The Last Tale of the Flower Bride(60)



In the mornings, Indigo and I would go to Tati’s bedroom. We would slide braided bracelets around her wrists and hang woven blond and brunette pendants from her neck. We wrapped her in memory and hoped that she would return.

I was never sure if it made a difference though. Tati seemed almost comatose during our visits. One day, while Indigo ran to the kitchens to fetch her a bowl of lukewarm broth, I watched Tati’s face closely. Her eyelids were closed tight. Indigo and I used to do that when we were pretending to be asleep.

“Tati?” I whispered, placing a hand on her wrist. “Are you awake?”

She looked different now. The stark lights leached the cinnamon warmth from her skin. Her body was too slender, hollowed out by the loss of her sight and her mind. Her shorn head was bandaged and stippled with age spots that I’d never realized were underneath those beautiful headscarves. I ran my fingers over the velvet nap of her scalp, wondering if I might feel the hard outline of the secret she kept in her skull. Tati’s last words had carved a space out of me, and in that new darkness, something I could not bring myself to look at bloomed—I saw it all wrong.

I wasn’t sure what I’d seen that night. I caught a flash of Indigo’s white nightdress in the hallway after I found Tati, but that couldn’t be right. The moment I’d screamed, Indigo appeared at the base of the stairs. She was wearing black. I had been out of it before I found Tati, dreaming, and sleeping in a pile of petals. I must have been confused.

“Tati.” I leaned in close and whispered. “What did you see?”

Her eyes opened. My face was only a few inches away from hers. Tati’s lips smacked wetly. Her milky eyes landed on nothing. And then, she opened her mouth and screamed.

Mrs. Revand threw open the doors, rushed inside. Indigo stood outside the threshold, her face curiously blank.

“Give her time,” said Mrs. Revand as she reached for a syringe and grabbed Tati’s thrashing arm.

“I saw nothing!” Tati bellowed. “I don’t want to see!”

“Shhh, Miss Hippolyta, there’s nothing to see,” murmured Mrs. Revand. She glanced at me over her shoulder. “You girls go play. I’ll take care of this.”

I met Indigo outside the door. I could feel the House’s worry—the floorboards vibrated, tapestries slipped off their hooks, the walls sagged. I rubbed my palm along the banister and tried to soothe it.

Beside me, Indigo was quiet. We hadn’t been alone in a while. At night, Indigo fell into an exhausted, dreamless sleep and in the morning, solicitors and agents clamored for her attention. We hadn’t been back to school in the two weeks since the accident, and though arrangements had been made so my grades wouldn’t suffer, those two weeks melted into one long, terrible night without the rhythm of schoolwork. Even my mother did not try to summon me home. When she heard about Tati’s misfortune, she had only closed her eyes.

Take all the time you need with her, she’d said.

I’d always thought I’d feel relieved—victorious, even—the day I saw guilt in my mother’s eyes, but when it finally happened, all I felt was exhaustion. How did we come to this? I wanted to ask her from where we stood on opposite ends of the dingy kitchenette. But Tati, the one who had kissed my scraped knees since I was ten years old, needed me, and so I left.

“It’s Tati’s fault, you know,” said Indigo as she brewed us cups of hibiscus tea.

I was the one who had found Tati screaming and scratching at her face. I didn’t see any signs of fault. Only pain.

“You heard her,” said Indigo, glancing upstairs, like she could see through the kitchen ceiling and into Tati’s bedroom. “She saw something she shouldn’t. Maybe she tried to get into the Otherworld when we weren’t there, and the fae punished her. Divine things don’t like to be exposed like that. She’s lucky it wasn’t a goddess who could send packs of wild dogs after her or a god hurling thunderbolts.” Indigo shivered, and only then did the cold in her voice thaw. “But that’s how you can tell the Otherworld loves us. They kept her alive for us when they should’ve done so much worse.”

Indigo loved Tati. She wept when we went to the hospital. She tested every tea and broth in the morning to make sure it wasn’t too hot, and when we left Tati’s room, Indigo always kissed her on the cheek. I knew she didn’t mourn like others did. Even when her own parents died, she told me she hardly wept.

“The sacred world has its own calculus,” she said.

There was no reason for me to look closely at the set of her mouth or the angle of her shoulders. Still, I did.

“Where were you when Tati got hurt?”

Indigo frowned. “Why?”

“I never had a chance to ask you,” I said carefully. My eyes must have given me away though. Indigo was wearing the same black linen shift from the night of Tati’s accident and I stared at it now, certain that she had worn something else earlier in the evening.

“I thought you were wearing a white dress that night,” I said.

“Oh, that,” said Indigo, plucking at the cloth. “I’d gotten some paint on my white nightgown, so I was changing in the laundry room when I heard you scream.”

I nodded. I wanted that dark space inside me to disappear . . . but I’d looked in the laundry room and I’d found no sign of the white dress.

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