Wildalone (46 page)

I
WOKE UP
and thought I was still dreaming: in front of me was an explosion of wildflowers, as if someone had robbed a field of its blooms and woven a fabric with them.

“I feel like I should be paying money to watch you sleep. Getting quite addicted to it.” Rhys was sitting on the edge of the bed, holding a sundress, smiling. “How's this for a Sunday outfit?”

“Are we staying in today?”

“Definitely not. I'm taking you out as soon as you get ready.”

“What about Jake?”

“He's gone. Back to New York, I guess.” He handed me the dress, while I struggled with a mix of relief and guilt from Jake's early departure. “Let me see you in it.”

“I can't go out in this. It's winter outside.”

“It sure is.” He went to the window and pulled the curtains. “And it's actually snowing.”

The snow floated quietly, in plush white patches. None of this made sense. He wanted me to wear a sundress in the middle of December?

While I was washing up, the rest of the outfit had materialized: a beige woolen coat and matching rubber boots, banded at the top with the same flower pattern as the dress.

He held the coat for me. “That's all you'll need.”

The snow had covered everything and muffled each sound, even the one from the engine as we drove through the deserted streets. When he pulled over, the trees by the road were barely visible.

“Come and close your eyes.”

We walked through cold silence. Then a sudden warmth enveloped us—heavy, scented of honey like the warmth of summer. He slipped the coat off my shoulders. Lifted my feet out of the boots and placed them on something soft that bent its blades under my toes—

Grass?

“Now you can open them.”

All around us—astonishing, bursting through one another up toward the sky, drunk on their own impetuous red—were poppies. Thousands of them. All the way to the trees in the distance where the snow still fell, undisturbed, encircling us in its ephemeral wall of whiteness.

“Do you recognize the place?”

I noticed it only now: the old willow, weeping its sleepy visions down into the ground.

“So it was you, back then? You made the poppies grow?”

“I couldn't resist. Wanted desperately to impress you.”

Not that he had to try. The thought of dating an incarnation of Dionysus was mind-blowing enough. And a little bit terrifying.

We sat down among the flowers. I was still hypnotized by the distant line where the waves of red crashed into the snow.

“How is any of this even possible?”

He smiled. “Being a daemon comes with perks.”

“Like what? Absolute control over nature?”

“I wish! No, certainly not over all of it.”

“What are the exceptions?”

“Humans.”

It was the one exception I found hard to believe, given his magnetic effect on everyone. “What else?”

“There are no other exceptions, Thea.”

He explained something about alternate dimensions, and his ability to create parallel environments while leaving the rest of the world unchanged. The exact premise eluded me, but I knew what he meant. I had witnessed it, when Carnegie had morphed into a vision during the few minutes while I played. Lush geraniums had sprouted up over the balconies of a Manhattan concert hall, just as countless poppies were now blooming inside a snowy Princeton forest, oblivious to the surrounding winter.

I felt like a child who had found a trove of miracles. “Show me more!”

He put his hands together. Held them briefly. Parted them just a bit, letting a cloud of black butterflies flutter out—as if the wind had blown through a pile of minuscule velvet cutouts and scattered them over the field. When his hands opened all the way, I saw a thin golden necklace: a chain with a poppy bud bending its head over a tiny stem. He clasped it around my neck and kissed the spot where the flower fell, right between the collarbones.

“How come you love poppies so much?”

“The easy answer is that they symbolize resurrection after death.”

“In Greek mythology?”

“In all sorts of cultures. Including our good old friends, the Greeks.”

“And the noneasy answer?”

His fingers ran through the petals closest to him. “Poppies induce sleep. My mother died from lack of it.”

“Rhys, I . . . I know about Isabel.”

“You do? Who told you?”

“Carmela. But it wasn't her fault. I may have asked too many questions.”

“It doesn't matter. My mother's death is not a secret.”

“You think poppies could have saved her?”

He plucked a flower out of the many around us and studied it for a few seconds, then threw it away. “Poppies can't save anyone. They die so fast, how would they possibly undo death?”

“Can daemons undo death?”

“Only one thing can, and you already know what it is. All the rest, this”—his arm stretched out toward the field—“is up to me. Although I try not to mess with reality too much. Not unless I crave something and there's no other way to get it.”

“Like the painting in your room?”

“I had to make my own; the one at the Tretyakov wasn't for sale. The two are virtually identical, except mine hasn't been damaged by time. Looks exactly as on the day he painted it.”

Better than the original.
I thought of that other “original,” the one I would always compare myself to. “Rhys, do I resemble her?”

“Whom?”

“My sister.”

His body stiffened up, just as it had done months ago when I first mentioned Bulgaria to him, in that same field. “You don't resemble her, no. And I wouldn't want you to.”

“Why not?”

“Because you don't . . . claim people. You let them stay in your presence until they want to be claimed—badly. But you don't do it even then. That's why I fell for you.”

“And Elza?”

“She had to have what she wanted. I can't tell you how maddening that is.” His eyes roamed the field, past the invisible membrane of its warm bubble. “I met her the summer before freshman year, at a piano competition in Bulgaria. We both won and had a drunk night of celebration. When school started, she wouldn't stop writing to me. I think I answered only once—the whole thing was pointless anyway. But then she applied to Princeton and I just . . . I went along with it. She was the hottest girl on campus. And I was vain and stupid, so she decided to make it easy for me. She made it so damn easy, Thea! All I had to do was not say no. Hordes of guys were after her, whereas I didn't need to lift a finger. I had the girl everyone wanted. In my bed. Every night.”

He leaned back. His elbows crushed a few poppies, but he didn't seem to care.

“Then her antics started to become annoying. She was constantly after me. I had warned her from the beginning that I didn't want a girlfriend. That it was just sex, nothing serious. But she acted as if I didn't mean it. When I tried to break things off, she went ballistic—cried, begged, threatened. Then suddenly her tune changed and she offered me something entirely different: a truce on my terms. No expectations. No strings attached. Did I want to go to a party with her that night? Sealing the pact, so to speak. And not just any party: ‘a forest feast beyond our wildest instincts.' So of course I went. That's how the insanity started. Once I got dragged in, there was no going back.”

“Dragged into what?”

“The rituals. You'd never imagine that some ancient pagan shit could survive for two thousand years, right? At first I thought it was a joke. Or some sorority rush—definitely not of American women, that much I could tell. Whatever it was, though, nothing I had ever done came even close. It made me feel invincible and free, and I was fascinated by it. Freaked out as hell. But totally hooked.”

“Who were the other women?”

“There were men too, I wasn't the only one. And the men seemed to be normal guys. But the women, they . . .” He looked for the safest way to say it. “There was nothing they wouldn't do, Thea. We drank nonstop—all kinds of ‘elixirs' with dubious contents. Plus drum music. Coming out of nowhere, right there, in the forest, while everyone was having sex with everyone else.”

“Even my sister?”

“She was mostly with me—but yes. We started going every week. Once, there was even a mock wedding. White veils for the women, wreaths of ivy for the men . . . I was wasted and don't remember much. I think at some point one woman had a snake.”

I knew about the snake's role in the rituals, but said nothing.

“After that night, Elza convinced herself that the whole thing had been real and we were in fact married. It was ludicrous. Still, I couldn't get it out of her head. Then she began writing to me again. And not just letters—all sorts of notes on random pieces of paper, creepy messages in books. Left
them everywhere, even in my own house! You actually saw one, in that book on the Vineyard.”

“Why did you save it?”

“I didn't. I threw everything out years ago, but Jake must have found the Rilke and kept it. My brother, he . . . he lives too much inside his own head. Sometimes I don't understand him at all.”

There were things about Jake he would never understand, and this was exactly where the conversation wasn't supposed to go. “Do you remember the library book I showed you once, the
Gypsy Ballads
? Elza left a note in it too. I recognized the handwriting.”

“Glad I never saw it. That would have ruined Lorca for me.”

“Why do you hate her so much? She was crazy about you. This part, at least, I understand.”

“You think you do. But you'd never get on a guy's case the way she did. Two days after my parents died, she came over to give me a book inscribed with more of that nonsense and signed
‘E.E.'
—Elza Estlin. Told me she was now all the family I had. Can you fucking believe it? We had the usual fight: me trying to break up with her while she pretended not to hear it. When she finally left, I drank every drop of alcohol in the house. Passed out eventually, only to wake up and see her back in my living room, sliding a ring on my finger. I lost my mind, Thea. Just lost it. I yelled, she yelled back. Then I told her I was going to drive her to Forbes and never see her again. She said nothing—which was odd, but all I cared about was that I'd finally managed to shut her up. We took my motorcycle and I gave her my helmet. Those were my last moments of human life.”

“But then your other life began. Which is lucky, because . . . otherwise how would I have met you?”

He managed a half-smile. “She did stop time for us; I guess that counts as a favor.”

“How much older than me are you, anyway?”

“Technically, I'm still in my twenties.”

“Technically?”

“Let's say I'm twenty-nine.”

“This happened fifteen years ago. You can't be that young.”

He kept smiling.

“And what do you mean by
let's say
?”

“I can be any age I want.”

“You simply decide and your age changes?” This was just as surreal as everything else I had heard that weekend. “Then I'd like to see how you looked before the accident. Can you really do that?”

He stood up, walked behind me, and came around my other side.

The long hair was what I saw first. Falling in waves over the much more fragile shoulders, the much narrower chest. His face was the same: strikingly perfect. Only . . . its cheeks had now sunk in. Its lips were pale. And a sadness—the same sadness I had sensed in him so many times—had muddled up the blue of his eyes, stealing their luster. Below, under the open shirt, his ribs could be counted through the skin, reaching like a skeleton's fingers down toward his stomach.

I came up to him, to this troubled boy my age, and kissed his lifeless lips. When I opened my eyes again, he had gone back to looking older.

“I like you better this way, the way you are with me.”

“Then let's forget the rest.”

Forgetting Elza. The one thing I would never be able to do. “Rhys, is she good at . . .”

“At what?”

I couldn't say it, but he must have realized I meant sex.

“She isn't human, Thea.”

“How about when she was human?”

“You don't want to go there. Trust me. You don't.”

“I go there all the time—in my head. And I'd rather hear it from you.”

“Then yes, she was good at it.” He lay back on the grass, arms folded under his head.

“Just good or fantastic good?”

“Fantastic good.”

“And now that she is no longer human?”

His eyelids closed, shutting the sky out of him. “It's like a drug forced
into you that you crave while it drains and collapses you. Then you detest it.”

“But it's still fantastic good?”

“Better.”

Better.
A word impossible to compete with, even in theory.

“So much for the proverbial one-to-ten scale, then.” I tried to sound lighthearted, but he must have seen right through it.

“Your sister would be a ten for anybody else.”

“And for you?”

“Scales are meaningless.” He placed my hand on his stomach—below the belly button, where his pulse could be felt through the skin—then slowly pushed it lower. “In my entire existence, your touch has been the only thing to make me feel death would be worth it.”

“Then . . . let's not talk about dying.”

He smiled and pulled a small book out of his pocket. “We almost didn't get to the real reason I brought you here.”

“Did you just make this too?”

“No, this I actually brought with me.”

The cover was simple white, embossed in gold: