Dark and Deepest Red(2)

Tante stands beneath the tree.

“Don’t look at him,” Lala whispers, trying not to stare herself.

“Oh?” Tante asks. “And why not?”

“They’ll think we’re trying to steal him.” Lala keeps her whisper low, even if Tante won’t match it.

Lala may be small, but she’s old enough to listen. She knows how many gadje mothers and fathers suspect Romnia of being witches who have nothing better to do than steal their children.

Tante tilts her head to look at Lala. “And who exactly will think that?”

With a prickling of guilt, Lala realizes there is a reason Tante does not ask if the boy is lost, or if anyone is missing him. It is clear from his dirt-stained clothes and hungry look that he is on his own.

The boy’s eyes shine out from the crab apple branches, more feral than frightened, like a cat caught in a lantern’s light.

Lala barely knows anything of their neighbors, or of this place her aunt has brought her. But it seems enough like Riquewihr that she knows what would happen to this boy, or what already has. Farmers’ wives chasing him off. Merchants beating him to make sure he never comes back.

Tante sets her hands on her hips, tilts her face up to the tree, and asks the boy, “And what are you good for?”

Not a taunt.

A true question.

Without hesitating, the boy comes down from the crab apple tree. He has hardly set his bare, dirt-grayed feet to the ground when he climbs the great oak next.

Lala watches at Tante’s skirt. She winces as the boy ascends into the clouds of wasps that fill the space between boughs.

He plunges his arms into those swarms and grabs handfuls of oak galls, not once being stung.

He climbs down, jumping from the lowest branch.

Soon, Lala and Tante will learn that this boy knows how to keep secrets. Theirs, and his own. As young as he is, he knows how to fold away the things the world would punish him for.

He holds the oak galls out to Tante Dorenia.

Tante looks between the boy and the tree.

“Now that,” she says, “is worth something.”





Emil


Emil sat at the top of the stairs, letting his parents believe he was asleep.

“It’s harmless, Yvette,” his father said.

They must have been in the kitchen. It was always easier to hear them when they were in the kitchen than the living room. The sound bounced off the hard floor and counters instead of disappearing into the sofa and rug.

“His teacher used the word alarming,” his mother said. “Our son somehow managed to alarm his grammar school. You want us to ignore that?”

Emil listened harder, his back tensing.

Something about the way his parents said grammar school made him feel like he was still in kindergarten.

“All he said was something about us having an ancestor table on holidays,” his father said. “It was everyone else who turned it into summoning ghosts from graveyards.”

Now the understanding hit Emil in the stomach. And as soon as it touched him, it turned to shame at how stupid he’d been. Stupid enough to think anyone at school would understand, or want to.

Last year, he’d told Rosella Oliva about his family’s altars—the white candle, the dish of water, the food left for the dead, the good cloths they used only for this. She’d taken it as naturally as him telling her the name of a particular butterfly. She’d told him about her own family’s altars each November, the photos and candles laid out, the food and flowers brought to those they’d lost.

And that, how easily she’d understood, had made him careless around everyone else. He’d forgotten that most gadje buried their dead and then acted like they were as far away as another galaxy.

“You know how this is,” Emil’s father said. “You mention something harmless, and suddenly they think you’re talking about Satan worship.”

“You think I don’t know that?” His mother’s voice rose, good for listening but bad for Emil’s sudden wish not to hear her. “Unfortunately, whatever they turn it into is what everyone else believes.”

“Just let it be forgotten,” his father said.

“And in the meantime, what?” his mother asked. “We let them say whatever they want about our son?”

“It’s not worth arguing with them.”

“We can explain.”

“And what do you think that will accomplish?” Emil could hear his father stop his pacing in the kitchen. He was still now. “This happened to the Olivas last year, remember? Rosella brought in those pictures of the calaveras, and half a dozen parents decided she was trying to frighten their children with skeletons.”

The mention of Rosella made Emil both wince and listen harder.

“And the Olivas talked to the school to clear it up,” Emil’s mother said. “You’re only proving my point.”

“I am not, because I wasn’t done,” his father said. “The Olivas tried to explain, and it ended with Rosella having to apologize. Apologize, for who she and her family are. And a week later she came home wearing lipstick.” His father said this last part with the resigned flourish of giving a story’s moral.

“What are you saying?” Emil’s mother asked. “One wrong move, then what? Next week our son will be a smoker?”