The Last Tale of the Flower Bride(9)

One spring afternoon, the phone rang. I did not know it at the time, but this was the moment when everything changed. I was reviewing plans for a new project while Indigo read through some correspondence from her charitable organizations. We rarely received direct calls on the landline, and Indigo startled.

“Yes?” She held the receiver away from her. Her lips flattened. The pen dropped from her hand. I watched her draw some shutter over herself even before she raised her eyes to look at me.

“Of course,” she said to the person on the other end.

She hung up. I waited.

“Tati, my aunt, is dying,” she said. “She needs to see us. I don’t know how much time she has left.”

“When do we leave?”

Indigo looked out the window toward the sea. When she spoke, I had the impression she was addressing someone who was not in the room.

“We leave for the House of Dreams tomorrow.”





Chapter Five

The Bridegroom




As a scholar, I have always found dreams to be frustrating—if not lazy—motifs. They might be portents or prophecies, messages or mysteries. Dreams might pass through gates of horn and speak true, or sneak through gates of ivory and speak false. At its heart, a dream is a door.

Sometimes there is nothing behind the door, only the stacked faces of strangers. Sometimes the door holds row upon row of indignities plucked and preserved like fruit out of season. And sometimes the door is a piece of yourself that has been exiled and severed for reasons you have been made to forget, and it is only in dream that it dares to show itself.

The night before we left for the House of Dreams, my brother came to me.

He has never come to me in dreams. Or in nightmare. He has only ever existed in the twilight of waking when I considered the impossible and folded it away before the sun could see.

In the dream, my brother’s back is turned to me as he crawls to the great cedar armoire in my parents’ hallway. My brother, forever on the cusp of six years old, clambers inside. I yell for him. I watch his pink toes as he melts into the dark. I am reminded of the jackets in the armoire, of my father’s wool coat that I once wore around the house, trumpeting the sleeve as if I were an elephant. For a moment, I hear my brother laugh.

A small, pudgy hand reaches out from the dark of the closet. I walk toward him, intent upon touching him when I catch a whiff of apples. Indigo is here too. She crawls past me, her heels kicked off, her bronze hand clasping my brother’s as he pulls her into the armoire.

“Wait!” I scream to them.

But they have crossed into a world where I cannot follow.

“Indigo,” I call out, but there is no point.

She is already beyond me. I am simply the thing that marks the journey, that which is left behind to bear witness. Perhaps I am the door.

Perhaps I am the dream.



I have studied the photograph of the House of Dreams so often I thought I would recognize it instantly. But I underestimated how the House acquired its name. I’d thought it was some affectation of the rich as they planned their Washington island estate back in 1901. But Domus Somnia fit the structure perfectly.

The House was an architectural gem boasting four stories of crimson brick. Its steep, gabled roofs were supported by figurines of frowning satyrs and narrow-waisted caryatids. Huge, stained-glass bay windows graced its exterior. Rosebushes decorated the entrance, but they looked all wrong and far too bright, like lipstick on a corpse’s mouth. In a slender turret, my gaze caught on an oddly shaped window.

It was an eye.

Blue and unblinking, the pupil a perfect circle of gold.

From Indigo’s photograph, the House of Dreams had seemed nostalgic in its beauty, a grand and faded souvenir of a dead era. In person, the House felt alive. Even the passing clouds cast an illusion of the brick bulging and narrowing. Breathing.

I stared at the wrought-iron door. It creaked open and an answering ache unfastened inside me. I saw a pair of small, pale feet crawling across its shadowed threshold. For the first time in years, my mind taunted me with familiar images—jam-stained fingers, a hiccupping laugh, a handful of wishing dandelions.

You never had a brother, my parents had said.

But he was here, I realized. My brother was here, and if I walked into the House, I would find him—

Inside the car, Indigo’s hand closed over mine. The touch of her skin dragged me back to myself. I blinked. The shadows around the House skittered like a laugh.

This was the first time the House whispered to me.

It would not be the last.

“The last time I was here, Tati told me she was glad that she was blind because she’d never have to set eyes on me again,” said Indigo, staring out the window.

This was the most she had said since receiving the call. When Indigo was in one of her moods, she might as well have been made of smoke for all that I could hold her. A week ago, I might have savored this morsel of her past. Today, the sentence seemed laid out like a trap.

“I’m sorry,” I said.

Indigo was wrapped in her favorite black sable coat. She wore dark pants, heavy boots, a cream blouse that crawled up her neck, red gloves, and a mink hat pulled over her ears. On someone else it would be an ordinary, albeit elegant, ensemble for winter. But on Indigo, each piece of cloth was an intentional boundary separating her from the world.