A great calm wraps itself around Sophia’s body. A chill and misty knowledge as certain as the night.
“I am not his first wife,” she says flatly.
“No,” confirms Cascavel. “I am sorry about that. We all are. It’s not much fun to be you, I know.”
“His second?” she asks hopefully, but she remembers all those bones, all those jewels, that little basil jar full of flakes of dead blood to season his supper. The locks of hair like strips of paint samples. She knows.
“No,” admits Cascavel.
“How many?”
Cascavel sighs. “Well, it’s a rather complicated question, honestly. I expect there’ll be a great deal of debate about it when all this comes out. If it ever does, that is. He gets bored very quickly these days, your old ball and chain. But I do think we are inching, ever so grindingly slow, toward an acceptable model. Too late for you, I’m afraid, but that’s why we’re here on this lovely evening, isn’t it?”
Sophia draws away from him. “Who are you? Cascavel is a very odd name.”
His eyes glitter with mirth. “It is a kind of snake, my dear. Quite a deadly one, I’m afraid.” He strokes her hair with shocking intimacy. “In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth, and the earth was without form and void and darkness was upon the face of the deep, and the spirit of God moved upon the waters. And God said: let there be light, and there was light, and He saw the light, and saw that it was good, and God divided the light from the darkness … and what was left over at the bottom of the keg was … me.”
Sophia begins to shake violently. Her limbs lose themselves. Her face collapses into a rictus of palsy.
Cascavel wraps her up in his long, serpentine arms. “There, there,” he says. “Just plain old Cascavel is fine. I know you’re frightened. It’s just awful when you lay it all out on the floor like a bunch of bones you dug out of your husband’s hidey holes. You don’t deserve it. Not one bit. But you should be proud of yourself! You figured it almost all the way out on your own! He never gives you girls much to work with up top anymore. Doesn’t want to get too invested, I suppose. Or competition. Well, darling, I have lived here in the Garden since the first stars detonated themselves into the sky and the oceans gave up the whales to the land. I saw the plates separate and I saw the rivers swell with the first water of the cosmos and I saw what that man did to you and all the rest of them and I have wept in earnest for every gorgeous loving girl that house has eaten whole. I have seen it all and let me tell you something as true as bleeding: I am invested. I am on your side. You are the life, but I am the party.” He curls her long hair round his finger. “Now, might I squeeze a third question in? I know I only said two, but I am known to lie from time to time, just like you.”
Sophia pauses. That part of her that knows it can trust no one and has no friends begs her to keep her peace. But it feels so good to be held, it feels so good to be spoken to like she is capable and wise, to hear her life gain weight, fed by Cascavel. Fed by being seen.
“I lied because he would have made me obey,” she confesses, and that feels good too. “He would have made me give the heron the hair and the brush and the bone, because the handbook says we must acquiesce to any request made of us. But I didn’t want to give them up. I wanted to know the truth. And they were … they were mine.”
“Thank you for telling me,” Cascavel says. “I am always very interested in lies.”
Sophia nods against his chest. She does not hear a heart there. Only a kind of old wind blowing beneath his skin.
“Ask me your third question,” she tells him.
“What’s your husband’s name, Sophia?”
She lifts her head and blinks in confusion.
“You’re married to the great lump. You must know.”
Sophia searches her memory, her heart, her whole life with him, every morning in bed, every golden smear of breakfast left on a plate, every whispered urgent promise in her ear.
But there’s nothing there to find.
Cascavel smiles, coaxing. “Do you want to know? I can tell you. But you have to ask. You have to want the truth, or it will mean nothing to you. Just a little rain falling into a puddle already full.”
Cascavel unwinds himself from her. He reaches up into the tree above them, its branches heavy, forking, bending as far as it can toward where they sit. He plucks an apple without even looking for one and holds it before her. It is so red, but in the night, in the moonlight, it shines black.