The Elementals

by Francesca Lia Block

  I shook my head. “I don’t like this rain.”

  “It’s a magical shower. Our guests love the rain. Come on. Let’s get you dressed.”

  She took me upstairs and I remembered the first time I had gone with her like this, to put on the blue dress and then came down to eat and dance with her and Perry and John. I was such a different person then. I hadn’t made love with anyone. No men looked at me. I kept my head down. I did well in school. But some things were the same. Jeni was still gone. My mom was still sick. As in love as I believed I was, my heart still ached as if it had been brutally broken, even in the midst of the most ecstatic lovemaking with John.

  Tania dressed me in a white bridal gown that night. It was of lace so fragile it was almost disintegrating, like cobwebs. It made me want to hold my breath. She painted my face white and put a veil over me.

  “A dead bride!” she chirped. “Perfect.”

  I adjusted the crown of the veil—a circlet of tissue-thin green leaves and golden roses—and it caught in my hair, tearing precisely at my scalp. “What are you? A fairy? An angel?”

  “Me, an angel?” She laughed. “I’m an elemental.”

  “A whatamental?”

  “A nature spirit. A bit like a fairy but that word’s been done to death, don’t you think? The elements. I’m fire. Perry’s earth. Johnny’s water. That’s why we needed you, Sylph.”

  John had mentioned this before but it seemed stranger when she said it. I shivered in the cold lace dress. It could have been made of clouds.

  “You’re air,” Tania said, handing me a cup of warm punch that smelled of cloves and cinnamon and something else I couldn’t place—like smoke and rain and minerals and light. “The fourth.”

  “What does that mean?” I asked.

  “You’ll see.”

  “I don’t want to see. I want you to tell me.”

  Tania knelt by my side. Her scent was like vanilla and honey.

  “It just means you were meant to be here, with us,” she said. “John loves you. He’s coming back to life.”

  John loves you.

  I could feel the familiar warm prick of tears coming and I didn’t want her to see me cry.

  “Okay?” she said. “Does that help?”

  I let her hug me. Her body always surprised me; it felt so small and thin and so steely at the same time. Her fuller breasts pressed against mine. They’d gotten smaller lately but John didn’t seem to mind; he kissed them just the same. I thought of his mouth on me and mine on Tania’s nipples, sucking like a baby. Then I shook my head to make it go away and took a sip of punch.

  I was drunk by eight o’clock. “Why don’t you lie down,” Tania said. “No one will be here until ten anyway.”

  “Where’s John?” I asked her as she walked me to my room. “I want John.”

  “He’ll be here.”

  * * *

  When I woke up the rain was still pouring down. My body felt leaden and my eyes were heavy as well; it was as if they had sunk deeper into my skull. I pulled myself up and shivered in the lace bridal gown, then got out of bed. A girl was staring at me.

  I jumped back before I realized it was my reflection. Even then, I still half-expected her to start speaking in someone else’s voice.

  Damn.

  John.

  Where was John?

  I picked up Tania’s piano shawl, wrapped myself in the embroidered roses and peonies and silk fringe and went downstairs. I left the crown with the veil on the dresser.

  The party was like a live thing raging through the house. The walls shook with music. Bodies filled the parlor—young men and women in top hats and tails, biker leather, furs and skins, purple wigs, monster masks; the only light came from candles so that the room was streaked with melancholy, flickering shadows. I recognized the friends from the Solstice party—Shoshanna, Sage, Erin, Steadman (even their names were like supermodels) standing in a circle, wearing elaborate headdresses made of twigs, leaves, flowers, bones, feathers and fur. Their eyes were closed.

  I was headed back upstairs to look for John when someone grabbed my arm.

  “Where are you going, ducky?”

  It was Eamon, the painter from L.A.

  I pulled away reflexively.

  “I’m sorry my paintings upset you,” he said.

  “What the fuck was that anyway?”

  Eamon’s fine, white hand clutched the banister. “I think we should get you some help.” His voice was tight. “Really.”

  I pushed past him and ran up the stairs.

  They were lying there, on the bed. Tania in her metallic sparkled dress. Her wings were tossed on the floor but there was a red feathered mask over her eyes. John in a suit covered with iridescent blue-and-green scales, a tangle of what looked like real seaweed in his hair and around his neck. Bare feet covered with sand. (Had he gone to the beach?) Perry—was it Perry? He wore brown fur trousers and a mask that looked so much like a real goat that it could have been taxidermy. The hinged jaw clattered as he turned toward me and fixed me with the yellow slitted eyes.

  Tania extended her hand.

  John’s eyes were sunken with worry.

  Perry’s goat jaw clacked.

  It looked as if they had been waiting for me.

  “What’s going on?” I said.

  “It’s okay, baby,” Tania said. “Come here.”

  Instead, I backed away, pulling her shawl around my shoulders.

  John got up and approached me the way you would a wild animal or someone with a weapon, stepping tentatively, hands outstretched in front of him, fingers down.

  “Come sit with us and we’ll talk,” he said. “Please, Ariel.”

  “We need you,” Tania said, getting up, too, coming toward me and taking off the feathered mask so I could see her eyes better. “Just the way you’ve needed us all this time. Now we need you. We can’t really explain it that easily. It won’t make a lot of sense to you. But we need your help.”

  She turned back to Perry. “Take that thing off. It’s scaring her.”

  Perry lifted the goat head off and it fell to the floor with a loud thud. The jaw continued to chatter for a few seconds.

  “We had a baby,” Tania said. “Camille. You can imagine what that is like because you are close to your mother. It’s loving someone so much you want to die if they go away. She was only here for a moment and then she went away and none of us have been the same.” Tania’s voice was rising in pitch and she was crying, tears melting makeup down her face. “We know about death. We know that souls continue on. But we can’t bring her back. Unless you help us.”

  “What are you saying?” I backed toward the door, reaching for the knob, but my hand only touched air and I stumbled. “That you want to bring back souls?” I stared at John. I could smell the electricity burning in the air. “Or maybe I’m just losing my mind. Is that it? Because I hope that’s it. Otherwise I’ve been living with three psychos and fucking one.”

  John’s face winced like I’d slapped it. “Don’t say that. You’re not crazy. We may be a little crazy. With grief. But we would never hurt you. And what Tania says is true, Ariel.”

  It felt like everyone was silent for five minutes, although it might only have been seconds.

  Then Perry said, “We need you, Sylph.” I saw he was crying, too. His bare chest glowed, every golden muscle and sinew defined.

  “What do you mean you need me?” I looked to John. Wanting him to make it stop, to make things go back to how they had been before—just us in the big bed, our pulses pressed together so that they vibrated through our bodies, no talk of soul retrieval or resurrection.

  “We need you to make love with all of us,” Perry said slowly. He looked at Tania. “Right?”

  She nodded. “You’re the fourth. It’s the only way to bring her back.”

  “So that’s why I’m here,” I said. “I should have known that’s why you let me in. And you’ve all been sleeping together this whole time, haven�
��t you? I’m just some missing piece for you to use, right, John?”

  I turned toward the door. “No!” John shouted. “Ariel. No!”

  As my hand touched the cold metal of the knob I turned back one last time. “Fuck. You,” I said. The bracelet spelling Jeni’s name, the one I had never removed all these years, caught and pulled and broke, scattering four white baby beads across the floor.

  * * *

  In the ballad, Janet, or Margaret as she is sometimes called, picks the double rose and a strange man appears to her and demands it back. When she arrives home she finds she is pregnant and goes back to where she had first met him to pick an herb to abort the child. He appears and tells her she must not get rid of his baby. “Were you ever mortal?” she asks. He says he is not an elf as she suspected but a mortal man who had been captured by the queen. He believes she is going to sacrifice him as an offering to hell that Halloween. The only way the girl can rescue him, he tells her, is to catch him at the crossroads, as he rides by on his white horse, and hold him while he shape-shifts into the form of many beasts and, finally, a piece of burning coal. So she does and he becomes himself again, naked as if reborn. The fairy queen wails that if she’d known he’d escape her she’d have taken out his eyes and replaced them with plugs of wood from an eldritch tree. But it was too late.

  * * *

  But that Halloween I knew I could not hold onto John Graves and still have any piece of myself left.

  I had to let him go.

  As I stepped outside I saw the giant, swaying back and forth on the porch, making soft, moaning sounds. He reached out one hand, like a slab of meat.

  * * *

  I went to Melinda Story’s that night because there was no place else to go. She came to the door in her robe, blinking at me with worry, and I asked her, panting, if I could come in. All I told her was that my boyfriend and I had broken up. She made me tea, ran a bath for me, gave me some dry clothes and let me sleep on her couch.

  My mom and dad arrived the next afternoon to drive me back to Los Angeles. I didn’t let them stop at the house in the hills to get my things. I hardly owned anything anyway—almost everything I had belonged to Tania. And I didn’t want to see John’s face again.

  That was it.

  Everything was over.

  The lovemaking, the sprawling garden dinners, the dancing, the music, the dreams, the dresses, the fairy tales told while John kissed me in the dark.

  And also the not knowing whom I slept with, the living in the land of the dead.

  It wasn’t that I was so shocked that they’d asked me to sleep with them. I’d seen it coming—I’d desired it in one way, though another part of me wanted to keep John to myself. But I’d run because of why they had wanted me.

  Now it was all over and I told myself I was relieved. And my heart hurt just the way they say it does—as if it had been pierced with something sharp.

  Along I-5 there weren’t many trees but I tried to remember which ones had elves in them according to one of the books I’d read in John’s library. Birch and cherry and oak, I remembered. Elm, ash, willow, cypress. There were no elves of the oleander bushes, that deadly poison with its deceptively cheerful flowers that crowded the islands on the highway and lined it on either side. I found myself yearning for tree elves and books. John had so many books. Books on Kabbalah and Gnosticism, Norse and Greek and Celtic mythology. Fairy tales and books of poetry and philosophy. I wanted to lock myself up in the house in the Berkeley hills and read every book there instead of going to school, instead of going back to Los Angeles. But it was too late. And even the stories in the books were changing, becoming as poisonous as the oleander.

  The sky was gray with haze and there was such a bleakness everywhere that I found myself sinking into a kind of stupor. I thought of all the tales John had told me. But I remembered them differently now. The girl who didn’t believe in the Fates and had a spindle stuck into her heart. The wood spirit who was captured in a wild hunt and nailed bleeding to the door of a man who did not believe in fae. The witches with sugar candies for fingers who lured children into their wells and ovens. Why hadn’t I pondered those tales before? I only heard the beauty, saw the glamour. Whom had I been living with?

  My mom sat in the backseat with me and cradled my head against her breast. She’d had reconstruction and you couldn’t tell. I heard her heartbeat through her thin sweater. She called me baby.

  When I was born, she told me, she rode home from the hospital in the backseat so she could be with me. She thought it seemed wrong, somehow, to bring something so tiny in a car. She had kept the clothes I wore that day—a little gown that made a pouch around my feet and a tiny pink knit cap that they’d given to me at the hospital. The gown had pink, blue and yellow ducks on it.

  We didn’t talk about what had happened to me that night in Berkeley. My parents played Little Earthquakes, not realizing that it made me think of Jeni. They stopped at a Fosters Freeze and bought me a vanilla soft serve, not seeming to know that I had given up sugar and, more recently, dairy. I licked it to its demise anyway and then promptly put my head down on my mother’s lap and fell into a deadly sleep. Like Beauty.

  But she only pricked her finger.

  I had a spindle through my heart.

  25. Deep as marrow

  In the weeks after I returned home, Melinda Story called me a few times and John Graves called me many times but I didn’t answer. I never even listened to the messages on the cell phone. They, the messages, especially John’s—the rich sound of his voice, the voice that had whispered to me in the dark—would only have drawn the spindle deeper in. Besides, I didn’t want John anymore. I wanted nothing because I was nothing.

  Except that, from the moment I saw my bed, with the little-girl butterfly quilt cover, I wanted to sleep.

  Sometimes I got up in the mornings and went jogging with what little energy I had left, returning home to take a bath and collapse back into bed. My bones ached and my back felt hollow, like the elf girl in the tale whose husband caught her pouring food into it and sent her away. One smoggy day, much too hot for November, I felt my phone vibrate in my sweatshirt pocket, against the jut of my ribs, as I ran on my spindle legs along the cement wash near my house. It was John. I took the phone out and watched it move in my palm like a creature. Then I lifted it above my head and threw it over the chain-link fence into a trickle of dirty water at the bottom of the L.A. river. My arm trembled from the effort. My phone was gone. But, more significantly, John was gone. I was gone.

  I didn’t get a replacement.

  * * *

  On another run I went farther than usual, past the house where Fritz Kragen lived. His car was in the driveway and I stopped for a moment, panting, pulsing, the day white in my eyes. My clothes were sopping wet and even under sun I shivered.

  Slowly I turned and stumbled away, knowing I wasn’t strong enough to fight with anyone. Except myself.

  In December, my parents sent me to a therapist they were also seeing, a tall, blond woman named Elise Ronan with an office waiting room filled with People and Us Weekly. I didn’t like her from the first moment. She gave my dad a bright smile and then turned to me and took my hand.

  “I’ve heard a lot about you,” she said. Her lips looked puffy, like a fish’s.

  I stared blankly at her. I could feel my father staring at her in a different way. I could feel Angelina Jolie and Brad Pitt staring, too, from the cover of one of the magazines.

  “Please, come in.” She smiled at my dad again and led me into her office. It was decorated in pastel colors. I sat on a mint green couch and crossed my arms over my chest.

  “This must be a hard time for you,” she began. “With your friend gone like that. Your mom being sick.”

  I shrugged and picked at my cuticles. I didn’t trust her, not at all. There was an ugly floral print on the rug and I stared at it. The flowers seemed to have eyes.

  “Do you want to tell me how this whole thing is makin
g you feel?” Elise Ronan asked. Although she was probably in her forties, there were probably more lines in my face than hers when I smiled.

  “I don’t feel much,” I said. “I’m just really tired.”

  “Are you eating?” she asked.

  I shrugged again. “Yes. I’m not really that hungry.”

  “You know, a lot of women your age have body issues. I know I certainly did,” the therapist went on. “I always thought I was fat.” She smoothed her skirt over her narrow hips.

  I blinked at her. Was she really talking about her weight?

  “You know,” she went on, “when the mother is ill it can really affect how the daughter feels about herself. It’s very natural. How do you feel about yourself in general?”

  I shook my head. Tears were coming to my eyes and I didn’t want her to see them. I couldn’t believe my mom had sent me here; if she hadn’t gotten sick it would never have happened.

  I stood up. “I can’t be here,” I said.

  My dad was waiting in the lobby, waiting for me. He looked worried but his face brightened again for a split second as Elise Ronan followed me out.

  “What’s the problem, Ariel?”

  “I need to go home,” I said.

  He turned to the therapist and made an apologetic gesture with his hands. Was this my father?

  “It’s okay,” she said. “We can try again next week.”

  “What the hell was that?” I asked on the way home after my fuming silence didn’t provoke any response from him.

  “What the hell was what? You walked out on her. I don’t really appreciate that. Her time is valuable,” my father said.

  I wanted to bang my forehead against the glass. “Who is she? She’s scary. I can’t believe you and mom picked her.”

  “Actually she’s a very good therapist,” my dad told me. “She’s very caring. Your mom wanted us to be in good hands…” He stopped.

  “What are you even saying?” He came to a sudden stop at the light and I slammed my foot forward on an imaginary brake. We went on in silence for a while.

  Finally, he spoke. “I’m sorry, Ariel.” He pulled the car over and leaned his head against the side of the car. “I don’t know what to do.”