by Lily Levi
He watched in fascinated horror how her broken teeth clattered against each other.
She opened her mouth, further cracking the skin at the corners.
It was a dream. It was a nightmare. It was impossible, but there it was. “Maman?” he said.
She gasped for breath that, without lungs, she didn’t need to take. Her eyes locked onto his and her yellowed, decrepit face twisted in dark agony.
“Maman?” His voice was steady and prepared, though his heart threatened to break out from behind the thick wall of his chest. He truly hadn’t expected her to come back, and if she did, he didn’t think it would happen while he was there.
“You,” she croaked. Her voice was dry and only the husk of the voice he remembered as a boy.
“Yes,” he said. He leaned forward, suddenly earnest. It was happening. It had worked. It had all worked, the spiders, the cat, Jolene.
“It’s me,” he said. “It’s Laurie.” He took a quick breath to hold back the unexpected tears that threatened to fall. She wouldn’t remember him, of course, not if she were anything like Jolene. She would likely have no memory of anything at all. He would have to teach her. He would have to help her remember.
He held his breath and waited for her to recognize him.
“You,” she whispered. Her black eyes narrowed in the growing dark.
“Maman.”
“You took me away,” she said, slowly, painfully. Her throat bobbed with the effort, but her eyes remained still.
“No, I brought you back,” he said. “I brought you home. You’re home, Maman. Don’t you remember?”
She coughed and her shriveled tongue flailed behind brown teeth. Staring wildly at him, her chest rose and fell with the shallow breaths he was sure she didn’t need to take. Her lungs were dust, gone forever, just as he had begun to allow himself to believe that she was.
“Home,” he said the word again, hoping it would stick.
“I was home.” She spat each word at him in slow succession.
I was home.
Laurie frowned at her and forced his tightened muscles to relax. It was imperative that he remain in control. Whatever she did, he could not let her frighten him.
“A tomb is not a home,” he said, folding his hands. There was no easy way to tell someone that they were dead, or had been dead. Even after so long, he hadn’t prepared the words. He thought they would come when the time was right, but they were nowhere to be found.
“Do you remember me?” he asked. He was afraid to hear the answer.
She stared at him through unblinking eyes. Her lower jaw shifted as if she were chewing. “Yes,” she said. She moved her tongue along her cracked lips. “You took me away.” Her chest heaved beneath the words. “Took me from Martel.”
“No,” said Laurie, setting his jaw. Their affair still stung him, even after so long. “Monsieur Marteaux is dead.”
“Yes,” she breathed, but her black eyes wavered. “You took me from him.” Her lips spread to display her gruesome teeth in an unhappy smile. “You did this.” Her hand reached out for him.
He stepped back. “Maman,” he said, unsure of what else to say. She was unhappy. She was upset. It was not what he’d expected. But he couldn’t have expected that she would be overjoyed to return to a body that in no way resembled the one she’d left behind. At the very least, she remembered his tutor – her old lover – and seemed to understand that she’d been brought back from somewhere else; although perhaps not that she’d been resurrected.
“How long?” she said and he knew what she meant.
He didn’t need to think back on the passing of time to tell her. “Two hundred and eighty-three years,” he said.
She shifted her eyes up to the ceiling. “You should be dead,” she whispered. Her body shivered beneath the blankets. “We should all be dead.”
Laurie watched a terrible frown spread across her face. She was not the mother he remembered, not at all. Still, the dead could not always come back happy, but where Jolene had been numb and disinterested, Maman was something else entirely.
“You don’t mean that,” he said, but he knew that she did.
In the morning, Laurie found Jolene in the parlor, just as he’d left her.
She stretched out on the green ottoman and smiled at him. “I was thinking,” she said.
“Were you?” He stepped into the room and pushed the horrendous vision of Maman’s broken face from his mind.
Bright light filtered in through the open curtains. He pulled on the bronze window handle and let the morning air swell in around them.
“Yes,” she said, matter-of-factly. “It’s just that I’m starting to feel like an intruder.”
Laurie stared down at her. “Far from it,” he said and sat down beside her. “You’re wonderful company, if anything at all.”
Even when she was cooped away and asleep in the bedroom he’d now come to think of as hers, she’d somehow managed to light up most of the house – except for the fourth floor, but he again pushed the image of the shadowed hall away from him. He shuddered inwardly at the thought of Maman, waiting for him to return to the room that he’d locked her in. And then what?
“I could be better,” she said, breaking the image of Maman from his mind. She gave him an apologetic half-smile. “But I guess what I’m trying to get at is that, well, to be honest with you, this place is as old as rocks and it’s so,” she paused, as though looking for the word, but he already knew what she was going to say.
“Dusty?” he said.
“Yes,” she said. “It’s so dusty.” She ran her palm over the cushioned head of the ottoman to show him what she meant.
He didn’t tell her that he’d come to like the house that way. It would’ve been a strange thing to say and he imagined that she was feeling strange enough in other ways he couldn’t pretend to understand. Instead, he patted the chair’s cushion between his legs and forced a small plume of dust to rise up.
“And so,” she said, reaching out to touch his hand. “What I’m thinking is that I get a little better, get to walking, and you hire me to, you know, keep things clean around here.” She bit her lower lip. “I hope I’m not hurting your feelings, that’s not what I meant.”
He laughed. So she liked it in the house with him. That was good. She didn’t want to leave as much as he didn’t want her to go.
He touched her hand. “Once you can walk fully on your own, we’ll negotiate the terms.”
She lifted her up chin at him. “Negotiate the terms,” she repeated. “I like the sound of that. Maybe I’ll try pulling myself up and down the stairs – oh, don’t look at me like that, I know it sounds bad, but I need to work up these leg muscles. Look at these spaghetti noodles I have for legs.”
He allowed himself a quick look down at her bare legs. “The stairs sound rather painful,” he said, looking up. “I have a better idea.”
Chapter Twenty
Jolene held herself steady with the bedpost and scrutinized the girl staring back at her in the faded vanity mirror. The gas lamp flickered lazily beside her reflection. She felt silly. The dress was ridiculously old-fashioned with its cornflower blue silk and white lace. It pooled around her feet like an antique wedding gown.
Leaning against the bed, she tied the pink sash around her waist and then, using the bed for support, stood as straight as she could manage.
He would laugh at her. She looked like an undead bride with her dark, unkempt hair and sallow skin. She tried combing her fingers through the knotted locks, but there was nothing to be done.
She sat back onto the bed and pulled the last cigarette from Laurie’s tin case. When she went to light it, she couldn’t help but notice how her hand shook.
He would see it and then he would know. But what if he didn’t feel the same?
She took a breath and blotted the cigarette out against the case. She placed it back inside. Of all things, she was too nervous to smoke.
Standing, she held onto
the furniture and stumbled barefoot away from the bed. The dress swished excitedly around her ankles.
She stopped against the door and steadied her breath.
What are you afraid of?
She clasped the warm doorknob in her hand.
Laurie stood at the top of the stairs. She hadn’t expected him there.
He leaned casually against the bannister. Even in the dim light, she could see how his eyes flashed down from her face to the dress and back up again. He uncrossed his arms from the front of a buttoned vest and stepped towards her with an outstretched arm.
She smiled, took his hand, and let herself lean against him to help her walk. She quietly breathed in his scent.
“That dress looks lovely on you,” he said, steadying her against him.
Her face grew hot and she knew she was blushing. She hoped he couldn’t see her change of color in the darkness. “I think I need shoes,” she said.
“Oh, no, no.” He guided her towards the staircase. “Dancers always dance best without shoes.”
With his arm around her waist, she followed him down, beneath the silver chandelier, and through the foyer.
They passed by closed doors, small alcoves, and open doorways into further hallways.
She swallowed back the sudden, creeping fear of being lost. Somehow, the house felt even bigger on the inside than it looked from the outside, and that was big enough.
She felt his arm leave her.
“And this,” he said, with some effort as he pushed into the middle of the wall with his shoulder, “is where you’ll find your feet again, in the best room of them all.”
The wall was not a wall at all, but a double door, wallpapered over like the walls that surrounded it. Its hinges creaked open with the ancient, rusted sound of disuse.
Jolene’s breath caught in her chest. She pressed her hand against the wall to steady herself. It was like coming out of a dark, crowded forest to look into a bright, open meadow.
The room itself stood two stories high. The tall walls, gilded with blue and gold, matched the marbled floor, sprinkled with dead leaves. Four golden chandeliers hung from the high ceiling from the front to the back. White candles flickered at one another. Faded maroon curtains dressed the trellised windows.
Laurie’s polished shoes clicked against the marble floor. He lowered the needle on a large, bronze gramophone in the middle of the room.
Sweet, beautifully scratched music filled the open air.
Jolene moved her bare feet from the wooden planks of the hallway onto the cool marble. She stood there with her hands at her side. Her fingers played nervously with the folded silk of the dress. She wasn’t sure what she was supposed to do. She felt frozen where she stood, nervous and wondering.
He walked back to her and she let him take her in his arms.
“Do you like it?” he asked.
“It’s not real,” she said. “It’s like a dream.”
He brought her forward into the center of the floor and they moved slowly around the gramophone.
She felt silly, but he didn’t seem to mind.
She lifted her face to his. His eyes were warm and she felt inexplicably at home. She pressed her hand against his chest. “Do you know of Beauty and the Beast?” she asked.
“You remember the story,” he said.
“I remember some things.”
“La Belle et La Bête,” he said. He gave her a closed-mouth smile and his chest swelled beneath her hand. “It’s a French story.”
“La Man et La Beast,” she said, mercilessly chopping the French. “I’m the beast, of course.” She looked away from him, suddenly and vividly aware of how much more attractive he was than her. She had nothing and he had everything. It had been childish to even begin cultivating feelings for him at all.
He would laugh at her if he knew. He was only being nice to her, that was all. He was a good man and it had nothing to do with her. He cared, though she couldn’t have said why. But she couldn’t let herself slip up and believe that he felt the same strange attraction as she did.
He put his hand on her lower back and pulled her closer to him. “You’re wrong,” he whispered beneath the sweet song of the gramophone. She thought for a moment that he’d read her mind or that she’d accidentally whispered the thoughts in her heart.
“No, you are no beast,” he added.
She let herself be held by him. He smelled like dead flowers, like warm dust. In that moment, in all the world, there was no scent she wanted so near to her than his.
“If I’m no beast,” she said with her cheek against his shoulder. “Then what am I?”
He said nothing for a time and she wished she hadn’t asked.
“Beautiful,” he said. “You’re beautiful.”
They danced and he guided her slowly through the whole of the grand ballroom, from one end to the other. She closed her eyes and let her world be nothing but the ballroom, nothing but the song, nothing but him. It would end, inevitably, but she promised herself that she would always remember it.
How could she forget?
He moved his hand higher up along her back and she shivered.
“I won’t lie to you,” he said.
She looked up at him and waited for his words. Her heart expanded and she wished they could dance forever. “What is it?” she asked.
“When I found you, you reminded me so much of someone I once loved very, very much. But,” he said this slowly, as if measuring his words before he said them, “you are not her at all.”
Her back stiffened at this and she was sure that he could feel it. “No,” she said. “I’m not her.”
“No,” he echoed. “You are an entirely different creature.” He paused.
“And?” she asked, moving her face back up to his.
“And,” he said. She could feel how his heart thundered beneath her hand.
“If I can still be honest with you,” he started to say, but stopped himself once more.
Her own heartbeat quickened at the warm scent of his breath. “You can,” she said. “You can say anything to me.”
There’s no one else for me to tell, she wanted to add, but his face betrayed a deep solemnity and she waited for him to speak.
His eyes held hers firm. “Jolene,” he said. “I wish I had the right words to tell you how I feel, but they simply aren’t there. I’ve looked. ‘Enamored’ is the best word I can find and even that does little justice.”
Jolene closed her eyes and pressed her head against his chest. She smiled to herself, but it was a smile that filled the ballroom, the house, the world. She might’ve said that she felt the same.
When one song ended and another one started, she did just that.
He held her closely and she let him. There was nothing else, not anywhere else, not anyone else. There was nothing, nothing except for Laurie, the rising music of the gramophone, and the sway of her cornflower blue dress across the leaf-littered marble.
The music would never stop. It played on and on, until it was as if a hundred years had passed and she didn’t care. She only wanted a hundred more to go by if it meant they could dance through them all, one swaying step after the next.
He moved his hands up to the sides of her arms.
She looked up at him and he looked down at her.
She felt drunk with the way he looked at her, so deeply and with a meaning she could only try to understand.
It was nothing like lust. It was something else, something that made her head spin with a strange excitement.
“Jolene,” he said, but he didn’t wait for an answer.
He pressed his lips against hers and she let herself fall headlong the deep, sudden kiss. His mouth held a virile sweetness. She grew heady and weak at the taste of him.
He pulled away from her and she found herself swimming again in his pooled eyes.
“Laurie,” she whispered.
“Yes,” he said. The heat of his breath lingered on her ear and the taste of his mo
uth played excitedly on her lips.
“Kiss me again.”
Chapter Twenty-One
The gramophone continued its song and before long, she found herself carried away to a lavish, hidden bedroom on the manor’s third floor.
Lying flat on his bed with his dark frame above her, she could still hear the soft playing of music from the ballroom below.
Moonlight streamed in through the open window at the end of the four poster bed. A warm breeze billowed the opaque curtains inward.
He pressed his mouth against her exposed neck.
Goosebumps rose on her skin. It wasn’t his body that she truly wanted, although she wanted that more anything. She wanted him, Laurie, the man in the linen shirt and suspenders who’d read to her and cared for her; who’d watched her paint; who listened patiently even when she said nothing; and who seemed to know her when she couldn’t even know herself.
His hands moved deftly between their bodies and across the front of her dress. He carefully undid the silver clasps all the way down to her middle, where he stopped and then moved his hand up to her cheek. “You’re a beautiful woman,” he whispered into her neck. “A gorgeous, wonderful woman.”
“And you’re too good to be true,” she said, blushing in the dark at the cliché. She couldn’t help it.
“I’m true,” he said. “I’m true and I’ll always be true.” He pressed his lips against hers and used his tongue to search her mouth with a growing eagerness.
His hand moved down from the side of her face and pushed away the open front of her dress. With his thumb, he lightly caressed the tip of her breast.
She felt her nipple harden at his touch.
His breath came faster. He moved his hand away from her breast. “I want to take care of you,” he breathed. His fingers trailed down along her side, moving the open side of the dress away from her skin as he went.
She closed her eyes and let his warm words wash over her again and again.
I want to take care of you. The words were sweeter than the music echoing up from the ballroom beneath them.
Their limbs danced together through the night, writhing on top of the blankets in a tangled mess of silk and linen.
