The Book of Speculation: A Novel

It began with the dream of running, the bloodied knees and gasping for air. It ended with falling, forced to the kitchen floor by her grandmother’s palm against her throat, prying her lips open, pouring pitcher after pitcher of scalding water down. Boiling water overflowed her mouth, burned her gut, filling the empty places that guilt had carved.

Her cry carried through the camp, startling those nearby. Amos awoke, his body shooting into a crouch. He sniffed the air and listened. The echo brushed his skin with an electric snap. He leapt from his bed in Peabody’s wagon, threw back the velvet curtain, and followed the sound.

Toes sinking into soft ground, he crept to her upended tub. Tentative hands peeled back oilcloth and curtain. Wide eyes peered through. In the curved tub bottom she thrashed and kicked, not the woman he watched rise from the water but an animal caught in a trap. He listened. She panted. No, she choked. She couldn’t breathe, was tossing, was not right, was afraid.

He climbed in beside her, fingers grazing her cheek. He pressed a hand to her shoulder and felt a pull. Come here. He shook her gently, surprised by the softness of her skin and how cool she was despite the heat.

Evangeline’s eyes opened. She jerked away, knocking her body heavily against the tub’s boards, her mouth working but making no sound. Amos understood. There was too much sound, it couldn’t leave all at once. She shuddered against the wall.

He touched her collarbone. Her arms went around him and he noticed a deep red welt on her shoulder from the staves. It was a fascinating thing. He traced the edges, circling with his fingertips. A mottled, dark spot against her skin, a flush gone too deep—how could a bruise be so lovely? He tried to take her from the bed, away from the dream. He tugged her hand but she held tighter and cried more. Water ran from her eyes. He didn’t understand why, but it made him need to hold to her. When he tried to put her down, to coax her back to sleep, she would not move. She felt like something warm that wouldn’t take shape in his head, a fuzzy memory, something from before, when he’d been small.

He thought they would lie down, that he would curl up on the mattress with the very soft girl with the bumpy knees and the pretty bruise. She slept. Yes, Evangeline could sleep. Amos decided he would stay awake. Just in case. She was very scared and soft like duck’s down.

*

Desperate to empty the space of stale air and bad spirits, Madame Ryzhkova had opened her wagon door and looked across the rain-soaked clearing. Then she’d heard the scream. A shiver at the base of her neck, the cold a woman feels when the dead speak her name. She’d heard the sound before, had traveled oceans to escape it. She’d closed her eyes quickly, only to summon the image of a man’s pale hand with familiar square fingertips disappearing below the surface of a frigid stream. When she’d opened her eyes again she saw the shadow of her apprentice running. To where the drowning girl slept. Ryzhkova’s lip curled. She spat to keep from saying it, but the name would not be contained. “Rusalka.”

*

In the first light of morning, Peabody found them together, a bundle of tired bodies, half buried in straw from a torn mattress. Amos’s arm curved tightly around the wing of Evangeline’s shoulder; his fingers brushed an ugly bruise. They made an oddly joined puzzle, but the pieces fit in the right craggy places. It had been years since he’d felt longing like the boy did, at least ten since his wife had passed. He wanted to pat the boy on his head, to muss his hair a little, but thought it best not to wake them. He quietly pulled the oilcloth down, then patted himself on the back at his good fortune. A future filled with wonderful children—Wild Boys and mermaids, fortune-tellers and dancers—profitable beauties, all.





9

JULY 15TH


The sound of shuffling paper wakes me. Enola is up, at my desk, and thumbing through my notebook, her hair sleep-flattened on one side. The front door is cracked and the wind off the beach is sharp with salt. I yawn. Without looking she points to the floor, where a steaming cup sits. We both know better than to talk before coffee.

It’s terrible coffee, burned, but not having to make it myself makes it delicious. She tips the chair back and drinks her own cup.

“Thanks.”

“I looked at your notebook,” she says.

“I noticed. I’d appreciate it if you didn’t go through my things.”

“Those names, the women—they’re relatives?”

“Best I can tell. You know circus people. It’s hard to figure out who anybody really is.” Names have a way of changing as people disappear into shows and new anonymous lives, drifting in and out with the wind.

“They’ve all drowned.”

Something in her voice makes me say, “My sources are a little spotty.”

She gnaws a little on her lip. “You think they’re suicides, don’t you?”