Bonavere Howl

by Caitlin Galway

  Rather, she went quiet, then asked, “What have you got there in your arm?” She advanced as a willowy shade along the edge of my eye. I sprinted through the garden, splashing my legs and skirt with puddled mud, tearing through frail, sun-starved shrubs and not stopping, my breaths panting and scratching, until I was far from Jackson Street, and there was not so much as a shadow of a person in any direction, but my own.

  Chapter 26

  I SQUEEZED A dishtowel over an aluminum bowl of hot water. The droplets struck the silvery surface.

  “I don’t need you to do this,” Fritzi said.

  “Does it feel nice?” I asked.

  She tapped my hand away and unfolded the towel over her face. “The tip of my nose has been cold all day like a puppy’s.” She lifted the corner and peeked out at me. “What happened to your mouth?”

  “An old cut split back open.”

  I had not told her what happened at the Bellrose estate. I had meant to, truly I had, but when I arrived home that evening from Jackson Street, the first sound I heard upon opening the front door was Fritzi hacking a wet crinkle of a cough, and when I ran upstairs to check on her I found her with a clammy chill purpling her lips.

  Her snore soon whistled from underneath the dishtowel. I placed it on the bedside table, and tilted her jaw to quiet the sound that had interrupted so many of my and Connie’s nights that we had resorted to alternating turns in waking her up. I continued to soak the towel and dab along my sister’s neck, but my eyes kept swerving to the right, where I had stashed Amy Bellrose’s journal in my satchel, and shoved it behind the bedroom door.

  The heat thickened as the afternoon wore on. I took off my sweaty blouse and threw on another one. It smelled of dried sweat, unwashed, but was crisp against my skin and that was as good as clean. The small fan whirred, propped on a chair by the bed. The spot beside Fritzi had never looked so inviting, sucking me toward it, every muscle in my body softened to dough. It had been so long since I had truly slept. I let my eyelids close an inch, and for the first time in weeks my limbs filled with a warm-boned, melting ease. I rose to walk it off and the head rush nearly knocked me over. It was almost narcotic, the drowsiness, like a sleeping pill. I touched my forehead and was shocked by the heat; there was a burning frenzy on the other side, percolating in a bubbling dew against my skin.

  “Your forehead is as hot as a stove!” Connie would have said, like she always did when I had a fever.

  “Hot as a witch’s cauldron,” I would say back. For a snap I closed my eyes and in the watery darkness I saw her, waterlog pale in a yellow dress dripping onto the floor. She was speaking only one half of a conversation, as if she were on the hallway telephone.

  “Bewitching,” she said.

  “Bewitching,” I said.

  “Your eyes.”

  “My eyes.”

  She had said this to me before. That I had bewitching eyes, their deep grey-blue almost like violet. When had she said this?

  I remembered collecting round stones with Connie and the sound of gulls. “You have misty spring eyes.”

  Lake Pontchartrain, that was it. We had been sitting on a rocky beach. She had a sketchpad on her lap, the one that Mama bought her for her birthday, same as Fritzi’s. I was eating an apple and feigning sultry poses, the gloomy sunlight diffused by cloud and stringing silver through my hair as I laughed and crossed my eyes and ruined the composition, asking what exactly about me she wanted to draw.

  I remembered how she wrapped herself in a picnic blanket, as though it were a shawl, and looked out happily at the water. She had let out a laugh like silver bells.

  My head twitched up with a jolt. Where was I? My eyes adjusted to my bedroom, but the angle was odd. How had I gotten on the floor? My head was sore, and there were books toppled uncomfortably under my midriff. I must have fainted again. I slapped my own face like I had seen people do on television, but it did not do a thing to stir me; it only made me feel ridiculous and aggravated the split in my lip. I shook the sleepiness loose from my hair, my head, blinked until my eyes stayed wide.

  I looked at Fritzi’s bed and whispered her name.

  She moaned.

  “Fritzi. You awake?”

  “No, quit askin’.”

  She needed to sleep in her condition, but our bedroom felt haunted when she was not awake. I usually tempered it by sleeping next to her; now her bed was too rife with pneumatic germs, and the untouched bunks were no better, saturated with a different sort of infection.

  I pulled myself onto my feet. Evening came on and winged over the room, and I caught my reflection in the moonlit window, my fist to my chin and a single finger curled against my lower lip. Fritzi’s worry face. Mama’s, too. A smudge of blood had dried along the corner of my mouth and a bruise blued my cheek. I had walked home looking like this, all the way home from Jackson Street, for everyone to see.

  I was talking myself in and out of opening Amy’s journal. Part of me thought no, not tonight, not without Fritzi. But this pneumonia could take days to pass, even weeks, and I could not sit still. The shadows in the corners of my eyes took on shapes lately, and I heard violins in the air vents, voices chattering in the noise of the fan. My bones buzzed whenever I stopped moving, and sometimes I thought a hummingbird had swallowed my heart.

  I held my hand out in front and watched it shake. I looked at Fritzi dissolving in her blankets. She had gotten thinner since the sickness. How had I allowed that? I unbuckled my satchel and took out Amy Bellrose’s journal. I did not open it. I set its spine on the desk, and both sides of dampened pages fell open onto a face with a scraggly lion’s mane. It had been scribbled in pencil, its mane coloured by dried brown streaks it took a moment for me to realize were blood. Beneath it Amy had written: COLD MAMA. I lingered on those words. They did not appear again.

  Over and over came the scribbled eyes and mouth, floating without binding contours, surrounded only by the reddened mane, until a second face began to darken the corners. I leaned close to it, my nose hovering over the page; I knew that face. I threw open the top drawer of the desk and pulled out Connie’s matching journal. I swept through the pages until I found the cracked face like a broken doll’s. I sat entirely still. Everything disappeared but for the electricity shooting up my arms. Parnella Bellrose had died in one of the tucked-away antebellum rooms. It had been a room with toys, a waxen doll at Dorian’s feet.

  Fritzi coughed painfully from her chest. I moved to the edge of her bed and watched her. Even when her breathing calmed it was strained. I followed the coils of her dark hair, long enough now to tangle. I touched a single end, springing up below her chin, curling into a gentle hook like mine and Connie’s. I brought my hand to her cheek and let it sit.

  She would have been sick over what I was thinking, sicker than she was, by far. She would have slapped me to knock some sense into my head.

  There was the matter of the fence. I would need something to help me up without Fritzi. I spun around, eyes washing over everything with an unfocused swoop. They dropped to the green pail peeking out from under Fritzi’s bed. It was bigger than most sand pails, a novelty — Mama won it playing the tin horse race at the carnival — and it had a white plastic strap that I could sling over my shoulder as I biked. I reached under the mattress. Slow, easy, careful not to cause a creak. I could never tell how deeply Fritzi slept; her nose could be pushing out weak, wheezy snores and she would still answer you if you asked her a question. I reached the rim of the pail and rolled the rest free, eyes still on Fritzi, who lay still but for her chest’s fragile rise and fall.

  I looked out the window at the paling dark. Two, maybe three hours from dawn. If I hurried I could beat the daylight. Get far enough that Fritzi could not catch up and haul me back.

  I rode my bike through the lonely sounds of empty roads, all wind and chafing palm leaves, made lonelier by the occasional car, the dreary sight of its white headlights in the distance. I felt like some squirrely detective in a film noir,
sneaking off in the dead of night. The reckless one, who always ends up sweating in a rain-beaten telephone booth, about to get shot. I sped past tailors and soap shops and an endless stream of cafés, grateful for the occasional all-night lights of expensive boutiques and the Dauphine Orleans.

  It was a long, long while before I reached the riverfront. I stopped every hour to drink water from my satchel, rest my legs, feel the river-swept breeze and blink away the building spots of grey against my eyes. My fingers slipped in sweat against my handlebars, and with nobody in sight, no building for miles, I tore off my blouse and let my skin breathe, mopping up the sweat with a handkerchief. When I slipped my blouse back on and buttoned it, the cotton clung coolly to my skin.

  Finally, when my legs had long been shaking with exhaustion, and ached so tenderly I stumbled and scraped my knees when first setting my foot on the ground, I reached the Lasalle’s shrouded pond-and-willow street. Clutching the pail’s strap around my shoulder, I hurried my bicycle to the bushes and made my way through the oak tunnel to the locked pinewood fence.

  I tried to even my breaths. I set the pail on the grass and stepped onto it, lifting myself close enough to the base of the fence spikes that with a few jumps, the pail teetering against the grass, I grabbed hold. My feet slipped against the planks as I pulled myself up. My arms strained until I thought they might snap.

  The ground hit harder this time. I had to sit for a moment, unsure if I could walk, pain tightening around my knees. The yard was empty. There was a cold twinkle to it, and the trees loomed under the last chilled stars before dawn.

  I moved slowly between the rows of trees, orange orbs hovering above me like fattened fireflies. The two busted cellar doors were tucked now beneath a big blue tarp, but Candy was surely there. She would help me, the way she had before. I began to pull the tarp up, but there was a hand on my back, and a twist between my shoulder blades. Darkness struck like a hammer and a sweet, halting scent covered my mouth.

  PART SIX

  The Faces of the Scarlet Room

  Chapter 27

  IT SMELLED OF rain, or dirty snow, something dreary and wet. Sharp edges cut into my spine, rattling against my back and thighs. My kneecaps, stiff and bluing in front of me, bent up from mounds of ice and shook so that the chipped cubes knocked together with a disorienting clatter. I could not think straight, see straight. My teeth were chattering so hard that twice they bit my lip and let out a nourishing stream of red warmth down my chin. My thoughts circled. Cold. I shivered so tightly that my muscles pained. Cold, cold.

  There was a knock on the door.

  “Miss Fayette, are you awake? I don’t want to startle you.”

  I tried to lift my head but it was too heavy, too blurred, everything around me ringed in a sour yellow haze. My fingers and toes stung. I curled them, let the pang expand and bring with it a stabbing sobriety.

  A black-and-white checkered floor spread out around me. Before me was a sink bowl and toilet. There were venous cracks along the tile, and a scalding whiteness over the walls, and for a moment I thought I was in Gentilly State. Not dodging wards this time, but shoved in the ice bath like Connie.

  I’m trapped in your body, Connie.

  Another knock. “Miss Fayette.”

  The door opened and a flaming bright head appeared against the bathroom’s icy backdrop like a blood spot on the snow.

  “You haven’t been in there too long,” he said. “You won’t freeze. It only feels that way.”

  I could lift my hand, weave it through the ice to the rim of the claw foot tub. I clung to the porcelain, not quite understanding the sight of my bare arm. Panic seared through me as I realized that my clothes were gone.

  “How are you feeling, Miss Fayette?” Dorian asked.

  I lay helpless beneath the ice. My own body felt torn from me, humiliation blazing a hot brandish across my bare chest. I asked what he had done, but my teeth chopped up my words.

  He eased the door shut behind him. “I didn’t undress you, don’t you even think that for a moment. You soiled your dress, that’s all. I thought the ice might calm you down when you came to. It’s a right respectable practice, that I can attest.”

  I tried to blink the bathroom clear. Soft grey moss blew against the window over the sink. “Where’s my sister?” I asked. My head rolled against the back of the tub. I could hardly hear myself over the bone-breaking chatter of my teeth, only feel the familiar cut of C against my throat as I forced out my sister’s name.

  Dorian lowered himself onto his haunches. He touched his fingertips to my hairline and stroked them back to the base of my skull. “Constance,” he said.

  “You have her.”

  He swept my hair across the back of my neck, sliding it to one side, and brushed the ice cubes from my arms. “Would you like to get out of the bathtub?” He retrieved a towel and held it out to me. “I ain’t goin’ to look,” he said, turning his cheek.

  I stared at the yellow fabric in his hand like I had never seen a towel in my life, until my arms acted for me, wrapping it around me as Dorian, face modestly against his shoulder, helped me stagger out of the tub.

  My feet were wrinkled sore against the tile. “I’m sorry,” I said, stammering, “for going into your yard.”

  “That’s not what I’m angry about, Miss Fayette.”

  The particulars of the room were clearer now. Stale baby’s breath, crisp as straw, and snowdrop lilies filled vases by the sink. Towels rested stiff on their holders, covered in dust to a ghostly lavender, with gold-threaded A’s sewn in the corners — but for one towel clean of dust and drab from use.

  “How do you feel?” Dorian asked.

  I did not know what he wanted me to say.

  “Are you calm now?”

  For one delirious moment I thought maybe I had fainted, hot with fever and overexerted from riding all the way from the Quarter, and Dorian had only acted in an effort to quell hysterics. There was the bathroom door, after all, unlocked and unbarred. It sounded reasonable enough, in the slanted manner of a nightmare, where reality has slid an inch out of place.

  “Miss Fayette. I must insist,” he said. “I would like to know how you feel.” When still I did not answer, he squeezed my arm. “Are you calm? Is your body at ease?”

  My legs buckled, like all of the bones had been broken and the blood drained out. Dorian grabbed hold of me with a soft easy, dear, and one arm around my torso to keep me upright. My whole body seized as he reached for a corner of the yellow towel and fastened it into a knot under my armpit. I caught the chain of Connie’s necklace sneaking up from the collar of his shirt.

  “Careful now, keep yourself covered.” He pressed my head to his damp shirt, his hand warm against my cheek. “Poor girl, poor girl. I’m going to help you.”

  Chapter 28

  I shivered in my wet towel in the room where Dorian had left me. I did not know where he had gone or when he would be back; he had pointed to my clothes folded on a corner chair and locked the door behind him.

  The room was an ocular circus; patterns of acanthus leaves spread across the quilts and the cushioned backs of sharp-pinnacle chairs; bloodshot blackberry vines covered the walls. I hurried on every light, from wall to wall, brushing away each patch of darkness so that nothing, no one, could hunker in the shadows unseen. I sat down on the bed, in the room’s rotted yellow glow, and blew on my frozen fingers. I rubbed up and down my arms and listened to my teeth clicking together. There was nothing in the room to smash through the locked window. Just useless glass lamps, browned journals, pillbox hats messy with cobweb.

  If the lamps had been brass, like our old Baroque ones at home; if the hats had been clocks like Mama liked; if the items of this room had been like my own family’s — brutal heavy metals and blunt objects of dark wood, I could have butchered the window to pieces.

  The shutters rocked in the low breeze, the iron latch broken off, allowing a glimpse of the oak tunnel and front yard. I spotted the toppled green
beach pail, unreachable on the grass two stories below. My head went fuzzy and my fingertips numbed. I had not been thinking when I ran from home. I should have woken Fritzi, of course I should have woken Fritzi. Only Fritzi knew how to knock me out of my stupid, senseless spells.

  My heart dropped into my stomach. Fritzi was probably sitting alone in our bedroom, feeling like the last person on the planet.

  I stayed close to the window. It was made of old, distorted glass, as if hammered into uneven thickness, so that the outside wavered, ever so slightly unreal. The walls smelled of sweet, musky wood. With the fence in the yard right below the window, I knew I was in one of the antebellum rooms.

  Around me floated the face of Apollina Lasalle. She looked out from dozens of photographs lining the scarlet walls, fashionably staged in a rowboat or posed at a dining table in a limp, ruffled dress. Her young child self hung in a prominent oval frame, shining in the recent finger trail that had swept away the dust.

  Someone — Dorian, I imagined — had collected what appeared to be a chronological assortment of Apollina Lasalle’s belongings. There was a glass ballerina, arms arched above her head, standing en pointe on the desk, and a heap of dance slippers underneath, their heels cut up and cracked. A stack of knitted sweaters with old toggle buttons and guilloche brooches was neatly folded on the floor, and beside it sat a doll with a cracked face made of jaundiceyellow wax.

  The room was impossibly cold. Its dust was so thick that I fell into a coughing fit as I lifted my clothes from the musty chair and hurried them on. It looked forgotten, long quarantined behind loose shutters and creeping hydrangea vines, but somebody had been here. Apollina’s fine-tip nose was evident where the dust had been brushed away, and there was a rolled-about rumple to the bed, and a bare hole large enough for a mug in the dust that layered thick across the nightstand.