Dark and Deepest Red(45)

“What happened to her?” is still the only question Lala can speak.

“You must come now,” the younger one says.

“Where is Enneleyn?” She is shouting it now, all in the square watching.

The sergeants take her arms and lead her away, her eyes clinging to that blue ribbon.

But the question still breaks from her lips. She yells it. “Where is she?”





Emil


Even when Rosella was gone, the smell of her stayed in the shed, that powdery, flowery smell he always thought of as belonging to the Olivas’ house. He’d learned a long time ago that it was her mother’s favorite fabric softener, one that always sat on the windowsill in its yellow bottle like a vase of flowers.

He wanted to hold on to it, that scent, their fingers touching near the burner, the way her expression shifted like the colors of flames. He wanted to know all of it as well as he knew the details of sodium and selenium.

But the question he’d had all day still knocked around in him.

A minute after his father came home, his parents were in the kitchen arguing.

Not fighting.

Arguing.

“Mon cheri,” his mother said. “We all know it is yours about the fluctuation of grain pricing according to storage method.”

“Mais non, mon trésor,” his father said. “It is clearly yours on the evolution of the codpiece.”

“That is my most popular and you know it!”

Emil set his thumb and third finger to his temples.

They were back to the long-running debate over which of them had written the most boring paper.

“Your exploration of nitrogen fixing in the arable region of the Vosges Mountains?” his mother said. “You want to talk about watching grass grow.”

“Your sixty-page treatise expounding on the ratio of domesticated to wild goats in the Bas-Rhin?” his father asked.

“It was feral goats!”

Emil cleared his throat. Loudly.

They both turned.

His mother studied him. “Tu vas bien?”

Emil looked at his mother, then his father.

Was he really doing this? He’d spent years learning as little as he could about their family. He knew his grandmother’s prayers to Sara la Kali, his cousins’ heart for certain trees. But he’d kept away from tracing their family back like his mother and father had, learning about the hundreds of years before them. Hadn’t it been talk of caring for their dead that had gotten his parents that first call home?

Emil never could turn his back on family he knew by name or face, those he kept in his own memory or who he learned in old photographs. But dredging up something five centuries old? It went against everything he’d taught himself since grade school.

He took a sharp breath like he was going underwater. “What really happened in Strasbourg?”

His mother’s stare joined Emil’s, both squarely on his father.

“You’ve made it very clear you don’t want to be bored with all this,” his father said, in a way that managed to be sad but not bitter. “So why do you ask?”

It had never been a matter of Emil being bored. Was that really what his parents thought?

“I want to know about the dancing plague,” Emil said.

His father glanced at his mother.

Then at Emil.

“People died,” his father said, the words as unadorned as in an academic paper.

“Died,” Emil said. “From dancing?”

“Their hearts gave out,” his mother said softly. “They had strokes. They, more or less, died of exhaustion.”

Emil braced enough to ask, “Did that happen to anyone we’re related to?”

“No,” his father said. “Not that we know of.”

“Why didn’t they stop?” Emil asked. “The dancers, I mean. They had to feel it killing them, so why did they keep going?”

“They couldn’t,” his mother said. “At least that’s how it seemed to everyone watching. There could have been some biological cause, but most likely it was a form of mass hysteria.”

“What—” Emil stumbled over the start of a question, not quite knowing where he was going until halfway in. “What stopped it?”

“We don’t know that either,” his mother said.

“What do they think stopped it?”

His father looked away.

“Papa,” Emil said. “What do they think cured it?”

His parents swapped another look.

“Will you two stop trying to signal each other and just tell me?” Emil asked.

His father sighed in a way so heavy Emil felt it in his own chest.

“Emil,” his father said. “Two of our relatives weren’t just in Strasbourg during the dancing plague.”

Emil’s heart tightened, and he almost stopped his father, told him he didn’t want to know. The air hummed in a way that told the truth a second before his father could.

“They were blamed for it,” Emil said, the words falling between him and his parents. “Weren’t they?”

The girl, the woman, in his dreams. A fever from five hundred years ago.

The screaming.

Emil hovered between the two awful possibilities, two potential results of Strasbourg needing someone to blame for their dancing plague.