Dark and Deepest Red(27)

He laughed, and the memory of her family, the Oliva house, came back. His own mother and father could only agree on neutrals. Gray and deep beige and ink black. But the Olivas’ house always seemed like it held every color at once. A sofa the red of cranberries. Big fluffy yellow and orange flowers. A blue-green blanket tossed over a grass-bright chair. The dark green carpet that Rosella’s father loved and her mother hated.

Their house was the smell of salt and cinnamon and epazote. It was the windowsill where Rosella and her mother set tiny vases of silver-dollar eucalyptus, which everyone else in this town hated like a weed but that they loved like a favorite flower.

Rosella’s fingers slid over Emil’s hands and wrists. His breath caught, and felt jagged, like cloth snagging.

“Sorry,” she said, mistaking it for pain.

He let her wrong impression stand.

“For what it’s worth,” Emil said, trying not to let the shiver down his neck get into his voice, “this is pretty tame.”

“Compared to what?” Rosella asked.

He pushed up his sleeve and showed her the back of his arm where a patch of hair had been singed away and still hadn’t grown back. “Bunsen burner. Magnesium oxide experiment.”

Rosella cringed. “I’ve got one uglier than that.” She rolled up her sleeve and showed a paler slash on the brown of her forearm. “Hot glue, last holiday season.”

Emil winced. He held up his left hand, showing her the patch of tightened, shinier skin that crossed two fingers. “Reconstituting stearic acid. Tube clamp slipped.”

She pulled down the neck of her sweater. A thin scar notched across her collarbone. “Leather awl, two years ago.”

Emil sucked air in through his teeth. “What the hell were you doing, hugging it?”

She laughed.

He had made her laugh.

He would probably never have the kind of charm his mother had, the kind that softened everything. She could critique how someone was arranging strawberries haphazardly in a tart or setting an oven at the wrong temperature, and it would sound like a compliment. She would take knives out of friends’ hands or stop them in the middle of salting meat. No, no, ma chérie, you must do it this way. And always she made it sound less like she was correcting them and more like she was sharing some family secret. You don’t do that, his mother said when people turned on the stove too early and then shut it off again. You don’t heat up a pan and then cool it down and then start it back up again. The oil, the metal, they are ready the first time.

It wasn’t a talent Emil had inherited. The same as how he’d missed whatever gene made his mother and father the kind of academics everyone wanted at dinner parties, the kind whose historical facts drunk people loved—did you know there was a kind of marriage between men in medieval France? Affrèrement!

Emil would probably turn out to be the kind of academic written off as pedantic by everyone except his cat.

But he could do this. He could, sometimes, when he was lucky, make Rosella Oliva laugh, even while he was trying not to think of kissing that scar on her collarbone.

Graham Davies passed by on the sidewalk. “Hey, Hot Pocket.”

She was down the block so fast Emil couldn’t even tell which one of them she’d been talking to.

Rosella looked like she wanted to hide behind the hardware store’s sidewalk sign.

Emil opened his mouth, hesitated, tried again. “Do I even want to know?”

Rosella answered before he was done asking. “Absolutely not.”





Strasbourg, 1518


There is satisfaction in feeling something crumble beneath her hands. Lala puts her arm and her anger into it, the grinding of oak galls.

When the oak galls are ground, there is still rage in her hands, so she kneads hot-water dough for the gougère.

“You are fortunate.” Tante Dorenia stands alongside.

“Oh?” Lala asks. “And why is that?”

Tante inspects the rhythm of Lala’s palms. “Because in your great-great-great-grandmother’s day, la gougère was prepared in a sheep’s stomach.”

Lala kneads on, not in the mood for Tante’s history tutoring.

“Lala,” Tante says. “Why does the hare run to the forest?”

Lala tries to smile.

Garude lava, the kind of riddles Lala’s father, Tante’s own brother, so loved.

“Because the forest will not run to the hare,” Lala says.

“And who is the brother who runs after his brother but can never catch him?”

The thought of the miller’s son glaring rises in Lala’s throat like bile.

She turns over the dough, still warm on her hands. “Is that all you can think of? Riddles?” The rage that kneading the dough calmed now flares. “Why did you bring us here?”

“Because this was where we could afford to live,” Tante says.

“Not this house.” Lala looks up from her kneading. “Why Strasbourg?”

“Because it is a free city, not beholden to laws either French or German,” Tante says, her voice trimmed down to a whisper. “Because we needed a place large enough to let us disappear and large enough for us to sell our blue. Because I knew there were families we could help here.”

Yes, Lala wants to say. And look how long it was before the gadje took even that.