Erika Swyler - The Book of Speculation

Amos bit back his concerns. He worried at the nature of the water act in light of all that had happened. It had not escaped his notice that Susanna had ceased speaking to Evangeline and Melina barely murmured greetings. Benno had begun to subtly sneer as she passed. Once Amos lunged for him, but Evangeline had held him back with a hand to his chest.

“Stop,” she’d said quietly. “He is afraid. If we give him nothing to fear, he’ll come around.” Nestled in her arms, Bess had cried out. Evangeline had looked at Benno. “I’ve known people like you.” I have killed a woman such as you. Benno had walked away, but he’d shuddered; she’d felt it.

Evangeline had hardly slept since the flood. In candlelight she watched Amos’s chest rise and fall, listened to her child’s snores, and wondered what misfortune she’d brought upon them. Never had there been two such cursed people. While they dreamt, she spent hours with the tarot, asking questions and looking for meanings. What will come of us? What will come of her? A frightening pattern emerged.

The cards spoke of old wrongs, what had sent her running and what had happened since. The wasting death of her mother, Grandmother Visser dead, the disappearance of Ryzhkova, Amos’s grief, the perished fish at the poisoned river, and Charlotte destroyed. She’d felt bold when Ryzhkova had confronted her, strong in Amos’s affection and desirous of a portion of happiness, the same as when she’d met Will Aben by the Hudson. Ryzhkova had been right. Amos’s life before Evangeline had been without worries; that was gone. Since their meeting, his face had gained hard, sad furrows. She touched the deck and her past and future spouted horrors, the paper recoiling from her. Amos need not know these things.

After a second week of clandestine prophesies, Evangeline asked Amos if she might avoid handling the cards during readings. Amos frowned but assented. The cards drove her to approach Peabody about the water act.

Peabody was delighted with the news of his mermaid’s return. An extra half share of pay would be easily recouped by the additional gentlemen patrons that the act drew. The tub was repaired, varnished, and whitewashed. Peabody encouraged Evangeline to bring Bess with her as she practiced.

“We have no way of telling what our magnificent starling shall be.” Peabody had taken to tickling the child’s stomach when he spoke such things. Bess in return watched him, her yellowish eyes slow and unblinking like a rabbit’s. “Broaden her horizons. Teach her cards, water, train her in contortion, juggling, anything she’ll learn.”

Amos abided the resurrection of the swimming tub, observing the sealing and painting from the Les Ferez wagon, but made no move to help. He blamed himself for Evangeline’s apprehension of the cards. He understood fear, but he would not stand for the training of his daughter, not when he suspected that her birth had summoned a deluge and his readings spoke of water yet to come. Charlotte gnawed on their minds like a sickness.

Three months passed. Peabody kept them to a circuitous route toward Philadelphia and eventually New York, toward his son. On an evening before they were due to open in Millerston, Evangeline came to take Bess from Amos.

“Come now, little fish. It’s time we teach you to swim.” She brushed her hand over Bess’s fine black hair.

Amos tucked the baby into his long coat, hiding her from Evangeline’s reach. Fear made him tight.

“You know as well as I that Peabody will need her to work. We must teach her. If we begin now, she won’t dread it the way I once did. I can make it safe for her.”

He wrapped Bess more securely, gathering her into the folds of his shirt. Her grasping fist hooked on to a length of lace. He shook his head, silently cursing that he could not reach his cards.

“It will be years before she can read tarot,” Evangeline reasoned. “And who would tell their secrets to a child? Most wouldn’t want a child touching the cards at all.”

He did not need her to say the rest. She did not want Bess near the cards. He would be unable to speak to his daughter.

Amos held Bess against the wall of the wagon, shuffling the infant into one arm. He removed the cards from their box and smacked the deck down onto a small table, hard enough to shake the legs. He meant to say no, that he was frightened — since the river, since Charlotte. He spread the cards across the table, each humming with his touch.

Evangeline reached for the cards. At the brush of her fingers a wind stirred in the wagon, blowing the deck across the table and to the floor, erasing Amos’s words. New cards took their place, painting violence, a murdered woman, great floods, sorrow, and a map of desolation with her, the Queen of Swords, and him, the Fool, at its center. Evangeline bent to collect the cards, but he stayed her. He studied the placement, the layers of meaning. Bess squealed, the sound muffled by his body. He’d protected Evangeline from Ryzhkova’s dread and the future she had read for him, but the cards on the floor told a different truth; he had been protecting himself. Evangeline had been keeping secrets.

The frail water girl he’d first met had killed. He saw it in the Swords and how they’d scattered, from Death falling across Judgment’s face. Murder was a wearing sin. Each time Evangeline looked for solace, the unsettled spirit would draw misfortune to itself. Her expression held no surprise. He thought of all the cards he’d hidden, how there had been no need. He remembered the red mark that had marred her shoulder when he’d first seen it bared. The welt had torn at him, fascinated him, and his fingers had itched to trace it.

“Please,” she begged. When he shielded Bess from her, Evangeline pressed her lips to his forehead. “I did not mean to kill her,” she said. “I would take it back.” Amos closed his eyes, but he did not let go of the child.

Evangeline had long since left the wagon when Bess began to scream.

Amos spent the remainder of the day in thought, running his fingers across the bed they shared, feeling the impression of her body. She curled up when she slept, a habit from when the tub had been her home. The baby tossed and kicked like her mother. It was good that Bess was not mute like him. He thought of Evangeline’s sureness; she had chosen to swim and had sought out Peabody. The dead woman in the cards — Evangeline had done it.

He was not this way. From the moment he had encountered Peabody his life had not been his own. His name was not his own — whatever it had been lived in a house somewhere beyond his memory. He bundled Bess and put her to rest in the costume trunk. She shrieked, her face twisting and purpling with rage. They might begin again, without the cards or Peabody, in a house in Burlington, a place where they could live a solitary life. He would tell Evangeline he did not believe Ryzhkova, or that he would learn not to believe. It was that bruise that had let him love her, because she needed caring. She’d let him care, had chosen him, she had looked after him, learned for him, and kept him from the cage. A simple bruise.

Bess cried the way others bled, as though she might die from it. He did what he could to comfort her, bouncing her, patting her, and at last turning to Susanna when he could think of nothing else. The contortionist rocked her and called Melina over to rub the child’s belly. Nat popped his cheeks and gave the baby a sweet-smelling root to suckle on, but Bess howled until she choked. She needed her mother.

Amos waited.

Evening came. Evangeline did not return.

* * *

She’d walked to the ocean, past where the trees thinned into grass, and grass gave way to a strip of sand that beckoned like a smile to come into the water. In the past swimming and the stretch of her body brought her peace, but it did not now. Her breath came deeper than it had before the child; the baby changed her in unexpected ways. The troupe feared her. She could withstand it, but Amos’s distrust cut deep. Her body had been reshaped by the baby, but it had changed too for him; the curve between her neck and shoulder had become a rest for his head, her spine had bent to fit to him, her heart slowed when his did.