The two women slid down the wall and onto the floor. They sat side by side, knees touching. Linda pitied Marion even though she’d made Linda feel like a monster. Behind her own eyes, Linda saw flashes: the creature in the curio shop, her father’s wan death face, her ex-husband’s trembling lips, Tristan’s gentle smile, the creature in the curio shop, her father, the creature. She was not a monster because of her divorce. But for other reasons, she could be.
“You’re not broken, you know,” Charity whispered. Linda was shocked by the words. It was as though Charity could read her mind, even in the chaos. How had she understood all that Linda didn’t say from the few conversations they had? She read between the lines, and Linda had never experienced affection from someone who paid attention not only to her words but also to the in-betweens. There was so much the men she had known didn’t understand about her, and Linda felt sure Charity would make it a point to learn, to grow, to change alongside her.
She and Charity stayed for a while more, sharing stale breaths, until Linda could no longer stand the reek of death on her body.
• • •
Once they were clean, the women couldn’t avoid the cloud of death, so planted themselves in Tristan’s room as though basking in the space his body had left might bring them solace. But Linda felt shock more than sadness, and the sudden turn of events hadn’t yet appeared on Sabrina’s or Charity’s face.
“He was just fine,” Charity said. “He was average.”
“Date a lot of men?” Sabrina said. “I’m inclined to disagree.”
“Most marriages end in divorce,” Charity said. “You and Marion are better off.”
“The other half end in death,” Linda said.
Chapter Thirty-Eight
Sabrina
When Sabrina had slipped the journal from Deja’s room into her shorts, she didn’t know what she would do with it.
After Tristan’s death, Sabrina excused herself outside, where she crouched against the back wall of the manor and pored over the pages. One page had been covered in sketches of spiral arrangements of various seeds. Another page showed an illustration of a woman with pins stuck in her skin. Finally, Sabrina reached a page that struck her less vividly, but it was familiar: a seance.
Her mother had used one like it to summon the dead.
It was after the death of her grandmother, her mother’s mother, a complex woman Sabrina’s mother had wanted to ruin. No matter how many intentions, curses, and bad omen crystals her mother used, Sabrina’s grandmother flourished. She hoarded her luck until her death, willing none of her earthly possessions to Sabrina’s mother. Sabrina’s mother wouldn’t rest until her curse succeeded at damning her mother to a hellish afterlife.
The illustration showed several spirits standing before a woman with a bowl. Behind her, English letters decorated the air. She bled from a single spot on her wrist, and one hungry spirit lapped at the blood like a drip from a faucet. Sabrina had blocked this one out precisely because it had frightened her as a child. She snuck through the halls of the bottom floor, searching behind each closed door until she found the quiet room with electric lights. She turned them on and sat in the middle of the floor, studying the diagram.
Sabrina took a deep breath. She did as the diagram reminded her, psyching herself up for the pricking of her finger. She’d never been frightened of needles, and she had taken so much blood, the sight of it made her weary instead of weak. But she hadn’t cleaned the knife, and she had no idea what it may have been used for. She closed her eyes and let her rationality press against the task at hand, her thoughts running in circles. She could get an infected finger, and trapped as they were, that infection could fester. But if she met spirits, they could tell her how to leave, or if she even should, or if her destiny was something else, someone else. She was supposed to dazzle the world with her good looks, but maybe it hadn’t been Tristan who was supposed to fall for them. She shivered. The spirits would tell her. But she wasn’t so sure she wanted to meet the dead returned.
If the seance didn’t work, she could put to rest her fears of the haunting. She could approach this place like the Sabrina who had enrolled in nursing school against her sister’s wishes, the only time she’d followed her own direction. She’d felt it was right to go, that it was the path she was supposed to follow—and wasn’t that the whole thing about destiny?
Sabrina dug the blade into the tip of her middle finger. It slid in easy, and she squeezed at her finger until three tiny drops of blood fell into a bowl at her feet. Then, she waited.
For what felt like a long while, nothing happened. Sabrina sat in the middle of that floor, letting flickering shadows dance over her. She allowed herself to hope, and to worry. These two competing desires—to be right and to be wrong—they warred inside her. She smiled to herself as nothing happened. The house groaned. The wind. Old houses. A natural shifting in the foundations. Pedestrian.
Then, Sabrina lost the feeling in her hands. Her head fogged, a lightness that drew her deep into herself. She closed her eyes, resigned finally to the awful truth. She waited for the spirits to come.
• • •
When she woke, she found herself in that familiar place, the portal in the wall she had crawled through on the morning she wound up in Tristan’s bedroom. The portal flexed on her, squeezing her inside. She pressed at the spongy brain-like texture until it expanded, allowing her to shape it. She made enough space for her to stand, then stretched the wall out more and more, until she had formed a circular room. She took in the smell, like wet guts, and called out to no one.
Slowly, the women forced their way through. First, the rejected contestants, dolled up, as though they were on their way to the final ceremonies. Their names had escaped her, except Amy, the tortured beauty who flung herself at Tristan’s feet. Sabrina had pitied her, but then, she had done the same, crawling from this space to Tristan’s feet, begging him to choose her over Marion. Had she let the house take hold of her? It had been easier to keep her rational mind in charge when she wasn’t kept awake by the whispering of wood shifting. Amy’s sparkling black dress dragged the ground as she entered and perched on a chair formed of plushy pink membrane. She crossed her dainty ankles and leveled her squinting gaze at Sabrina.
“You’re here for the fab-gab?” Amy asked.
Sabrina’s brow furrowed. Only eliminated women did the fab-gab, a live episode where all the former contestants talked out the drama, then hashed it out with The Groom himself.
“I knew you wouldn’t make it.”
The other women giggled.
“She made it far enough,” one said.
“I’m not eliminated,” Sabrina said. “At least, I don’t think so.”
“I’d remember,” Brandon Fuller said as he pried apart the wall and stepped inside. He wore a bright pink suit that nearly blended with the organ in which they stood. He grinned with half his mouth. Around his neck, rope marks throbbed in the half-light. “You were there when I went home.”
Amy laughed. “Brandon, you can’t get eliminated! You’re the host.”
“And what a host I’ve been!” As he swept closer to Sabrina, a stage rose from beneath his feet. “Welcome to our live audience tonight, on this, our most dramatic fab-gab to date!”
Sabrina tried to pull herself together, to recall the moment she must have been sent home.
“Sabrina, please take your seat. You know you’re not the star of this show.”
Sabrina’s stomach flipped, embarrassed to have forgotten. “I’m so sorry.” She sat, and the floor rose to meet her, a toadstool of a chair forming to accept her. “I’m a little confused.”
“We all are, tonight!” Brandon said as the other women laughed as one. “We’re confused to see the faces of so many worthy women! Does our Groom Tristan regret any of his decisions? We’ll find out soon, on this passionate episode of this season’s fab-gab!”
All at once, the other women chanted: “Tristan, Tristan, Tristan!”
“And without further ado, this year’s Groom, our Iowan prince himself… Tristan!”
Sabrina searched the group and the room, but she didn’t see Tristan pushing his way through.
