Page 25 of Feast of Sparks (Thornchapel 2)
I wake without either of the two men I fell asleep with, but plus a big, sleepy dog curled against me. I wake with my back stinging, cunt sore, eyes swollen; I wake with a mind jumbled with fragments of dreams that feel unlike any dreams I’ve ever had before, and yet it’s the rain I wake to above all else.
A silver cerement to wrap up the world, sheets and veils of cloistering, pattering wet. As if Thornchapel is sealed off from the rest of space and time. As if the six of us are alone with the house’s secrets and sins.
If only it could stay that way, I think. If only the six of us were the entire world.
The next thing I notice is the strange lightness in my body—or maybe it’s a heaviness? The kind of heavy you feel when you’re pushing through cool, clean water. Or it’s the kind of light you feel when you take off a pair of roller skates and your feet feel like they’re going to float right off the ground, but instead of my feet, it’s all over my body.
I feel . . . tilled. Like soil. Loose and turned up. Broken, but not withered or stale.
New?
Is this feeling newness?
Or just numbness?
I fall back asleep, Sir James having woken not at all, and when I wake up for the final time, the day has lightened from dark iron to dove-gray smoke, and I can make out the yellow blur of police coats moving through the trees. Sir James stretches and yawns and finally oozes off the bed with a dozy plop and then sits down by the door while I do the same.
But I don’t get ready just yet, because getting ready means facing the day. I stand by the window for a long time, just watching the rain-coated officers bobbing to and fro, nothing more than fluorescent daubs in the rain, like a strange Impressionist painting brought to life. Then I look around Auden’s room to see where someone’s set out a painkiller and a glass of water. A neatly folded shirt is there, along with a pair of my own pajama pants that I sewed out of an old Care Bears sheet.
The shirt is Auden’s—a soft, loose T-shirt that smells like him. Like Thornchapel, like wet trees and crushed flowers. With a singe of peppery orange at the end like the merry bite of winter.
I bury my face in it for several long inhales, wishing it were him. Wishing I’d woken up in his arms, wishing I’d woken up to anything but the rain and the bleeding, tilting reminder that my mother is dead and her bones are in the thorn chapel and that today I have to talk to my father. Today, I’ll have to start a new life as a new Proserpina. One who’s motherless, one who knows that not everything is possible.
At that thought, I press my hands on Auden’s plush bed and duck my head, tears stinging, and the ache in my back and thighs and belly is enough to push the tears all the way out. The pain is permission, lingering all the way from last night, hugging me, holding me. It’s as if Auden and Rebecca and Saint are still here, their arms still wrapped tight around my body. The memory of them made manifest with marks and welts and bruises, and that memory whispers you are loved, you are cared for.
The memory whispers, you can cry and we will be here to kiss your tears away.
Pain is love today.
Which fits, since today is the day after I’ve seen my mother’s bones, and that means today love is pain.
The tilled feeling returns, like I’ve become loose and loamy and quiet, but there’s something else with it now. I don’t have the words for it, I can’t even imagine what one calls it when they’re cut down to the bone and knows they can’t be cut any deeper.
I cry for a long time, and when I finish, I skip the painkiller because I’m not ready to be without it, both the memory of my friends’ love and the counter-pressure it applies to the pain inside me. But I do go to find the source of the woody, floral smell I’m currently wrapped in. I do go to find St. Sebastian’s shuttered brown eyes that unshutter only for me.
And as if he’s appointed himself my protector in his owner’s absence, Sir James Frazer follows me down the stairs and across the hall to the library, claws clicking on the flags as he goes.
Normally I’d be embarrassed to be waking up so late, but it’s as if the day has been smashed open like a clock, and there’s nothing but glass and springs and cogs everywhere, and time is meaningless. Because when I get to the library, everyone but Rebecca and Saint are still in pajamas, and there’s still the scattered remains of a breakfast on the low table between the old sofas, but there’s also a bottle of scotch, a mostly empty bottle of gin, and a bowl full of lime wedges.
Rebecca—hair coiled in a tight basket on top of her head and draped in a high-necked silk blouse—is typing on a laptop at one of the long library tables, the only one working it seems. Delphine is sprawled on a sofa in a Cambridge sweatshirt and shorts, legs dangling listlessly over the sofa arm, one fuzzy-slippered foot bobbing arrhythmically in the air. Becket is wearing what seem to be borrowed pajamas—drawstring pants and a v-neck cotton shirt that showcase the strong, elegant line of his collarbone—and he’s currently paging through a thick tome that I think is a Bible, but I can’t be sure.
Saint’s in borrowed clothes too, and they’re certainly Auden’s—the trousers pull tight around St. Sebastian’s muscled ass and thighs, but are rolled up once on the bottom like a youth’s, as Saint is a few inches shorter. He’s in one of Auden’s sweaters too, and even with his hair damp and tousled as if he’s just come from a shower, and even with his bare feet and silver barbell studding his lip, in these clothes he looks like a spoiled prince as much as Auden. He’s wandering around the shelves like a restless ghost, fingertips brushing along the spines of the books, his mouth pulled into its customary pretty sulk.
And Auden is in his favorite place, leaning with one hand braced on the mantel, staring into the fire, which cracks and pops as if it’s ten in the evening and not barely afternoon. A half-drunk glass of whisky is on the mantel next to his hand, and he’s also in a pair of linen drawstring pants and a long-sleeved v-neck shirt—both draping and pulling over the curves and flats of his long, tight body. He’s wearing his glasses, and his feet are bare, so distractingly bare, and I never got to kiss them last night. Somehow the idea of cuddling them, rubbing my cheeks against the hair-dusted tops, is magnetic. Soothing. I want to bathe his feet with my tears, blanket them with kisses, just like the sinful woman in the Gospels did for Jesus.
It’s his feet I’m staring at when he finally notices me, shoving off the mantel and striding toward me with concern on his face. When he gets to me, he pulls me into a careful embrace—the embrace of a man who knows exactly what parts of my body don’t ache and sting.
“I didn’t want you to wake up alone,” he murmurs. “But we had to get up when the police came, and I thought it was better to let you rest.”
Rest. Even though I’ve just woken up after what has to be nearly fourteen hours of sleep, I could easily go back to bed. My body feels honeycombed with exhaustion, I feel weak and flimsy and tremulous, that tilled feeling again, and Auden’s chest is so firm when I rest my cheek against it. He’s so solid and warm and steady, and I want to be right here forever. Just here, without having to do anything, without having to think, the beat of his strong heart against my ear.
I watch Rebecca move toward us, the jewel-purple silk of her blouse catching the soft light of the room as she walks, and when she gets to me, she puts a cool hand on the back of my neck.
“How are you feeling?” she asks.
My body sings pain to me, and my heart feels like it’s beating outside of my body, like if I walked outside right now, I’d feel each and every raindrop on fragile, vital flesh.
I’m not numb.
