Wildalone (40 page)

“Maybe. But I can't take this chance. I need to know.”

He threw on his jacket. Didn't even bother with the shirt. Then thought of something and turned around.

“My heart will always be yours. Either way.”

I HEARD THE RAIN AS
soon as I woke up—my window was half open, and the tiptoe of drops down bare branches filled the room with its cryptic beat. It had come, with one unusually warm morning: the day when I would see Rhys to say good-bye.

I was ready, in theory. But imagining something and going through with it were two different things. What exactly was I supposed to tell him, anyway? That I was now switching over to his brother, whom I had wanted from the start? And that this same insecure brother of his was sending me to break the news, instead of confronting Rhys himself?

I threw on a sweater and went for a walk on the golf course. There wasn't much rain by now, just a faint, inert drizzle. Already anemic, the grass had sunk into the earth, caught in premonitions of darkness and snow. Yet in one last whim of the dying fall, the rain had trickled through the blades, filling them up until they appeared—for a few final hours—fresh and vibrant with life.

I tried to come to terms with what I had seen on these hills. To imagine taking Rhys back, if he offered enough excuses. He was a guy. He needed sex. The spontaneous, guilt-free sex that he wasn't getting from me and that, frankly, most other girls were probably eager to give him. Add to this the family fortune and the genetic threat of dying young—no wonder he went through the world like a hurricane. Selfish. Destructive. Entitled to everything.

The pine tree stood by the gravel path—almost collapsing, weighed down with rain, its ragged bark exposed in the daylight like the wrinkled skin of a man already too old to die. There was no menace under those branches. It was ordinary. Just a tree.

I went back to my room, called Jake and told him I would be at his house in half an hour, to end things with his brother. All I heard was “I'll tell Rhys”—then he hung up the phone.

“Tesh, are you nuts? Where are you going in this weather?”

Rita had just come out from brunch and saw me crossing the Forbes lobby. I looked through the glass doors. She was right: the rain had turned into a downpour.

“Don't worry, I'll be fine.”

“How exactly? It's a deluge and you don't even have an umbrella!”

“I'm not made out of sugar.”

“Nuts or blind? Hmm . . .” She lifted her hands, palms up, as if measuring on scales the likelihood of me being either. “Sorry, but I have to give you a ride.”

“Since when do you have a car?”

“Since I stopped wasting time with Dev and decided to jump-start my life. Now we can hit New York whenever we want!”

The jump-start turned out to be a gray minivan. She had probably picked it for its size, to fit the entire RCA group.

“So where to? Library or practice room?”

“The corner of Springdale and Mercer, behind the Graduate—”

“I know where it is. Although didn't you say Jake had a dorm room?” When I wouldn't answer, she shook her head and started the engine. “I thought you were done with Rhys. It's your own life, of course, but I hope you know what you're doing. I really do.”

By the time she dropped me off, the downpour had stopped as suddenly as it had started. I was fifteen minutes early but it was better that way—we could get the whole thing over with sooner.

The house waited on the other end of the lawn, undisturbed, crowned with its own silence. I realized, as soon as I saw it, that to me it would always
remain his house—Rhys's, not Jake's—and that I would never want to be in it again.

The wet grass squelched under my steps. I knew that the doors to the living room were closed, that there was no one on the granite stairs. But I saw Rhys as if he were real, rushing out to meet me. To lift me in his arms so that my shoes wouldn't get wet. And to carry me. Carry me and kiss me through the entire lawn . . .

Not this time.

My feet found the stairs, my fingers—the handle of a door. Then I heard the two voices, echoing throughout the house from inside the library.

“—because if that's what you think, Jake, you are out of your fucking mind! It's not why I allow you to live here.”

“This is my home. I don't need your permission.”

“Stay out of my life, or you'll never set foot near Princeton and you know it!”

“Do whatever you want with your life. But it's her life too.”

“And since when is Thea's life any of your business?”

No answer.

“What time did she say she's coming?”

“Ten more minutes.”

“You'll tell her that I went out. And that it's better for her not to see me again—now or ever.”

“You need to talk to her yourself.”

“Are you starting again?” Something hit wood and hit it hard—the windows shuddered. “You'll tell her exactly what I say!”

“Rhys, you broke her heart . . .”

“And you don't think the truth would have broken it? Stop lecturing me, because you have no idea what it's like, being forced to lie to the woman you love.”

“Then don't lie to her. You never should have.”

“Apparently, you and I differ on what I should or shouldn't do. Especially as it concerns Thea. It's rather presumptuous, actually”—his voice was charging up with anger again—“that you feel entitled to even have an
opinion. But either way—you'll do what I say and that's the end of this conversation!”

“What I will do is not your decision.”

“Don't make me turn against you, Jake. Or I swear—”

“I don't care what you do to me. She deserves to know and if you don't tell her—”

“Then what—
you
will? Is that it? Is that what my little brother will do for me?”

This time his voice exploded with a rage I had never heard from anyone. The walls could no longer contain it, and it shook the entire place.

“If you tell her anything—anything at all—I want you out of this house! Do not come back!”

A door got slammed. When I came in, Jake was alone, bent over the writing desk.

“Thea?!”

“If you tell me what exactly?”

“My brother is the one who should—”

“Yes, he should. But your brother will never be honest with me; I think by now he's made that more than clear. So please, don't be like him.”

He looked crushed. Defeated.

“And don't act like hearing the truth would kill me. I know most of it already.”

“You do? How?”

“It doesn't matter how. I know about your family's . . . about the illness that runs through generations. And the way your mom died. I was very sorry to hear it, but I really wish you and Rhys would just—”

“It has nothing to do with my family. It has to do with yours.”

He walked up to one of the bookshelves, pulled a large volume and showed it to me. Mikhail Vrubel. The Siberian who had painted the canvas in Rhys's room.

The leaves flew under his fingers. Portraits. Stylized icons. A still life here and there. Then a complete change of course: an obsession with Russian fairy tales. Girls becoming swans. Flying seraphs. Sea kings chasing red-
haired maidens. Until a single image obliterated all the others—raw, magnificent, bursting its colors over two entire pages.

Seated Demon
. Painted in 1890, after a poem by Lermontov about a demon who fell in love with a human girl on the eve of her wedding.

“He looks like my brother, doesn't he?”

No stretch of the imagination could have prepared me for what I heard next. And, for a while, none of it made sense. As Jake spoke, I kept hoping for a sign that he was joking. But I had never seen him more serious, his voice mechanical, ruthless—the only way he could bring himself to be the one to finally tell me everything—and foreign, the voice of a stranger, heaping up the verdict on me quickly, in seemingly unrelated fragments, too frightening to hold anything but truth.

“The woman you saw with him is your sister. She died years ago, in a ritual, to save his life. In many ways, most of which probably shouldn't matter, he isn't exactly alive himself . . . not in the human sense, anyway. When she sacrificed herself for him, he became bound to her forever. Every month, on the full moon, he has to meet her and be with her the way you saw them—which was never a problem until he ran into you. I warned him, but he had fallen for you hard. You are the first woman he has truly loved. And, knowing my brother, you most likely will be the last. But the one thing he can never do is break his vow. He would be finished. Probably you too. So, since he can't bring himself to go to her after having just been with you, he shuts you off, drinks, goes wild—it drugs the thought of you out. When she's had enough of him, he is free to be with you for another month. That's all.”

Then he left the room.

B
EFORE YOU ASK
for the truth, you must be ready for it.

I left the house right after Jake's hasty exit. I felt unsafe there, alone in the home of someone who had dated me for months and was now turning out to be . . . what exactly? A zombie? Vampire? Some creepy mix of both? A creature whom Giles, in his infinite quest for leaps from the rational, would have called—and please don't turn so pale, Miss Slavin, remember that in ancient Greece this was not considered a malevolent spirit—
daemon
?!

All I needed was one part of the story that didn't fit, one detail Jake had failed to account for, and I could dismiss his entire monologue as a delusion. An elaborate fantasy, triggered by a girl who had messed with his mind many years prior and had remained elusive ever since.

Elza had probably fed him this nonsense back then, filling his head with more than piano tunes and pangs of puberty. She might have told him tales. Legends, you know. Of strange, stunning witches who stole your heart and, with sex rituals, made you theirs forever. But not “forever” as in happily ever after.
Forever
. As in you could no longer die.

It might have disturbed the imagination of that twelve-year-old boy so much that, in the end, playing with death had spilled over into real life. Sneaking into a funeral home, for instance. Dropping blood in that coffin, to spook a few visitors. Then stealing Elza's body and doing . . . God knows what with it. And maybe this wasn't all? Her death continued to be a mystery. No leads. No suspects. But who in their right mind would suspect a child?

I went to class, hoping that the lecture on the decline of Athenian drama would distract me from the drama I was creating in my own head, of juvenile murderers and evil witches. When the hour was up, Giles went around to collect the Nietzsche papers. Mine, of course, was missing.

“I must say I'm a bit surprised, Miss Slavin. It was a fairly straightforward assignment.” Fifty heads turned—his own little chorus (except it didn't comment, only watched). “Any particular reason you aren't turning it in?”

I was busy leaping from the rational after breakfast.
Instead, I mumbled an apology: personal emergency . . . still catching up . . .

“You have until midnight. I will be deducting half a grade.”

His idea of “fairly straightforward” turned out to be a painful crawl through one of the most unintelligible books I had ever read. Luckily, a Web search for “
birth of tragedy”
and “
chorus”
took me directly to chapters 7 and 8—the passages on that fantastic and repellent creature we were supposed to write about.

Satyr
. A cross between man and goat. Or to the Greeks: between god and goat. Immortal. Living in a world of myth and ritual. Through the satyr chorus—a group of divine creatures who remained unchanged forever—tragedy offered a much needed consolation that no matter what happened, life would remain indestructible and joyful.

Unchanged forever.
I kept on reading. Faced with the absurdity of life, of a tragic world in which action could alter nothing, the Greeks invented satyrs and the wisdom of Silenus, the god of the woods.

It took another second for the name to register, then my eyes flew through the rest of the page:

. . .
inspired reveller . . . harbinger of wisdom . . . a sympathetic companion whom the Greeks considered with respectful astonishment . . .

I couldn't believe what I was reading. God of the woods? It was impossible. There was no way.

But it turned out to be all over the Internet. The satyrs (or
silens
, as they were often called) were creatures of pleasure who danced with nymphs to the music of flutes. The oldest and wisest among them—Silenus—was the teacher of Dionysus, said to possess the gift of prophecy. There were many images on vases too, and they all matched: bushy hair, beard, pointed nose, fleshy lips.