Comfort Me With Apples(16)

Sophia pauses. That part of her that knows it can trust no one and has no friends begs her to keep her peace. But it feels so good to be held, it feels so good to be spoken to like she is capable and wise, to hear her life gain weight, fed by Cascavel. Fed by being seen.

“I lied because he would have made me obey,” she confesses, and that feels good too. “He would have made me give the heron the hair and the brush and the bone, because the handbook says we must acquiesce to any request made of us. But I didn’t want to give them up. I wanted to know the truth. And they were … they were mine.”

“Thank you for telling me,” Cascavel says. “I am always very interested in lies.”

Sophia nods against his chest. She does not hear a heart there. Only a kind of old wind blowing beneath his skin.

“Ask me your third question,” she tells him.

“What’s your husband’s name, Sophia?”

She lifts her head and blinks in confusion.

“You’re married to the great lump. You must know.”

Sophia searches her memory, her heart, her whole life with him, every morning in bed, every golden smear of breakfast left on a plate, every whispered urgent promise in her ear.

But there’s nothing there to find.

Cascavel smiles, coaxing. “Do you want to know? I can tell you. But you have to ask. You have to want the truth, or it will mean nothing to you. Just a little rain falling into a puddle already full.”

Cascavel unwinds himself from her. He reaches up into the tree above them, its branches heavy, forking, bending as far as it can toward where they sit. He plucks an apple without even looking for one and holds it before her. It is so red, but in the night, in the moonlight, it shines black.

“Do you want it?” he whispers. His eyes slick over with a silver membrane. “Do you want to know? It will do you no good. It will not make you happy. It will not make one moment of what is to come easier on you. But ask me, and I will give it to you.”

Sophia marvels at the apple. It is so big. She can see her face reflected in its skin. It smells ripe, autumnal, wholesome. But she does not reach for it. “Why, if it will not help me?”

Cascavel raises his eyes to Heaven and shakes his beautiful head. “My own foolishness. A weakness for those in pain. Hope. That the outcome will, against all odds, be different this time.” He goes completely still, appraising her, adding sums in his mind that Sophia can never guess at.

Then he kisses her again, and this time it is not her forehead, and it is not paternal, but a real kiss, a needful, desperate, despairing kiss, the color of lava and longing and raw new stars and whatever is left over when you divide the light from the dark. A kiss for the end of the world. “Because I love you and you do not deserve what that man and his Father have prepared for you,” he whispers into the place their mouths joined only a moment before. “You all find your way here in the end. To this green place. To this tree and to me. I always offer you the truth. The simplest and deepest of temptations. And I hope against hope you will say no. Say no, Sophia. Say no and run, past the gardens and the pools and the silent streetlamps, out of the gate and into the far hot sands that stretch on beyond the length of the sky. Into the world. Without him. Without guilt. But you won’t. You never do. Except her. And whatever they ever say about her, Sophia, she lived. So, she won.”

“Her?”

“The one whose hair you found in your dresser drawer. The one whose name he whispers into your neck as he uses your body. The one Mrs. Palfrey tried to show you in the pantomime, putting the brush there for you to find, to help you, to show you the truth before I could get to you. Semengelof went after her, to execute the terms of the same contract you signed. That you all sign. But she is beautiful and she is convincing and he let her live, if she agreed to leave you alone and give you a chance. Of course she didn’t tell him what she’d done. She was always the cleverest of the lot. She found a way to speak to you, though she can never pass through the gate again. Solidarity is a hell of a thing. And it did not exist before a few months ago. Because there were never two of you here at once. Like a new flower in the wall.”

Cascavel pulls her to him again, and Sophia is so deep in the dark she wants him to do it, to hold her and make her safe and kiss her again because he is not her husband and she knows, the way she knows the sun and the moon, that her husband is going to hurt her somehow, and soon. So anyone else is better.

But anyone else is not better. Anyone else is not him. Anyone else is not the great broad man who fills her up and makes her warm and tells her who she is with every breath he takes. She cannot escape her purpose.

I was made for him.

I was made for him.

Cascavel lets her go. He offers her the apple.

“Ask me,” he says in defeat. “You are not her. They built you to be everything other than her. So ask me and you will have what I have. What your neighbors have by now, though they never wanted it.”

“What?” Sophia can barely breathe. “What is it?”

“Knowledge of good,” he runs his finger affectionately down her nose. “And evil.” Cascavel gazes over her head, back toward her house.

Sophia will go back to him. She already knows. She cannot stop herself for much longer. She is a machine designed to return to its master. But she will not go helpless.

She takes the apple, shuts her eyes, and sinks her teeth into its flesh. Savor it all, she hears his voice saying to her while the fireflies danced. It’s for you.