Angelika Frankenstein Makes Her Match(101)
Angelika nodded. A sensation began to unfold in her chest: an easing of a tightness she had held and nurtured for days. “I did tell him, Mary. From the minute I brought him back that first time, I told him that I loved him, in different ways, and he knew it.”
“Then you have done well, and it is time to lay him down.” Mary cupped a hand on Angelika’s cheek, just like she used to do when she was a child. “You will be all right. I’m here now. There’s nothing to be afraid of.” She glanced up, and her characteristic fierce frown formed. “Get that pig out of here.”
“Mary. Jolly good, we may need a third hand for this.” Victor stumbled into the room, looking every inch as exhausted as his sister. Belladonna was indeed in the doorway behind him. He set a tray of implements on the bed, where they slid around and clanged. “Oh, holy hell,” Victor cursed, putting a hand into his hair.
Angelika’s heart squeezed in sympathy. “Vic. It’s time.”
“Yes, exactly. I’ve only just gotten this finished now.” He held up a long, strange strip of what appeared to be flesh. “I can’t sew half as well as you, and I have failed so many times, but I think this is the one.” He gave Lizzie a kiss on the cheek when she came to his side. “Hello, Lizzie. We are going to give him one more turn around the mortal maypole.”
Angelika shook her head. “Listen to me. It’s time to let him go. It’s time to just . . . pray. We will be with him as he leaves, and we will let him rest in peace.”
“You can do that,” Victor said, and then held up a thick sewing needle. “But you got me thinking, Jelly. You said you’re connected at a blood level. That’s what he needs. Not broth, not prayer. Blood. Do you want it to be me or you?”
Angelika lifted herself up onto her elbows with difficulty. “You’ve made a tube?”
“Out of a rabbit’s intestine,” Victor said. “The thinnest, most impossible thing to sew. I have gone through an absolute pile of them. So many times I almost came in here and asked you to do it. And that’s when I knew how much I have taken you for granted in everything I have ever done.” He was unbuttoning his shirt, but Angelika stopped him.
“Me.”
Victor assessed his sister. “You don’t look so good.”
“It has to be me.” The press of the needle into the bend of her elbow was so painful that she shouted, and beside her, Arlo’s body twitched. They all watched with morbid fascination as the blood began to leak, spurt, and then fill the tube. Lizzie croaked. Mary fainted onto the bed. Angelika winced. “Wait, we should have put down a muslin cloth. Blood is so hard to soak out of linen.”
But then the Frankensteins did not notice anything except the neat squiggle of red that charted a course across the bed, captured in a membrane thinner than an eyelash. One wrong stitch would undo it all, but Angelika saw that her brother had applied himself thoroughly.
“You always said you cannot sew,” she said to him. “But you have done well. Whatever happens next, thank you for trying. I will never forget it.”
“This is the only tube that I managed to completely suture, and I don’t think I can reuse it. So you are going to have to hold on tight, Jelly. I just put this into him here.” Victor plunged the other needle into Arlo’s vein with detached calm. “And we wait. And we pray.” He held his sister’s gaze and put out his hand to her. “I will pray with you, my beloved sister.”
Mary was revived, Lizzie helped her into the armchair, and they both watched the impossible.
“Dear Lord,” Victor said, with his eyes closed. “Dear Lord, save him. I will do anything. Whatever it takes, I will do it. I will bleed myself into him every day if it means my sister can live with her only true love. He is better than all of us put together, and I know that sounds like a strange thing to say about a man who is completely put together.”
Everyone laughed.
Victor continued, still with closed eyes. “I have not prayed once, in my entire life. I did not pray for my parents; I did not pray to find Lizzie. I trusted the natural order of things. I trusted science, and I still do, clearly. But for the first and only prayer I will make in my life, I ask you to save him.” His eyes opened and locked on Angelika’s. “God, I am asking you to let us have him. One lifetime’s worth will do, and when he is an old man, he can return to you.”
Angelika felt a curious sensation: a sparkling, a pulling, a star sensation. She looked across the pillow. “Is he coming or going?”
“He’s right on the edge,” Victor said. Mary rounded to his side, still waxy from the sight of the blood, and her eyeline carefully averted. She assessed the man below. She put her hand on his forehead. She patted his cheek, and then put her thumb on his pulse, and was silent.
“Well?” Lizzie ventured timidly.
Mary replied with dignity, “I am praying, too.” And in the silence that followed, they all thought of the life they wished for him.
Victor wanted a brother at last, to ride horses with at sunset, stomachs full of ale. He wished for a nephew or niece so hard that he brought himself to tears.
Lizzie prayed for Angelika’s smile. She prayed for a blanket laid beneath an apple tree, and the faint buzz of bees. More than anything, she wished that a baby would look at her with Angelika’s same tart, direct gaze.