Meridia dropped to her knees to retrieve it. The instant her fingers curled around the stem, a savage cry tore from her bowels. She snatched up the lily as though her life depended on it, dashed out to the hallway, and yelled in surprise when she ran right into Noah. Earlier, the shop assistant had taken him and two schoolmates to see a traveling carnival. Meridia’s heart shattered at the sight of her son’s beaming face, his little hand holding up a candied apple. “For Grandma,” he said proudly. Meridia patted his head. “Why don’t you wash up first?” she said. “I’ll be back soon with Grandma.” Feeling tears scratch her eyes, she did not stay to hear his question, but pressed the lily into his hand, called to the maid to prepare his supper, and rushed downstairs and out to the gleaming spectacle of Magnolia Avenue.
Her feet covered the pavement rapidly. Under the swinging lanterns, faces swam by her, this one hazy, the next opaque, and at them she fired the same inconceivable question: “Have you seen my mother?” She walked quickly and tensely, without noticing that the path she was on was turning from stone to grass and grass to mud and mud back to stone. The hushed darkness of the residential quarters soon replaced the din and lights of Magnolia Avenue. Through a window, a woman was scraping dinner plates with a butter knife, and her little girl, standing on a stool and wearing the same green apron, was rinsing the plates under the faucet. Feeling a punch to her heart, Meridia traded the curb for the middle of the street. A minute later, she struck across a deserted playground and was overcome by a feeling that she had been there before. Was that her riding the swing on a summer day, a white bow in her hair and her shoes the color of teal, while Ravenna pushed from behind till she laughed and aimed her legs to the sky? She could smell the sun-warmed grass, feel the wind on her cheek, even hear the other children talk with envy, but the memory itself could not have been real. Ravenna—boiling resentment in the kitchen—would never have taken her here.
The house at 24 Monarch Street stood silent and grim. Along with the crescent moon, a street lamp provided an indifferent illumination, casting just enough light along the stone steps to prevent a fall. At the top of the steps someone had left the massive door open. Pale with terror, Meridia went in. It was much darker inside than she had anticipated. Fumbling along the wall, she shouted for Ravenna and pushed her way into the hall where Gabriel used to smoke and torment her in the morning. The air was stale and sour. Dusty white sheets stretched over furniture, stirring like ghosts waking from a spoiled dream. Suddenly there was a bright spark coming from the kitchen, accompanied by a loud explosion that shook the house. Meridia ran along the wall. A few paces from the kitchen an incandescent bullet flew straight at her face. She ducked at the last second. The bullet zoomed up, twisted into an arc, then made a slicing dive down the length of the corridor. Before she could move, another bullet followed, then another, and another. It took her a moment to realize they were fireflies.
She broke into a run. Inside the kitchen a bright swarm of fireflies hovered over the stove, hundreds of them, thousands perhaps, as if the great explosion had just given birth to them. An overpowering smell of smoke and charred meat sent her reeling with a cough. The floor was littered with Ravenna’s belongings, her suitcase and dresses, shoes and powder bottles, and all the objects Noah had procured for her to smell. Meridia reached for the stove to steady herself but withdrew her hand instantly. The stove was hot as fire. The raw and horrific immensity of loss suddenly hit her. There was no trace of Ravenna anywhere, only the smell of ash and smoke and flame.
“Mama!”
Her scream set the fireflies into motion. With that one word, she said all that had eluded a lifetime of expression.
THIRTY-SIX
She knew he would wait for her, and it was for him that she returned. Under the drowning moon, the fireflies guided her passage home, distracting passersby with their flame so no one noticed her grief or the suitcase she was dragging. As she retraced her steps from stone to mud and mud to grass and grass back to stone, she did not allow herself to think what she would say to him. The fireflies did not scatter once she entered the house, but flew upward to the roof like a thousand glittering jewels.
She carried the suitcase up the stairs and into the room at the end of the hallway. She was not surprised to find him there, sitting on his grandmother’s bed with his profile shaded in darkness. He was still holding the lily and the candied apple. When their eyes met, he did not give her a chance to speak.
“She’s not coming back, is she?”
His tone was steady, more a declaration than a question. Keeping the gesture small, Meridia shook her head. He said nothing more, but went on staring at her, his clairvoyant eyes defenseless yet seemingly unruffled. It was only when he turned to the lamp that she saw the patchwork of tears on his face. On his right temple, Elias’s scar throbbed thick with blood.
Meridia pulled her son close and felt him shaking in her arms. Noah allowed her to comfort him but did not cling to her. Something in her eye had warned him of the thing to come. Over her shoulder, he noticed the worn leather suitcase at the door.
“What’s that, Mama?”
Without turning, she held his wet face between her hands.
“Grandma’s last wish,” she said. “In the end, you see, she found a way to speak to me.”
SHE PUT HIM TO bed and hauled the suitcase to her room, unlocked it, slid its sole content under the bed, and repacked it with clothes. Twenty minutes later, she went downstairs to the little office, opened the combination on the fireproof vault, and emptied into a sack all the money and jewelry there. Back in her room, she took her own jewelry box from a locked drawer and dropped it as well into the sack. She put the sack in the suitcase and hid the suitcase in the hallway closet. Only then did she slip into bed with all her clothes on, switch off the light…and wait.
The blue mist arrived an hour before the cocks crowed. The sequence of sounds was by then a familiar one—first the front door clicked, then the stairs thudded, then the bedroom door opened with a breeze. Light as a thief, Daniel hung his coat on the hook behind the door, pulled off his clothes, and climbed into bed in his underwear. This time, as though he knew what his wife was planning, he let his leg brush against her calf. The unexpected touch nearly split Meridia at the seams. For a moment she was tempted to open her eyes, to abandon what was stored under the bed and in the closet and walk to the pit of hell and pull at the rope he was holding. But then she smelled the heat oozing from his skin, the scent and staleness of another woman, and her anger surged. She pinched her eyes tighter, remembering Ravenna, and remained still. Daniel rolled away with a grunt. A long time passed before his breathing steadied.
She waited a few more minutes before getting up. Without a sound, she gathered his clothes and carried them to the window. She parted the curtain a finger’s width, and with the aid of dawn examined the clothes carefully. The trousers had a viscous, darkish stain on the left thigh; the shirt the scarlet imprint of a mouth. No sooner did she spot them than they began to fade.
She placed the clothes on the chair by the window and reached under the bed for the object she had dragged across town in the suitcase under shelter of the fireflies. She stood up, pointed the blade of the shovel straight down, and gripped the top of the shaft with both hands. One look at Daniel was all she needed for twenty-seven years of Ravenna’s anger to burn in her veins. She took three steps back until the chair stood between them, raised the shovel to the ceiling, and brought it cleanly down. The instant the blade bit through the clothes the cocks began to crow. The chair gave a terrifying shriek, but the shovel stuck. The viscous stain and the scarlet mouth glowered. Nothing could erase them now, for Ravenna’s sacrifice had purchased their permanence. Removing her wedding ring, Meridia tossed it onto the bed where Daniel continued to sleep.
Noah appeared in the hallway as she was retrieving the suitcase from the closet. He was dressed and had his coat on, his own little suitcase ready at his feet. They said no words, exchanged on
ly a look. Meridia fastened her coat and took both suitcases down the stairs. He followed her without a glance at his father’s door. Outside, the morning was brisk and amber-hued, the southerly wind damp with the scent of the mountain on its back. Except for a street sweeper, Magnolia Avenue was deserted. No one kept watch as a horde of fireflies followed mother and son down the street and vanished along with them.
DANIEL WOKE UP LATE from a dream. In it he was kissing a woman’s nape, sweet and slender, yet interminable in length. Starting at the base, his lips must have traveled miles and miles of skin, some freckled, some dappled with hair, all tasting of berries, and still there was more to kiss. After what seemed like hours, his mouth gave out from exhaustion, but when he tried to lift his head, a steel hand clamped down and pitted him against the nape. Gasping for breath, he saw the pale freckles balloon into boils and the fine hairs sprout into darting reptilian tongues. He woke up choking with disgust. His wife’s wedding ring was wedged between his lips.
“Damn you,” he spat.
His first thought was that it had slipped off her finger while she slept. Seeing that she had already risen, he set down the ring on the nightstand and did not make much of it. He closed his eyes and was sinking back into sleep when the smell of blood knocked all thoughts out of his head. He sat up with a start and blinked his eyes savagely. He was already on his feet when he spotted the shovel sticking from the chair.
He saw the shirt and trousers he had worn last night pinned underneath the blade, and the smell of blood was coming from them. “What is it now?” he snapped as if his wife were standing in front of him. He was about to kick the chair away when the glowering stains caught his eye. One dark, one red, both pulsing with blood.
For a moment he stood pale and speechless. Then angrily he wrenched the shovel free from the chair and hurled it against the wall.
He hitched up his pants and threw on a shirt. In the hallway he barked at the maid, “Where is your mistress?” The terrified girl said she had not seen her, an answer that almost made him shake her out of the way. Daniel stormed into the parlor, the dining room, the guest room—smashing lamps and breaking furniture—but found no sign of either mother or daughter. His heart thumping madly, he ran toward the room he had saved for last and told himself she wouldn’t dare take his boy. The door yielded before he opened it, and at once he knew his worst fear had come true. A layer of fuzz covered the floor, mildew spread over the bed, and a fat spider was weaving a web in one corner of the ceiling. The room looked as though it had not been inhabited in months.
Daniel dashed for the stairs. The ground floor was deserted, and then he remembered it was Sunday and the shop was closed. He rushed to the little office and noticed the vault door was open. He pulled the handle and saw that the money box and jewelry trays had been emptied.
“Goddamn you!” he bellowed. Shaking with fury, he set off toward Orchard Road and marched straight up to his mother’s room, where she was dyeing her hair. Without waiting another minute, he fulminated on the spot, skipping the part about the shovel and the stains. Eva listened solemnly, almost serenely, while black henna dripped down her face and stained the towel around her shoulders (it was no use; her hair would turn white again in a matter of hours). When Daniel was done, Eva’s mouth became a terrifying thing that tore at him without pity.
“Go get your boy. Show your wife no mercy. If you fail this time, God help you, she’ll have your manhood out on a platter.”
It was all he needed to hear. Indignant, he stomped out of the house with his back straighter and his head taller than when he entered. This time he’d really show her what he was made of! What he had done—what she in fact had driven him to do—was nothing compared to her action. The brazenness! The deceitfulness! As he approached the stone steps of 24 Monarch Street, fresh anger jolted him anew. More than a decade ago, when he was poor and green and terrified, Ravenna had chased him away from these steps like a flea-ridden dog. Well, let the blighted woman try now! Even if she had the force of hell on her side, he would not budge until he had his boy back!
He strode up to the door with enough resolution to fell a tree. In the bright noon sun the house stood gray and silent. He lifted his fist and pounded on the door. No one answered. He pounded harder. Just when he thought his boy was peering at him from behind the window, something unimaginable happened. A hail of tiny bright bullets dropped from the sky. A blinding spark followed, and the little bullets tore viciously at his vision. Before he could move, a sharp pulsating pain seized him from head to foot. He fell and rolled down the stone steps, smashing his shoulder on the pavement. The incandescent bullets pursued him without mercy. He clambered up, screaming from the pain, and began to run. A second later he was down again, crawling and yelping, yet no one helped him, though he could hear voices talking. The last thing he remembered was bumping his head against a hard surface. The darkness swelled and spun and swallowed the earth from underneath him.
When he came to, the pain was gone and it took him some time to realize he could not see. He kept blinking his eyes, certain that something was blocking his vision, and when finally it dawned on him that he was blind, he screamed and fought like a demon condemned. He did not know where he was. Womanly hands, gentle yet unfamiliar, soothed him as he shouted over and over for his wife. He did not like those hands; they were not Meridia’s and they did not know how to calm him. When he grew weary of fighting, he sank into lethargy and smelled his wife’s scent emanating from the pillows. He was in his bed after all. But who had brought him home from Monarch Street? In a rough voice he asked again for Meridia, but the woman with the soft hands told him she was not there. He did not recognize her voice, and when she leaned over him, a whiff of her perfume made his bowels churn. Swinging his arm haphazardly, he caught her in the flank and ordered her to leave. The woman began sobbing.
“Wait outside, Sylva,” said another voice. “I’ll take care of him.”
It was his mother. Applying compresses over his eyes, she told him that two of his friends had seen him lying in the street, twisting like a man bedeviled while strangers gawked because he kept flailing his arms and screaming “Get them off me!” when they could see that he was alone and fighting nothing but air. Every time they tried to help, he pushed them away and yelled that they were hurting his eyes, those tiny bullets that had dropped from the sky and exploded his eyeballs. The louder he yelled, the more he added to the confusion, because as far as anybody could tell, neither his face nor his clothes bore the dimmest trace of blood.
“You fainted after you screamed yourself hoarse,” said his mother. “Your friends carried you home. The maid ran to get me.”
He shook his head in total confusion. Before he could put two and two together, his mother launched into a tirade, declaring that his wife had put an evil curse on him, paralyzed him, turned him into a public disgrace, and if he did not realize this now then she, his mother, truly grieved for him, for she had raised him to have respect for himself, not to mention the courage and wisdom to do what was right, and if he thought he could show his face in town after this—
“Enough! Enough! Enough!” he pleaded. His fatigue was so deep he could not feel his arms or legs, only the darkness that beat down thickly upon his eyes.
THE DOCTOR SAID IT was a temporary blindness, brought on, in all likelihood, by overworked nerves and a prolonged exposure to the sun. “Keep him in bed for a few weeks with the curtains drawn and he’ll regain his sight.” In addition to herbal tea and honey, the doctor prescribed a variety of salves and unguents, to be applied over the eyes at different times of the day. He also cautioned against sleeplessness and extensive ruminating, a malady he claimed would prolong the blindness indefinitely.
Bed-bound, Daniel employed every trick in his possession to escape nostalgia. He added numbers in his head, counted forward and backward, composed music from the noises in the street, and pretended the humming maid was a spirit masquerading as a lark. At night, before the sleepi
ng draught his mother gave him took effect, he fortified his thoughts with anger and resentment, reciting under his breath all his wife’s offenses until they blackened his dream. Nothing worked. After three days of resistance, he realized he was no match for the memories that saturated every corner of the room. She was at once nowhere and everywhere. No matter how he struggled, he could not evade the scent of her, the taste of her. The glimpses of her that blazed up the dark edges of his sleep never failed to wake him with the terrible urgency of a desolation.
On his fifth day of blindness, he curbed his pride and asked his mother if she had received word from Monarch Street. “No,” Eva said simply. When prompted, she confessed that against her better instinct, she had already informed Meridia of his condition, but that cold and calculating woman who never thought of anyone but herself had refused to see him. “Daniel brought it upon himself and must now pay for it,’ was what your wife said. And as if this wasn’t enough, she then had the gall to demand her things! ‘You can take them anytime you want,’ I told her, ‘but what about letting the boy see his father?’” To this, she, Eva, had the door slammed in her face.
He attended his mother’s tears with mute bewilderment. The picture she painted did not resemble the woman he knew, yet in these days of darkness he could barely tell who he was, let alone how much his wife might have changed since she left him. And so he continued to lie in silence, incapable of wrath or repudiation, while his mother’s sobs grew louder and more indignant.