I shivered. “What is it like? Being dead?”
“What do you think it is like?”
I pondered this question, noticing only then that I was still clutching one of Rowe’s letters. “I think death is something like being drugged or having a fever,” I whispered. “Like being a step away from everyone else. A step so large and wide that catching up quickly becomes impossible, and all I can do is watch as everyone I love slowly disappears.”
“Is that what you want?”
“Do I have a choice?”
“We all have a choice.”
I laughed cruelly, but I didn’t care. “Do we? What about you? Did you choose to come here? To spend your afterlife as a misshapen monster?”
“Ah, ma petite-nièce, I volunteered.”
“Why?”
The man stood. “Love makes us such fools,” he said, his transparent form shimmering slightly before disappearing completely.
For the first time in six months, I pulled myself up into a sitting position. I lowered my weak legs to the floor and tried to walk across the room in shaky steps to the window. The maple tree outside stood against the dark sky, its bare limbs shivering in the cold. I looked down at the road knowing that in only a matter of hours it would bring Rowe home on break for the holidays. I had read every one of his letters so many times it was as if each word had been permanently inscribed on the inside of my eyelids. I knew that in the second letter he misspelled the word existence, replacing the second e with an a; in the fourth he forgot to dot the i in believe. I slept with them not under my pillow but clutched in my hand, with the sweat from my dreams leaking from my palms and smudging the ink. And I’d read the last line of the letter I received only a few days before — the final Rowe would send before coming home — until the words had lost all meaning to my head and only my heart still understood.
I loved you before, Ava. Let me love you still.
IN THE BEDROOM across the hall, my grandmother was deep in a dream. In it she was back in Beauregard’s Manhatine, in the apartment with the cracked porcelain kitchen sink and the bureau with the drawer where, once upon a time, baby Pierette had slept. Her three siblings sat waiting for her around the wooden table, their faces and bodies whole and intact — René’s handsome face handsome yet again, Margaux’s heart beating underneath her solid rib cage, Pierette fluffing her bright-yellow hair.
René stood and wrapped Emilienne in his arms, then picked her up from the ground with one easy lift and plunked her into the chair in between her sisters.
“We’ve been waiting for you.” Margaux motioned at the two decks of cards sitting in the middle of the table. “None of us can remember how to play bezique.”
“You can’t play bezique with four players,” Emilienne answered. “You’re thinking of pinochle.”
Pierette wrinkled her nose. “What’s the difference?”
Emilienne shuffled the cards, marveling at the agility of her fingers, at the plump skin across her hands. Pausing in her card playing, she wrapped a curl of her thick hair around her finger, relishing the black color that the years had faded first to gray and then to white. On her feet were a pair of laced black shoes, and on her head, newly painted with red poppies, was the cloche hat.
“I never liked that hat,” Pierette mused.
“I think I liked you more as a bird,” Emilienne answered, and the four began to laugh.
Emilienne drifted back into consciousness. In the dark she could barely make out the shadowed shapes in her bedroom: the faded wedding picture propped up on the bedside table, the rose-colored chair with the cat hair matted to the side, and the man sitting in the chair, his handsome face as handsome as it once was.
“None of us can remember how to play bezique,” René said.
“I think you mean pinochle.” Emilienne pulled the metal string on the lamp near her bed, and the light cast a soft glow across the room.
“Do I?”
“Yes, I think you do.” Emilienne rose from the bed and shook out her dark hair from the chignon she would no longer wear at the nape of her neck. She slid her hand into the crook of René’s offered elbow and gave it a light squeeze with young agile fingers.
“We were hoping you’d be able to play us a tune on that harpsichord of yours,” he said as he led her from the room.
“Oh? Well, I think that would be lovely.”
I peered out into the hallway, startled to find it empty. Hadn’t I heard someone out there? I crept past my doorway, each step announcing itself with a long wailing creak. I paused and listened to the night sounds of the house: the motorized purr of one of the cats asleep under my bed, the soft swishing of the long hair on Trouver’s legs as the dog ran in his dreams. There was the distant hum of the refrigerator downstairs, my mother’s soft breathing from the room across the hall.
A soft glow spilled into the hall from under my grandmother’s door. I walked toward it. I turned the doorknob slowly. Blinking in the light, I saw Emilienne tucked in her four-poster bed. Her eyes were closed, her white hair spread out across the pillows, her lips slightly parted as if she were waiting to speak.
I leaned down and pressed my face close to hers, determined not to breathe until I felt my grandmother’s breath on my cheek. After a few moments of struggling, I finally exhaled and leaned my forehead against her cold cheek.
No one had occupied the third floor of our house since the days of Fatima Inês. It was believed that the room upstairs had long ago belonged to her and that her ghost kept everyone away from that floor. I learned the truth behind this myth when I entered the room with cautious, shaky steps. It was not the ghost of Fatima Inês that greeted me.
Birds perched on the rafters, each tipping its head curiously as I made my way past the dilapidated canopy bed, the dresser, the rocking horse. Their nests rested along the beams; their droppings covered the floor. They called to one another in a language only they understood. I glanced around at these strange-looking birds with big black crow bodies and tiny white dove heads, noting that never before had I seen such a bird. Not in the sky above my house. Not in the trees in my yard. And not in Nathaniel Sorrows’s front room. These were Fatima Inês’s birds — the very descendants of the doves who had escaped from their hutches to breed with the crows. Somehow, they were more resilient than all the other birds in the neighborhood. This I found most heartening.
The birds fell silent when I opened the door to the rickety widow’s walk and stepped outside. I could see all of Seattle glowing beneath a handful of stars. The full moon cast a shimmering silver light on the ground below. My bare feet began to burn from the cold, and I looked down at the house next door.
Marigold Pie’s house sat abandoned and vacant. They’d found Marigold in one of the upstairs bedrooms looking a bit like a whale-size Sleeping Beauty with stale cookie crumbs scattered across the pillow. When she finally awoke, Marigold, who had no intention of losing weight, joined a circus traveling through Seattle. She spent the rest of her years as the carnival’s beloved Fat Lady in a tent between the Human Pincushion and Errol, the cloven-hoofed boy. She often sent me postcards from her travels. Later, at the occasion of her death, Marigold willed me Nathaniel’s journal — discovered in her yard the night of my attack. It took me years to open its pages, even longer to read them.