Swanny has had over one hundred and fifty extractions. She has had menstrual cramps that brought her close to fainting. She once broke a toe kicking her father’s gravestone in rage, and she’s sprained her ankle on rabbit holes in the garden on two separate occasions. But nothing in her experience compares with the loss of her virginity tonight. The pain was excruciating, consuming, and with it came a blinding anger. She hated Ripple, hated every inch of his endoparasitoid nudity—but to her chagrin and surprise, she also hated herself. Her body betrayed her, became a contortionist’s box with blades coming in the sides. Frigid.
It was never like this in her fantasies (because yes, of course she had them, fantasies intended for pure titillation—truth and beauty will only get a young lady so far). Even in daydreams of highwaymen and pirate kings, who in their villainy would overpower her, Swanny imagined she would, with this as with all things, seek out and take her own dark, secret pleasure. Yet tonight, with Duncan, she found herself without inner resources of any kind, clamped in the merciless jaws of the actual. Ripple’s penis was not a metaphor for anything. It was a wedge between her and herself, held in place by the most erosive friction, as if he were saying, I don’t love you, I don’t love you, with every scoot. Swanny is cracked almost in two, and worse yet, the grand gates of the Hotel Paracosm are locked to her. Has Ripple ruined her, for everyone, for all time? Erased all her imaginary friends? At the moment, she cannot conjure the charming fop, the rakish brigadier, from whose touch she wouldn’t shrink. Her whole life, she has longed for contact, sure and true, on the deepest levels of sensuality and emotion. Now, on her wedding night, she wants to be alone.
Swanny silently slips into her mother’s suite. The space is like a little apartment, a parlor and two bedrooms. One of the bedroom doors is ajar. Swanny peeks in. The lights are off and her mother is in bed, wearing a sleep mask and an anti-aging cream that glows faintly in the darkness. Swanny tiptoes to the other bedroom and lets herself inside.
The decor is tastefully barren; other than a sleek, oblong light fixture and a painting of lovers on the Twolands Bridge, the walls are ivory, unadorned. Swanny rips off her negligee, wads it up in a ball, and throws it into a corner. Her hope chest stands waiting at the foot of the bed. She opens it and tosses clothes over both shoulders until she finds her favorite pajamas, red flannel with a repeating pattern of iconic retro housewives declaring, “Cook your own damn dinner!” and “I start drinking at noon!”—the ones that her mother says make her look like a Sapphic endtimes lumberjack. But even with these on, she’s still shivering. Frigid. She drapes her chinchilla coat around her shoulders as she digs deeper into the chest for her quilted dressing gown, and it’s then that she finds the envelope. Swanny, it says. Open ASAP. Inside, there’s a card about the size of a party invitation, letterpressed with her initials. Swanny recognizes it: she used dozens of these the week after her engagement, to announce the news in personalized notes to all her mother’s friends. But the handwriting here isn’t hers. It’s plain, and cramped, and nevertheless spills out from the card onto an additional sheet of legal paper folded up inside, as if the words, once flowing, couldn’t easily be staunched.
Dear Swanny,
Tomorrow morning you are leaving. You are traveling to the city to meet your husband and all your new servants, to make a new life. Your mother says she will come back after the wedding, but I don’t believe she will. She has packed all her jewelry and her Who’s Who books and her content reel, and I think that if she can, she will never leave your side. A mother does not let her child go easily. I know. Though my son has been dead longer now than he ever was alive, I carry him with me still. If it would bring him back, if it would keep him safe, I would gladly follow him to the ends of the Earth. This is the one thing, perhaps, that your mother and I share.
So I will not see either of you again.
You never asked me what I did before I came to this place. But I once also made a journey far from the only home I knew. When I was a young mother, not much older than you are now, I too had a head full of dreams. At night, I tended my baby; each day, I taught grammar and geography to little children in a hot, dusty classroom without desks or window glass. When I had money, I bought books from the pulp mill for their shelf. The books came in unlabeled cartons and I bought them by the pound. Sometimes, when the books were in your language, I rewrote them into mine. It was a puzzle I could solve, to keep my mind fresh, to stake a claim on the world. One of these books was your father’s.
I was pleased with my work. When I sent him my lines alongside his, it was a gift. I did not expect to be hired as governess to his newborn child, to travel with my son to the manor on his estate, half a world away. I did not expect servant quarters twice the size of the cramped apartment I shared with my boy back home. I did not expect it to ruin my life.
This house is mine now, this house I have cared for so many years, and I have earned it a hundred times over. No manor home is worth a lifetime of grief. Though you were a sweet child—lonely and spoiled, yes, but sweet—raising any child is a struggle, and you were not my own. If I could take back every hour I spent with your family, I would. But it is too late for that.
Once upon a time, I tried to tell you why my son died. I told you about the sickness that ate away his body from inside until only his soul was left, trapped behind the windows of his eyes. I told you about how your father taught him to swim, how they splashed together in the pool until the well water pruned their toes. I told you, but you did not listen. You always pretended to flout your mother’s teachings, yet perhaps you learned from her all too well. In your mind, we were creatures of different kinds, you and I. You did not believe that my family’s life could have anything to do with yours—that the same monsters could devour us both.
Swanny, I know you have wondered why you have so many teeth, and I know your mother has told you that you are inbred. La Diabla. I never contradicted her, because lying to a child is a mother’s right. Also I did not want to lose my job. I had already lost too much. Now, though, I have nothing left to lose. And no one stays a child forever.
There is a sickness in this place. In the ground. In the water.
That sickness is also in you.