CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
Bryony
She drove out to Metairie on a Sunday evening because she remembered, from the one dinner two years gone, that the parents went to the late Mass and the elder daughter drove them, and she wanted the house when it held only Bryony in it.
It was a long haul from the Bywater, up onto the interstate and west along the raised gray ribbon of it over the rooftops, across the parish line where the city quietly became the suburb and the streets went wide and flat and Sundays-empty, twenty-five minutes that felt like crossing into another country, which in a way it was, the country Lark had escaped and Maren had visited once and the country that had, it turned out, reached out across all that distance and pulled her back down into the water.
Rowan had wanted to come. Maren had said no, this one was hers, and Rowan, who knew the worth of letting a person do the thing alone when the thing was theirs, had handed her the keys and said only, call me from the car after, don't drive on it.
The brick house was the same, immaculate and closed, the crucifix she knew would be in the hall and the runner on the stairs, the sprinkler ticking over the same clipped lawn.
Maren sat in the truck across the street until she saw the parents' car back out, Mr. Aldous at the wheel and Mrs. Aldous beside him in her good hat, the two of them gone to be told they were forgiven, and the elder daughter not with them, which meant Bryony had stayed home, which meant Bryony was in there alone.
Maren sat a moment longer with her hands on the wheel.
The street was so quiet. A sprinkler ticked somewhere.
A screen door banged two houses down and a dog answered once and gave up.
This was where Lark had been a child, on this flat forgettable street, in that brick box with the crucifix in the hall, the wild copper-headed girl who had grown up too loud for the house and fled it the first year the law let her.
Maren had loved a woman three years and had never once been able to picture her small, and now she sat outside the one place that could have shown her and felt the meanness of having finally come here for this: not to learn what Lark had been like at seven, but to confirm that this house had failed to keep her, and then reached all the way across the parish to finish her.
She got out. The heat came down like a hand on the back of her neck.
She crossed the dead-level lawn and went up the step and rang the bell, and heard it chime somewhere deep inside, two soft tones, ordinary as any Sunday.
Maren had not planned what she would say. She had learned, this last month, that planning was for people who still believed they were in control of the rooms they walked into.
Bryony opened the door on the chain and went the color of the paper Lark had gone in the library.
"You can't be here," she said. Not how dare you, not what do you want, which is what an innocent woman says.
You can't be here. As if Maren's standing on the step were a thing she'd been dreading and rehearsing against for a month, a debt come to the door.
She did not shut it, though. That was the thing Maren clocked through her own slamming heart.
A woman with nothing to answer for shuts the door.
Bryony stood there behind the chain with Lark's face on her, Lark's face with the color drained and the light put out, and she did not shut the door, because some part of her had been waiting, the way the guilty wait, to be made to stop carrying it alone.
"I just want to talk about her," Maren said, and made it gentle, made it the voice you'd use on a spooked animal, because she understood suddenly and coldly that gentleness would open this door where fury never would.
"Bryony. Please. There's nobody left I can talk to about her who knew her since she was small.
Twenty minutes. Then I'll go and I won't come back. "
The chain came off. Maren has wondered since whether that was mercy or whether the leash reached even out there, into the suburb, and made her say the one true thing that would work.
She thinks it was true. She thinks she did want, underneath everything, to sit in a room with someone who had known Lark as a child.
That was the horror of the whole errand: every cruel thing she did that evening, she did with a true feeling underneath it, the way Bryony had drowned her sister with love underneath it, the way Calla fed the goddess with devotion underneath it.
The whole rotten machine ran on real feeling. That was what made it run.
The front room was hot and close and full of framed photographs, and Maren's eye went to them and stuck, because they were all Lark.
Lark at her First Communion, Lark gap-toothed on a bicycle, Lark a bright spot in every group, the adored child documented down the years, and almost none of the other one, the one who'd taken the pictures and cooked the dinners and stayed.
Maren sat on the hard sofa and Bryony sat across from her on the edge of a chair with her knees together and her hands knotted in her lap, braced, and the two of them looked at the shrine to the dead girl on the walls, and Maren let the silence do the first part of the work.
Bryony offered her a drink in a voice gone high and wrong, sweet tea, water, anything, half-rising, desperate for a task to do with her body, and Maren said no thank you, and Bryony sat back down and had nowhere to put her hands.
On the side table nearest Maren stood a framed photograph of the two sisters as girls, Lark maybe seven and gap-toothed and caught mid-laugh, and Bryony at ten unsmiling at the edge of the frame with her arm around the smaller one, holding her, even then the one who held and was not held.
"I think about her every day," Bryony said into the quiet, and it came out almost as a plea, as if she needed Maren to know it, needed the credit for the grief.
"Every single day. People think because she went off the way she did that I didn't, that we weren't close, but she was my baby sister.
I taught her her letters. I used to do her hair for school.
" Her voice wavered. "Nobody believes how much I loved her. "
"I believe it," Maren said. And the terrible thing, the thing that was the whole rotten heart of the evening, was that she did.
"She was trying to leave them," Maren said at last. Quiet. "The people who'd put their hooks in her. In the last weeks. She'd worked out what was done to us and she was trying to undo it and get us both clear. Did you know that?"
"She was confused," Bryony said quickly, scripture-stiff, a line worn smooth from saying.
"She was lost. She'd gone so far from how we were raised, she didn't, she couldn't see straight anymore.
She was in danger of her soul." The words came out in a rush, defensive, rehearsed, and then Bryony heard herself and stopped, and her hands twisted harder.
"In danger of her soul," Maren repeated.
The cold was coming up off her chest now, the mark stirring, but she kept her voice level.
"That's a particular way to put it. That's not how a sister talks.
That's how a congregation talks. Who taught you to talk about Lark like that, Bryony?
Who told you my Lark's soul was in danger? "
Bryony's mouth opened and shut. Her eyes went to the window, to the door, to the photographs, anywhere but Maren's face, and her hands worked in her lap, and Maren watched her fight it, watched the trained obedient fear of saying too much war with the thing every guilty lonely person wants even more than safety, which is to be known, to set the weight down, to have one living soul understand what she had carried out to the water and why.
Maren had grown up among foster-house silences.
She knew the exact shape of a confession dammed up behind the teeth.
She did not push. You set the quiet down in front of them like a bowl, and you wait.
"You called her that night," she said at last, soft as she could make it while everything in her went to iron. "The last night. You phoned her and told her something was wrong and asked her to come, and you told her not to bring me. Didn't you."
Bryony's face crumpled all the way open. "She always came when I called," she whispered. "However far she'd gone from us, whatever she thought of how we lived, if I said I needed her, she came. She was the only one in this whole family who ever once came when I called."
"She's safe now." Bryony's voice cracked right down the middle of it, and her eyes came up wet and wild and pleading, pleading with Maren to agree, pleading the way you plead with the one person who might let you believe the thing you cannot survive disbelieving.
"That's what nobody understands. She's safe now.
She's not lost anymore, she's not confused, she's been made clean, she's been, she's, she's with the Mother and she's safe and she'll never be in danger again, they promised me that, they swore it to me, they said it was the only way and that she would be lost to all of us forever if I didn't and saved if I did, and I know it doesn't look like, I know how it looks, but she's safe, Maren, I would never, I love her, she's my, I would never hurt her, I saved her. "
The room rang with it. I saved her.
Maren sat very still on the hard sofa under the photographs of the adored dead child while the elder daughter wept across from her, and the last of it dropped into place inside her, not with a crash but with the soft final click of a key she had been turning for a month, and she understood that she was looking at the hand.
Not the architect. The hand. An overlooked woman who had been handed, at last, after a whole invisible life, a way to be the one who mattered, the one who saved, the chosen one, and the price of it had been her bright impossible sister, and she had paid it believing, needing to believe, that she was performing a rescue.
The how was plain now. Bryony had phoned Lark that night with a story, some lie shaped like a crisis, come, I'm in trouble, don't tell anyone, don't tell Maren, and Lark, who would walk into deep dark water for someone she loved who said they were drowning, had gone.
Had followed her own sister down to the still red shallows of the Vaudry water because she trusted her, because she loved her, because that is what Lark did, and her sister had walked her into the arms of the women who put her under.
Maren did not say the whole of it. She felt it rise in her, the entire black flood of it, the fury that wanted to cross the room, and the mark over her heart woke hot and glad and forward, reaching toward the weeping woman, eager, because here, here was the kill that completed the cup, here was the one whose blood would answer the debt and seal Maren in the water forever with a leashed and grinning Lark, and Calla's voice came back to her across three days and the whole grand length of Esplanade, you come back to me and I will show you how to make it right, one life given back for the one that was taken, and here was the life, weeping and ready and so terribly easy, a starved woman alone in an empty house with no one coming home for an hour, and Maren felt the leash haul on her and she sat on her own two hands and did not move.
Not here. Not yet. Not steered. Whatever she did about Bryony Aldous she would do because she chose it and not because the thing on her chest pulled the string, and so she held still, shaking, while it burned at her to rise, and she breathed, and she did the hardest thing she had done since the morgue, which was nothing.
When she could trust her own legs she stood.
"I'm going to go," she said, and her voice came out wrecked and quiet.
Bryony looked up at her, ruined, and in looking up she put one hand to her own throat, a child's gesture, a self-soothing, fingers closing on something under the high modest collar of her Sunday blouse, and the blouse pulled, and Maren saw it.
It was a medal, the kind a devout woman wears, worn silver on a thin chain, the sort of thing that in that crucifix-and-runner house would pass without a single glance, one more sign of a good chapel-going daughter's faith.
But Maren had stood in a garden on Esplanade three days before and seen the brass plate on the gate, and she knew the face stamped on the little medal now, the woman with her hands open over still water and the words curved round the rim, Our Lady of Slackwater, the mask, the respectable saint who was no saint, the public face of the drowned goddess, worn against the skin and hidden under the collar of the dutiful sister who stayed.
Not a hand the cult had used and dropped.
One of their own. Wading. Marked. Belonging, at last, to something, the way she had hungered her whole life to belong, with the token of it lying warm and secret over her heart in exactly the place Maren carried Lark.
Bryony saw her see it. Her hand flew flat over the medal, too late, and her wet eyes went wide with a fear that was not of Maren at all but of something far behind Maren, and Maren understood the last thing, the thing that turned the whole evening from a grief into a war.
The betrayal did not stop at one frightened lonely woman and a lie.
It went all the way down, into the cult, into the water, into a goddess, and the sister who had drowned Lark was not the bottom of it.
She was only the nearest hand of a thing that had a great many.