Juniper & Thorn(36)

Breathing all too steadily, I went to the icebox. My scarred hands lifted the lid. It was empty.

No, this couldn’t be. I closed the lid and opened it again, as if it were a music box and I could reset the song, start it over from the beginning. But still there was nothing inside.

I could not understand. I had cooked a chicken liver with browned onions for Papa last night, and it was well before Sunday, which was shopping day, when my father went out into the city and came back with all the meat and vegetables we needed for the week. The icebox had been full of varenyky filling and the jars stuffed to the brim with pickled cabbage and whitefish.

I let the lid slide shut and stood up and perused the shelves. There were only vials of herbs, mostly empty, and onion skins that lined the cabinet floor like autumn foliage. A roach skittered inches from my reaching fingers. I closed the cabinet door.

And then fear spread deep and cold in me, like a pond in winter. Papa had gone into the sitting room; I heard the floorboards groaning under his weight and the silk of his housecoat rasping against the couch’s velvet cushions. The kettle on the stove had gone silent, and the water I’d poured into the teacups was only lukewarm.

My bare feet were numb against the tile as I crossed the threshold of the kitchen, to where Papa sat, without anything but my own trembling, empty hands.

“Marlinchen,” he said. The bags under his eyes were exceptionally purple and fat. “Where is my breakfast?”

“There’s nothing,” I managed, the words squeezed through the small gap in my closing throat. “The icebox and the cabinets are empty. All the food is gone.”

I watched the fury rise in Papa, fettered behind his eyes and bound in the white knuckles of his clenched fists. His whole body shook like a spirit trapped in an oil lamp. He stood up and came close to me, so close that I could smell the sourness of sleep still on his breath and see each bristling hair of his beard, straws of indigo that held none of the buttery morning sunlight, that swallowed all of it up into a matte and pitiless blue.

I shut my eyes and readied myself for the blister of air that his screams would visit across my face. But all that came was a whisper.

“I’m so hungry, Marlinchen,” he said, his voice dreadfully soft. “I feel like there’s a snake in my belly that eats the food that falls down my throat. I feel like it’s been a hundred years since I last put a bite of anything on my tongue. I can hardly remember the taste of pork varenyky or sour cream or blackberry kvass. The curse has its teeth in my mind, not just in my stomach. It’s chewed up all the parts of me that remember what it’s like to be full. What it’s like to be sated. It hurts, Marlinchen. It hurts.”

I opened my eyes. There were tears beading on Papa’s stubbly lashes, which were as blue as his beard but finer, limned with sunlight that made his tears look like morning dew on wheat grass. It took another moment, the grandfather clock ticking out each unbearable second, before I understood.

“Did you eat it all?” I squeaked out. “Everything in the icebox and the cabinets—”

Before I could finish, and in one swift, uninterrupted movement, Papa’s hand was on my chin, fingernails digging into my cheeks. I gasped as his thumb pushed down hard against my throat, hearing my own pulse thumping under his skin.

“Would my own daughter be so cruel to me?” he rasped. “Must I tell you how I stood over the sink and ate the cold filling of the varenyky in my bare fists? Must I paint such an image in your mind? Must I tell you how I shattered the glasses of cabbage and whitefish and licked them clean down to their shards? It would be another curse, to have to confess such things so baldly in the morning light. Surely you do not wish to curse me so. You are not that sort of witch.”

That’s what he had done, then, as I had danced with Sevas in the tavern, as we had strolled down the boardwalk. As I had laughed and pretended to be an ordinary girl, or a swan-maiden with feathers in her hair, oblivious to the strings that bound me, my father had been here, devouring everything within his reach.

“I’m sorry, Papa,” I whispered. “I didn’t know.”

Yet how could I have known? For years I had cooked him the same three meals, and they had sated him well enough, and he had not needed to raid my stores in a desperate midnight panic. I was lucky that he had not passed by my bedroom in his feverish craving. But I felt somehow that my jaunt had caused this. I had a secret now, and though Papa had not uncovered it himself, it had shifted the stones in his stream bed.

I had always been told my magic did not have that sort of power: the power to do or change or make. And yet in some sneaky, winding way, I had done this to Papa; I had made him hurt.

“The curse has grown with me, Marlinchen,” Papa said, his voice still low. “With every wrinkle that forms on my face or every silver hair I find in my beard, there is another pang of hunger in my belly. Titka Whiskers was truly a serpent of a woman. Her venom is still hot in my veins.”

His hands were still on my face, but my heart gave a horrible wrenching of guilt, of pity. Whatever Papa had done, whatever way he made us live, this was a fate he did not deserve. Such agony, and all I had to do to ease some of it was a bit of labor in the kitchen. It would have been extraordinarily cruel of me to refuse. I would have been the meanest of all the daughters, in all the stories, written and real. Undine had already chosen cruelty, and Rose had chosen cleverness. What else was left for me but kindness? Third daughters always got the last pick of everything.