Page 79 of Feast of Sparks (Thornchapel 2)
Easter comes and I consent to being dragged to the front pew that everyone seems to like so much, even though I prefer the back. Even Rebecca comes, even though she wasn’t raised a Catholic and dislikes most church-y things now anyway, on account of some complicated family history that she’ll allude to but refuses to fully explain.
Rebecca and Auden do another flogging scene with Poe, this time with everyone crowded into Auden’s new room in the southern wing, which he’s fitted with hooks in the beams for all sorts of nefarious purposes. And that night, we break our rules a little bit, and Auden holds Poe in his lap while I lick and suckle ravenously at her—the first I’ve ever touched her or any woman like this—and he broods down at me as I do.
“Soon,” Auden promises in that low, dark tone I love so much. “Soon it’ll be you I’m topping too. Would you like that?”
I lift my head from between Poe’s legs, catching her gaze before I meet Auden’s. She gives me a loopy, endorphin-laced smile.
“Fuck off,” I tell him, but I say it with a little smile of my own. “You’re supposed to earn me.”
Auden lets out an exasperated breath. “If I haven’t earned you with all that shelving I’ve been doing, then I don’t even know what to try next.”
But before I can tell if he’s serious, Poe has her hands in my hair and is guiding me back between her legs once again.
It’s a mild April morning, and I’m walking back from the small café on the green with a warm cup of coffee in my hand, practically assaulted by all the beauty curling into tender life around me. The trees are budding with soft leaves and the grass is dyeing itself back to its preferred shade of green, which is an emerald hue so deep and verdant that it almost seems like a digital effect and not just English spring.
Wild daffodils nod their buttery heads, and primroses dot the grass like dollops of cream. The hedgerows preen with celandine and sorrel and dog violets. It’s as if the entire valley is gently and delicately exhaling. It’s impossible not to exhale with it.
When I get home, I decide today is the day. It was my mother’s favorite kind of day—the showy stirs of spring evident everywhere—and the kind of day she’d tell me over and over again was far too rare in Texas. Clement and cool, and as colorful and vibrant in the forgotten corners of the village as it was in any garden.
It’s the kind of day she would like for cleaning house.
I start with her bedroom, because I anticipate it will be simultaneously the most painful and also the easiest. I mean, I’m not looking forward to sorting through all the clothes and jewelry she’ll never wear again, but also there’s not much question of me actually needing to hold on to her bras or impressive legging collection.
I grab some bin bags and start a bag for rubbish and a bag for donating. The things I’ll save, I pile on the bed—extra sheets, her jewelry, a Tweety Bird watch with a worn leather band that she wore my entire childhood.
Her underwear drawer I dump into the rubbish bag while taking great pains not to actually look at it. Her shoes I sort through and bin the worst ones and save the rest for donation. Her actual clothes I barely let myself look at, knowing there’s a real danger I’ll end up keeping everything, and my house won’t just be a library of books, but a library of the dead.
So instead I look at everything once and I commit it to memory. A slinky dress her sister gave her to try to encourage her to go on more dates, the scarves upon scarves and the sweaters and shawls because even after twenty-odd years in England, she never stopped getting cold. I memorize what they look like, what they feel like, and then I fold them away for the last and final time.
Her bedside table is nearly the thing that gets me. Or rather, it’s her favorite rosary curled in a pile of onyx beads on top of her Bible.
She’d gotten it for her confirmation, she told me, as a gift from the family, and for a long time, it had been the most expensive thing she owned. It’s not that the Martinezes were poor by any means—my grandfather’s company did extremely well—but it was simply that Abuelo and Abuela never hoarded any money for themselves. They gave to everyone who needed it, both in Dallas and back in Tlalnepantla, and so it meant while there was always enough for everyone, there was never so much that my mother ever took anything for granted.
Not for the first time, I wonder if that’s why she insisted so much on her financial independence; she never asked for help from her family, even when we sorely needed it. Even when I came back in the middle of college, she didn’t ask her parents for help. She didn’t even ask me for help—I only heard about how much she was struggling from my aunt—and then I only realized how bad it really was when I came back here.
She’d been furious with me, I recall with some ruefulness. The day I showed up here with my things and without a degree, there’d been hell to pay. She
was livid that I’d interrupted my education to come back and help, but what else was I supposed to do? If she was too proud to ask for help before she starved? And besides, we were a package deal. After my father died, it’d had only been the two of us, and we’d survived together, us against the world.
I pour the cool onyx beads into my hand and study the large silver crucifix at the end for a moment, before I move on to the Bible, which has a few pictures and clippings stuck under the front cover. There’s a picture of my father holding me as a baby in the garden, grinning at the camera with paint flecked on his face. There’s the three of us when I was four, me beaming up over a birthday cake and my father beaming over at my mother, like he couldn’t imagine ever being happier.
And then there’s his obituary. It’s yellowed with age, but it’s still very neatly folded, unwrinkled and crisp, as if it’s been handled with the utmost care.
Richard Davey, local builder, dead at twenty-eight years old.
He’d painted over exposed electrical lines in a house he was working on—the kind of accident so random and unavoidable that it still surprises me when I actually think about it. Did he not see the wires? Did he see them but think the power was turned off? Whose fault was it, ultimately, or was it just a senseless, tragic mistake?
My mother cried for months afterwards. She’d sit on this bed and cry, and when she wasn’t crying, she’d stare almost catatonically at the wall until I’d pull on her hand and tell her I was hungry or that I wanted her to walk to the bathroom with me because the light straining through the embroidered curtains in her room made it look like there were spiders on the carpet.
Maybe that’s why I feel so familiar with death. We were introduced when I was young enough to be more curious than afraid.
And now? Am I still curious about death now?
I don’t know.
I finish clearing out the table drawer—there’s some Vicks VapoRub in there, a lighter for the vela San Juda on the top, and a half-read Ken Follett novel that I know would have gone half-read even if she’d lived for another forty years. I leave the Bible on the top without finishing looking through it—I think I’ve handled all I can from it today—but a cutting slips out from the pages anyway, and I mean to pick it up without reading it until I catch a name that sends a frisson of electricity bolting right to my heart.
Guest.
