Three Slices (16 page)

“As am I. Shall we find it together?” Just for fun, I waggle my eyebrows lasciviously.

Her gloved hand flaps, dismissing me. “I suspect we’re looking for different things. But the lanterns are over there, if you’re still trying to illuminate your wagon. I was going to bring you one on my way. They never do give enough warning before the wagon starts.”

Right before I look where she’s pointing, I catch her eyes darting away and mark the spot: a trunk hastily shoved under an old rug. I think perhaps she’s an accomplished liar who’s unaccustomed to doubt; pretty creatures often are.

“Ah, my thoughtful, skulking girl. What are you looking for?”

“Something that belonged to Phaedro. Nothing you can find.”

“This game of Twenty Questions isn’t going my way, so I’ll try again. How old is this caravan?”

She shrugs and edges away. “Older than me. Bailey’s father ran it before him, I heard, back when each wagon was pulled by a draft horse. One of the original wheels is there, against the wall.” I look where she’s pointing but notice that she uses my glance to slip something into her pocket.

“Impressive,” I murmur, a hand to flaking red paint on the carved spindles.

Past the wheel, way in the back, the wagon’s junk takes on a distinguished sort of languor, as if it’s been sitting unwanted so long that it’s grown superior about it. The boxes still bear adze marks and handmade nails, and instead of lanterns, rusted candelabras tangle together in forgotten heaps. There’s a smell here, a layer of magic and age that calls to me, makes me hunger for the solid feel of my grimoires and leather-bound books under my palm. I flip through a series of portraits, hand-painted posters of long-gone freaks including a lizard man, something I’ve never seen in person before and would literally, literally kill to have in my future show.

Merissa steps close to my back now, peering inquisitively around me.

“Grotesque,” she says, and I shrug.

“Depends on which side of the velvet rope you’re on, I suppose.”

Beyond the paintings, a strange gleam of orange shimmers in my blue light, and I reach out to touch the faded, frayed canvas of a tent, folded neatly and crusted with age. Rummaging underneath it, I’m overcome with a vague sense of unease. Tiny hairs raise up on the back of my neck, and a chill creeps down my spine as I uncover a collection of lanterns and a single dusty brazier. I have seen these objects before. Recently. And they still seemed new then.

“Do you know anything about this?” I ask, holding my blue flame to an ancient wooden box. Inside nestle a twisted ladle, dozens of tarnished silver plates, , and a carefully folded flowered scarf.

“It’s all junk,” Merissa says. “From fifty years ago, when Bailey was a boy. I asked the costumer once why we never had a fortune-teller, and she went over all queer and said,
One tyromancer is enough. Never again
.” She reaches past me to hold the fire-blackened ladle up to the light. “Scrying with cheese.” She shakes her head. “So primitive. So...human. I kept pushing to find a glancer, and Mrs. Cleavers told me that the elder Bailey put the fortune-teller to death. Burned her at the stake all those years ago and swore we’d never have another. Perhaps she gave a bad fortune.”

“So, there’s no fortune-teller in the caravan now?” I ask, an open hole filled with ice where my stomach should be.

“Of course not. Surely you noticed when you were taking stock?”

“Of course not,” I echo, remembering the warmth of the light on the young girl’s dark hair, the penetrative weight of her gaze. “Have you ever had your fortune told?”

Merissa shakes her head and pulls her hands away. “Wouldn’t want to. It’s personal, what they see. Right down to your toes, and you can’t hide.”

“If you’ve nothing to hide, it shouldn’t be a problem.”

“There’s always something to hide. Like all this old flotsam. Don’t know why someone doesn’t toss everything out, or at least sell it to a scrap man on Portobello Road.” She reaches for a pierced tin lamp, and I swat her hand away.

“I wanted light, and this will do. There’s something to be said for objects with a purpose and a choice bit of tarnish, don’t you think? An electric light can go out, but a lantern is a vessel. When the light shines through, it connects the viewer to everyone who’s ever looked into the lamp, who’s read a book by its light or held it up in the darkness to frighten away the monsters.” I pick up the pierced lantern I remember, the one with the hooded figure surrounded by stars, forever chased by a wolf. The beeswax candle within still has a wick, and I brush the dust away, snap my fingers to light it, and close the little door. Stars and leaves dance around us, golden warm, and Merissa’s honest smile is its own light. “See?”

“I do. There’s a poetry to it, isn’t there?”

“That there is, love.”

When I offer her the lantern, she takes it, holding it high for me. The old box is heavier than it looks, but I manage to maneuver it to a clear space by the door. So, I have what I came for, light and secrets, but I’m now stuck in a moving vehicle with a woman I’d very much like to woo, which is about the loveliest situation I can think of. We have privacy, we have romantic lighting, and we have one forgotten, three-legged velvet chaise that won’t suffer for a stain or two.

Tossing open the sliding door, I breathe in the afternoon sunlight. Gold fields and green trees rumble past under a leaden gray sky, and the air smells of ozone and wildflowers.

“Are you going to jump out?” Merissa asks, clutching the jamb tightly as she looks outside.

My hands find her waist and pull her back, spin her around against the wall. Ever so gently, I tip my head to kiss her, giving her every chance to pull away or push me away or say something or turn her head. But she doesn’t, and I knew she wouldn’t, and we’re kissing and the ground is moving and I know the fortune-teller told me that I’d only get one of my desires this soon, but a woman like this is better solace than a circus.

She’ll do.

By my blood and all the heavens, she’ll do.

8.

W
E’RE TANGLED
up on the chaise under a filmy curtain, breathing in time together. Merissa’s slender, calloused fingers trace up and down my forearm, alternately tickling and arousing. Her lovemaking is full of playful torture mixed with ferocity, and I have bruises and bite marks and absolutely no desire to move again. Ever.

“Do you love me?” she asks in a teasing voice, and I consider.

“I don’t know you,” I say, “But I want to.”

“That’s a more honest answer than most men would give, I suppose.” Her wandering fingers slither over the inside of my elbow, up my bicep, over my chest. “Have you ever really loved someone before?”

I shift uncomfortably under her hands and her scrutiny. “I don’t think so.”

“That means no.”

“Have you ever loved someone, then?”

She chuckles softly but sadly, sadly but sweetly. “Oh, I have.”

“What happened to him?”

She sighs and lays her cheek against my heartbeat. “He died.”

My arm curls around her, and I stroke her tumbled hair. “I’m sorry,” I say, and I am.

“I’m not a brooder. I don’t brood. I look to the future. I choose hope.”

“That’s a compelling sentiment, my girl. Choosing hope.” I kiss her forehead and nuzzle her hair and wish I knew at what point infatuation became love, what sort of tender feeling made a
maybe
into a
yes
and
one day
into
now
. “But tell me. How did you know when it was love? Truly love?”

She sighs and stretches out her lithe, muscled legs, her fine-boned feet poking out the open wagon door. “I have this saying, you see. From my grandmother.
Not my circus, not my monkeys.
She would say it whenever someone brought her a problem that wasn’t hers, one she didn’t intend to own. If my brother pulled my pigtails or if I accidentally knocked over an inkwell, I would run to her, crying, and she would frown and shrug and say it. And so I started saying it, too, whenever a boy would court me, whenever a man would beg for my attentions.
Why won’t you kiss me? Why won’t you accept my proposal
?” She sighs. “Not my circus, not my monkeys.”

“And so...?”

“And so, one day, with this man, I didn’t say that. Not ever.”

I chuckle, but I don’t feel anything. “So, you found your circus and your monkeys. That’s rather sweet.”

“Oh, it was. But nothing stays the same, does it?”

“Change isn’t always bad, love. Wouldn’t you like some new monkeys?”

She turns in my arms, and her eyes dance with mischief, and she runs a claw over my lips. “Maybe I could do with one monkey. A dancing monkey. Do you dance, Stain?”

I exhale and let all my masks fall away. “I’ll waltz but I’ll never jig or kneel, if that’s what you’re asking.”

Her laugh is light and lying, and I begin to wonder if every moment with Merissa is playing some sort of game, and if that’s an intriguing proposition or a long, slow suicide. I want to hold her, dig my thumbs into her heart and pry it loose and hold it up to the light to see if it’s made of muscle or stone or diamond. But I can’t do those things, and I don’t know if she would do them to me, so I do the only thing I can do.

Ever so gently, I cup her cheek and turn her face to mine and kiss us both into a stupid, lovely oblivion.

T
HE TRAIN
stops at dusk, and Merissa hops down first and scurries away, muttering about seeing to the horses. I’m gratified to note that her usual, practiced, swaying walk is more than a little bow-legged. Whoever her last monkey was, he clearly didn’t have my skills and stamina.

When I leave, I take the box with me. A few whispered words and a dash of powder sprinkled on my head and the eyes of the milling, laughing carnivalleros skitter over me like a crack in fine porcelain. I don’t want to talk to anyone. As pleasant a diversion and as intriguing a future as Merissa might present, I haven’t been able to stop thinking about how I had my fortune told by a ghost in a caravan with no fortune-teller. The answers, I know, are under the orange cloth in this box.

My wagon is still dark, but something is off. Someone has been here since I left. I can’t smell their mark or see anything missing, but the back of my neck prickles and I can’t rest until I’ve checked every hiding place. Once the new lanterns are spread about, the entire space takes on an eerie, honey-warm glow. The pierced lantern is the last one I light, and I place it in the center of the room, on a spindly table, and rotate it so that the girl and the wolf are on opposite walls. I think I might smell the faintest, nutty hint of cheese, and I follow the scent to a corner where the wallpaper is peeling. I tug down the hideous purple, a lower layer of flowers, a layer of sepia-toned newspaper, and reveal...warm orange.

“This was your wagon, wasn’t it?” I whisper to the still air, and the lantern spins of its own accord as if held in a small girl’s hand, the stars whirling dizzily. I lift out the next layer of possessions in the old box. Dozens of dishes, porcelain and tin, each one lovingly clean but old enough to show the marks of an artisan’s hands, unlike today’s factory-produced rubbish. About fifty silver knives fall out when I unroll the flowered scarf. It reminds me of the one my mother used to keep her tarot cards in, and I hold it up to the light and trace the silk roses and vines with a sigh of nostalgia.

The box is almost empty now, just scraps of old newspaper and a mending kit for the tent. I marvel over the rolled, stitched leather, running my fingers over the bone needles and slubby thread and tiny thimbles. Did the little girl live alone? How did she set up such a large tent by herself? Where was her family? How did she come to be a—what had Merissa called it? A tyromancer.

At what point does one wake up and decide to seek the future in runny cheese?

There’s a lump in the mending kit, and I fish out a tarnished chain and locket. There’s a setting for a jewel on one side, but whatever paste frippery it once held is long gone. On the other side is a compass rose. When I flick open the clasp, I find a portrait inside. It’s a beautiful woman with riotous black hair, her chin up and her dark blue eyes firm. Something about her seems to challenge me in a way that makes one of my eyebrows raise automatically. Could it be the little girl as a grown woman? Not if Bailey murdered her young. Her mother, perhaps? But the woman’s clothing is modern, her hat of a style I haven’t seen before. So who is she? Under the woman’s portrait is the name Letitia, written in my own handwriting, and if I wasn’t unsettled before, I tell you I am now.

“The locket will draw her to you.”

It’s the little girl’s voice, coming from nowhere and everywhere. And I know that she’s dead, that old Bailey had her burned at the stake, but I feel like she’s here in the room with me, wrapped in the warm scent of beeswax and cheese and the comfort of an unforeseen future.

My head swims, and I could swear I hear her laughing. The lights flicker, and the pierced lantern spins in a wind that definitely isn’t there, sending stars and wolf teeth dancing across the dark walls, faster and faster. Something rustles in the far side of the wagon, and I hunch over, fingers curling into claws.