Page 45 of Harvest of Sighs (Thornchapel 3)
“I’m sorry, you’re right, it’s been too long,” I apologize. “But I need your help.”
“Hmph,” she says, but she only manages to resist asking her next question for a few seconds. “What help?”
I take a deep breath. “I need to know about my father.”
“Richard?”
“No. Not Richard.”
I might be the first person in the world to successfully quiet Ana María for any length of time. And . . . her silence is all the confirmation I need.
“I know you know the truth,” I say after a few heavy moments without either of us saying anything. “I know you know who he was.”
More silence. I wonder what she’s looking at right now. If she’s staring at her shrine of Santa Muerte, thinking of how I’m named for her. If she’s missing my mother, who was her best friend. If she’s staring at the picture of Jesus on her wall—the picture, the only one the women in my family seem to like: a frowning, silky-bearded god with a heart of thorns.
I wonder if she’s thinking of what to say to me.
There’s the flick of a lighter and a long breath in. The habit she and my mother both picked up when they spent a semester studying abroad in France. When she speaks, I can practically see the smoke floating up toward the ceiling. “How did you find out?” she asks.
I can hardly say I found out after waking up sex-sore and happy in my half-brother’s room, so I try to find a reasonable facsimile of the truth. “Apparently Ralph had arranged for a letter to be sent after his death. To his legitimate son.” Legitimate. What a stupid word. And yet I hate all the other words even more. Acknowledged. Recognized.
Chosen.
“I just—” I don’t know how to go on, because I have every question in the entire world and yet I have no questions left inside me at all. There’s a hollowness where the questions should be, an empty fatalism, which just says of course, over and over again. Of course the one good thing I’d found, the one home, the one place for my heart—of course that would be taken away.
And of course Auden would be the one to do it.
“I don’t understand,” I finally manage to say. “When did they meet? How? And why would she lie about it to me? Why go through the whole charade of pretending Richard was my father if it was Ralph all along? And then the money—” I break off because suddenly the money makes sense, suddenly it all makes sense.
Of course that’s why he gave her the money. Of course. Ralph fathered me so he paid for me. Noblesse oblige applies to bastard sons too, and as much as I imagine it hurt my mother’s pride to take it, she did anyway.
Ana María takes an audible drag, holds it in for a long moment, and then sighs. “She was very young, you have to understand, just out of college, and we both—as girls, we both loved magic. Everything about it. So when she took the job working for the paper out there and one of her first assignments was profiling the festivals celebrated in Thorncombe, she was thrilled.”
Another inhale, the next words coming out on the coughing exhale. “And then she met Ralph. The next thing I knew, she was seeing him every day. The next thing I knew, she was in love.”
“He would have been married.” I have a faint memory of Auden’s parents being congratulated on their twentieth anniversary at Mass when I was sixteen. “He was married.”
I hear Ana María take another drag, perhaps using the time to think of what to say. “Love is often wrong, St. Sebastian. It’s often wrong about everything.”
And what can I say to that? It’s a lesson I was too stubborn to learn back when it would’ve done me any good.
“She knew he was married, of course, but I think she loved him too much to stop. And that was the first year he was trying to revive the old ways.” Ana María pauses then. “Do I need to explain those to you?”
If I were capable of feeling anything other than empty, wasting pain, maybe I’d feel shame right now. But I’m not, so I don’t. “I know them, Ana María,” I tell her. “I know the old ways.”
“She would hate that,” my cousin says. “Your mother wanted nothing to do with them after everything happened.”
“You don’t sound like you hate it,” I say.
She snorts. “Certainly not. I’m proud. But also I know you’re too smart a boy to let yourself get hurt, so that’s why I don’t worry.”
I rub idly at my chest, where those scissors keep snip-snipping my heart right out of my body.
I’m not too smart, Ana María. I let myself get hurt so badly.
She clears her throat. “That first year, the first time he tried to bring back the old ways, your mother was his May Queen. Imbolc through Samhain, every feast.”
“It wasn’t his wife?” I think of Auden’s mother, pale and trembling whenever they visited the Abbey.
