The Curiosities (Carolrhoda Ya) (36 page)

We stood looking up at it. The recessed lighting made faint halos around our heads, and Bryce put down his drink like he was about to say something, gesturing vaguely. Sebastian’s body was pierced in six places, but in his beatific ecstasy, he was one millimeter off from smiling.

“That’s the way to go,” Bryce said. He said it solemnly, without irony. “No old age, no fading into obscurity. People remember a really dramatic death.”

I let myself drift closer—closer—until the backs of our hands were touching. “He’s so...isolated though, like he’s on stage. I mean, everyone’s looking at him, but no one can know what he’s feeling. Do you think he’s lonely?”

Bryce shrugged, taking his hand back, glancing away. “Are you talking about the painting or the man?”

“Does it matter? Maybe I was talking about the saint. I mean, what’s the difference?”

“Only one of those things is real, though. He was a man, but the painting and the saint are just impressions, the way other people saw him, and not how he actually was.”

“Do you think people ever actually know each other?”

He twitched his shoulders and swallowed. “Do people even really know themselves?”

I looked up at Sebastian, martyred by arrows. I supposed that some people did know. Portia did, I was almost sure. But I couldn’t say with any real authority that I knew myself.

I turned my back on Bryce and Sebastian, watching the pseudointellectuals in their hipster glasses. The grad-school girls weren’t flirting, weren’t dancing, weren’t anything. They just sat around the crowded living room, waiting for someone to take pity on them and start a conversation.

I finished my drink and turned to face Bryce again. “Did you hear about the girl in the woods?”

He nodded. The question wasn’t particularly original. Everyone had heard about the girl in the woods. “Nothing concrete really, but students were talking about it in my European Masters seminar.”

He said
students
the way a person would say c
onvicts,
or
hookworms,
like they were so beneath him. Like he wasn’t one, even though last time I looked, grad student still had the word
student
attached to it.

“Was she poisoned?” he said, and I knew that he was teasing me about Rosamund. “Stabbed? Drowned in the tub?”

I shook my head, trying to convey the awful weight of the girl in the tree, her empty death, her aloneness. Trying to convey all the ways that this was not a joke. The blunt, factual nature of her demise made something shudder deep inside me, and when I pretended to Portia or to myself that the dark stuff couldn’t touch me, that was a lie. I’d been waking up from nightmares since the day they found her, rope knotted around her neck and hands tied. There was nothing else to say about her. The known facts were spare and arbitrary. A dead girl found hanging in a tree, without rhyme or reason, no explanation and no story.

Bryce sighed like he was humoring me. “How did she die?”

“Hung,” I said. “Hanged. Whatever. She was out in the woods behind the lake, in that big buckeye tree.”

“Did you know her?”

I shook my head.

“Did you see her, then? Did you find the body or something?”

“No, but I went out to look after they took it down.”

Bryce raised his eyebrows, smiling for the first time. “A little ghoulish, don’t you think?”

I didn’t disagree.

He reached to set his drink on the low, glass-topped coffee table, watching me intently, and there was a need in his face that I recognized. It was the same half-buried hunger I saw in my own face. An emptiness that never seemed to show in photographs, but which was uncomfortably visible every time I studied myself in the mirror.

All at once, I knew what I wanted. What I would do. It would be this thing we’d have, a raw, poignant bond, and once it was in place, he’d see me through the lens of this one shared thing. We would have our moment of unfailing connection, and everyone else would be outside it.

“Come on,” I said, reaching for his hand. “I’ll show you.”

. . .

There is a light in the window—the one he pointed to from the street before they left the safety of the pavement and started into the woods. Now she stands looking up, captivated by the warm rectangle above her. The light and the promise of warmth pull at her. They draw her like a flame, her face moth-white, her lips a cool, lifeless blue.

. . .

We found our coats in the pile on the bed and went out through the kitchen. I looked for Portia before we left, but she was working her magic on a cluster of lit. majors, and I didn’t interrupt her.

Down in the street the rain had let up, but the asphalt was slick, reflecting the streetlights in smeared pools.

We headed in the direction of the lake, and Bryce reached for my hand but chickened out at the last minute, letting his fingers brush lightly against my sleeve, then fall again.

As we crossed the quad, he walked faster, and I had to scramble to keep up, scuffing my feet along the sidewalk to keep my ballet flats from slipping off. Brick apartments rose on either side of us, picturesque and shabby.

“I live up there,” he said, and when he pointed, I knew that after our foray into the woods we’d come back here, newly allied, and we’d climb the three flights to his tiny TA-salary apartment, where he’d suggest brandy or coffee or
Parcheesi,
and he’d let me stay. We’d sit together on the couch and talk about art and philosophy. About the girl in the woods.

Later, I would put my glass down, lean toward him, and kiss him before he could demur. He’d be pleasantly startled, grateful even. He would treat me like he knew how much I mattered.

The path into the woods was narrow but easy to find if you knew where to look, and everyone did. It was the quickest way to get from one side of campus to the other, and the path was worn hard and bare by so many feet. Now, though, it was late and dark and empty. Only a fool would go into the woods at night with a strange man. Only a fool would lead the way.

. . .

She mounts the steps with plodding dignity. Her remaining shoe is made of silk, muddy now and in tatters, the sole pulling away from the upper. Her bare foot taps out a soft patting rhythm as she climbs the stairs. The rustle of her dress sounds like a drawn breath, but she is not breathing.

. . .

We stood in the shadow of the buckeye tree, looking up. In the daylight you’d be able to see the dusty mark where the rope had been looped and knotted around the branch, but at night even that was invisible, no proof at all that anything terrible had happened.

In the dark I could feel Bryce watching me. “This is it? What you wanted to show me?”

His tone was polite, but disappointed, like I’d promised him fireworks and delivered a burnt match. I nodded, feeling childish suddenly. Pointless. We were here, in the very location of horror and tragedy, and still it meant nothing.

Bryce started to speak again, then cut himself off. I couldn’t see his expression, but the angle of his head seemed like he might be watching me with actual pity.

“Sorry,” I told him, trying to sound casual, unbothered by how ordinary everything seemed, suddenly. “I don’t know what I was thinking. I thought it was going to be better.”

“Don’t apologize,” he said in a solemn voice. “I should be thanking you. It’s funny, but I’m glad you brought me out here.”

“Why? It was a stupid idea. It’s not even like the place is secret or anything. I mean, everyone walks through here.”

He took his hands out of his pockets and moved closer. “Yes, but it’s nice to see it through your eyes.”

I had always been the kind of girl who made the first move, but when our lips met, he was the one kissing me. His mouth was warm and soft and just a little too cautious.

Then he was holding me, pressing my back against the tree, and I remembered the way he had looked, standing in front of Saint Sebastian, the dark hunger in his eyes, like he knew what it was to spend hours or days staring down the grimmest, most impossible questions. Like maybe he even had the answers.

He touched my throat, running a finger down my trachea, and I swallowed. My mouth was very dry suddenly. I couldn’t see his face, but his shoulders had a set that told me things about his expression. Enough to know that he was smiling.

“Rosamund,” he said, and it was all there in his voice, the things he was really saying.

I nodded.

Rosamund, who took what wasn’t hers, whose story was a fake, a collection of rumors and lies. Rosamund, girl of a thousand deaths, and who is she without them? If none of them are true, who is the girl in stories? Nothing but a proud, selfish nobody. King Henry II’s mistress, who died in a nunnery of natural causes.

I stood with the tree at my back, heart jackhammering in my chest, but not quite ready to run. When you spend your whole life convinced that underneath your warm party smile, you are utterly, permanently alone, you spend your whole life thinking nothing can touch you.

. . .

She doesn’t remember the moment of her death, not the electric chill of his eyes on hers, shining up out of the dark, not the way her hands fluttered at his face like wings and then went numb.

The only thing left to her now is a memory of hope, vague but insistent. Of a wish made in the street before the long walk into the woods. Before her lungs failed and her eyes closed. A wish for closeness, for understanding.

Now she stands outside his door, waiting for the moment when she will present herself to him, share the horror of her milky eyes and her newly quiet heart. Here in the empty hall, she knows what saints know—that no one will understand the mysteries of the grave unless they have felt the chill and the stillness for themselves.

After a long time, she rings his buzzer, waits as his footsteps grow louder. There is a rattle as he draws back the chain.

In a moment, he will open the door and invite her in, and if he doesn’t, she will come in anyway. The cold in her veins is overwhelming, the truest thing, and he will spend a long time dying. Long enough, in his final agony, to share it with her.

I would’ve laughed if you’d told me ten years ago that I’d be sitting on ideas for two weeks, two months, two years, two decades, before writing them. Used to be that my modus operandi was to come up with an idea at breakfast and start writing the novel by dinner. If for any reason I got interrupted before I finished writing the novel, it was curtains for the nag. These frantic ideas were as fragile as newborn pandas—wow, that is two animal metaphors in one paragraph. If the ideas were left untended for a moment, they perished. It was impossible for me to imagine ever returning to one of these abandoned novels or ideas. And yet I find myself now sitting on story ideas for months at a time or returning to novel ideas that I first kicked around when I was sixteen or seventeen. Really, I think it’s because my writing has become deeper now. The plot and world and characters are just clever covers for things I want to think about and questions I want to ask myself and others.