Toil & Trouble

by Jessica Spotswood

  “Yeah,” she says. “I’ll come over.”

  “Okay, good. Well, seeya.” The line beeps out. This is what he does most nights, nearly hangs up on her. He doesn’t like parting words, trying to detangle himself from the conversation.

  Nova glances at the phone now, still lit up in her dim room. DeLuca, it says. She never calls him Hunter except sometimes in her head.

  She can’t even remember when they exchanged numbers. Not in the first couple of months, that’s for sure. She didn’t trust any of them, and she was working around the clock.

  She does remember the day she looked twice at him. She’d stepped into the walk-in cooler, looking for a salad dressing base she’d begun earlier. She hadn’t heard him enter behind her, but there he was, tall and imposing in front of the closed door.

  “Listen, you gotta give me a heads-up on what you want me to do.” He was in a black sous chef jacket, bandana around his head like always. He spoke as if she’d begun the conversation, like he was being forced to respond.

  “Excuse me?”

  “When the guys give you a hard time. Do I tell them to shut the fuck up? Or is that making it seem like you need my help, which you don’t? Do I pull them aside and say that’s enough? Or does that make you feel more...separate or whatever?”

  The chill didn’t touch Nova’s arms, just then. She studied this man, with his long lashes incongruously soft near a sharp jaw and nose, near stubble, and tried to let it sink in that he was asking her how she’d like to be supported. “Well, for starters, maybe don’t corner me in a closed fridge.”

  “Oh.” He studied their positions, how he’d blocked her exit. “Fuck.”

  Nova had laughed then, a little at his obtuseness but mostly at his nervous surprise. He stepped sideways.

  “I don’t need your help,” she said. Her impulse was to thank him, but she refused it. “I’m fine.”

  “I know you are. You’re good at this.” He said this like a pronouncement, like his stupid blessing made it true. Not the years of practice and honing the talent she was born with. Not the culinary degree or the three kitchens she’d worked in before this one.

  “I know I am,” she snapped.

  He grinned, a rare, slow-blooming thing. “The ego’s good, too. Practically a prerequisite for this job.”

  It doesn’t have to be, she wanted to yell. The macho culture, the aggressiveness and posturing, it was all so childish. Little boys on their bikes, forming neighborhood packs like the kitchen was a clubhouse.

  It made her show back up after a bad night. Made her want to head up a Michelin-starred restaurant someday and have her face in a photograph of the Top 100 restaurants.

  “All right, well,” he began. Truly, how was one human so bad at exiting a conversation? “You let me know, Gherin. If you need anything.”

  “Thank you,” she replied, sincerely. “But I won’t.”

  She’d been wrong.

  Rosemary

  In the morning, Rosie feeds Gnome and tends to the plants around her room. She brushes one finger against the pink-striped Calathea leaves, painted with thin strokes. She reaches for a philodendron stem, like a tiny arm extending toward a giant, deep green hand. With each new touch, she makes eye contact with the plant. Like she is asking what it needs.

  Rosie can feel Nova leaning against the door frame, wondering the same thing about her.

  “I’m fine, Novy,” Rosie says. But when her sisters don’t believe it, she struggles to believe it, too. Why can’t they just trust her?

  “Can I make you some breakfast before I leave for the airport?” Nova asks.

  Rosie sets down the watering can. “No, thank you.”

  “Ro,” Nova says, gently. “Please swear to me that you won’t go over there.”

  “Over where?”

  “To wherever he’s staying.” When Rosie doesn’t respond, because she is seething, Nova adds, “I can cancel my flight, Ro. I’ll stay. Just say the word.”

  It hits Rosie like whiplash, the comment reverberating back again. She turns, slowly, fists clenched. “Just say it to my face, Nova. Say that this never would have happened to you.”

  Nova blinks at her. “What?”

  “You knew he was poison. None of this would have happened if I had listened to you.”

  “No,” Nova says, evenly. “None of this would have happened if he wasn’t a monster.”

  Rosie grips her fists tighter, wanting to scream. She can read between those lines: Nova thinks Wyatt saw easy prey because Rosie is easy prey.

  “It’s not...” Nova starts again, looking frustrated with herself. “You know none of this was your fault, right?”

  “That’s what they tell me!” Rosie says in a sarcastic, too-chipper voice. Momma told her; the therapist she saw for a year told her.

  “It wasn’t your fault, Rosie,” Nova says.

  Willa appears in the doorway to referee. Rosie hates that her youngest sister gets put in the middle so often. But Novy gets under her skin. Expects too much. And Rosie pushes back.

  “But it was, Novy!” Rosie yells. God, it feels good to yell. The feelings release with the words, loud and unshackled. “You knew. Momma and Daddy knew! I didn’t. There’s something wrong with me! Just! Say! It!”

  “There’s something wrong with him, Rosie! He’s a hedge maze from hell! Momma and Daddy and me, we had a bird’s eye view, so we could see. We were farther away, that’s all.”

  “If that’s true,” Rosie says, “then why did I crumble last night?”

  “Because you were caught off guard! It’s so sneaky, the way he treats you.”

  “She’s right, Ro,” Willa says from the doorway. “And when it feels like your fault...you know that’s still him, right? He turned everything—everything—back on you.”

  “Neither of you understand,” Rosie says shakily. They had no idea how much sense her own thoughts had made, when she lived in that house. What now looked like denial had felt entirely true.

  “Ro.” Willa enters the room, just two steps. “He fooled me, too. Even last night! I started to wonder if he was as bad as I’d built him up to be. But he was. He was that bad. You were so brave to leave.”

  Rosie glances between them, disbelieving. These are exactly the things her sisters would say to try to make her feel better. But she only wants the truth.

  “Dammit, Rosemary,” Nova mutters. She stretches one arm back to Willa, who touches her hand. Rosie’s eyes flick between them, waiting.

  “Admiration,” Willa says quietly, looking up. “And anger. And protectiveness. And feeling like a failure. Frustration that she’s not communicating well with you.”

  Rosie’s eyes flood with tears. “Admiration?”

  “God, Ro.” Now Nova’s eyes are watery, too, and Novy never cries. “Yes.”

  Rosie can see, even with teary vision, that she’s been wrong. That Novy is on her side. That Novy has been on Rosie’s side even when Rosie herself wandered away from it.

  Rosie blots beneath her own lashes. “I’m sorry that I yelled.”

  “Oh, please,” Nova says, swiping the apology away.

  Rosie never yells, really, except at Nova. And she’s always wondered why that is. It seems so clear now: she can yell at her older sister because Novy’s love is not conditional on Rosie’s behavior. The tears take over, shaking her shoulders. She sinks to the edge of the bed, and her sisters drop beside her.

  “You’re going to miss your plane,” Rosie tells Nova miserably.

  “Like I give a shit about my plane.”

  And that, of all things, is what quiets the static in Rosie’s mind. Her sisters would kneel on the old pine floors beside her. They’d miss their flights. They’d plead with her to let them in, but they’d never, ever kick her door down. They’d whisper her name back when she’d lost it, place the m
issing pieces back into her hands.

  What a wonder—love that powerful, but so careful to never break anything in its path.

  Rosie holds out both her hands, and closes her eyes as each sister grasps on tightly. It feels as real as blood gushing out, fast and warm. Willa, she knows, can feel every facet of pain. Her distrust of herself, of others, her anger, her frustration at everyone who doesn’t understand, her fear that it could happen again, her embarrassment that she still feels drawn to him, her ache at being perceived as weak. The love—the huge, reliant love of her sisters. Surely Willa must feel that, too. And please, Rosie begs the universe, let both my sisters feel that I am also okay.

  When Rosie opens her eyes, Willa is looking right at her. “Nothing I didn’t already know.”

  Nova searches Rosie’s face. “How about I make cherry scones before I go?”

  Nova

  Late that night, in an outside borough of New York, Nova knocks on the apartment door. She rolls her eyes as Hunter scoops her up onto his dumb jock body and hauls her inside. A big dopey pit bull, Nova thinks. Roughhousing. When he sets her down, she has white flour smudges on her shirt. Her eyes find the pastry dough, rolled out thin on the countertops.

  A train groans past, rattling the walls. She missed it, the city noise. Craved it. But later this week, she knows her lungs will cry for the plains, for open air and seeing all the way to where the horizon line bends.

  “Your flight okay?” he asks.

  “Yeah,” she says. Her chest ached during takeoff, as it always does, leaving.

  “And your sis?”

  “Hanging in there. She’s tough.”

  “Why doesn’t that surprise me?” Hunter says, opening the fridge. “Beer?”

  Nova accepts the can, cold in her hand, and tips it back.

  “Don’t leave again,” he says. But he makes eye contact, reads her face. He has sisters, too. If they needed him, he’d swim across the Hudson in nothing but his skin. “Not for a while, okay?”

  “Okay,” Nova says. She weighs her heart in her palm, tests if it is enough or too much. As if it is a decision. As if any Gherin girl has ever believed she has total control of her destiny.

  Later, when he’s dicing tomatoes, she watches his forearms, still tanned from summer. A butcher knife tattooed down one arm, shears down the other. One for each parent’s vocation. She thinks she could stand to watch his arms—lifting crates of vegetables, shifting pans on the stove, held out and waiting—for a while. Maybe for a very long while.

  Willa

  Downstairs in the farmhouse, Willa hears a tap on the glass before Ingrid’s lavender fingernails appear under the barely open bedroom window. One long leg swings inside, then the other and her hips. Willa has a kind of low-level obsession with Ingrid’s hips, the heft and bone of them.

  “My whole family knows you sneak in here, you know. Just come through the front door.”

  Ingrid shrugs. “It seems more respectful to at least pretend I’m not breaking the rules.”

  She crawls along the bed until their bodies are aligned, and nuzzles into Willa’s neck.

  On contact, Willa feels that Ingrid is comforted. Contented. And a tiny bit worried. Ingrid has known for months that Willa can feel her emotions. But Willa is learning that touch can be like hearing, the difference between eavesdropping and knowing there is a buzz of sound around you.

  “Rosie okay?” Ingrid asks, her voice just below Willa’s ear. Willa is so helpless to the smell of her—the sandalwood shampoo, but also her skin. Can something smell soft?

  Willa shrugs, fitting her legs with Ingrid’s until they’re entwined. “She’s working through it.”

  Both girls stay quiet, as if listening for the sounds of Rosie’s sadness, for the wails of a minor-key orchestra. But it’s quiet, just now.

  “Doesn’t it freak you out sometimes, how badly love can break you?” Willa whispers.

  “Mmm,” Ingrid says.

  “You could hurt me like that, you know.” Willa means it, too. She handed Ingrid some vital part of herself earlier this year and trusted her with its safekeeping.

  Ingrid stretches her neck long, tucking Willa’s head beneath her chin. She reaches to lace their fingers together.

  “No,” she says, quiet. “Never like that.”

  The kissing that follows is interrupted by a sharp knock at the door and Rosie’s voice calling out, “Will?”

  “Just a sec!” Willa says, unraveling herself.

  “Sorry to bother,” Rosie replies. “Did Momma move the extra box of candles?”

  “Hall closet!” Willa says. “Top left.”

  “Thank you,” Rosie says, her voice already farther away. “And hi, Ingrid!”

  “Dammit.” Ing laughs, rolling over. “You guys know everything.”

  Rosemary

  Lifting Gnomey from the bedroom windowsill, Rosie scratches the spot behind his ears. She sets him on the bed, where he happily settles into a tight circle. Little nomad cat.

  Wyatt’s boot connecting with his skinny little rib cage. Even that, she reasoned at the time, was her fault. Wyatt had said not to feed him.

  The mangy thing goes or you do.

  He’d never done that before—suggested that she could, or should, leave. Rosie imagined a black, wrought-iron fence around her life with him. Had the gate really never been padlocked?

  Where did Wyatt imagine she’d go? Home, of course. To her family. They’d told her she could do that. Why had it not seemed truly possible until now? Why couldn’t she see it until Wyatt acknowledged it?

  So began a series of small dares. When Wyatt wasn’t home, Rosie dared herself to open the door, scoop up the cat, and walk to the sidewalk, across the street. No alarm sounded. Only the singong of the spring birds, finally here. She dared herself to put a few things in a bag. Harmless—and just as easily unpacked. When a friend from work picked her up for a shift, Rosie dared herself to ask for a ride home instead. Trembling, she grabbed the bag and the cat.

  She barely breathed until the house was far behind them.

  She barely breathed for months after.

  Now Gnome looks up at her with blinking green eyes, like a child waiting for a bedtime story. Once upon a time in a cold underworld, a boy took something from her that she can’t quite name—a tangled piece between trust and innocence. But not all of it. Not all of it.

  She’ll tell her daughters someday: If you don’t feel safe enough to yell back, you’re not safe enough. My babies, that is not love. She imagines three girls—will they look like her? Like a someday-partner or like Novy and Will? Will she see Daddy and Momma in their little faces?

  Rosie Gherin opens the bay window behind the ledge where she has lined up white pillar candles. The September air carries a chill, but she no longer fears being snuffed out. Rosie has fire in her blood from her ancestors, from Nova’s fast, stovetop heat and Willa’s smoldering coals. And some fire that’s all her own.

  One by one, she lights the wicks.

  * * * * *

  WHY THEY WATCH US BURN

  by Elizabeth May

  I.

  * * *

  THE WOMAN AHEAD of me bribed the guard for chalk before they executed her. I never learned her name; it might as well have been my own. My penmanship on this stone floor is abysmal, but I’m keeping my mind occupied while the crowds roar outside for the next of us. I smell the wood burning through the small, square window now, and it makes me want to vomit.

  Tomorrow, I am meant to leave. My punishment (a mercy, they say) is penance. Work. Prayer. But everyone knows women who go to those camps in the forest never come back out; what they mean is my bones are strong, and I am young, and I will not die quickly. My body makes for better labor than tinder.

  For those who come to this cell after me, this is for you. A lesson:

&n
bsp; Destroying a girl is one of the easiest things in the world. I would have said differently, once. It’s such a simple form of denial, and it goes like this: bad things happen to those girls. Other girls. Not this girl. Not me. I’m different.

  You’re only different until the day you’re not.

  My destruction began with words. I held the accusation on my tongue, uncertain. I fought my hesitance (because I’m different. I’m not those girls), that awful prophecy every woman remembers when her time comes. A prediction, based on the countless women who came before us.

  But I was compelled to say his name. To speak my truth: he hurt me, he put his hands on me, he left bruises.

  Liar.

  My explanation was punctuated by rattling, quick exhales, but they told me to calm down. They said I was being hysterical. They spoke to me as if I were a child.

  Why didn’t you fight back?

  Don’t they understand fear? Don’t they know what it looks like? Haven’t they seen animals lie prone on the ground, unable to move because they just can’t? That’s what prey do when they sense a predator. It’s how they survive.

  What were you wearing?

  Clothes. They were clothes. I wasn’t waving a red flag at a bull; I was just existing. I felt pretty until he made me feel shame.

  Flaunted your body. Asked for it. Wanted it. Deserved it.

  That’s not what happened. No, no, no. It was a complete sentence. No.

  Whore. Slut. Temptress.

  You seduced him with your clothes, your body, your sinner’s smile. You cast a hex with your eyes, didn’t you? That’s what he said. That’s what he told us. How could he resist? You’re nothing but a devil. A witch intent on destroying a good man.

  Here’s how to fulfill a prophecy: you are a woman, you speak the truth, and the world makes you into a liar.

  Then they tie you to a post, put you out into the town square for everyone to see, and light you on fire. They all cheer as the wind carries away your ashes.

  Thus endeth the lesson.