do not constitute a world,” she countered. “You’re not an orchid growing in a hothouse. I’m not letting you stay. Pack your prints or your favorite book or whatever you wish, you are coming with us.”
“You don’t belong here, Noemí. But I do. What would I do outside?” he asked.
“Anything you want.”
“But that is a deceiving idea. You are right to think that I was grown like an orchid. Carefully manufactured, carefully reared. I am, yes, like an orchid. Accustomed to a certain climate, a certain amount of light and heat. I’ve been fashioned for a single end. A fish can’t breathe out of water. I belong with the family.”
“You’re not an orchid or a fish.”
“My father tried to escape, and you see how he fared,” he countered. “My mother and Virgil, they came back.”
He laughed without joy, and she could very well believe he would stay behind, a cephalophore martyr of cold marble who’d let the dust accumulate on his shoulders, who’d allow the house to gently, slowly devour him.
“You’ll come with me.”
“But—”
“But nothing! Don’t you want to leave this place?” she insisted.
His shoulders were hunched, and he looked as if he would bolt out the door any second, but then he took a shaky breath.
“For God’s sake, you can’t be that blind?” he replied, his voice low and harrowed. “I want to follow you, wherever you may go. To the damn Antarctic, even if I’d freeze my toes off, who cares? But the tincture can sever your link between you and the house, not mine. I’ve lived too long with it. Ruth tried to find a way around it, tried to kill Howard to escape. That didn’t work. And my father’s gambit didn’t work either. There’s no solution.”
What he said made a terrible amount of sense. Yet she stubbornly refused to concede. Was everyone in this house a moth caught in a killing jar and then pinned against a board?
“Listen,” she said. “Follow me. I’ll be your pied piper.”
“Those who follow the pied piper don’t meet a good end.”
“I forget which fairy tale it is,” Noemí said angrily. “But follow me all the same.”
“Noemí—”
She raised a hand and touched his face, her fingers gliding along his jaw.
He looked at her, mutely, his lips moving though he uttered no words, gathering his courage. He reached out for her, pulling her closer to him in a gentle motion. His hand trailed down her back, palm pressed flat, and she rested her cheek against his chest.
The house was quiet, a quiet that she disliked, for it seemed to her all the boards that normally creaked and groaned had stopped creaking, the clocks on the walls did not tick, and even the rain against the window panes was shushed. It was as if an animal waited to pounce on them.
“They’re listening, aren’t they?” she whispered. They couldn’t understand them since they were speaking in Spanish. Yet it still disturbed her.
“Yes,” he said.
He was scared too, she could tell. In the silence his heart beat loud against her ear. At length she lifted her head and looked at him, and he pressed his index finger to his lips, rising and stepping back from her. And she wondered if in addition to being able to listen, the house might not have eyes too.
The gloom, shivering and waiting, like a spider’s web, and them sitting on a silvery bit of silk. The lightest movement would reveal their presence and the spider would pounce on them. Such a dreadful thought, and yet she considered the possibility of entering that cold, foreign space willingly, which she’d never done before.
It terrified her.
But Ruth existed in the gloom, after all, and she wanted to speak to her again. She wasn’t sure how to accomplish that. After Francis left, Noemí lay in bed with her hands at her side, listening to her own breathing, and tried to visualize the young woman’s face as it looked in her portrait.
Eventually she dreamed. They were in the cemetery, she and Ruth, walking among the tombstones. The mist was thick around them, and Ruth carried a lantern, which glowed a sickly yellow. They paused before the entrance to the mausoleum, and Ruth raised the lantern, and they both raised their heads to look at the statue of Agnes. The lantern could not provide sufficient illumination, and the statue remained half in shadow.
“This is our mother,” Ruth said. “She sleeps.”
Not your mother, Noemí thought, for Agnes had died young, as had her child.