Comfort Me With Apples(15)

The dark crowds so close around Cascavel’s face. Shadows drawn to him, to be near him. But she wants to know his questions. She wants to have his answers.

“All right, little one. All right. The first one is easy.” He tucks a stray lock of hair away from her face round her ear, such a curiously paternal thing. “What are you clutching so in your left hand?”

Sophia looks down. Her fingers are balled into a red fist, a grip so tight they’ve gone numb. She opens them, the electric prickle of life returning to the pad of her thumb.

She is desperately holding on to the little crooked ancient finger bone. She must have taken it in the moment of her breaking, reflexively, instinctively, the way she lied about the window. Sophia presses her soft lips together. She begins to cry as simply and miserably as the first weeping of the world.

“It should be inside someone and it’s not,” she sobs helplessly.

“I see,” Cascavel says with real comfort in the margins of his voice. “I see.”

He nods his head as if he expected it, but still hoped for some other outcome. Sophia studies his face. He looks so sad for her, the way Mrs. Palfrey looked at the amphitheater.

“Are you ready for my second question, sweet girl?”

Sophia nods wretchedly, turning the bone over and over in her hand.

Cascavel takes her chin in both his hands and kisses her forehead with so much love it feels like the mark of his lips must have left her brow stained with gold. A love that beggars sensation.

“Are you happy, Sophia?”

“NO,” she screams in his face, and there is so much relief in that one syllable that she almost faints clear away.

Cascavel chuckles kindly. “Well, thank the good Lord on his janky old throne, who could expect you to be? Feel better now?”

Sophia gawks at him through her tears. “Why does everyone keep asking me that?”

Cascavel clicks his tongue against his teeth. “Because you were made without the ability to be dissatisfied, Sophia. After the last disaster, it seemed a prudent move. And we care about you. Everyone here cares more about what happens to you than you can possibly imagine. So they ask, because as long as the answer is yes, you are safe. But the answer is not yes anymore, is it, poor poppet?”

“But I have to be happy. Everything here is perfect.” Sophia swallows what feels like a ball of knives in her throat. She knows the truth. She just has to say it. “Except me.”

“Don’t even think it, Sophie, my girl! Except him.”

“I don’t understand.”

“Yes, that’s what Mrs. Palfrey said. She tried her mightiest to help you, but she’s only an old nag in the end. Bigger guns were required.” Cascavel straightens himself, crosses and recrosses his long dark limbs. “The bastard of it is, Sophie, I’m going to need you to say it yourself. You’ve got to say it out loud or I can’t do a thing for you. I would be a kinder soul to leave you in peace knowing nothing, so if we’re to set sail together on this vile little voyage, it’s you who must call for the ark.” He laughs at his own little joke. “So to speak.”

A great calm wraps itself around Sophia’s body. A chill and misty knowledge as certain as the night.

“I am not his first wife,” she says flatly.

“No,” confirms Cascavel. “I am sorry about that. We all are. It’s not much fun to be you, I know.”

“His second?” she asks hopefully, but she remembers all those bones, all those jewels, that little basil jar full of flakes of dead blood to season his supper. The locks of hair like strips of paint samples. She knows.

“No,” admits Cascavel.

“How many?”

Cascavel sighs. “Well, it’s a rather complicated question, honestly. I expect there’ll be a great deal of debate about it when all this comes out. If it ever does, that is. He gets bored very quickly these days, your old ball and chain. But I do think we are inching, ever so grindingly slow, toward an acceptable model. Too late for you, I’m afraid, but that’s why we’re here on this lovely evening, isn’t it?”

Sophia draws away from him. “Who are you? Cascavel is a very odd name.”

His eyes glitter with mirth. “It is a kind of snake, my dear. Quite a deadly one, I’m afraid.” He strokes her hair with shocking intimacy. “In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth, and the earth was without form and void and darkness was upon the face of the deep, and the spirit of God moved upon the waters. And God said: let there be light, and there was light, and He saw the light, and saw that it was good, and God divided the light from the darkness … and what was left over at the bottom of the keg was … me.”

Sophia begins to shake violently. Her limbs lose themselves. Her face collapses into a rictus of palsy.

Cascavel wraps her up in his long, serpentine arms. “There, there,” he says. “Just plain old Cascavel is fine. I know you’re frightened. It’s just awful when you lay it all out on the floor like a bunch of bones you dug out of your husband’s hidey holes. You don’t deserve it. Not one bit. But you should be proud of yourself! You figured it almost all the way out on your own! He never gives you girls much to work with up top anymore. Doesn’t want to get too invested, I suppose. Or competition. Well, darling, I have lived here in the Garden since the first stars detonated themselves into the sky and the oceans gave up the whales to the land. I saw the plates separate and I saw the rivers swell with the first water of the cosmos and I saw what that man did to you and all the rest of them and I have wept in earnest for every gorgeous loving girl that house has eaten whole. I have seen it all and let me tell you something as true as bleeding: I am invested. I am on your side. You are the life, but I am the party.” He curls her long hair round his finger. “Now, might I squeeze a third question in? I know I only said two, but I am known to lie from time to time, just like you.”