Let the Dark Flower Blossom (22 page)

Ro and I buried the body. And we remained bound together by a gravediggers' hitch. I went out to California with him. It seemed that our general distrust of each other kept us together. After we separated in California he always kept a loosely knotted noose on me. He needed to know where I was. He never feared our secret coming out; it was more of a game to him. A game of odds and chance and memory and probability. Which one of us would break first? Who would tell the story? It was only a matter of time. Stone & Schell, partners in crime. Sometimes I thought that he wanted me to confess, that he was daring me to write a book; other times it seemed that he had forgotten what happened in the woods. He had pushed it from his mind; so much had happened to him since then, so much success, so much happiness. And I too began to wonder if it had ever really happened.

We sat that night before the fire.

There were four of us.

Wren was brooding. Eloise sat at Ro's feet. We drank champagne. Ro began his ghost story. Of course, it wasn't Roman's story.

It was mine.

Do you know what I love about you?
said Pru one night long ago in Little America.
You make ugly things seem so beautiful. That's what I call a real writer
.

“Tell the story,” said Wren.

We drank champagne.

We ate oranges.

And sat before the fire.

Roman told the story of how I found my mother and father dead.

A true haunting.

His ghost story.

My ghosts.

Eloise was standing at the window.

Her back was to Zigouiller.

She looked out at the city.

She turned from the glass.

She looked at him.

In the darkness.

“I wish I had killed him,” he said.

He rose from the bed.

He went to her.

“You called me a whore,” she said.

“It was a stupid thing to say,” she said.

They sat upon the bed.

They lay down upon the bed.

The drapes were open.

And the lights of the city shined upon the snow.

Eloise on her side.

In her black slip.

With his hand on her hip.

“Do you forgive me?” he asked.

And in all these years; since I became the ghost of my own father; the years since we buried the girl in the snow; the years since my wife died; the years that proved my bad luck by virtue of my lack of virtue, I told my story only to one person.

I told my story to Dr. Lemon.

As we sat before the chessboard.

As we moved our ivory pieces across the black-and-white squares.

He poured me plum brandy.

He was deep and knowing.

I told him about my father and mother.

About my wife.

About my sister. About my book.

About Roman. About the girl.

The doctor could not remember the sins that I nightly confessed to him.

And because the doctor could not remember that what I touched was subject to destruction; he asked me to possess his most beloved object.

Zigouiller asked Eloise if she could forgive him.

The ghost-perfume seeps from the wallpaper. Like roses.

“What are you thinking?” he asked her.

She was thinking of summer and salted licorice and an apple tree and no image that fit in a line with the next image just one thing after the next a ruined vase a cracked kettle a broken clock. She was thinking of Mother and Father. And the house and the tree and the garden and the table in the kitchen an unmade bed a closed door and the light burning burning in the window that you could see when you left your bicycle in the grass so you knew that Mother was reading. Eloise was thinking about Louie how he asked her again and again to tell him what happened. What did you see? he asked her. Do you remember? Did she remember? Father was in the cellar. He was making a box in which to lock all that was bad in the world. Father taught the children to be good. His wrath was a terrible thing. Mother was beautiful. In the garden. With the flowers and the aphids, the snails, the slugs cutting their way through green flesh; boring holes, sucking, destroying the life of flowers. Mother went at night to search for slugs in the garden. She crushed them between her fingers. To save the flowers. Mother's kindness was a terrible thing. At night the moonflowers opened in their twining around the fence; white flowers that hid from the light. See? Mother said. Mother whispered. See? how they open in the darkness? I see, said Eloise. And she did. She had seen. She saw.

She was the one who found the bodies.

“What are you thinking?” said Zigouiller.

She was thinking of the girl.

Of the swan.

Of the ocean.

Of the salt.

“El?” he said.

She was thinking of how her mother taught her to knick the moonflower seed with a knife to break the hard husk so that when buried in the ground the green shoots could push out and up and twine and mingle and knot and secretly at night and in the darkness blossom.

“I forgive you,” she said.

There is nothing so much that people will beg for as the truth; and then when given this thing, this
truth
, they will immediately doubt it. Why is kindness repaid with cruelty? The greater mystery is why the bird clings to the branch. Or the mouse plays dead to avoid the cat. When I was a child I used to keep my stories locked in a cedar box. I don't know whether I was protecting my story or the world.

W
E WALKED.
The smoke of burning sage and cigarettes. We walked. The white flowers in the darkness. We walked. The dark hours by the light of the lanterns. We drank coffee with honey. At a little shop I bought postcards. We walked. He told me about a box that contained all the misery in the world. It was night. It was not. It was not night. We walked. It was morning. It was a hot dull morning. We stood on the balcony. He broke an orange in two. And he handed half to me. He went back into the room. I opened the box. His manuscript was tied with my ribbon. He untied the ribbon. He undid the
knot. His papers fell to the floor. The fallen pages, the papers fluttering. I collected the fallen pages. He sat in shadow. I waited. I waited. I asked him to tell me the story. In the vase the black lilies wilted. In the lobby the statue began to weep. And everyone said that it was a miracle. Then one day or maybe it was night: he was gone. I read about it in the newspaper. It said that he died. And there would be no more of him. I came back here to our room. The night porter's wife asks about him and she brings me coffee with milk and honey but I have no taste for it. I do not tell her that he died. And I am waiting for a ghost.

S
USU
Z
IGOUILLER LOVED
A
MERICA
: the shopping malls, fast food, cheeseburgers and push-up bras, gossip magazines, baseball, poetic justice, and blockbuster movies in which sloganeering heroes jump from jet planes two-fisted with guns blazing. She couldn't help but feel fondness for a certain species of vulgarity, for so much sugar and fat and sex and salt. The highs were high and the lows were low; truth was an artificial construct; beauty was in the eye of the beerholder; and her favorite gods and goddesses had long since ditched Mount Olympus for the Hollywood hills. She understood the sign of her own symbolism. She knew the difference between story and plot. All the history in the world had already happened. And she was in exile on an ancient island.

Dibby Stone, once wife and now widow, in the warmth of a restored post-and-beam New England farmhouse that had been
(not once, but) twice featured in
House & Garden
magazine, in a room that despite the absence of the subject had an objective (objectionable?) masculine presence: her late husband's study (he had objected to her calling it a
study
, as he assuredly had never
studied
anything; he was a natural—), touched her fingers to the black keys of his typewriter.

Eloise Sarasine, reading a novel (or rather, not reading—), let the book fall closed.

Elizabeth Weiss held her raku cup in both hands and blew slightly to cool the lime-infused green tisane, and she let the moment linger into a dramatic pause before she answered the question of the girl who sat beside her on the overstuffed sofa. The girl was a graduate student. Her name was Eris. She had bombarded Liz with e-mails, until finally, Liz, both flattered and wary, had agreed to the interview. The girl's hair was bleached white blonde. She was wearing a perfume of green apples, and she was working on her thesis:
Who killed the novel?

Her theory was murder-suicide.

The girl broke off a bit of her buckwheat scone between her fingers.

And Liz said, “What was the question?”

Eris, caught between bites, set her plate on the cushion, put her hand before her mouth, and held up the other in a gesture, wait, wait—

“How did you meet your husband?” she asked.

Benjamin Salt arrived on Pear Island on the last day of December. His journey began in Brooklyn. He had taken a taxi to the airport.
He had flown from JFK to Detroit, then changed planes and traveled on to Duluth. There he had rented a car. And continued on toward his destination. He spent the night at a grim motel called the Stockade; breakfasted the next morning at the Kracked Kettle. Salt arrived in Damascus, Wisconsin, in a flurry of snow. He smoked a cigarette and walked along the jetty. Lake Superior was dark. The water was dark with distant islands. He said aloud in the cold afternoon,
archipelago
. He liked the sound of the word. A posted sign announced that the ferry was no longer taking passengers across the lake; but this was no impediment to Salt. He was not to be stymied by such a small thing as circumstance. He hired a boat to take him across. And once on the island, he enlisted the aid of a boy from the inn to take him to the home of Sheldon Schell.