Meridia did not know what to make of this. Every time she visited Monarch Street, she always found Ravenna sitting in her room, staring at Gabriel’s deathbed with an idol’s invariable expression. The nurse she had hired to look after her attested to the same thing: All day long, Ravenna stayed in that room, saying nothing and sometimes refusing to take her meals. As the tales multiplied, Meridia began to show up more frequently at unpredictable hours, but not once did she ever catch Ravenna in her wandering. In the meantime, Daniel’s displeasure deepened. She had only to examine his frown to guess the lurid nature of the tale being circulated that day.
Things came to a boil a month later. One afternoon, Meridia was writing a purchase order for a customer at the shop when a commotion erupted in the street.
“Make way for a sick woman, sirs! See for yourselves her deplorable condition!”
Meridia rushed to the curb. A crowd, lured by the noise, had gathered. A distance away, Eva was marching in the direction of the shop, head held high and shoulders thrown back, pushing a haggard and barely clothed Ravenna from behind. On seeing Meridia, she dropped her voice but was still loud enough for everyone to hear.
“How tragic it is to be a widow. I am without husband myself, and I bless heaven for giving me a stronger constitution than this wretched soul. An abandoned mother! At her advanced age! Her daughter must be too busy to look after her. Guess what she was doing just now? Scouring the latrines at Cinema Garden for food! She was so relieved to see me she wept and kissed me on the cheek!”
Before the crowd caught on, Meridia surged forward and snatched Ravenna away from Eva’s clutches. She moved so lightly and swiftly that all the crowd felt was a heated breeze on their elbows. It was only on her way back to the shop, leading Ravenna by the shoulder, that they noticed her. A storm had broken over her face, and though her lips were colorless, her eyes blazed like lightning. She threw a cutting look at Daniel, who had come out to follow her, and went back into the shop. The tension between them was not lost on Eva.
“Son!” she exclaimed jubilantly. “Imagine what would have happened had I not rescued your beloved mother-in-law!”
With these words clanging in her ear, Meridia guided Ravenna up the stairs. More than a few customers stared, but she managed to dismiss them with a measure of calm. As soon as they reached the guest room, Meridia shut the door and sat her mother down on the bed. Ravenna looked lost and frightened, clucking like a hen but saying nothing. Her gaunt cheeks were streaked with dirt, her knot disarrayed, her dress torn, her mouth reeking something abominable—Ravenna, who had never tolerated a speck of dust in her house, let alone on her person! To see her mother paraded around like a circus animal, pitied and gawked at without the least amount of self-defense, incited in Meridia a sadness greater than anger. As she cleaned the dirt off Ravenna, her mind began to fashion the armor she would have to wield in order to protect her.
THAT EVENING, AS SOON as the assistant departed, Meridia went into the small office at the back of the shop. Daniel was storing the day’s inventory in the fireproof metal vault, and from the way his eyes strayed from hers, she knew she was in for an uphill battle. A sleeping dog had awoken in him the night Ravenna took her to the dark heart of town. In six months, he had gone to visit Gabriel but twice, and with each hour Meridia spent away from the house, his temper, up till then mild and agreeable, became increasingly volatile. Often he turned churlish for no reason, and made vague demands that required all her mind-reading ability to interpret. When she guessed wrong, he rebuffed her with silence. When she tried to please and mollify, he stopped her cold with a gruff look.
Presently she stood before him, tall and straight-backed as a sword, and did not move until he raised his eyes from the stacked jewelry trays on the desk.
“What is it?”
The impatience in his voice made her decide on a direct approach. “I want my mother to live with us,” she said.
He picked up a tray and slammed it into the vault.
“She has a house of her own. What good can come from her living here?”
“She’s lonely and can no longer take care of herself. You saw what happened this afternoon.”
“You already hired a nurse. And visit three times a day.”
Maintaining her calm, Meridia shook her head. “She needs me, her daughter, to take care of her. And besides, once she lives here I can spend more time at the shop.”
Daniel pushed the remaining trays aside and drew to his full height. The eyes he trained on her were those of a stranger.
“What makes you think you can take care of her? From what I’ve heard, she’s quite a handful, roaming the streets like a lunatic, barking at strangers and pelting them with stones. How are you going to keep her in this house without chaining her ankles? She’ll make a spectacle of herself and humiliate us again, just like today!”
Meridia felt her calm quickly slip away. “If I remember correctly, it was your mother who provided the spectacle.”
“You should be thanking my mother for rescuing yours!”
“For parading her around like a beast of marvel? Allow me to send a dozen roses this instant!”
Daniel clenched his eyes sharply. In that moment there was no trace of the tenderhearted man she had married.
“There’s no room for your mother in this house,” he said.
Meridia stepped forward, keeping her eyes on him, and replied through her teeth, “Yes, there is.”
A mocking smile spread across his face, chilling for a moment the flare of anger on her lips. She felt as if time had reversed, and the occurrences of the last ten years had done nothing but returned her to the exact same spot. For there on his face was the same cruel expression that had darkened Gabriel’s, more times than she cared to remember.
“Then answer me this,” he said. “Should my mother find herself in the same condition—heaven forbid—would you allow her to live with us?”
Meridia responded instantly. “I will never stand in the way of your duty.”
Daniel burst into a gale of laughter, so brutal and belittling it would have flattened anyone with less composure. Meridia asked him point-blank: “Why do you resent her so?”
“Because she treated me worse than a flea when I had nothing to my name!”
“She did it to protect me.”
“To protect you? From me?”
“From despair and adversity.” She drew a deep breath and wished she could locate the man she loved. “It was a mistake. Forgive her one lapse of judgment.”
Daniel huffed in disdain. “Why should I? She never apologized. And now, given her malady, she probably never will.”
It was a cheap shot, but Meridia let it pass. “Then let me apologize for her. Please.”
She humbled herself, sought him with all the love in her being, yet she could not still the beating animosity inside him. In a flash, she deduced that something—someone—had been toiling overtime to influence him. While she was busy nursing Gabriel and comforting Ravenna, Eva must have surrounded him with her bees. She had been too anxious, too preoccupied, to notice.
“I have suffered more than anyone at your mother’s hand,” she said, weighing her arguments to find one strong enough to blast away the bees. “But if she needed my help—if for any reason her happiness depended on my blessing—then because I love you, I would give it to her. I’m asking you to do the same. Forgive my mother as you once have been forgiven.”
“How dare you throw that at me!” cried Daniel. “Mama was right. You would do and say anything to get your way.”
Meridia saw it clearly then—the fence she had first glimpsed the night Daniel returned home from Orchard Road covered with bees’ marks—now stretching and thickening in her face. Daniel had never looked angrier. Blood flushed his temples and his lungs panted for air as though they could never get enough.
“You will not bring your mother into this house!” he roared. “Am I making myself understood?”
Merid
ia drew back, rupturing the tension so tenderly at first that Daniel mistook it for a surrender. But nothing, nothing in their ten years of marriage could prepare him for her next words.
“Then I’ll take Noah to live with me on Monarch Street.”
There was nothing menacing in her voice, yet Daniel froze as if he had been stabbed. Snatching the rest of the trays, he thrust them into the vault and slammed the bolts. Meridia did not linger. For the moment she had won, but every victory, as she well knew, came at a price that no one could predict.
THIRTY-TWO
Noah was nine the year Ravenna moved into Magnolia Avenue. By that time, she had secured her place in his affection as that enchanting and elusive being who drifted into the house in a cloud of scent when he had least expected it. Though he saw her even less after his grandfather turned into a seal, he remembered every detail about her—the immemorial black dress with pearl buttons on her wrists; the steel knot on the back of her head; her long, generous nose; the bold twilight eyes and their power to defy misfortune.
He was surprised, therefore, to discover that the woman who occupied the room at the end of the hallway was not the grandmother of his memory. In her place was a befuddled creature with leathery skin, murky gray eyes, and a loose, crinkled tunic that swallowed her rail-thin figure. Her coal black hair was replaced by bristly silver wires his mother combed once in the morning and once before bedtime. She looked ancient to him, drained of energy, her hands folded to her chest like wounded claws. The only thing that remained of her old self was her scent.
For the first few days, Noah did not dare approach his grandmother. Her wracking cough frightened him as much as her bewildered stare, and his stomach heaved at the texture of her skin, which had dried and toughened like that of a reptile. But then one day, when the two of them were alone, his grandmother spoke to him. She told him, in a strange and halting language only he could understand, to bring her scents.
That day, he brought her a bottle of vanilla extract from the kitchen, which she inhaled greedily, as if it was the most pleasing aroma in the world. The next day, he ransacked his mother’s spice rack and came up with thyme, clove, and nutmeg. On subsequent mornings, he brought her flowers—daffodils, hyacinths, tuberoses—plucked from his mother’s garden or pilfered from the neighbors. Over the course of the month, not content with what was free and available, he used his allowance to buy frankincense, sandalwood candles, cane syrup, cinnamon pastilles, and lemongrass vinegar. In the afternoon after his father picked him up from school, he kept his nose out for the most extraordinary scents as they walked home through the market square. Seeing him dart about and brandish his coins like a little lord, Daniel cocked a brow, but the boy, warned by his keen intuition that his father would put an end to his spending were he to discover the truth, simply looked at him with his snub nose and round dark eyes and explained, “It’s for school, Papa.”
He cherished the moments when his grandmother drank in the scent he brought her. Her breathing might turn raspy while she imbued the aroma with meaning, but it was more than countered by her suddenly glowing skin. Sometimes he could not stop himself from hugging her. She never objected. She only looked at him with tender eyes. When she smiled, she looked neither old nor wizened but beautiful.
Every day their game would end when he heard his mother approach. Quickly, he would hide the bottle or flower in his pocket and watch his grandmother’s expression revert to its state of torment. But by then she had already savored the scent he brought her, and he had already absorbed a little more of her mystery. Together they had shared a secret whose sanctity he would uphold until the day he died.
IN THE BEGINNING, MERIDIA did everything to hide Ravenna from Daniel. She did not tell him when her mother was moving in, but one day simply settled her along with two suitcases in the room at the end of the hallway. She kept the room closed up at all times, and at night took an extra precaution by sealing the crack at the bottom of the door with a towel. She personally prepared and delivered Ravenna’s meals, stuffed her clothes in a sack for the maid to wash, and brewed her tonics with the windows open so the smell would not linger. Once a day, she took Ravenna down to the garden for exercise, but only when Daniel was out on an errand. Her strategy worked so well that for a full week he did not realize there was another person living under his roof.
As spring turned into summer, Meridia carefully wove Ravenna’s presence into the house. Whenever she left her post at the shop, she would signal to the assistant that she would be just upstairs, making sure that her gesture was not lost on Daniel. Once a week when the doctor came, she would pause with him on the stairs before she brought him up, acquainting him in a low voice with Ravenna’s progress while Daniel watched. She let slip to a few customers that her ailing mother was now living with her, and in turn, they sent her cards and flowers, all of which she displayed prominently in the living room. At dinner, she set aside a plate of food without giving an explanation, thus turning Ravenna, through a scoop of rice and a serving of vegetables, into an undeniable reality.
She found an indispensable ally in Noah. Since the episode of the cockatoo (on some nights the empty cage in his room still rattled with the bird’s outrage), there was no more question where his loyalty lay. The boy proved to be as wily as she was, and much more merciless. One afternoon at the shop, he made a great show of stuffing his schoolbag with books in front of his father.
“What are you doing, son?” asked a puzzled Daniel. “Opening a library?”
“No, Papa. I’m going to do my homework upstairs in the guest room. You know, the one that smells like lemon and coughs for no reason?”
Daniel almost choked. Meridia ducked her head and pretended to be busy.
After weeks of these maneuvers, Daniel exhibited every sign of being pacified. He no longer glared at her with resentment, and seemed reconciled to his mother-in-law’s presence in his house. Emboldened, Meridia took Ravenna more and more out of her room. One Sunday, she sat with her in the living room for the entire afternoon and heard not a word from Daniel. The following week, she took her down to the shop and sat her across the table from him, and still he said nothing. Every morning, she kept an ear out for the first outcry from Orchard Road, but the wind blowing from the westerly direction carried no trace of bees. Business was booming. Their finances were in order. Their lovemaking, if somewhat less frequent, remained on familiar ground.
IN REALITY, THE BEES were out in full swing that summer, but Eva cleverly kept them from Meridia. “How dare she shelter that revenant under your brother’s roof!” They droned round and round Permony. “The very house whose door has never welcomed me and whose table has yet to serve me supper! I understand that the beastly woman is in mourning, but when I became widowed, did I receive any such pampering? I don’t even remember your sister-in-law offering me her condolences! And why should that crazy woman be rewarded for wallowing in self-pity? I was the strong one. I said my good-bye, put your father in the ground, and moved on with my life, like any self-respecting woman would. And to think that letch spent the majority of his life despising her, frittering his manhood in the arms of a harlot, and probably sowing enough bastards to mobilize an army! Hah! One time she slapped me until my ear rang for three days, and now she can’t even slap a mosquito. Heaven’s justice, wouldn’t you say? But why your brother’s peace of mind should be mixed up with her lunacy, I don’t see. She’s rich enough, she can hire someone to coddle her in her own house. What kind of an upbringing will my grandson have with an ax-wielding grandmother breathing in the next room? If your brother doesn’t put his foot down, Noah will soon start chanting to houseplants, or worse, hacking off our limbs while we sleep!”
Nettling the bees over time were three additional injuries. One, Gabilan, after years of enduring abuse in silence, skipped town in the middle of the night with a fellow maid. She left behind all her belongings, but took half a dozen copper pans from the kitchen. Eva, apoplectic with rage, threatened to hav
e her arrested. “For what, Mama?” counseled Permony wisely. “Stealing battered skillets? God knows why she wanted them in the first place.” But secretly Permony understood. For years Patina’s hands had handled those pans every day; as a matter of fact, they were among the few things in the house that Eva never touched.
Two, the town’s gossiping of Malin was reaching a new low. At the market, Eva could not walk from one stall to the next without being harassed by whispers. Jonathan hasn’t touched her in months, wouldn’t kiss her, wouldn’t make love to her. And who can blame him? What good is a wife who prefers a gravestone to her husband’s flesh? Indignant, Eva scowled. Yet even haggling and hectoring did nothing to stop them.
The third injury was the most galling. When not gossiping about Malin, the town picked apart the shop on Lotus Blossom Lane. It’s gone downhill since Elias died three years ago. Thanks to his widow’s incompetence, customers are leaving by the droves and the inventory is as musty as its carpeting. If only Eva would hand over the shop to Permony. The girl has an eye for jewelry and a good head for business. But her mother always chases her to the background as if she is jealous…
Eva listened to this angrily. It was one thing to accuse her of ineptitude, but jealousy? Of Permony? Her youngest could barely pour tea without spilling it! And for their information, the shop was failing because Meridia stole all her customers! If only she could get her hand on some money, she could give the shop a face-lift, an updated inventory, and squash that bloodsucking cockroach once and for all. She thought of borrowing money from Daniel, but the idea of Meridia’s discovery was too humiliating to bear. Borrowing from Malin was out of the question; these days the girl could do little more than gather flowers for the cemetery.