The bride-to-be, whose cruelty toward her sister had cooled into mild disdain in the ardor of Jonathan’s courtship, shrugged her shoulders.
As became her nature since Patina’s disappearance, Permony took this stoically. If she bled inside, no one could tell. In his chair, Elias pondered his hands and did not object, so deep was his gloom he could not rescue his darling daughter.
On the day of the wedding, a tangle of clouds obstructed the sun and threw shadows over Cinema Garden. Thick fog shrouded the jasmine blossoms, burnished the air with a chilly hue. The guests arrived in their coats, hair rumpled by wind, fearing it would rain before they returned home. Once inside the cavernous tent, however, they were astonished to find sunlight and palm trees. The parents received the guests at the entrance, all proud and beaming except for Elias, who could barely stand to mutter his greetings. The mayor came with his brother the judge, the general with his wife and four colonels. Renowned bankers and merchants took their seats—all good friends of Jonathan’s father. Everyone noticed that neither Gabriel nor his wife was present.
Unbeknown to Meridia, Eva had attempted to have her ejected from the table of honor at the last minute. “Jonathan’s great-aunt is coming after all,” she explained to Malin. “I’m sure your sister-in-law wouldn’t mind sitting away from your brother.” Malin, who had silently grown to respect Meridia over the years, took one look at her mother and said, “You don’t have to sit at my table but she does.” Eva gasped in disbelief, turned to Permony, and berated her soundly for wearing too little rouge.
All the guests agreed on one thing—there was no denying the groom’s love for his bride. Tall and bright-eyed, with lanky brown hair and a patient mouth, he followed her movement with a nearly sacramental devotion, which the bride accepted as if she had expected nothing less. At twenty, Malin had a kind of beauty that commanded worship as much as it resisted intimacy. Her visage was stunning with its jet-black hair and delicate cheekbones, yet her impenetrable air of self-sufficiency discouraged her admirers from coming closer. A splendid white gown, a sparkling artillery of jewelry—these were no match for her eyes, which remained the boldest and most intimidating thing about her.
But beauty of a different nature rivaled Malin’s. Wearing a plain avocado dress Eva had grudgingly purchased at the last second, Permony managed to attract a fair share of attention. Many were drawn to her polite and disarming manners, took pleasure in speaking to her, and noted how her whole face glowed without the aid of a single diamond. One distinguished-looking foreigner with short yellow hair and a long mustache was visibly smitten. He could not stop glancing at her every few minutes.
“She’s glorious, isn’t she?” said Daniel as they sat down for dinner.
Meridia, watching the same yellow-haired foreigner steal yet another glance at Permony, nodded without asking which sister he was referring to.
“She is,” she said with a surge of affection. “I’ve never seen her look prettier.”
She turned to Noah on her other side and encouraged him with a nudge. “Go sit with your grandfather.”
Noah opened his mouth, closed it, then got to his feet. Meridia watched anxiously as the familiar scene repeated itself. At Noah’s approach, Elias emerged out of his gloom with a roar of laughter. But then just as suddenly his face darkened, the laughter stopped, and back he tumbled into the shadows. Despite Noah’s attempt to cheer him, he kept his eyes bent until the boy returned confused and defeated to his seat. Elias would not look at him, would not regard the scar his hand had branded.
It was Eva who performed the heavy lifting. In order to draw attention away from Elias, she stayed on her feet all night and graced every table with her invincible hostess’s smile. With skill she shrugged off his silence as “simple indigestion,” spread ripples of laughter wherever she went, and urged the guests to eat and drink but “save plenty of room for the cake.” Her hair was showing white, a curious and maddening condition that no dye was able to camouflage, but her figure was solid and sprightly in a cascade of ruffles. In spite of herself, Meridia felt a tinge of admiration for the woman.
At a sign from the matchmaker, the conical ceiling parted to reveal glimmering stars. Fireworks exploded, then magically simmered into a hundred white doves. The guests erupted in cheers. The sheer organza fluttered like ribbons. As the birds soared into the night, eight matrons led by the groom’s mother leapt to their feet and charged toward the bride. Malin, somehow managing to retain her dignity, succumbed to the blindfold and the relentless tickling. In the midst of the commotion, Meridia noticed the strangest thing. Elias was looking at the distinguished-looking foreigner who had been stealing glances at Permony. His gaze seemed angry and troubled, as if he had placed the man’s face from somewhere but wished he had not.
ELIAS’S CONDITION DETERIORATED OVER the next several months. First to go were words, slipping like sand from an uncurled hand. Then thoughts eroded, taking with them habits and memories. Every morning, Elias awoke to remember less, and his days regressed to those of an infant. If he was hungry, he fussed. If he wanted something, he drummed his fingers impatiently. Nothing upset him anymore. Everything erased in a stroke of mercy.
The doctors agreed there was nothing they could do. They said a blood vessel had ruptured in his brain, debilitating cell after cell quickly and unstoppably. One thing they could not agree on was numbers. Three, five, seven, nine. Weeks or months or years they could not say. After each prediction, Eva went out to the front lawn and wept among the roses.
Mobility was the last to go. Elias spent his final weeks in bed, eyes strapped to the ceiling in search of some impalpable firmament. He had shrunk to half his size, his body a mere hanger for loose flesh and folded wrinkles. A child’s perennial smile lingered on his lips. Aided by Permony, Eva tended to him faithfully. Together they bathed him, scooped food into his mouth, wiped spittle from his lips. They held him steady in the bathroom as he went about his business.
In those weeks, Elias let his love for Permony show. As soon as the girl entered the room, he grinned foolishly like a simpleton. He would not sleep until he heard her voice, would not eat until her cool hand touched his cheek. When nightmares harassed him, it was Permony he hollered to see, all the while ignoring his wife, who fretted by his side. Like beads on a necklace Eva strung one snub after another, waiting for the right time to exact her payment from Permony.
It happened one day in the middle of autumn. Since Elias fell ill, it was Eva who had been running the shop on Lotus Blossom Lane. That afternoon, due to a lack of customers, she closed business early and went home. As she was making her way up the stairs, she heard strange, cricketlike noises issuing from her room. She crept toward the door and peered in. Elias was speaking in a peculiar language. Permony, sitting with her back to the door, was kneading her father’s nape with one hand. This display of intimacy sliced through Eva like a rusted blade. She shook with pain and anger, recognizing the sounds burbling from Elias’s lips as an outpouring of love.
“What is he saying?”
Permony jumped and turned to the door. Her lavender eyes were wet with tears.
“You scared me, Mama.”
“What is he saying?” repeated Eva. “Is he telling you what a terrible wife I am? Is he blaming me for his illness?”
Permony shook her head as tears spilled down her cheeks. “Papa’s telling me of beauty. Boundless, heavenly beauty. Immortal forest at dusk…eternal river…enchanted land where souls drift like fireflies…He said the air is pure there because there’s no rage, no shame, no guilt. Oh, isn’t it beautiful, Mama?”
Dread slithered up Eva’s spine. The thought that Elias had envisioned himself passing through death’s door—embraced it even—was more than she could bear. In defiance she threw him an angry look, damning those cricketlike noises he kept spitting at Permony. It hit her then, the pang of his rejection, his complete and absolute denial of her. At the end of his life, a hateful hand had knocked her right out of his c
onsciousness. And she knew full well to whom the hand belonged.
“What is this nonsense?” she said, her voice exploding like a rifle. “Either you’re making it up or he’s gone insane.”
Permony lowered her eyes sadly. “He said you would say that. He said you wouldn’t believe me if I told you.”
The girl could not have put it worse. All at once Eva stiffened. Vivid and unerring it flashed before her, the scene that had first stoked her fury and preserved it over the years. She was lying on a damp bed with blood pouring from her womb—weak, used, forgotten. She did not want this one, she had told him; she was too old and tired, but he had insisted. “It will be all right,” he had said. “I’ll stand by you.” But he did not even look at her as she lay bleeding on that bed, absorbed as he was in the pale ugly thing he held in his arms. “This one is precious,” he said, laughing. “This one will be a comfort in my old age.” She knew he meant every word, because he had said nothing when he first held the other two. At the time, she had endured the humiliation by sobbing into her pillow. But now, eighteen years after the pale ugly thing stole her place in his affection, she would expose her for who she was.
“You’ve always been your father’s whore,” said Eva. “I’ve seen the way you look at him. Touch him like a lover. You think you can fool everyone with your innocent face and little-girl manners, but you can’t fool me! I’ve known for years there’s something going on between you two. Why do you think Malin kept away from you all these years? She guessed it, too, but wouldn’t say a word. Because even God has no forgiveness for what you’ve done.”
Permony stood still as if a thunderbolt had struck her.
“How could you say that, Mama?” She was gasping now, shaking uncontrollably. “How could you think such things of your own husband, your own daughter?”
She began to weep the way she used to as a little girl—soundlessly, head folded to chest, fingers digging into her eyes. Eva was unstoppable.
“I knew what you were from the day you were born. No mother is ever as unfortunate as I, to have carried an abomination in my womb and live to see it spite me!”
Permony protested in vain. Eva’s curse rained down like hail and drowned her. On the bed, Elias’s recounting of celestial valleys and mystical mountains continued. He smiled as he prophesied, a glob of spit wavering on the tip of his chin. The unseeing eyes he trained at the ceiling were glazed with contentment.
FOUR DAYS LATER, EARLY in the morning, a heavy silence fell over 27 Orchard Road. All at once the marigolds ceased their clamor, Gabilan her scrubbing, Eva her fussing, Permony her weeping. In alarm, mother and daughter stared at the father’s white lips, hushed now with no more hiss of divination. Had it not been for the childlike glow of his smile, they would have taken him for dead. Immediately, Eva sent Gabilan to inform the family.
Malin had refused to enter her father’s room during the final stages of his decrepitude. She was horrified by the stench, she said, by the sharp bones that stuck from his skin and the bedsores that never healed. Citing a hectic newlywed’s schedule, she seldom came to visit, and when she did, she acted as if she was performing a penance. But on that fateful morning when Eva summoned her, she did not enter the house with her usual arrogance. There was a quiver in her voice, so habitually armored with distaste it was perceptible only to those who had known her all her life. She took one look at her father, blanched, and withdrew downstairs to her old room, refusing to say good-bye.
A moment later, Daniel arrived accompanied by Noah and Meridia. They were halfway up the stairs when a stricken Permony ran down to meet them.
“Tell me he’s not going,” she pleaded, her face worn with anguish. The silence that followed confirmed her worst fear, and she burst out sobbing.
Meridia made a sign to Daniel, who understood and took Noah upstairs with him. Holding Permony in her arms, she let the girl sob to her heart’s content.
“He told me he was sorry.” Permony choked on her words. “For throwing you out of the house that day. All these years he didn’t know how to make it up to you.”
“It’s in the past,” said Meridia gently. “Heaven knows he’s made it up to us.”
“It broke him, you know, what he did to Noah. He couldn’t look at that scar without falling apart at the seams. He called himself a monster, saying it was in his nature to harm those he loved most.”
Meridia tightened her clasp on the girl. “It wasn’t his fault,” she said. “Noah forgave him a long time ago.”
Nodding like a person in a trance, Permony made her way down the stairs. Meridia watched her glide to the terrace, sit in her father’s rocking chair, fold her head to her chest, and cry without sound.
Meridia was turning to climb the stairs when a low strangled noise arrested her. Alarmed, she went back down and followed the noise to the girls’ room. The door was half open. When she pushed it, she saw Malin kneeling at the foot of the orange bed, rocking to and fro with her hands cradling her stomach. Seeing Meridia, she stopped crying at once. “Don’t tell anyone,” she warned, her haughty eyes red with tears. Meridia nodded and went back out. She understood then that Malin was with child. The girl had not kept away from her father out of callousness, but to protect her baby from the mark of death.
Upstairs, Meridia joined Noah and Daniel by the bed. Elias’s body had begun to rot. Daniel shivered as he watched his father’s chest rise and fall, the childlike smile odd yet stubborn, and in that second Meridia realized how these men had loved each other without ever saying a word, their needs sacrificed to please the woman who provoked every mutation in their souls with her slippery tongue and inscrutable desires.
Without being told, Noah stepped forward and kissed his grandfather good-bye. He did not shrink from the ghastly sores, did not look away from the greenish skin. Elias stirred at the boy’s kiss and opened his eyes. For a second they burned directly into Meridia’s. Then his smile faded and his breath departed.
A shadow closed in fast from behind, and before they knew it, Eva had pushed them away from the bed. Ravaged by anger, grief, and disbelief, she stared hard at her husband’s remains and shook her head, looking at once weak and invincible. “Come back, you fool!” she wailed in a voice jagged with loss. Silent and profuse, the tears fell. Daniel put his arms around her, but she shook him off.
“If you could arrange the coffin, Malin will take care of the service,” she said, wiping her tears roughly. “Gabilan! Run to the mortuary and fetch the undertaker. Permony! Get your father’s blue suit from the closet and send it to the cleaners. I will deal with the florist myself. That man has been known to swindle highly emotional widows. Hah! Let’s see him try putting one over on me!”
Meridia scarcely heeded this outburst. In the second when Elias’s eyes met hers, she thought his lips had mouthed a plea. Save her. Save whom? And from what? Meridia leaned closer to the dead body, willing it to give up one more clue or confirmation, but nothing moved. She shuddered when she thought that she had misread the last and final commandment of his life.
TWENTY-EIGHT
In the third month of Malin’s pregnancy, Eva commissioned a fortune-teller to eliminate every imaginable catastrophe. The man’s surefire methods included burning incense for seven days, chanting, strangling a chicken, and brewing a papaya-based potion against miscarriage. Following weeks of frenzied supernatural activities, a silver banner was mounted on the roof of 27 Orchard Road, signaling to the town that all the universal elements had been realigned for a favorable delivery.
The prospect of fatherhood seemed to have knocked common sense out of Jonathan. Unable to guess the sex of his child, he turned two rooms in his house into nurseries: one painted deep blue for a boy, one pink for a girl. He placed orders all over the world for baby clothes and toys, blankets and shoes, and when they arrived, it took his servants days to classify them into the two nurseries. He summoned doctor after doctor to monitor his wife, always agreeing with one while repudiating another. From morni
ng till night the house on Museum Avenue was packed with herbalists and acupuncturists, nutritionists and massage therapists, all tending to Malin as if she were the most fragile creature in existence. When Malin announced that the baby was kicking for the first time, Jonathan went wild with joy and bought her the biggest piece of jewelry from Lotus Blossom Lane.
Eva attended to her daughter like a crazed disciple. With unrelenting eyes she oversaw the army of doctors and therapists, made sure Malin had plenty of rest and exercise, and served her all the delicacies with which she had accused Meridia of spoiling her uterus while pregnant. When the heat became unbearable, Eva tasked the servants to fan Malin with all their strength, and when they did just that, she blamed them for creating a hurricane in the room. To anyone who would listen, she detailed Malin’s struggle with morning sickness, her sore nipples, frequent urination, and impossibly hard bowel movements.
Malin herself was no longer the girl she had once been. As her due date neared, her patented sneer gave way to an uncommon tenderness. Gone were her tantrums, her endless irritations when her wishes were not met. To everyone’s surprise, she was able to develop a tolerance for Jonathan’s folly, humor for Eva’s meddling, and patience for the servants’ shortcomings. More amazing still, her contempt for Permony dissipated. For the first time in her life, Malin made efforts to befriend her sister, buying her dresses, inviting her to dinner, and even defending her against Eva. A shocked and grateful Permony responded by placing herself completely at her sister’s disposal.