Roses and Rot (32 page)

From here, I could watch as the remaining artists presented their work. I was feverish with nerves, sick and relieved simultaneously. So much talent. A crashing storm of something on the piano that sounded like being caught up in a hurricane. Another writer, a poet who spoke a sestina. This, at least, I knew I was better than—the technique was impressive, but there was no heart beneath it.

I understood then, too, why there had been no reaction following my reading. I couldn’t move to clap or cheer. Couldn’t weep or gasp from beauty. Everything was pulled from my body, the emotions, the reactions sucked out from under my skin, taken from me at the height of their intensity. By the time the performance was over, I had already given my praise.

This is what it would be, to be in Faerie. This was the first taste of all of those seven years. Nothing I would feel would be mine.

And then Marin danced. The Myrtha variation from
Giselle
, the leaps, the power, the heartbreak. The queen of the fey women who haunted the forest, who stole young men and danced them to their deaths, in revenge for how they had been treated.

She was seduction and she was power, and she danced better than she ever had.

I don’t know what played in her head as she danced. What memories she relived, or if she had been given another sort of spell to break. Her face was wet with tears as she finished, but every movement that she made, from the arch of her feet to the angle of her fingers, was perfect. Was true.

Silence when she finished, as there had been silence for all of us. I could not stand, could not clap, could not weep.

Then a chiming, as silver hourglasses fell from lapels, from chains. All of them.

Except for Marin’s.

Sick to my stomach and unable to sleep, I paced on feet swollen and blistered. I’d failed.

Failed Gavin, failed Marin, failed myself. Everything I’d poured into the work hadn’t been enough. Unable to hold myself together, undermined by my past.

The past, or whatever it had been. There had been no explanation, not from any of them, at the end. No reaction from the Fae, no words from the mentors. No thank you and good luck, you weren’t what we were looking for this time, but we hope to see new work from you in the future.

Just a forest full of aching, echoing silence, and us alone to stumble our way out of it.

And now, Marin would go away to Faerie, and she might never come back. The best, the best I could hope for was that she might return in seven years, that she might still be herself then. But no promises, no guarantees.

I had ruined our relationship, made her think that I didn’t love or support her, that all the poisoned words our mother dripped in her ear were true, and I had failed anyway.

I stumbled to the bathroom and vomited, retching again and again until all that came up was acid. Stood, trembling, and washed my face and hands, tried to clean the taste of my failure from my mouth, and then hobbled slowly downstairs to brew a cup of tea.
Three flights of stairs on feet that were sure they shouldn’t be walking.

The light was still on in the kitchen. I hoped it was Marin. I missed my sister. Maybe now that what I promised Gavin didn’t matter, I could somehow convince her to forgive me.

“Helena?” I couldn’t parse what I was seeing at first. A limp form, bright-haired, on the floor, the shattered mug, the spilled liquid. The stench of rot and roses. Then I understood.

“Helena.” I felt in her neck for a pulse. Still there. She was cold, clammy, and there was vomit crusting her mouth. The reek of decayed flowers was overwhelming.

“Help!” I screamed as loud as I could, cursing my phone, plugged into a charger on the third floor. “Help!”

Ariel ran into the kitchen. “What’s wrong? Oh, God.”

“Call campus security. We need to get her to a hospital.”

Helena’s breathing gasped and rattled. I didn’t know what to do, so I held her hand and spoke to her. “Helena. Hang on. Just please hang on. We’re getting you help.”

“Imogen, is everything—oh, no.” Marin, Gavin behind her.

“She drank something. I don’t know what. Ariel’s calling for help.”

“The hospital can’t help her,” Gavin said, kneeling on the floor next to Helena. “The plants she used—they’re from Faerie.”

Ariel set her phone down. “Can you do something?”

“I don’t know.”

“Try,” Marin said. “Please.”

“One of you hold her.”

I gathered Helena’s head into my lap, held her shoulders. She was so cold. Gavin sniffed at the shattered mug, tasted the liquid spilled on the floor. His glamour fell away from him, his eyes shading to black, the crown of antlers rising up from his head. He looked utterly inhuman. The air in the room crackled, electric.

Gavin spoke a word, all sharp edges and daggers. It scorched the air like lightning, and Helena convulsed. I pushed on her shoulders, holding her steady, willing her to be safe. Her heels thudded against the floor.

He spoke again, and the air turned sour, the stench of rot overpowering the scent of roses. Helena choked, gasped. Liquid began to dribble from her mouth.

“Help me hold her up,” I said, worried she would drown in whatever it was Gavin’s magic was bringing out of her. Ariel and I maneuvered her to a sitting position. Marin stood, watching Gavin, her face like stone.

One more word, that flared like phosphorus behind my eyes. Helena vomited, thick ropes of green that coiled like snakes. Her eyes opened, then closed again. She moaned.

“The poison is out of her system,” Gavin said. He hunched over, looking like he might vomit himself. “Someone should stay with her, though. She’ll feel horrible when she wakes.”

“But she’ll wake up? She’ll be okay?” Ariel asked.

“I’ve done everything I can to make it so she will.” Tired, I thought. He looked tired. Just like the rest of us, and the thought chilled me.

Gavin carried Helena upstairs, and Ariel and I got her cleaned up and into bed. She was so pale, her chest barely moving the blankets as she breathed. Her eyes hadn’t opened again.

Marin came in later. “Has she woken up yet?”

I shook my head. “She was there tonight. In Faerie. That’s how she got the whatever it was she took.”

“She was there?” Marin asked.

“She had to be.” I spoke in a near whisper, as if the words might break if they were said too loudly. “Like Halloween, everyone who
had ever dwelt in Faerie and was at Melete had to be there. It must have been awful for her, watching the thing she thought she’d be doing her whole life. She was there, and Janet was too—who knows what horrors Janet might have spewed at her.

“Didn’t you see them? In the audience?”

“No,” Marin said, and turned away, looking toward the window. I wondered again at what magic it was that she had danced through, but I wouldn’t ask her to relive it.

The pink of the rising sun illuminated the blinds, and she winced. “Gavin said if Helena hadn’t been found, the poison would have killed her at sunrise.”

“That seems oddly specific.” But it had a horrible kind of logic. All the ritual and belief necessary for Fae magic. Sunrises and sunsets and every seven years.

“Has someone told Janet?” I asked.

“Ariel was going over there.”

“I don’t know what to say to you.”

She turned and opened the blinds, letting in the risen sun. “Not now. Let’s just not, right now.”

I blinked, eyes tearing at the sudden brightness, and turned away, toward Helena, still unwoken, still a faded ghost, and nodded.

Janet refused to come see Helena.

Ariel’s rage was incandescent. “She said that she had given Helena every chance to be extraordinary, and instead, Helena had chosen to be mediocre and a coward, and this was only one more example of that.”

“That’s disgusting,” I said.

“I’m going back there later. I swear to God, I will drag that
woman over here if I have to. She just stood there, looking like I was something she had wiped off her shoe, telling me that Helena was no longer her concern.”

Helena still hadn’t woken up. She was, if anything, paler than she had been, the shock of her hair almost obscene against the translucence of her skin.

Gavin, still looking exhausted, had checked on her, and said that she was beyond his ability to help. Later that day, the same Fae woman who had brought Marin and me to the selection came. She had, she said, some skill with healing, and she was here at Gavin’s instruction to use it. Helena’s room smelled like the inside of a storm when she finished.

“Will she be okay?” I asked.

“I have done what I could to make her so,” she said. “But what she took, we call it Heart’s Ease. If death is what will ease her heart, then that is the fate she has chosen for herself, and nothing that any of us can do will serve to undo that choice.”

I wished, very much, that the Fae could lie. I could have used the comfort.

“Can you get word to Thomas?” I asked Gavin.

“I have,” he said.

“Is someone with Helena now?” I asked.

“Ariel is,” he said. “And Marin’s here.”

“Good.” I shoved my feet into wellies and grabbed my coat. “I’ll be back.”

I knocked on Janet’s door hard enough to bruise my knuckles. When she opened it, the house smelled like she had been baking.

“She took Heart’s Ease. Do you know what that means?” I asked. I could taste fury in my mouth, like heat.

“That her life or death is her choice,” Janet said. She sounded
like she was making observations on some mildly inconvenient weather. Her hair was perfect, her clothing precisely ironed.

“Did it occur to you that if you took, oh, half an hour out of your day to visit her, she might choose to live?”

“She made her choice when she drank. I have nothing to say to her.” She began to close the door.

I shoved my foot in it.

“She could die.” I spoke the words slowly, as if that would be the thing that would make Janet hear and understand.

“Then she will. She is a coward, and a mediocre poet who never once used any of the advantages I gave her. And so, I have nothing to say, and no interest in keeping her in a world she has chosen to leave. Now remove yourself from my house.” She didn’t even look before closing the door.

I pulled my hand back, fist clenched. I couldn’t even lie to myself, couldn’t walk off in a rage of
I don’t understand how a mother could do that
. The things that a mother could do were permanently scarred onto my body. I understood them very well.

It was worse, somehow, when it was your mother. When the person who was supposed to be the one who loved you the most made it clear that she didn’t love you at all, that you were nothing to her, that a random person on the street would have showed you more compassion, more kindness. It made the lack of love all the more obvious.

I stopped, wrapped my arms around my stomach, and let the sobs fall from my throat. Cried for Helena, for Marin, for myself, until I was raw, hollowed out.

Then I scrubbed my hands across my face, and slogged back home. At least there, I could pretend like I was doing something that would make a difference.

I met Thomas on my way up to the house. “Hey, this year’s girl, I’ve come to meet my kid.” He smiled, but he looked pale, his clothing rumpled, dark crescents beneath his eyes.

“She’s upstairs.” I took him to Helena’s room. He sat with her for hours.

That night, Helena died.

Janet never came.

I wore the same dress that I had worn just five nights before. Not even a week. Not even long enough for the blisters on my feet to have healed before I stuffed them back into the same shoes that had put them there.

The click of heels from all our shoes echoed down the stairs, across the wood floors of the house, on the groaning front porch. They sounded wrong, those steps from only three sets of feet, as if the house itself had forgotten someone.

Helena’s body had been cremated. There would be no waxen figure in a polished coffin, no open grave like a scar on the earth, waiting for its contents. But we would stand, and speak her name, and remember. That was what you did when someone died. It wasn’t enough, couldn’t possibly be, but we could observe the fucking formalities.

Melete was green and budding. Young leaves hazing the branches of the trees, grass curling up from the dirt, birds singing the songs that welcomed the season. Too bright, too loud.

This was why it rained on funerals in the movies. Because anything other than muted grey, than the sky itself weeping, seemed callous and false. An abomination, that someone can be dead, and the trees be full of singing birds.

We had her memorial in the rose garden. It wasn’t in bloom yet, the plants little more than thorned canes, but it was the one place
at Melete that any of us could remember hearing her say that she liked.

“Which is awful,” Ariel had said. “She lived here her entire life, and the best we can do is a muddy bunch of thorns to say good-bye to her in.”

We were a small party of mourners. Ariel, Marin, me. Thomas, looking as if he hadn’t slept since Helena died. Gavin.

Janet knew where we were. None of us expected her to show up. “She can’t be bothered to show up for an alive daughter. I don’t know why she’d come for a dead one,” Marin had said.