Come Little Children (14 page)

The Yukon’s weather had turned with Camilla’s mood. The yards were drying out faster than the wood’s scrubland, and all around insects were going about sealing themselves in their dirt sarcophagi. Something about Mother Nature’s exodus this year was incredibly bleak. Camilla tried coping by reminding herself that nothing had changed; she hadn’t come down with a crippling disease or any kind of terminal sentence. The only difference was the awareness of something that she hadn’t known before. She was the same person, yes, but at the same time she had never felt less like herself her entire life.

Thank God I still have some style
, she thought as she slid on her black-and-white Lolita dress. She adjusted the bows and fluffed the bell sleeves.

Laura had told her she could wear whatever she wanted to the wedding, and this outfit had been a front-runner for two solid weeks. Camilla stepped back from the vanity and gave herself the once-over, from her freshly curled hair down to her black-and-carmine stilettos.

“What do you guys think?” She averted her eyes in the mirror to the shelf of skulls behind her.

The skulls grinned, as always.

She looked back at herself and grinned too.
Forget antidepressants—mood disorders are no match for a good dress and a pair of heels
. Silently she wondered what Peter would think.
The last time he saw me in a dress was the night I arrived
.

Her eyes wandered to her four-poster bed and studied the outline of two bodies in the sheets. She hadn’t noticed him take
off this morning, but that wasn’t uncommon; the family knew they were together, yet he always made sure to be back in his own room before the rest of them were awake, lest Moira clamp them with chastity belts.

They’d spent every night together since she’d returned from the hospital. The sex was good—even if it was getting less and less frequent—but their pillow talk could use work. They avoided serious topics like tap water in Mexico, and if anything heavy came up, like where they saw themselves in ten years or what would happen to the funeral home when the three directors were gone, Camilla would feel a knife in her gut and turn right off.

The topics always hovered around family. Vincent this, Vincent that. When Peter had asked about hers, she’d given him the straight facts: her father was in a corrections facility in Alberta, and her mother lived in a psychiatric care center. That was all there was to talk about. He wouldn’t understand her volatile past any more than she understood the white-picket-fence future he kept mentioning: fixing up the funeral home, taking more vacations, getting a dog for the family.
There it was, the full circle back to family. Is that all they ever think about?

It was straining. Until she knew that she couldn’t have children, the thought
never
crossed her mind. But since she’d learned about her “preexisting conditions,” the idea seemed to manifest itself almost every day.

The first week back had been the worst.

One morning on their way to a pickup, they had passed a group of girls playing hopscotch, followed closely by a couple pushing a stroller and a little boy at a lemonade stand. The next afternoon, she went for a walk and wound up at the school’s playground, stopping at the fence and watching the ten-year-olds
monkey around the gym equipment for only three minutes before brushing her eyes and having to leave.

No longer did the sight of children spark an unsolved mystery having to do with scars carved into chests or missing clothes or soaking-wet skin. Instead, they piqued profound emptiness. Sometimes she still woke up with the hope that everything had been a dream—that she might open her eyes and see Peter on the floor of the tree house, a picnic box parked beside them and a thin blanket over their shoulders—but then a sharp feeling would hook her stomach when she felt her mattress and realized it had all been real.

There was a knock on the door.

Camilla snapped out of her trance. She grabbed the bedsheets and gave them a quick fluff.
It’s not Peter. He never knocks
.

“Come in,” she called.

No response.

She walked to the door and cracked it open. No one was there. She pulled the door wider and stuck her head into the hallway—still no one.

Frowning, she started to back away when something caught the bottom of her vision.

It was a slip of paper lying on the rug. She bent over and picked it up, mouthing the five words written across the front.

Meet me at the window
.

She reread the note. ‘
Meet me at the window’?
W
hich window?

She flipped the paper over, and there were two more words across the back—
that way
—with an arrow pointing left. Her eyes followed the arrow to the window at the end of the hall, and without hesitating she started toward it.

Camilla hated surprises, and this was no exception (especially since she was supposed to be downstairs helping unload
chrysanthemums in less than five minutes). But it was Peter’s careful calligraphy—the same font that his tattoos were scrawled with—and if there was one thing that she hated more than a surprise, it was a cliff-hanger.

When she got to the window, she spotted a piece of paper on the ledge. Peeling it open revealed two more words:
look up
.

Her eyes shot up before she could guess what was hovering above her.

At first all she saw was the ceiling, then her eyes calibrated and a thin strand of rope came into focus, hanging from the roof with a third slip of paper tied to the end. Camilla reached up and snagged the note with the tips of her fingers.

Pull hard
.

She boosted herself onto the balls of her toes and gripped the end of rope. Coming down, the roof caved in above her. A staircase unfolded from the ceiling like an upside down cave of wonders, its steps its teeth leading into a dark jaw with a gust of old, mothy breath.

The attic of the Vincent manor had a dry aroma that was more than wood and dust bunnies. It was a marinade of forgotten chattels, like the mustiness of a nostalgia shop or the staleness of a secondhand bookstore. From racks of dresses in plastic sheets to shoeboxes packed with projector slides, tattered carpetbags, and bins of retired stuffed animals, the trove was squirreled away and stockpiled as high as any roadside consignment barn.

Every step Camilla took left a footprint in the dust behind her. She passed crate after crate of someone’s old vinyl collection, then an instrument section where a few flute and trumpet cases concealed a cluster of mouse traps (how mice were resourceful
enough to climb into attics, she didn’t know—she pictured their little white bodies squirming up the brick walls, then, more fantastically, shooting miniature grapple hooks and using ropes and ladders like mousey musketeers). Unsurprisingly, there was also an upright piano pushed into a corner.
What is that, number five?

“You look gorgeous.”

Camilla turned, her dress swirling around her body.

Peter was coming out from behind a stack of boxes. He was done up in full black-and-white too: a fitted tuxedo, a pair of polished cap-toe shoes, and a skinny black tie. Even his hair was combed back with what Camilla was surprised to note was a dollop of product.

“You look…groomed.”

“Groomed?”

“You know what I mean,” she backpedaled. “You look good.”

“Have you looked outside yet? It’s looking pretty groomed too.”

Peter nodded toward the window on the far wall. Its view revealed the rear courtyard, which had been transformed into an elegant outdoor wedding chapel. There were rows of white wooden chairs facing the towering tree, along with a gazebo set up in front of the pond. Brutus, Jasper, Maddock, and Moira could be seen carrying in large bouquets of flowers, and every time Brutus tried setting one down somewhere, Moira would start shouting at him and nod somewhere else.

“Oh no.” Camilla frowned. “The chyrsanthe—”

“They’re fine. I asked Laura if I could talk to you first.”

“Well talk fast, because I think your uncle’s about to be strangled.” She cringed, watching Moira slap the back of Brutus’s head when he tried to stuff too many flowers into one vase.

The silence hummed while Camilla kept watching the preparations. Another few seconds went by before she turned around to see Peter still standing there, just looking at her.

“Do you remember,” he started, “the drive that first night you arrived?”

“The ride in the landau?”

“Right. What were you thinking before it got here?”

Camilla tipped her eyes up. “I think I was humming a song about eating corpse guts.”

Peter snickered. “And, uh, guts aside, what were you expecting?”

“Less pressure, more food.”

Peter full-out laughed. He stepped forward and kissed her. Camilla kissed back, still uncertain where this was going.

Their lips drifted apart. “Do you know what I was doing that day?”

She shook her head, looking away. Eye contact had never been one of her strong suits, especially when conversations veered toward anything serious.

“I was over there”—he nodded across the room—“cleaning
that
.” There was a lone rifle perched inside an oak gun cabinet. The glass in the cabinet’s doors was missing, but jagged bits were still poking out of the edges, as if someone had smashed the windows and only swept up the fallen pieces.

“You hunt?”

“Not really. Dad took us when we were little, but I was too small to hold the gun. I’ve gotten used to just cleaning it.”

Peter paused. He glanced around the attic, examining the artifacts that were stacked halfway to the joists. “Actually,” he said, “I found this place the day dad was buried. I was in my room when mom called up saying it was time to go. And I remember thinking—
knowing
—I couldn’t leave. So I ran out, but
her footsteps were already coming up the stairs. Then I saw the rope and before I knew it I was up here. She called and called, but I didn’t answer, so they left for the service without me.”

Peter squeezed Camilla’s hands. She felt the gnawing in her stomach getting worse.

“I still come up when I need to be alone. Every time I look through his vinyl, or start up a slide deck, or work on his gun, it feels like it’s just me and him again. So this is where I saw you pull in. From the front window over there.”

“Aw, my little stalker.”

“Well, actually”—Peter blushed—“it’s pretty high up. You were too far away and, y’know, I wanted a closer look. So…”

“So?”

“So
maybe
I used the gun scope to get a better peek.”

“Wait. Wait, wait, wait.
That’s
how I walked into this job? With a rifle aimed at my head?”

Peter flashed his little-boy grin. “I didn’t even notice till later the safety was off.”

“You might have saved me some embarrassment if you’d just taken the shot.”

“Yeah.” He snickered. “Well, everything was fine until you did something I wasn’t expecting. Remember what?”

“No, creep, what did I do?”

“You looked up,” he said, shaking his head. “You looked straight at me, and I tripped backward and smashed through the gun cabinet. There was glass and powder
everywhere
. Took a week and a half to clean up.”

“Excellent.”

“But you know what, that’s fine. Totally fine. Because
you
were about to make my incredibly clumsy ass look smooth by comparison.”

Ugh
, Camilla thought,
don’t remind me
.
Day one was definitely
not
my best day
.

“So…you’re glad you didn’t shoot me? That’s good. That’s a relief.”

“What I’m saying,” Peter leveled, “is that since you’ve been here, from the moment you walked in—from when you almost ate cat food and stuck your hand down Maddock’s pants—to right now, you haven’t been anything I’ve expected.”

“Oh really? And what unexpected thing have I done today?”

“Well,” Peter said, “why don’t we find out?”

His voice trembled a little at the end of the question. He reached inside his pocket and produced a plain, wooden box as Camilla’s hands went to cover her mouth.

“I was going to carve something, but I couldn’t think of anything good enough,” he said. “And honestly, now that we’re standing here, I can’t think of anything good enough to say either. You’re the only perfect thing I’ve got. Nothing can say it better than this.”

Peter got down on one knee and opened the lid, revealing a single diamond ring resting inside.

“I love you, Camilla. Will you marry me?”

“That,” Camilla said, her eyes swelling to the size of tenpin bowling balls, “is an engagement ring.”

“Yes…?”

“Like a
real
engagement ring. OK. Wow.”

“OK? Is that an answer, or…?”

“Peter…” She hunched over, crossing her arms, and coughed into one of her fists. “Could you…could you stand up?”

Peter got up and put a hand on Camilla’s arm, bringing her closer.

“Listen,” he said, his words all of a sudden rushing back to him. “I know you’re wondering how the hell I propose after a month—a
month
. But trust me, I have a lot of doubts about a lot of things, and not a single one about this.”

The clawing in Camilla’s stomach dug in deeper than ever, lurching like the nails of a violent backhoe.

“If,” she started, completely avoiding eye contact now. “If you think you’re ready, then I’m sure you are. But I-I’m not in a good place right now.”

Peter didn’t respond. He kept massaging her arms, letting the silence draw out the words.

“It’s this thing. This…this…”
Marriage!
she felt like screaming.
Marriage! Family! Pregnancy!
“This Carleton thing,” she settled on. “We don’t have the best track record with marriages.”

“That’s your family, not you.”

“What about yours? They’re not exactly my cheerleading squad.”

“I’ve already asked them for their blessing.”

“And they said
yes
?” she sputtered, unable to hide her shock.

“It was a two-to-one vote.” He grinned nervously. “Majority wins.”