50. Theo #3
May Dressler is dead.
Susi came to tell me. I hardly knew what to say, and stupidly offered money for May’s burial. But Susi told me her mother had been buried in an anonymous grave at the asylum. She wept bitterly, and I stood there, helpless to offer comfort, for I feel as if I have murdered the woman myself.
Liv’s voice cracked, but she pressed onward, speaking faster than before, as if desperate to get to the end of the journal.
Tonight we are meant to go to a charity ball, but I cannot face it. All I can think of is the frivolous evening that awaits me, while May lies rotting in her grave.
How can I ever pay for what I’ve done? It seems my life is the only fair recompense. A life for a life, as Lizzie and I have conspired to take May’s own.
One could argue that Lily is indeed better off with us, but no such argument can be made for what befell May Dressler.
Perhaps such melancholia and neurosis as she suffered would have afflicted her regardless of our actions.
But I cannot help but feel our behavior brought it to the fore, much as the ideal temperature and soil composition might coax a reluctant seed to bloom.
The guy was a fucking poet. Good for him.
I feel as if I have been walking a tightrope between my wife’s blind insistence—driven by love, but blind nonetheless—and May’s rightful misery. I could not allow the child to be torn apart between them. And if there ever was any hope of reconciliation, now it is gone.
The last time I saw May, she spat at me and uttered a phrase that seemed more dire than all the rest. I had never asked Susi to translate her mother’s words before, but I did then.
“What did she say to me, that last time?” I asked her, doing my best to recall the words. “Zol er kre—something.”
Susi gave me a look that mingled grief and calculation, as if unsure she should tell me. But at last, she surrendered; I suppose she thought the worst damage had already been done.
“Zol er krenken un gedenken,” she said. “She cursed you. It means, Let him suffer and remember.”
A shudder ran through me. I cursed him, May had said in my dream. You will see.
Liv gripped the book tight, her fingers trembling as she read the journal’s final words.
Since the moment I first laid eyes on May Dressler, I have done little else. I am a man truly cursed. And the woman who cursed me has passed beyond the veil; there is no way for her to undo what she has visited upon me, even if I deserved such a thing—which I do not.
There is no way out for me, save one. Let the curse end with me; if the child that sleeps in the room down the hall is not my daughter by blood, then let me see my darling Ella again; let me not meet May in the world that lies beyond this one.
Tonight, I take my life, in penance. Let me, at last, find peace.
The cup fell from Ella’s fingers, sending tea splattering everywhere. She'd gone pale, her eyes huge.
“I remember,” she said, her voice shaking.
“He committed suicide?” Liv’s voice broke. “Oh my God.”
Ella hugged herself, as if cold. “He left us,” she said. “He left me. I never understood why…until now.”
“He felt so guilty, he killed himself,” I said, remembering Liv’s dream about Charles, how he’d pleaded with her to forgive him, the way she’d woken to hear the piano playing.
This shit just kept getting freakier. “What was it he said, a life for a life? I guess he was trying to right the balance. But…I thought he died of a heart attack.”
Ella shook her head. “That day, I found him lying in his study, his pistol next to him. There was blood all over the rug. Mama burned it in the hearth. She swore me to secrecy, and the servants too. We would never be able to bear up under the weight of the scandal, she said. So I had to promise to tell everyone his heart gave out from the stress of the market’s crash.
She paid the servants bonuses to say the same.
And she made me repeat it over and over again, until I believed it myself. ”
I imagined a small, thin version of Grandma Susi, brokenhearted at the loss of her mother. And then, just a few miles away, a little girl who’d lost her dad.
I’d thought of the Carters as the villains. But the whole thing was a goddamn tragedy.
As I watched Liv wrap her arms around her grandmother, the truth hit me with the force of a hundred-mile-per-hour fastball.
Even Charles Carter, who’d come from blueblood stock and had every resource at his disposal, had struggled with how to be a good man.
Charles had killed himself rather than deal with his problems. My father had abandoned our family.
And here I was, running away from Liv when she was the best thing that had ever happened to me.
I’d been a coward, like Charles. I’d spent my life on the run.
Well, fuck that. I still had no idea how to be a partner or a decent role model for a kid. But Will had been right: all anyone could do was their best.
And I was here now. Maybe I’d lost Liv for good, but I wasn’t going to give up without a fight.