What bothered Sadie most was that she was certain Marie wasn’t feeling tormented at all. She imagined Marie almost as though she were a pastoral painting. She imagined her lying on a large bed, completely naked with a black ribbon around her neck, eating grapes. She imagined her walking in the park. She imagined her sleeping on a canoe with a book on her chest as she moved gently down the river.
Sadie stood at the back of the ship one evening. There were animals underneath the ship. Entire cities of them. There were whales who opened their mouths and swallowed great gulps of the sea. Sadie considered jumping into the water and being swallowed whole by a whale. She imagined sitting in the belly of the whale with all the other suicidal children who had jumped into the sea. She imagined one could sit in the stomach of the whale only for so long before they began to be digested. She imagined trying to pick up a fish’s rib cage to comb her hair, only to discover three of her fingers were gone. She would have to hold things in a delicate, awkward manner. She would sleep on a jellyfish but then wake to discover her legs had disintegrated. Perhaps it was better to go that way. Piece by piece. First you said good-bye to your toes. Then your ankles. Then your heart.
This sort of morbid reflection was very comforting to her.
Sadie was aware of the growing distance the ocean was creating. She didn’t miss anything about the Golden Mile. She refused to experience homesickness. The only thing that would cause her to miss the Golden Mile was Marie. She decided to put Marie out of her mind.
She and Marie had been separated. There was no chance they would see each other again. She accepted this. Sadie headed back into the ship, turning her back on North America.
* * *
After eight days at sea, the ship docked in England. The noise of the city was brutal and greeted them before they even landed. Sadie took in everything. When she stepped off the ship in London, she couldn’t help but compare the world she saw before her to paintings of hell.
But Sadie wasn’t frightened. Perhaps a pleasant surprise of this entire venture was that she found the chaotic, crowded scene before her curious. Her little heart was beating in her little chest quite rapidly—but it was not out of fear, she realized quickly. It was out of excitement. If she was not afraid of this scene, she would not be afraid of anything.
There was a woman from the boarding school who was there to meet her. Sadie curtsied.
CHAPTER 10
Marie Awakes from a Nap
Marie felt shaken up about the murder. Everything she touched seemed to be vibrating. First the doorknob was vibrating. Then the pen she was holding was vibrating. Until she realized it was actually her who was vibrating. She imagined Sadie would be punished for a time, as her friend was not able to manipulate her parents as well as she was. They would not be able to see each other for perhaps a week or so. Then Sadie would refuse to speak to her for a brief time before forgiving her.
Marie’s father put her in a carriage and brought her out to their country estate. That was where he had brought her mother when she was feeling depressed. He had been told by a doctor that the best cure for nervous anxiety in women was to take them out to the fresh air. They could sit in the sunshine and wiggle their toes and not worry about fashion. Louis also felt there was something more natural about women. He thought they somehow belonged in nature: in fields of flowers, milking goats and holding sheep in their arms.
Her father had filled the bench of the carriage with pillows and the softest blankets. So her trip would be lovely and bouncy, and she could feel like she hadn’t even left her bed. Louis knew that Marie was sensitive. And he had learned from his wife that maladies of the mind could be as devastating as those of the body. He squashed his large body in with hers. He let her rest her beautiful head on his lap.
They left the clamor of the city with all its new buildings that had been recently erected for a growing population. There was scaffolding everywhere, with men pulling up buckets of cement and bricks and yelling. There was never a moment of peace and quiet in the city. It was always in the middle of building itself. You couldn’t even tell what the city looked like. A street would build itself up and then would catch on fire from a single cigarette butt and burn to the ground. It looked for trouble. Sometimes a building climbed up taller and taller and then collapsed in the middle of the street.
When they arrived at the country home, Marie was given lemon and honey tea. It was so strong her nose scrunched up when she drank it. The maid had been instructed to put drops of opium in her tea and to make sure she drank it all day. She placed the drug into Marie’s teacups with a thin dropper, like a hummingbird pollinating a flower.
After she drank the tea, Marie felt so extraordinary. She stared at the sunbeams in the room that were filled with motes. She was sure if she were to put the motes under a microscope they would be tiny, fidgety fairies, lifting up their dresses and scratching their twats, picking their noses and pulling cobwebs off their wings. There had been quite a lot of documentation of fairies lately. Marie yawned, inhaling a hundred fairies up her nose.
Marie was stoned for two weeks. She was eating strawberries dipped in chocolate with her eyes closed. She missed her mouth on several occasions, causing there to be a chocolate mustache above her lip.
The fall came more quickly in the countryside outside Montreal. Marie sat in a lounge chair on the porch, wrapped in a fur blanket, and watched the trees begin to turn colors. The yellow leaves shone like they were made from the gold leaf in illuminated manuscripts. The red made the hills look like a battlefield after a holy war.
She was so impressed by the movements of a leaf, she felt the need to spread her arms and attempt to imitate it. She danced on tiptoe along the edge of an icy pond, pretending to be a leaf.
She had the maid bring in a baby rabbit for her to stroke. She could not get over how incredibly soft it was. She squished it so hard. She fell asleep with the rabbit in her arms, accidentally suffocating it. But she never knew because the maid replaced it with another one.
* * *
Then one day, Marie woke up from a deep nap and realized she had lost all sense of time. Her first thought was that she might have lost an entire week. But her sense of loss was too great for that. She believed she had lost a year.
She was terrified of how much time might have passed. She looked at her body for a moment. Almost as if to check if it was old and that her entire youth had passed her by. Everything about her body was the same. Her toes were the same. Her nose was the same. Her knees were the same. Her peach-colored pubic hair was the same. Her fingers were the same. Her thumb was the same. Her palms were the same.