Chapter 48
“It was just the booze.” It hurt to talk.
“Your pulse is still thready,” Sebastian said, his fingers light on my wrist.
“No kidding.” I felt awful, dizzy and dehydrated.
At least I was in my own room, my own bed. Gertie was here too, luggage still in tow. Tom had taken Mary back to the Great Hall, where Grandmother was waiting. They’d be surprised it wasn’t me bringing her.
I wondered what excuse Tom would make—or would he simply tell the truth? Jessica couldn’t handle the curae. She collapsed.
And if he didn’t, what would Mary say?
Jessica’s car crash turned her into a bunny.
“A lot was going on,” Gertie said. “One almost fainted oneself.”
“I didn’t faint—I threw up. It was the booze.”
“The booze,” she repeated. She’d watched me learn to handle Martinis at age fifteen.
“You’ll be fine,” Sebastian said. “But we need to discuss Mary.”
“It’s that name,” Gertie murmured. From beneath my bed, Uncle Max answered with a low moan. He was different since his tumble down the airshaft. Quieter, and he walked with a twitch.
“She’s a Morton now,” Sebastian said. “Slay the rabbit, spare the child.”
The moment Trotzky died, Mary had completed her curae. I should have called a halt, summoned Grandmother, and detailed the disrespectful—chaotic, unhinged—performance. But I was too busy collapsing.
“I’m fucked.”
“Don’t be silly,” Gertie said. “Uncle Merwin passed Peter, after all.”
“And look how that wound up,” Sebastian said.
A fresh wave of nausea hit. The memories that had spilled out of Trotzky’s veins were still with me. No longer in the hallway, nor under the Barrow Marsh.
They were here, in this room.
I had killed Hiromi.
Her frantic breathing at the end, like she’d just run a long, long way. The faltering light in her eyes. Our last words to each other, simple and quick, as if she were stepping onto a train.
“Mary named her rabbit, what, eight months ago?” Sebastian was saying. “Delayed her curae till all four of us were home. She even tried to dress like him. She’s obsessed.”
“They all are,” Gertie said. “Haven’t you heard their little song? ‘Uncle Max, took an axe, gave the cousins forty whacks.’ ”
Sebastian scoffed. “That’s just the Lizzy Borden song.”
“But one must appreciate the internal rhyme.”
“They’re still afraid of him,” I said.
They both looked at me.
“We killed Max. We erased him.” I turned to Gertie. “And you and Tom watched him die. But for the younger kids, he’s still out there. Behind every tree, every door.”
“A boogeyman for little Mortons,” Gertie said.
Sebastian frowned. “So Mary wants to be the bogeyman?”
“She’ll tell everyone,” I said. “How I puked, because a rabbit got its head cut off.”
“Don’t be silly,” Gertie said. “Decapitation is banal. It was the theme that was unsettling.”
“Mary’s too smart to tell anyone.” Sebastian put a hand on my forehead, reassuringly cool. “She doesn’t want any questions about tonight. Her little show was just for us.”
“Aspirin?” Gertie asked.
Strange, how they both wanted to protect me, when I was weak and broken. Because I’d protected them once, long ago.
I love you too, Mary had screeched at Trotzky.
A gentle knock came at the door. We exchanged glances, like children with a guilty secret, but it was Tom.
“She’s home safe, still ecstatic. Still laughing at everything.” He hesitated, staring at the vomit stain on my shirt. He looked as sick as I felt. “There was a message from your mother. She wants to see you tomorrow morning.”
I fell back against my pillows, dizzy again.
I hadn’t visited my mother since the crash. Her eyes were too sharp. Her memories of the way I used to be too exact.
She would see this change in me.
Uncle Max eased himself from beneath the bed. He twitched his way across the room and jumped into Gertie’s lap. She pulled a dropper bottle from her handbag and began to dribble water into his mouth.
We all watched.
“A cleft palette,” she explained, “from the defenestration. He has to tip his head back when he drinks, or it all comes out his nose.”
When she finished dribbling, Uncle Max sneezed exactly once. It glistened for a moment in the air, like a spritz from a perfume bottle.
“Sorry about what I did to your cat,” I told Gertie.
She blinked. “What an odd thing to say.”
The next morning after breakfast, I climbed the stairs to Mother’s room.
Nothing had changed—the spiderwebs, the tray of dirty dishes outside her door, a whiff of bedpan. With my new eyes, it was tinged with dignified sadness, like some slow, lush movement by Beethoven.
Twelve years in this room. Not all Mortons heal.
I knocked and went inside.
“There you are,” my mother said.
She was not alone. Grandmother sat in the corner, a phone instead of knitting needles in her hands.
Change of plan.
I bowed to her. “Good morning, Grandmother. How was London?”
“Illuminating.” She smiled—that was all I was getting.
“And Mary’s mors curae?” Mother asked. “How did it go?
“Very well. The declaration of care, in particular.”
“Hmm. The poor creature never looked terribly happy.”
“Some rabbits appreciate tough love.”
“What about the kill? Nothing unseemly?”
I shrugged. “No pyrotechnics.”
She looked away from me, out the room’s single window. Here in late summer, the view was entirely blocked by leaves.
“That’s not what I’ve heard,” she said, and suddenly the ceiling was too low, the air too still.
I’d never understood why ordinaries panic when faced with spiders, bees, venomous snakes—when all they have to do is stay still. But now I felt it, the screaming in my body for action, for flight.
Had Tom said something? He’d struggled to meet my eyes at breakfast.
“She killed the rabbit with a single stroke.” My voice sounded shaky, but the words kept coming. “Like his namesake, with a quicker result. Very clean.”
“You know who didn’t think it was clean?”
I shook my head. Not Sebastian, surely.
“Edwin,” she said.
The phonograph table, spattered with blood, a deep gouge cut into it. We’d left it out all night.
“Gertie had her luggage with her. We forgot.”
“We? You were in charge, Aunt Jessica. Leaving blood-spattered furniture behind is rarely best practice.” She smiled a little. “Unless spattered blood is what the assignment calls for.”
The assignment—my assignment. I felt my stomach threatening to roil.
Grandmother remained silent, her fingers tapping at her phone. Maybe ending someone else’s life remotely, casually, a few texted words at a time.
Murder-suicide is simpler.
It had, in some ways, been simple.
First Hiromi. It has to be done, I told her, as she was already dying. She didn’t look shocked or angry, just confused.
I love you too, more breath than words.
Then him.
He stepped into the room, stilled with shock at the sight of her, of the white walls turned red, before kneeling down to help, smearing himself in blood.
I seized him from behind, the knife into his belly, pulling up. The smell of the contents of his stomach, his bowels, spilled out. I held the knife tight, cutting higher, deeper.
He groaned quietly, no fight in him as he slid to the floor. I wiped the knife and wrapped his hands around its hilt, surveyed the room.
A few minutes to arrange things, one bloody footprint of mine to smear away. I grabbed a cushion from the bed, and used it to climb out the window, leaving no trace.
Now, I wondered about Lyon’s lack of fight. Had he been drunk? High? So in love with Hiromi that something in him had shut down? Maybe he couldn’t live without her.
That was for me to do.
“Jessica,” Mother said. “You’re positively ashen. Are you well?”
“I’m still off-kilter from the accident.”
Off-kilter? Keelhauled.
“Perhaps we should stop for today,” Grandmother said, at last looking up from her phone. “Jessica’s doing the best she can.”
When I arrived at the Great Hall—carrying a bucket of cleaning supplies, wood filler, and sandpaper—music was playing. Sleeping Beauty, whose choreography we all learned as kids. A dozen bodies with a single purpose, math in motion.
But Mary was dancing alone—no partner, no teacher. Just her in a lilac tutu, doing something I’d never done as a child.
Improvising.
She danced with certainty, taking command of the space. She didn’t follow the music; the music followed her. As if last night had cut away something that had weighed her down.
Her care, what little she had possessed, was gone.
Mary didn’t look my way, but I could feel her awareness of me. I put my bucket down and waited till the first act was over.
“I forgot to say congratulations last night,” I said, lifting the needle from the record.
She kept dancing in the silence. “Too busy puking.”
Aunts didn’t make excuses, or apologize. I’d been doing too much of both. “It was quite a spectacle. Congratulations.”
I slid the phonograph to one end of the table, revealing a deep gouge and the stains from Trotzky’s blood.
“I did it for you, Jessica.”
I put on rubber gloves.
“That was your big day,” she said, going into a series of pirouettes, her ballet shoes shushing as she spun. “The day you became a prodigy.”
“I was always a prodigy.”
The bucket held mineral spirits, baking soda, detergent, steel wool—Merwin’s tool kit for removing blood from wood. As I poured mineral spirits onto a washcloth, the smell of solvent cut the air, like freshly opened mezcal.
“You were a prodigy at training,” Mary said. “That’s not the same as someone coming at you with an axe.”
“True.” The spirits were soaking through the table’s ancient varnish, lifting the blood. My eyes burned.
“When I pulled out the special axe, Tom made a funny noise,” she said, her dance slowing to a halt at last. “Like one of Aunt Beatrice’s boy-pigs getting cut. Did he shriek like that when Uncle Max came for real?”
“He was young. He left his rabbit behind. But he’s alive.”
She giggled. “Trotzky isn’t.”
“Her name was very clever. When did you come up with it?”
“Aunt Tilly used to tell us stories at bedtime.” She promenaded to one of the barres and began to stretch. “Gruesome murders, clever assassinations. No one noticed but me, how the names fit together.”
“And you kept it a secret all this time. Impressive.”
She smiled at me, radiant.
The blood was lifting, except in the deepest part of the gouge, which I could cover with filler. I might not have to revarnish.
Mary hadn’t offered to help, but the thought of asking her made my heart race. What if she refused?
“Everyone always says I should be like you,” Mary said. “That’s what I was trying to do last night. Did it work?”
Abused as a child, and you don’t even know it.
“Only you can answer that,” I said. “How do you feel now?”
Her stretching came to a halt, a distance coming over her expression, as if she had gone to some deep place to consider the question.
“Like I could dance all day,” she finally said. “Bunnies get heavy at the end.”