“Oh,” said the little girls. “Oh. Oh. Oh.” They stepped forward, their knees knocking together. “Well, then.” The sound echoed: well well well. “We will have to eat your heart instead.” They stepped forward and grabbed the hem of the woman’s skirt as though they were her children trying to keep from getting lost.
The first girl, the tallest, reached up and put a hand on the woman’s arm.
“Don’t worry.” She stroked the woman’s arm lovingly. “Everything will be better when we’re done.”
I awoke screaming beneath a row of white dresses with my baba Ada shaking my elbow. Her skin was pale paper, crumpled slightly and pulled back tight by the set of her mouth. For a moment I couldn’t stop my screams — the dresses brushed back and forth around me like branches and the plastic wrappings clung to my skin. Ada grabbed my shoulders and pulled me out into the center of the room, dragging a couple of wedding gowns off their hangers behind me. Standing on my own two feet, I was able to bring the room into focus. I took a few gulping breaths, feeling the hash marks I’d scratched into my throat by shrieking.
“What is it?” Ada kept hold of my shoulders and searched my face as if she would be able to see through it. On the word it, she gave me the tiniest shake, so slight I’m not sure she was aware of doing so. “What’s the matter?”
A whispering drew my attention to the doorway. There, several seamstresses leaned their heads together, sneaking occasional peeks in my direction. A sick feeling followed: they were talking about me, their eyes full of pity. I tried to straighten my spine. What I wanted more than anything was to burrow into my babenka’s arms, feel her cradle and soothe me. But the women were watching. I tried to imagine what they’d say if I told them what I’d dreamed — they’d think I was crazy.
And what would Ada think? It wasn’t so much the disruption that made me feel guilty as the fact that my dream had turned Greta somehow sinister. It populated her landscape with threats, which was the opposite of what Ada wanted. My babenka didn’t always tell me the truth. But when she chose not to, it was because she wanted to let me believe something better. Or because she needed to believe something better. She could give that to me, and I could give it to her, too.
“Nothing,” I said. “I’m okay. I fell asleep.”
Ada looked at me with a terrible little wrinkle in her forehead. But then she straightened up and turned towards the doorway with a shrug that scattered the women who’d gathered there. When they’d gone, Ada picked up one of the wedding dresses that had fallen to the floor in the confusion — it draped heavily over her elbow like a lady in a pose of supplication, arms wafting hopelessly down.
“I’m going to have to press this again.” She spoke quietly, inspecting the few almost imperceptible new lines in the fabric. “Maybe you could go sit in the main room with the girls? I think you left a book with Basia.”
I nodded tightly and walked down the hall, trying to keep my footsteps quiet. Trying to be good. I’d bitten my tongue thrashing around inside the nightmare, and for the rest of the day my mouth tasted like blood. I found it sitting on my teeth at the gum line and felt myself swallowing it, my stomach filling up with iron.
I try to walk slowly and keep myself calm as I move away from the graveyard, but the weather won’t let me. The weather, and the tight fist of my heart. There are too many people on the street, all of them guarding their faces from the wind but still, somehow, seeming to watch me. When I see a bookstore I duck inside, because it looks empty. In the heat of the store, cold fingers of snow melt off my hair and drip down my neck, and I watch the sleet outside, leaning with one hand on a stack of old books with cloth covers. They smell like little museums.
I turn away from the window-paned door and start to gather myself. Or at least I try. What actually happens is that the baby sneezes, and an older man behind the counter looks up and says, “God bless you.”
I begin to cry.
“Hey now,” says the man. He’s half hidden behind piles of merchandise, the corners of his mouth turned down in a frown. “No need for that.”
I want to explain myself, but where to begin? Kara has begun whimpering too, and taking a ragged breath, I shush her. Brush a few drops of water off her cap where snowflakes melted. The bookstore man watches as I dry myself off, digging in my purse for a napkin that I use to wipe my eyes and blow my nose, after first dabbing Kara’s face. When it seems like the danger of my bursting into renewed tears has passed, he looks down at the open book in front of him and the sheet of paper beside it, which is filled with tabulations. He jots something down with a pencil, but then looks back up at me. I’m still there.
“Is there someone I can call for you?” he asks. I shake my head.
“Actually, if you don’t mind me using my phone in here, I can call.” I pull out my cell phone and show it to him, as if to prove I’m not lying, and he looks around us at the empty store.
“Not like there’s anyone to bother.”
He turns back to his book, flipping through the pages and skimming, now and then licking his index finger for traction. I seem to disappear, which suits me fine.
In the back of the store, behind a tall bookshelf, I find a chair — faded upholstery tacked onto unpolished cherrywood, with curling armrests like cat paws — and I sit, gratefully. Kara lies against me. A store like this would be a nice place to take a sleeping baby sometime. I could pick titles off the shelves and read long passages in this very chair, waiting to see if the words lived up to whatever price the man had penciled into his books. An ordinary world — what must that be like?
As I arrange myself, the chair lets up puffs of dust. The cushions seem too skinny for that, but apparently they have unseen depths. Like everything.
I know what to do. Who to call. I flick through the numbers on my phone, trying not to think what a strange portal it is, a sort of witchcraft. The phone, like the chair, feels thin and insubstantial. But it can bring me all the way across the world. Take the dust of my voice to an ear so far in my past that, by rights, it should be as deaf as stone.
“Hello?” I speak immediately when the line connects.
“Hello?” Echo. Silence. “Hello?”
Her voice is so familiar, I could cry.
“Mama,” I say. “It’s me.”
8
The woods encroached on Greta’s home — through the lumber, through every window and crack. But they also belonged to her, and she to them. Her people were always killed in the manner of forest creatures; they died as they lived — struck by lightning, poisoned by a corrupted stream, lost in a field of identical birches that confounded a wanderer’s sense of direction. People in town said Greta came from nowhere, that she’d been found by a hunter bundled up on the ground and had for the most part raised herself. And for that reason or for some other, she continually slipped back into the woods on rambling walks that led her nowhere.
People also said she pulled trouble behind her wherever she went, but for a long time that was just talk, it wasn’t true. Not until she was a grown woman making choices for herself and asking for the things she wanted. Wishes are dangerous things, you see. Start asking the sky to grant you requests and you better prepare for some fallout, red rain.
When a fifth daughter had bloomed within her and faded, this was when she made the deal. The baby lasted long enough inside her to inspire a new glimmer of hope, and to bring a new type of devastation when it was born early, blue and still. Greta insisted on digging the grave herself, and taking the girl far away from her home. She was worried that the voices of the lost girls were getting too loud, and that no child would ever be able to hear past them. She was insensible to protests — deaf to Saul’s urging to stay in bed, to the midwife’s painstaking explication of the volume of blood she’d lost in labor. Greta took the small raisin of a body and wrapped it in clean blankets with the face left bare. Even close up it was difficult to tell the child wasn’t just sleeping.