The Worm in Every Heart (12 page)

And when only his bones are left, long after those bones are nothing but a fine, grey, rendered ash like that of a slow-burning cigarette, then I'll go home. And go to sleep.

Thinking:
All in all, a good night's work.

YOU ENTER YOUR AUNT MARIS
' garden through a hole in the wall, so draped as to be half-hidden by a fallow choke of dead trumpet vine. The grass is sere on the frozen ground, dry and uncut, still high enough to have to wade through. Your own breath, white and visible, blows back over your face like a veil in the wind, a gumbo of rotting herbs—coaxed forth from that half-moon-shaped flowerbed under the small back window—mingling with it. You smell basil, taste thyme. Dead marigolds. Desiccated rosemary. You smell and taste something that died here not too long ago, when the weather had already turned too cold to let it rot away quickly.

Inside your jacket, your breasts press painfully against the ribbing of your T-shirt. Because your maternity bra was not among those few things you grabbed as you made your escape from the hospital earlier today, they ride unrestrained, full and leaking; you cup one cartoonishly, mittened hand and arm beneath them, propping them up protectively, and use your other to dig with, scrabbling at the rigid dirt. You start to kneel, but something seeps down one thigh, quick and hot—blood? Fluid? So you rise again, bend carefully over. Try to ignore it.

Your stomach still bulges slightly—a pale swell, an empty gourd. If you only pressed hard enough, you think, you might be able to feel something rattling around inside it.

Perfectly fit to leave, according to hospital staff—despite the strenuous objections of Diehl, your (hopefully) soon-to-be ex-husband. A clean bill of health; no complications. Hale and hearty.

And hollow.

Eventually, you find the key to the kitchen door buried under a broken stone cupid's head rakishly set (ever so slightly askew) in a nodding circle of withered things that probably used to be pansies, right where your Aunt Maris' unexpected last note said it would be. The lawyer who read you her will passed it on to you, discreetly sealed inside a rough-woven, off-white envelope with an unfamiliar watermark, the pulp of its paper thick with cotton fibres. The note itself written in strong black ink, bordered with a faint, printed pattern of Arabic writing—a poem maybe, or a curse, or an advertisement for some hotel, but completely indecipherable to you, no matter its actual content—framing Aunt Maris' few choice words, a looping flow of script, as terse and stylish as herself:

They gave you my name. I give you my house, and everything in it, with this sole proviso: Use it as you see fit, but tell no one of your intentions. If you need it, find it. And use it.

And since you do, you have. And will.

You breathe on the lock, scrub at it clumsily, showering the mat with frost. Faint icy flowers flourish at every corner of the door's glass insert, a pale frenzy. At first, the key sticks; but as it turns at last, with a distressingly loud wrench, the first flurry of that snow they've all been telling you to expect—these three days running—finally blows over your shoulder, sending a few flakes up over the collar of your coat, across that feverish line of flesh which occasionally comes and goes between the otherwise impervious meeting of hat, sweater and bundled-up hair. They melt on contact, as though consumed by some inner infection.

Your nipples hurt. The mess between your thighs is cooling now, insistent. You want bed, bath, music, sleep. Dreams, even—preferably borne on a tide of Drambuie fumes, rendering them incoherent and easy to forget.

You step inside, into dusty silence, and let the blooming, colourless riot of the door's glass forest swing shut behind you, ice marbled like veins over the trunks of numberless suggested trees—hidden eyes, gleaming here and there, amongst the frail and subtle leaves.

* * *

1949.North Africa. Somewhere outside of Ain Korfa.

The woman's name, Maris has been assured, is Sufiya.
She makes bottles, Madame. Excuse me, Mademoiselle.
The ceilings of her hut are too low for Maris to stand upright; she enters sideways, slipping on sand. Curtains are everywhere, veils fine as smoke. Outside, two musicians perform—some kind of flute and a small drum bound with hide on either end, and a girl dancing with a cane held between her hands.
One thought you might take an interest, seeing as you collect them.

So hot, and dry, and breathless, in the dimming light; everything turns flat and pulsing, as when you walk into a dark shop on a bright afternoon. The girl is reduced to a series of undulations, a bored mouth, the liquid sideways flash of an eye.

Wouldn't Maris rather stay outside, and ask her whether—for a modest fee (but then, all fees are modest, here)—she might be persuaded to do more than dance?

But here is Sufiya now, between the curtains, barely visible against a bank of convex and reflected light, her collection—her wrapped limbs gilded by a warped, bluish halo of glass. Smoking. Watching. Combing the tobacco's sweet exhalation back over her head in handfuls, like gaseous perfume. It lingers, heavy and enticing, more than possibly laced with something stronger.

Ya Ummi, foreigner. One hears you seek me.

There are faint blue tattoo marks between her brows, shards of mirror hanging from her long, dark hair, braided into it. More tattoos, stretched triangular by time and gravity, on her long, full, bare brown breasts. Maris feels a fresh clutch of interest, and lets the dancing girl slip away, forgotten. She takes her hat off, loosing her own pale braid like a sudden flood; Sufiya smiles at the sight, revealing flat, slightly discoloured teeth. Also bluish.

Again, the barest suggestion of addiction; there is a definite nervous edge to her Oriental languor. The inside of her bottom lip is tattooed as well, rimmed in faded purple.

Is her tongue? Will she show her?

You have money, one doesn't doubt,
Sufiya says, putting her cigarette out in the sand at her feet.
Foreign lady.

Maris smiles herself.
Much,
she replies.

Sufiya shrugs, fluid.

Then you may ask . . . what you will.

* * *

Your Aunt Maris, on your mother's side, for whom you were indeed named (much as your father might sometimes like to imply otherwise)—Aunt Maris, the family myth. Literally unmentionable. Few of her pictures survived the internal purge, but here is one: A snapshot, small and brown-tinted, taken in Tunis, the year that you were born. There, under the lone palm, one bright slice of darkness in a collective mass of shadow, straight-backed for her age, linen-suited. Her hair—pile on pile of it, gone quite colourless as bleached silk—is hidden, like yours, under her hat. But not against the weather.

Her eyes are black stones under incongruous ink-black brows, crinkled at the edges, long washed clean of anything but curiosity.

Your parents met and married late; both are old, comparatively speaking, and she was always older than either. A world traveller. Cosmopolitan. Serene and self-contained.

Self-
outed
, in fact, for longer than most people ever knew the closet was for more than keeping clothes in. But though she may well have had regrets, she had no visible shame.

Over thirty years ago, she took her inheritance and spoke the Deplorable Word, calling herself what she really was. The rest of your family threw her from them, genteelly erasing her—except for her name, which they deeded to you, instead.

Hoping to start over fresh, no doubt.

Your Aunt Maris, whose lifeblood flows unchecked in your veins, beats unchecked in your heart. And beats unchecked between your legs, hammer-hard, whenever some woman you find attractive passes close enough to steal the breath from your throat.

You thought of Aunt Maris the first time you read Garcia Lorca, the first time you dissected a foetal pig, the first time you had an orgasm with someone other than yourself.

Family reunions had not been barred to her—at least, not explicitly. You saw her there, twice from a distance, once accidentally close; she met your gaze across the proverbial crowded room, and followed you into a guest bathroom when you slipped away to splash some water on your suddenly flushed face. You glanced up from the sink and froze to see her behind you, reflected in the bathroom mirror. She just looked at you, carefully, almost studiously. With those empty eyes.

And you stared back, breathless.

So you thought of her opaque eyes, flat and bleak as some unmapped moral absence. You thought of her knived tongue, her soft white lips. You knit your thighs around the head of a girl you barely liked, whose name you can no longer even recall, and saw the bedroom lamp flare like a star. And you thought you would gladly cut your own heart from vent to vent for the chance to make your Aunt Maris feel the way this moron between your legs (Pamela? Patti?) was making you feel at that very moment.

Absences, especially unexplained ones, attract more than presences; you know that now. They breed infectious dreams which sink marrow-deep and wait there for a touch to reignite them—linger like figures drawn on glass, in condensation, invisible until someone else's breath brings them to life once more.

* * *

Sufiya and Maris share tea. Sufiya passes her bottle after bottle, smoothly shaped, almost invisible in the faded dusk. A lamp has come on in a nearby house, fierce and guttering, but it casts more shadow than light. Darkness washes over the both of them in waves, stirs in the bottles' warped depths, sluggish as caught smoke.

Sometimes one may keep oil in them,
Sufiya says.
Or perfume.
She pauses, slyly. Watching to see how Maris will respond.

Or perfumed oil,
Maris replies, deadpan.

Sufiya laughs, and drinks some more tea. She no longer bothers to pull her robes around her when she moves. The rest of her body is lush and burnished, faintly decorated everywhere one looks; her mirrored braids chime slightly, softly. Whatever her poison of preference, it leaves little physical trace.

Maris smiles. Carefully, she says:
In my country, we have a tale of how a ghost may be caught—in a bottle.

Sufiya's eyes gleam.

Many things may be caught in bottles.

Spirits?
Maris asks. (The pun does not occur to her until the word is already out.)

Sufiya grins.
Oh, certainly.

Demons?

Perhaps.

Sufiya yawns and stretches, immodestly. Luxuriously. Everything peeling back at once.

Maris burns her tongue on an incautious swallow of tea, still quite hot. Th
en bites it.

Have you heard tell of djinni, foreign lady?
Sufiya asks.

* * *

You don't really know how Aunt Maris died, or when—your parents, typically, only told you about it because Maris' lawyer requested them to. Had there been any chance of reconciliation between you and Diehl, you think, they might actually have found some way to avoid mentioning it at all. But even they could see there would have been no point to such a deception, especially in light of recent events.

It had been a quarter past eleven, and you were in Diehl's car. Together. Which was strange in itself—but then, you were on your way to a family gathering (your family), and Diehl could hardly have afforded to show up without you, considering how much trouble he'd gone to in order to marry into it in the first place.

Moving out onto Yonge, just past the local Gap, you took a pull from your mutual Starbucks thermos, and saw Diehl shoot you a look.

“Yes?”

“That could make you a little edgy, don't you think?” he said. “Given your . . . condition.”

“Scared of what I might do?”

“No!” he snapped, quick and definite, as though the very thought insulted you both.

You took another sip. “Ah,” you said, sweetly. “And how about what
you
might do?”

And so you started to argue again, started to fight—first verbally, then physically. A genuine struggle, quick but vicious. Your thumbnail digging at his eye. His fist across your jaw. Your hand on the door handle, the door you thought you had locked. Securely.

He hit you, pushed you. The door opened. You fell out.

And what had been inside you at that moment, that tiny, subdividing swatch of cells and energy—he, she, whoever it had once had the potential to become—

—fell out, too.

* * *

Maris shakes her head. Her pale hair parts like a veil. Her lips part, urgent and intent. She leans forward, ready to breathe in Sufiya's words like a kiss.

No,
she says.
So tell me of them. These djinni.

Adding unnecessarily:
One will pay, of course.

Sufiya nods, over the rim of her cup.
Yes,
she replies.
One will.

* * *

Your Aunt Maris' house—now securely snowed in—lies crooked and quiet, a psychic sump. Its old pipes keep it hibernation-hot. The floors of some upstairs rooms are so uneven that you can put a marble down near the window, step back, watch it roll slowly out the door, and hear it bumping down the staircase to the front hall. Breathing is an extra effort; every new move comes complete with a constricted sigh or malformed gasp.

You drift from room to room as masala chai brews in the kitchen—black Darjeeling tea boiled with milk, cardamom, cinnamon, cloves, sugar, thick and warming.

The furniture is covered in sheets. Pebbled glass gleams on the windows, not just in the bathroom, but everywhere. Some stained glass, but all of it that weirdly “experimental” 1960s kind, done in shades of dark brown and murky green.

Down in the basement, which you give just a quick glance from the top of the steps, the windows seem to have been painted over entirely.

“Maris?” Diehl had said, when the lawyer's letter came. “That crazy old dyke? That hermit? Anything you get from her, you'd have to sandblast before you could take it out in public.”

“
My
aunt,” you reminded him. “Not yours. Throw away your own relatives, if you want to.”

“If mine were like yours, you could count on it.”