Dark and Deepest Red(42)

“Do you want to come in?” he asked. “We’ve gotten her out of the habit of biting. Mostly.”

Gerta batted first at the edge of the sofa and then at the hem of my jeans.

“Gerta,” Emil said, as though trying to reason with her.

“She’s not bothering me,” I said.

“Not yet.”

As though she understood, the cat arched her back, pricked her ears, and showed her teeth.

“And this is why I don’t have a girlfriend.” Emil picked her up, and she turned into a purring round. “She does this every time.”

“Sure, blame the cat,” I said.

He petted Gerta’s ears.

“Can I get you anything?” he asked. “Water? Tea? Coffee strong enough that you can chew it?”

My laugh sounded more tired than I meant it to. “I’m okay.”

He set the cat down, his shirt now flecked with orange fur. “Be nice, liebling.” The sound in his voice brought me back to grade school, how he spoke the same as his parents, any German word tinted with a French accent and the other way around.

Yvette Woodlock breezed through the living room. I always saw her and Julien in town, alternating who picked up both of their suits at the dry cleaner’s. She was fine boned without seeming birdlike, with black hair that fell in even waves I’d always envied, and thin-framed glasses so much like Emil’s I wondered if they’d bought them together. Even in her own home, she wore neat slacks and collared shirts that would have looked stuffy if she didn’t have that cloud of French refinement always following her.

At first glance, Yvette and her husband seemed mismatched. Julien, taller and broader than both his wife and his son, had hair a little like old photos of Einstein. Already all white, it grew less neat throughout the day because he put his hands in it whenever he was thinking. He threw papers in fanned messes across his desk, always able to find a particular one despite the chaos. (Emil took after his mother, with her labeled folders and paper clips always fastened straight up and down.)

Each insisted they were the better cook, Yvette tidily recording her recipe for sauerkraut with onions and butter and flat champagne, while Julien thought instructions deadened the soul of the chef.

Now Yvette noticed me.

“Oh,” she said, surveying me in a way that was surprised but not unfriendly. “?a fait longtemps.”

I gave Yvette the best smile I had, though I felt it on my own face, weak and watered down.

Yvette Woodlock’s gaze was as sharp and unyielding as the fairy tales she used to tell our class. Snow White’s queen demanding her heart as proof that she was dead, the hunter cutting out the heart of a deer. The queen made to dance herself to death in iron shoes. Stepsisters cutting off parts of themselves for nothing but a glass slipper and a prince so boring we never learned his name.

Only Yvette Woodlock could tell us fairy stories and have it seem like she was telling us the truth about how the world worked.

“If my son takes you outside,” Yvette said to me on her way out of the room, “wear protective equipment.”

“What?” I asked Emil.

“Thanks a lot, Maman,” Emil mumbled.

Yvette paused next to her son. “Ne sois pas un poulet mouillé,” she said, talking to him but glancing at me.

Emil shut his eyes in the same cringing, forced smile I had given my parents a hundred times.

“Do I want to know?” I asked Emil when Yvette was out of the room.

“Absolutely not,” he said.

I started remembering what the Woodlocks’ house smelled like, all the different kinds of tea they kept in their kitchen. Black and chamomile, dried berries and cloves, fennel and rose hip.

I wondered if Emil had memories of my house that mirrored mine of his. My mother teaching Emil to make a tortilla at the same time she taught me, when we were six, our hands shaping the masa. How making manriklo with Yvette meant Emil was instantly better at it than I was, and how I never heard the end of it from my mother.

A slash of pain crossed my anklebone. I took a slow breath to keep myself from reacting. The air I drew in brought the smell of everything else I remembered from the Woodlocks’ downstairs. Wood and paper. Yvette’s favorite rosemary candles. And another smell I’d come to think of as the ink in their books.

“Are you okay?” Emil asked.

“Yeah,” I said. “I just stopped by because I wanted to say thank you.”

Stopped by. As though Emil’s house was on the way from my house to anything in Briar Meadow.

“And I’m sorry for taking off like I did,” I said.

“Don’t worry about it,” he said. “Can I ask what you were doing out there?”

“It’s stupid,” I said, feeling the pinprick of anticipating my own lie. “I was looking at the glimmer and I just lost my balance.”

He gave the kind of half-raised-eyebrow, slow nod I remembered from years ago.

I remembered it meaning he didn’t believe me at all. Like when I said the bruise on my knee was from the stairs when really it was from trying to imitate Sylvie’s ballet-class pirouettes. Or when I told him I’d missed school because I had a cold when it had been because my cousins got me to eat something that contained the nuts I was allergic to (like hell I was telling Emil about the hives, so many of them that my painkiller-fuzzed brain couldn’t count them).