Dark and Deepest Red(10)

Lala shields her eyes from the sun’s glare.

The approaching figure does not turn toward the back garden, but takes the crabgrass-roughened path to the door.

Not Geruscha. Not Henne.

A man.

Lala distinguishes the colors of his garb, white and black.

Her heart quickens.

The robe and cape of a Dominican friar, one trained to root out witchcraft.

Alifair is alongside her, his approach quiet as a moth’s.

They listen at the weather-warped door.

They hear the friar’s voice, his greeting to Tante Dorenia. His words, however polite, cannot veil the contempt in his tone, his disdain for the fact that Tante is a businesswoman, never married, trading in the richest black and deepest blue.

Lala cannot catch all the words, but hears enough to make out a name, a phrase, a stretch of time.

Delphine.

She has been missing.

Two nights and a day.

Delphine.

The woman whose silhouette Lala and Alifair glimpsed just beyond the trees.

The woman they saw dancing.

Lala feels Alifair’s shadow incline forward.

“Alifair,” she says.

“We saw her,” he whispers. “What if we can be of help?”

She takes hold of his arm. “And don’t you think he will wonder what cause we had to be out in the thick of night?”

“I won’t tell him about that,” he says. “And I’ll leave you out of it. No one will even know you were there.”

As though that is any comfort. One word to the magistrate that Alifair was the last to see Delphine, and to see her dancing like some wild spirit at that, and they’ll blame him for it. He’ll be brought to the scaffold or the stake before he finishes his testimony. The rumors that he appeared out of the woods like some fairy’s child will not help.

Lala grips his arm tighter. “Please.”

Alifair looks at her, his eyes turning to flint, his jaw hardening.

He shrugs off her hold, and nods.

Lala knows him well enough to recognize this not as agreeing, but as relenting.

He is simply giving in.





Rosella


In Briar Meadow, our small, loosely gathered set of houses bounded in by woods and highway, the glimmers were as much a part of our calendar as the seasons. But I was the only one always dreading another year of blood on rosebushes, and all the slashed cloth and scattered beads that might come with it.

It never came.

Not when I was eight, when daughters who’d given their mothers nothing but silence for months suddenly wanted to spill their hearts out over late-night freezer cake. Not when I was eleven, when congregation members who, according to their choir director, “couldn’t carry a tune in a bucket” sang like angels. Not even two years ago, when the glimmer brought Mexican coywolves out of the woods; cute as puppies, they had an annoying talent for getting into houses—even ones where all the doors and windows were locked—and chewing on the nicest shoes they could find.

By the time I turned sixteen, I had almost forgotten to dread the glimmer, so I wasn’t even thinking about it when the red shoes started appearing around town. They showed up on sofas and bedroom floors. Instead of resting in attic trunks, or on the high shelves where they’d been stored, they appeared in the open, as though airing themselves out. They were found propped up in corners, heels against baseboards, toes resting on carpet. Or in cupboards, with broom bristles grazing their delicate beading. Mothers stumbled over them in hallways, pausing to yell to their daughters to pick up their things before realizing the red shoes on the floor had been wrapped away in tissue paper for years.

They emerged from linen cabinets and coat closets. They showed up in dining rooms, and slender women who’d sworn off bread years ago ate slices of black forest cake like they were drinking in a new perfume. When red shoes appeared at the senior community out by the pear orchard, eighty-year-olds who’d once been high school sweethearts ran off together.

Aubrey Wyeth, famous for being afraid to drive, found a brick-red pair once belonging to her older sister, in the middle of the street. The neighbors all saw her get into her mother’s four door and speed away from that cluster of houses, identical and neat as folded shirts.

Sylvie Everley found a pair resting on her bed, soles down on her great-grandmother’s patchwork quilt. The color of the satin, just between red and burgundy, was the near-purple of her mother’s favorite wine. The beading made her think of how the light from the dining room chandelier reflected in a glass. The next morning she took a second look at a flush-cheeked boy she sometimes partnered with on the debate team. He’d been trying for weeks to work up the nerve to talk to her. That afternoon they were kissing behind the library.

For all the rumors that Oliva shoes brought grace and luck, it had always been our red ones that carried the spark of secret kisses, of brazen hearts, of eating bread with more butter than flour. And this year, all my friends were wearing them. Their red shoes crunched over the leaf mulch, flashing with the bright magic that had taken hold of them all.

All of them, except me.

I was an Oliva. My family had made all these red shoes, and somehow I was the only one of my friends not wearing them. I had learned to blow-dry my hair straight (sometimes just so Sylvie could curl it again), put on eyeliner in the side mirror of Graham’s car (pencil only; I was still working on liquid), eat lemon slices dusted with packets of artificial sweetener (the only thing Piper ever ate before a dance). All the things that made me almost, almost the same kind of girl as Piper Tamsin and Sylvie Everley.