by Lyndsay Faye
FIN
“Oh god,” Benjamin gasps.
He’s on his mother’s couch and her hand is on his face. So small and so soft, like worn linen.
“Honey, what is happening?” She’s frightened. He didn’t mean to frighten her.
“A dream. No. The memory of a dream that wasn’t mine.”
“What the hell did you just take?”
“Brain candy.”
“Do I need to call an ambulance?”
“No, they don’t come for dreams.” He sits up. “Especially if they aren’t yours.”
“My sweet boy—”
“Don’t you understand, I can’t control this? Dreams are a short film, and you can’t even close your eyes because the dream is fucking behind them. They were bad enough when they were mine.”
“Benjamin, honey, dreams can’t hurt you,” Trudy pleads.
Ben steps over spilled wine and ceramic mug shards. Probably of his making. “Apparently they absolutely can. But this is also a panic attack. Which . . . well, does feel exactly like dying.”
“And you would know, after all.”
Ben rubs his hand over his wrist cuff. “I . . . Jesus Christ, Mom.”
Trudy instantly looks on the verge of tears. “God of course, of course I go and blurt out the wrong thing. We were so close once. Will it ever come back? First you try to leave me on purpose with a knife to your own wrist and then your father sinks into a paranoid depression. You both just . . . departed. You all at once and Jackson by degrees. If it weren’t for your uncle, I don’t know what I would have done. At least Claude is sane.”
Shaking his head, Ben runs, he runs.
He pelts away from the clocks, throwing the front door wide and leaving it gaping like a wound.
LIA
Love is a funny thing shaped like a lizard,
Run down your heart strings and tickle your gizzard.
—traditional New Orleans blues song, Gumbo Ya-Ya: Folk Tales of Louisiana
Oh, how I wish you’d been there!” Robin, at his ease in an overstuffed armchair, shows milk-white teeth. “Here’s the groom confessing his love for the divorced ex-stepmother of the bride—and to think if I hadn’t been so tragically careless, she’d never have discovered her picture in his wallet at all—the bride being sedated, groom weeping into his flask. Already pocketed my fee in advance, naturally, can never tell with weddings, what?”
“Not when you’re running them, mais non. And here you turn up at our doorstep, nursing your wounds?” Mam’zelle reigns from the ornate parlor sofa, her curves draped in mauve velvet.
“Comical notion! Didn’t breathe a word about personal injury. To correct all misapprehensions: I am here to celebrate, old friends.”
“Ain’t so very old, us,” Moma notes from the ballet barre installed against the wall. Sweat glints from the deep scoop in her racerback shirt.
“Aren’t you?”
“Nor so young, neither.”
“Timeless as the winds, that’s my sisters!” Robin pushes his tissue-thin sweater up his forearms, squinting at the dress sock he’s darning. He always seems to have a needle in his fingers. “Only meant to say that I bodged together an annulment, a whopping lavish destination elopement, and a perfectly swish reception for the new happy couple! Quite the coup, eh?”
Mam’zelle rolls her eyes while Moma’s nose crinkles.
“Bitter fruit,” Maw-maw rumbles from the kitchen. She fans the neckline of her linen dress, hovering over a vat of oyster stew. It’s another garment inspired by a trash bag that costs four figures at Bloomingdale’s. Ever since Robin turned up, she’s been cooking and making weirder than usual pronouncements. Deviled eggs and rice-stuffed baked tomatoes rest on the dining room table. Onions, celery, and bell pepper have been sizzling like hellfire.
“Every fruit turns bitter in the end,” Robin teases.
Lia can’t figure out whether the sisters are friends with the newcomer, enemies, ex-lovers, business associates. So she sketches, listening. The flower market this morning was a blur of violently yellow ranunculus and delphinium of a blue she could drown in. Now she sits at her artist’s nook, pothos vines surrounding her, sketching a new installation.
It’s the first she’s attempted since she came here. It terrifies her in the way she imagines pregnancies are terrifying. Exhaustive and excruciating. But for the first time in a long, weary while, she feels compelled to make. As if a long-dormant virus woke up. Normally her sketches here own all the purposefulness of a cat stretching—she does them because she always has.
But this. This is a plan.
Lia adds leaves to the braided vine-monster she’s drawn. She hears his progress in her dream last night, squelching through the mud, and she moves to touch her mother’s strawberry-stitched scarf. She’s been wearing it for days. Months, maybe? Is it years now? But she remembers with a pang that she couldn’t find it in her attic room after her post-market nap. It’s wedged under a pillow or lurking in the folds of the bed. It’s not here to defend her.
“How did the four of you meet?” Lia calls.
Moma answers upside down, one leg on the barre. “We lot met back in N’awlins. Professionally speaking. He put around he’s a ‘wedding coordinator,’ is how come we get to know him, working the same circles.”
“Working from different ends of the same circle.” Mam’zelle smiles. “If you follow me.”
“Amen to that, my sister,” Moma snorts.
“Circles within circles,” comes Maw-maw’s rasp.
“Indeed,” Robin purrs. “I am a wedding coordinator in precisely the same way you ladies are florists.”
Putting her pencil between her teeth, Lia squints. She’s never been very observant, physically speaking. Whether the light switch was on the right or the left in the hotel bathroom, what color the waiter’s eyes were. She’d be crap at a murder investigation. Earrings wander off, MetroCards vanish, Ben huffed in frustration when the electric bill went unpaid and unseen.
Spiritually though, Lia has been through enough to be a goddamn water witch, and her divining rod is twitching.
The sisters’ floral arrangements are careful, intricate, meant to influence. They nudge people in a desired direction; sometimes they downright shove. Every time, they tend toward resolution—a person really does get well soon, a contrite philanderer is forgiven, a happy birthday is indeed enjoyed. Robin seems remarkably akin somehow to Lia’s friends. But he’s shared several anecdotes, and they all involve havoc. A wedding day ends in disaster. A sweet sixteen party catches fire. An anniversary dinner hurtles into divorce.
If you’re at opposite ends, but the shapes are circles, how are you meant to know which side you’re on at all?
DEVIL POD: Used to reverse jinxes and to repel evil intentions back upon the sender.
“So you had new business last night.” Mam’zelle’s liquid brown eyes slit. “Félicitations et bonne chance.”
“Yes, matters are certainly . . . percolating. In fact, I met a chap on the flight here from London who may have something to do with it.”
“Why you say so?” Moma inquires.
“Was bloody well sat next to him, wasn’t I! Never a coincidence. Great brawny Anglo-Indian fellow, eyes dark as temples. Handsome chappie, could’ve sworn I was sat next to a young Naveen Andrews. Poor lad was bloodsick as anything to boot. Could smell it from the boarding gate, my darling duckies.”
Mam’zelle clucks. “Bloodsickness . . . you ought to have said, cher. That could end up in tragedy if someone doesn’t mind their manners.”
“Leads to no end of trouble,” Moma agrees.
“No end of trouble.” Robin looks up from his sewing, winks. “If we might only be so lucky! And would I could soak in your spiffing company all the lazy day long. But I’ve appointments with the client who imported me here
and simply must see whether I happen to bump into my transatlantic acquaintance en route somehow.”
“Stirring the pot, you,” Moma states.
“Not at all. Beginning to gather the threads, what?” He snaps his needle free with sharp canine teeth, and a shiver drips down Lia’s spine.
“Have you anything else to share, you sly critter?” Mam’zelle prods.
“Safer to let the pages of the love letter unfold, as it were. Chummy of you lot to let me kip here, though. Always game to take in a stray, it seems.”
Lia feels Robin’s eyes scorch like a sunbeam across her face.
“Eh, la la, don’t be ridiculous.” Mam’zelle pats the nimbus of her hair. “We don’t allow gens du commun above the Three Sisters’ Floral Boutique.”
“Apologies for any unintentional insult, then. I’ve not put you out, have I?”
“If space is what’s needed, we ain’t got no end of it, us.” Moma saunters over to the sitting area, sipping from a rainbow-patterned water bottle. “There’s room after room after room at the Three Sisters’.”
Lia knows this is true. When she couldn’t be with Ben anymore, the last spectacular disaster already played out, the sisters installed her in a tiny third-floor bedroom. It’s like a princess’s mullioned tower, and like a dragon’s glittering cave.
“Limitless occupancy, eh?” Robin spears a fresh glint of emerald through the needle’s eye.
“The bedrooms might be full, but this settee’s surely welcoming,” Mam’zelle agrees.
“Settee might be occupied, but ain’t that couch in the flower shop plush.” Moma adjusts the towel around her neck.
“Room in the oven, nice and toasty,” Maw-maw calls.
“Maw-maw! For shame! Comment peux-tu dire ça!”
“Maw-maw, when you took your pills this morning? Lands sake, what I’m gonna do with you?”
Robin grins, fingers moving like silverfish. Lia has no idea where he slept, having gone straight from her childhood bedroom to the flower market before pale lines of dawn had even scarred the sky, but the sisters have a seemingly endless supply of space. Their rooms swell to suit them. The two floors above the flower shop are walled with recessed shelves groaning with exotica, esoterica, erotica, idols, cookbooks, crystals, antique perfume atomizers, and one statue of the Virgin Mary decked in Mardi Gras beads. Lia was exploring once and came upon a baby grand piano. She never found it again.
Moma has sidled up behind Lia, pressing thumbs into her stiff neck. Happy sparks shoot down her spine. “What you scheming and dreaming, baby girl?”
Lia frowns at her sketch. She woke up to her dad’s bedroom door open, a curled lump under the quilt, and the sweet rhythm of his snores. The awful pictures of Ben’s mom and his uncle were gone. But her rising panic had surprisingly little to do with her hapless father, or even the Dane family.
Moma used the right word, because she was dreaming again. Dreaming of him. The urge to get this vision out of her system and into artwork is like the desire to vomit up poison. Art scrapes off toxic sludge. Telling stories to save her soul—her mom’s slow cancer arranged into floating flower biers, her own clawing guilt rendered in thistles and thorns.
“Our petite chère has been like this ever since she lugged all those juniper branches home,” Mam’zelle notes.
JUNIPER: Symbol of the fertility goddess Astarte in Canaanite lore, an aid to sexual health and virility; burned for its aromatic smoke in rituals of sanctification and purifying.
“Wouldn’t even take a buttered biscuit, just grabbed her colored pencils and set to,” Moma agrees as she studies the rendering.
After her mother died, Lia fashioned miniature funeral pyres from iris leaves and seed pods, gave them twigs for masts, and sailed them to their watery doom. Which led to the middle school display of the 3-D floral arrangements with their frames rendered in metallic Sharpie against the gym wall. Next came the rotting sofa she transformed into a planter, and the anatomically immaculate little girl’s skeleton (freeze-drying enough white rosebuds to wire together proving the hardest challenge).
Artistic purging of emotion vanished after the final calamity. Why recite tales of failure when you’ve already lived them a hundred times over? When they were all your fault? She buys product for the sisters, tries to help Moma with the serious gris-gris and gets shooed affectionately away.
This is art, though.
I forgot how fucking painful art is.
“You saw this, my chouchou, in your mind’s eye?” Mam’zelle is hovering now, too.
“No, I had a dream, and it felt like this.”
The sketch shows Lia lying under a huge tree draped in sickly green tinsel. A hideous golem composed of swamp detritus looms at her feet. Spanish moss slithers from the ground like roots, binding her arms and legs to the earth. A huge clump restrains her neck.
“Love it,” breathes Robin from behind the pair of sisters. “She ought to plan events with me—there’s an entire tale here just for the looking.”
“Mademoiselle Lia’s our own perfect angel, so just you scram,” Mam’zelle coos.
“Our baby ain’t no lousy event planner, her,” Moma brags, sliding coconut-scented arms around Lia’s neck. “She’s a visionary.”
“But with such an eye for narrative!” Robin insists. “Why, the events she could orchestrate from behind an executive desk in an all-chrome office. Nation building, regime toppling—”
“Tu es villain parfois, you sick thing,” Mam’zelle hisses.
“Even weddings,” Robin chuckles. “Which are, as we well know, the hardest of all. Have you ever been engaged, me duck?”
“Have I what now?” Lia returns.
Moma snips a creeper of ivy off a hanging basket and starts weaving it into Lia’s thicket of hair like a crown.
“Oh, topping!” Robin rubs his hands together. “The heartshattered always plan the very best events.”
“She is never heartshattered,” Mam’zelle snaps, crossing her arms. “It’s broke, it is not in shards. Tu comprends?”
“Her man, he loved her so.” Moma releases the ivy. The leafy diadem is as secure as it would be knotted into lambswool. “We saw for ourselves, us.”
“My sister, we surely did,” Mam’zelle agrees.
“Can this topic maybe be tabled indefinitely?” Lia wonders, her throat contracting.
“This scar what she carries gonna be powerful,” Moma continues as if she hadn’t heard. “Because such a love that was! Mmmm, I shiver just to think on first seeing them.”
Lia hides her burning face in her sketch. Because she remembers it too, her debut gallery opening in Alphabet City. A white birch tree suspended by its roots from a ceiling with real grass affixed to it, hundreds of crystal-speckled filaments strung from branches to sod, the rain falling endlessly upward. She wore a tattered ivory maxi dress like a Grecian ruin, Ben passing her glasses of champagne while she soaked up the accolades.
He whispered in her ear, It’s too magnificent to exist.
It’s normally necessary to have connections, to rub elbows and kiss ass, to get a gallery show. But for Lia, somehow everything fell into place. This always struck her as vaguely bizarre. And yet . . . The three sisters were always present. Among the art lovers, minor critics, and people who liked free prosecco and cheese cubes. Lia remembers the women who would save her vividly, though she didn’t know why at the time. It was like recalling someone from the future. Mam’zelle wore a coral-pink blouse and massive hoops, looking like a sculptor or printmaker. Moma was in a black velour Sugarhigh jumpsuit with a scandalous neckline, obviously a local yoga instructor or psychic. Maw-maw was dressed in a raw silk sack, clearly an eccentric art-hoarding millionaire. They fit right in. And yet they didn’t, somehow. They carried their own space with them.
They were all looking at Lia when Ben whispered, You’re a
lso too magnificent to exist. But they were gone when he said, I’d have married you under that tree, I shoulda called, what do you need, a priest these days or just a notary or something? Later, after they’d laughed and made love and two of his fingers were still inside her, he said, You know I love you everywhere, but I think it’s everywhen, too. Every universe. In all of them at once, I love you the same.
“That boy loved her as hard and as long as he could,” Moma continues. “Till it was once too much too many and he couldn’t no more. And every time she kissed him, he found I love you too behind her teeth.”
“So when our petite chère came to hard times, we nursed her like our own,” Mam’zelle concurs.
“Please, I can’t talk about this,” Lia begs.
“It took a long while to get the devil out of her, spooning her broth and sugared tea.” Mam’zelle sighs, unhearing.
“Some might’ve called us crazy, but we knew her spirit, and what I’m gonna do when I sees a busted work of art on the cement? I’m gonna glue it up, me,” Moma affirms.
“OK, actually, I’m not a work of art, I’m a fire in a trash can, so you really shouldn’t have,” Lia chokes, feeling sick. “I never fully understood why the hell you did.”
“Why did we? How you say that at us?” Moma cries.
“Why, we loved you from sight, precious girl.” Mam’zelle grips Lia’s shaking hands in her soft ones. “Un coeur comme un artichaud.”
“Heart just like an artichoke, lord bless me. A leaf for everyone,” Moma explains. “Your man, did he ever adore you for it. He’d have torn down the stars just to spell out your name with them.”
Lia rips herself loose. Rises, blind and clumsy.
“Quite right! Perfectly reasonable to be cross with them,” Robin crows, white hair gleaming as he cocks his head. “You ought to come over to my side. Shall we commence your career as an event planner this evening, or would morning suit better?”
“Fuck you very much.” Lia shoves her drawings under her arm.
