by Sara Faring
“Carmela,” I ask. “Who told you about the Others?”
“Don’t patronize me.” She unwraps and rewraps her hooded garment around herself, and a rank clove scent chokes the room.
“Who is she?”
“Speak to her yourself if you must,” she snaps, ripping a tissue from the box beside her bed and stifling a noise in her throat. “Leave me in peace, won’t you? Just leave me.”
I pause, wondering if she’s losing her mind. Managing grief can turn you into an enlightened individual sensitive to nature’s mysteries—mysteries like the Others—but it can also fracture you beyond repair.
Mavi tugs on my wrist hard. We’ve long overstayed our welcome, considering we never had it. She leans on me as we shuffle out the door, which I shut carefully, and we hobble in silence until we are out of earshot.
Why do I feel this urge to pity this madwoman now? She looked so vulnerable, her grief so obvious. And her cruelty—her cruelty isn’t the result of our crystallized self-pity, like the Others’. Her cruelty is something else entirely—the product of something like mafia rules.
Mav feels warm beside me, but her breaths come and go hard. We fumble around the pitch-dark hallway—we lost our candles somewhere inside the girl’s apartment. But I feel pressure dissipate as we put distance between us and Carmela. I wouldn’t be disappointed if I never saw her again. It wasn’t just her vulnerability and my newfound, twisted sympathy that shook me. Her loneliness was palpable, and if there’s one thing I know about loneliness, it’s that it makes its victims repulsive to everyone else who might help to lessen it.
“I’m not convinced the tenth girl is Marie,” Mavi whispers, testing her ankle again.
“What?” I slow, thinking of the photo of Marie as a baby in the bathroom. I can’t erase the sight of her smile from my mind, the black curls. She was cheery in a way the tenth girl I met wasn’t, but life (and death) can beat a person down. To put it bluntly.
“Surely she would’ve shown herself to her mother, at least once?” Mavi tucks her hair behind her ears. She’s managing to walk well by herself already. “If not to be reunited with her, then to warn her about the kinds of power the Others possess. Just like she warned us.”
“I’m still wondering why Carmela is so convinced that the Others can bring back the dead,” I admit.
She walks down another set of steps cautiously and pauses at the bottom. I can tell from the way she rubs her lips together that she’s thinking of her mother. “Well, can they?”
I should answer that I don’t know what the Others can and can’t do. Why should we be able to play God? Dom’s skin itches as if I’m about to break out into hives. Here is a person I care about, in pain over someone she’s lost. And for once, I can’t bear to lie. “I know that we can’t bring the dead back ourselves, because I would’ve brought back my mama and Rob,” I say. My voice comes from a place outside myself.
“Rob.” She watches me with quiet confusion. “Who’s that?”
My mouth goes dry. It’s difficult to wrap my head around the fact I’ve never told her, desperate as I was to prove I needed nothing from her.
“Please. Won’t you tell me?” she whispers.
“My brother.”
“And he died. Your brother,” she says softly. “Your brother and your mother.”
“Yes.”
“Your whole family,” she says, understanding and closing her eyes.
“Yes.”
Her eyes open. She stares at me long and hard in the dark. When her voice comes, it’s quiet. “Did you … kill yourself because of that, Angel?”
A flurry of pain. I swallow hard. I don’t answer. We walk on for several paces.
“I’m sorry.” She shakes her head. “I thought—I’m sorry. I don’t fully understand your—your situation.”
My mind frantically pogos from answer to answer without landing on one that is remotely adequate. How do I explain what happened? How can it make sense to her without making me sound utterly pathetic and reprehensible? I want to be honest; I want to bare my soul. But there are rules that shouldn’t be broken, rules that govern our existence, rules that hedge in my sanity.
“It doesn’t matter, I suppose.” She tugs at her hair. It’s a gentle lie I won’t call her on. We walk on, but there’s a fresh tension there that won’t abate.
“I need to do it,” she says, out of the blue, as we reach the end of the stone corridor.
I look at her, thinking she’s delirious as we climb the staff stairs.
“Sleep. And tomorrow, we’ll—we’ll talk to her.” She looks up into the hall, where the storm glows through the skylight.
“What?”
“‘I was told by someone I trust with my life about the Zapuche sacrifices to the Others,’” she says in Carmela’s haughty voice.
I inhale, low and slow, stoking the fire in my mind. “‘Speak to her yourself,’” I whisper, echoing Carmela’s reply to me as we tiptoe past room 1.
Maybe it wasn’t madness. Maybe it was bare honesty from a woman broken open.
“There is only one woman here whose opinion Carmela would trust,” Mavi says as we reach her door. “Even if she doesn’t listen to her all the time.” She glances back at room 1.
Morency. Morency, who kowtows to Carmela. Who long sensed the darkness in this house. But where does she stand in this tangled mess?
“Tomorrow,” Mavi whispers to me again, eyelids drooping. “Tomorrow.”
I don’t want to leave Mavi in her room. But I don’t have much of a choice. So we wake Yesi, and I ease Mavi into bed beside her. They fall into position like stacked sardines. I feel a weird pang of jealousy at how naturally they fit together. I’m the odd one out, the freak in a borrowed body, hovering. The one whose life doesn’t fit here, in this old-fashioned castle in the clouds.
“I’m worried I won’t be able to fall asleep,” Mavi whispers to me, dreamily, as I go to leave—her eyes already shuddering shut. As I watch, she succumbs, with Yesi in her arms.
* * *
Walking back through the family’s quarters, as the storm rages on, I can’t scrape Carmela’s undying love from my head. The heat of it. It had a beating heart all its own.
It makes me miss them, as it should. Mama and Rob: Rob, cuddling up in my bed in his Star Wars pj’s. Rob, taking comfort in my arms like hugs could save both of us if we tried hard enough.
I would have traded my life for them without question, as Carmela would for Marie. But that choice was never given to me.
If I could have given my life to someone like Mavi, would I have? Or was oblivion the only thing I sought?
I field a second, almost-as-absurd thought—is there a world in which Mavi can stride into her closet, as I do, and escape into the Other Place in my stead? Could any human access the Other Place through a closet in the house as Others do? Would they want to if they could?
Returning to Dom’s room, I open his closet with his body.
First, I feel around every inch of the closet walls and floor with my hands.
Nothing.
I kick and punch at the empty back of the closet with the hot meat hands, which doesn’t even dent the wood. Tools, I think. Tools. I rummage through the musty sitting rooms downstairs, finding nothing resembling a crowbar but the fire poker in the old stag room. I smash the fire poker against the closet back, again and again, and still, the wood won’t nudge. I set fire to the door with a book of matches and a bottle of alcohol, and the wood resists. Everything else in the house is falling apart, but these closets remain unchanged. Which rung of hell is this?
I hurl my chair against the back of the closet, and obviously, the blow doesn’t even leave a scuff. I drop onto the bed, leaving Dom to sleep at last.
* * *
When I brave the raging squall to stop by the cloud house, I find Charon is still asleep and—in his own lazy way—confirming I’m dead to him.
“Charon,” I ask, trying and failing to shake him into co
nsciousness with my crystal hands. “Charon, you know-it-all. Wake up. Will the storm ever end?”
His only answer is a rattling snore, as loud as the thunder outside.
29
MAVI: ARGENTINA, JUNE 1978
In the morning, the storm blows hard and heavy against the house. When will the stone walls crumble and cascade toward the ice? I wake with a start next to Yesi, whose skin is cool to the touch, like marble in winter. Her breath wouldn’t fog a mirror. I worry for a moment that she’s left me; as if body and spirit have become unbound. But when I rub her shoulder, her eyes flutter up at me, and her blue-frosted lips smile.
Each surviving step of our morning ritual—even washing up—frays my nerves. Once every few minutes, the sleet strikes the skylight pane like stray bullets. It’s a wonder the glass hasn’t shattered. Yesi doesn’t think much of it, but I can’t help but flinch every time. Once dressed, we creep downstairs to forage for food in the mildewed kitchen, and I recount what happened last night. No need to whisper: The house is deserted. With the kitchen staff gone and all the girls sick and sleeping, the teachers who aren’t responsible for their care burrow in their rooms. To my great surprise, the only soul we pass is Mole, wearing sooty floral pajamas and lugging a leaking canvas sack full to the brim with odd-size lumps.
“Bit of an ugly day, no?” Yesi says, yawning, as Mole half-heartedly conceals the bag behind her back in silence.
She readjusts her skewed glasses. “Two-five-three-two-one-three-one-seven-seven,” she says, inexplicably, nodding at me. “One-three-seven-two-zero-seven-two-four-zero,” she says, as if in greeting to Yesi.
“Up to some fresh numerology, are we?” Yesi asks as I shiver.
Mole says nothing. She darts forward once, twice, as if desperate to leave us.
Yesi crosses her arms. “Have you been to see the girls this morning?”
“No one slept well,” I add, as if to excuse her behavior. Mole’s nose twitches.
“What’s in the bag, Moley?” asks Yesi, still blocking her way. She looks like a little priestess sometimes. “Remedies for the girls?”
“You have no right,” Mole hisses, mouth puckering into an angry little node of punctuation. “Between the girls’ nonsense and the lies, I’ve been sucked dry. I’m entitled my due.” We look at her as if she’s gone mad. “I know you think me lazy; others always think twos lazy. Always. But I am not. I have worked hard, and I am deserving of this.”
We hold her furious gaze far longer than I thought possible until I perceive some kind of stench and she softens, her eyes deadening.
“Twos, you know, twos are ones and ones and zeros,” she says, extending the bag toward us as if it pains her, and we peek inside. Unappealing leftovers from the refrigerator, long rotted. Some old cutlet scraps, wilted vegetable stalks, and bruised apple cores.
“Don’t you dare judge me,” she says. “Don’t you dare. I’ll take some to Lamb and the others. Don’t you worry, either. I’ll care for them, too. Patient and loving, I am.” Though her tone drips with bitterness, there’s a glint of indescribable ecstasy in her eyes, the first sign of a mind unhinged—what is there to be happy about here? She hurries along before we can say anything more.
I raise a brow at Yesi, who takes my arm and pulls me forward. “Let’s eat and go to them,” she whispers. The house has, indeed, gone to pieces, I see her think silently with a troubled dart of her eyes.
Our own search for food does not go well, and we are reduced to eating cans of cold, unnamed legumes and a leftover jar of quince jam. Yesi cuts her lip on the edge of a can while slurping out the chunks and presses her hand to the dots of blood until they stop. I dip my fingers into the jar and spoon the gunk into my mouth as if I haven’t had a meal in ages. It tastes of sweetened sawdust mixed in water. The truth is, I don’t feel like I need nourishment. But I need the structure of a meal if I am to recoup my mental energy before confronting Morency.
After we finish eating, Yesi and I gather cans to take to the girls. To my horror, they are sleeping unwatched, some of them sprawled across their narrow cots, some of them curled into balls, some of them posed like corpses, stonily facing the ceiling, with its flecks of mold spots like blood spatter. Silvina and Mariella wake for mere moments to eat the soup I trickle into their mouths before falling back asleep. They don’t speak, much less notice us, choosing, instead, to watch the spores around our heads like opium addicts, as Sara once did. I gather that none of them recognize us at all anymore. Michelle cannot be roused, but at least her cheeks are rosy, and she smiles in her repose. Sara alone keeps her eyes open for long stretches, despite being catatonic. I take her hand in mine and try to coax out a word, a flicker of the eyes, but nothing does the trick. I hum a lullaby to her, the only one I know: “Que linda manito que tengo yo, que linda y bonita que Dios me dio…” It might be too overemotional to claim that God has abandoned his creations here, but that is exactly how I feel. Sometimes this fate seems crueler than death. Other times I wonder if they might all wake and blossom at the snap of a finger, sleeping beauties. What are we meant to do, alone? Bathe them? Feed them? What’s the best use of our time? None of them have wet their beds, a bewildering blessing since they can’t be roused and trundled over to the restroom.
“They’re tucked inside their chrysalises now,” Yesi whispers to me as we patrol the rows of beds the girls sleep on. “I’ve figured it out, Swamp. When they wake, they’ll be whole in a way we can’t imagine now.” She squeezes my hand. “Every night of this kind of sleep is a chance at seizing back some discarded part of themselves. Don’t you see?”
I keep an upbeat expression on my face; Yesi doesn’t register it, anyway. Her imagination protects her now. It’s as if this near world that I am in can no longer hold her full attention. Strange new fascinations bloomed in Yesi while we slept, and I notice them only now. As she let go of the notion that spirits cannot exist, she lost her hold on more basic natural laws: Why shouldn’t the tenth girl live inside the walls of this house? she asked me as we sat watching the girls. And why shouldn’t we hunt for her inside each brick? Why shouldn’t she live inside the pages of a book in the library, or in the colors of our dreams, to be called out by the scratches of a pen or the sweeping motions of the subconscious?
When Angel joins us, I am exhausted by Yesi’s imagination. It’s time. Time to confront Morency.
* * *
Angel and I arrive at room 1 and knock. The wood feels soft enough to give, and a good minute passes without an answer.
“Where could she have gone?” I whisper to him.
“Nowhere major.” He points up at the skylight, ravaged by the storm. These miserable skylights have made living here like inhabiting a slick-walled well. “I’ll try the family’s quarters. See if she went to visit Carmela.”
I’ve no interest in returning there.
“You stay here,” he says. “Keep knocking and see if she answers.”
I puff the air out of my cheeks. “All right.”
As soon as he’s rounded the corner and gone on his way, the knob rattles. A single eye the size of a moon appears in the crack, one that waxes at the sight of me, and she pulls open the door. Her hair is loose, wild. She’s wearing another black gown that resembles Carmela’s hooded one. It’s eerie to see her this way—locked in her room.
I swing back to look for Angel on instinct.
“Stop that,” she whispers, opening the door wide. “Come inside, now. You alone. I have come from the madame’s room, and we have much to discuss.” My heart spasms: What might Carmela have said? But I haven’t time to respond, because she takes me by the shoulder and pulls me inside.
I perch myself on the sofa I observed only from afar last time. She has a fire going, with a steaming kettle hanging above it, but otherwise the room is dark. A half-full cup of tea sits on a nearby table. She cradles it, swivels it around in her hand.
“You were truthful with me. I should have known your romance with Domenico woul
d not have bloomed without him truly being possessed,” she says, standing across from me.
Even at a moment like this, her tongue remains as sharp as ever—she herself remains as myopic as ever. But her petty comments can no longer derail me.
“So you admit that you know of the Others.”
Morency watches the flames in silence. A log crackles in the fireplace. “Yes, of course I know of them,” she says, grazing the lip of her teacup with a finger. She studies me, eyes sharp and clear, as if determining I am not possessed. “But I do not fraternize with their kind.”
“Yet you know all about them. Enough to persuade Carmela to reopen this school.”
She sets her eyes on me. “Miss Quercia, I am loyal to the De Vaccaro family. When Madame De Vaccaro asked me to tell her the house lore as an exercise in learning more about her family, I obliged her. I couldn’t know what she felt herself capable of accomplishing. She claimed she hoped to reconnect with old generations of her family, and after the loss of the child…” She trails off, mouth pursing with pain. “Who was I to deny her that?” She sips from her cup. “When she wished to open the school, I followed her wishes. I would do whatever is necessary for Madame De Vaccaro. She is a good woman, if troubled. I did not see it until too late that she has lost her way.”
So Morency knows that Carmela has gone mad from grief. Yet she gives up responsibility for any wrong committed, using that blanket excuse of loyalty, servant to master.
“But how do you know about them? The Others?”
Her eyes flick away.
“Why didn’t you tell me about them?” I ask. “Why didn’t you tell anyone?”
“I expressed that this house was dangerous to each of its occupants to the best of my ability. But as you can understand, Miss Quercia, one does not always know whom one should trust at Vaccaro School. People are not themselves. Those who possess us flood these halls.” She shakes her head. “Beyond that, I tried to urge you along, in my way, inspiring your curiosity and rebelliousness so that you might divine the truth yourself, while protecting you as best as I could. I couldn’t know what Madame De Vaccaro might do to someone she perceived to be outside of her control. You worried me, Miss Quercia. It was so important you be careful. I preferred that you fear me, the servant who is Marguerite Morency, over the person who might inflict actual damage on you out of misplaced anger.”
