Wildalone (10 page)

“The school reiterates its condolences. Our office will update you immediately on any progress, but for the time being we suggest you postpone your trip.”

More calls had followed. Many more. But none of them brought a single answer. To this day, my parents had no idea who—or what—had taken the life of their girl.

THE YEARS HAD WASHED THE
Polaroid out to a nondescript beige—everything except the eyes. For a brief moment, they had bewitched the camera with the dark blue of winter seas. Then, gradually, the sky had withdrawn its storm. The waters had breathed out and cleared. And now these same eyes streamed their pale luminosity down on you as if, in the last second before she forgot ever having seen you, Elza had reached every corner of your mind, all the way to the bottom.

That evening I lay in bed, staring at the girl who would have been my best friend. We did look alike. If we had been closer in age, we probably could have passed for twins. Yet I didn't see it in me, the spell of that stunning creature whose name still lit up the eyes of everyone who knew her. She had been ethereal, a dandelion: the flower of wishes. Of all flowers, this was the only one that began bright and ripe (like the sun), then paled to a weightless silver (like the moon), letting you blow it off into the wind—a constellation of scattered seeds—so that your wish would come true. Like every girl, she must have had her own wishes. The piano. The faraway school. The boy who maybe (or maybe not) had dared to break her heart . . .

A knock on the door made me slide the picture under the pillow—my
father had come to say good night. But instead of the usual peck on both cheeks, he just stood by my bed, saying nothing.

“Should I not go, Dad?”

“Not go? So that's what we've come up with now—defeat?”

“I'm serious. I don't want you and Mom dealing with this a second time.”

“There won't be a second time. Because you
are
coming home for Christmas.”

“Of course I am.” Although I wondered if, by then, his hair would be even whiter; whether people aged visibly in four months if you didn't see them. “I meant everything else: seeing me off, not having me around, worrying about me.”

“Parents always worry. That's part of the predicament.”

“You'll worry less if I am here.”

“How did this get into your little head?” He sat down on the edge of the bed. “Of course you're going. We'll worry much less if we know you are happy.”

“I can be happy anywhere. No need to follow in my sister's footsteps.”

His hand rested on my knee—a hand so big and warm I often wanted to curl up inside it, like a Lilliputian. “It's fine to follow someone else's footsteps, Thea. So long as you don't follow someone else's dream.”

I looked around, at everything that wasn't going to fit inside the two suitcases. “My dream right now is to lift all this and plant it in Boston, with you and Mom in it.”

He tried to smile. “Your room will still be here when you come home for winter break. As will your mother and I.”

“But I thought you guys were against America?”

“Not against it, just . . . wary of it. Of one school especially.”

“Which one?”

The frown was instant. And very, very deep. “Princeton.”

In a flash, the past few weeks came back to me: the stress of choosing a college, my parents' unexplained aversion to Princeton. Ever since the acceptance letters came, they had insisted on Harvard and I accused them of name snobbery—“Harvard is Harvard” seemed to be the mantra in Bulgaria, a
no-brainer for anyone lucky enough to get in. But the deadline to decide hadn't come yet. I still had a week to change my mind.

“Dad, do you think we'll ever find out what happened to her?”

“No. And I don't want you trying. You are going to college, not on a ghost chase into the past.”

“Why not? I was thinking what if—”

“There are no ifs, Thea. We did everything we could. And so did the police, the school, the press, our embassy. The case went even higher up the chain—and nothing. Trust me, it becomes a downward spiral very quickly.”

“Why?”

“Because you love her, and you want to know. You search obsessively. Press articles. School records. Nothing you haven't seen already, yet you still go through the files a thousand times.
What if I missed something? There has to be a clue . . .
Years go by. Then one day the Internet pops up and becomes your daily drug.
Just five more minutes, one more search.
Until you start to realize that you aren't getting any closer. That you never will.”

He looked devastated. At that moment I knew: I would be going to Princeton. Maybe my father was right, and there was no hope of ever finding out what happened to Elza. But how could I be certain unless I tried? Everything that I considered mine—my family, my home, the life I was supposed to leave behind—had crumbled, a scaffold built on lies. And in its place? Suspicions. Warnings. Fears that, just like my sister, I might become . . . what exactly? Unhinged? Delusional? A freak? Witch? Monster?

“So, no detective games. Promise?” He gave me a kiss and headed for the door.

“Dad—” When he turned around, his face was finally at peace. “What's the story with the
samodivi
?”

THE AIRPORT IN SOFIA LOOKED
like any other: white marble, steel, everything drenched with light through a glass ceiling, as if the entire terminal was designed to give those who stayed behind the illusion of being headed somewhere, into a sky of their own.

I had traveled abroad before for music festivals and competitions, and loved every minute of it—even the fuss at the airport, with my parents snapping pictures while I showed off the boarding pass as an official license for the next adventure to start.

This time was different. I forced myself to walk through security. Then passport control. Then down a hallway toward the gate. And I kept turning back—over and over, to catch a glimpse of the two figures quickly subsumed by the crowd, reduced to a pair of moving dots (their hands, still waving).

What a blessing she is, this little girl. Yet the Slavins will always remain broken people.

Years had passed since I overheard these words. But it was only now, on a plane to America, that I caught on to their meaning. There were probably all kinds of broken people. People who had lost a love. A home. A dream. And then there were also the wrecks, those who had gone through a loss more than once, their soul patched and torn and repatched until it resembled a quilt: each square a distinct color, proof that the heart would stay warm, ready for the next breakage.

Now, for the first time, I felt broken too. I tried to think of college, of the new life waiting for me there. Yet all I could picture were Mom and Dad, going back to an empty house. It had crushed them, back in May, to find out I had decided to go to Princeton. And not just decided, but made the arrangements without telling them—written to the school, booked the plane ticket, everything. It was their worst nightmare; fate laughing in their faces after eighteen years of struggle to avoid exactly this: me becoming like Elza. I tried to explain that I was different, that the past didn't scare me and Princeton was as safe a school as any other. If by being there I could solve the mystery of her death—why not? Or even if I couldn't, at least they would make peace with the place and finally take that canceled trip from long ago, only this time for my graduation . . .

To get through the ten-hour flight, I started reading the book of legends. Its cover showed a girl in white standing by a well, looking up at the moon.
Once upon a time, beyond nine lands into the tenth . . .

The tale of the
samodivi
had them swimming in the black waters of a
mountain lake—naked, innocent like children absorbed in the oblivion of games. After the bath, once they got dressed again, came the magic of their dance, the hypnotic swirl of the
horo:
a circle of intertwined arms and flashing feet whose beat sent shivers through the forest.

Never before had mortals seen the wonder of such beauty. And of those ill-fated ones who did, of those doomed roamers of the night who set brave foot upon the moon-soaked
samodivi
meadows, not one laid eyes upon the dawn again, not one reached home to tell a tale of lovelorn sorrow.

Now a vagabond would fold his knee under the dome of oak-green branches. Now a thief would claim the fallen oak leaves as pillow for the night. A merchant, having chased elusive trades all day, would tie his horse around the rigged oak bark. Or a monk, astray, would hum his prayers to the oak roots, touching cheek to earth as summons for the mystic lull of sleep. But it was just as well: an equal end was destined for them all. An end of threefold joy and tenfold horror . . .

“What's the story with the
samodivi
, Dad?”

He had turned pale, the defeated pale of a man who has suffered quietly for a long time only to realize that a disease has been eating him from the start. “Why are you asking, Thea?”

I summed up what I had learned in Tsarevo, without mentioning my church visit.

“Old Stefana, still living in her loony world! She used to fill your sister's head with folktales too, which is why we didn't want you anywhere near her. But the son at least could have shown some common sense.”

“He only told me what he knew.”

“And you believed all this?”

“Why wouldn't I?”

“Because people have nothing better to do. They get bored, and they let their sick imaginations wander.”

“Was Elza's imagination sick too?”

No answer.

“And, Dad, does any of this really run in our family?”

He sat back down on the bed, reaching for my hand as if his touch could convince me even if his words failed. “Nothing runs in our family, no matter what anyone says. Your sister was a perfectly healthy girl. And so are you.”

“Yet she believed the
samodivi
legend.”

“She was fascinated by it, then started to believe it, yes. But not because of family lunacy. The whole thing was a school project.”

I almost laughed.
All students are to dance at full moon in a church cemetery. White garment optional. Extra credit if carried out within vicinity of fig tree.

“Why would any school assign such a project?”

“It wasn't assigned, she volunteered. Your sister had two passions: piano and archaeology. Each summer at the Black Sea, she would drag us out to see the ancient settlements. Town walls, churches, all kinds of ruins. The older and more decrepit, the better.”

Which explained her frequent escapes to the church in Tsarevo, but not the figure I had seen there.

“In those first years after Communism, looters began to smuggle our antiques abroad. Elza and her school team signed up with the Ministry of Culture to compile a central database of artifacts. They opened Communist archives, warehouses, entire rooms of artworks labeled ‘highly privileged' and sealed for decades. There, she found a scroll that eventually consumed her mind.”

“What kind of scroll?”

“The written confessions of a monk who was allegedly blinded by
samodivi
in the forest. Elza loved bizarre stories and wouldn't stop talking about it, about how this man might have been the master of the Rila Monastery cross.”

“The famous one?” It was one of Bulgaria's most treasured relics. A wooden cross carved with hundreds of elaborate, miniature gospel scenes.

“Yes. She became convinced that this monk had received mysterious powers from the
samodivi
. That he made the cross only after he was blinded.”

“What if it was true?”

“That's not possible, Thea.”

“Why not?”

“Because these creatures don't exist. Some disturbed man wrote a piece of fiction and your sister went too far with it.”

“Do you happen to have a copy of this fiction, Dad?”

“This fiction is in the past. And you promised me not to go there.”

He seemed upset, so I didn't insist—either that night or in the next few months before I left for America. All my questions about Elza, especially about her life at Princeton, received the same answer:
None of this matters anymore
. Her letters from school? Destroyed. Her possessions? There had been no point in keeping them. And the three buckled chests? He took me to the locked room and opened them, one by one. All three were empty.

I didn't believe for a second that my parents, the two most sentimental people I knew, who kept even ticket stubs from my concerts neatly arranged in albums, would discard what had been left behind by their first child. More likely, Elza's things had been removed from the house and locked up elsewhere, safely out of my reach. Perhaps with time, after I had spent a few semesters at Princeton, Mom and Dad might finally let go of the fear and allow me access to my sister's life, including the alleged “fiction” that had consumed her mind with tales of monks and forest witches.

For now, another piece of fiction had found its way into my hands, and I continued to read about the
samodivi
while everyone around me on the plane slept. The words had the playful rhythm of a fairy tale. Yet Bulgarian fairy tales often read with the bleak echo of omens:

Stepping softly from their bath, laughing and aglow with star mist, the maidens would begin to sense the hidden stare of a traveler. They'd tempt him, draw him out, then gift their blameless bodies to him. Until a strange beat would imbue the night. A pulse of suddenly awoken rhythms. The beauties would begin their dance, the moon unleashing madness on them. And breathless, raving, free at last, they'd lock the man inside their deadly circle . . .

The rest was a terrifying feast. An indulgence of cruelty. The witches dance their prey to the verge of death and, just as his heart collapses in its first
convulsions, they descend on him with the hunger of beasts—taking out his eyes, his heart, tearing off his limbs in an outburst of vengeance.