It's the same master suite that has played home to the Vega heads of house for summers unending; the space has hardly changed except for the subtle effects of disuse. A little ghostlike maid, an unsettling, inhuman-looking girl in black lace, embroidered gloves, had of course tidied the space for the long-awaited return of the matriarch Luciana, but she has not been allowed in here since then. It would unsettle the mother too much.
It's her son who sits beside her now; even Vega can bow his head sometimes, it seems. The woman's white, white hand (the skin is still so smooth, even though the bones of the graceful thing have begun to show) clutches her son's tight, too tight.
She is holding a black-haired baby, and she is overcome.
"Marius," says Luciana, strangled with a wellspring of emotions it has been too long since she knew how to express. And she says her son's name again, and again, proud, overwhelmed, her dark eyes fixated on the infant's delicate face as she holds him to a bosom made for children -- even at her age, like a living Madonna. Vega is not especially sensitive to imagery, but in that moment, he wishes to capture it; his mother, his child.
"His mother named him Lucian, Mama," Vega tells her carefully. He watches her eyes brimming, he keeps his own voice level. "His mother's here. I want you to be able to meet her, Mama... can you do that?"
She doesn't seem to hear him; is it difficult for her, the passing of time, the evolution of her family dynasty?
"Mama?"
It seems that Luciana will answer, and yet all of a sudden, there is the flash of a camera. Mother and son look up to see the long, lean shape of an interloper in the frame of the door; Aden Brande, nephew and cousin, had stole in so silently, coming on like a bad omen.
"May I intrude?" Asks the black sheep with uncommon elegance, politesse. And yet he passes into the room without awaiting permission, placing the camera on the nightstand presumably as a gift to his cousin. Brande's aunt, his cousin Vega, stare at him silently.
"Marshall," says Luciana, conflicted, but smiling, purse-lipped. She holds the baby close.
"That's just Aden, Mama," says Marius, darkly. And Brande smiles, crookedly, and he stands over where Marius sits, and looks down at him. Looks down at the baby, too, his first time seeing it; reflexive twitch of something negative, undefinable, at the maternal scene. Discreetly presses the edge of his hand to his upper lip, as if to repress a wave of nausea.
"Brande, when are you leaving?" Asks Marius directly. "I don't want you near my kid, and my sister's coming, so you should probably get out of here."
"Where is Mercedes, the dear little thing?" Luciana asks dazedly, pet-pet-petting Lucian's downy crown adoringly.
"Your sister?" Says Brande, mildly, ignoring her, as if he did not know to whom Marius referred.
And Vega cannot, he will not, lose his temper in front of his mother, in front of the baby. And he won't lose his temper for Brande's sake, that's for sure. "Nettie's on her way here to see her mother and her nephew. I don't think you should be here when she arrives."
"Neither do I," says Brande, easily; that's too easy, Vega reflects, and Luciana is gazing at Brande in the strangest way.
"Marshall," she says again.
There's a long silence; Only briefly does Lucian agitate, shifting, squeezing tiny fists, as if to hide against his pale, lovely grandmother.
"Marius," says Brande, and he lifts his chin. The citrines are impassive, unearthly, and the electric line of his shoulders is straight. "Antoinette is not your sister."
"Marshall," says Luciana again, more urgently. In the way of babies, perhaps Lucian perceives something; he makes a sound, a muffled little noise as if tears are imminent. "Marshall," says Luciana again, with distinct anxiety, adoration, a strange, unfamiliar cocktail.
Vega -- he is becoming more comfortable holding him -- leans in as if to retrieve the child, but something about his mother's stricken body language stops him. "The fu-- what are you talking about, Brande?" Weary, Marius Vega is so weary of the mad.
"She's my father's child," says Brande, glacial, expressionless except for the luminous way in which he watches Marius for a reaction. "Isn't she, Aunt Luciana?"
She says only, despondently. "Marshall, please--"
Says Marius, "Mama?"
Lucian's crying.
Says Brande -- and only now does he allow himself the razor's edge of his subtlest, most vicious smile -- through the mask of that kind of frozen, sick fury is the only way he can produce words like these, can acknowledge a fact like this, so distasteful as to shake the foundation of his being. Of course, of course -- the cruelest, the most bitter of ironies. "She's my half-sister."
Marius has no answer; it's hard to tell whether he's more shocked at the fact or at the circumstances under which Brande chose to believe them. He forgets himself; he says, "motherfucker," under his breath, although it isn't clear whether he means Brande or Brande's father, and Lucian cries louder. In just a few minutes, one of the attentive staff whose life's occupation is the care and comfort of the child of Marius Vega and Jill Lockhart will come in, summoned by the sound, to retrieve the baby.
Luciana's crying. "Marshall," she says, "Wh-what -- why --"
Vega wants to ask his mother if it's true, but she's too fragile for confrontations, he knows. She's too weak. He can see it in her face right now, and it sickens him, because in her eyes, in her tears, he knows Brande is not lying. And he can't hate his mother, and so he hates his cousin, a stone that hardens in his gut.
"This is what you wanted me to know, Brande? This is what this has all been about?" Fathomless, fathomless.
Silence; the revelation is effective enough on its own without Brande repeating it, and it's sickening enough to taste in his own mouth, so he says nothing.
Mother and infant cry. Says Marius, hoarsely: "Does Antoinette know?"
"I think she knows," says Brande. "I think," he adds, reflective, as if something had occurred to him for the first time, "maybe she always has."
Silence, except for the crying of the young and old. Vega's coal black eyes, the inheritance of his father, meet the ill yellow eyes of his cousin, who'd inherited his from his own. So had Antoinette, come to think of it. Come to think of it, she looks more like a Brande -- she is more of a Brande -- than Mercedes, born of an unrelated mother, had ever been.
Says Brande, "I trust this is the end of your self-righteousness."
Silence and crying.
Then Marius says, "I think you'd better go, Brande."
"Fair enough."
Marius has reclaimed his son from his mother's arms; Luciana is overcome again, though with a certain immutable grief, she has curled over on herself, she is trying to remember the rosary, her prayers for forgiveness, and it is impossible, impossible for her son to watch.
Marius says, "You'd better go far from me. I don't think I want to see your face for a while. And stay away from my sister."
My sister. The slow, smokewisp curl of Brande's crooked lips is impossibly cold. "Advise her to stay away from me," he reciprocates simply. Gilded gaze falls on the crumpled Luciana, and there is nothing evident in the eyes save for a pale, detached sort of fascination, subtle revulsion. "Lovely to see you again, Aunt," he says, low.
And then, says Brande: "Congratulations on your new family, Marius."
It doesn't seem that he's insincere. Just distanced, ambiguous, impassive. And the gesture of farewell that he makes with one black hand is similar to a benediction, archaic, silent, before the alchemist leaves the room, its air clotted with ghosts that for once, for merciful once, have nothing to do with him. It's liberating.
she knows me
and she knows what i mean
no stopping to ask for directions
and no directions to give for you asking me
i'm living for what's on my mind
i'm living for what's on my mind
i am
i was climbing a mountain
but i did not see a top
i was climbing to meet you
and i got lost
now i'm living for what's on my mind
i'm living for what's on my mind
she spreads her legs like wings for me
she makes herself feel bad for me
and i feel love through my gloves
There was a kid in a tree
Among the birds and the bees
Between bee hive and bird nest
(And I think you know the rest)
He wanted to be free with them
But they weren't believing
Pecking and stinging him
Till he wasn't breathing
But it ain't gonna do him in
He'll just go to heaven
Not done, just a dreamer of ten or eleven.
--
Just a little more. Mmh, god, just a little more, and then I can leave here. We can leave. And when I say this to myself in the first breath of autumn, I'm not sure if I'm talking about the lakehouse or about everything.
I finished the Sun, and I'm tired like I always have been. I feel if she'd died, I'd know, so I must assume she's all right. I don't have the energy for caring -- I did what I wanted, and what I'd meant to do all along. I just need to know the extent of the damage, the totality of my success, and so I'd be anxious to see her if I wasn't so certain I soon will.
The air here is affecting me -- I feel almost like Luciana, sleepless and on edge. I could be keeping her calm, but by now her son is likely neck deep in the past, just as I intended (of course). Let him comfort her while I ready myself for the final blow. I trust Marius will not ask me about my sister like that ever again, nor harangue me about his child's mother, once I am well enough to sit down with my aunt and cousin.
Marius hasn't come to see me; doubt he knows that I've been ill, either. He knows he's being taught a lesson. He probably knows I'm not finished.
That's just as well, too, that he stays out of my way, that he had no opportunity to bother Shannon -- except to eat everything she cooked, which means Milla and I are stuck eating Persephone's food. But if Persephone's cooking is the largest inconvenience of this family reunion, I can count myself fortunate.
I'd love for Ray to be here as well, but he hasn't accepted my invitation. Really, and then all I would need would be dear Nettie, and we could all sit around the fucking table for dinner. Those are thoughts more violent than I can safely entertain now, in the state I'm in, so I shouldn't push my luck. We'll be fine.
The silent surrender of Vega means Milla is left alone, too; that there is no one to influence her but me, which is precisely how I wanted.
That, too, is sometimes more than I can stand, with things as they are -- Milla's blush, Milla pressing her knees together, Milla's only for you, Milla's worshiping all my signs and seals. This would have been a different sort of vacation entirely had I not put her in Mercedes' room, where even I am too superstitious to have her, not in front of my sister's ghost.
My sister's ghost -- I don't know what haunts me more this time of year, the distinct impression of her present shade, or the idea that there is nothing left of her here but my memories of the scent of summer ending on the lake. In her room I think about the composition of dust, the probability that there are fibres of her hair among the tiny motes that glitter in the light, that there are cells of her skin in the pores of the wood.
Had there been dresses of hers still in storage here I might have lost myself, but my parents have removed all trace of her.
It's just two weeks away from the day I visit the grave, and that I dreamed of Phin in the past few days' delusions sits in my gut like a shard of lead. I try to turn it to hatred -- I try to make myself loathe that girlchild, for superimposing her leaving on the day of my sister's departure.
I can't hate her. It's no one's fault but my own.
If anything, I remind myself, her ability to steal into my dreams even still and place her little image (so like mine) in the lens of my memory beside Mercedes' headstone, holding my stone, my red heart on a gold chain (what intolerably sentimental imagery) is all the reason why she should not still be here, why I prefer it that she has gone.
It's my sister buried there, and not my madmuse's hollow bones. It's harder and harder to remember the song she sang. While Mercedes gets closer to me, Phineas will draw farther and farther away, and it will be as if she were never really here. Phin, Phina, Phineas sounds a lot like fin, final, finished, and perhaps all along she was never real. In my mad moments, I'm certain she wasn't, that she was some delusion the Ten made manifest to ruin me, to torment me with ideas of my dead.
My dead.
This year, there is another stone I need to find.
Soon. Not yet; there is enough in front of me now, and Milla too. Supposing even if I had myself made Phineas; even if she had been a flower from my own seed -- who is truly 'father', the one who provides the biology, or the one who shapes the self? What child is more mine, the one I birth or the one I breed?
I have made mistakes. I'm not making them with Milla, no matter how the ghosts call.
It's almost over -- just a little more. And then I'll have everything I want, everything I have asked for. Everything.
--
I got a freeway in mind
(Let go of my head)
Walk down my line
Better be sure you'll be dead
To get up on top these days, you gotta be a low life drifter, so
Slither up just like a snake upon a spiral staircase
Slither up just like a snake upon a spiral staircase.
[--kurt vile, 'beach on the moon' (listen in player to the left)]
The way he wanted it to go
Is the way it went
Don't think we're letting him
Get away with it
You say you saw him on the hillside
Well, I swear I saw him in the meadow
Do you believe in ghosts or do you
Believe in faith?
So don't throw the bones away
And we'll find a place to pray
Because I can see him and
You can see him
But no one saves the day
--
This is my house, my lab; this is a memory of mine, only I've got in my hands the scales of snakes and not the materials of carmot and alkahest. I hear the door open behind me, I remember the bile of my old rage. Only this time it's not Naomi standing at the bottom of the stairs; it's Shannon, rubbing her wrist.
She says: "I want to have a baby."
She shouldn't be in here. No one should be in here. While I watch her, a haggard black bird seems to materialize from the shadows behind her, and takes a position on her shoulder. Strange shapes are moving in the darkness, and there is the scent of vitriol.
I tell her: "Never." That's exactly what I said, I think.
I don't want her to get any closer, this Naomi-Shannon apparition, but suddenly she's behind me, she's putting her hand to the base of my neck, and suddenly it's my hand that hurts, my left hand, Thanatos' seal is bleeding -- I look down and a black scorpion is flashing, glittering-skittering away from the injury site, and I am aware of being poisoned, I'm going to be ill immediately, and when I jerk my hand I can hear a glass flask shattering --
Mercedes' hands shake, and she drops the glass frame she'd been trying to hang. The insects we'd pinned inside are round, exposed under the shadowed glass, and that black scorpion is pinned prominently in its center. Only it's still alive, it's jerking with the pins in its body. I look at my sister, and she looks at me, wringing her trembling hands.
"I broke it," she says.
She must have cut herself somewhere, because I can smell blood, but when I reach for her, she -- backs away from me? What is this painting that hangs behind her, this enormous black-and-gray canvas? I remember it, I know what it is, but I don't remember the violet, the green --
"Don't you care?" She asks me, and her voice sounds wrong, that's Jill's voice -- why did I think I was talking to my sister when it's Jill here, her hands on her swollen belly, and her eyes are sick-violet, accusatory, and she is not supposed to be here --
"Get the fuck out," I tell her. Somewhere I am aware again, I can pull the Ten together, we can remember what we are doing, we're walking down a long, mirrored corridor with a locked door at its end, and on the door is a seal. Upstairs, Naomi is breaking dishes into the sink, and she's crying, this shrill, horrible squalling. I can't do this again --
"I can't," I tell Shannon, who is in my bed, undressed, whispering my name. She has the long tail of a snake, but for some reason this seems correct.
"Why?" She says, and I wanted to ask her the same thing, why, why me.
"Because she's watching," I say, and in the closet of my room is ...Antoinette? I can see her little yellow eye, my eye, peeping on us from the dark. The entire room tilts, and so abrupt is the imbalance, the wrongness, that I become immediately aware of myself in the lakehouse again, of holding Shannon by the shoulders hard enough to bruise her, manifold violet injuries appearing on a bleeding door at the top of a tall, tall ladder --
"What've you done?" Says my sister's voice, and she sounds so sad it breaks me. That blood I smell is my own, one of the arcana is opening in my skin, and I have a nauseating moment of I can't do this, and I'm going to lose -- Shannon looks devastated, pulling away from me, I've broken something in her eyes --
I'm lying face-down in the library and my heart isn't beating, and I hear Ray, and I've never ever heard his voice sound like this: "What've you done?"
"You're such a fucking idiot," says Marius, standing over my hospital bed.
No, no, this isn't right, this isn't how it's meant to go, I muster the agents and we tear through the aether, we must find our way back to this field -- there she is, Shannon standing on a hillside, and a man is holding her. It's a funeral; there is a woman there I've never seen, a witch, and she's sobbing as if her heart will break, because she's lost something, she's lost --
Yes. We're winning. I grab my sister's hand, and I tell her, "Come on," and I'm running through the long grass with her -- god, suffusing euphoria, we could fly if we wanted to, everything aligns, and my own power's such that I know awe -- we're running to them, this crowd on the hillside, where the Ten are standing with Shannon under a sick-colored sky.
But Mercedes doesn't keep up -- her weight gets heavier, she slows like she's moving through water, and I lift her onto my back like always; a blur out of the corner of my eye is little Antoinette, crying, "It's my turn," but her presence is like a flicker of static, there and then gone. This is it, and I can't be stopped; there's a ladder in the sky leading up to an unraveling seal, the ceiling of the world is opening --
Mercedes. She's become so heavy that I can take only the smallest steps, and somehow the funeral party doesn't seem to draw any closer. Her head on my shoulder aches, and she whispers in my ear, sad and sorry. "You can't go forward," she says. Her form on my back -- it's not her anymore, it's the heavy, crushing coils of a large snake, and it's killing me so slowly that it's almost anticlimactic. Oh, this is it, then, what it will feel like to die.
"You don't know what it feels like," says someone else, and I lift my head, and there's Phineas in a black dress, her hands clasped at her waist as if she's mourning. There's no one else around, but I know I'm not lost.
"Oh god, Baby," I hear myself say. "Baby, I'm so sorry."
"You're not sorry," she says, and she shakes her head. Over the horizon a car is coming to take her away, and I know I'm running out of time. "You're not sorry at all, Daddy. You held me and you didn't even cry."
I hear sirens. Somehow the snake is gone, and I'm holding in my hand a very small body bag. It's closed, and I can't tell if there's anything in it or not, and my hands are bleeding so heavily from the scorpion sting that my entire left arm is coated in blood. Someone is lying in the grass just ahead of me, in pain, but from the shape I can't tell if it's Naomi or Shannon.
"Look at me," says Phina.
"I am looking at you," I tell her. "I can't stop looking at you." Ugh, god, this ache, this fucking knife in my breast, this tightness, some black mass of unshed tears. I want her back.
"No, look," says Phina, and she points down at her feet, and there's a tiny little gravestone, a pale placard, but for some reason my head aches and I can't read the name -- Naomi, you named it? What was her name? Where's the stone? There's a stone in my fist, the stone of the Philosophers, but it's spilling blood between my knuckles like a little beating heart.
An ambulance pulls up alongside the grave. "You never even knew my name," says Phina, and she gives me a rueful look. "You just thought of me as yours. I have to go," she says, she inclines her head, and with impossible grace, she simply alights into the back of the ambulance, it swallows her, and Naomi is crying, and crying -- no, that's Shannon crying. I've almost reached her.
She's still lying in the grass, and she looks up at me, blood soaking her nightgown all over her hips, thighs -- she's in agony, and she asks me: "Where's your Baby Girl?"
"I broke it," I tell her, looking down, and I am as cold and dark as a pillar to the heavens. I won. It's done.
But the door in the sky remains closed. Why won't it open? There's nothing in my hands, there is no one else here any more but Shannon and I -- I don't understand. Why won't Shannon stand? Why does she keep bleeding, why is she turning violet, why is she dying? Why can I still hear the sirens, the screaming?
"Please," she begs me. I can't look at her, I can't look at the little stone, even though it's dawning on me what the Ten want me to do, what they will demand in exchange for breaking this seal.
"Never," I tell her.
She's holding it out to me. The little bloody body of a baby girl. She wants me to hold it.
She says, "Please."
The world is beginning to peel. I can't hold this together much longer. I can feel something like an insect crawling on my skin -- it's my sister's fingers wrapping around my neck, around the column of my spine. It'd be so easy just to let go, to let this whole world implode.
But I can't. I hold my hands out, and I take the thing from her, and when I do, the thing in my chest un-knots, it unravels like a particularly complex seal, and the sky opens for the rain at precisely the moment I feel, like a foreign sensation, the sting of tears in my eyes.
"It's mine," I tell Shannon, and I'm not holding a baby anymore but a dead scorpion. It's raining on me -- I can't tell if it's the rain or my tears -- but she's bathed in sunshine. Something poisonous is washing away; my hands have stopped bleeding, and I'm just holding the Philosopher's Stone.
---
The next thing I'm aware of is lying in bed. I can smell Milla somewhere nearby. There's not a lot of blood, but I feel turned inside-out, nauseated-sick, the unbearable smell of milk. Why the fuck do I hear a baby crying? Oh, Jill's baby. This is the lakehouse. I broke the curse, but I'm deeply poisoned. The Ten are pleased with me that I endured their torment, that I did this mostly correctly. Mostly.
The process was messy. Milla asks me all kinds of questions, and as usual all I can tell her is I don't know and we'll see. But I'd lie, I'd make up any story she wanted to hear if it would keep her lying near me. I can only really rest if she's here, the Ten are pleased to have her, and I desperately need her to keep me stable. How ironic.
I wonder what happened to my sister's and my bug collections. I wonder where that baby is buried.
--
I say don't throw the bones away
And force them into place
Because I can see him and
You can see him
But no one saves the day
He sent you to the east and he kept me west
I've got a compass and
You've got a compass
To see with
And I know you've heard of such authors
Do you think the judge will ever die?
And captains are cruel when captains are cruel
You can't blame the horses they ride
So don't throw the bones away and
find a place to pray
Because I can see him and
You can see him
But no one saves the day
Your prettiness is seeping through
Out from the dress I took from you, so pretty
My emptiness is swollen shut, always a wretch
I have become
So empty
Please don't leave me
"Thank you for agreeing to see me on short notice," said the woman on Dr. Carter's couch in a tremulous voice. Everything about her composure was off -- the pale lips, the way her short, modern cut was just a little disheveled, the way the woman clutched at her Kleenex as if she were much, much younger. Naomi Weiss kept her ankles tucked underneath her, and looked at her fine-boned hands.
"That's all right," said Dr. Carter. "Is there a problem with the prescription?"
"No," said Naomi, hesitantly. She always spoke in whispers, brown eyes stealing sidelong occasionally, as if she felt herself being watched. Manifesting paranoia again, wrote the doctor on the yellow pad, without once taking her hawkish eyes off of the patient. "I had been sleeping fine, but..."
"The nightmares again?"
"Yes, all of a sudden," said Naomi, sitting forward hesitantly.
"Can you describe them?"
"I... well, the same ones," said Naomi evasively. She tidily tore the damp Kleenex into two neat halves, balling each up in either fist, keeping her hands, fingers busy.
"About your ex-husband and the baby?"
Naomi flinched; it seemed she didn't care to vocalize either ex-husband or baby. Dr. Carter's face remained placid, but inwardly she frowned, made a few notes about the patient's regressing, and asked: "Why do you think the dreams have begun returning, Naomi?"
"I... don't know," she said, tucking her hair behind her ear prettily. She really was a lovely woman, if a bit on the thin side, even with the beginning of fine lines around her eyes. "I think... he's done something. That's the only thing I can think of, he must be using his..." As if she were about to be reprimanded, Naomi pursed her lips. Psychotherapy had a way of making everyone feel childish.
"Naomi, do you remember when we talked about 'projecting'? Remember, your ex-husband does not have any sort of 'magical power' over you. All of that was just a form of emotional terrorism designed to make you feel afraid. That isn't real," said Dr. Carter, while her ink pen scratched rapidly all over her pad. She wondered briefly if the receptionist was back from lunch and how quickly she could secure a hospitalization for Naomi Weiss if it turned out to be necessary.
"Yes," she said, in a way that didn't sound certain at all, tremulous, as if still haunted by her most recent dream. "But then why do I sometimes --"
"Naomi," said Dr. Carter, carefully, calmly. "Your ex-husband does not have magical powers, and he is not possessed by spirits. Those things simply aren't real. Do you understand me?"
"But my baby --" And here, the color drained from her face, she felt frustrating, helpless tears sting her eyes. Some days, Naomi Weiss felt like one old wound that wouldn't stop opening.
"The loss of your child was very hard, Naomi, and we've accepted that this is a pain that will be with you for the rest of your life. Do you remember your process on that, the journals we did? And it's normal and natural to blame your ex-husband because of the ways the stress and the pain you felt at that time might have helped create the situation. But you know that there were also quite legitimate medical reasons for your miscarriage, for your infertility -- please try to remember."
Naomi took only small, nervous little breaths, and Dr. Carter watched her closely.
"Do you remember all the work we did, Naomi? He doesn't have any influence on your life any more. Say that to me."
"He doesn't have any influence on my life any more," she gulped, trying to steady herself.
"Have you been stressed at work? My opinion is that when you're unable to cope with daily life, you sublimate stress onto these fantastical memories of your ex-husband as some mystical figure who's causing you nightmares from afar. That's why you start having the dreams again, isn't it? It's common to have flashbacks of trauma during times of stress; it's perfectly normal."
Naomi thought. She had been a little stressed, she supposed, and so she nodded, her breathing slowing. "Yes, I suppose. Perhaps, if I could, ah--"
"A higher Ambien dosage?" Dr. Carter filled in for her. She had already written the script, and prepared to tear it off.
"Yes," said Naomi, wringing at her shredded tissue. She'd torn it to bits.
--
I'm watching Naomi full bloom
I'm hoping she will soon explode
Into one billion tastes and tunes
One billion angels come and hold her down
They could hold her down
Until she cries
[ok, and now i'm ill, awesome. haven't forgotten you guys, hang in.]
