Of Bees and Mist (26 page)

T
wenty-seven years after its first appearance, the blue mist arrived late at 24 Monarch Street. All morning long as she flayed carrots and admonished turnips, Ravenna nursed her fury. By the time the mailman completed his rounds in the neighborhood, there was still no sign of Gabriel. Ravenna threw away the carrots and attacked the pork rump, so viciously her maids did not dare come within ten feet of her. When at last the blue mist made its delivery, the sun was halfway up in the sky. Armed with a steaming plate of ham-and-paprika omelet, Ravenna entered the dining room and glared at the man seated at the head of the table. When she plopped down the plate in front of him, he did not appear to notice. Taking in his pale and exhausted color, Ravenna gave a righteous grunt, saying to herself that his mistress’s erotic antics must have finally caught up with him. She continued to watch him with disdain when the unimaginable happened: Gabriel pushed the plate away, stood up, and went off to his study. Ravenna reeled as if he had punched her. The pact was broken. For the first time in twenty-seven years, he had left the food she served him untouched.

That evening, the yellow mist arrived earlier than usual. As soon
as Gabriel stepped into the vapor, the knot of anguish that had been sitting in Ravenna’s stomach since morning ruptured like a boil. She flew downstairs and tore into his study. She ransacked the cabinets and towering shelves. Smashed jars and flasks. Flung books into the air. She peered closely at his notebooks. Stripped the maps and charts off the walls. Rushing to the little closet where he kept his clothes, she yelped in disbelief when she found it half emptied. In rage, she turned out all his jacket pockets, netting two fountain pens, four buttons, and a handful of change. She prosecuted his remaining wardrobe next, but still could not extract an explanation for his change in behavior. Snatching a shirt from the hanger, she shredded it to pieces, took up another and another until a hill of sacrificial fabric mounted at her feet. At last, the smell of burnt meat snapped her to her senses. The pork roast! She ran to the kitchen, pushed aside the terrified maids, and put out the fire with her bare hands. That night, long after Monarch Street fell asleep, Ravenna charged up the stone steps and assailed the ivory mist. “Bastard! Coward! Son of a bitch!” she barked. The break of dawn found her standing on wet grass, grim and erect with the terribleness of a storm.

The blue mist did not turn up that morning. Ravenna waited until noon before she hurled breakfast against the wall. For the rest of the day, Gabriel neither returned nor sent news. When evening came, Ravenna stood at her bedroom window and stared far beyond the rooftops. A pale autumn sky stretched vast and benign, yet some unaccustomed movement among the stars convinced her that the blue mist would never again carry him home. All at once she felt it—the keen and irrevocable agony of loss. Closing the window and shutting the curtain did not lessen the feeling one bit.

The blue mist did turn up the following morning. But instead of releasing Gabriel from its union with the ivory, it held out a note addressed to the lady of the house. Ravenna stuck her hand into the beating heart of the vapor and plucked out the note. In the gray morning light Gabriel’s fastidious handwriting glared at her.
I can
no longer live under the same roof with you. You can have the house—I will send for my things.
Ravenna dropped the note as a tide of pain knocked her back. Blinking and trembling, she looked up and realized that both the blue and ivory mists had vanished. A gust of wind snatched up the note and buoyed it dancingly, first across the street, then to the tops of trees and to the sky beyond. Ravenna slammed the front door shut. Back in the kitchen, she gathered all her cooking implements, her pots and pans and knives and spices and sacks of flour, and heaped them together in one corner. To these she added fresh meat and vegetables, fish, eggs, butter, fruit, rice, and oil. The two maids watched in horror as the iron knot on the back of her head sliced about the room like a rapier.

“Take what you want and leave,” she ordered them. “From this day forward there will be no more cooking in this house.”

She unlocked a drawer and dispensed their wages. Before either one could object, Ravenna had herded them away.

On the third night of Gabriel’s absence, she threw a thick coat over her shoulders and marched through the fog to Magnolia Avenue. A drizzle was falling, peppering the town with beads of liquid pearls. From the way the leaves bent in the wind, she predicted they were in for a season of thunder. The hour was not late; under the bright white lanterns, Magnolia Avenue was bustling with pedestrians and their umbrellas. When she reached number seventy, friendly voices drifted from an upstairs window. Ravenna hesitated a moment, not expecting others to be present, then pressed her finger to the doorbell.

“You’re an hour late, Rebecca!”

Meridia answered the door in a blue evening dress, her hair stylishly swept back and eyes bright with laughter. She started when she saw her mother but suppressed her gasp.

“Come with me,” said Ravenna.

It took Meridia all of one second to digest this. In a rush she went back up the stairs, and reappeared a moment later in a hooded cloak that fell down to her ankles. Daniel followed with daggers in
his eyes. Before he said a word, Meridia gave him a kiss and swept out into the cold. “Go without me,” she said, hoping his displeasure was somehow lost on Ravenna.

Under the waning moon, they began their journey. Meridia had no idea where her mother was going, aware only that they were heading into the dark heart of town. The earth was damp and muddy, yet Ravenna walked as though her shoes touched nothing but brick. As the drizzle thickened into rain, they hustled past moldering huts and ramshackle tenements, past temples of abandoned gods and hotels tenanted by transient midnight souls. Eyes without bodies tracked them from the depths of shadows, howling, laughing at every turn of the wind. Crude letters blazed up dusty windows. For a few coppers, anyone could purchase a pill for oblivion, a curse for a cuckolding spouse, a brew to abort the unwanted. Through an open doorway, Meridia saw a toothless crone standing by a fire, calling in a loud, croaking voice, “Let me erase your past, hapless one! I can deflect the future and obscure the present!” Meridia shuddered and fastened her hood. Ravenna strode on as if she did not hear a thing.

The wind lifted in a violent gust when they entered the mouth of a certain alley. A hailstorm of flowers broke out, trapping them in swirling, shivering petals that beat their skin like frenzied wings. The rain came down hard and soaked them. For a long time they could neither see nor move. When the gust receded, Meridia brushed the petals off her face and noticed that Ravenna’s knot had come undone. Down her unbending spine the long strands of hair hung wet and heavy.

Mother and daughter swung into the alley. A modest cottage, which did not otherwise differ in appearance from the others, was marked by the familiar yellow mist. Seizing this, Ravenna flew at the vapor and pounded on the door. Meridia followed, her tongue coppery with panic and premonition. As soon as her skin brushed the cold mist, she understood that she had plunged into a world where men withdrew to hide their shame.

Despite Ravenna’s thunderous knocks, a long time elapsed before footsteps approached. A moment later the bolt turned and the door yielded a fraction. A woman’s tremulous voice reached them before her eyes appeared through the slit.

“What do you want?”

“My husband,” said Ravenna.

“He’s asleep. Come back in the morning.”

“Open the door now, woman!”

“He doesn’t want to see you. Please leave before you wake up the whole town.”

Ravenna’s fury suddenly found an outlet. “I’ve waited for twenty-seven years, you shameless old slut! Before this rain stops, that bastard will listen to what I have to say!”

Ravenna kicked the door open, smashing the woman in the face. There was a painful yelp, followed by a nasty tumble to the floor. Ravenna flung the door wide and charged into the house.

“Where is he?”

The woman had fallen on her backside, one hand supporting herself and the other clamping her nose. A shaded lamp lit the dingy parlor, spartanly furnished with worn leather chairs and a battered table. A stale yet familiar smell of lilac suffocated the air. The instant Meridia locked eyes with her father’s mistress, a deep tremor took hold of her bones. She needed no help to recognize who it was.

“Pilar!”

Sinking, Patina’s sister was hiding her face and weeping. “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean for this to happen.”

Meridia stared dumbly. Saw bright blood oozing from the woman’s nose but could not move to help her.

“Come out, you pig! You rotten, good-for-nothing asshole!”

Ravenna was already storming the narrow hallway. Two doors stood to her right, one to her left. She tried the first one on the right, which led to an empty sitting room, and slammed it shut. The second door she shut even more quickly—it opened to a cramped
and smelly kitchen. She made for the last door and flung it open. A second later her scream vibrated the cottage to its core.

Meridia ran for the door and found herself in a large, dusky room. At a glance she made out a garishly ornate bed, huge and imposing in the center of the room, with Ravenna bending over it. The air here shimmered with heat, as if an invisible fire were eating its way slowly across the floor. As Meridia crept closer, she began to perspire, and noticed that the bed was surrounded by iron pails full of blazing charcoal. Why did the room require such excessive heating? The question had barely crossed her mind when she saw it: a pillar of ice lying in the middle of the bed. She drew back, nearly losing her balance. She stared at the face sealed by doom and felt its coldness slicing at her heart.

“Papa!”

Under the transparent ice, Gabriel’s elegant features were meticulously preserved. Thick gray locks swept across his forehead, skin unlined, lips flushed, jaws clenched in inviolate dignity. He was wearing one of his dark suits with a gardenia pinned to his buttonhole. His hands, long and well sculpted, folded regally across his chest. Only the eyes were restless, staring straight up with a bleak sense of unfinished mission. Meridia had no doubt she was looking at a corpse.

“What have you done to him?” Ravenna suddenly swung around to face the door.

Pilar had walked in with a towel pressed to her nose. The sobbing noise she emitted sounded as strange and incorporeal as a goblin’s wail.

“He caught a chill a few days ago and woke up sick,” she began, frozen to the spot by Ravenna’s glare. “I pleaded with him to stay in bed, but he said he was fine and insisted on…on returning to you. That evening he came back much earlier and immediately took to bed. He looked dejected and kept muttering something about a broken pact. I made nothing of it, but all night long he complained that a cold wind was jabbing up and down his spine. I scolded him
for talking nonsense and pulled out more blankets. I never suspected—dear God, if I only knew—”

Pilar wiped her tears with the bloodstained towel. Meridia, torn by a hundred emotions, could not decide whether she ought to pity her or smack her.

“Go on,” Ravenna demanded, immovable as the ice that swaddled Gabriel.

Pilar exerted herself with difficulty. “The next morning he couldn’t get out of bed. His teeth were chattering, and I couldn’t keep him warm no matter what I did. That afternoon I sent for a doctor, who prescribed plenty of liquid and hot-water bottles. A few hours later, the first frost appeared on his lips. I panicked and piled more hot-water bottles on him. This seemed to reduce the chill, and the frost slowly began to thaw. That night, he insisted on writing a note to you. After he finished, he ordered me to change him into his best suit. I didn’t know what he was thinking, not then, and when he asked for the gardenia, I thought he’d lost his mind. He made me swear that under no circumstance was I to let you in this house. He slept peacefully that night. In the morning, I woke to find him sealed in ice. I jumped, sent again for the doctor. This time the gentleman scratched his head and ordered for charcoal to be brought in. We kept it going for hours but the ice did not thaw. ‘Just as well, the cold will keep him alive,’ said the doctor. ‘Whatever you do, do not break the ice. It will be the death of him.’ This was yesterday. Last night the ice stopped growing, and he’s been the same since.”

Seeing that Ravenna had not moved, Pilar ventured a step forward. Meridia noticed that her nose had stopped bleeding.

“I’m sorry the note never reached you,” said Pilar, a thumb scratching her chin. “I put it on the hallway table after he wrote it, thinking I would send it in the morning. But it wasn’t there when I looked the next day. I must have misplaced it. Or maybe he changed his mind during the night and destroyed it while he still had the strength. I wish I could tell you what he wrote, but he kept it secret from me. I would hate to think—”

“I received the note,” Ravenna said brusquely.

Pilar staggered back. “You did? But who delivered it?”

Ravenna had no time to respond, for at that moment a loud splitting sound erupted from inside the ice. A tiny fissure appeared on the surface of the pillar, running from the top of Gabriel’s head to just below the left side of his chest. Before anyone else could react, Ravenna leapt into motion.

“Get up, old man!” She grabbed a pewter washbasin from the nightstand and brought it down hard against the ice. The fissure broadened. Ravenna struck harder, creating a hairsbreadth line to Gabriel’s heart.

“You’ll kill him if you break the ice, Mama!” cried Meridia. Ravenna responded by increasing the force of her pounding.

Pilar let out a shriek but did not dare interfere. Meridia stood thunderstruck, thinking her mother had lost it.

“Did you think you could write me off with a lousy letter?” Ravenna shouted into the depths of the ice. “Did you honestly believe this
igloo
would keep you safe from me?”

As the blows rained harder and the tangle of lines spread across the ice, Ravenna’s face lit up with a madcap determination. Suddenly Meridia understood what she had to do. She shed her cloak on the floor, snatched a brass candlestick from the top of the armoire, and smashed it full force against the ice.