Sub Rosa, page 24
I peered over her shoulder at the heavy textbook that she was almost finished reading. It was about atmospheric science, whatever that means, and there were illustrations of different types of clouds scattered alongside the tiny text. I looked at the two-dimensional storm clouds wistfully.
“Breakfast?” I asked her.
“Had it,” she said, pointing at the muffin wrapper and empty teacup on the coffee table. “I bought a dozen—apple cinnamon—if you’re hungry.”
“Well, I was on my way to the Mayflower, before I ran into that awful clock. If you don’t mind?” First waved goodbye with a smile, her eyes focused on her book.
I avoided the neon clock on my way out. It was late enough in the morning that the triplets would be well caffeinated and ready to gossip, this I knew. Their table was covered in beads and felt and smears of glue when I arrived. Collaging menu covers was their latest project. “But we never use the menus,” I said. Magazine clippings crumpled under my arms as I took a spot at their table. As I slid over, a pair of cut-out eyes stuck to my elbow.
“These are daily special menus,” Portia explained, holding one up. “There are seven different menus, one for each day of the week.”
“Maggie and Al are testing out new recipes,” said Likka. “It’s because of our influence, don’t you think? We’ve been very encouraging.” The triplets nodded and giggled in agreement. A second later they were arguing about how long it had been since a new dish had been added to the menu.
I had a more serious topic in mind for discussion. “So, I hear that all Diamond’s children were once real orphans,” I said.
Likka dropped her glitter glue. “Where did you hear that?”
“We always thought that was a rumour so that the live ones would feel sorry for them,” said Myra.
“It’s no rumour,” snapped Likka. “You know all the zombie men? It was the Dowager who banished them to the Dark in the first place, right? Well, the orphan children are all their girlfriends and sisters that got left behind when the zombies were exiled.”
“The zombie’s sisters. That’s rich!” Portia snorted. “The Dowager’s girls, for your information, are all the darlings who never made their dowries. Some girls just don’t have what it takes. The city leaves them too broken, like, say, orphans. Orphans are particularly broken. It’s these girls who don’t do so good on their Dark Days. That’s how Diamond’s children got their name.”
“That’s right, isn’t it?” said Myra. “I remember, because when Arsen opened the bets on you, a lot of Glories bet you’d end up with the Dowager. You had that look, you know, that a-little-too-far-gone look about you. Were you an orphan, Little?”
Either Portia or Likka kicked Myra from under the table. Myra let out a short yelp, then pressed her lips together and resumed gluing sparkles onto Mayflower menus. “Don’t ask stupid questions,” Likka scolded. “I was just curious. Is that so wrong?” Myra said sternly as she pushed the clippings around the table, searching for a head to fit on top of a collage body.
Portia ripped into a baggie of plastic googly eyes, which spilled across the table. “Shit,” she blurted out. “I never thought you looked too far gone,” she said a second later. “It must be hard for the Daddies. They have to pick just the right girl. One that wants desperately to leave the city, but not so desperate that she can’t succeed as a Glory. You’d think if anyone was going to be good at picking darlings, it would be Arsen. But the way I heard it is he’s lost girls to the Dowager. At least two, as far as I know. That’s why most Glories thought you’d wind up an orphan child. That’s the only reason.”
Shirley sprang up with cups of their new seafood chowder for us to sample. She laid the placemats on top of the triplet’s art supplies and offered us the steaming ceramic mugs. The chowder had roasted yellow peppers and whitefish that dissolved on my tongue. It was just what was needed to quell the tension after what Portia said. The triplets examined their collages between bites. Hearts and lady legs and marabou feathers. Portia put her soup aside to craft four-leaf clovers with a green bingo dabber.
“My grandmother used to have an ashtray shaped like a four-leaf clover,” I said, half-consciously. A moment later the words sunk in and as they did, I nearly leaped out of my seat. I wasn’t an orphan—I had a grandmother.
“You mean a candy dish?” asked Myra.
“No, an ashtray! She smoked her lungs out.” I grinned at the thought of it.
“It’s not funny, poor woman. And she put out her nasty cigarettes in a four-leaf clover, no less. City people—they just don’t know any better, do they?”
City people visited us every day. In a few hours they’d begin their routine visits that we depended on. We call them live ones simply because they’ve passed through the invisible border to Sub Rosa. They stop being city people and become cherished, valuable. Most city people would never make it to Sub Rosa. Did that make them useless? Invisible? It was Thursday—the day the Widower had chosen for his regular appointment. This time I planned to look, hard, out his car window. And hopefully, I wouldn’t be the only one.
The Dowager and her orphan children wore soiled garden gloves and were armed with little metal claws and hoes. As I approached, I could hear very faint girlish grunts as they laboured away at the cracked earth, pushing black soil around from tiny pile to hole and back again. There were, undeniably, more blooms on her wisteria vine, more buds on her roses than before.
“They’re really starting to bloom,” I said, standing on the edge of her property.
The Diamond Dowager stood, and her orphan children all scrambled to their feet after her. “Come smell one, if you like,” she offered. “They are quite fragrant.” As I stood on my tiptoes to reach her roses, I spotted Isabella. She looked like a dishevelled soldier, mud-stained knees, her ivory slip showing beneath her black lace dress. Soil smeared across both cheeks. Had she been lying in the dirt?
“I have tea inside,” the Dowager said, beckoning me from behind the roses and thorns. The orphan children moved drone-like toward the house; Diamond stopped them with a single upturned finger. We left them tending the nearly lifeless earth.
The inside of the Dowager’s house was the same as the outside: gloomy. Dark wood that looked to be polished with ash. I feared that if I touched the walls, they would stain my skin. Cut-crystal chandeliers hung side by side from the ceiling, thousands of sparkling arrows pointed at my head. They chimed precariously in the cool draft that pushed the front door shut behind us. I wondered what kind of live one found himself in this house.
Yet there were objects inside the house that, like the Dowager’s roses, were full of colour and hope. A tiny brass bell hung by a red ribbon above her doorway. A melancholic rendition of “Moon River” played on a gramophone in the corner. The sugar cubes for our tea were contained in a ceramic rabbit-shaped bowl, its little face desperately cute in the drab surroundings. I began to understand what kind of live one would visit. The Wifey Wing overwhelms one with gratification. What could possibly be yearned for that we don’t already have? The House of Diamond was full of wanting. She needed an entire mansion to hold all that want. I imagined live ones ascending to the upstairs rooms, each as sad as the sitting room, maybe containing a painting of a summer garden or an old portrait to interrupt the emptiness. I imagined undressing an orphan child, unwrapping the layers of black crepe to find her skin, pale and pure. As if she were the only precious thing that survived fire or flood. As if she were the last untouched thing left on this spoiled earth.
“If you’re finished scrutinizing my home, you can tell me why you’ve come.” The Dowager narrowed her eyes at me. I figured I should get right to the point.
“The Widower has requested a duo,” I lied. “I’d like to take one of the orphans with me to his house.”
“My girls don’t do duos with Glories from other houses.”
I had anticipated this answer. “Believe me,” I said carefully, “I prefer to bring someone more … complementary to my working style. More flexible. Your children are too obedient to you to serve me personally, in any way. I’d take First, but she can be a bit overwhelming at times. I don’t want to jeopardize the relationship I have with the Widower. He’s head shy.”
“I know all about him. As do my girls, if you recall.” Diamond poured me more tea. I took this as a sign she was still willing to hear my proposition.
“He knows your girls, all right. He was asking after Isabella at my debut party. Maybe she mentioned it?”
“Of course she did,” said the Dowager. “But I already knew Isabella was a favourite of his.” I didn’t care whether she was telling the truth or boasting. My only aim was to arrange some time alone with Isabella. “I’ll consider it,” said the Dowager.
“Well if you decided to send her, have her be ready and waiting curbside at seven sharp,” I said, doing my best to come off indifferent. I gulped back the remainder of my tea. The sugar had sunk to the bottom of the cup, leaving my mouth sweet.
“A duo will be a healing experience for you,” I explained to the Widower as I opened his car door and let Isabella in. He held back his reservations as we drove to his waterfront home the same way he later held back his gratitude as I led a naked Isabella to the blanket laid out before him.
The Widower sat on his firm leather sofa, watching. Isabella squirmed under me and, I must admit, put on a very good show. Her heightened breathing whistled through the gap in her front teeth. How I wanted to pry her mouth open to free her sounds. I gripped her throat tightly for seconds at a time, pressing my fingernails into the soft flesh beneath her earlobe, hoping for a scream. She curled her toes, pressed her palms flat into the blanket. Nothing was escaping her. I handed her over to the Widower, flush and dizzy, and took a turn at watching. And I might have enjoyed the spectacle if I hadn’t been so preoccupied with what I would say to her during the cab ride home.
I could hardly wait to tell Isabella about the newspaper clipping taped to the Watchman’s cupboard door. Glories liked fame, after all. They enjoyed being sought out, even dullards like the orphans. But more than this, if I told Isabella, I wouldn’t be alone with memory any more. If I told First, she would just scold me for reading a newspaper and that would be the end of our conversation. But I wasn’t nervous about confessing my discovery to an orphan—not when she was the topic of the newspaper article herself.
In the taxi, Isabella fanned herself with the Widower’s envelope. “I have never felt so good. Did you have fun?”
“Duos are more fun than being alone with a live one,” I explained. “Glories are better than everyone else—except maybe Daddies.”
“I wouldn’t know.”
“Oh, sorry.”
“Don’t be sorry. Royal generously gives his love to me.”
“Yeah? But you can’t … you know … with a ghost,” I said. Isabella raised a suggestive eyebrow at me. “Sex?” I asked.
“Well, not sex. But my feelings aren’t based solely upon physical, tangible things.” She looked out the window. The sky was the colour of dirty mop-bucket water. Isabella scrunched her nose at the rain drops that splattered against the window. “I try not to let people or things dictate what I feel. We orphans keep our emotion deep within ourselves. I don’t need a Daddy to feel loved.”
“Daddies aren’t about love,” I corrected her. Who was she to be spouting off words of so-called wisdom? She was a brainwashed orphan, as far as I was concerned, staring back at me with big round empty eyes. “The Daddies help us stay connected to that ‘emotion deep within ourselves.’ It’s called ‘roots,’ Isabella. Once upon a time we came from the city, and that’s what the Daddies give us, a little bit of the city, in a good way, get it? It can’t be all Sub Rosa all the time. We’d all be exactly the same if it was like that.”
As soon I said this, I understood that it was utterly true. The Daddies provide what we are unable to get for ourselves. When I was a runaway, Arsen tempted me with a home. He made me beautiful when I was pathetic and ugly. He removed me from harm’s way and put me on Sub Rosa. Now that I was a Glory, he offered me snippets of the city. That was my favourite thing about him, his retelling of city stories. Which restaurants city people liked and how long they were willing to wait in line to eat at them, what kind of toy dog was becoming the most popular pet, and if royal or navy was the fashionable blue for the season. He told these stories so that First and I might better understand our live ones. Based on Arsen’s reports, First would decide whether to serve chai or green tea to live ones or use light lavender- or vanilla-scented candles in the working room. But aside from their practical function, these stories kept us from feeling like we’d lost ourselves by coming to Sub Rosa. Arsen’s city stories were personal; that’s why we liked them. The realization made me momentarily proud of myself.
“Is that your way of insulting me?” Isabella snapped “‘We’d all be exactly the same’? What do you know about me?” The suddenly bitchy tone of her voice irked me. She was so clueless compared to me.
“I know you never had a dad or a mom,” I said. “I heard that orphan business was a Glory gimmick. But you’re no fake, are you? You’re the read deal, little orphan Annie Brianna Isabella, or whoever.” At last Isabella’s stiff lips fell wide open. Her face went slack and she sank into the cheap taxi upholstery with the sudden weight of it all. I gave her a few moments to take it all in. She was so still she didn’t seem to be breathing. This wasn’t how I had imagined her reacting. My delivery was too rough. I was beating her with her own past. I may as well have seized her hand and slapped her face with it.
“I know about the Sisters of Hope of Nazareth. Sister Mary,” I tried again, gentle-like. “Do you remember? Brianna—that’s your real name?”
“How do you know that?” she asked. “How could you know that when I barely know that? Your magic? You can touch people without touching them and you can see the past? True Glory magic like the old legends?”
“I get glimpses,” I said, liking the credit she was giving me. I inched closer, ready to bait her with more prophecies when a bellowing sob exploded out of her, her spittle hitting my cheek. I hugged her close, just to shut her up. “Listen quietly, this cab ride won’t last forever.” I lowered my own voice so that the cabbie wouldn’t hear. “The truth is, I’ve been thinking lots about the city since my second trip to the Dark. My own memories, they’re all mashed up together in my head. But you, I found something of yours out there. It was a newspaper clipping in the Night Watchman’s garage, and it was all about you. There was a picture of you and everything. Sister Mary is worried about you. She put out a missing person’s. She started a prayer group. She went to the newspapers, the police. It was all right there in the paper I saw.”
“When was it written?” Isabella stammered.
It had never occurred to me to look at the date. I shrugged my shoulders. “A long time ago. The ink was old and faded.”
“What did it say, exactly?” I had stopped hugging her, but she continued to cling to me.
“Just like I said.” Isabella held me closer, shaking me slightly for more. I racked my brain for the fine details. “Sister Mary, she thought the police weren’t doing enough to find you. So she gathered a whole bunch of church people together to do their own search. And in your picture, you had big rocker hair, and you were wearing a school cardigan. Our Lady of Hope High School, was that it?”
“Lady of Hope,” she said, and fell back into the seat, repeating it again to herself every few seconds. Each time she said it her voice varied in tone, and the words seemed to take on a new meaning. Except Isabella spoke only to herself. I grew nervous that I had dislodged too much emotion for her orphan mind to handle.
“You have no idea how lucky you are to have a newspaper story, from an actual newspaper. Newspapers don’t lie. I don’t even have proof of when my own birthday is,” I told her, and she fell silent. We didn’t speak for the rest of the cab ride. When we stopped outside the Dowager’s Mansion, Isabella turned to me and asked, “When can you arrange another duo?”
“Give me a week,” I told her. “The Widower comes every week at the same time.” She walked up her garden path without a word. “Or sooner,” I called out. She didn’t turn back, though her steps sprang up a little as I said it. She was gone before she even made it inside—lost in the dull shade of the yard, the sunless veranda of the Mansion.
Our conversation, however, did not disappear with her. I would add this cab ride to my growing collection of “unforgettables.” I had never forgotten the map scrawled on the back of my T-shirt, the handcuff strength of Jellyfish’s grasp, or my grandmother’s lolling, cigarette-stained hand. I still itched from the mess of the Night Watchman’s hair trimmings. Not to mention the pile-up of hazy memories that I wasn’t even certain were real. They were beginning to weigh on me, yet I wanted more. I wanted to be smothered in memory the same way live ones paid First to be smothered. If memory was going to press itself on me, then I wanted real, measurable weight. Pound for pound. Hold it in my hands. See it. Feel it. Name it. Declare its existence. But for what? What can you do with memory on Sub Rosa? You can’t eat memory. You can’t wear it on your ring finger or charge it by the hour. It didn’t help me be a Glory in any way.
More than ever, I looked like a Glory. Each strand of my hair was a fine brush stroke from a calligraphy pen, my skin silk-charmeuse smooth; light trailed behind me like a firefly when I moved. I was still as desirable as any Glory could hope to be. I belonged to a house of legends. I myself had been a heroine at least twice. Stories about me would be told for lifetimes. I doubted any storybook heroine had ever asked, “Isn’t there something else, something more?” Was any Glory unnerved by memory like me?
