The phonograph table, spattered with blood, a deep gouge cut into it. We’d left it out all night.
“Gertie had her luggage with her. We forgot.”
“We?You were in charge, Aunt Jessica. Leaving blood-spatteredfurniture behind is rarely best practice.” She smiled a little. “Unless spattered blood is what the assignment calls for.”
The assignment—my assignment. I felt my stomach threatening to roil.
Grandmother remained silent, her fingers tapping at her phone. Maybe ending someone else’s life remotely, casually, a few texted words at a time.
Murder-suicide is simpler.
It had, in some ways, been simple.
First Hiromi.It has to be done, I told her, as she was already dying. She didn’t look shocked or angry, just confused.
I love you too, more breath than words.
Then him.
He stepped into the room, stilled with shock at the sight of her, of the white walls turned red, before kneeling down to help, smearing himself in blood.
I seized him from behind, the knife into his belly, pulling up. The smell of the contents of his stomach, his bowels, spilled out. I held the knife tight, cutting higher, deeper.
He groaned quietly, no fight in him as he slid to the floor. I wiped the knife and wrapped his hands around its hilt, surveyed the room.
A few minutes to arrange things, one bloody footprint of mine to smear away. I grabbed a cushion from the bed, and used it to climb out the window, leaving no trace.
Now, I wondered about Lyon’s lack of fight. Had he been drunk? High? So in love with Hiromi that something in him had shut down? Maybe he couldn’t live without her.
That was for me to do.
“Jessica,” Mother said. “You’re positively ashen. Are you well?”
“I’m still off-kilter from the accident.”
Off-kilter? Keelhauled.
“Perhaps we should stop for today,” Grandmother said, at last looking up from her phone. “Jessica’s doing the best she can.”
When I arrivedat the Great Hall—carrying a bucket of cleaning supplies, wood filler, and sandpaper—music was playing.Sleeping Beauty, whose choreography we all learned as kids. A dozen bodies with a single purpose, math in motion.
But Mary was dancing alone—no partner, no teacher. Just her in a lilac tutu, doing something I’d never done as a child.
Improvising.
She danced with certainty, taking command of the space. She didn’t follow the music; the music followed her. As if last night had cut away something that had weighed her down.
Her care, what little she had possessed, was gone.
Mary didn’t look my way, but I could feel her awareness of me. I put my bucket down and waited till the first act was over.
“I forgot to say congratulations last night,” I said, lifting the needle from the record.
She kept dancing in the silence. “Too busy puking.”
Aunts didn’t make excuses, or apologize. I’d been doing too much of both. “It was quite a spectacle. Congratulations.”
I slid the phonograph to one end of the table, revealing a deep gouge and the stains from Trotzky’s blood.