TEN
Each day drew hotter than the last, until the air was so heavy that birds ceased flying and blossoms mourned for honeybees. Gardens dried up; their flowers’ heads bent towards the ground, weak and thirsty. Alex began to feel depressed in her dark house, with the only lights coming from the door when Robert left or returned from work, or when Lucie stepped out to walk a few houses before turning around again, her black clothes burning her thin back.
Towards the end of June, it rained. It felt like a small miracle. Everything cooled and softened, and the breeze carried scents of the earth reawakening – fresh mint, crushed grass, rose petals – throughout the neighborhood. Deena opened a blind and read. Lucie ran outside in her underwear and splashed in puddles, her hair sticking to her skin. She shrieked when Robert drove up the drive, spraying her with oily water. Deena peered out of the window and smiled.
Alex looked out, too. She felt as though she would never understand her daughter again, and then she wondered if she ever had to begin with. Sighing, she welcomed Robert with a kiss. Deena tip-toed downstairs. Alex and Robert looked at her and nodded. There was something about a dark house that made people silent.
“I’m going outside,” Deena said, and she slipped out the door before Robert or Alex could object.
Raindrops rushed down her back and she shivered with delight. She leapt over a deep pool of mud, found her balance, and stood in silent appreciation for the blood that felt alive again inside her veins. Lucie saw her and ran over; she looked like a wild creature, mud up to her ankles and dirt streaking her face.
“Deena,” she cried, “there’s a giant puddle behind you!”
Before Deena could protest, Lucie reached forward to push her in. Deena grabbed Lucie’s hand and both girls went splashing into the puddle, dripping with mud, sheaves of grass sticking to their skin.
“You beast!” Lucie cried to Deena, mud clinging to her eyelashes, “you absolute beast!”
She laughed, and her laughter poured through Deena’s soul as the rainwater poured down her skin.
“No one’s ever called me a beast, you – you –”
“Bitch?” Lucie volunteered, smiling slyly.
“Yes!” Deena shouted, and she stood up, pulling Lucie up. Lucie fell back like a dead-weight.
“No, no, I’ll stay here,” she announced, and lay back, the mud pooling over her legs and shoulders.
“Till that her garments, heavy with their drink,” Lucie quoted, “pulled the poor wretch from her melodious lay, to muddy death.”
“I don’t think that Ophelia,” Deena laughed, “drowned in a foot of water wearing only her underwear.”
Lucie sat up, feigning a hurt expression.
“Hey, it’s possible,” she said, but she stood up and raised her arms to the sky, letting the dirt and grass slide down her body with the rain. In a matter of minutes, the pouring rain had cleaned the mud from the girls. They shivered and giggled and stumbled into the house, where they stood like two animals rescued from a storm. Alex looked horrified.
“Stay where you are!” she called, “you’ll get the foyer dirty!”
She disappeared from sight and returned a minute later with towels.
In my mind’s dark forest, where the light had begun to break through, the brook had filled with mud and scum. I checked in from time to time, making sure my prisoner was still held safe beneath the water. When I came home from Auralia’s, childless, just in time for my fifteenth birthday, I discovered he had disappeared. That was when I realized: no matter what I could do to him in the magical forest, he was still living and breathing only a few blocks away from my home. No justice had been done. No retribution served. The next time I looked into the brook, he was gone.
A while later, wrapped in towels, their hair drying in the breeze from an open window, Deena and Lucie sat together in the kitchen. Deena read a book and Lucie ate an apple, thoughtfully chewing.
“You don’t really believe Adam made Eve from a rib, right?” Lucie asked, examining the apple.
“Of course I do,” Deena said, frowning.
“Seriously? Come on. What about physics?”
“Physics explain only half of the truth,” Deena said firmly, closing her book.
“Okay,” Lucie said, shrugging. She tossed the apple core out of the kitchen window and leaned back, a confident demi-goddess. She leaned her head back, letting her hair flow out of the window and catch on the breeze.
Deena peered closely at Lucie. She saw a thin scar at the base of Lucie’s neck, white and thread-like. She pointed at it.
“What’s that?”
“What’s what?”
“That white mark.”
Lucie’s hand flew to her throat.
“You never noticed it?”
“No.”
“Seriously?”
Lucie ran her fingers across the scar.
“There were all sorts of rumors at my school on where I got this,” she said, “and I don’t deny or approve any of them.”
“Like what?”
Lucie shrugged.
“Some people thought I was in a gang,” she said, laughing, “and other people thought I liked rough sex.”
Deena cast a disapproving glance at Lucie.
”Well, which was it?” she snapped, suddenly irritable, her hair still wet against her neck.
Lucie wrapped her arms around herself, lowering her chin so her scar was covered. She turned her eyes up to Deena.
“A long time ago,” she said softly, “there was a princess who got lost.”
“Don’t change the subject, Lucie, I want to know where –”
“Let me finish,” Lucie whispered.
Deena sat back. Lucie’s eyes held pain and heaviness, and she smelled like pine and cardamom.
“So then,” Lucie continued, “just as she thought she’d be lost forever, a man found her. He told her everything was going to be fine; he could help her find her way back. She believed him. She followed him to his house. He was ugly and sweaty and he took off all her clothes, but she grew wings and tried to fly away. He cut her wings off. When she tried to get them back, he cut her throat, just enough to make her bleed and he took pictures of the wound and …”
Lucie trailed off, letting her towel fall around her hips. She leaned back, gazing at the ceiling. Deena was entranced.
“And what?” she whispered.
Lucie smiled.
“It doesn’t matter,” she said, the scar tightening around her throat. “It’s just a story.”
She turned her head away from Deena, giving her sign that the story was over: no more talking. Deena shuddered. She had heard rumors at her own school, vivid and boasting: both from boys who claimed they had slept with Lucie, and from girls who retold the boys’ stories much more vividly. Lucie had a terrible reputation, but despite her sins, despite her deep and storied flaws, Deena knew there was more to Lucie than what others made up. She felt that she had never cared about another person this way. Lucie was her sister. She felt it in her bones.
“I love you, Lucie,” she said softly.
Lucie nodded. She smiled. But she didn’t say it back.
