Comfort Me With Apples(17)

The sugar inside bursts into her mouth, singing. She swallows and opens her eyes.

Inside the apple is a small iron key.

Cascavel stands, his voice full of sorrow and tenderness.

“Your husband’s name is Adam. The Big A. Number one on the factory line. Old Mr. Dust. And that is a key to his basement. It is almost finished.”

Cascavel starts to walk back to the wall of struggling flowers. But he pauses, a curious posture taking hold of his form. He raises one hand in an elegant gesture. “Take the apple with you if you like,” he says lightly, as though the thought has only just occurred to him and matters not a bit. “You are beautiful and convincing too, Sophia. Make him eat it. You may find it kills him.”





HONEYCRISP



23.??For in the day thou eatest thereof, thou shalt surely die.





JUBILEE



Sophia reassembles her house shard by shard. She works quickly; she can finish before dawn. She has always been a good worker. It is what he wanted, after all. She knows now. She knows everything.

Back it all goes, each in its place, and by the time the songbirds begin their rounds, no one would ever know any sadness touched this house.

Except for the sack of bones on the table.

Sophia holds the key to the cellar in her hand. Perhaps she will not use it. She knows what she will find. More of the same. The broken, rendered scraps of wives, like old candle ends, burnt out for him. What use can it be to her to see another sad, shattered, achingly small relic that should still belong to its person and never will again?

Instead, Sophia bakes. In the past it always calmed her. Rolling the dough, flouring the board, whipping sugar and eggs and all the good things of this world. She slices the apple, sprinkles it with dates and walnuts and cinnamon, and folds it into the dish, crimping the edges with precise, quick little movements born of infinite practice.

The heat of the oven wriggles. The pastry shivers gold and brown.

After all, why not, Sophia thinks. If I have come this far for knowledge, why not down a staircase? Why not a little farther?

The key turns easy in the lock, because Cascavel only pretends to enjoy lies, and she knew that when he said it. The truth hurts so much better. Sophia pulls the cord on a naked light and shadows retreat—but not by much. It is still dark in the depths of the cellar.

This staircase is just her size.

She grabs a lantern off the ledge as she descends. Clean white walls, a polished floor, furniture here and there—almost finished, as the serpent said. She had so often thought of making her little soaps and baskets and jellies down here, in a space built just for her.

And then she sees it. And Sophia understands with a sickening puddle of fear in her gut that her husband hadn’t lied either. Not really.

So much old equipment lying around.

It’s dangerous.

She could get hurt.

Long, clean knives hang on the walls. Axes. Saws. Pliers. Hooks. Shears. Rendering barrels in one corner, a drain for fluids in another. Everything you needed to get your keepsake and make use of the rest. Nothing wasted. Nothing left out.

And in the soft dirt of the floor gapes a long, deep hole, lovingly Sophia-sized. It does not seem fresh. It waited for a long time under her like a mouth, while she moved and lived and brushed her hair above. The invisible root of her being.

A space built just for her.

“So, you know,” Adam says behind her, and Sophia screams, no matter how she might wish she hadn’t, might wish that she was beyond fearing him now. “Pie smells good.” He sighs in disappointment. “Come on up and we’ll talk.”

They sit together, not at the great table but on the floor, side by side. She serves him a piece of the pie, glistening, steaming, perfect. He takes the plate, sets it down between them, and doesn’t touch it.

“You were supposed to be different,” he says, and there is real anger in it.

“I don’t understand,” Sophia ventures. She does, of course, but she wants him to say it.

Adam throws up his prehistoric hands. “None of you ever do, until you do, and then what am I supposed to do with you? Where does that leave me? None of you ever think of that, not for a second. It’s always whining and crying and what’s in the basement, Adam? Me, me, me! You’re all the same.”

“I found the bones. And the hair and the blood and the jewelry,” Sophia says haltingly, so that he will think she does not know the whole of it, and her time might stretch a little longer.

Adam lifts his chin, refusing to be shamed. “I miss them. I loved them.” His lip quivers. “Why should I give them up? I loved them so much. And no one should have to live without the things they love. They’re mine, anyway. I can do what I like. It’s not for you to say.”

Sophia’s eyes slip closed. This far. Why not farther? “You loved them so much you used those knives in the cellar on them?”

“Oh,” Adam says sheepishly. He fiddles with his fork. “That.”

“Yes, that, Adam.”

He flinches at the sound of his name like she’s cut him.

“I was born a giant, you know,” he says, refusing to look up at her, gazing anywhere but at his wife. “I was formed of the dust of the ground, and the Lord God my Father breathed life into my nostrils, and gave unto me a living soul and all that. But in the beginning, I was so big. A giant! Bet you think I’m a strapping fellow now, but you should have seen me when the ocean was new. I still think that was the best me, but He won’t give it back. But not just a giant, see? My first wife was born at the same time, of the same dust. We were one flesh, fused together spine to spine. We were never apart. We finished each other’s sentences. We loved as fierce as sea storms. And we built this house! But we could never touch, and obviously that was no good. You see how it could never have worked, don’t you? I can’t be blamed for that first one. I begged Him to separate us so I could look upon my wife and please myself upon her. He loved me, His firstborn son, so He did. But she hated me for it. She liked it the old way. She said I should have asked her consent. She wouldn’t let me touch her, and she wouldn’t touch me, and that’s just an impossible situation, Soph, you know it is. That’s no way to live in paradise! So I begged my Father again to make me another. I was so lonely. The neighbors all had mates. The lions and the fish and the minks and the bears and the bees and the palfreys. Why should I be deprived? So my Father returned her to the dust. I asked if I could keep her thigh bone to remember her by—she had such pretty, powerful legs! And He said I could so long as I didn’t show anyone, which I never did, you found it on your own, I can’t be blamed. I only took my treasures out at night when you were asleep, I was very careful.”