Adrienne Celt - Invitation to a Bonfire

It’s been a week since then. Most days, Vera seems satisfied. She floats from room to room flexing her fingers, as if new and uncomfortable strength was flowing into them. The way a child’s legs hurt in a growth spurt. She’s been making lists with an increasing frenzy, phone calls to her travel agent that she doesn’t let me hear. I stay out of her way in my room or walking on the beach, and sometimes when I come back in I notice that a page I’ve been writing on has moved, though naturally this could be my imagination. Vera hasn’t yet explained her plan for getting me out of the country, since I told her it would be a risk to use my passport. If they have any notion about what I’ve done, they’ll be watching for me. She says I worry too much.

Sometimes when I walk into the room where’s she’s planning, thinking, I can feel myself crawling like a beetle over the bones of her hand. If she realized I was there, she would shake me onto the ground and she would crush me. But how can I help letting her know? It’s in the nature of my trivial feet, my clicking wings. Generally if she sees me lurking, she calls me over and asks me to make tea. Which is companionable enough. But sometimes, too, she looks at me like I am dinner.

All it would take is a single phone call: Yes, Officer, I did notice the girl had an unnatural attachment to my husband. Of course I would appreciate being left out of the questioning, but I can tell you where she’ll be at such and such time, on such and such day. I’ll be heading out of the country. A period of mourning. You understand.

I could be inventing things. But in my experience a terrible feeling is usually followed by a terrible act. I used to think if I followed the rules, every new set, I’d get to the end of the rainbow, the end of the line. Now I think I’d do better to make my own rules. It’s what everyone else does.

Maybe you’re concerned about me, dear reader. Don’t be. Vera will be back from the store soon, and in the meantime I’ve tried on several of her dresses, plus a blouse, and that pair of work pants she wore to the jetty café. Turns out they were rolled up because they’re much too long for her, which is lucky; we aren’t the same size, but it’s mostly a problem of length and height. I can button her nice wool skirts around my waist with ease. (Not eating well lately has helped. I’ve dropped five pounds, maybe ten. Dinners of oyster crackers. No matter.) They fall to just above the knee, instead of mid-calf as I’d prefer. But I only have to manage for a little while.

It’s easy to want what you do not have: I would know. My life has been a study in this. In Moscow I saw girls with fox-fur coats, and when I say girls I mean ten years old. Though what I really wanted was not the coats, but the feeling of a small creature tucked around my throat. The feeling that, if I could not control the weather, at least I could gather a group of mammalian ushers to shield me from the harshest wind. I wanted my dreams to come true, even the ones I could only describe as colors or sensations. Yes, I wanted power.

The wind is high today; chilly for midsummer. Vera always overextends herself at the store, and will be wanting a cup of tea. The cabin’s rent is paid through the end of the month, though of course that will soon become irrelevant.

I asked her: Don’t you need to go back to Maple Hill? Not just to talk to the police and show them you’re grieving (which I assume, or assume she could put on like a jacket; tears for the camera), but to gather your possessions and make an inventory? Their house was not enormous, but it was nice. There were wedding photos on the walls, Vera radiant in her white gown. She told me she has everything she needs. That she spoke by phone with a very sympathetic detective, and can withdraw cash with just a signature. She’s good at letting things go, I guess. Her father passed away a long time ago; he couldn’t manage the transition, postwar, and took his own life, leaving her his empty apartment in the fourteenth arrondissement, which has gone quite fashionable in the years since Lev and Vera left. The police? She snorted. The police will be no trouble at all.

In Paris she’d be une veuve jolie, a beautiful mourner. Black crêpe, black polished shoes, la pauvre femme en deuil. There would be no reason to stop her at passport control, as she isn’t the official object of any investigation, and if she meets with a Parisian police inspector, that will be her duty fulfilled. If she becomes a benefactor to the Donne School, they’ll lean on the local sheriff to avoid any line of questioning that places her under suspicion. That’s what she says, and I believe her. She walks so confidently. It’s a step you can pick up, with care, a little like imitating a person’s voice on the phone. I’ve made a study of her notes on Lev’s manuscripts, which she didn’t think to destroy along with her letters, and can now do a passable version of her handwriting.

I couldn’t save much of Lev’s, in the end. Not for myself. His gifts felt empty of him (presents without presence, kind without kin), so I left them behind in Maple Hill, where perhaps they’ll act as clues or links between us. Twenty dollars spent on gold; a bangle abandoned in a gardener’s apartment. What I did save was a folded envelope, and the tablets sliding back and forth inside. Powder held safe from the elements, lying in wait. Vera was the most glowing one of us, the kind of woman God makes as an example to the rest. Here , you can imagine Him saying, is a life worth living . A life of modesty and steam. There will always be a Vera , I assured myself, one way or another . With a dark rinse, I think our hair will look quite similar. She sets it to the side, in a style that’s easy enough to replicate with the right number of pins.

My mother told me to take cues from my betters. Learn their habits, and track them like deer in a live wood. Keep watch of their movements, and, if it helps, imagine you’ve tied a line of bright yarn to one ankle to make their path clear. Vera puts two spoonfuls of sugar in her tea before even sipping. She and I share a soul, or so Lev insisted. Why not share a little more? I found out yesterday when she went to town for a bottle of wine that she doesn’t carry her passport with her, nor check it for safety upon her return. Easy enough to move it into a clean purse, where I will slide her wallet too. Take her wedding ring from around her finger, though I doubt it will fit on mine. Something to ask a jeweler about when I arrive in France.

A fire in the fireplace might pop and get out of hand. In a place like this, made all of wood, the destruction would be catastrophic. Police, when they come, might find a woman’s body burned clean of all identifying marks, except the locket—my locket—around its neck, and scraps of my clothes melted to the remaining flesh. Why would they look closer? Already they’ll have found my fingerprints on the gun that shot Lev, and it can’t be long before they match them to the set that’s been on file since the orphan boat carried me to America. Remorse, they’ll think. A murder and then a suicide. Not the most shocking idea, when you get down to it.

And then imagine: a woman walks onto an airplane and smiles, ironic and wan. She answers questions from the stewardess with an exhausted non or oui before waving her off and falling asleep with a scarf tied around her hair . I don’t speak French well, but Vera doesn’t talk in excess, and I can pick anything up in time. I will avoid her old acquaintances, if any still remain, and eventually it will be my face that people associate with her name, if only through the force of habit. Not such a strange thing, for a widow to hide herself away, especially when she has her husband’s legacy to maintain. Correspondence. The occasional grieved statement made by postcard. A packet of papers, a yellow old manuscript, locked in a safe underneath her bed. Maybe two packets, if I can’t bring myself to burn these pages after all.