Fiction: 1522 St. Joan Ave
first you should really read this story by emmelinep because this is a (much longer) follow-up. 7000 words, first draft.
1522 St. Joan Ave
"Really, Delilah?"
She turned around in the driveway, crossing her arms. "I think it's nice."
"Really?" Cassie repeated, crossing her own arms in return.
"What?"
"Well--nothing, really. But it's.."
"Old," Jessamine said, cutting in. She was climbing out of the car, pulling a rogue shoe out from under the front seat. "And old. It's gonna leak when it rains. No one will ever want to stay here."
"You're crazy," Delilah said, turning her back on both of them. She looked up at the house. "It reminds me of Paper Street."
"Not this again," Cassie stage-whispered to Jessamine. "Marla complex?"
"Marla complex," Jessamine sighed. "You really bought this ting, Delilah? There are seven broken front windows on the front side of the house alone."
"There's a hole in your porch, too," said Cassie, who had walked to the edge of the pavement, where the porch stairs began to ascend. "Like, a big one. Like this is rotted and you're going to have to get new wood for this whole thing if you want people to be able to walk on it."
"Oh, that's not the only hole," said Delilah, happily. She was grinning like a maniac and Jessamine knew why: ever since she was young Delilah, a child of the suburbs, had wanted an old, dilapidated Victorian mansion to call her own. "You should see the dining room ceiling! It goes up two stories! And the basement has a steel cage."
"A what?" Jessamine asked, alarmed, but a strangled cry from Cassie caught her attention. She had attempted to climb the stairs to the porch using the railing, and the railing had fallen off in her hand.
"Goddamn it Delilah!" she yelled, shaking the piece of plank at her. "Does it even have indoor plumbing?"
"Of course it does, don't be ridiculous," Delilah said, stepping over to the porch, her silver high heels clicking on the uneven concrete of the driveway. "I know what's necessary in a house. The heat and air, though, that's iffy."
"At least it has a roof," Jessamine sighed. She jammed her hands into the pockets of her overalls and joined them on the porch. Cassie had gingerly set the railing down over the gaping hole, and Delilah in her heels was studiously avoiding the uneven gaps in the boards.
"Key?" Cassie asked, and Delilah reached into her pocket to pull out three. A deadbolt, a skeleton key, and a handle-key later the front door was open, giving a soft thud and a shower of dust as they opened it.
The girls peered in. Sunlight at the end of the hallway revealed the dust three layers thick over everything. And there was, indeed, everything--the hall was crammed with stuff. Boxes lined the walls on both sides, piled on top of tables and couches and chairs. A disused aquarium filled with some sort of potted plant was at the back of the hallway, right under the window, where a little red flower was reaching for the sun.
"Is this what you meant by furnished?" Jessamine asked suspiciously.
"Oh, come on," said Delilah. She couldn't stop smiling, and despite the doubt etched heavy on both Cassie and Jessamine's faces they were smiling, too. "Think of how much fun it'll be to look through! There could be priceless stuff in here. And I got the whole house for this, too,
it's amazing."
Jessamine had started walking towards the boxes but Cassie grabbed her arm firmly. "Let's go upstairs first," she said. "Look through the whole house and then assess how crazy our wife is."
"Very crazy," said Delilah, still beaming as they walked up the stiars (which swayed precariously under their weight). "Super-duper, batshit, lady-with-cats-times-ten crazy. They'll lock me away."
"If they can find you," Cassie muttered. "In here?"
"Doubtful," Jessamine agreed. She stopped at the top of the stairs, lifting her hand off the railing. "Oh, wow."
"Wow what?" Cassie asked, craning over her shoulder, but she was already shaking her head by the time they all three got up the stairs.
This room, too, was lined with stuff: boxes and furniture and paintings and mirrors lined the walls. But at the end of the hall, receiving the brunt of their attention, was a pipe organ, complete with a full set of pipes set into the wall behind it, which lined a stained-glass window of...
"Is that a mandala?" Jessamine asked finally, but Cassie was more focused on the music.
"Does it work?" she demanded, not waiting for an answer before she walked over to the instrument, pulling out the dusty piano bench. "The full foot keyboard," she said, checking each pedal with her foot. "Very nice, wonder if there are pipes missing--"
"Not even the best part," Delilah interrupted. "See. Upstairs."
"Shouldn't we look at the rooms?" Cassie asked, getting up reluctantly, but Delilah was already hand-in-hand with Jessamine, pulling her round the corner and up the next set of stairs.
"Later," Delilah said. "Watch for the hole!"
"Delilah, there is a hoe in the middle of your floor," Jessamine said, twisting her neck around to stare at it as Delilah continued to pull her.
"Yep," said Delilah, still grinning like a maniac. "That's the dining room, down there. But come, look!"
Up the stairs they went, Delilah dragging Jessamine, leaving the imprint of high heels, converse, and boots in the dust. "Look," said Delilah, proudly, pulling them to a door at the very end of the upstairs hallway. "This is my room."
the door opened into the circular part of the house--a room lined in windows, painted entirely in white, with a vaulted ceiling going up into the roof. "How can you sleep with all this light?" Jessamine asked, as Cassie twirled around delightedly.
"Won't it get cold in the winter?" Cassie asked, crossing her arms.
"Don't care, it's perfect," Delilah said, stopping abruptly. "And I already cleaned it out. There's a bedframe and everything in one of the downstairs room, we just have to get a mattress. This is my room. The front tower." She laughed again. "I get to live in a tower!"
"You're adorable," Jessamine said, watching her caper about madly.
"Fucking adorable," Cassie agreed. She bit her lip, then uncrossed her arms and stuck her hands into the pockets of her dress, pushing her coat back in the process. "Well. If we're going to stay here tonight, we should get stuff out of the car."
"Air mattresses," said Jessamine and immediately Cassie nodded.
"Paper towels," she said, turning around. "Toilet paper, Spra Power, the bread for sandwiches--"
"Is there a working refrigerator?" Jessamine asked as they walked downstairs. Delilah had started singing to herself and wasn't paying them any mind. They turned and looked at her, then looked at each other and shook their heads. "Call Austin and Daniel to come move the bed," Cassie said. "They've never been to New Orleans before, I think they would come."
"You know what? I bet there's got to be something useful in all those boxes," Jessamine reasoned as they traipsed down the stairs. "Books, furniture, jewelry...something..."
"Delilah, darling, please find a refrigerator and tell me it's nice, relatively new--1980s or later please--empty, and keeping things cold," Cassie yelled over her shoulder as Delilah went dashing off down the hallway on the first floor.
"Clothes? There's got to be clothes in a house like this," Jessamine continued as the two walked down the front porch stairs. "A basement, too--did she say there was a steel cage?"
"Yes," Cassie said, sighing. "Maybe we can convince Meredith to come too, to get that organ in tune..."
"There's furniture, at least," Jessamine said, opening the trunk. She handed Cassie a carpetbag covered in flowers and took out a canvas Army surplus duffel for herself. "We don't need housewarming presents."
"I don't know about that," said Cassie as she removed two bags from Whole Foods from the trunk. "I mean, it might have all the furniture and crap you'll ever need but I don't think it has a blender."
"Or fresh yogurt," Jessamine said, pulling a giant bag stuffed with blankets into her arms and shutting the trunk with one hand. "Very important, fresh yogurt."
"The porch is nice,, though," Cassie said. "Bet Joseph can do something about that, he's handy."
"No--really? Joseph in carpentry?"
"You'd never think it," Cassie said, pushing the front door open with her body. "And maybe more paint, too."
"Yes," Jessamine said immediately. "I mean, don't get me wrong, the color is fabulous, but--"
"--the electric blue needs a touch-up?" Cassie finished. She followed the sound of Delilah's voice to a back room which proved to be a kitchen, where Delilah was busy clearing off counter space. "Good," she said, setting down the bags of food. "Find a fridge?"
"in the garage," Delilah said. "the ice-maker's not hooked up and I'v ejust plugged it in, but there's space for it in that corner once we move the boxes..."
"We're calling Austin and Daniel," Jessamine sighed, setting down the bag of bedding.
"And I daresay a few besides," Cassie murmured. She set down the carpetbag and sneezed, then stuffed her hands into the pocket of her pirate coat. "This is going to be a hell of a housewarming party."
And it was.
"Hey, where'd you get the coat?" someone asked over the music. Cassie looked him up and down. He had bright red hair and a sniffly expression: the sleeves of his green canvas jacket hung over the ends of his wrists.
"It was a costume in a movie," she said shortly.
"What movie?" he asked. "it's badass!"
"Pirates," Cassie said.
"Like Pirates of the Caribbean?" the kid yelled. He was standing give feet away and kept moving closer, shouting to be heard over the music.
"No, like the porno," Cassie said, and then turned around and walked away.
It had been like this for three nights now. She didn't want the music, really, she didn't. Cassie did not like grunge music and all these obnoxious wanna-bes who came around wearing the converse and hitting on Delilah because she was attractive and tiny and hitting on Jessamine because she wore miniskirts all the time. Of the trio, Cassie was in fact the only one who did not get hit on, mostly because instead of tolerating the boys like the other two, she gave them withering death-glares and made pointed comments until they went away. The only people she would talk to were the initial call in: Meredith, Austin, Daniel, Erin, and Joseph.
As for the rest, she didn't know where they came from. Skater punks, from the looks of them, attracted from nearby colleges where flat-ironed, face-curtain hair was the current Look and who still thought talking about 4chan was underground. Like the male version of eco-feminists, she thought, but didn't say it out loud because Jessamine was an eco-feminist, albeit a useful one. Cassie had theories on why this was, and they mostly had to do with Jessamine not actually being an eco-feminist at all, but did not mention them: they had long learned not to talk politics in each other's company.
The company had been off and on, make no mistake. Since college, they'd been living across the country: with Jessamine in New York, with Cassie in Los Angeles, and when Delilah's parents died and she got the money, she bought a house in New Orleans and invited the other two to come live with her.
It wasn't as far fetched as it sounded. Jessamine had just been fired from her architecture firm after she, in a fit of creative frustration, knocked over two computers onto a model she was working on, and Cassie was a recent PhD in molecular biology who had nothing else better to do. She'd always assumed that with a PhD in molecular biology she should know what to do with her life, but when it came down to it, the choice was between all the research job opportunities with the big pharmaceuticals in LA or Delilah and Jessamine.
It wasn't even a contest.
"Please, please make them go away," Cassie said to Delilah, cutting between her and some Goth twerp who was telling her some boring story about some lame trip he'd had once. He started to protest and she turned around and glared at him until he shut up and turned away, looking sulky. She turned back to Delilah. "If you do not make them all leave right now I will start pushing things through the hole in the dining room ceiling."
"What's so bad about them? Housewarming, Cassie," said Delilah, who was still holding a glass of something. Cassie took it out of her hand and downed the rest of it, then dropped the empty glass into a box filled with newspapers. They'd found a set of twenty-four crystal glasses in a box earlier and Delilah had decided to celebrate. Delilah drunk was a mess: first she was happy, giggling and flirting with everyone, then she just started laughing quietly to herself until she was crying, then she was just crying, usually at this point huddled up against Cassie or Jessamine's chest, makeup running like crazy. This had been happening more and more in the six months since her parents' deaths: this was something Jessamine and Cassie talked about late at night when Delilah was asleep between them, and never in the daylight.
Cassie ignored her and walked over to the speakers, hooked into some punk's laptop. She yanked out the cord, blasting the room with static for thirty seconds until she unplugged the speakers as well. She climbed onto the table, boots thunking heavily on the thick wood.
"Now I have kindly put up with all you twerps for three days," she said, "Since my lovely wife over there decided she would be nice and have a celebration. Let me get this straight. This is not your new hangout spot. This is not your place to come pick up girls. This is not some hot new club. This is our home and starting tomorrow morning, I am putting up a nice fence. One of the pretty, wrought-iron ones with all those sharp pointy things at the top. It will be right out front. And you will not come in here. Don't get me wrong--there will be more parties. But godDAMMIT if there is a party in this house it will be with people who actually deserve to be here. Now get out."
A murmur started in the crowd. Cassie crossed her arms. "Out! I will call the police on you! Out!"
They dissipated slowly, muttering: "bitch" and "lame" under their breath. Cassie didn't particularly care. She wasn't the kind of person who was bothered by the kinds of people who said: "bitch" under their breath at the end of an argument: she was a woman in combat boots and a pirate coat and she was very, very pissed off. Jessamine hoped that, for their own sakes, all the couples having sex in the rooms upstairs left before she caught them.
"If there are people having sex in the rooms upstairs--" Cassie began, striding off the table with a loud thump, and Jessamine winced. Cassie left the room and Jessamine looked around for Delilah, stepping over empty wine bottles as she entered the kitchen.
"Delilah?" she called. "Austin? Meredith?"
"I think they've all retreated to the attic," Delilah said, quietly, from one corner. "They started hiding when they started playing that godawful music." She ran a hand through her hair, rubbing glitter into it in the process. "I could see Cassie getting madder and madder all night. I thought she was going to knife somebody."
"Damn close," Jessamine said, sitting down next to her. Delilah's silver, beaded flapper dress hung in disarray, and her mascara was in thick black lines under her eyes, making the circles there even more pronounced. "The one time her good old fashioned Republican values came through for us."
Delilah snorted. "Republican," she said, then fell silent. In the silence, she put her head in her hands. "My head is killing me," she said softly, and Jessamine moved closer to her, laying her head on Delilah's back and reaching up to stroke her hair softly.
"Probably a good thing Cassie went crazy, then," she said. "I think maybe the housewarming has gone on long enough."
Delilah nodded, but gasped wetly for breath. Jessamine reached around to hug her. "You need sleep," she said. "Good thing Austin and Daniel got your bed put together, huh? Come on, sweetie, come on."
She ended up half-dragging, half-carrying Delilah up the stairs, into the white tower room with the bed by the windows. In deference to her sensibilities, Delilah had put up white muslin curtains, which Jessamine pulled closed before undressing Delilah and tucking her in bed.
"How bad is she?" Cassie asked. She was leaning against the wall outside when Jessamine exited the room, shutting the door quietly behind her.
"How drunk, you mean?" Jessamine asked, then sighed. She slid down the wall to sit on the floor next to where Cassie was leaning. "Pretty drunk. I tried to watch her drinks but I don't know how many she had. At least seven."
"Right," Cassie said, after a minute, staring off at the far wall. Her hands, balled into fists, were jammed deep into her pockets.
"She wasn't laughing this time, for a change," Jessamine said, laying her head against the wall with a small thud.
"Crying?" Cassie asked, still looking straight ahead.
"Yeah," Jessamine sighed. "Probably only natural."
"Probably," Cassie said, but her voice was still tight, too even. In the long silence between then, Jessamine reached up to rub her leg, gently, before dropping her hand. Cassie looked down.
"You find everyone?" Jessamine asked.
"In the attic, as predicted," Cassie said, indicating a door on the other end of the hall, where a closet concealed a very narrow spiral staircase. The closet locked from the inside. There were ways to get to the attic, of course, and all of them involved at least a little bit of climbing on the roof. "They're all for the fence idea. I think the boys are going to start on it tonight."
"Good," Jessamine said. They'd found the wrought-iron fence in the garage, behind one of the rows of boxes. Once they'd cleaned out enough boxes to actually fit the car into the garage they'd acquired a whole slew of new things, from the crystal glasses to a set of bunk beds with (apparently) three stacking bunks, now assembled in the tall portion of the attic. The fence had been one of the finds.
"Tomorrow we have to start going through things for real," Cassie said, reaching over with her foot to tap one of the boxes.
"It'll be amazing," Jessamine said.
"It'll be annoying," Cassie said. "All the useless stuff people keep. Old report cards, old family photographs, old diaries. I don't want to be the one to throw someone else's family portraits away, but what else are we going to do with it? We can't even store it. This house has been nothing but storage for decades and look at it now. I found wedding photographs today from 1948 in my bedroom drawer. What am I supposed to do with that?" She sighed. "I feel creepy keeping them and I feel like an asshole throwing them away. I guess that's why they got shoved into this house in the first place."
"We can do art with it," Jessamine said. "I have a few ideas."
"I'm sure you do," Cassie said. "Well, more power to you. Maybe you can sell some of this stuff on eBay and we can actually use the money for...I don't know, repairs."
"New electric blue paint," Jessamine said, and for the first time Cassie actually smiled. "What time is it?" she asked, changing the subject.
Cassie pulled a pocketwatch from her front pocket. "Three twenty five," she said, studying the face, then closed it with a click.
"We should go to sleep," Jessamine said, tracing a pattern in the dust with her fingernail.
"Yeah," said Cassie. She let the watch drop through her fingers by its chain, then dropped the ensemble back in her pocket. "You going back with Del?"
"Yeah," Jessamine said, standing up. Cassie nodded.
"I'm going to check on the attic, but I'll be back," she said. They kissed briefly before turning away, leaving only the faint sound of a door closing and boots echoing down the hall.
The house was huge. You had to give it that.
It took two weeks to clear the front hallway, but once it was clear and Cassie had scrubbed the walls down thrice with cleaner, it was clear that Delilah's house may have been worth something after all. The front staircase, once appraised, was found to be maple and polishable. The walls had exquisite, faded blue-gold wallpaper that reminded Jessamine of old theaters, and brass light fixtures (devoid of bulbs) up near the ceiling. Once the boxes were gone (and oh, the boxes, the boxes), the walls clean, the floors swept and the bulbs replaces, the room was gorgeous. Golden mirrors from the attic were affixed in place and Cassie, the practical one who liked traditional decorations, had found tables that matched the front staircase and even a matching umbrella stand.
"Gorgeous," Delilah said. "We don't have a freezer but we have an umbrella stand."
"A matching umbrella stand," Cassie corrected.
"I want to redo the wallpaper," Jessamine said. "It'll be gorgeous once it's finished."
"It's gorgeous now," Delilah said, running her fingers against it, but turned around. "Same colors, same pattern," she instructed, and Jessamine grinned.
"We have a foyer," she said. "It's official. Now we just need a house to go with it."
"Basement up," Cassie said firmly. "Go from the basement up. If we don't clean out the basement now we'll do the entire rest of the house and end up dumping it all in the basement and it'll be unusable."
Jessamine and Delilah looked at each other. "Fair enough," Delilah said, shrugging, and down they traipsed.
They found things.
In addition to the wrought-iron fence (gorgeous; rusted) and bedframes (seven in total, one for each bedroom), they found more crystal wineglasses, a set of identical silver rings made one in every size (of which the trio gleefully claimed three), three boxes of monogrammed linen napkins, sixteen boxes of trashy romance novels, four boxes of multiple copies of one book (As the Sparrow Falls, by Jackson Ruse. "He must have lived here, self-published, and never sold these," Jessamine mused while Cassie read on it. "Crap! Utter crap!" she proclaimed. Later the book was made into a movie about a house that was bigger on the inside, and Cassie hated every minute of it.), five boxes full of towels (all light blue, a color appearing in zero rooms of the house), a box filled with red checkered fabric, a box filled with worsted gray yarn, a box filled with newspapers from 1949 (which they donated to the library), a box full of baby mice (mostly alive, which was both adorable and terrifying), three boxes of silk, a box of what they assumed (with Jessamine's and Cassie's fiber expertise) was alpaca fur, a box of typewriter keys, a box of unidentified computer cords, three boxes of chinaware (which they used in the kitchen), six boxes of magazines, one really heavy box full of power tools (which Austin and Daniel were sorting through, slowly, with occasional help from Joseph when he didn't work), and one box--Jessamine's favorite--full of dead butterflies, artistically arranged in a spiral by color. It was magnificent and terrible. Jessamine put it in her room.
They did get rooms, eventually, too. Jessamine got a room in a back corner, with the fire escape on the outside of the house, where she put out flowers and upside down tomato plants. She hung all her paintings and pictures on the walls and the ceiling especially--her bed was on the corner right under the stairs, and she said the sloping ceiling made it feel like she was being embraced. She took her fishnets and tights and scarves and made a curtain across her bed, which was a twin twice as deep as a regular mattress. She got blackout curtains and put Christmas lights around the edges, plugged them at night and had the entire room pitch black all day except when she was painting...which, now, was all the time. One corner of the room, by the fire escape, was dedicated to perpetual art.
"Move in a bit," she instructed, doing nudes of Cassie and Delilah together, limbs draped across chairs, expanses of skin and muscle and bone. When she was done she had captured their essence in pencil, long lines and dark eyes and mouths too close together, expressions that could be everything or anything. It hurt to look at them too long, stretched out together like that, mortality hanging in the air as heavy as the dust that swirled down the stairs.
Eventually, he showed up.
It was at one of the parties.
"You know, these maybe fine for the Captain, but they get on my nerves," Cassie said. She was on her third whiskey-and-OJ. No one liked her when she drank because she just ended up bitching about everything for hours and shooting everyone what she thought were dark looks but really just looked like drunken leering. Considering Cassie was a 29 year old, 5'10" hourglass figure with enormous breasts, no one at these parties really cared--but inside she had the mind of a forty-year old, and no one knew it like Jessamine when she had to barsit. Normally it was just Delilah. Delilah was tiny and had hair like a dandelion and held her alcohol like one. When she and Erin started drinking it was a contest to see who would end up making out with the other one first, in some weird sort of drinking game that Jessamine had never really gotten the hang of. She thought it was one of those things that only made sense when you were drunk.
She noticed him when he came in, of course. Tall, awkward kid in a army surplus jacket, hanging around in a corner holding a glass and never drinking from it (Jessamine noticed these things). He was a by-product of one of Austin's friends, but since Austin, Daniel, and Joseph were all busy with their band (who were using the second-stair landing as a stage. This worked to a greater or lesser extent depending on which part of the house you were on. Funnily enough, you got really perfect sound if you stood in the corner between the hot-water heater and the sink in the second floor blue bathroom), he just ended up standing in a corner, looking awkward.
He was almost Jessamine's type. Tall and holocaust skinny. But something about his hunched-over shoulders and dark eyes threw her off.
Cassie was still talking, ranting about something. "I mean, look at what she does. Airplane full of dead babies? O that sick, so sick, and she passes it off as a party favor--all those goddamn kids, those goddamn elementary school kids--and she picked all the ones that were being abused at home, how sick can you get--"
"Cassie," Jessamine said gently, trying to pry a drink out of Cassie's fingers. "Cassie, honey, I think you've had enough. What is---are you drinking absinthe? Dammit." She looked up, exasperated. "Meredith?"
Meredith was sitting on the stairs with one of the boys, a swimmer who was in training for the Olympics. Totally Meredith's type, too--tall, blonde, easy smile, completely ripped. "I'm telling you, Michael Phelps? Was a joke, that was last summer. You should see the new suits they're putting out, it'll make Michael Phelps a one-hit wonder."
"Meredith!" Jessamine said, then sighed. "Goddammit. Why are all my friends drunk and talking to attractive boys? And why am I drunksitting you?"
"I am not drunk," said Cassie. "I hold my absinthe very well, thank you--" she paused here, to sneeze once and then continued without pause--"and I am perfectly aware of, of that." She stopped talking and reached for her glass. "And there is no liquid in this glass," she said, standing up and holding the glass straight up over her head. "No liquid!" she exclaimed again before sauntering off. Jessamine set her forehead on the bar.
"Goddammit," she said again. "Give me a schnapps," she said (without moving her head) to the bartender, a tall, giraffe-like woman with a shock of red hair. "I want the full sixteen ounces and at least 92 proof. Now."
It was the only time all three of them ever got drunk at a party.
When Jessamine woke up, she was in the clawed-foot bathtub on the third floor, using a towel as a pillow and wearing Austin's coat over her favorite yellow fishnets. "Goddammit," she said again to bathroom, empty save for Austin himself, who had used three towels to construct a bed for himself on the other side of the sink. Slowly, she pulled herself up using the shower curtain and limped downstairs, a bruise on the edge of her leg just beginning to turn black.
When Cassie woke up, she was in her bed, wearing her pirate coat, boots, and lingerie. Blood was still dripping from the cut on her hand and eyeliner stains were rubbed into her pillow. The curtains around her four-poster bed were pulled back just enough to let a ray of sunlight fall on her face, showing tear tracks through the mascara. She woke up calm, stared at the ceiling, and thought very slowly about cellular processes before getting out of bed and washing the blood off her hands.
When Delilah woke up she was in her bed, lying next to him, her head nestled into his shoulder. With her face pressed close like that, he smelled like her father.
And then he stayed.
"I dislike you," Cassie said to him one day, over breakfast. This was when she'd gotten a real job, using her PhD in molecular biology for something in a lab somewhere in the city, or maybe a med school or a hospital. She was cooking an egg, over-easy, and toast, and he was sitting at the kitchen counter, tall and hollowed-out looking, with spaces in the places where his bones should fit together. He looked hunched-over, hunted, nervous.
"Why?" he asked, his voice rough.
Cassie shrugged, taking her egg out of the frying pan. She replaced it with the toast, making the pan sizzle with melting butter. Silence stretched out while he waited, afraid to talk, and Cassie poked at her toast. "You're not good for Delilah," she said finally, flipping the bread over. It sizzled again, then faded.
"Why?" he asked again, too wary to ask for more.
She looked at him; she had a disconcerting habit of looking people straight in the eyes. "You're not what she needs," she said. "She needs....oh, lots of things. Light and air and sunshine. Jefferson Square and Audubon Zoo and tigers and lions and bears."
"Raindrops on roses and whiskers on kittens," Jessamine said, reaching around Cassie's waist for a hug. "Bright copper kettles and warm woolen mittens."
"Also brown paper packages tied up with strings," Cassie said, waving a spatula at him. She returned to her toast, flipping it once more before setting it on a plate. "Eggs, Jess?"
"Yes, yes, yes," Jessamine said. She took the egg and cracked the yolk open with her fork, pouring the yellow liquid on the toast. "Don't listen to Cassie," she told him, sitting next to him conversationally. "She's silly. I think there is nothing wrong with you."
"Nothing wrong with me?" he said, not quite smiling. He didn't say: "Saying there is nothing wrong with me is not approving of me," which is what he was thinking, nor did he say: "I don't care what you think," because really, if Delilah cared what they thought, then he cared what they thought, too. And he knew that they were married--he saw the rings they all wore, smooth identical bands across three interlaced sets of fingers, no matter what the law said. He knew that they were lovers and sisters first.
None of that mattered when Delilah walked into the room, and his entire world lit up.
Cassie was right, in the end.
She got worse after that. By his fifth party, he hadn't slept with Delilah again--just stolen kisses and brief touches of skin on skin, sensations that sent tingling like needles up and down his spine. The night of the fifth party he followed her upstairs, watched her smoke in her yellow-daisy underwear, and after that it was like kissing an ashtray and he didn't care. She licked his skin like she couldn't get enough and he had never loved anyone so much in his entire life, not ever, not anyone as much as how he wanted to stop the entire world when her skin was silk against his. When he left at six am to go back to work she lay in bed, unmoving, and he thought she was asleep.
When Jessamine got back from work at six pm she was still lying in bed, in the white room, unmoving, the covers wet and her hair damp from sweat. Jessamine got her into the shower. By the time Cassie got there they barely managed to get her dressed and into the kitchen for food. She sat at the kitchen table in an ugly blue school jumper, trying to smile with her mouth and her eyes full of tears, trying to hold coffee with hands that were shaking.
"I...I can't do it, Jess," she finally whispered, when she spoke, her voice cracking. Even with both hands wrapped around the coffee mug, the brown liquid still splashed onto the counter. She raised her eyes to look at Cassie, because Cassie never looked away. "I'm sorry..." She bit her lip then stopped talking. Jessamine held her in her arms and whispered into her ear, silly words to songs and poems, while Cassie held her hand, rubbing her thumb across Delilah's knuckles, holding her fingers to make the tremors stop.
After that they slept in the same bed, sharing sheets. After a few quiet words Austin and Daniel played music in the bathroom next to her bedroom, drums and bass that hummed silently through the walls, more reverberations that sound. It calmed her nerves and helped her sleep. When Delilah was asleep Cassie and Jessamine met eyes over her hair, held hands over her body.
You should remember the most that they, too, were nothing when she was gone.
He moved in, eventually, because even though Cassie thought his presence was what made her worse, she stopped shaking when he was near and Jessamine said they had to take what they could get. They argued about this sometimes in low voices in the kitchen, in this-that-or-the-other language, hoping he wouldn't hear them. Cassie, at least, treated him like a thing, a sort of repulsive medicine: good for now, with possible addictive and negative side effects. In the long run, maybe not worth it: needs more chemical trials, she would have written on a lab report, if he had been a drug. More specificity needed in signal-receptor bonding, something with less harmful side effects. Jessamine talked to him sometimes, was civil, at least; offered him coffee and made him toast once.
"No me gusta que sea dormiendo con ella todos las noches. Es mejor que nosotros duermamos con ella porque sabemos que no somos la causa de su depresión--"
"No sabes que el es la causa, pero no te gusta el, no tiene prueba--"
"¡Ella es enfermada! No dejamos nada a la improvisacion con ella."
"¡Yo sé, yo sé! Pero algo que puede ayudar ella, pienso que debamos intentar.”
“Pero su padres-,” here Cassie raised her voice, gesticulating wildly, and Jessamine hushed her. Cassie saw him standing at the top of the stairs, watching them, and shot him a dirty look before stuffing her fists in her pockets and striding off towards the kitchen. Jessamine stood in the foyer, hands hanging at her sides, her head thrown back. A sigh escaped from her lips, and then she opened her eyes and walked up the stairs, brushing past him.
He didn't like being treated like an inanimate object, exactly: it was more that he didn't have a choice. He knew something was wrong with Delilah and he didn't know if he was making it better or worse.
The Captain came in, at the last, the days when Delilah was too tired to move, was all dandelion-hair and pink nightgowns, no more smeared makeup and failed macaroni. Cassie did not quite approve, but she and the Captain were apparently old bosom buddies, and Jessamine was a major fan. The Captain, he had heard of: she was legendary for her parties, for her pranks, for her twisted sense of humor, for her airships and fashion and her single-minded charisma, her drive and her wisdom. She was legend, she was myth: he had heard of her but never seen her, never even dared to imagine her. She was revolutionary in his underground zine counterculture circles and of all these things she was more in person. She walked into the house and went straight to Delilah's room, asked him, quiet but firm, to leave.
She talked to Delilah for a few hours, while he hung out feeling awkward. He always felt awkward when he wasn't with Delilah: he didn't belong on these velvet couches, wood-paneled floors, listening to people come and go on the second-floor balcony. Down in the garden outside, they were having tea and croquet. The girls wore very short ruffled, brightly colored dresses: Meredith in green, Erin in red, Jessamine in blue, Cassie in purple. The boys wore old-fashioned suits, like costumes from a movie, tailcoats and top hats: Daniel in forest green, Austin in navy, Joseph in burgundy, someone he didn’t know wearing dark orange. He sat at the window and watched them play: it was like watching a stop-motion Alice in Wonderland, watching the dappled sunlight move slowly along the field, the brightly-colored figures too distant for sound. He was painfully aware of the long hallway behind him, the echoing silence that permeated between wood floors and velvet couches.
When the Captain finally left she did not ignore him as the others did. She walked out of the room and sat next to him in the windowsill, gazing down at the croquet players. Only then, for the first time, did any of them turn to look at the window. Cassie just shook her head and Jessamine gave a long, slow nod before returning to the game.
"They are playing for her," the Captain said. He became aware now that she had been staring at his face, her gaze heavy and measuring. She stared at him more, her eyes deep and unreadable, and his cheeks flushed with embarrassment. In that moment he felt every moment, every hollow moment, from the pornos he bought when he was twelve to the bag of weed still in his pocket, hanging heavy and judgmental. It was worse than Cassie’s even stare, heavy with dislike: worse than the sad glances he avoided from his mother when he was fourteen, arrested for the first time; worse than his first girlfriend, crying in the bathroom after they had sex. Then he knew why the Captain was a legend in counterculture and why, for the first time, he understood that he was not part of that culture. And when Delilah said his name, very quietly at the end of the hallway, he knew what grace was.
The Captain did not say anything, nor did she move, as he went to Delilah's room. Together they lay on the white bed, nestled into each other's arms, and watched the croquet game until it became too dark to see.
He didn't even get to stand with them at the funeral. Cassie and Jessamine, they held hands so tightly their knuckles were white, both their hands shaking, matching rings dark against their pale skin. But they did not cry.
He cried, after everyone left. Not even at her grave, because they won't let you touch it for so long after all the dirt is put back and they arrange everything, flowers and grass and cold dirt piled over her cold body. He thought of her skin, drying out in the small, dark confines of the coffin and the room she lived in, the white tower room with all the white paint and white windows, all open space and light. He cried, sitting on the ground, pushing his body up against a tree in the cemetery, with the wind pulling at his surplus army jacket and mud on the sides of his chuck taylors, covering his face with his hands and drawing ragged breaths that pulled and cut into his lungs. No one comforted him.
When Cassie and Jessamine got back to the house they went to Delilah's room and laid in her bed, sheets and skin. If they cried, they cried then, and then they just had each other, skin to skin, incomplete in their misery.
He thought about them, lying on the bed together, and knew that their sorrow meant more than his. But he also knew, deep inside him, that at least they had each other.
Next time he walked by, they had written "Delilah" over the door, at 1522 St. Joan Avenue. He did not enter the house.
1522 St. Joan Ave
"Really, Delilah?"
She turned around in the driveway, crossing her arms. "I think it's nice."
"Really?" Cassie repeated, crossing her own arms in return.
"What?"
"Well--nothing, really. But it's.."
"Old," Jessamine said, cutting in. She was climbing out of the car, pulling a rogue shoe out from under the front seat. "And old. It's gonna leak when it rains. No one will ever want to stay here."
"You're crazy," Delilah said, turning her back on both of them. She looked up at the house. "It reminds me of Paper Street."
"Not this again," Cassie stage-whispered to Jessamine. "Marla complex?"
"Marla complex," Jessamine sighed. "You really bought this ting, Delilah? There are seven broken front windows on the front side of the house alone."
"There's a hole in your porch, too," said Cassie, who had walked to the edge of the pavement, where the porch stairs began to ascend. "Like, a big one. Like this is rotted and you're going to have to get new wood for this whole thing if you want people to be able to walk on it."
"Oh, that's not the only hole," said Delilah, happily. She was grinning like a maniac and Jessamine knew why: ever since she was young Delilah, a child of the suburbs, had wanted an old, dilapidated Victorian mansion to call her own. "You should see the dining room ceiling! It goes up two stories! And the basement has a steel cage."
"A what?" Jessamine asked, alarmed, but a strangled cry from Cassie caught her attention. She had attempted to climb the stairs to the porch using the railing, and the railing had fallen off in her hand.
"Goddamn it Delilah!" she yelled, shaking the piece of plank at her. "Does it even have indoor plumbing?"
"Of course it does, don't be ridiculous," Delilah said, stepping over to the porch, her silver high heels clicking on the uneven concrete of the driveway. "I know what's necessary in a house. The heat and air, though, that's iffy."
"At least it has a roof," Jessamine sighed. She jammed her hands into the pockets of her overalls and joined them on the porch. Cassie had gingerly set the railing down over the gaping hole, and Delilah in her heels was studiously avoiding the uneven gaps in the boards.
"Key?" Cassie asked, and Delilah reached into her pocket to pull out three. A deadbolt, a skeleton key, and a handle-key later the front door was open, giving a soft thud and a shower of dust as they opened it.
The girls peered in. Sunlight at the end of the hallway revealed the dust three layers thick over everything. And there was, indeed, everything--the hall was crammed with stuff. Boxes lined the walls on both sides, piled on top of tables and couches and chairs. A disused aquarium filled with some sort of potted plant was at the back of the hallway, right under the window, where a little red flower was reaching for the sun.
"Is this what you meant by furnished?" Jessamine asked suspiciously.
"Oh, come on," said Delilah. She couldn't stop smiling, and despite the doubt etched heavy on both Cassie and Jessamine's faces they were smiling, too. "Think of how much fun it'll be to look through! There could be priceless stuff in here. And I got the whole house for this, too,
it's amazing."
Jessamine had started walking towards the boxes but Cassie grabbed her arm firmly. "Let's go upstairs first," she said. "Look through the whole house and then assess how crazy our wife is."
"Very crazy," said Delilah, still beaming as they walked up the stiars (which swayed precariously under their weight). "Super-duper, batshit, lady-with-cats-times-ten crazy. They'll lock me away."
"If they can find you," Cassie muttered. "In here?"
"Doubtful," Jessamine agreed. She stopped at the top of the stairs, lifting her hand off the railing. "Oh, wow."
"Wow what?" Cassie asked, craning over her shoulder, but she was already shaking her head by the time they all three got up the stairs.
This room, too, was lined with stuff: boxes and furniture and paintings and mirrors lined the walls. But at the end of the hall, receiving the brunt of their attention, was a pipe organ, complete with a full set of pipes set into the wall behind it, which lined a stained-glass window of...
"Is that a mandala?" Jessamine asked finally, but Cassie was more focused on the music.
"Does it work?" she demanded, not waiting for an answer before she walked over to the instrument, pulling out the dusty piano bench. "The full foot keyboard," she said, checking each pedal with her foot. "Very nice, wonder if there are pipes missing--"
"Not even the best part," Delilah interrupted. "See. Upstairs."
"Shouldn't we look at the rooms?" Cassie asked, getting up reluctantly, but Delilah was already hand-in-hand with Jessamine, pulling her round the corner and up the next set of stairs.
"Later," Delilah said. "Watch for the hole!"
"Delilah, there is a hoe in the middle of your floor," Jessamine said, twisting her neck around to stare at it as Delilah continued to pull her.
"Yep," said Delilah, still grinning like a maniac. "That's the dining room, down there. But come, look!"
Up the stairs they went, Delilah dragging Jessamine, leaving the imprint of high heels, converse, and boots in the dust. "Look," said Delilah, proudly, pulling them to a door at the very end of the upstairs hallway. "This is my room."
the door opened into the circular part of the house--a room lined in windows, painted entirely in white, with a vaulted ceiling going up into the roof. "How can you sleep with all this light?" Jessamine asked, as Cassie twirled around delightedly.
"Won't it get cold in the winter?" Cassie asked, crossing her arms.
"Don't care, it's perfect," Delilah said, stopping abruptly. "And I already cleaned it out. There's a bedframe and everything in one of the downstairs room, we just have to get a mattress. This is my room. The front tower." She laughed again. "I get to live in a tower!"
"You're adorable," Jessamine said, watching her caper about madly.
"Fucking adorable," Cassie agreed. She bit her lip, then uncrossed her arms and stuck her hands into the pockets of her dress, pushing her coat back in the process. "Well. If we're going to stay here tonight, we should get stuff out of the car."
"Air mattresses," said Jessamine and immediately Cassie nodded.
"Paper towels," she said, turning around. "Toilet paper, Spra Power, the bread for sandwiches--"
"Is there a working refrigerator?" Jessamine asked as they walked downstairs. Delilah had started singing to herself and wasn't paying them any mind. They turned and looked at her, then looked at each other and shook their heads. "Call Austin and Daniel to come move the bed," Cassie said. "They've never been to New Orleans before, I think they would come."
"You know what? I bet there's got to be something useful in all those boxes," Jessamine reasoned as they traipsed down the stairs. "Books, furniture, jewelry...something..."
"Delilah, darling, please find a refrigerator and tell me it's nice, relatively new--1980s or later please--empty, and keeping things cold," Cassie yelled over her shoulder as Delilah went dashing off down the hallway on the first floor.
"Clothes? There's got to be clothes in a house like this," Jessamine continued as the two walked down the front porch stairs. "A basement, too--did she say there was a steel cage?"
"Yes," Cassie said, sighing. "Maybe we can convince Meredith to come too, to get that organ in tune..."
"There's furniture, at least," Jessamine said, opening the trunk. She handed Cassie a carpetbag covered in flowers and took out a canvas Army surplus duffel for herself. "We don't need housewarming presents."
"I don't know about that," said Cassie as she removed two bags from Whole Foods from the trunk. "I mean, it might have all the furniture and crap you'll ever need but I don't think it has a blender."
"Or fresh yogurt," Jessamine said, pulling a giant bag stuffed with blankets into her arms and shutting the trunk with one hand. "Very important, fresh yogurt."
"The porch is nice,, though," Cassie said. "Bet Joseph can do something about that, he's handy."
"No--really? Joseph in carpentry?"
"You'd never think it," Cassie said, pushing the front door open with her body. "And maybe more paint, too."
"Yes," Jessamine said immediately. "I mean, don't get me wrong, the color is fabulous, but--"
"--the electric blue needs a touch-up?" Cassie finished. She followed the sound of Delilah's voice to a back room which proved to be a kitchen, where Delilah was busy clearing off counter space. "Good," she said, setting down the bags of food. "Find a fridge?"
"in the garage," Delilah said. "the ice-maker's not hooked up and I'v ejust plugged it in, but there's space for it in that corner once we move the boxes..."
"We're calling Austin and Daniel," Jessamine sighed, setting down the bag of bedding.
"And I daresay a few besides," Cassie murmured. She set down the carpetbag and sneezed, then stuffed her hands into the pocket of her pirate coat. "This is going to be a hell of a housewarming party."
And it was.
"Hey, where'd you get the coat?" someone asked over the music. Cassie looked him up and down. He had bright red hair and a sniffly expression: the sleeves of his green canvas jacket hung over the ends of his wrists.
"It was a costume in a movie," she said shortly.
"What movie?" he asked. "it's badass!"
"Pirates," Cassie said.
"Like Pirates of the Caribbean?" the kid yelled. He was standing give feet away and kept moving closer, shouting to be heard over the music.
"No, like the porno," Cassie said, and then turned around and walked away.
It had been like this for three nights now. She didn't want the music, really, she didn't. Cassie did not like grunge music and all these obnoxious wanna-bes who came around wearing the converse and hitting on Delilah because she was attractive and tiny and hitting on Jessamine because she wore miniskirts all the time. Of the trio, Cassie was in fact the only one who did not get hit on, mostly because instead of tolerating the boys like the other two, she gave them withering death-glares and made pointed comments until they went away. The only people she would talk to were the initial call in: Meredith, Austin, Daniel, Erin, and Joseph.
As for the rest, she didn't know where they came from. Skater punks, from the looks of them, attracted from nearby colleges where flat-ironed, face-curtain hair was the current Look and who still thought talking about 4chan was underground. Like the male version of eco-feminists, she thought, but didn't say it out loud because Jessamine was an eco-feminist, albeit a useful one. Cassie had theories on why this was, and they mostly had to do with Jessamine not actually being an eco-feminist at all, but did not mention them: they had long learned not to talk politics in each other's company.
The company had been off and on, make no mistake. Since college, they'd been living across the country: with Jessamine in New York, with Cassie in Los Angeles, and when Delilah's parents died and she got the money, she bought a house in New Orleans and invited the other two to come live with her.
It wasn't as far fetched as it sounded. Jessamine had just been fired from her architecture firm after she, in a fit of creative frustration, knocked over two computers onto a model she was working on, and Cassie was a recent PhD in molecular biology who had nothing else better to do. She'd always assumed that with a PhD in molecular biology she should know what to do with her life, but when it came down to it, the choice was between all the research job opportunities with the big pharmaceuticals in LA or Delilah and Jessamine.
It wasn't even a contest.
"Please, please make them go away," Cassie said to Delilah, cutting between her and some Goth twerp who was telling her some boring story about some lame trip he'd had once. He started to protest and she turned around and glared at him until he shut up and turned away, looking sulky. She turned back to Delilah. "If you do not make them all leave right now I will start pushing things through the hole in the dining room ceiling."
"What's so bad about them? Housewarming, Cassie," said Delilah, who was still holding a glass of something. Cassie took it out of her hand and downed the rest of it, then dropped the empty glass into a box filled with newspapers. They'd found a set of twenty-four crystal glasses in a box earlier and Delilah had decided to celebrate. Delilah drunk was a mess: first she was happy, giggling and flirting with everyone, then she just started laughing quietly to herself until she was crying, then she was just crying, usually at this point huddled up against Cassie or Jessamine's chest, makeup running like crazy. This had been happening more and more in the six months since her parents' deaths: this was something Jessamine and Cassie talked about late at night when Delilah was asleep between them, and never in the daylight.
Cassie ignored her and walked over to the speakers, hooked into some punk's laptop. She yanked out the cord, blasting the room with static for thirty seconds until she unplugged the speakers as well. She climbed onto the table, boots thunking heavily on the thick wood.
"Now I have kindly put up with all you twerps for three days," she said, "Since my lovely wife over there decided she would be nice and have a celebration. Let me get this straight. This is not your new hangout spot. This is not your place to come pick up girls. This is not some hot new club. This is our home and starting tomorrow morning, I am putting up a nice fence. One of the pretty, wrought-iron ones with all those sharp pointy things at the top. It will be right out front. And you will not come in here. Don't get me wrong--there will be more parties. But godDAMMIT if there is a party in this house it will be with people who actually deserve to be here. Now get out."
A murmur started in the crowd. Cassie crossed her arms. "Out! I will call the police on you! Out!"
They dissipated slowly, muttering: "bitch" and "lame" under their breath. Cassie didn't particularly care. She wasn't the kind of person who was bothered by the kinds of people who said: "bitch" under their breath at the end of an argument: she was a woman in combat boots and a pirate coat and she was very, very pissed off. Jessamine hoped that, for their own sakes, all the couples having sex in the rooms upstairs left before she caught them.
"If there are people having sex in the rooms upstairs--" Cassie began, striding off the table with a loud thump, and Jessamine winced. Cassie left the room and Jessamine looked around for Delilah, stepping over empty wine bottles as she entered the kitchen.
"Delilah?" she called. "Austin? Meredith?"
"I think they've all retreated to the attic," Delilah said, quietly, from one corner. "They started hiding when they started playing that godawful music." She ran a hand through her hair, rubbing glitter into it in the process. "I could see Cassie getting madder and madder all night. I thought she was going to knife somebody."
"Damn close," Jessamine said, sitting down next to her. Delilah's silver, beaded flapper dress hung in disarray, and her mascara was in thick black lines under her eyes, making the circles there even more pronounced. "The one time her good old fashioned Republican values came through for us."
Delilah snorted. "Republican," she said, then fell silent. In the silence, she put her head in her hands. "My head is killing me," she said softly, and Jessamine moved closer to her, laying her head on Delilah's back and reaching up to stroke her hair softly.
"Probably a good thing Cassie went crazy, then," she said. "I think maybe the housewarming has gone on long enough."
Delilah nodded, but gasped wetly for breath. Jessamine reached around to hug her. "You need sleep," she said. "Good thing Austin and Daniel got your bed put together, huh? Come on, sweetie, come on."
She ended up half-dragging, half-carrying Delilah up the stairs, into the white tower room with the bed by the windows. In deference to her sensibilities, Delilah had put up white muslin curtains, which Jessamine pulled closed before undressing Delilah and tucking her in bed.
"How bad is she?" Cassie asked. She was leaning against the wall outside when Jessamine exited the room, shutting the door quietly behind her.
"How drunk, you mean?" Jessamine asked, then sighed. She slid down the wall to sit on the floor next to where Cassie was leaning. "Pretty drunk. I tried to watch her drinks but I don't know how many she had. At least seven."
"Right," Cassie said, after a minute, staring off at the far wall. Her hands, balled into fists, were jammed deep into her pockets.
"She wasn't laughing this time, for a change," Jessamine said, laying her head against the wall with a small thud.
"Crying?" Cassie asked, still looking straight ahead.
"Yeah," Jessamine sighed. "Probably only natural."
"Probably," Cassie said, but her voice was still tight, too even. In the long silence between then, Jessamine reached up to rub her leg, gently, before dropping her hand. Cassie looked down.
"You find everyone?" Jessamine asked.
"In the attic, as predicted," Cassie said, indicating a door on the other end of the hall, where a closet concealed a very narrow spiral staircase. The closet locked from the inside. There were ways to get to the attic, of course, and all of them involved at least a little bit of climbing on the roof. "They're all for the fence idea. I think the boys are going to start on it tonight."
"Good," Jessamine said. They'd found the wrought-iron fence in the garage, behind one of the rows of boxes. Once they'd cleaned out enough boxes to actually fit the car into the garage they'd acquired a whole slew of new things, from the crystal glasses to a set of bunk beds with (apparently) three stacking bunks, now assembled in the tall portion of the attic. The fence had been one of the finds.
"Tomorrow we have to start going through things for real," Cassie said, reaching over with her foot to tap one of the boxes.
"It'll be amazing," Jessamine said.
"It'll be annoying," Cassie said. "All the useless stuff people keep. Old report cards, old family photographs, old diaries. I don't want to be the one to throw someone else's family portraits away, but what else are we going to do with it? We can't even store it. This house has been nothing but storage for decades and look at it now. I found wedding photographs today from 1948 in my bedroom drawer. What am I supposed to do with that?" She sighed. "I feel creepy keeping them and I feel like an asshole throwing them away. I guess that's why they got shoved into this house in the first place."
"We can do art with it," Jessamine said. "I have a few ideas."
"I'm sure you do," Cassie said. "Well, more power to you. Maybe you can sell some of this stuff on eBay and we can actually use the money for...I don't know, repairs."
"New electric blue paint," Jessamine said, and for the first time Cassie actually smiled. "What time is it?" she asked, changing the subject.
Cassie pulled a pocketwatch from her front pocket. "Three twenty five," she said, studying the face, then closed it with a click.
"We should go to sleep," Jessamine said, tracing a pattern in the dust with her fingernail.
"Yeah," said Cassie. She let the watch drop through her fingers by its chain, then dropped the ensemble back in her pocket. "You going back with Del?"
"Yeah," Jessamine said, standing up. Cassie nodded.
"I'm going to check on the attic, but I'll be back," she said. They kissed briefly before turning away, leaving only the faint sound of a door closing and boots echoing down the hall.
The house was huge. You had to give it that.
It took two weeks to clear the front hallway, but once it was clear and Cassie had scrubbed the walls down thrice with cleaner, it was clear that Delilah's house may have been worth something after all. The front staircase, once appraised, was found to be maple and polishable. The walls had exquisite, faded blue-gold wallpaper that reminded Jessamine of old theaters, and brass light fixtures (devoid of bulbs) up near the ceiling. Once the boxes were gone (and oh, the boxes, the boxes), the walls clean, the floors swept and the bulbs replaces, the room was gorgeous. Golden mirrors from the attic were affixed in place and Cassie, the practical one who liked traditional decorations, had found tables that matched the front staircase and even a matching umbrella stand.
"Gorgeous," Delilah said. "We don't have a freezer but we have an umbrella stand."
"A matching umbrella stand," Cassie corrected.
"I want to redo the wallpaper," Jessamine said. "It'll be gorgeous once it's finished."
"It's gorgeous now," Delilah said, running her fingers against it, but turned around. "Same colors, same pattern," she instructed, and Jessamine grinned.
"We have a foyer," she said. "It's official. Now we just need a house to go with it."
"Basement up," Cassie said firmly. "Go from the basement up. If we don't clean out the basement now we'll do the entire rest of the house and end up dumping it all in the basement and it'll be unusable."
Jessamine and Delilah looked at each other. "Fair enough," Delilah said, shrugging, and down they traipsed.
They found things.
In addition to the wrought-iron fence (gorgeous; rusted) and bedframes (seven in total, one for each bedroom), they found more crystal wineglasses, a set of identical silver rings made one in every size (of which the trio gleefully claimed three), three boxes of monogrammed linen napkins, sixteen boxes of trashy romance novels, four boxes of multiple copies of one book (As the Sparrow Falls, by Jackson Ruse. "He must have lived here, self-published, and never sold these," Jessamine mused while Cassie read on it. "Crap! Utter crap!" she proclaimed. Later the book was made into a movie about a house that was bigger on the inside, and Cassie hated every minute of it.), five boxes full of towels (all light blue, a color appearing in zero rooms of the house), a box filled with red checkered fabric, a box filled with worsted gray yarn, a box filled with newspapers from 1949 (which they donated to the library), a box full of baby mice (mostly alive, which was both adorable and terrifying), three boxes of silk, a box of what they assumed (with Jessamine's and Cassie's fiber expertise) was alpaca fur, a box of typewriter keys, a box of unidentified computer cords, three boxes of chinaware (which they used in the kitchen), six boxes of magazines, one really heavy box full of power tools (which Austin and Daniel were sorting through, slowly, with occasional help from Joseph when he didn't work), and one box--Jessamine's favorite--full of dead butterflies, artistically arranged in a spiral by color. It was magnificent and terrible. Jessamine put it in her room.
They did get rooms, eventually, too. Jessamine got a room in a back corner, with the fire escape on the outside of the house, where she put out flowers and upside down tomato plants. She hung all her paintings and pictures on the walls and the ceiling especially--her bed was on the corner right under the stairs, and she said the sloping ceiling made it feel like she was being embraced. She took her fishnets and tights and scarves and made a curtain across her bed, which was a twin twice as deep as a regular mattress. She got blackout curtains and put Christmas lights around the edges, plugged them at night and had the entire room pitch black all day except when she was painting...which, now, was all the time. One corner of the room, by the fire escape, was dedicated to perpetual art.
"Move in a bit," she instructed, doing nudes of Cassie and Delilah together, limbs draped across chairs, expanses of skin and muscle and bone. When she was done she had captured their essence in pencil, long lines and dark eyes and mouths too close together, expressions that could be everything or anything. It hurt to look at them too long, stretched out together like that, mortality hanging in the air as heavy as the dust that swirled down the stairs.
Eventually, he showed up.
It was at one of the parties.
"You know, these maybe fine for the Captain, but they get on my nerves," Cassie said. She was on her third whiskey-and-OJ. No one liked her when she drank because she just ended up bitching about everything for hours and shooting everyone what she thought were dark looks but really just looked like drunken leering. Considering Cassie was a 29 year old, 5'10" hourglass figure with enormous breasts, no one at these parties really cared--but inside she had the mind of a forty-year old, and no one knew it like Jessamine when she had to barsit. Normally it was just Delilah. Delilah was tiny and had hair like a dandelion and held her alcohol like one. When she and Erin started drinking it was a contest to see who would end up making out with the other one first, in some weird sort of drinking game that Jessamine had never really gotten the hang of. She thought it was one of those things that only made sense when you were drunk.
She noticed him when he came in, of course. Tall, awkward kid in a army surplus jacket, hanging around in a corner holding a glass and never drinking from it (Jessamine noticed these things). He was a by-product of one of Austin's friends, but since Austin, Daniel, and Joseph were all busy with their band (who were using the second-stair landing as a stage. This worked to a greater or lesser extent depending on which part of the house you were on. Funnily enough, you got really perfect sound if you stood in the corner between the hot-water heater and the sink in the second floor blue bathroom), he just ended up standing in a corner, looking awkward.
He was almost Jessamine's type. Tall and holocaust skinny. But something about his hunched-over shoulders and dark eyes threw her off.
Cassie was still talking, ranting about something. "I mean, look at what she does. Airplane full of dead babies? O that sick, so sick, and she passes it off as a party favor--all those goddamn kids, those goddamn elementary school kids--and she picked all the ones that were being abused at home, how sick can you get--"
"Cassie," Jessamine said gently, trying to pry a drink out of Cassie's fingers. "Cassie, honey, I think you've had enough. What is---are you drinking absinthe? Dammit." She looked up, exasperated. "Meredith?"
Meredith was sitting on the stairs with one of the boys, a swimmer who was in training for the Olympics. Totally Meredith's type, too--tall, blonde, easy smile, completely ripped. "I'm telling you, Michael Phelps? Was a joke, that was last summer. You should see the new suits they're putting out, it'll make Michael Phelps a one-hit wonder."
"Meredith!" Jessamine said, then sighed. "Goddammit. Why are all my friends drunk and talking to attractive boys? And why am I drunksitting you?"
"I am not drunk," said Cassie. "I hold my absinthe very well, thank you--" she paused here, to sneeze once and then continued without pause--"and I am perfectly aware of, of that." She stopped talking and reached for her glass. "And there is no liquid in this glass," she said, standing up and holding the glass straight up over her head. "No liquid!" she exclaimed again before sauntering off. Jessamine set her forehead on the bar.
"Goddammit," she said again. "Give me a schnapps," she said (without moving her head) to the bartender, a tall, giraffe-like woman with a shock of red hair. "I want the full sixteen ounces and at least 92 proof. Now."
It was the only time all three of them ever got drunk at a party.
When Jessamine woke up, she was in the clawed-foot bathtub on the third floor, using a towel as a pillow and wearing Austin's coat over her favorite yellow fishnets. "Goddammit," she said again to bathroom, empty save for Austin himself, who had used three towels to construct a bed for himself on the other side of the sink. Slowly, she pulled herself up using the shower curtain and limped downstairs, a bruise on the edge of her leg just beginning to turn black.
When Cassie woke up, she was in her bed, wearing her pirate coat, boots, and lingerie. Blood was still dripping from the cut on her hand and eyeliner stains were rubbed into her pillow. The curtains around her four-poster bed were pulled back just enough to let a ray of sunlight fall on her face, showing tear tracks through the mascara. She woke up calm, stared at the ceiling, and thought very slowly about cellular processes before getting out of bed and washing the blood off her hands.
When Delilah woke up she was in her bed, lying next to him, her head nestled into his shoulder. With her face pressed close like that, he smelled like her father.
And then he stayed.
"I dislike you," Cassie said to him one day, over breakfast. This was when she'd gotten a real job, using her PhD in molecular biology for something in a lab somewhere in the city, or maybe a med school or a hospital. She was cooking an egg, over-easy, and toast, and he was sitting at the kitchen counter, tall and hollowed-out looking, with spaces in the places where his bones should fit together. He looked hunched-over, hunted, nervous.
"Why?" he asked, his voice rough.
Cassie shrugged, taking her egg out of the frying pan. She replaced it with the toast, making the pan sizzle with melting butter. Silence stretched out while he waited, afraid to talk, and Cassie poked at her toast. "You're not good for Delilah," she said finally, flipping the bread over. It sizzled again, then faded.
"Why?" he asked again, too wary to ask for more.
She looked at him; she had a disconcerting habit of looking people straight in the eyes. "You're not what she needs," she said. "She needs....oh, lots of things. Light and air and sunshine. Jefferson Square and Audubon Zoo and tigers and lions and bears."
"Raindrops on roses and whiskers on kittens," Jessamine said, reaching around Cassie's waist for a hug. "Bright copper kettles and warm woolen mittens."
"Also brown paper packages tied up with strings," Cassie said, waving a spatula at him. She returned to her toast, flipping it once more before setting it on a plate. "Eggs, Jess?"
"Yes, yes, yes," Jessamine said. She took the egg and cracked the yolk open with her fork, pouring the yellow liquid on the toast. "Don't listen to Cassie," she told him, sitting next to him conversationally. "She's silly. I think there is nothing wrong with you."
"Nothing wrong with me?" he said, not quite smiling. He didn't say: "Saying there is nothing wrong with me is not approving of me," which is what he was thinking, nor did he say: "I don't care what you think," because really, if Delilah cared what they thought, then he cared what they thought, too. And he knew that they were married--he saw the rings they all wore, smooth identical bands across three interlaced sets of fingers, no matter what the law said. He knew that they were lovers and sisters first.
None of that mattered when Delilah walked into the room, and his entire world lit up.
Cassie was right, in the end.
She got worse after that. By his fifth party, he hadn't slept with Delilah again--just stolen kisses and brief touches of skin on skin, sensations that sent tingling like needles up and down his spine. The night of the fifth party he followed her upstairs, watched her smoke in her yellow-daisy underwear, and after that it was like kissing an ashtray and he didn't care. She licked his skin like she couldn't get enough and he had never loved anyone so much in his entire life, not ever, not anyone as much as how he wanted to stop the entire world when her skin was silk against his. When he left at six am to go back to work she lay in bed, unmoving, and he thought she was asleep.
When Jessamine got back from work at six pm she was still lying in bed, in the white room, unmoving, the covers wet and her hair damp from sweat. Jessamine got her into the shower. By the time Cassie got there they barely managed to get her dressed and into the kitchen for food. She sat at the kitchen table in an ugly blue school jumper, trying to smile with her mouth and her eyes full of tears, trying to hold coffee with hands that were shaking.
"I...I can't do it, Jess," she finally whispered, when she spoke, her voice cracking. Even with both hands wrapped around the coffee mug, the brown liquid still splashed onto the counter. She raised her eyes to look at Cassie, because Cassie never looked away. "I'm sorry..." She bit her lip then stopped talking. Jessamine held her in her arms and whispered into her ear, silly words to songs and poems, while Cassie held her hand, rubbing her thumb across Delilah's knuckles, holding her fingers to make the tremors stop.
After that they slept in the same bed, sharing sheets. After a few quiet words Austin and Daniel played music in the bathroom next to her bedroom, drums and bass that hummed silently through the walls, more reverberations that sound. It calmed her nerves and helped her sleep. When Delilah was asleep Cassie and Jessamine met eyes over her hair, held hands over her body.
You should remember the most that they, too, were nothing when she was gone.
He moved in, eventually, because even though Cassie thought his presence was what made her worse, she stopped shaking when he was near and Jessamine said they had to take what they could get. They argued about this sometimes in low voices in the kitchen, in this-that-or-the-other language, hoping he wouldn't hear them. Cassie, at least, treated him like a thing, a sort of repulsive medicine: good for now, with possible addictive and negative side effects. In the long run, maybe not worth it: needs more chemical trials, she would have written on a lab report, if he had been a drug. More specificity needed in signal-receptor bonding, something with less harmful side effects. Jessamine talked to him sometimes, was civil, at least; offered him coffee and made him toast once.
"No me gusta que sea dormiendo con ella todos las noches. Es mejor que nosotros duermamos con ella porque sabemos que no somos la causa de su depresión--"
"No sabes que el es la causa, pero no te gusta el, no tiene prueba--"
"¡Ella es enfermada! No dejamos nada a la improvisacion con ella."
"¡Yo sé, yo sé! Pero algo que puede ayudar ella, pienso que debamos intentar.”
“Pero su padres-,” here Cassie raised her voice, gesticulating wildly, and Jessamine hushed her. Cassie saw him standing at the top of the stairs, watching them, and shot him a dirty look before stuffing her fists in her pockets and striding off towards the kitchen. Jessamine stood in the foyer, hands hanging at her sides, her head thrown back. A sigh escaped from her lips, and then she opened her eyes and walked up the stairs, brushing past him.
He didn't like being treated like an inanimate object, exactly: it was more that he didn't have a choice. He knew something was wrong with Delilah and he didn't know if he was making it better or worse.
The Captain came in, at the last, the days when Delilah was too tired to move, was all dandelion-hair and pink nightgowns, no more smeared makeup and failed macaroni. Cassie did not quite approve, but she and the Captain were apparently old bosom buddies, and Jessamine was a major fan. The Captain, he had heard of: she was legendary for her parties, for her pranks, for her twisted sense of humor, for her airships and fashion and her single-minded charisma, her drive and her wisdom. She was legend, she was myth: he had heard of her but never seen her, never even dared to imagine her. She was revolutionary in his underground zine counterculture circles and of all these things she was more in person. She walked into the house and went straight to Delilah's room, asked him, quiet but firm, to leave.
She talked to Delilah for a few hours, while he hung out feeling awkward. He always felt awkward when he wasn't with Delilah: he didn't belong on these velvet couches, wood-paneled floors, listening to people come and go on the second-floor balcony. Down in the garden outside, they were having tea and croquet. The girls wore very short ruffled, brightly colored dresses: Meredith in green, Erin in red, Jessamine in blue, Cassie in purple. The boys wore old-fashioned suits, like costumes from a movie, tailcoats and top hats: Daniel in forest green, Austin in navy, Joseph in burgundy, someone he didn’t know wearing dark orange. He sat at the window and watched them play: it was like watching a stop-motion Alice in Wonderland, watching the dappled sunlight move slowly along the field, the brightly-colored figures too distant for sound. He was painfully aware of the long hallway behind him, the echoing silence that permeated between wood floors and velvet couches.
When the Captain finally left she did not ignore him as the others did. She walked out of the room and sat next to him in the windowsill, gazing down at the croquet players. Only then, for the first time, did any of them turn to look at the window. Cassie just shook her head and Jessamine gave a long, slow nod before returning to the game.
"They are playing for her," the Captain said. He became aware now that she had been staring at his face, her gaze heavy and measuring. She stared at him more, her eyes deep and unreadable, and his cheeks flushed with embarrassment. In that moment he felt every moment, every hollow moment, from the pornos he bought when he was twelve to the bag of weed still in his pocket, hanging heavy and judgmental. It was worse than Cassie’s even stare, heavy with dislike: worse than the sad glances he avoided from his mother when he was fourteen, arrested for the first time; worse than his first girlfriend, crying in the bathroom after they had sex. Then he knew why the Captain was a legend in counterculture and why, for the first time, he understood that he was not part of that culture. And when Delilah said his name, very quietly at the end of the hallway, he knew what grace was.
The Captain did not say anything, nor did she move, as he went to Delilah's room. Together they lay on the white bed, nestled into each other's arms, and watched the croquet game until it became too dark to see.
He didn't even get to stand with them at the funeral. Cassie and Jessamine, they held hands so tightly their knuckles were white, both their hands shaking, matching rings dark against their pale skin. But they did not cry.
He cried, after everyone left. Not even at her grave, because they won't let you touch it for so long after all the dirt is put back and they arrange everything, flowers and grass and cold dirt piled over her cold body. He thought of her skin, drying out in the small, dark confines of the coffin and the room she lived in, the white tower room with all the white paint and white windows, all open space and light. He cried, sitting on the ground, pushing his body up against a tree in the cemetery, with the wind pulling at his surplus army jacket and mud on the sides of his chuck taylors, covering his face with his hands and drawing ragged breaths that pulled and cut into his lungs. No one comforted him.
When Cassie and Jessamine got back to the house they went to Delilah's room and laid in her bed, sheets and skin. If they cried, they cried then, and then they just had each other, skin to skin, incomplete in their misery.
He thought about them, lying on the bed together, and knew that their sorrow meant more than his. But he also knew, deep inside him, that at least they had each other.
Next time he walked by, they had written "Delilah" over the door, at 1522 St. Joan Avenue. He did not enter the house.