Wildalone (9 page)

“Ethereal?”

“That's it! Moved lightly. Spoke lightly. As if she could be blown away like a dandelion.”

“Do you know what happened to her?”

“Yes,
that
.” He continued to avoid my eyes. “I was here when it happened. Wish I hadn't been, though. There was some talk about a boy that summer—I never met him but heard he was a handsome one, the type girls always fall for. They said he broke her heart. Not a chance, if you ask me. The boy hasn't been born yet who can walk away from a creature like her.”

“She was that beautiful?”

“Beautiful? Ha! The most perfect girl I ever saw! All she had to do was smile at a man and he was ready to die for her. Down at the ships, everyone was at her feet. She'd come to the docks, flash her pretty face, and those fools would talk about nothing else for days. Me they called ‘the witch's cousin.' Most of them took a few punches for that one!”

“Do you think that she was really . . .”

“What, a witch? I don't believe in witches.”

“Then why did people call her that?”

“Something must have snapped, inside that head of hers. She started
walking by the sea, all alone, often even way past sunset. God knows what she was up to out there. Then one night she went missing and turned up by the old church, almost no life left in her. Your parents took her back to Sofia and we never heard from them again.”

“So you don't know if she is still alive?”

“I always assumed she was. But from what you're telling me, it doesn't seem to be the case.” He fidgeted with a rip on his jeans, above the knee. “I warned you I'm not much help. And neither is my mother.”

“She called me
samodiva
. I know the legends, of course. But what do they have to do with Elza? And with the local church, and cemeteries, and fig trees?”

“That's where they found your sister, by the church graveyard. A fig grows right there. As for my mother . . . she hasn't had her wits for years. Believes a lot of things.”

“What things?”

“That the
samodivi
do exist. There's a story linked to our family. Have you heard it?”

“No.”

“It isn't very old. My great-aunt, Evdokia, lived in a region that's now in Turkey. After one of the many Balkan wars moved the border, everyone fled to our parts here, chased by the Ottoman troops. Evdokia had a newborn, but a crying baby is the last thing you want while hiding in the forest. So imagine waking up in the middle of the night, and over you—a man in a turban, holding your child against the tip of his yataghan.
All infidels must be slain, in the name of Allah!
When the blade goes through, it's as if your own heart is cut in two. Then horror erupts. A massacre. Even the moon, up in the sky, bleeds. Until suddenly, as if dropped straight from the heavens, white figures begin descending through the trees. Young girls. Frail. Luminous. The kind of incandescent beauty one encounters only in fairy tales. With quick precision, they tear off each turbaned head in sight—
crack! crack!
—necks breaking like twigs, spurting red fountains as the bodies fall, twitching, on the soaked ground. Once all is done, the creatures vanish. But before they do, they fall into dance, inviting only one human girl into their circle: the one
bent in tears over her dead child. Later, those who survive would recall how Evdokia saved their lives. How, mad with grief, she summoned the
samodivi
.”

“Summoned them?”

“I've heard that anyone born with
samodiva
blood can call on them like that—” He snapped his fingers. “No spell, no nothing. Just wish for them at night, and here they come.”

I could see now why my parents had kept me in the dark all those years.
Born with
samodiva
blood
. Was I? Was my sister? It sounded like a harmless superstition. Folklore. Fairy tales. But once the seed had been planted in my mind, it became impossible to weed the questions out.

“Are you saying that even I could . . . that some sort of witch power runs in our family?”

“I'm saying it's all rubbish, stuff old people make up to tickle their aching bones. You'd love to have superpowers. I mean, who wouldn't? But I'm sorry to tell you that's just a pretty tale. Evdokia wasn't a
samodiva.
Otherwise she'd still be alive, roaming our shores at night.”

“How did she die?”

“Pneumonia, shortly after getting here. I've seen her grave with my own eyes.”

“At the church cemetery?”

With a quick nod, he changed the subject: “How long are you in town? You're welcome to stay with us.”

“Thank you, but I've booked a hotel. Driving back early tomorrow.”

“I see your parents don't keep such a close watch anymore.”

“They don't have a choice, really. I'll be leaving for America soon.”

“You too?”

It was the final secret I would find out from him about my sister. That fateful summer, she had bragged about going to college soon, ticket already bought and everything. There had been frequent mentions of New York City. Then the incident at the church had happened.

“I've often wondered if she ended up going or not,” he said, glancing at me before my silence reminded him that I knew even less about Elza's fate than he did. “And this whole college thing . . . Your folks must be a mess now.
After losing one child, they probably never thought the second one would leave too.”

“Maybe that's why they had me in the first place? Insurance against loneliness, once Elza grew up.”

“Don't dwell on it. People have children for all sorts of reasons, even later in life. Gives them a chance to fix everything they did wrong the first time.” He smiled and stood up from the bench. “I'm sure they did their best to keep you out of trouble. And yet—here you are.”

As we were saying good-bye, I asked if he had a picture of Elza. He went to check in some old albums but came back shaking his head.

“Sorry, no luck. The good news is, though, you can just look in a mirror. When I saw you standing here earlier, I thought it was her ghost, I swear.”

“Am I . . . ethereal?”

“I sure hope not!” He chuckled. “You're a real girl, flesh and blood. Make sure it stays that way.”

I thanked him and promised to send them a card from America. But I wasn't done yet. I had one more stop to make before leaving Tsarevo.

THE CHURCH WAITED, PATIENTLY, ON
the bare rocks above the Black Sea. A sunset sky bled all over it, bursting off the windows in deep pomegranate hues as if the entire building had been set on fire from within.

I sat in the car.

What now?

Walk up the hill . . . Open the door . . . Go in and light a candle . . .

Or just drive off and never come back?

Not that it mattered. I felt betrayed—by everyone, especially my parents. And now that the truth was out, nothing could change it or give me a clue what to do with it.

I had a sister.

Possibly a crazy one.

Was she still alive? If not, how had she died—an accident? A suicide? Or something even worse, sealing everyone's lips for so long?

I left the car by the road and headed uphill. A path led to the entrance, curving only once, halfway up, to avoid contact with the old fig tree whose crooked branches sagged into the ground—an impenetrable dome of fruit, bark, leaves.
The way you danced under that tree, white beauty in the moonlight . . .

I shut the voice out of my head: just an old woman, spicing up her story with the stuff of legends. But other voices took its place. Acquaintances. Strangers. People who knew more about my past than I did. I could imagine their conversations. Years of hidden glances. Gossip disguised as pity, heads shaking as soon as I would turn my back:

“That poor family. Trying their best to keep at least the younger daughter from sliding off the deep end.”

“Why, what happened to the older one?”

“You haven't heard? She was into witchcraft. It's a shame, really. To be so smart and yet get caught up in
that
sort of thing!”

“And the Slavins didn't know?”

“They must have. Why else rush to have a second child fifteen years after the first one? Saddest part is, the problem might even be genetic . . . But let's hope for the best. So far, little Theodora seems to be turning out just fine.”

As I climbed higher up the hill, I could hear waves hurling their fury at the rocks below. The air was densing up with salt, with cries of seagulls, with an odor of dead clams and seaweed (baked by day, rotting off by night). From a distance, the church had an austere, minimalist charm—almost a natural extension of the rock. But up close, the simplicity was striking. The walls seemed thrown together by chance, out of whatever materials had happened to be lying around. Stones of all shapes and colors balanced under the spell of an invisible hand, ready to collapse back to nature's chaos.

The front door was locked, so I circled to the back, where a terrace opened out above the sea. It was impossible not to feel small against such vastness of water. But I also felt its indifference—the crushing indifference of a world whose territory began where my home ended. Somewhere in that world, thousands of miles away,
abroad
already waited. The dream. The unknown. My bet on a supposedly fantastic future. Now, for the first time, I wondered if I
was ready for it. How could I be, if I no longer even knew who I was? “Ghost child” (a term I had seen in a book, once): someone raised in the shadow of a dead sibling. All my life, without realizing it, I had been a substitute for another girl. Getting her hand-me-downs. Her piano. Her looks. Whatever else allegedly ran in our blood. I probably acted like her. Spoke like her. It had been just a matter of time before America, too, would beckon . . .

Distracted by these thoughts, I didn't notice nightfall. The distant hills had disappeared. The dark was quickly creeping in. I stepped back from the railing, turned around, and walked over to the next corner—

It took a second to realize my mistake, but by then it was too late. In front of me, directly at my feet, was the graveyard. Crosses. Tombstones. Thistles. Swaying at me, blocking my way out.

Don't go near the church, it's by the cemetery that they'll get you!

I hadn't listened, and now had walked into a trap. Suddenly the wind was gone. The sound of waves had altogether vanished. The air turned so still I began to hear my breathing. Terrified, my eyes traced the darkness in a semicircle, back to the middle of the terrace. And there, ineffably real against the black canvas of the sky . . .

a girl—

dressed in white

thin, so thin she appeared almost weightless

facing the sea, feet barely touching the ground, arms lifted in the air, slowly moving—

I ran through the graveyard, stumbling, fighting the urge to look back for proof that I wasn't being chased, then shortcutting downhill—away from the path, from a black shape that could only be the fig tree.

As soon as my feet reached asphalt, I dived into the car, slammed the door, and released my panic on the pedal.

HOW DO YOU TELL THE
two people you love most that you just lied to them? I dreaded the return home, the inevitable face-off. Not that I needed excuses—the penchant for secrets apparently ran in the family. Besides,
given what I had uncovered, my parents had much more to explain than I did. But none of this made things easier. The drive back from Tsarevo. The first steps into the living room. The alarm on their faces when I admitted that I hadn't been on a trip with friends, after all. And finally the hardest part, the one about my sister.

I wanted to know everything and they gave in reluctantly, as if each detail would feed me poison. Elza had been their pride. The perfect child. A brilliant little devil, very early on. Learned to read when she was three. Started piano at five. English at seven. Went to the best high school. Won awards. Then a full scholarship to America.

So far—a lot like me. But this was just the surface.

“What happened to her?”

My mother said it first: Elza left for college and never came back.

“I need to know what really happened, Mom.”

The two of them locked eyes—accomplices for life, trying to outwit grief. Then the vast quiet of their sadness poured out, the dam suddenly released after so many years.

Elza used to write home once a week, called every Sunday. Then for two weeks in November—nothing. My parents had given it a few more days before they called the school and were assured that their daughter was attending to her schedule, as shown by scans of her ID in cafeterias and academic buildings.

On the tenth of December, two weeks before Christmas, a phone call delivered the distressed voice of a university official. Something terrible had happened: Ms. Slavin's body had been found on a nearby hiking trail. Not a sign of violence, thank God. And no, there was no doubt as to the girl's identity. The school was going to take care of the funeral arrangements (or air transport, if the family preferred to bury her at home) as well as other incidentals, including round-trip tickets for the parents.

“So you went to America?”

My mother shook her head. “We received another phone call, Thea.”

That second call had brought news of the strangest kind, a turn of events beyond comprehension:

Elza's body had been stolen from the funeral home. Overnight. Just like that.

“We are deeply sorry, Mrs. Slavin, but despite the joint efforts of university security and town police, at present there are neither leads nor suspects.”

The newspapers proceeded to speculate about a possible break-in, but the funeral home was found safely locked in the morning, exactly as it had been left the night before. Not to mention the obvious—why would anyone abandon the body by a hiking trail, only to bother with stealing it back later?