“Where should I carry it?”
She pointed to her heart. “Like me.”
“Like you,” I echoed. “Like you with all the secrets.”
She chewed on that for a while. Where I expected she’d turn mean, the sun made her mellow, philosophical even.
“No one gets away with life, girl,” she said wistfully, her eye closed to the sun. “Trust me, no one. Learn that, and you will save yourself a few surprises. You and you alone get to decide what part of your story you let folks see, ’cause what they see, they’ll use to peg you.”
All right, then, I decided, if we were going to have this chat, we were going to have it. “The duke is my father,” I declared. “There, I’ve said it. And it didn’t kill you or me.”
“No,” she said, “it didn’t kill you.”
We were quiet then. I had already decided the duke was my father after she went on about him the night she rambled. But knowing it was a different thing. It felt like a punch to the stomach.
“Did you love him?”
“Love? Oh God, is that where this is going?” She took the last bite of the monkey bread and worked it around in her mouth. “Beyond the duke,” she said. “Beyond him. Let me tell you: they kill strong-minded women like us. I don’t mean they literally kill them. No, what they do is chip at their hearts. If they spot your ambition, they whittle you, dissect you, reduce you. An uncommon woman is to be shunned.”
“I won’t be shunned,” I said. “I don’t care what folks say, but I won’t be shunned.”
“Ha! So, you do think you’re exceptional. You once denied it.”
I smiled. Having confirmed the bit about the duke, I was content to let that stand. It wasn’t untrue.
She was pouring herself more whiskey and I could feel her winding up to say more.
“You think I don’t know you,” she said. “I know you. I know you because I know me.” Her voice shook with emotion. “Let me tell you something, Vera. When your eyes are dark and your skin isn’t fair, you will never be in. When you have a sharp tongue. When you fail to compromise, when you are unpleasing, when you are different, when your gaze is piercing, when your eyes see, when you are quiet, when you frown because you are concentrating, when you pull at your nose in public—oh, yes—when your body is made more for work than ease, when you want men till you have them, want friends till they talk, want to be happy till all the happy things bore you, want quiet in the middle of a conversation, when all you hope for is arms around you, until you learn that they come at the price of your soul, when you are melancholy more often than not, when you are fierce in a world of feathers and folly, when you’re alone in every room you enter, you do not fit in. You never will. I know you.”
She fell back against the pillows and waved a weak hand, dismissing me, now that she was done. She’d hit all her marks. But not every mark.
My head was throbbing. When I was very small, I longed to be near her. When I was some older, I wanted to be like her. Now that I was fifteen—fifteen plus a quake—I wanted only to have what she possessed: power. The power to decide for myself who and what to love.
“I hope… I hope I never see the world as grimly as you do,” I said. “I’d rather—”
“What, die?” she scoffed. “Come, not you. You’re the ultimate survivor.” She nodded. “And that, at the end of the end, pleases me.”
“You’re pleased, but that’s as far as you go. You… don’t love,” I said with conviction, though I was just trying it on. “You’re afraid to love.”
She pulled on the arms of the chaise, struggling to lift herself higher. “You think you know me well enough to talk of my desires? You?”
“I wouldn’t… say I know you. I don’t fully know myself,” I admitted.
“There. That’s right,” she agreed.
“So why don’t you tell me. What do you, Rose of The Rose, truly love?”
“There’s only one thing worth loving, my girl. Freedom. Always I have loved my freedom.”
The Cliffs
I know his body even more so now. All these years, he’s in my skin. And to think, when so much else has fallen away. Bobby’s body blazes bright, and when little is left, you have the marks to show.
He was too thin. His teeth were too large for his mouth. He smelled of tobacco—it was in his hair, and stained into his fingers. He was careful. I didn’t want him to be careful. I wanted him to rush, to get to it. He refused. We had all night—two kids in the moonlight, knocking our bony knees together.
Everyone believes they invented it, the first time. And every time I expect it’s true. Every rustle and scoot feeling like the exploration of pioneers. Those nights in the attic, Bobby and I built a new planet out of dust and stars.
And he didn’t call me Versus, or Anyway. He called me Vera.
I could give you his body cell by cell, but I won’t. I won’t give that away.
All the men I’ve known since, and there have been quite a few, there never was another Bobby—no one so sure, so knowing in that way. That scamp. How did this boy, this scrap of an urchin, with holes in his pockets and raggedy cuffs, his hair cut with
