“You want to see?” she asks, her English much better than Gav’s.
“I’d love to,” I tell her.
My aunt’s converted the barn into a print shop—nothing too fancy, just drywall and space heaters, a raised floor in case there’s ever a leak, fluorescent tubes like a lattice of light suspended from the roof slats. She opens the wide double doors for fresh air, but even so the place smells like ink and astringent chemicals, old wood and wet hay. Gavril used this barn as his studio when he was making art, and some of his things are still here, stashed in the corner—televisions, speaker parts, old computers still in their boxes. The rest of the barn is taken up with my aunt’s printing equipment—several presses of different sizes, cabinets filled with a rainbow of ink.
“Over here,” she says, leading me to her worktable—a massive wood slab with benches suitable for a mead hall. She’s a wood-block printer primarily, and her worktable’s covered with carving tools and wood panels for different steps of the layered printing process. Her work is fanciful, hyperdetailed, lush—mostly children’s book illustrations. She’s working on a series for a new Czech translation of the Brothers Grimm.
“I’ll use you as a model for the good prince,” she says. “He loses his eyes in the brambles, no? So I’ll model him after you, put your troubles with your eye to some good use—”
“All right, but my modeling work doesn’t come cheap—”
“I know, I know,” she says. “Strudel. More strudel—”
She’s especially interested in showing me a press she calls her “jobber,” a cast-iron old thing that looks like an overgrown typewriter.
“Letterpress,” she says. “For your poetry. You can work when I work—”
My aunt hands me two keys on a ring, the smaller key for the type-case drawers, the larger for the cabinet stocked with her expensive paper. “Here,” she says, pulling a drawer from the type case and setting it on a secondary worktable near the jobber—the drawer’s filled with metal blocks, each bearing a letter in a different font, capitals and lowercases.
“Easy,” she says, showing me how to fit each letter into the composing stick, how to tie off the galley. She spells out John Dominic Blaxton lives here, then shows me how to ink the letters and run it through the press.
“For your door,” she says, handing me the print. “Now you try. Something simple for first one—”
I rummage through the typefaces, picking out metal blocks—difficult with my hands the way they are, but my aunt helps. The heft of letters in my palm is comforting, somehow, like language become sculptural, tangible. I’m drawn to a blocky Cloister Black font, picking out uppercase letters. I’m not sure what I’m trying to spell until I collect the first two letters, M-O, then find the others, O-K.
MOOK.
“What’s mook?” my aunt asks once we’ve finished the print, that single black word in the middle of a bone-white page.
“I’m not sure,” I tell her.
I have trouble sleeping, so I spend the dead hours sitting on the front porch bundled in a quilt, staring into midnight and drinking brandy and milk, probably drinking too much, but I can’t relax until I’ve nudged myself into a dull buzz. I think about Mook. What he must have thought when I started finding those traces, tracking Albion like I was following a thread through a labyrinth, unraveling all the work he’d done to hide her. He knew about the Christ House. He knew about Timothy and Waverly and he knew about Hannah’s murder, maybe of other murders. He was recruited into this terror just like I was, and didn’t know what to do when he peeled away the surface story and found Waverly’s legacy of dead women, just like I don’t know what to do now—so he made that monument in Pittsburgh, the geocached installation of Hannah’s death because he couldn’t turn away from the evil he’d uncovered but he was too afraid to expose it, was too invested in helping Albion disappear, maybe he loved her. Will I just let this pass? For all his threats, for his deletion of Theresa, Mook was probably terrified of me—he probably thought I was one of them, one with Waverly. I hate him for what he did to me, for what he did to Theresa, I hate him—but I understand, too. I finish my brandy and milk and pour another finger from the bottle and wish Mook was here with me to help me think this through. I wish he was still alive.
Monuments to the dead—
The next time my aunt drives to Domažlice I check out a library tablet and log into my old e-mail account—someone’s been through my in-box, it looks like, some recent messages have been opened, others deleted. Risky to log in like this, in case Waverly’s monitoring the account, so I make it quick—sifting through old message folders until I find the poetry manuscript Twiggy once sent to me. I print out the thirty-five pages of her work.
My aunt works early in the morning, but I don’t make it into the studio until the afternoon. I bring her a fresh thermos of coffee. She pauses in her work to help me get started with the jobber and answers my questions, gives me advice about printing technique. I only make small edits to Twiggy’s manuscript, fixing typos or correcting obvious mistakes, then design each page for the letterpress by stacking every letter in the composing stick until I form her words. I begin my printing. I start with the first poem of hers that I read:
I reached for you this morning but you were gone.
My plan is to produce a limited-edition chapbook, no more than a hundred copies of her work. I’m slow at this, but I find the process calming—assembling the text, inking the letters. It takes me a full day to create two pages, sometimes a few days for a longer page of text. I pull each sheet and hang them to dry on lines that crisscross the barn, the studio starting to resemble a ship with sails unfurled.
11, 11—
Gavril and Kelly have flown in for the week. My aunt showers him with kisses. “Ma, Ma,” he says, wiping wet smudges from his cheeks and forehead.
My aunt’s warm with Kelly, but formal—still measuring each other, I suppose. They can’t quite connect, is all—Kelly a little too urban sophisticate, my aunt a hayseed hippie. They do their best bonding over food, Kelly a health-food obsessive and my aunt a champion of the farm-to-fork movement—they’re making plans for a trip into Prague, to try a raw-food tapas bar a friend of my aunt’s opened a few months ago.
I pull my cousin aside. “Gav, I need to talk with you—”
“Sure,” he says. “Can we go for a walk?”
I use the translator app on my cell, holding it to my ear whenever Gavril talks—regaling me with tales of London nightlife, his contract negotiations with Vogue. He waxes rhapsodic over his love for Kelly. “I want to marry her,” he says. “Think of the cute little Gavrils we could make—”
The dropping temperature’s affecting my leg, cramping me up quicker than usual. We walk the driveway, turn left along the edge of the road. When we reach the forsythia, an unkempt riot of browning leaves and branches, Gavril says, “I think I still have some Playboys buried in Tupperware over here. We can try to find them—”
Gavril digs around beneath the bush for ten minutes at least before he starts worrying that his mother might have found his Playboys and thrown out the issues.
“It’s all right if she did,” I tell him. “You’re a grown man—”
“Hm,” he says, resuming his search, using a stick to poke deeper into the frigid clay. “Maybe I’ll come back in the summer when it’s not so hard to dig—”