Comfort Me With Apples(5)

“But your sweetie still looks at you as hungry as ever,” Mrs. Minke reassures her, patting her hand. “I’ve seen it with my own eyes. One quiver of your lip and he’s fit to hunt you and only you to the ends of time and back.”

The girls giggle and Sophia does feel better. She has been silly, really. Her husband works with all manner of animals, after all. It’s probably a snipping off some prize mare he forgot to tell her about. Far too coarse and thick and wild-smelling for a woman. A woman couldn’t smell like that. Sophia doesn’t smell like that. What was she thinking? It all seems so insignificant, now, in Mrs. Lyon’s sitting room, surrounded by bright lamps and good china and the laughter of good ladies.

Who, indeed?

A quiet, polite knock at the door cracks open the afternoon like a spoon tapping an egg.

“Oh!” Mrs. Lyon exclaims, clapping her big hands together. Her round butterscotch eyes shine. “We have company! Clear the tea things, Mrs. Minke, there’s a good girl. The Maestro doesn’t partake, you know.”

“You never mentioned company,” Sophia whispers.

Her shoulders tense. Anxiety simmers back through her veins in a sour flood. Sophia does not like to be surprised. It hardly ever happens to her. Perhaps once, when she first saw the enormous house on Cedar Drive. Possibly twice. When she met her husband for the first time, the size and the color of him, the hum of his voice, how completely her bones and her sinew and the musculature of her heart knew they belonged to him. Nothing was ever the same again after. Surprises did that to you. Nasty things. Lying in wait. A surprise, even a little one, means a change in the world, and Sophia likes her world as it is. She likes it so much.

But Mrs. Lyon does not agree. She smiles with feline smugness. “Why would I? It’s a surprise! Now go on and answer the door, Sophie, it’s not polite to keep a man waiting on the stoop.”

Sophia places her slender hand on the latch. She studies the little dapple of shadow and light over her fingers, a flutter of red like blood projected there through the high roses outside Mrs. Lyon’s front window. The wind comes. The red breaks apart. It is only her hand again. She opens the door and looks up into a stranger’s face.

He is tall, taller than her husband even, but so skinny, a riot of golden hair tangling up from his skull like a crown of buttercups. His eyes burn into her, staring, staring, looking for something he cannot find in the very cellar of her being. Oh, she hates them! She hates his eyes instantly and forever. They are blue and green and brown all at once, fringed with long lashes, so bright Sophia looks away. An ungovernable shyness cripples her. She does not want to look at the stranger. His gaze peels her open like an unripe green almond. He should not look at her like that. Sophia does not want to look at any man but her husband. She does not want any strangers in her life at all. She crosses her arms over her chest to keep him out. He frowns at this gesture, as though it is not entirely his fault.

“Mr. Semengelof, come in!” purrs Mrs. Lyon. “Mrs. Minke, Mrs. Fische, this is Mr. Semengelof, he is a most extraordinary musician, just back from travels abroad—you will tell us all about your journeys through all those thrilling foreign climes, won’t you?”

“If you wish.” He bows slightly at the waist. His voice isn’t like the voices of the women. Sophia hardly thinks she hears him at all. She feels his voice, sawing over her heart like an unresined bow.

“Where did you go?” Sophia says softly. What a strange name. What a strange man. She wishes he would just turn around and leave again, immediately.

But he does not. Mr. Semengelof turns to fix her with that every-colored stare again. He does not say one single merciful word for a long time. Far too long for any sort of manners.

“Far,” he answers, as though that suffices.

Sophia wants to scream. She can feel the scream trying to claw up out of her belly.

“Well, I’m sure I can’t imagine anywhere better than our own Arcadia Gardens!” Mrs. Lyon sniffs.

Mrs. Minke’s small eyes narrow even further with gossipy delight. “He was tracking a criminal, Sophia. Can you imagine? A criminal, just outside our gates! It’s positively thrilling. She could have descended upon any one of us, at any moment! Snatched our babies in the night or ransacked our homes! Oh! Too horrid! It makes one feel just terrifically alive.”

Sophia can hear the scream in her head, echoing off the walls of her skull. She tries to speak normally. Is she speaking normally? Is her voice too loud in this suddenly small room?

“What did she do? The criminal, I mean.”

Mr. Semengelof’s jaw moves beneath his skin. He seems to see no one but her.

“She broke the contract,” he says evenly. “The Association’s terms are very clearly enumerated in the Agreement. She had no excuse.” He pauses. His eyes crawl all over her, pressing for a way in. “I do hope others will not be so careless.”

Sophia knows she should stop talking. The longer she talks, the longer this man will stay. She doesn’t mean to open her mouth at all. Her words just seem to happen to her.

“Are you a policeman?” she almost whispers. Be quiet, Sophia!

Mr. Semengelof turns his head to one side curiously. Then he keeps turning it—slowly, slowly—further, further—sickeningly far, until his neck must surely break, but does not. And then further still. Sophia glimpses the back of his skull for a moment before his gaze comes back round the other side to throttle her again, like a terrible owl. Mrs. Minke and Mrs. Fische keep smiling eagerly, as though nothing untoward has happened. Sophia’s jaws throb with the effort of keeping that scream on the right side of her teeth.