The Elementals (21 page)

“No. No sorry.” I flung my arms around him and felt him stiffen for a second, then melt into me, his chest heaving quietly against mine.

“I don’t understand it,” he kept saying. “I don’t understand why.”

“Maybe there is no why. It’s just how we manage to survive it.”

He nodded against me. His tears were on my shirt. I kneaded his shoulders through his coat, trying to loosen the knots of hurt. Then, in moments, his lips brushed mine; then, in moments, it changed.

John was kissing me, fierce as a beast so that I felt the edge of his teeth under his lips. I took his head in both my hands and tried to calm him by stroking his temples with my thumbs. He had me on my back in the earth and I felt the pressure of him forcing between my legs. Desire shot up through my groin. I groaned and he reached down and undid my jeans, then his own. I didn’t tell him to stop. He was so large and hard I almost couldn’t take all of him. He didn’t ask me if I was okay the way he usually did. He didn’t have to. Sparks of light shot through me; I was panting so hard I thought I might faint. His fingers, jammed between us, rubbed so that I tightened even more around him. Tighter tighter tighter like a bud ready to explode. Then I was a flower in time-lapse, opening my petals all at once. Big, pink, velvety tongue-like petals dusting his sex with their russet pollen. And then he was coming and coming and I could feel all of it without any barriers between us, just John inside of me as the sun set and we clung to each other and wept on his baby’s grave.

*   *   *

John apologized immediately after for not using a condom and I told him not to worry; I’d been just as carried away, I said.

But what if I were pregnant? What then? I’d always had a silly fantasy that if I accidentally got pregnant too early I’d have the baby and my mom would help me raise her. Of course, now my mom couldn’t do that at all. I imagined living in the house with John, Tania and Perry. Raising the baby with all of them. I had a sudden, disturbing image of sitting in a bathtub with Tania, passing the child back and forth between our breasts.

Even so, the blood that came brought some disappointment, because I felt pregnant, pregnant with feeling for John Graves. It formed deep in my belly. It swelled my breasts with pleasure. It pressed up against my heart. I remembered my mom telling me that she had read somewhere that having a baby was like walking around with your heart outside your body. I felt that way about John. I also felt that way about Jeni, though. So what did it mean if that heart, that missing heart of mine, no longer beat?

24. You’d better change

On Halloween the rain came down. Not the kind of rain that makes you want to snuggle under the covers and read and dream but the kind of rain that feels like the end of the world. It beat on my brain. I didn’t understand how my housemates expected anyone to come to their party in that storm but they didn’t seem fazed by it; they went about getting ready—or Tania and Perry did; John was out—as if it were a balmy spring evening while I sat huddled on the sofa in front of the fire, nursing my tea, my socked feet tucked up under me. I smelled something sweet and warm coming from the kitchen and went to see.

“The fees danced on it in the night!” Tania exclaimed, showing me the pockmarks dotting the surface of the cake she had made.

“The what?”

“Fees. Another term for fae. It’s lucky! They wore high heels.”

I looked at her blankly and sank into a chair. She didn’t sound charming to me, then. My head hurt and the smell of the cake was making my hands shake and my mouth water. I wanted to eat the whole thing all by myself right then and there. I’d been losing weight again, sustaining myself mostly on my housemates’ wine, but occasionally I’d get ravenous.

“Sylph!” Tania said. “You’d better change. You’re not wearing that, are you?” She had on a long vintage gown of cream mesh encrusted with bronze, gold, silver and red sequin flames. On her back were a pair of large angel wings made of precisely layered red feathers.

I ignored her and she came and sat beside me, took one foot onto her lap. She massaged it gently but strongly enough that I could feel the pulses rise up to meet her touch. “What’s wrong, love?”

I shook my head. “I don’t like this rain.”

“It’s a magical shower. Our guests love the rain. Come on. Let’s get you dressed.”

She took me upstairs and I remembered the first time I had gone with her like this, to put on the blue dress and then came down to eat and dance with her and Perry and John. I was such a different person then. I hadn’t made love with anyone. No men looked at me. I kept my head down. I did well in school. But some things were the same. Jeni was still gone. My mom was still sick. As in love as I believed I was, my heart still ached as if it had been brutally broken, even in the midst of the most ecstatic lovemaking with John.

Tania dressed me in a white bridal gown that night. It was of lace so fragile it was almost disintegrating, like cobwebs. It made me want to hold my breath. She painted my face white and put a veil over me.

“A dead bride!” she chirped. “Perfect.”

I adjusted the crown of the veil—a circlet of tissue-thin green leaves and golden roses—and it caught in my hair, tearing precisely at my scalp. “What are you? A fairy? An angel?”

“Me, an angel?” She laughed. “I’m an elemental.”

“A whatamental?”

“A nature spirit. A bit like a fairy but that word’s been done to death, don’t you think? The elements. I’m fire. Perry’s earth. Johnny’s water. That’s why we needed you, Sylph.”

John had mentioned this before but it seemed stranger when she said it. I shivered in the cold lace dress. It could have been made of clouds.

“You’re air,” Tania said, handing me a cup of warm punch that smelled of cloves and cinnamon and something else I couldn’t place—like smoke and rain and minerals and light. “The fourth.”

“What does that mean?” I asked.

“You’ll see.”

“I don’t want to
see.
I want you to tell me.”

Tania knelt by my side. Her scent was like vanilla and honey.

“It just means you were meant to be here, with us,” she said. “John loves you. He’s coming back to life.”

John loves you.

I could feel the familiar warm prick of tears coming and I didn’t want her to see me cry.

“Okay?” she said. “Does that help?”

I let her hug me. Her body always surprised me; it felt so small and thin and so steely at the same time. Her fuller breasts pressed against mine. They’d gotten smaller lately but John didn’t seem to mind; he kissed them just the same. I thought of his mouth on me and mine on Tania’s nipples, sucking like a baby. Then I shook my head to make it go away and took a sip of punch.

I was drunk by eight o’clock. “Why don’t you lie down,” Tania said. “No one will be here until ten anyway.”

“Where’s John?” I asked her as she walked me to my room. “I want John.”

“He’ll be here.”

*   *   *

When I woke up the rain was still pouring down. My body felt leaden and my eyes were heavy as well; it was as if they had sunk deeper into my skull. I pulled myself up and shivered in the lace bridal gown, then got out of bed. A girl was staring at me.

I jumped back before I realized it was my reflection. Even then, I still half-expected her to start speaking in someone else’s voice.

Damn.

John.

Where was John?

I picked up Tania’s piano shawl, wrapped myself in the embroidered roses and peonies and silk fringe and went downstairs. I left the crown with the veil on the dresser.

The party was like a live thing raging through the house. The walls shook with music. Bodies filled the parlor—young men and women in top hats and tails, biker leather, furs and skins, purple wigs, monster masks; the only light came from candles so that the room was streaked with melancholy, flickering shadows. I recognized the friends from the Solstice party—Shoshanna, Sage, Erin, Steadman (even their names were like supermodels) standing in a circle, wearing elaborate headdresses made of twigs, leaves, flowers, bones, feathers and fur. Their eyes were closed.

I was headed back upstairs to look for John when someone grabbed my arm.

“Where are you going, ducky?”

It was Eamon, the painter from L.A.

I pulled away reflexively.

“I’m sorry my paintings upset you,” he said.

“What the fuck was that anyway?”

Eamon’s fine, white hand clutched the banister. “I think we should get you some help.” His voice was tight. “Really.”

I pushed past him and ran up the stairs.

They were lying there, on the bed. Tania in her metallic sparkled dress. Her wings were tossed on the floor but there was a red feathered mask over her eyes. John in a suit covered with iridescent blue-and-green scales, a tangle of what looked like real seaweed in his hair and around his neck. Bare feet covered with sand. (Had he gone to the beach?) Perry—was it Perry? He wore brown fur trousers and a mask that looked so much like a real goat that it could have been taxidermy. The hinged jaw clattered as he turned toward me and fixed me with the yellow slitted eyes.

Tania extended her hand.

John’s eyes were sunken with worry.

Perry’s goat jaw clacked.

It looked as if they had been waiting for me.

“What’s going on?” I said.

“It’s okay, baby,” Tania said. “Come here.”

Instead, I backed away, pulling her shawl around my shoulders.

John got up and approached me the way you would a wild animal or someone with a weapon, stepping tentatively, hands outstretched in front of him, fingers down.

“Come sit with us and we’ll talk,” he said. “Please, Ariel.”

“We need you,” Tania said, getting up, too, coming toward me and taking off the feathered mask so I could see her eyes better. “Just the way you’ve needed us all this time. Now we need you. We can’t really explain it that easily. It won’t make a lot of sense to you. But we need your help.”

She turned back to Perry. “Take that thing off. It’s scaring her.”

Perry lifted the goat head off and it fell to the floor with a loud thud. The jaw continued to chatter for a few seconds.

“We had a baby,” Tania said. “Camille. You can imagine what that is like because you are close to your mother. It’s loving someone so much you want to die if they go away. She was only here for a moment and then she went away and none of us have been the same.” Tania’s voice was rising in pitch and she was crying, tears melting makeup down her face. “We know about death. We know that souls continue on. But we can’t bring her back. Unless you help us.”

“What are you saying?” I backed toward the door, reaching for the knob, but my hand only touched air and I stumbled. “That you want to bring back souls?” I stared at John. I could smell the electricity burning in the air. “Or maybe I’m just losing my mind. Is that it? Because I hope that’s it. Otherwise I’ve been living with three psychos and fucking one.”

John’s face winced like I’d slapped it. “Don’t say that. You’re not crazy. We may be a little crazy. With grief. But we would never hurt you. And what Tania says is true, Ariel.”

It felt like everyone was silent for five minutes, although it might only have been seconds.

Then Perry said, “We need you, Sylph.” I saw he was crying, too. His bare chest glowed, every golden muscle and sinew defined.

“What do you mean you need me?” I looked to John. Wanting him to make it stop, to make things go back to how they had been before—just us in the big bed, our pulses pressed together so that they vibrated through our bodies, no talk of soul retrieval or resurrection.

“We need you to make love with all of us,” Perry said slowly. He looked at Tania. “Right?”

She nodded. “You’re the fourth. It’s the only way to bring her back.”

“So that’s why I’m here,” I said. “I should have known that’s why you let me in. And you’ve all been sleeping together this whole time, haven’t you? I’m just some missing piece for you to use, right, John?”

I turned toward the door. “No!” John shouted. “Ariel. No!”

As my hand touched the cold metal of the knob I turned back one last time. “Fuck. You,” I said. The bracelet spelling Jeni’s name, the one I had never removed all these years, caught and pulled and broke, scattering four white baby beads across the floor.

*   *   *

In the ballad, Janet, or Margaret as she is sometimes called, picks the double rose and a strange man appears to her and demands it back. When she arrives home she finds she is pregnant and goes back to where she had first met him to pick an herb to abort the child. He appears and tells her she must not get rid of his baby. “Were you ever mortal?” she asks. He says he is not an elf as she suspected but a mortal man who had been captured by the queen. He believes she is going to sacrifice him as an offering to hell that Halloween. The only way the girl can rescue him, he tells her, is to catch him at the crossroads, as he rides by on his white horse, and hold him while he shape-shifts into the form of many beasts and, finally, a piece of burning coal. So she does and he becomes himself again, naked as if reborn. The fairy queen wails that if she’d known he’d escape her she’d have taken out his eyes and replaced them with plugs of wood from an eldritch tree. But it was too late.

*   *   *

But that Halloween I knew I could not hold onto John Graves and still have any piece of myself left.

I had to let him go.

As I stepped outside I saw the giant, swaying back and forth on the porch, making soft, moaning sounds. He reached out one hand, like a slab of meat.

*   *   *

I went to Melinda Story’s that night because there was no place else to go. She came to the door in her robe, blinking at me with worry, and I asked her, panting, if I could come in. All I told her was that my boyfriend and I had broken up. She made me tea, ran a bath for me, gave me some dry clothes and let me sleep on her couch.

My mom and dad arrived the next afternoon to drive me back to Los Angeles. I didn’t let them stop at the house in the hills to get my things. I hardly owned anything anyway—almost everything I had belonged to Tania. And I didn’t want to see John’s face again.