Harvest of Sighs

Chapter 10-2

“Convivificat,” I say aloud, thinking of the words etched onto the altar. The lettering looked newer than Roman to me, just by the shape of the letters, but how much newer is hard to say. Long enough for the grass to grow over the altar, I suppose.

“I still don’t know why she wrote it,” Poe says, looking down at the book with distinct yearning. “But it’s nice to know the history of it, you know?”

“And the altar.”

“Isn't that part wild?” she asks. “The altar being older than everything else in that clearing?” And then she frowns to herself. “Well, other than the door, maybe.”

“The door?”

She looks away from me and the book, off to the window. As if she’s embarrassed. “It’s going to sound very, um, bizarre, but I’ve seen a door. Behind the altar. Mostly in my dreams, but also glimpses of it when I’m awake, and then Auden saw it too. After Beltane.”

“A door,” I repeat. “Like an actual door? A door that takes up space in the real world?”

She winces. “Yeah.”

I have walked every inch of that clearing in every possible weather, mood, and time of day, and I’ve never, ever seen a door behind the altar. So why does the idea of it raise goosebumps along my arms?

“Hmm.” But I don’t say anything else about it and neither does she.

I set down the book and we walk downstairs together, Sir James running ahead of us, and then wheeling back, and then running ahead again.

“Also I didn’t mean to pressure you about the gala,” Poe says as we reach the door. “If seeing Auden is too painful, then I understand. I just—surely there is some way you can stay close to each other? Even if it looks different than you thought it would?”

I kiss her.

I kiss her because I love her, and I love her hope, and I can’t bear to snuff it out.

But I know the truth, and the truth is that there is no staying close to Auden Guest.

You either fall at his feet or flee into the hills. That’s it.

I walk home.

The walk itself is very easy—a mile of barely used country lane, lined by ancient hedges and frowned over by enormous, creaking trees. There’s some hills—but where aren’t there in Dartmoor, honestly—and there’s the occasional walker using the lane to jump onto the next section of public footpath, but other than that, it’s an easy, lonely heaven. When I was a boy, I liked to pretend that I was on my way to the Prancing Pony; when I got older, I used to put on my headphones and listen to all sorts of sad and wistful music and imagine myself in a sad and wistful music video. Now I see it as Dr. Davidson might see it—a lane following the route of an ancient road, which follows the line of an even older path. An artery running from the valley’s heart out to the village, a thread connecting the sacred to the profane.

How did Poe’s mother see it, I wonder, the lane which ribboned through the trees to her eventual death? Did she know? Did she have an inkling the last time she came here? Was there a part of her that knew as she walked over the bridge and into the world of Thornchapel that she’d never see another dawn?

And my own mother? How many times must she have walked down this road—a tiny me skipping or sulking by her side—and had to pass the turn for the estate, had to listen to the whisper of the little streamlet guarding the old house from the rest of the world?

Was I conceived after a walk down this lane? Did she walk back to the village afterward feeling happy? Ashamed? Hopeful? Ralph was a monster, and my mom was perfect, and so how did they come together? How could it ever have happened?

There’s some halfhearted drizzle by the time I get to the house, enough to make all the rooms gloomy and gray, and by the time I take off my jacket, kick off my boots, and hunt down an apple to eat, I feel that dull ache in my chest again. Those blunt scissors around my heart.

Snip snip snip.

I poke around my mom’s office for a minute or two, not sure what I even want to find, and then I spend an embarrassing amount of time looking at the picture of Richard Davey on my mother’s desk, too shy to actually pick it up. He’s gingery and red-cheeked and grinning. If I concentrate very hard, I can remember clambering over him, hugging him, pulling on his beard. I can remember the sharp, painty scent of him; I can remember how he used to draw me robots and mermaids whenever I asked, which was often.

He loved me.

And I know, in an abstract sort of way, that Richard is still my father. That Ralph’s DNA can mean as little as I want it to—at least when it comes to how I think of my family and who raised me.

But it still feels like something’s been ripped out of my hands, something I didn’t even know I was supposed to hold onto, and now I can never get it back.

Suddenly I’m backing away from the picture, I’m pressed against the wall, I’m sliding down to the floor and staring at the half-eaten apple in my hands like it holds all the answers. Like it can reassure me that I was loved and that I deserved it, and that those robots and mermaids and cuddles were given out of anything other than pity.

I wanted to do this, but later, because it’s too early, it’s still so early in the morning in Mexico City. But I can’t stop myself from finding my phone and pulling up Ana María’s number. She’s a vampire, though, so maybe she hasn’t even gone to bed yet. Maybe she’s still awake, curled up on her couch with her latest paranormal romance and a cigarette.

I press call and then feel hope and dread both as I hear her pick up.

“St. Sebastian, if your mother were alive to see how you neglect your family, you know what she’d say.”

“Ana María,” I say in Spanish, trying to sound normal and soothing and not at all like I’ve been in hell the past two days. “I’ve been busy. I work for my uncle here—”

“I know all about you working for your uncle,” she interrupts. Ana María is the kind of relative that knows everything—even when you’d rather that she not. “And I know you call your grandmother and grandfather almost every week,” she goes on, “but you can’t call me once in an entire year?”

I could point out that my grandparents helped raise me and also that Ana María is only a cousin—my mom’s cousin at that, which makes her like a second cousin. Or a cousin once removed or something. I could point out that I’m calling her now, so it makes very little sense to scold me about not doing the thing she wants me to do while I’m actually doing it.

But I want her help, and also I can’t help but like her. She may be bossy, she may mail me selenite wands and abalone shells and smudge sticks, but she’s also funny and generous and loves all the same books I do.

Also I’ve spent the last three months doing breathlessly filthy things out in the woods, so I’m the last person who should judge about abalone shells.

“I’m sorry, you’re right, it’s been too long,” I apologize. “But I need your help.”

“Hmph,” she says, but she only manages to resist asking her next question for a few seconds. “What help?”

I take a deep breath. “I need to know about my father.”

“Richard?”

“No. Not Richard.”

I might be the first person in the world to successfully quiet Ana María for any length of time. And . . . her silence is all the confirmation I need.

“I know you know the truth,” I say after a few heavy moments without either of us saying anything. “I know you know who he was.”

More silence. I wonder what she’s looking at right now. If she’s staring at her shrine of Santa Muerte, thinking of how I’m named for her. If she’s missing my mother, who was her best friend. If she’s staring at the picture of Jesus on her wall—the picture, the only one the women in my family seem to like: a frowning, silky-bearded god with a heart of thorns.

I wonder if she’s thinking of what to say to me.

There’s the flick of a lighter and a long breath in. The habit she and my mother both picked up when they spent a semester studying abroad in France. When she speaks, I can practically see the smoke floating up toward the ceiling. “How did you find out?” she asks.

I can hardly say I found out after waking up s*x-sore and happy in my half-brother’s room, so I try to find a reasonable facsimile of the truth. “Apparently Ralph had arranged for a letter to be sent after his death. To his legitimate son.” Legitimate. What a stupid word. And yet I hate all the other words even more. Acknowledged. Recognized.

Chosen.

“I just—” I don’t know how to go on, because I have every question in the entire world and yet I have no questions left inside me at all. There’s a hollowness where the questions should be, an empty fatalism, which just says of course, over and over again. Of course the one good thing I’d found, the one home, the one place for my heart—of course that would be taken away.

And of course Auden would be the one to do it.

“I don’t understand,” I finally manage to say. “When did they meet? How? And why would she lie about it to me? Why go through the whole charade of pretending Richard was my father if it was Ralph all along? And then the money—” I break off because suddenly the money makes sense, suddenly it all makes sense.

Of course that’s why he gave her the money. Of course. Ralph fathered me so he paid for me. Noblesse oblige applies to bastard sons too, and as much as I imagine it hurt my mother’s pride to take it, she did anyway.

Ana María takes an audible drag, holds it in for a long moment, and then sighs. “She was very young, you have to understand, just out of college, and we both—as girls, we both loved magic. Everything about it. So when she took the job working for the paper out there and one of her first assignments was profiling the festivals celebrated in Thorncombe, she was thrilled.”

Another inhale, the next words coming out on the coughing exhale. “And then she met Ralph. The next thing I knew, she was seeing him every day. The next thing I knew, she was in love.”

“He would have been married.” I have a faint memory of Auden’s parents being congratulated on their twentieth anniversary at Mass when I was sixteen. “He was married.”

I hear Ana María take another drag, perhaps using the time to think of what to say. “Love is often wrong, St. Sebastian. It’s often wrong about everything.”

And what can I say to that? It’s a lesson I was too stubborn to learn back when it would’ve done me any good.

“She knew he was married, of course, but I think she loved him too much to stop. And that was the first year he was trying to revive the old ways.” Ana María pauses then. “Do I need to explain those to you?”