Dark and Deepest Red(60)

If she survives this, she will find a way to make up the worth to her aunt.

Tante Dorenia’s snore, a roaring, unsettling thing on the nights it has kept Lala from sleeping, now sounds of a music she will miss. Enneleyn used to say, without shame, that the prettiest women had the loudest snores. The thought of losing this one weighs deep in Lala’s stomach.

She presses a light kiss onto her sleeping aunt’s forehead, glossed with summer heat and the strain of her growing child. Tante smells of the garden, of all that Lala will miss. Of wild thyme and tansy, of yarrow and feverfew, of figs and cornelian cherries drying in the sun.

She kisses her palm and then rests it against her aunt’s belly, to say goodbye to the cousin she will never meet.

She turns her back only once. She cannot bear to do it a second time.

On her way toward the city, she says goodbye to all these things that have watched her pass from little girl to reckless, heartbroken woman.

The blossoming woad, the yellow flowers of the plant that yield such blue dye.

The flax in bloom, the sky-colored petals making the field seem a mirror for the heavens.

The places that grew beneath her hands, and that grew her.





Emil


“A fire, Emil?” his mother asked.

Emil breathed out. “Please stop saying it like that. It sounds like you think I set it. Anyway, it’s out. I got it all cleaned up this afternoon.”

She set the first aid kit on the kitchen table. “What is going on with you?”

“Nothing. This season is just getting to me.”

His mother eyed the floor. “I don’t see a pair of red shoes on your feet.”

He gave a tired laugh. “And yet.”

Gerta rubbed her face against the table leg and then went for the hem of Emil’s jeans.

Gerta, one of the few signs of Briar Meadow’s falls that had stayed.

His mother gestured for his arm, with the kind of brusque insistence that left no room for objection.

She smoothed antibiotic jelly onto the side of his forearm. “It’s so strange, isn’t it?”

Emil tried not to suck air in through his teeth. “What is?”

“In Strasbourg,” she said. “All those years ago.”

Her eyes flashed between his face and his arm a couple of times, as though waiting for him to remember something. It came with an expression he knew well, one that said, Don’t you know this? I could have sworn I told you this.

“I’m sorry,” she said with a shake of her head. “I still forget sometimes you don’t want to hear about these things.”

He caught his mother’s eye. “I want to hear about these things.”

The words came out flat, but with enough weight that his mother’s expression turned.

“Red shoes were supposed to help cure the dancing plague,” she said. “And look at what they’re doing now. Everyone in red shoes falling in love, driving faster, cooking with more salt and spice. What would the sixteenth-century church think of our little town?”

The words rattled around in Emil’s head before settling.

“Wait,” he said. “What?”

“Red shoes,” his mother said. “The color was supposed to help cure the afflicted.”

“Papa didn’t say anything about that,” Emil said.

“It’s barely a footnote in the history,” his mother said, taping gauze over his burn. “Shoes dyed red with carmine, or madder, and then blessed with holy water and balsam oil and the sign of the cross. It’s a detail so small that most accounts leave it out entirely. But it’s something, isn’t it? The thought that a color could cure a fever sent by heaven or hell.”

“Red shoes,” Emil said. “Back then. This was a real thing?”

“Dozens, even hundreds of pairs.” She set the last piece of tape. “The city ordered them made. Strasbourg’s most powerful men paid for the leather and dye, the work of the city’s craftsmen, and the travel of priests to Saverne to bless them. It’s a strange fact in a strange corner of history, n’est-ce pas?”

Emil set his free hand against the edge of the table. He didn’t realize until he did it that he was trying to steady himself, stop everything from moving.

Red shoes.

However much this was about him and Rosella, it was just as much about her family and his.

They were up against five centuries in more ways than she knew.

Why did we stop being friends? she’d asked him.

He’d let her think it was just that he couldn’t take the teasing, the jokes about them being girlfriend and boyfriend. But it had never been about that, not really.

It was because her family’s prayers to la Virgen de Guadalupe let her understand his grandmother’s prayers to Sara la Kali. It was because their families both celebrated their dead as much as they mourned them. It was because the Olivas’ familiarity with curanderas meant she understood him telling her about drabarimos, and the work of a drabarni.

It was because she always used the word Romani, instead of the slur most of their classmates turned it into.

Every time Rosella didn’t reject something about Emil, it made it harder for him to reject it about himself.

He didn’t fight to stay friends with her, because it would have meant fighting to keep some part of himself he knew he couldn’t have.