The whole time I thought of nothing but Mama’s clamshell compact buried under the juniper tree. I wanted to curl up around it like a cat around its litter. I wanted to tuck it back into the cleft of my breasts and let it grow warm again with the heat of my body. If I could have forced it down my throat, I would have. There was nowhere safer for it than inside my stomach like a swallowed peach pit. It occurred to me very abruptly that I was hungry.
I served up Papa’s food for him on a platter and poured him water from the sink. My left wrist felt so dismally buoyant without Mama’s charm bracelet. I already missed its companionable heaviness, and thinking about it jangling and jangling in the broker’s pocket made me want to weep all over again.
Papa was sitting on the chaise longue, leaning forward, elbows resting on his knees with the look of an animal about to lurch.
“Oh, Marlinchen,” he said when I placed the tray in front of him. “You’re the best and kindest of all my daughters. I’m sorry about your mother’s things. You know I didn’t want to sell them, but we hardly had a choice. I’ll go to the market tomorrow and buy the fattest chicken I can find, still feathered and pecking. The ripest fruits and the freshest fish. Here, have a sip of this kvass.”
There was a glass of something as black as pitch on the cloven-footed table. “What is that? I thought we didn’t have anything to eat.”
“I found it in the cellar. You must have made it. Don’t you remember?”
I had made a great many things over the years, including kvass, which kept forever. I did not remember this one in particular, though I thought I would have: it was so dark and thick-looking. Yet I was hungry enough that my knees were trembling and my vision had gone blurry around the edges, so I simply nodded.
I perched beside Papa on the very edge of the chaise longue, our arms touching. He gave me a kiss on the top of my head and put the cup in my hand.
It was cold and smelled like nothing, but perhaps that was my own mind, my own fear and exhaustion rippling out into a spell that made everything seem ashen and empty. Perhaps my body knew that I would not be able to throw it up later, and it was doing me a kindness by making it appear sylphlike and void, nothing that would sit in my belly with too much unbearable weight.
I now counted out my hours like varenyky on a plate, each one wrapped neatly in dough. From seven to eight I had listened to Papa’s yelling. From eight to nine I had roused my sisters from their beds. From nine to ten I had tidied the house in preparation for the visitors. From ten to eleven I had spoken to a skupshchik. From eleven to twelve I had spoken to another. From twelve to one I had spoken to no one and watched my sisters and tried not to weep. From one to two I had sold all of Undine’s old china dolls. From two to three I had sold Mama’s charm bracelet. From three to four I had killed and butchered the monster.
Outside the sky was black and close with storm clouds, the red gash of sunset bleeding thinly through. The gate groaned in the wind, metal latch opening with a clink. The juniper tree looked as stolid as a grave marker, unruffled. Under the dirt was the compact and inside the compact was the black sand and in every grain of that sand was Sevas, my first secret, my first lie, safe as death. I brought the glass to my mouth and drank.
Chapter Seven
I woke to the sound of rainwater dripping from the eaves. The storm had come and gone as I slept, and it had uprooted our saplings like needles drawn from a pincushion and blown ferns across my window. I rubbed at the marbled condensation on the glass and peered through, eyes scanning the ravaged garden until I found the juniper tree. It stood as straight and tall as a ship’s mast, unperturbed, black berries gleaming as if there were a thousand-eyed animal ensconced in its scrubby foliage.
I exhaled my relief, fogging up the glass again. That was when I realized there was a water stain on my pillow. I touched the back of my neck. It felt oddly damp, my hair sodden. Perhaps something had leaked through the roof; I did not know how else I might have gotten wet. I stood up on my bed, unsteadily, and checked the ceiling for cracks. No hairline fracture, nothing.
I climbed down again, feeling both foolish and perturbed. I wanted to ask my sisters if they had woken up damp, too, but Undine was still angry at me and still mourning the loss of Mama’s pearls, and I knew Rose would just sigh and chide me for my fear and strangeness.
Sitting on my bed, another odd memory inhabited me. It was wispy and vague this time, like the vestiges of a dream. In the dream I was drenched in water; above me, the black sky was forked with lightning, and there were hard cobblestones under my feet. Perhaps my dream-self had carried me out of my bed and into Oblya’s streets again. Yet how could my dreaming desires leave any mark upon my waking-self?