“The goodlady?”
“She likes us.”
I skipped a beat, then said: “Stay up, just for a bit more. Tell me a Herodotus story or something.”
She grumbled, “Tired.”
A small, stiff thing coursed through the dark and sank cold claws into my head. I switched Miri’s lamp on. Miri grumbled again, but the shape under her bedcovers didn’t move. I got the odd feeling that her voice was coming from somewhere else. I said: “Miri… Lily’s slipping away. We have to remember her or she’ll be gone.”
She opened her eyes. “What do you mean?”
“Quick, we’ve got to remember her. What can you remember?”
Miri’s eyes narrowed and she took a long time to reply. “Lily’s… hair,” she said, finally. “The near-blackness of it, and the wave in it, near the bottom, where the brush keeps getting stuck.”
“We need more than that. What else do we know? What else is real about her?”
“Eliot. Please.”
“Miri, you’d better fucking stay awake. I mean it. Stay awake or Lily will die.”
Shrill singing between my ears.
“Why are you saying this? It’s not true,” Miri said. “The goodlady—”
“No. There is no such thing, Miri. Grow up.”
She slid up out of the covers, gasping, her face mottled pink and white as if she had come from a place of burning. She rested her head against her bedstead.
“Don’t say that. There is such a thing.”
She was about to cry. There was a change in the shadows and I twisted around, looking into the corners where the lamplight cracked.
Miri is the older twin. Maybe she has seen things that craned their necks to look at her and then withdrew before I was born, thinking that to consider one of us is to consider both.
“Come on, don’t be a baby. Just remember something.”
“Lily smells of the ghosts of roses,” Miri murmured. “Lily is so small she fits under Dad’s chin. Lily…”
“Stay awake,” I warned, and lay down with ice in my chest. I fell asleep to the sound of Miri listing things. “Lily loves the shape of cartoon tear-drops. Lily never knew her mother, and she doesn’t care. Lily’s favourite films have a lot of tap dancing and a little bit of story. Lily slides towards the colour red like it’s a magnet…”
In the morning Miri was still sitting up, her arms stiff on the bedspread before her, gone so deep into sleep that she seemed part of the wall behind her, a girl-shaped texture rising from the plaster in an un-repeated pattern. Her braid was unravelling. Her lips were pinched, her forehead lined with effort. I think in her dreams she was listing things. She tumbled awake and blurted, “Lily can’t stand Pachelbel’s Canon!” I would have laughed if she hadn’t said it with such terror.
Later — when Dad told us what the voice in the phone had told him — prim, slender Miri folded her hands on the lap of her dress. She looked down and, for a moment, appeared to be smiling. She wasn’t smiling. She wasn’t in control of her face.
29 barton road:
The twins were sixteen and a half when their mother died. She was shot in Port-au-Prince; gunfire sprayed into the queue at a voting station. Her camera remained intact throughout. Also, the lens was unstained. To protect it from dust and flies, Lily had covered it with a square of checked cloth and an elastic band, rustic jam-jar style.
That day two bullets were for her; they found her and leapt into her lung. She fell amidst milling feet. Someone leant against her and pushed her aside, outside, out of life. She pushed back, sweat standing out on her skin in droplets as if she had been rained on. But her opponent had great wings, lined with clouds of feathers that brushed her, cooled her, pricked her. The shadow of them darkened her sight. She tried to lift her head and see into the crowd. The other two she had been standing with, the newspaper journalists, her eyes couldn’t find them. They had long gone. She dribbled blood, could not let it go, closed her eyes only for the length of time it took to drink it up again. The brokenness in her chest was not clean. It was not a straight line or a single throb. She couldn’t see it but it consumed her.
Stupid, stupid; Lily had been warned not to go to Haiti. I warned her.
Why do people go to these places, these places that are not for them?
It must be that they believe in their night vision. They believe themselves able to draw images up out of the dark.
But black wells only yield black water.
PART ONE. Curiouser
LUC DUFRESNE
is not tall. He is pale and the sun fails on his skin. He used to write restaurant reviews, plying a thesaurus for other facets to the words “juicy” and “rich.” He met Lily at a magazine Christmas party; a room set up like a chessboard, at its centre a fir tree gravely decorated with white ribbons and jet globes. They were the only people standing by the tree with both hands in their pockets. For hours Lily addressed Luc as “Mike,” to see what he had to say about it. He didn’t correct her; neither did he seem charmed, puzzled, or annoyed, reactions Lily had had before. When she finally asked him about it, he said, “I didn’t think you were doing it on purpose. But then I didn’t think you’d made a mistake. I don’t know what I thought. I suppose I thought you were calling me Mike because Mike was my name, if you see what I mean.”
He wooed his wife with peach tarts he’d learnt from his pastry-maker father. The peaches fused into the dough with their skins intact, bittered and sweetened by burnt sugar. He won his wife with modern jazz clouded with cello and xylophone notes.
His fingers are ruined by too close and careless contact with heat; the parts that touch each other when the hand is held out straight and flat, the skin there is stretched, speckled and shiny. Lily had never seen such hands. To her they seemed the most wonderful in all the world. Those hands on her, their strong and broken course over her, his thumbs on her hip bones.
One night she said to him, “I love you, do you love me?” She said it as lightly as such a thing can be said without it being a joke. Immediately he replied, “Yes I love you, and you are beautiful,” pronouncing his words with a hint of impatience because they had been waiting in him a long time.
He seems always to be waiting, his long face quiet, a dark glimmer in his heavy-lidded eyes. Waiting for the mix in the pot or the oven to be ready. Waiting for blame (when, at twelve, Miranda’s condition became chronic he thought that somehow he was responsible; he’d let her haunt the kitchen too much, licking spoons. He forgot that he had allowed Eliot to do the same.) Waiting, now, for the day Lily died to be over, but for some reason that day will not stop.
Meanwhile he has the bed-and-breakfast to run, he has cooking to oversee, peach tarts to make for the guests who know to ask for them. The peach tarts are work he doesn’t yet know how to do without feeling Lily. He has baked two batches of them since she died. Twice it was just him and the cook, the Kurdish woman, in the kitchen and he has bowed his head over his perfectly layered circles of pastry, covered his face and moaned with such appalled, amazed pain, as if he has been opened in a place that he never even knew existed. “Oh,” he has said, unable to hold it in. “Oh.” Luc is very ugly when he cries; his grief is turned entirely inward and has nothing of the child’s appeal for help. The Kurdish woman clicked her tongue and moved her hands and her head; her distress was at his distress and he didn’t notice her. The first time he cried like that she tried to touch her fat hand to his, but he said, “Don’t — don’t,” in a voice that shook her.