He did the rest. There was pain that surprised me, and I was so cold, it burned as he entered me, the heat of him, but this also its own strange pleasure. I pulled his quilt up around me like a cape, pushing it against my face so he could not see me cry, my eyes starting at the shock of it. Soon there was only the terrible cold around us in the room and the new warmth of him, and beneath that, a surprise: the beat of his heart, strange to me, there in the veins.
It wasn’t his heart there, though, pushing in me.
He was tough and hard all over except here, with a wiry fur to his chest and belly. A tremor came over him like fear and his head rolled back, eyes shut. He was not a pretty man. Was he falling asleep? He was very drunk. I hoped he was. I reached down and put my hand along his beard, touched his lip to check. He pulled back.
It wasn’t to be tender then, I saw. He chose that moment to sit up and made to kiss me. I pushed him back down and held his arms in place until we were done. The kissing I could not bear.
The kissing would be worse than the ice.
Afterward, when he was done, he threw back his blankets and swore. Eh. I’ve ruined you, have I? he said, for there was blood on him and on me. He went to his basin and washed himself before telling me to do the same.
Men always said it that way—I’ve ruined you. I couldn’t explain, but, no, I did not feel ruined. I wasn’t sure what I felt at first, besides being shocked by the blood—I felt like I’d slain something else, though the blood was mine.
He let me stay the night in his bed, which was warmer than the room off the kitchen. It was a strange vigil, for he snored so loudly I couldn’t sleep. Instead, I felt my body warm.
I could feel how easy it would be to stay, and it was almost tempting, for being easy. I, with only ash for my trousseau, the new girl for the widower. I think he felt this also. But that was not what I wanted. It wasn’t why I’d come all this way.
What I felt, by morning, was how it was as if I were someone new. Or, perhaps, more: There was someone I had become, and she had made this decision by way of introduction.
You should leave, this new girl I was said to me. Before he wakes.
I slunk from the bed and stood again in the cold. As I dressed myself in that dim kitchen light, I felt the opposite of ruined. I felt strong again, ready to try to cross the ocean again.
I was sore, that was all. And so this felt like a triumph over death, as if I had been dealt a murderous blow and lived.
§
There was still one member of my family left to bury.
I paused on the hill above his farm, having found graves much like the ones my mother and I had made, though these were made with stones well carved.
He was like me, then, also the last of his family left among the living.
The name I took was from a smaller stone, farther back, older. She had died three years before these new ones, at the age of three. Her last name was different from the rest. She could have been a sister’s child. I said it aloud in the air, a whisper.
Lilliet Berne.
I suppose I knew even then what Verdi later told me about the great tragedies, those great families who’d caught the attention of the gods for their hubris and were struck down, known to us now as the subjects of operas. My family was not, to my knowledge, a great family, but they were dearly good—any greatness they had was in their goodness. But I sensed even then, before I knew the word, the hubris was mine. And the gods did not kill for hubris—for hubris, they let you live long enough to learn.
It is only to be for a little while, I told myself, for however long it would take me to get to my aunt. I would go back to my old name then. This one would keep me safe as I traveled. In its disguise, I could hide all my sins, like this one.
Instead, it would be this name I would return to, the name I chose that day, this name that would stay with me when almost nothing else had.
My hubris was hidden from me, as it always is, until it is too late, and it began with this stolen name. I believed I could hide from my Maker and start again. My hubris, then, something I’ve not yet been punished for, the real punishment still ahead of me.
§