The Empress Chronicles (21 page)

Did she have this power? I could not risk that she did. Hers was a bargain I had to make. I bowed to the witch. “I will do this, madam. You have my word.”

Again, the crone’s eyes seared the likeness in my locket, and as she did so, a smile spread across her face. She released my shoulders and grabbed for my keepsake. I peered down. My count’s face was fading, and in its place appeared the haughty cheeks, high forehead, and cocksure gaze of Emperor Franz Joseph.

I pulled back in horror, but her claws were firmly attached to my keepsake. “Do not recoil. Our bargain begins with this. In Bad Ischl, you will offer this necklace to your sister on the night of the emperor’s birthday, and all will be well.”

Though my breath felt caught inside my chest, I nodded agreement.

“Go then, you wicked child,” she whispered, untethering me from her grasp. “Do not stray from the path, and do not tell anyone of our meeting. Do you understand?”

I bowed my head and acknowledged my penance. I fixed my cape round me, turned and strode off into a clear summer’s day. Ravens gathered overhead—some carcass must be lying nearby—but I paid them no mind. I would do as Lola bade. I squeezed tight my eyes, hoping to conjure my dear love behind them, his handsome face in happier times, but it was to no avail. All that lay underneath my vision was a black landscape.

In the woods, heading back to the Herzog, my footfalls were soft on layers of cool moss and the low ferns. All was eerily quiet until I heard the footsteps of another. The clearing of brush, the crunch of twig. Almost the sound of a worried stag fleeing a chase.

I stood behind an oak and peeked from around its broad trunk. The sounds grew closer; they were staggered and uneven, like a lame horse or a three-legged hound. Maybe a creature was in trouble and needed aid? I came out of my hiding place and advanced toward the noisy trespasser, and then I heard singing. The baritone was off-key but completely recognizable.

This was my beloved here in the woods! And he was drunk as drunk could be.

I stood stiff in one place ahead of him in the path, hands on hips, my gaze level with his swigging hand. He nearly plowed over me before he noticed.

“Ah. It’s Duchess Elisabeth,” he slurred before dropping to his knees. “The beautiful.”

“Get up, you sot,” I shouted. “What do you mean, frolicking through the wood in your cups like this? It’s barely after the breakfast.” His breath was so intoxicated, clearly my count had been at the jug awhile. Perhaps all night.

“Sisi,” he pled, his eyes upturned as though at chapel. “Feast upon this sight. Rare is there a more wretched demonstration than humanity completely damned.”

“It’s the liquor, you idiot,” I shot back. I’d seen Papa in this state more than I cared to recall. Men and spirits had an ugly connection. But even besotted and groveling, Count Sebastian had an appeal that drew a tonic into my veins. I knelt beside him and stroked his head. He caressed the heel of my boot.

“This is,” said my love, “my last day on these grounds.”

“And you’re marking it this way? Through the wavy glass of a bottle?”

“Ah, but my weaknesses. Horses. Drink. You. A man can only defer his nature so long before kingdoms collapse.”

He
was
wretched, my dear Count Sebastian, and so outside himself. “But what if things were different?” I whispered close to his ear.

Count Sebastian reached his hand to my torn cheek. “What tree branch maimed this pure skin?”

“A reminder,” I said, placing my hand atop his. “Of our first meeting. The hunt where you gave me the fox brush?”

“This is more than a small wound from a foxhunt. What has happened to you, fair Sisi? What demon has sought to injure such a comely girl?”

I thought back on the foxhunt so long ago. Oh, but if we might return to that day. Count Sebastian held my bloody hand in his. He stroked it tenderly. In turn, I kissed the top of his mighty head, an impulse I could not resist, for if I did not do something with my lips, the whole tale would soon rush out of them.

This time Count Sebastian returned my kiss, there under the canopy of deep green trees. The ravens gathered closer in as we lay there in long embrace. Inside my heart now, where only the day before lived darkness, a new awakening beat forth, but it was joined by fear. There was so much I still did not know. How were my locket and its image connected to the shape-shifting Lola Montez?

Perhaps I needed to have the simple faith I’d never been able to trust. Faith, and hope. Hope for a future that included this man who now fell asleep in my very arms.

The Volvo comes to a stop in the driveway, and Dad tells me Cory and Willow are in the goat shed, attending a kid birth. Apparently, the laboring doe is nervous and has a history of trampling her kids right after birth.

“It’s like she doesn’t know how to be a mom,” Dad says. “We thought we’d help her out this time around.”

The last place I want to be is in the goat shed, but I’m not exactly in a position to beg off. I grab the trench coat and its pockets of secrets and follow Dad to the rickety barn.

The doe is in full-on delivery mode when we get there, a slimy sack of fluid peeking out from under her tail. She is bleating and pacing. Willow’s feeding the other goats, and there’s Cory, crouching in a corner of the stall, ready with a pail of water and a few rags.

Dad strokes the doe’s hips, the dips between them, and she bleats and grunts, bending her neck around to peer at Dad, her eyes wide. “I know, girl,” he says. “It hurts like hell.”

I know that I look like a ragged mess. I have to pee. But my feet are rooted to the spot.

Willow sidles up next to me and puts her arm around me. “You okay?”

I half-nod, half-wince while watching the greenish slimy sac emerging from the goat. Which is just the tip of the iceberg in everything that isn’t okay. The pain in the doe’s eyes. The terror. I know Willow means am I okay about last night, my disappearance, Cory’s partying, all of that. I hug Cory’s heavy trench coat, the weight of it solid in my arms. I let Willow keep her arm around me.

“Help me with this,” Dad says to Cory as he holds the tiny tuft of doe tail up. “We need to push the kid’s nose down; it’s getting hung up.”

Wordlessly, Cory walks over to the doe and tries to reach inside of her where the tips of two baby hoofs are poking out, encased in the slime sac. The doe shifts her back end, bleats, grunts. Other goats in the shed bleat back, a chorus of sympathizers. A barn cat mews. A cascade of little turd balls drop from the doe and skitter off Cory’s cuff. He doesn’t move an inch.

“That’s it,” says Dad, “I see the neck. Push, girl. Push.”

But Cory says, “I can’t get up far enough.”

Willow squeezes my shoulder. Out of the corner of my eye I see tears leaking down her cheeks. It’s that side of her that Cory described. Sensitive. Naïve. My heart aches a little for her.

A slimy white head emerges from the mother goat. The doe drops to her knees, and Cory falls with her like they’re in a ballet together, his body curling in on itself. “It’s stuck,” he says, a little panicked.

Cory is not at all that cocky boy of last night with the hacky sack. He looks pressed in on himself, as though he longs to be in his own fetal ball instead of helping to deliver a baby.

Willow’s at my elbow as she rushes into the stall. “Liz, we need to help,” she says, trying to make her voice sound calm.

The mother goat bleats and moans, and the little sac emerging from her hind end pulses in and out like a heartbeat. My brain’s frozen, but my body follows Willow into the stall, and before I know it, I’m right there on the straw, next to Cory, stroking the doe on the flank with bare fingertips.

Cory’s hands keep slipping off the birth sac and he mutters in a slow, measured voice, “Liz, your hand is small enough to get in there and move the kid’s nose down. The baby is suffocating.”

Again, my brain goes to that place where I’m at the edge of a cliff, and if I move in any direction, I’m going to fall. I close my eyes, stretch my fingers toward the birthing sac, the slime of it. I feel coarse animal hair, warm slippery ooze, and I make the picture in my mind of honey, of balm, of the ointments and creams that the burn-unit nurses lovingly rubbed on my scalp.

Cory’s voice guides my hand, which is not really my hand at all, but a magic wand, and he says, “Push up and back with your fingers. That’s it. Like that.”

And the magic wand touches the little hump of a nose and it seems wrong to push up and back, like I would break something, but I do it anyway, and the slime ball shifts, and I hear Dad and Willow cheer and the doe screams out a bleat and then the baby’s head pours out of its mom, and Cory eases the baby goat to a mound of fresh straw on the floor of the stall. And I fall backwards, my gooey hand now my hand again.

And there it is. A mound of wet newborn, slicked up with the fluids of birth, a tiny creature already moving toward where it instinctually knows nourishment waits. I’d never seen life happen before outside of YouTube. The smells, the sounds, the prickly hotness. It’s a sort of chaos. Entropy. Exploding cells, random order. All the things that usually leave me fearful and panicky. But within all of that, there’s another feeling, the same kind I get looking at a beautiful painting. And it occurs to me. Today is Sunday. This kid is Sunday’s child. Like Sisi.

Her secrets are within reach of this little miracle.

Cory leaves the kid and doe and crawls to the pail and rag. The doe turns her head, sniffs the sticky, wet kid, and then begins to lick the slime from its body.

“She’s got it this time, I think,” Willow says. “She knows how to be a mommy.”

Cory stands up and Dad joins him on the other side of the stall, two men no longer needed. I notice for the first time that they’re exactly the same height, Dad and Cory. Both of them tired-looking, both with extra whiskers on their faces. But only Dad has a stoop in his shoulders and a protruding gut and a balding head. Cory turns around, squares his face to mine. The shape of his mouth, no dimples showing, is one I recognize. The inside of that look says,
why
? and
hate
, and
get away from me
.

“I’m sorry I took off last night,” I mumble. “I shouldn’t have left you wondering where I was. But you really pissed me off when you ditched me to play beer pong.”

Cory turns to Dad. “Am I done here?”

Dad nods.

Cory semi-stomps out of the stall, and I grab the wet rag and clean the goo off of my hand, which is still bandaged from last night, and my ears are ringing with all the life around me and the disorder of the last twenty-four hours. The trench coat with the diary and the jagged metal wing and Cory’s breaking and entering tools lie in a whirlpool shape next to the doe and her new baby.

“You did it, Princess,” says Dad, putting his arm around me. “You saved that baby.”

I’m looking at my shoes when Willow says, “He really was a jerk last night, Liz. He knows it, and he’s ashamed. There’s more to him than you think there is.”

I think about Mom then. What she said to me about Dad after he left. She said, “Your father is his own worst enemy. And so are you, Liz.”

I watch as the doe continues to lie on her side, licking her baby and then, sniffing with that very nose I pushed up and away, the new kid nuzzles up to its mom’s belly and sucks on her milk bag expertly, as though he just completed a course.

Dad seems so proud. And Willow, tears dried now, is smiling. The three of us stand together for a while, watching new life. The miracle of it. The still calmness of it.

Finally, though, the fact that I really, really have to pee becomes overpowering. As does the need to wash my hands with actual soap. And lie down on my futon, in my room, with Sisi’s words. Cory owes me at least the translation he promised.

I grab the trench coat and leave my father and his girlfriend and the doe and the kid, and wander back to the little shack where nothing is smooth or well kept. To the tiny shared excuse for a bathroom. But when I get there, no go. A closed and locked door that won’t budge.

“Cory?”

No answer, no sound.

I bang the door with my fist, my other arm still cradling the trench coat. “Hey, Cory, you going to be long?”

I hear a quiet rattle from inside the bathroom. Almost a baby-rattle type of sound, but I know it isn’t a baby rattle.

“You okay?”

The spigot turns on, the
phsst, phsst
of water blasting out the faucet for a couple of seconds, then nothing.

There’s the tiniest crack of space between the door and its jamb where the hook hooks into the eye. Cory’s tools are right here, in the coat. I root around in the pocket and find the long, thin screwdriver he used to break and enter. The working end of it just about fits in the crack, but I need something more. Luckily, there’s also a small hammer in Cory’s coat of tricks, so I pull it out and get to work like a geologist breaking open a geode. In no time, the hook springs out of the eye and the door bursts open. Cory is sitting between the toilet and the tub, his legs out in front of him in a vee. An empty container of pills lies on its side in front of the toilet.
My
container of pills. The tall, thin cylinder of what used to hold Luvox. I barge up to him, pick up the empty yellow pill vial and hold it up to his face, that handsome, chiseled face, which at this moment is hanging like clothes on a line. Next to his slumping body is an empty fifth of vodka. “Cory?”

He raises his eyes, his face, that collection of nose, cheeks, lips, and whiskers. Just the smallest rice grain of a dimple shows. Birdseed, really. The tiny period at the end of long, cumbersome sentence. “Hey, Princess, I got another German word for you,” he mumbles.

I don’t know much, but I know the symptoms of drug-and-alcohol overdose. Nausea, shortness of breath, drowsiness. “Stand up!” I shout. “You could die from this, you asshole!” I have syrup of ipecac in my toiletry bag, behind a little curtain under the sink, shoved up next to Willow’s menstrual sponges. I tear open the curtain and riffle through the bag until I find it. “Get off the floor, Cory, look at me. I need you to drink this.”

“
Schadenfreude
,” Cory says. “It means when you get off on other people’s misery. You happy, Liz? Knowing you’re not the only basket case around here?”

I open the tiny apothecary-style glass bottle of ipecac and cram it into Cory’s mouth.

Some of the syrup dribbles down his chin. His pupils look weird.

“Liz, don’t bother,” he manages, his words slurring around the syrup.

My arms, out of nowhere, are Superman arms. My fingers have somehow been able to twist off the impossibly tiny cap. Now, they’re finding the pause between words out of Cory’s lips and shoving another dose of the barf syrup down his throat. Muscle memory, based on nothing. All I know is I want Cory back. I want him safe. I want him not to die.

Then, Mom’s words, Dr. Greta’s words, even Willow’s words to me, out my mouth at Cory: “You’re a better person than you let yourself be. You’re your own worst enemy, you know that?”

Cory looks up, his puppy eyes not very focused.

“Plus,” I add, “we have a stolen diary to read. I’m not going to let you let me down.”

Cory swallows, musters a fast chuckle, and says, “That’s my specialty, letting people down.” Then, grabbing his gut, he says, “I’m going to be sick.”

I yank up the lid to the toilet and help him lean over it. The messy chaos is all around the crappy little bathroom, and then there’s gagging from Cory, bodily fluids spewing. I rub his back the way Dad or Mom rubbed mine when I was little and had the stomach flu.

It doesn’t occur to me until Cory’s fourth or fifth hurl spasm that I don’t even have my latex gloves on.