Roses and Rot (22 page)

What Ariel said, about being there changing a person’s art, had
been a hitch in my thoughts. Beth hadn’t published anything before the book she started while she was here and finished in Faerie, and I had no desire to read Janet’s poetry. But I liked Evan’s art, and he was still in the same studio that he’d been assigned when he arrived as a fellow. So I could compare.

He led me through the trees I had seen before, and I was struck again by the lonely beauty of them. Then further, into the back of the studio, where drop cloths had been undraped and pushed aside. “Here they are.”

They weren’t metal. Marble sculpture, creatures emerging half-formed, as if in the process of birthing themselves from that cool, unforgiving stone. A falcon in spread-winged flight, an uncoiling serpent, a herd of horses rising from the foam of a wave. All of them small scale, a feast of detail.

“Why the change?” I asked.

“I wanted something barer. Stripped down, more essential. Plus, I wanted to let my art take up space.”

I could see that. The newer pieces, the metal ones, had no softness to them, nothing extra. They stood in front of you and forced you to feel. The marble pieces could simply be seen as beauty. The emotion was there, but it required the viewer to put her own story—escape, birth, emergence—on top of them.

The older pieces were beautiful; the new ones were alive.

“Do you ever think you’d go back to your old style?”

“I’m not that person anymore. And yes, I’m sure being in Faerie changed me. Just like Tania’s death did. And so did all the small things that have happened over the course of nearly seven years. It might not have shown up as drastically in my art, but things would still be different even if I hadn’t gone. Do you want to be writing the same thing in seven years as you are now?”

“Of course not,” I said. “I want to be better.”

“Exactly. And better means pushing yourself. Trying new things. I know you were hoping for a clear answer, but I can’t tell you what kind of art I’d be making if I had been somewhere other than Faerie for the past seven years, Imogen. I’d have to be able to erase them to do that.”

That was always the catch. Your past came with you to your art whether you wanted it to or not. It haunted you. If you had a fraught past, it was the question you always considered, and always had asked of you—would you change it, if you could? Would you trade bad for good, or even for normal, knowing that if you did, the things that mattered to you now might disappear along with the evils of the past?

I started writing as an escape, as an act of defiance. If I hadn’t had a childhood that had driven me so far into stories, that might never have happened. But I liked who I had become, and I was proud of my writing. Take away one thing, and maybe I don’t get the other. I couldn’t answer the question of who I would be without my past. So I had part of my answer.

Then there were the questions I couldn’t ask Evan, like what kind of a person he had been before Faerie. Though, in a way, his answer would be the same. Seven years different from the person he was now, and the time in Faerie was only part of the reason why.

For now, that was enough. I reached up and kissed him. Evan pulled me closer, fisting his hands in my shirt, and deepened the kiss. I sank into it, losing myself in the sensations. “I’ve missed you, too,” I said. “Come stay with me tonight.”

“Stay with me now,” he said. “Let me show you how much I want you.” His hands moved over my skin, and he kissed his way down the cord of my neck.

“Yes,” I breathed into his mouth. We took each other in the shadows of the forest he had made.

I didn’t feel the cold as I walked home.

I opened the front door to the warm vanilla-cinnamon smell of cookies baking. Music played. Ariel hit the high notes in “All I Want for Christmas Is You.” The mixer whirred. In the time I had been gone, someone had wound a garland of silver tinsel, gaudy and sparkling, around the banister, and decorated it with red and green glass balls. I hung my coat on a hook next to the door and wandered into the kitchen.

It wasn’t just Ariel baking—Helena was there as well, a Santa Claus hat providing a terrific contrast to the bright fuchsia of her hair.

“Give me a job,” I said, while washing my hands, “I’m ready to help. Helena, I love your hat.”

She jerked away from whatever she had been stirring, looked at me. “You’re serious. Okay. I wasn’t sure if we were dressing up, so I just got a hat. I’ve never done something like this. Janet doesn’t care for holidays.”

“I’m serious. It’s great.” I rolled the dough Ariel passed me into balls, then dented the cookies, so there was a place for the chocolate kiss that would be baked on top.

Baking together had been Ariel’s idea. Her family had done it growing up. “Because there were always like twenty cousins wandering around, and my mom figured she might as well put us to work. Harder to get in trouble if you’re rolling dough or spreading frosting. And she gave cookies to everyone—the delivery guys, our teachers, our priest—so she always had a ton that needed baking. End of the day, we’d all be flour-covered messes, but it was fun. The four of us need fun.”

She was right. The ocean of unrelieved white through the windows looked more like an alien landscape than a Currier and Ives print. The blizzard had socked us in the house and made everything tight and claustrophobic. For the first few days after, we hadn’t been able to escape the house, or each other. Tempers had frayed.

Marin was sure that Janet was lying to Helena about the tithe. “I asked Gavin. He told me things don’t work like that, that it can’t be used to bargain for anything beyond success. Even if it could, Faerie would have had no reason to mess around in Thomas and Janet’s relationship, because there was no gain in it.”

It was a cold way of putting things, but the calculatedness of it was also why I believed Gavin. “Beth said something similar. I’m starting to think that Janet could give our mother a run for the money in the awful-parent department.”

“Seriously. She never even asked if Helena could be sent out of Faerie after she was born, or if there was some way to protect her while she was there. I get that maybe Janet never wanted to be pregnant, but the Fae could have undone that, if she had asked. She just didn’t care. I don’t think she’s ever started caring.”

Marin came in wearing red and green parti-colored tights. “Helena! I love your hat.”

“Everyone does, I guess.”

Ariel caught my eye and shook her head at Helena’s response. Prickly as usual, but she was here, and cooking, and not starting fights with anyone, and I even heard her singing along under her breath to a couple of the carols.

It was a good day. Five kinds of cookies and two kinds of fudge dissipated the tension that had filled the house since the night of the blizzard. Helena had even smiled at Marin, and laughed when
Ariel pronounced the event “a Christmas miracle.” It wasn’t a miracle, but it was, quietly, enough.

Beth was going to be away from Melete over the holidays. “I apologize for abandoning you like this—usually I stay all the way through once I’ve made the commitment, but my daughter just had a daughter. This is her first child, and my first grandchild, so I’m going to stay with them, to help out and celebrate.”

“Oh, that’s lovely. Congratulations.” Strange to say the words and mean them, to think of a family visit as something associated with celebration, but Beth’s face was full of joy. There were piles of completed knitting—blankets, beanies—stacked up around the room, ready to be packed. I shoved aside my envy, and the thought that if I ever had a child, I would do everything in my power to make sure that my mother never got near her.

“Please don’t hesitate to get in touch if you need anything. I mean that. Same email and cell phone as when I’m here. The holidays always bring their own complications with them, and sometimes remaining in residence can aggravate those complications. It’s okay if you change your mind and go home.”

My hand clenched into a claw at my side. I breathed in, out, willing myself to relax. Picked up my mug of coffee, drank. Beth and I didn’t discuss my life outside of Melete. As far as I was concerned, there was no need to unless some part of it turned into something that interfered with my work here. So I didn’t tell her that I knew all about the fraughtness of the holidays, and Christmas in particular. I had been eleven the year my mother took my Christmas kitten back to the shelter, telling me she had them put it to sleep immediately, because I hadn’t gotten dressed in my Christmas dress. She hadn’t bought me a new one, and the previous year’s had been
a size too small. The zipper burst when I put it on for dinner, and so I had put on a dress that fit, knowing it was the wrong decision, and also knowing that there wasn’t a right one.

Marin had looked up the phone number for the shelter, held my hand while I called, while I wept out the story on the phone to the kind woman who told me, “No, dear, of course we don’t put down healthy kittens. That ball of fuzz went to a good home today.” I still cried myself to sleep that night, but at least I stopped feeling like a murderer.

When I was a freshman in high school, thirteen, I had the lead in the local Christmas program. It was the first time my mother had ever told me she was proud of me. She couldn’t wait until I was on the stage, where everyone would be able to see that she had two talented daughters. “And you both get it from me,” she had simpered.

I was so terrified that I would somehow do something wrong and make her angry, that I had a panic attack and collapsed onstage. When we got back to the house, she threw all of the notebooks of stories I had written onto the fire. If I hadn’t spent all my time making things up, she said, maybe I would have been prepared for the play, and I wouldn’t have embarrassed her.

I cried out as they burned, and Marin reached in, trying to save them. She burned her hand, and my mother had slapped her, for “interfering in something your sister has brought on herself.” It was the one time I had ever seen her strike Marin.

As we both stood in shock, our mother grabbed my hand, my right hand, the one that I wrote with, and held it in the fire. Holding it as it burned, as I screamed. “You have to learn to do as I say. I’ve told you and told you, and obviously that hasn’t made an impression. I’m only doing this for your own good.”

Red. Blisters. An agony of pain. My breath whistled in gasps. I couldn’t speak.

She let go.

“Now, Marin, let’s get you to the hospital, where they can take care of the damage your sister caused. We don’t want you to scar—that wouldn’t look right onstage.” Our mother gathered her keys, her purse. “Let’s go.”

“But Imogen—she needs to go, too. More than me.”

“Your sister is going to stay here and think about what she’s done.”

“But—”

“Marin.” I swallowed down a sob. “Just go.”

That was the year I started looking for boarding schools, and saving my babysitting money to pay the application fees. I worried about leaving Marin, but I thought it might actually kill me if I stayed.

It was the year I learned to write left-handed, and to get even better at hiding things, and keeping secrets.

My hand clenched harder, shook, and coffee spilled over the rim of the mug. Breath hissed out through my teeth.

“Imogen! Are you all right?” Beth leaned forward, her knitting loose in her hands. “I didn’t realize the coffee was so hot.”

I breathed out again, setting the mug on the floor before my trembling made the spill worse. “No, it’s fine. Scar tissue is just more sensitive. I wasn’t paying attention.” There was nothing she needed to know. More to the point, there was nothing the Fae needed to know.

Cutting off the questions I could see forming on her face, I shook my hand out, smiled. “But there’s no need for me to go home this year. Marin and I are staying—we’ll have Christmas together. I’m really looking forward to a quiet holiday.”

“Well, that does sound lovely.” She let the questions go, leaned back, her knitting needles moving again.

“Is that a stocking for your granddaughter?” I could stay. We could finish the conversation. Most of the pain was in the past, not in my hand. I stretched my fingers along the outside of my thigh, steadying the shaking.