Eventually she dreamed. They were in the cemetery, she and Ruth, walking among the tombstones. The mist was thick around them, and Ruth carried a lantern, which glowed a sickly yellow. They paused before the entrance to the mausoleum, and Ruth raised the lantern, and they both raised their heads to look at the statue of Agnes. The lantern could not provide sufficient illumination, and the statue remained half in shadow.
“This is our mother,” Ruth said. “She sleeps.”
Not your mother, Noemí thought, for Agnes had died young, as had her child.
“Our father is a monster who comes at night, creeping around this house. You can hear his footsteps outside the door,” Ruth said, and she raised the lantern higher, the light shifting the pattern of lights and shadow, obscuring the statue’s hands, her body, but revealing the face. Unseeing eyes and the lips pressed tightly together.
“Your father can’t hurt you anymore,” Noemí said. Because at least there was that mercy, she supposed. Ghosts cannot be tortured.
But the girl grimaced. “He can always hurt us. He never stops hurting us. He will never stop.”
Ruth turned her lantern toward Noemí, making her squint and hold a hand up to shield her eyes. “Never, ever, never. I’ve seen you. I think I know you.”
The conversation was fragmented, yet it remained more coherent than any other exchange Noemí had conducted with the girl before. In fact, it was the first time she had the impression she was speaking to an actual person rather than the faint carbon copy of one. But that’s what she was, wasn’t she? A faded carbon copy, the original manuscript long destroyed. One could not blame Ruth if she didn’t make much sense, if she muttered and lowered the lantern and raised it again repeatedly like a wind-up doll.
“Yes, you’ve seen me around the house,” Noemí said, stilling Ruth with a gentle touch on the arm. “I need to ask you a question, and I hope you’ll have an answer. How strong is the bond between the house and your family? Could a Doyle leave and never come back?” she asked, because she kept thinking about what Francis had told her.
Ruth tilted her head and looked at Noemí. “Father is powerful. He knew something was wrong, sent Mother to stop me…and the others, the others too. I tried to keep my mind clear. I wrote my plan down, concentrated on my words.”
The diary page. Like a mnemonic device? Was that the key to the gloom? Tricking it in such a way? Focus on commands and instructions and let them lead your steps?
“Ruth, could a Doyle ever leave this house?”
Ruth had stopped listening to her; her eyes were glassy. Noemí stood directly in front of her.
“You thought about running away, no? With Benito?”
And the young woman blinked and nodded. “Yes, I did,” she whispered. “Perhaps you could. I thought I could. But it’s a compulsion. It’s in the blood.”
Like the cicadas Francis talked about.I’ll carry him out if I need to, she thought and her resolve grew firmer even if Ruth’s words had hardly been the solid reassurance she’d sought. There was at least a possibility he could be pulled from the grip of Howard Doyle and his noxious house.
“It’s dark here, isn’t it?” Ruth said, looking up at the sky. There were no stars, no moon. Only mist and night. “Take this,” Ruth said and handed Noemí the lantern.
Noemí grabbed it, her fingers curling around the metal handle. Ruth sat down at the foot of the statue, touching its feet and contemplating it. She lay next to the base of the statue, as if she were about to take a nap on a bed made of mist and grass.
“Remember to open your eyes,” Ruth told her.
“Open your eyes,” Noemí whispered.
When she did, turning her head toward the window, she saw that the sun was out. She was to be married that evening.
24
It occurred in reverse, the farce of a marriage. First the banquet, then the ceremony.
They gathered in the dining room, Francis and Noemí sitting side by side, Florence and Catalina across from the groom and bride, and Virgil at the head of the table. Neither Howard nor Dr. Cummins was present.
The servants had lit many candles, and dishes were piled upon the white damask tablecloth. Wildflowers were crammed into high turquoise glass vases. The plates and the cups that evening were silver, and though carefully polished, they looked very old, older than the silver Noemí had cleaned. They must have used these to feast some four hundred years ago. Perhaps even more. Treasure troves from their vault, carefully placed in crates, just like the dark earth Howard had packed, so that they might reassemble the world where they’d reigned as masters.
At Noemí’s right Francis sat dressed in his double-breasted gray frock coat suit, white waistcoat and dark gray necktie. She wondered if this outfit had belonged to Ruth’s groom, or whether it was a relic of another relative. In Noemí’s case, they had found a proper veil for her somewhere in a chest. It was a white tulle bandeau that covered her forehead, head combs and pins holding it in place.
Noemí did not eat, and she drank only water; she did not speak, and neither did the others. The magic rule of silence had been reinstated, the susurrus of hands upon a napkin the only interruption. Noemí glanced in Catalina’s direction, and her cousin looked back at her.
The scene reminded her of a picture in one of her childhood fairy tale books, when the wedding banquet is in place and an evil fairy walks into the room. She recalled the table laden with meats and pies, the women wearing high headdresses, and the men in box coats with huge sleeves. She touched her silver cup and once again wondered at the age of it and whether Howard had been born three hundred, four hundred, five hundred years in the past and might have walked around in a jerkin and hose. She’d seen him in a dream, but the dream had been vague, or it had grown vaguer in the days since. How many times had he died, acquired a new body? She looked at Virgil, and he returned the look, raising his cup, which prompted Noemí to stare at her plate.
The clock marked the hour, and that was their cue. They rose. Francis took her hand and they walked together, up the stairs, a tiny wedding procession winding its way to Howard’s room. She’d known instinctively that this must be their destination, yet she still recoiled at the entrance and clutched Francis’s hand so hard she must have hurt him. He whispered in her ear.
“We’re together,” he said.