Authors: Juliann Whicker
“
That’s death.” After the chicken the flavor was unmistakable to me.
“
Not death, Autumn. I don’t think anyone’s figured out how to bottle death, though no doubt some have tried. This brew comes from an ancient recipe passed down on my mother’s side of the family. I think you’ll like it.” He smiled kindly as I took the goblet and looked down into the amber depths. Why did I have to find the smell of death so appealing? It reminded me of my dream of the nightmare, the Nether.
“
First, drink this.” My dad pulled a vial out of his pocket and slid it to me across the table. I pulled off the stopper and wrinkled my nose. It smelled as bad as death smelled good. “Drink it quickly. It should help with the dreams.” Ah. So that was what my father had been doing all day. I took a deep breath and poured the stuff into my mouth. I gagged but my dad pressed the goblet to my lips and the putrid flavor was drowned in the taste of death.
My dad filled my glass again. By the time I was near the dregs, I felt like my head was going to fall to the ground if it didn’t hit a pillow first. He picked me up and carried me through the kitchen and up the stairs as if I weighed nothing and tucked me into bed.
“
No nightmares tonight,” he whispered as he smoothed my hair and I drifted off to sleep.
It was a different kind of dream. The sun shone golden on me as I walked through the woods, stepping lightly beneath the canopy that rose so far above my head. I swung my arms and whistled back to the birds. I slowed down and giggled when I heard the boys ahead of me. Crouching behind a fallen tree, I watched Devlin’s bent head where he worked with his friends on their fort. He looked up at me, the still chubby cheeks of a child, but his blue black eyes were so serious in his face.
The shrieking of birds grew louder until I sat up in bed and recognized the contours of my bedroom in my father’s house. I put my hand on my forehead and wiped away sweat. My father was not sitting in the chair with a book. I felt a wave of abandonment but I shook it off. It was already light out and that hadn’t been a nightmare. I put my head on my knees and let my tears soak the blanket. It was a memory that I’d forgotten for a very long time. When had I stopped remembering what it was like to whistle, to feel the sun on my skin, and to feel happy and whole simply being alive? When I finally dragged myself out of bed and down to breakfast, I didn’t feel more rested for lack of nightmares.
That day passed with Ethel patiently going over knitting with me. I tried but I had a harder time focusing than the day before. I couldn’t get the serious child’s eyes out of my head. How old had he been? Not old enough to take someone’s soul. I sat on the patio with the knitting needles trying not to stab myself as I made a mess of the yarn. It was beautiful yarn, the color of the mango skins on the table, the texture of the softest wool, but it only reminded me of how it had felt, or rather how I’d felt nothing a month ago. Had my brother, the person I loved most in the world, taken color out of it? My dad said he left because of what Devlin did, but he hadn’t told me why. Why wouldn’t Devlin want me to have color?
That night I dreamed of dancing, twirling and spinning with Devlin while my dad played an instrument and my beautiful mother sang, leaning on his shoulder, looking down at him with a smile that could melt stone. The living room was filled with golden and blue paintings the color of joy and hope.
I woke up and buried my head in my pillow. I didn’t come down until nearly noon trying to make sense of it. That day my knitting was even worse. Ethel shook her head and made me start over and over. Had Devlin taken dancing away from me? I still danced on the dance team at school, but it was simply what I did, not what I loved. I used to love dancing. It had been such a different house when I was a child from the one I’d left a few weeks ago. When had all the warmth gone out of it? I suppose when my dad had left. I closed my eyes and could hear the echo of my dream, my mother laughing in a way I hadn’t heard in a very long time. I surreptitiously wiped tears out of my eyes but Ethel was focused on her own knitting and didn’t seem to notice. She didn’t like to talk much. She always seemed completely focused on the task at hand. Maybe she had her own memories she wanted to forget.
That evening when I sat on the patio in the approaching dusk, I put off downing the bitter sleep concoction. I wasn’t looking forward to my dreams. In fact, I was starting to miss my nightmare. “Ethel doesn’t like to talk much does she? I think I asked her about Nether and she gave me a look that made me feel five years old.”
My dad laughed, a silver sound that reminded me of my mother not laughing. “It isn’t something polite society discusses. Ethel spent years in a girls home trying to instill manners into young Hotblooded women. It’s a good taboo, as taboos go. Talking about Nether with most people could very easily get you locked up in an insane asylum.”
“
But she knows about them?” He nodded. “Is she Cool like you?”
“
Ethel was raised by Hotbloods. I don’t like to discuss her heritage since it brings her pain. She tells me that you’re doing well with knitting.”
I couldn’t help snorting. “Yeah, real well.” I was doing fantastically both awake and asleep. I couldn’t shake the depression I felt remembering what my life had been like before my soul got sucked out of me. I tried to tell myself that what mattered was here and now and that I shouldn’t think about Devlin. It didn’t work—not when I kept seeing his eyes. “Why did he do it?” My dad stared at me, and I realized we’d been talking about knitting. I shook my head. “Never mind,” I said and drank the bitter and let the taste fill me to the top. I ignored the glass of autumn and stumbled to my room, putting myself to bed.
That night I dreamed I sat at the piano, my feet swinging, unable to touch the pedals as I carefully plunked out notes. Devlin’s laugh distracted me from the complicated chords and I looked up to frown at him but he had his cello. With a flick of his fingers he sent me off on a goose chase, trying to keep up with him. I was laughing so hard I couldn’t play the right notes but it didn’t matter since he followed me when I stumbled and made every mistake beautiful. The dream shifted until I played in the moonlight of the darkened music room, the notes perfect and dead. I watched my fingers move effortlessly across the keys, the sound distant, hollow. I let my fingers stop but the music continued, a piano playing the heartbroken chords of The Moonlight Sonata.
I blinked awake in my bed but the song continued, distant, but definitely Beethoven. I jerked my blankets back and threw open my door. I didn’t think; I moved following the ghost of song, a melody that played out the ache inside of my chest. I ran down the stairs, through the hall, and stopped at the door across from the room with jars. When I stepped through the door, I could make out the contours of a piano in the corner. It was beautiful—the black reflecting the light from the moon, the white keys punctuated with sharps and flats. I was still for a moment, feeling the cold that had wrapped around my heart for so long. Devlin had taken away music.
I stepped forward and knocked the bench over with my knees. The rattle as it hit the floor startled me, and I reached for a leg to pick it up. Instead the leg came off in my hand, like pulling the leg off of a spider, I thought as I gripped the carved leg in my hand. Devlin had taken away dancing. My hand seemed to rise on its own volition, the leg above my head. I closed my eyes and for a second felt a flicker of the stillness and control I’d found the first day of knitting, but the thought of Devlin taking away the beauty of music shattered the calm.
There was a crack as I brought the bench leg down on the keyboard. Devlin had taken away color. There was an anguished screech, a sharp crack as the keyboard buckled in the middle. Devlin had taken away my mother, crash, my father, smash, and myself. I kept hitting the piano, the splintered wood flying all around me. I felt the sting as slivers found my skin, my cheek, arm, but I kept smashing, until the leg I’d used was a splintered mess. I grabbed what I could of the former beauty and shoved it with all my strength. The crunch and tinkling as it struck the wall wasn’t enough.
I stood panting, needing something else to destroy, grabbing fistfuls of my hair, wanting something to hurt, but I already hurt. The pain inside of me was more than any pain I could ever inflict on anyone or anything. I crumpled to the floor feeling like I’d been beaten up. In the end Devlin hadn’t just taken apart my life, he’d taken himself too. He’d taken the brother I loved and turned him into a monster. Thinking of Devlin as a monster was more than I could bear. I buried my head in my arms and cried until I thought my body was going to shake apart.
When I woke up I couldn’t feel my arm. I sat up terrified that I was going numb again but when I moved, pins and needles shot up it. I rubbed the sensation back into my arm and realized that my dad was sitting cross-legged in the doorway reading a book, a ray of sunshine falling across his silver hair. I remembered in a rush what I was doing sleeping on the hard wood floor and turned my head slowly to stare at the wreckage that had been a sparkling grand piano the night before.
I turned back to my father and stared at his expressionless face as he focused on his book. I didn’t bother trying to explain the rush of heat I felt at his lack of reaction, even to myself. “That must be a really interesting book.” My voice was loud.
He turned the book over in his hands and examined the cover. “A treatise on good and evil in Greek. What you said the other day about being the good guy has stayed with me. What do you think about arbitrary morality?”
I blinked at him then struggled to think, to make my mind work the logical rounds it used to be so good at. “The theory that what’s right and wrong is what the majority says it is?”
My dad smiled at me then got a look in his eye that reminded me of something, a memory of my mother and father in the kitchen, turquoise and yellow in those days, her laughing as he lectured her about something, the professor, she called him when he got that look on his eye. “I suppose I don’t have to lecture you.” His smile grew into a grin and he went back to his book.
I clenched my hands into fists then smoothed my nightgown over my knees. I should be grateful that he wasn’t upset. I was upset enough for both of us. I went to the window and opened it, took a deep breath of fresh air then proceeded to clean up my mess by throwing it onto the grass outside. By midmorning I had it swept up, and the pictures I’d knocked off the wall in a neat stack while my dad sat and read.
“
Tonight we’ll have a bonfire,” he said cheerfully when he walked with me to the kitchen.
I didn’t understand him at all. He should be angry, furious that I’d lost my temper and destroyed something that beautiful. If good and evil were defined by whether your motivation was to create or to destroy, then my demonstration clearly showed whose team I played for.
I sat at the table and tried to eat while he fished slivers out of my face and arms. Ethel didn’t say anything but I could feel her disapproval. After lunch (we’d sort of skipped breakfast) I walked with him to his painting studio by the lake. Inside he talked about politics and movies while I sat in an old comfortable overstuffed chair feeling more and more frustrated.
“
Dad! How can you talk about movies after what I did to your piano?”
He never paused in his brushstrokes. “It was your piano to do with as you like.”
I dropped my head in my hands and felt the anger conflicting with relief. “Good.”
“
More mediocre than good,” he corrected.
“
Mediocre?” I snapped glaring at him. “I think I did an incredibly thorough job of annihilating the piano.”
He chuckled. “Yes, I suppose that’s true but I was referring to morality rather than quality. I’m not upset because you’re expressing your pain in a normal way. You hurt something that couldn’t feel instead of wanting to inflict actual pain on someone who would suffer. You could do worse.”
“
I could?” I closed my eyes and felt torn between laughter and tears. “Yeah. I guess so. Mediocre it is. Maybe I’m not meant to be anything other than mediocre.”
He leaned closer to his canvas studying it intensely. “I don’t believe we’re meant to be anything at all. After a life of studying human behavior, I’ve come to the conclusion that goodness doesn’t come because you’re destined to be so. The only thing destiny does is confuse the issues. At least that’s how it’s played out in my life. Other people’s lives are always much easier to understand, not to mention fix. Good often comes from the strangest places, much like evil. I doubt that your destiny is an ending. I feel that it’s the choices you make every moment of every day. If you look at my painting, what do you see?” He pivoted it on one corner and I was trapped staring at the sun-illuminated oils, the layers of gold, blue, and green so reminiscent of Lewis’ eyes I could barely breathe. “Speechless? I’ll take that as a compliment,” he said wryly. “At any rate a painting is built up with every mindful brushstroke to create a whole, but it’s not really anything more than tedious motions one on top of each other over the course of a long period of time.”
“
It’s beautiful.” It was more than beautiful. It felt like peace, and life, hope and joy. “I want that.” I wanted to have a life as beautiful as that painting built up by careful actions every day. If all the things I’d done since waking up in the woods was any indication, I had a long way to go. I would struggle with the fury but eventually I would be able to make the choices that would create the life I wanted. Maybe struggle was okay. What had my dad said about good coming from unlikely sources? Even Hotblood furies could live well. And even good people who cared deeply for those they loved could do things that set a course of destruction and misery for those around them, like Devlin. I flinched at the thought of him, the ultimate good person, who had done something to me I couldn’t imagine doing to my worst enemy. I shook my head as the anger filled me.