Lauren Groff - Fates and Furies

“I’m so sorry,” she said. “Lotto never told me that Gwennie had killed herself.”

“He never knew. He thought it was an accident,” Chollie said, and this didn’t sound strange to her in the meadow full of winter light. It wouldn’t ring strange for some months, because here the horror was, plowing through her, and she could feel nothing for a very long time but its wild and whistling force.

—

It comes over us that we shall never again hear the laughter of our friend, that this garden is forever locked against us. And at that moment begins our true grief.

Antoine de Saint-Exupéry said this. He, too, had found himself crashed into the desert when, just moments before, all had been open blue sky.

Where are the people? said Saint-Exupéry’s Little Prince. It’s a little lonely in the desert…

It’s lonely when you’re among people, too, said the snake.

—

LIKE CARP, the loved ones surfaced, mouthing the air around her face before sinking deep again.

They put her in a chair, put a blanket on her. God the dog sat trembling beneath.

These loved ones all day were lowering their faces at her, moving away. Lotto’s nieces and nephew creeping up to put their cheeks on her knees. Food on her lap, taken away. The children sat there through the long afternoon. They understood at an animal level, new enough to the world to be uneasy in language. Sudden night in the window. She sat and sat. She thought of what her husband might have been thinking the moment he died. A flash of light, perhaps. The ocean. He had always loved the ocean. She hoped he’d seen her own younger face coming near his. Samuel put his shoulder under one arm, Lotto’s sister put hers under the other, they deposited her in the bed that still smelled like him. She put her face in his pillow. She lay.

She could do nothing. Her whole body had turned inward. Mathilde had become a fist.

MATHILDE WAS NOT UNFAMILIAR with grief. That old wolf had come sniffing around her house before.

She had one picture of herself from when she was tiny.

Her name had been Aurélie. Fat cheeks, gold hair. The only child in a large Breton family. Her bangs clipped from her face in a barrette, scarves on her neck, lacy socks to her ankles. Her grandparents fed her galettes, cider, caramels with sea salt. The kitchen had rounds of Camembert ripening in the cabinet. It could knock you down to open the door, unsuspecting.

Her mother was a fishwife at the market in Nantes. She’d rise in the blue night and drive to the city and come home midmorning with her hands chapped and glittering with scales, cold to the bone from contact with ice. Her face was delicate, but she had no education. Her husband had wooed her with his leather jacket, his pompadour, his motorcycle. Small things to trade for a life, but at the time they had seemed powerful. Aurélie’s father was a stonemason, and his family had lived in the same house in Notre-Dame-des-Landes for twelve generations. Aurélie was conceived during the revolution of May 1968; though her parents were far from radical, there was so much excitement in the air that they didn’t know how to express themselves except animally. When it was impossible for the girl’s mother to hide her pregnancy, they were married with orange blossoms in her hair, a slice of coconut cake in the freezer.

Aurélie’s father was quiet, loved few things. Putting stone on stone, the wine he made in his garage, his hunting dog he called Bibiche, his mother who’d survived World War II by black-marketing blood sausages, and his daughter. She was spoiled, a happy and singing girl.

But when Aurélie was three, the new baby came. He was a fretful and screaming creature. Still, he was cooed over, that wizened turnip in blankets. Aurélie watched from under a chair, burning.

Colic arrived in the baby, and the house went piebald with vomit. Aurélie’s mother walked around as if shattered. Four aunts, smelling of butter, came to help. They gossiped viciously and their brother showed them his grapes and the aunts chased Bibiche from the house with a broom.

When the baby at last began to crawl, he got into everything, and the father had to build a gate at the top of the stairs. Aurélie’s mother cried during the day in her bed when the children were supposed to be asleep. She was so tired. She smelled of fish.

The baby liked best to crawl into Aurélie’s bed and suck his thumb and twirl her hair, the snot in his nose catching so it sounded as if he were purring. During the night, she would slowly move both of their bodies toward the edge of the bed so that when he finally fell asleep and rolled onto his back he’d tumble out and wake shrieking from the floor. She’d open her eyes in time to watch her mother rush in and pick the baby up with her swollen red hands and, scolding in whispers, carry him back to his own crib.

—

WHEN THE GIRL was four years old and the baby brother one, the family went for supper to the grandmother’s house one afternoon. The house had been the grandmother’s ancestors’ for centuries, and she’d brought it to her marriage with the neighbor boy. The fields, still conjoined, were all hers. The house was far finer than the little girl’s family’s, the bedrooms larger, a stone creamery from the eighteenth century still attached to the main building. The manure had been spread that morning and could be tasted in the milk. The grandmother was like her son, square, strong-featured, taller than most men. Her mouth was carved down into a sharp n shape. She had a granite lap and a way of puncturing the jokes of others by sighing loudly at the punch line.

The baby was put down for a nap in the grandmother’s bed and everyone else was outside under the oak, eating. Aurélie was on the downstairs potty, trying to go. She was listening to her brother upstairs thumping around in the grandmother’s room, crowing to himself. She pulled up her panties and slowly went up the stairs, collecting a gray fur on her finger from the dust between banisters. She stood in the honey-bright hallway listening to him through the door: he was singing to himself, thumping his feet on the headboard. She thought of him inside the room and smiled. She opened the door to him, and he climbed off the bed and toddled into the grandmother’s hallway, grabbing at her, but she stepped backward, away from his sticky hands.

She sucked a finger and watched him move beyond her, toward the top of the stairs. He looked at her, beamish, teetering. He reached out his daisy of a hand, and she watched as her baby brother fell.

—

WHEN AURÉLIE’S PARENTS returned from the hospital, they were silent, gray-faced. The baby’s neck had broken. There was nothing they could have done.

Her mother wanted to take Aurélie home. It was late and the girl’s face was swollen with crying, but her father had said no. He couldn’t look at her, though she clung to his knees, smelling his jeans stiff with sweat and stone dust. After the baby fell, someone had dragged Aurélie down the stairs and her arm was black with a bruise. She showed it to them, but they didn’t look.

The parents were holding up something invisible but terribly heavy between them. There was no power in them to lift anything else, certainly not their daughter.

“We’ll leave her for tonight,” the mother said. The sad face with the apple cheeks, the glorious eyebrows, came near, kissed the girl, went away. Her father slammed the door to the hatchback three times. They drove off, Bibiche gazing out the back window. The taillights winked in the dark, were gone.

In the morning, Aurélie woke to her grandparents’ house, the grandmother downstairs making crêpes, and she washed herself neatly. All morning, her parents didn’t come. They didn’t come and they didn’t come.