Lauren Groff - Fates and Furies

Chollie had showed her his stash of Ecstasy and slyly said, “This is how my quest for world dominance begins.” Said he’d be out all night selling at a rave, would she be okay? “Go,” she said, “make your money.” He went. Their father was in his room, sleeping. Now she put the envelope of Antoinette’s cash under her brother’s pillow and considered it; then she changed his smelly sheets and placed the money under the pillow again. She took the bag of drugs from under her own mattress and swallowed one pill and waited for it to seize her, then shook the whole bottle in her mouth and swallowed the pills with milk from the carton. The ache began in her stomach.

Already woozy. The air had turned muddy. She collapsed into bed. Vaguely, she heard her father leave for work. Sleep stole over her like waves. In the waves, a sweetness, a peace.

[Go ahead and weep into your wine, angry woman, half a life away. What do you hope will follow you out of the dark? Morning coming into the window as every day it does, the dog waking on her bed out of dreams of chipmunks; but there is no such thing as resurrection. Still, you did it anyway, didn’t you, brought the poor girl back. Now what are you going to do? Here she is before you, as alive as she’ll ever be, and your apology would never have meant a thing.]

Chollie came home to a heavy silence and knew something was wrong. The father away at work, Chollie overdue because of the concert. He stood in the door, hearing nothing, then he ran. Found what he found. Everything in him flipped over. He waited for the ambulance, and as he waited, the plan emerged, what he would do, the years it would take. He slid his sister’s head on his lap and held it there. From a mile away, the sound. The sirens.

—

IT WAS DAWN, a thin pale spreading over the distance. Mathilde was shaking, but not from cold. She pitied them, the cowardly ones. Because she, too, despaired; she, too, was blinded by the dark, but to turn your back is too easy. Cheating. The handful, the cold glass, the swallow. The chair kicked back, the burn on the skin of the throat. A minute of pain, then stillness. Despicable, such lack of pride. Better to feel it all. Better the long, slow burn.

Mathilde’s heart was a bitter one, vengeful and quick. [True.]

Mathilde’s heart was a kindly one. [True.]

Mathilde thought of Land’s gorgeous back, muscled and long, the spine a delicate splitting serration. It had been Lotto’s back as well. The lips, the cheekbones, the eyelashes, all the same. The ghost manifest in the living flesh. She could give the boy this gift. If not father or mother, still blood, an uncle. Chollie had known Lotto second best, after all; he could tell Land about Lotto, summon a person out of what, to Land, had just been details, gleanings: interviews, plays, a brief moment with the widow, but Mathilde knew how closed off she was, how she’d shown him only her body, nothing real. Chollie could bring Gwennie to him, a mother. Mathilde could leave Land with something living. She could give Land and his uncle time.

She stood. The thing that had given her lightness these past months had fled, and her bones felt made of granite, her skin stretched like an old tarp over them. She hefted the box, feeling all the weight of Chollie’s evil in her arms, and set it in the sink.

She lit a match and watched its blue edge suck down the stick, and for a moment, the lightness returned, the breath to blow out the flame just behind her lips — fuck it, Chollie deserved the worst for what he’d done to Lotto in his last days, the doubt he’d created — but something stopped her breath. [Internal; not us.] Just before the flame singed her skin, she dropped the match onto the box. She watched the papers burn, bereft, her curse on Chollie going up in a tongue of smoke. She would send a letter in her own hand, later, to both men. Land could call his newfound uncle every day of his life. He would. Chollie would host Land’s wedding at his palace by the sea. Chollie would be at Land’s children’s graduations, would drive up in the Porsches he’d give them. Land would be loved.

“That’s not nothing,” she said aloud.

The dog woke, screaming at the smoke. When Mathilde looked up from the charred mess, the small, dark girl she’d summoned had gone.

DECADES LATER, the nursemaid would come into the tea room in Mathilde’s house. [Blue canvas on the wall; a cool, twilit sense of being young and lovelorn.] She would carry a platter of the cakes that were the only thing Mathilde would eat anymore. She would talk, this woman, talk and talk, because there was a smile on Mathilde’s lips. But when she touched her, the nursemaid would find the old woman gone. No breath. Skin cooling. The last spark in Mathilde’s brain was pulling her toward the sea, the raspy beach, a fiery love like a torch in the night almost imperceptible down the shoreline.

Chollie, who heard the news an hour later, took a flight. In the middle of the morning, he outsmarted the locks of Mathilde’s flat in London and came in with his halting, panting steps. He was as fat and antique these days as a potbellied stove. Through everything, he survived, like the rats, the jellyfish, the cockroaches would. He took the three slender books that Mathilde had written to an echoing lack of acclaim and put them in his bag. [ Alazon, Eiron, Bomolochos ; she was sly but unsubtle in this. In a room in his house the rest of the print runs sat in cardboard boxes, being eaten by cockroaches.] Though he was old, he was as sharp as ever. He poured bourbon, then neglected the glass and took the bottle to the attic with him. He spent a night paging through the valuable first drafts of Lancelot Satterwhite’s plays in their careful archival boxes, searching for the first ludicrously yellowed printed-out draft of The Springs. It would be worth more than this entire house. He wouldn’t find it. It was no longer kin of the other plays, having left Mathilde decades earlier one dawn, filched by the hand of a young man who had woken in shame and fury in an alien house, who had let the dog out in the dark to pee and made fruit salad and coffee without turning on the light. He had slid the papers under his shirt, had warmed them with his skin as he drove back to the city. In the end, it didn’t matter. Land had had a claim as strong as any, it is true; a boy who had explained the theft in a letter he’d tucked in a great blue bowl full of ripening tomatoes, a boy who had felt in his bones what only one other person had truly known.

—

TWO YEARS A WIDOW, Mathilde went to see Land in New Jersey. A production of The Tempest. He’d been Caliban. He acquitted himself well, but alas, there was no spark. The children of geniuses rarely being geniuses, et cetera. His greatest talent was the gorgeous face he hid behind the latex.

After the curtain call, she walked into the dusk. She hadn’t disguised herself, thinking there would have been no need; she was a healthy weight, her hair had returned, and it was a natural soft brown. But there he was in front of the theater, smoking a cigarette in his lumpy makeup, the hump on his back, the rags. “What did you think, Mathilde?” he called across the eddy of people leaving for dinner, for the babysitter, for a drink.

The look he gave her. Christ. It was as if he could see into her dark heart and was sickened to death by what he saw.

Well, it’s true, Lotto had the same moral rigidity. Had he known — all that she had done, all that she was, the anger sparking like lightning under her skin, the times when she would hear him boast at some party, jovially drunk, and hate the words coming out of that beautiful mouth, how she wanted to incinerate the shoes he kicked off everywhere, the lazy way he had with people’s swift and delicate feelings, the ego heavier than the granite slab their house was hitched to, how she was sometimes sick of his body that had once been hers, the smell of the body, the flab on the waist, the unsightly hairs of that body that was now bones — would he have forgiven her? Oh, Christ, of course he would.