Hurriedly I scooped up all of the sand and shut it inside the clamshell compact lying on the edge of the sink. Inside it would mingle with our mother’s white face powder and scratch away at the small, rust-flecked mirror, but at least it was hidden. I closed my finger around the compact, feeling its ridges. It was unmistakably heavy now, like the hunk of polished obsidian that Papa used as a paperweight.
Fear was a winged pulse in my belly. There were river stones shifting under me.
As if summoned, Papa’s footsteps echoed up through the floor. I knew he was pacing the foyer, following his perfunctory route from the grandfather clock to the threshold of the sitting room, then back again. I put on my clothes and my mother’s charm bracelet and hurried to my room. My thoughts were scattered like leaves. I flung open my wardrobe and tucked the compact inside one of my satin slippers.
A pair of red eyes blinked at me from under the bed. I combed frantically through my wet hair as I clambered down the stairs again.
Undine was already perched on the chaise longue, her face pale and drawn. When she saw me, her gaze narrowed like a knife blade. Papa’s head swiveled, eyes pinning me to the wall.
“Go fetch your other sister,” Papa said. “And do it quickly. The draught is already cooling.”
I nodded and wordlessly went to the storeroom, my heart pounding in my throat. The smell of basil was leaking through a crack in the door. The weight of this new secret was like a sodden dress; I felt it clinging to me with every step.
Rose was bent over the table, butcher knife in hand, cutting the stems off sprigs of meadow rue. When she heard me, she turned around without dropping the knife and said, “Papa wants us, doesn’t he?”
“Yes,” I managed, not trusting myself with more words. The secret was stinging my tongue like a pinch of paprika.
“What’s wrong, Marlinchen?” Rose came to me, frowning. “You don’t have anything to fret over with the draught . . . do you?”
“No!” I said, heat rising in my cheeks. “No, of course not.”
My objection was too vehement. Rose’s brow furrowed. “You would tell me first, wouldn’t you? Before Papa, of course, but also before Undine.”
“I would never tell Undine anything I wasn’t proud to speak aloud,” I said, and Rose smiled at last, our mother’s violet eyes filling with affection. She put the knife down on the table, patted both of my cheeks, and followed me out into the corridor.
Papa was leaning over Undine now, holding the capped vial in his fist. As a child, my oldest sister had been the one who wailed the loudest and the longest, the one who tearfully protested every perceived injustice. The years had bled most of that petulance out of her, but there was still a clear outrage even to her silences. Her fury lifted off her in vapors, like steam rising from boiled water. My shoulder still ached where she’d shoved me.
“Open your mouth, Undine,” Papa said.
Her pink lips parted, eyes wavering with anger. He poured a bit of the red-black liquid onto her tongue, and she shut her mouth and swallowed.
Seconds trickled past us, the grandfather clock keeping their time. When the minute hand had gone a full circle, Papa gave a curt nod, and Undine let out a breath and stood and stalked out of the room at once. As she brushed past me wordlessly, I saw that her lips and tongue were dyed a garish red.
“Now you, Rosenrot.” Papa beckoned her toward him.
I watched him pour a swallow of the potion into her mouth, feeling my damp hair drip down my neck and onto the carpet. The dark spot of water grew and grew. Rose licked her red lips.
After another moment, our father nodded. “Good. You can go.”
She went, and it was only Papa and me. The flaps of his cheeks quivered under his beard. When I did step toward him, I could smell the breakfast I’d cooked for him on his breath: mlyntsi with cottage cheese and six boiled eggs, kasha with butter, and the last of our blackberry kvass. My own empty stomach began to roil.
He held my chin and tilted my head back and said, “I trust you, Marlinchen. You most of all.”
The draught tasted as it did every time, like sulfur and ash, like the end of a tobacco pipe if you licked it. Tears gathered in my eyes as I swallowed, but Papa didn’t notice and I was so glad, because this time I was more afraid than I had ever been.
Papa’s potion was a test to see if we had kept our thighs unbloodied, our maidenheads unspoiled. I was always careful when I touched myself never to let my fingers slip too far inside, never to break what Papa wanted intact. He told us, too, what would happen if we drank the potion when we were ruined: we would vomit it back up along with our livers, and then he would hold up our own naked organs to us as proof of our deception, proof that we were thankless and debauched daughters who would sully the Vashchenko name.