looked around herself she always felt the forest encroaching, the trees returning to reclaim their material selves. Greenling stalks coiled around into the backs of chairs, and trunks like spines erupted from the floorboards: a thicket of men turning their attention to the distance. From the ceiling sagged branches so robust that Greta knew they came from trees almost too large to fathom, and despite the careful chinking Saul had done, wind seemed to slither through the timber limbs.

  When they grew out of their cribs, each boy went with his father into the woods on what Saul called a hunting expedition, the purpose of wh
ich was to find the boy’s bed. They would spend a full day, sometimes two, searching through gnarled branches, assessing the benefits of each possible contender. Andrzej chose a mighty pine because the tree had impressed him in the backbone of his house, and because upon leaning his ear to its trunk he heard something inside that he chose not to describe. Fil settled on ash after telling his father to close his eyes and then sneaking a taste on the tip of his tongue.

  And Konrad, who was often inscrutable, spent two days of fruitless hunting. When his father was nearing exhaustion and despair, a sudden wind picked up and began blowing leaves around the forest floor. Konrad held out his hand and snatched something off the breeze. By the river’s edge, he and Saul found the willow that the leaf belonged to, and Konrad hid his eyes behind the roughing knuckle of one hand until the tree had been felled.

  During these expeditions Greta stayed near the house or barn, usually wrestling with a new presence in her belly. What tree will you choose? she hummed and asked the air. When Andrzej was on his quest, it was a cheerful question; with Fil, uncertain. And by the time Konrad stepped into the woods, Greta’s mind sat balanced on a careful scale of fear and joy as she contemplated the red mess of a child coagulating within her. For between each boy there had come a girl, at least one, for whom there had also been a careful selection of wood grain. But instead of a bed, Saul cut the somber boards of a box, inside which each girl would nestle like a jewel while she rested silent beneath the trees.

  It wasn’t until I was eleven that I realized what these sleeping girls meant. Who they were. They’d shown up in various Greta tales over the course of my life as anything from vital talismans to mere window dressing, their grave markers landmarks on the grassy ground my great-grandmother walked. But from the way that Ada spoke about them, it hadn’t occurred to me that they were my flesh and blood—Ada’s sisters.