“By listening to you tell your story. And — Lily, this is the most wonderful part — you know how I’ve been saving so that we could go to Lourdes for your fourteenth birthday?”
Lily waits.
“Well, God has provided. There’s more than enough money for us to go together and to stay as long as it takes to petition Our Lady for a cure.”
“I’m not sick.”
Mercedes flushes slightly and her eyes return to this world.
“Lily. Don’t you want to have two good legs?”
“No.”
Mercedes had not counted on this.
“But Lily. If you are blessed with a cure, it will be proof that God really does have a special plan for you.”
“I don’t need proof.”
Mercedes is vexed, for Lily is, of course, right. She requires no proof because she has faith. But the bishop requires proof. Rome requires proof. And Mercedes requires that Lily’s goodness — the essential goodness of this family — be revealed for all to see.
“Lily….” Mercedes lifts a lock of Lily’s hair and slowly starts to wind and weave, “Do you know how pretty you are?”
Lily begins her habit of sucking in her lips one at a time, passing them back and forth over her teeth.
“I know you’re afraid, Lily.” Lily’s hair is so smooth, her honey cheeks tinted rose, her lips flushed and full. “Change is frightening even when it’s for the good. But Lily, I also know that you love your family and that, in the end, you’ll do what’s best for everyone.” Mercedes strokes the long gleaming braid and lets it fall.
Lily remains still as Mercedes rises and takes her tea from the room. After a moment, Lily hears the piano and Mercedes’ slender voice floating above it, “‘A-A-A-A-A-A-A-A-A-ve Mari-i-i-i-i-i-i-i-i-i-i-i-ia…. ’”
Like “Londonderry Air” — or, as Frances always called it, “London Derrière” — many people find it impossible to hear this hymn and not swell with sweet guilt at how they ought to have been nicer to their parents while they still had the chance. But for some reason it only makes Lily angry. Perhaps because she has always been so nice.
Lily rises and leaves the kitchen, past the front room — “‘gra-a-a-a-a-a-zi-ia-a ple-ena-a-a-a-a-a’” — where she can just see the top of Daddy’s dry flaxen head above his parapet of books. She proceeds up the stairs, past the room where Frances has not stirred among moist sheets and up to the attic to do the one thing she can for Frances.
Lily is set to break the lock on the hope chest with her bare hands — she intends to remove the baptismal gown and dispose of it for good so that Frances need never come across it. But the hope chest isn’t locked. The lid is down but not quite flush to the frame of the box itself. Lily lifts the lid. The cedar smell wafts up cloaking a second smell — in all likelihood another mouse entombed and decomposing. What light there is reflects feebly from the yellowed satin of the old baptismal gown. Lily remembers the garment spread lightly over Frances’s beloved dolls, not wrapped about them, but she must be mistaken because, when she slips her hands beneath and lifts, the gown feels full and heavy. Too heavy for dolls. Cool fur. Trixie. Swaddled and entwined.
“Trixie.” She must have leapt in for a nap and the lid shut. Oh Trixie. Oh no. She must have panicked and tangled herself up, winding and twisting until she finally came to rest. “Poor Trixie.” Lily strokes the yellow eyes shut, but there is nothing to be done about the gaping jaw.
A truly terrible smell now, the body having been disturbed. Lily takes the shallowest of breaths to avoid her gag reflex as she carries Trixie down the attic steps. On her way past Frances’s room, she sees Mercedes by the dancing light of a candle, seated on the edge of Frances’s bed with an empty tray in her lap. Lily continues down the front hall stairs.
In Frances’s room, Mercedes hears the kitchen door slam. She makes a move towards the window but stops when she sees Frances coming awake at the sound. “Frances?”
Frances looks up at Mercedes.
“Frances, it’s time to make you fresh and dry, dear.”
Frances blinks. Mercedes smiles.
“I’ve brought you your favourite dishes. Look.”
Frances looks at the tray while Mercedes identifies its contents, “Blancmange, treacle, mead and mutton —”
“It’s empty.”
“Frances —” Mercedes’ head starts to shake.
“Mercedes, what’s wrong?”
Mercedes’ fingers begin a blind search of her own face, probing her eye sockets — Frances reaches up and gently lowers her hands. Mercedes takes a breath and pulls herself taut. “I’m sorry, I didn’t want him to —” but trembles and cracks all over like spring breakup — “die! — I —” Frances reaches up and draws Mercedes down into an embrace, soaking them both. Mercedes smells the new milk. “I’m sorry, Frances.”
“He died. It’s not your fault.”
Mercedes grieves into Frances’s neck. “Maybe if we had stayed here and let Mrs Luvovitz —”
“Hush,” patting her back. “Hush now, it’s all right.”
Mercedes mangles many words against Frances’s neck, unintelligible to her sister but for “I love you Frances.”
“Shsh.”
“Can I sleep here tonight?”
But Frances is looking past Mercedes’ shoulder out the window. “What’s Lily doing?”
Mercedes looks up.
They can see Lily on her hands and knees in the garden. Somehow she has rolled the big rock aside on her own. There is an object lying nearby — a brighter patch against the ground. Lily is scooping debris from a freshly excavated hole.
“She’s digging,” says Mercedes.
They watch Lily pause and rest for a moment against the garden stone.
“She’s praying,” says Frances.
They see Lily rise from her knees and pick up the dimly glittering bundle. She cradles it for a moment in her arms before lowering it into the hole. Mercedes rises and straightens her shoulders.
“I’m worried about Lily, Frances.”
“Leave her be.”
“You know, Frances, one thing looks very much like another.”
“Mercedes —”
“What kind of a creature prefers to be crippled, Frances? Answer me that.” Mercedes has entered a mad classroom, i before e except after c, the time has come, the Walrus said, to give you forty whacks instead.
“Mercedes, come back.”
But Mercedes has left the room and now she is almost fainting at the evil smell enshrouding the hall. She follows the putrid cloud downstairs and into the darkened kitchen before Lily is halfway across the yard on her way back to the house. Mercedes waits with her hand on the electric light switch, trying not to breathe. One thing looks like another, but nose knows. There is the odour of sanctity. And there is the stench of hell.
The kitchen door opens and Lily steps into the sudden light.
“What have you done?” demands Mercedes.
Lily’s hands are cupped together around a secret. She looks like a child with a robin’s egg, it fell out of the nest, I rescued it, really ’n’ truly.
“I’ve buried Trixie,” Lily says.
Mercedes waits. Gives her one last chance. Lily walks to the kitchen table and deposits her treasure. Blackened with coal, nestled in a remnant of stained linen, a tiny human skull, fragile as a shell, with sutures still agape. Along with a few slender twig and pebble bones, the stuff of birds’ nests.
“And I’ve found my brother.”
She watches as Mercedes gets down on her knees, squeezes shut her eyes and, in a stage whisper, implores God to cast the Devil from Lily — “‘exorcizo te, immunde spiritus, maledicte diabole’” — repeating the words until they are no longer words but sounds. She makes the sign of the cross over, and over, and over — Later she will contact the bishop so that Lily may be taken away to a place where a special priest will drive the unclean spirit from her by force of prayer and perhaps other means, cruel to the body but so kind to the soul. Later Mercedes will beg God’s forgiveness for having flattered herself that she was the sister of a saint.