Roses and Rot (3 page)

“That place looks like Cinderella’s castle,” Marin said.

It did, formed in miniature, down to the front door fashioned like a drawbridge. It was even painted the same shade of semi-sparkling blue that her ball gown had been in the Disney movie.

“The one next to it is like something out of a Russian novel, all onion domes and red,” I said. “Who designed this place?” Gravel crunched beneath our feet, and the air smelled honey-green, like warm grass.

“The people who came here as architects. Or maybe the sculptors. I forget exactly. But it’s a thank-you tradition. They do bridges over the river, too. Kind of amazing, right?” She grinned, her whole face lighting up.

It was impossible not to smile back. “So far, everything about this place is.”

We returned to our house as the sun was setting, dappling everything in golden light. We heard the voice before we saw her, pure and clear, singing,
“O mio babbino caro.”

The woman singing was standing in front of our house, eyes closed. She looked like a darker-skinned Louise Brooks in leather leggings and a slouchy T-shirt—effortlessly cool.

Everything narrowed to a point—the small magic of her voice, the setting, that song. Hearing her was an ache in my heart.

“Brava, brava!” Marin called out.

“Thanks. Seemed like the time and place for it. I mean, how do you stand in the middle of this and not sing?” She spread her arms open wide, taking in everything. “I’m Ariel, by the way. You two live here, too?”

“We do.” Marin smiled. “A fact that is still sinking in. I’m Marin, and this is my sister, Imogen.”

“You have a great voice,” I said. “Are you an opera singer?”

“Singer singer. My voice doesn’t really do the opera thing, but I love that aria. It just gets me, right here.” She thumped her fist over her heart. “I still kind of can’t believe this place is real. I mean, look at this house. Are they all like this?”

“The house next door has a moat,” I said.

“Seriously, a moat?” Ariel asked.

“I know. I’m trying to convince Imogen that we should stage an invasion. Or go skinny-dipping in it. I haven’t decided,” Marin said.

“Invasion,” Ariel said. “You just know people skinny-dip in the moat all the time, and we’re not here to be conventional.”

“I like how you think,” Marin said, and bumped her shoulder against Ariel’s. She had always been so much easier with new people than I was.

“What are you planning on working on while you’re here?” I asked. One of the quirks of Melete was that we weren’t required to work on anything. No one had to give recitals or have portfolios reviewed before they left. It was, in fact, completely possible to be accepted, then come to Melete for nine months to just hang out—or, in the language of the official paperwork, to take the time in residence to think deeply about the nature of your art. But there was an unwritten tradition of working on a large, ambitious project, and many of those projects had proven to be breakout ones, an ever-growing list of the origins of the next big things.

“I’m writing a rock opera about Joan of Arc. When it’s staged, I’ll be Joan.”

I turned the idea over in my brain. “That really works. She is one of the few people I can think of where the idea of a rock opera sounds fitting, not weird.”

“Working on it seems just scary enough,” Ariel said. “Which is
the way I like to pick what I’m going to do next. You know, how much does this idea make my stomach hurt? Oh, all the way to nausea? Why yes, that’s exactly what I’ll do.”

“Just being here for me is a kind of terror,” Marin said.

I blinked in shock. This was the first time I’d heard Marin say anything about Melete that wasn’t a rave. She had never hesitated when we discussed applying, never given any hint that this wasn’t the thing she wanted more than anything else.

“Seriously?” Ariel said.

“Leaving my company for a year, it’s insane. Just not done. There’s no guarantee I’ll have a place to go back to.” Her foot described a half-circle on the ground as she spoke, a piece of a dance step, Marin’s version of fidgeting.

“Why come then?” Ariel asked. I was glad she did, so I didn’t have to. It was fine for someone we’d just met not to know this huge, important thing. Not so much for a sister.

“To study with Gavin Delacourt. Hopefully, working with him will be enough of a career boost that I won’t need to go back to my old company. To make myself be extraordinary.” She shrugged. “Same reason as anyone—to be so good that nothing else matters.”

“That’s the truth,” Ariel said. “How about you, Imogen?”

I hedged, not stepping close to the specifics. Talking about my work made me feel like the weight of my words might break the thing in my head. “Something big, and, like you said, something that scares me enough that I know I’m supposed to be writing it. I feel like this is the best time to try something huge and ambitious, the kind of thing I wouldn’t even consider somewhere else.”

Ariel nodded. “I couldn’t even think about a project this big without a place like this to work on it. In my real life, there would have been no way to buy myself the time to take it seriously.”

“Exactly.” I smiled.

Still, I watched Marin, who hadn’t bought herself time by coming here, but maybe had given part of it up. I wondered what had happened, to make a risk this big seem safe, or whether safety had stopped mattering to her.

“Happy as I’d be to talk art with you ladies all night, I haven’t even started to unpack,” Ariel said, “and I really should.”

“I still need to finish, too,” I said. “Which is sad, since I’ve been here longer than you both.”

“We should have that all-night art talk soon, though,” Marin said. “That’s part of why we’re here, right?”

Plans made, we went back to our new rooms. I glanced down the hallway as I walked up. Helena’s door was still closed tight, a bar against the rest of the house.

Once I got upstairs, I opened the windows to let the night in. The dark blanket of the night was my favorite time to write. It was easier to think about impossible things then, when there was no one else around to see or judge. It was the time of day most conducive to naked honesty, the time that made me feel like it was safe to tell secrets, to reveal desires.

At my desk, alone in the falling evening, I opened my notebook. Even though I hadn’t said so, I knew exactly the thing I had come to Melete to write—a novel told in stories, told in interweaving fairy tales, about the girls who get lost in the woods, and how it is that they come to be lost there, and whether or not they can save themselves. About the stories that lead them into the dark places of the forest, of their lives, and then become the maps by which they find their way out. I had known for a while that this was something I wanted to do, a story I needed to tell.

I picked up my pen, then set it back down. Put my hands on the
desk to steady myself, and breathed deep, pulling the late-summer air into my lungs.

The truth, the night-dark truth of it, was that I was afraid of what it meant to write this book, of how close to the bone I would have to cut myself to do it. I was afraid if I thought about it too deeply, talked about it too much, I would talk myself out of writing it. I had done that before.

It was so much easier to hide, to stay safe and write the kind of thing I knew I was good at, the kind of thing I had sent in as a sample of my creative work when I applied. Quiet stories about girls with tragic pasts who faded away and became less. Lots of metaphor, lots of melancholy. I could write them beautifully, make you cry, before you realized you didn’t know anything about the character you were crying for.

Easier to write, but less real.

Not now. Not anymore. I was here to see what I could do if I pushed everything else aside except the story. To see if I could, like Marin said, make myself extraordinary.

I stretched my hand, rubbed the ache out of the scar tissue, and picked up my pen.

You always tell yourself that there’s someone who has it worse, and if you lived through the abuse, there almost certainly was. There’s a horrible sort of comfort in reassuring yourself in that fashion—maybe you were hungry some nights, but you had food. Maybe you got slapped, but at least you didn’t get beaten. Maybe you got beaten, but at least you never had broken bones. You think of the worst thing that happened to you, and then you think of something even worse than that. If you survived, you always can, and so by pained, contorted logic, what happened to you wasn’t really that bad.

Maybe your mother tried to break you, to tell you that you were nothing, that you’d never matter, that you were a waste of her time, but she never succeeded. Maybe you still have scars, but those marks on your skin mean you’ve lived long enough to heal.

Maybe you lived, once, a life full of secrets. Ones you could never tell, not because you didn’t know the words, but because you had learned, time and time again, that the words didn’t matter. People would rather believe a pretty lie than an ugly truth, and you were always the one who wasn’t believed. So you learned the power in silence, and in secrets. Maybe you still look over your shoulder, but at least you got away.

And after all, if you’d had a childhood that was different, one that didn’t always feel like walking on knives, maybe you would never have found your voice. If you hadn’t been forced to swallow your words, you would have never learned the power in speaking them.

This is what you tell yourself. This is how you keep breathing. This is what happily ever after means.

I woke soon after going to sleep, as the fingers of dawn were beginning to pluck at the edges of the sky, to find my room full of butterflies. An entire kaleidoscope of them, orange and red and black and electric, Nabokov blue. Their wings were opening and closing slowly, and it seemed as if my walls moved in time with the beat of some unknown heart.

I lay in bed, not moving, barely even breathing, just watching. Minutes passed, or maybe hours. It felt like I was in a cathedral, some holy place outside of time.

The next time I woke up, the butterflies were gone, no sign that any of them had ever been there. I had nearly convinced myself that
it was a particularly vivid dream when I saw, on the open page of my notebook, a smear of iridescent dust.

I don’t like the idea of signs and portents. People like to say fate is inescapable, but I believe there’s always an escape. We make our own luck, and we do that by bending our will and energy toward what we want. I think that if you look for an omen, you’ll find one, and it will tell you exactly what you desire it to, for good or ill. It would have been easy, had I wanted, to think of that tiny, shimmering smudge as some sort of sign, but I didn’t need it to be. I didn’t need signs. I had myself.

Marin had hung amber-colored curtains over the windows so that the light turned her room warm and honey-gold. We strung red fairy lights around the top of the ceiling, just beneath the molding, then stepped back to take in the effect.

“I like it—elegant and welcoming,” I said.

“Did you bring your stars?” she asked.

“Of course I did.” Marin had given me a set of glow-in-the-dark stars to stick on my ceiling when she moved into her first apartment, sending them completely out of the blue. What she had called a “reverse housewarming present” had broken through four years of silence, and helped us start talking again. I had put them up in every one of my bedrooms since. “They’re arranged in constellations and everything.”

“Your favorite mythologies, all set out on the ceiling.” Marin folded herself onto the bed, then began sewing the ribbons on a new pair of pointe shoes. “Just like you always said you would have.”

“Rearranging the stories so the ones that should be next to each other are,” I said.

“You used to tell me stories about the stars when we were kids,” she said, not looking up from her sewing. “When I couldn’t sleep. About the two princesses who lived in the star palaces. Remember?”

“They had a constellation carousel, to move the sky into place for
their adventures.” I pressed the heel of my hand against my chest, soothing the ache of the memory.

“I loved those stories. Did you ever think about writing them down? I mean, not to sell or anything. I know that’s not the kind of thing you write now, but, like, just to have?” She snipped the thread, and picked up the other shoe.