First she considered the immense disappointment she’d cause her father. He’d sent her as an ambassador, to squelch scandal and provide answers, and she would return home empty-handed. Their deal would be void—no master’s degree for her, ever—and worse than that, she hated the taste of failure.
Besides, she didn’t dare to go anywhere with Catalina in this state. What if she should need her? How could she hurt Catalina and then run off? How could she leave her all alone, racked in pain?
“She’s my family,” Noemí said. “You must stand by your family.”
“Even if you can’t possibly help her?”
“You don’t know that.”
“This is no place for you,” he assured her.
“Have they asked you to chase me away?” she asked, standing up quickly, irritated by his sudden vehemence. “Are you trying to get rid of me? Do you dislike me so much?”
“I like you very much and you know it,” he said, his hands sliding into his jacket’s pockets again as he looked down.
“Then you’ll help me and take me into town now, won’t you?”
“Why do you need to go into town?”
“I want to find out what was in the tincture Catalina drank.”
“It won’t do you any good.”
“Even if it doesn’t, I want to go. Will you take me?”
“Not today.”
“Tomorrow, then.”
“The day after tomorrow, perhaps. Perhaps not.”
“Why not make it in a month,” she replied angrily. “I can walk into town without you if you have no desire to help me.”
She meant to stomp away and succeeded only in stumbling. Francis offered her his arm to steady herself, and he let out a sigh when her fingers caught his sleeve.
“I have every desire to help you. I’m tired. We all are. Uncle Howard has been keeping us awake at nights,” he said, shaking his head.
His cheeks seemed more hollowed out and the dark circles under his eyes were almost purplish. Again she felt selfish and awful. She thought of no one but herself and did not pause to imagine that other people at High Place had problems of their own. For example, who knew if at nights Francis was called to tend upon his sickly uncle. She could picture Florence, directing her son to hold up an oil lamp as she pressed cold compresses against the old man’s face. Or perhaps other tasks were handed to the young men. Virgil and Francis, undressing the frail, bleached body of Howard Doyle, applying ointments and medications in a closed room reeking of impending death.
Noemí flexed her fingers, raising them to her mouth, and recalling, vaguely, that horrid nightmare in which the pale man had extended his arms toward her.
“Virgil said he has an old wound. But what is the injury?”
“Ulcers that won’t heal. But it won’t be the end of him. It’ll never be the end of him.” Francis let out a low, sad chuckle, his eyes on the stone statue of Agnes. “I’ll take you to town early tomorrow, before the others wake up. Before breakfast, like the last time. And if you should want to take your suitcase—”
“You’ll have to think of a more creative way to get me to leave,” she replied.
They began to drift, quietly, back toward the iron gates of the cemetery. She brushed the cool tops of the headstones as they walked. At one point they passed a dead gray oak tree that lay upon the ground, clumps of honey-colored mushrooms growing upon the rotten bark. Francis bent down, running a finger across the smooth caps, just as she’d touched the headstones.
“What has made Catalina so miserable?” she asked. “She was happy when she married. Stupidly happy, my father would have said. Is Virgil cruel to her? Last night, when I spoke to him, he was hard, he had no pity.”
“It’s the house,” Francis murmured. By now the black gates with their snakes were in sight. The ouroboros, casting shadows upon the ground. “It wasn’t made for love, the house.”
“Any place is made for love,” she protested.
“Not this place and not us. You look back two, three generations, as far as you can. You won’t find love. We are incapable of such a thing.”
His fingers curled around the intricate iron bars, and he stood there, for a second, looking at the ground, before he opened the gate for her.