Blood and Petals

I followed Mrs. Bespaticos out into the front foyer— that huge room with a hundred doors and the ancient plaster flowers. The open place was so big that every step echoed and every word was drowned. She sat us near the window, facing the front road, and I looked out at the dusty path still marred by carriage ruts from when this place hosted dances with fine men and women coming together.
Mrs. B sat primly with her hands on her lap and took a breath to gather her thoughts before she started asking me some hard questions.
Better to keep her off balance. “May I have my letter, Mrs. B?”
“What letter?” she asked.
And I stared at her. Was I confused? “The one… Annie wrote just now. To me.”
“Why would your dear friend write you letters when you are living in the same house?” Mrs. B asked. “Surely she’d just speak to you.”
Surely, she would, but… the wrongness of the letters seemed normal compared to the strangeness of everything else. Annie’s traumatic response to pregnancy was to ignore the real me and write letters to a fake me. The nightmares we all had. The incessant murmur of the bees, just outside the window, as if they were listening to this conversation, like a chatty audience at a community theater play.
I gathered my wits. “Do you have a letter in your pocket?”
Mrs. B took out the envelope and showed it to me.
I slipped my fingers into the open gash and pulled out… a check. A letter from a donor, thanking Mrs. B for helping their daughter get her life back in order. And a picture of a smiling young lady, standing out in front of a university.
“Oh… my mistake.”
Mrs. Bespatikos smiled, but it was a smile with too little crinkle in her eyes. I had upset her. “Paulie, it’s come to my attention— well, I always suspected…”
I cringed, but I said nothing. No sense in accusing myself before I heard what she suspected.
“You have no baby to give,” she said, simply.
It seemed like a very obvious thing suddenly. What a foolish child I was for thinking I could deceive her. Just to pine over my friend who did not know me. “Please don’t send me away. I couldn’t bear to—”
“My dear,” Mrs. B. lifted her hand to silence me. “Wouldn’t dream of it.”
Her words were comforting, but her tone was in opposition. She’d send me to the bottom of a bottomless pit if she had her druthers. But… someone else was making her keep me. She didn’t have permission to dash me into pieces for deceiving her, for eating her food, for living in her house without paying for it. At least not yet.
“Yes, you have it right. So very clever.” She said as if I had spoken. “I don’t have the power to send you away.”
I tilted my head, confused. Bespatikos was our Queen Bee. No one had more power than she did or wielded it as kindly.
“I was never certain why the house agreed to have you. You clearly don’t belong here.” She shrugged her delicate shoulders. “Yet, here you are and here you will remain until such a time as you are no longer here.”
Her words made no sense to me. Outside the window, the droning of the bees was… distracting. I latched onto the only thing she’d said that made any sense. “If it’s about money, I can work to earn my keep.”
Somehow that annoyed her. “You came for Annie. To save her? And to convince her to keep her child?”
“I… I came for Annie. To make sure she made her own choices—” The drone of the bees was overwhelming. Like they were inside my head. “Mrs. B, can we talk away from the window?”
“No. Focus, Pauline. You’re getting in the way of what Annie wants.”
“Am I?” I was horrified. “I would never—”
“I’m sure you don’t mean to. But she’s suffering so much…” Mrs. B’s little mouth pinched together. “It hurts me to see her so torn. You keep distracting her from her wish.”
“What is her wish?” I asked, desperate to know so I could help her have all she desired. “Has she told you? About her dreams? Not the nightmares, I mean, but what she wants. I’ll do anything she—”
“Such a noble heart. So brave and selfless.” Mrs. B. sneered.
It was not a compliment. And I staggered before this insult. “Ma’am, may I say… sometimes I can’t tell if you are disgusted by me or in awe.”
“Yes. I imagine it would be difficult, as I’m not certain myself.” She sniffled slightly. “It’s better for you if I remain undecided.”
It was the most honest thing she’d ever said to me. For a moment, I shook off the overwhelming fog. I saw I wasn’t in a house but someplace wilder. A tree honeycombed with a substance I couldn’t quite understand. Across the foyer, one of the girls licked the wall, and her eyes shone like sunlight glinting off newly fallen snow.
“Pauline?”
I looked at Mrs. B.’s crinkled face and her huge dark eyes and shook off the brief glimpse of… madness. I needed to sleep more. I wasn’t in my right mind.
“Ma’am, I can earn my keep. I can go to town and work as a waitress or in the grocery store. Or I could restore pieces of the house. My father always let me help when he had to fix something. All the chores the ladies can’t do. Mow that whole lawn and clear out the brambles. Make you a nice beaten path through the trees.”
“Why would I want that?” Everything I’d said offended her. “It’s not about money. How can I drive that home to you, child?”
Across the foyer, the girl who’d been licking the wall— oh, it was Annie—was drinking from the pitcher of milk.
“Is it the space then? I… Mrs. B, you took me in so quickly… I didn’t know there was a waiting list.”
“There’s not. Stop applying your man’s logic to—” Mrs. B. interrupted herself. “What do you wish, Pauline?”
“Wish? Oh, I don’t believe in wishing.”
“But when you did?”
I thought of birthday candles and wishing stars before I was old enough to understand biology and the way of the world. I wished to be like my brothers. I wished to grow a beard. I wished to be big and strong like my father. I wished to be a boy.
Until the day, Mama overheard me talking this nonsense and slapped me silly. She made me take a bath, put on a dress, and read from her psalm book of womanly devotion. The lesson I took was that certain wishes could never come true.
And so, I stopped wishing.
The silence between us was so thick that only the beat of the bees’ wings could break it. Her expression creased then softened as if in the stillness she could hear all my secret self-loathing.
How my short hair and pants were not a fashion statement. How I wasn’t just a bold young girl wearing modern clothes under the guise that they fit. She read in my silence all the years of agony, of not fitting my own skin, of the despair of looking into the future. I didn’t know who I would become, who I could love, or how I would be forced to hide, and play pretend to get that love, and who I would hurt to keep it.
She hummed sympathetically.
Out of the corner of my eye, I saw something frail in a flowing white gown walking past Mrs. B and I. Annie headed out into the garden. I instinctively got up to follow her, to make sure she was all right. Even if she wouldn’t look at me, I could watch over her. She was so beautiful and sad, haunted as any ghost.
“Paul.” Mrs. B put her tiny hand on my arm and anchored me in the window seat. Annie always had danced with the ending of my name, but this woman— these things were so very important to her— Mrs. B. had never shortened my name like that.
“Paul,” she said again. “You were about to make a wish?”
I struggled, wanting to take my hand away from her tiny fingers. “The only thing I want is to help Annie, to support her through her troubles, like any good friend would.”
Mrs. B. nodded, but there was a sourness. She could hear that I lied.
Had I lied? You don’t just tell strangers— you don’t tell friends and families— that you have that kind of wrongness in you. Girl or boy is a law of nature. It’s a strange and uncomfortable thing to want to break such a thing. There’s no reason to foist that desire upon someone else. It’s not polite.
I did wish, though.
I wished I could be the man Annie wanted. I wished to be the man she needed so badly to step up and take responsibility. I wished I could save her from this so-called mistake she must have made out of love.
“Alright. There’s something I can work with!” Mrs. Bespatikos said, suddenly cheerfully. “So be it.”
“What?”
She patted my cheek. “You’ll be our helper, Paulie. You’ll do the grocery run and fix things about the house. If you like, you can wear your trousers. And you will leave when Miss Helena Anabelle Fairbridge leaves. Does that sound all right?”
“All right?” All the tension in me broke into pieces, and I beamed. “Damn skippy. That’s all right!”
I eagerly shook her hand. “You won’t regret it, Mrs. B. I’ll do such a good job; you’ll wish to keep me forever!”
“I’m sure.”
I jolted to my feet and embraced her, picking her off the ground as I would my little brother. “Thank you! Thank you!”
She laughed and pushed me away. “Now! Now!”
I was suddenly very dizzy. That’s right, I was hallucinating. I set her down quickly.
And she laughed. “Why don’t you check on Annie and then go upstairs and rest, lovely. You look very tired, and there’s nothing to fear. All right?”

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