“I have some things lined up. I’ll be fine,” I say. Sanders-Beecher checking references is a good sign. And the half a job lined up with Frank might tide me over — if Alice forgives me.
“Whatever,” she says.
Seeing Enola and Doyle in her room makes me realize how small it is, a child’s room. She rummages under her bed, bones and sinew thrown together in jeans and a dirty paisley skirt. I’ve never understood women who wear skirts and pants at the same time. She stuffs her foot into her shoe, shoving it over a mangled backstay. I stare at her other naked foot. She scrunches the toes up, a habit to hide a deformity, a slight, fleshy webbing between each digit.
“When will you be back?”
“Not sure. Swing by if you feel like getting out.” She looks around her room. “Hell if I know how you stand this place.” Without looking at it, she points to a deep gouge in the wall. To Doyle she says, “I did that.” She began digging that gouge after Dad died.
“Really?” His forehead wrinkles, scrunching the dark ink that crosses his scalp.
“I liked really picking at something hard, you know? When I was pissed off I’d dig at it with a quarter.” I let her lie to him. She used to eat the chalky lumps of drywall. When I came home late I’d check on her and watch as she dug at the wall with her littlest finger and licked the dust.
Things were that bad. They must have been.
“You want us to bring you zeppole?” Enola asks as we walk back to the living room.
“Huh?”
“From the carnival. You used to like them. You should come. If it’s a slow day and George is bored he might share his weed with us; the Fat Man gets good weed. You want?”
“Thanks, no.”
“Suit yourself. Come by, though, okay?” Enola pulls hard at the door, bracing her foot against the wall, yanking until it pops open.
“Do you think Thom would talk to me about his book?”
Doyle slinks an arm around Enola’s waist. Maybe it’s the light, but she’s so thin that if she turned sideways she might disappear. She isn’t well.
“Stop it with the book stuff,” she says. “I know you want to think it’s something more, but maybe it’s just that we’re sad. Maybe Mom was unbearably sad. It doesn’t have to be more than that. Being that sad is enough.”
And then she walks away. Doyle looks over his shoulder at me as they head to his car. For a moment I think he’ll say something, but he rests his hand on her hip and walks with her. As they’re pulling away he leans from the window and shouts, “Dude, just come.”
Two steps from my desk a crack rends the air; my left ankle rolls and my knee buckles. Shit. Shit. Shit. I’m shouting, falling. The floor gives way and the lower half of my leg is swallowed by breaking boards, wrenched and wrong. I crash onto my back, skull cracking against the floor. The quickest flash of memory — Mom, pressing her lips to a bump on my head after I smacked it against the corner of the coffee table.
I’m close enough to the couch to press my shoulders into it and leverage my weight. Shimmying the leg from the hole adds splinters to the pain. I shout to Enola, Doyle, but they’re already gone. My calf is chewed up and my ankle is bloodied and twisted. A dust cloud makes the air dirty. Papers fall from my desk, floating like leaves.
I could just lie here, couldn’t I? Just for a little while. I look down at the hole. It’s a decent size, a fair amount of damage, I thought it would be foot-shaped but it’s no specific shape. The disturbing part is that there’s a noise, lapping waves from the void below the floor. I stare into the hole. Is that sand? It could be sand. There shouldn’t be sand down there. I put my belly to the floor and peer down through the hole. That can’t be sand. I stick my head into the blackness. Only it’s not entirely black. Light is leaking in.
With Enola and Doyle gone I call Alice, hoping pain will breed sympathy.
“Please don’t hang up.”
“Tell me why I shouldn’t,” she says.
“Because my floor just broke, maybe my ankle, too. I’m stuck by the couch and I’m sorry.”
I hear her closing a desk drawer and remember that she color codes her pens. “You made it to the phone just fine.”
“It was on the floor.”
“Fine,” she says. And I learn the meaning of a long-suffering sigh.
If I was hoping for softness, the Alice who opens the door lacks it. She helps lift me onto the couch, arms under my shoulders, with the efficiency of an ER nurse.
“I’m sorry,” I say.
“Yes, you are.” Before she leaves she slings a bag over one shoulder. “I’ll take those books now.”
The Tenets of the Oracle. “You said it would look bad if you brought them back. I promise I’ll do it. Just give me a day.”
She chews on her bottom lip and though she’s angry it’s lovely, drawing attention to a dark freckle in the valley between lip and chin. “What’s going on, Simon? I feel like you’re not here anymore.”
I tell her that it’s Enola.
She sighs. “It always is.”
“She likes you,” I say. “She thinks you’re good for me.”
She leans against the door and though she’s here, she’s somewhere else, too. “It’d be nice if you were good for me,” she says.
“I do want to leave here, eventually,” I say. “I don’t want to take the money.”
“Good,” she says absently. “Keep that elevated.” And then she’s out the door. I push up on my hands to watch her go. She’s at her car when she calls, “I’ll cool off. Eventually.”
I wonder, just maybe, if she and Enola talk.
If Enola is right and there isn’t a curse, if we are just a sad family, the sort that’s chemically unable to stay alive, if we drown ourselves for that reason, then my sister just told me there’s nothing I can do for her. That is not a possibility.
Near the desk is a color printout of a flyer, an excerpt from H. W. Calvin’s Guide to Entertainments for the Discerning Gentleman—a guide to clubs, speakeasies, and brothels, a piece of propaganda from the burlesque days of Celine Duvel, before she became the Mermaid Girl of Cirque Marveau. A fine line sketch shows that Celine Duvel is one of us: dark hair, light skin, eyes like Enola.
Back at the book again I discover a twisted little secret. More torn pages. Enola has ripped out every single sketch of tarot cards, each one carefully scored and removed with a thumbnail. She lied to my face. Who does that to a book, defaces art like that? My sister, of course, systematically destroying things for reasons she won’t say. I should have photocopied everything. I should have never left her alone with it, not after seeing her destroy that first page. I hadn’t thought. Maybe we’re just sad, she said, as though she is deeply sad.
Always women. Drowned women make a paper river on my desk. No mention of a single son. Lovers, bereaved husbands, aggrieved fathers abound, but a son? A brother? No, only me. I am an anomaly. While she continually shuffles cards and defaces my already damaged book. How did it become so ruined?
The phone rings. It’s the man who sent me a book I shouldn’t have, that he shouldn’t have had, unless something terrible happened. It’s not a coincidence that the women die on July 24th; there are too many names. I pick up the call.
“Simon? I hadn’t heard from you. Have you had any success with Binding Charms? Is it helpful?”
“Yes, sort of. It’s intense reading.”
He hums agreement. “I know. I suspect that’s why I haven’t been able to sell it. It’s a lovely volume, but dense is an understatement. However, it was the best thing I had on hand. I — well, I know what I said in the note but you can keep it if you like, if you find it useful.”
Maybe it’s the pain in my leg offering the right amount of distraction but pieces of what I read in Binding Charms slip together with something Enola said. “Martin, I think I’ve figured out something. Something very bad happened to the people who owned this book. I think there was a flood or an accident.” I run a thumb across a water-ruined page. “Something bad enough that it could almost infect — is that the right word? — infect an object, or anyone who survived with a piece of it. I think this book survived something terrible, and that it’s marked because of it. I think my family may be too, and that’s what’s killing us.”