La Famille du Loup

White sheets and a whiter neck, with crimson flowers blooming fast. Ruby roses mar expensive sheets and red petals glisten on a pale Adam’s apple.

            My hands are hot and slick with it- it, which covers the walls, which swirls in intricate patterns, which covers the carpet, which eats at the corners of my vision.

            His eyes are China doll’s eyes, his skin just as waxen.

            It’s always the same. It’s always everywhere- red in my eyes, red in my mouth, biting and metallic.

            And it’s always here I wake, damp with sweat and dotted with goosebumps in the frozen December air. My heart slams itself against my ribs like a caged animal, and I sink my hands into my bed sheets, surprised and yet relieved to find them white as they were before I sank into my nightmare.

            A sigh escapes my lips, and with a shudder I slip out of bed, hopping lightly over the creaky board and tiptoeing into the hallway, where my fate stands opposite at the end of hall.

            A grandfather clock. I have taken to measuring the monetary value of all our possessions in bodies. The grandfather clock hands which tick and tock with a rigor mortis stiffness toward midnight are the lifeless hands of a Marquis. My locket is the slit throat of a banker who made one too many faulty loans. Our house is built on a foundation of stacked heads with lolling tongues and rotting eyes sockets.  

            My eyes are fixed on the ever-swinging pendulum, as though somehow I can stop it from its predetermined course.

            The hall is silent, and blue-tinted with soft night, the fog of quiet broken only by the harsh objections of the grandfather clock.

            Tick.

            Tock.

            Two minutes now.

            Tick.

            Tock.

            I feel myself sink to the ground, burying my fingers in the softness of our Persian rug, two poisoned royal advisors.

            Tick.

            Tock.

            One minute.

            And then the crash. A resounding bong rings out twelve times.  

            Dry mouth, dry throat, dry eyes. I swallow and feel as though I’m swallowing my tongue. I shut my eyes methodically, the grandfather clock blurring and swirling into an indistinguishable blackness.

            “Happy birthday, Addie.” My words smoke in the freezing air.

            “Christ!”

            My head snaps and I see the face of my brother stained indigo by night and  contorted by a look of shock. The floor protests as he shifts his weight from leg to leg. There’s a sour scent of alcohol reeking from him. “Mother doesn’t like you doing that.”

            It’s too dark to see, but I know he has just rolled his eyes. “Mother doesn’t like a lot of things.”

            A heavy silence squeezes into the space between us.

            Tick.

            Tock.

            “It happened again,” I say. My voice in the quiet seems intrusive, too loud.

            His shoulders slump in a great sigh. “You’re going to have to be more specific than that.”

            “The nightmares,”

            “I know,”

            “About the blood,”

            “I know,”

            I bite my lip. “Pierre,”

            He doesn’t respond, only leans against the wall, still gangly at nineteen, still with an unsure sense of where to put his limbs, confused by a new-found sense of being a man countered by the puerile tangle of strawberry-blonde hair sprouting from every imaginable direction on his head.

            “Pierre,” I repeat.

            “It gets easier,” he says without looking at me.

            I say nothing.

            “It really does, I swear.”

            “I don’t think I can.” My voice is small, that of a little girl’s.

            He inches toward his room, tangible discomfort oozing from his pores. “You’ll be surprised at what you can do.”

            His answers aren’t sufficient. “Pierre…”

            “Yes?”

            The question I want to ask, the question he knows I want to asks hangs in the air, unsaid, as always. A shimmering bubble of that which one does not ask. We pause a moment, waiting to see if I have courage to break it.

            What does it take to kill a man?

            “Whose side are we on?”

             “What do you mean?” The shadows mask his emotions from me.

            “Whose side are we on, Pierre? That man, the one you were assigned last-”

            A scoffing sound scrapes from the bottom of his throat. “For God’s sake Adeline, don’t be euphemistic. I killed him last week. Yeah. Jacques d’Etienne.”

            “Jacques d’Etienne.” His name tastes like bile, feels like lead.

            “Yes.”

            “He wasn’t a marquis, he wasn’t in the government- he was a common man. He was a revolutionary, Pierre, he-”

            The unsaids are back, floating in a tempest around my head, what is it that goes through your head the moment before does he have children does he have a wife what is the look in his eyes do you think about him ever does he have children how do you do even-

            “I have your answer. We’re on the winning side.”

            “Which is that?”

            Tick.

            Tock.

            His eyes dart around the hallway. “Money. Money always wins.”

            My hands fly to my locket. What else could I measure my possessions in? One silver locket, how many tears of the widow d’Ettienne? I try to swallow again. “Who did you go out with tonight?”

            Another shrug. “My friends,”

            “Revolutionaries.”

            Pierre shifts his weight from one foot to the next. “Does it matter?”

            “Revolutionaries.”

            “Yes,”

            My stomach is clenched. “It’s not right. It’s not right that we play both sides. You can’t do that.”

            “Yeah? Well, life’s not a chess game. And the last thing you’d want to be is a pawn.” With a heaving sigh, he plops down beside me. “It’s a shame, really.”

            “What is?”

            “That you were born so damn nice, Adeline de Loup.”

            The words feel like blows. “I think you’re nice,” I’m so quiet I can barely hear myself.

            He twists his mouth into a tight smile. “I’m really not. Not anymore.”

            I’m supposed to say something here. But there’s nothing. Nothing really anymore. I’m supposed to defend him.

            Defend my brother.

            Defend a killer.

            The laugh that bubbles from his throat is acrid and stinging. “It’s alright. Really! It’s alright.” His expression suddenly shifts to one of furrowed eyebrows and inquisitiveness. “You ever wonder why we don’t go to mass?”

            “I-” but he wasn’t looking for my answer.

            “I asked.” His eyes are full of an emotion I can’t quite place. “I asked Father when I was seventeen. When it was my turn.”

            “What did he say?”

            “Don’t you get it?” His whispering is more alarming than shouts ever could be. “You’re about to go through training, just like I did, just like Father did, just like his father did. And now, I see you, and I see a body. I see thirteen distinct places where you’re exposed right now. I see at least seventeen objects in this hallway with which I could kill you. Don’t you get it?”

            I shake my head. My internal organs twist with his words.

            “It’s us. We’re gods. We decide.”

            “We work for money.”

            He scoffs. “You put your money where your heart is.”

            “We’re not gods. We’re assassins.” And when you walk down the street what do you think Pierre do you think I can kill you and you and you and I would do it in this way this way this way this way do you see people at all Pierre or do you just see beating hearts and pumping lungs and little hour glasses over our heads waiting for the right amount of money to break them oh Pierre.

            “This is the only thing that protects you.” Spying my incredulous look, he continues, his whisper harsher, angrier. “Do you know what’s outside?”

            “Sh, don’t be so-”

            “It’s Madame Guillotine, and her children are thirsty for an aristocrat’s blood!” He gesticulates out, out there, out on the streets, to the discontent of the rabble. “Are you going to give it to them Addie? Your own? We would be dead by now if we weren’t—”

            “Killing people.”

            We both have to laugh at this.

            “It doesn’t sound like we’re gods at all. We worship the mob.”

            Pierre considers this. “People live their whole lives for death. Then death is God, and we’re his high priests, and we can only hope he gives us a little extra time.”

            “I can’t.”

            “I know you can’t.” He dusts an alcohol tinged kiss on my cheek, uncurls his long limbs, slinks to his room. “And I’m going to bed. So, you know, I’ll be asleep. I wouldn’t notice. They wouldn’t notice.”

            “What?”

            “I’m saying I’m going to bed. Happy birthday, Addie.” The lock clicks, and he’s gone.

            And in that instant I realize what it is he wants me to do. What it is I have to do. And in an instant I’m in my room, stuffing clothes in a bag, I’m down the stairs, over the creaky board, almost to the door…

            “Adeline,” I turn to face the shadowy man sitting in our drawing room. He gestures to the white and black speckled marble board before him. “Care for a game of chess?” My father. “Happy birthday, by the way.” He’s got a knife. “Seventeen already.”