Free Dwellers by Eliza Victoria Page A

eyes.
    Right now, I can’t say for sure.
    She stands, and Louis stands with her. I would have done the same—I actually leaned forward, only to feel my legs tying me down like boulders—because old habits die hard.
    “Tomorrow,” she says. We nod. She looks at Louis. “Your father is grieving.”
    “I know,” he says.
    “I will need to tell him, as well.”
    “Yes.”
    She moves as if to turn to the door. At the last moment she pauses, steps forward, and places a finger on my knee. She puts no pressure on it—it is so light her finger could have been
hovering—but I nearly scream.
    “I can mend your bones,” Auntie says. Louis has taken a step forward with his hands slightly raised, as though planning to tackle her.
    I nod, but in my head I am screaming
take your finger off take it off take it off take it off—
    “I can,” she says, “but I won’t. Do you understand why?”
    They were nearly the same words she told me when I fell from Grandfather’s tree when I was eight.
Your mother has told you several times to stop climbing this tree. I can fix this, but
I won’t. Do you understand why?
    I do. I nod.
Because I don’t deserve it.
She turns without another word and steps out the door, the imagined weight of her finger like a brand on my knee, the sound of the rain
spiriting her away like a black cloak.
     
    LOUIS SITS DOWN again. I can hear him cursing under his breath. I have no anger left; in a strange way, I am relieved. What was bound to happen has happened. Now I can move on,
now I can stop hoping. Hope is a fragile thing, but it is a heavy thing, and the pain in my bones is heavy enough as it is.
    Ivy begins to moan, first like a person awakened from a dream, then like a person injured. Louis stands up, goes to his room, and comes back out with a pen and a notepad. Ivy touches her
forehead and sits up. Louis starts to draw something, but I touch his arm, shake my head. This is mine. I take the pad, draw the necessary symbol, and tear off the page. Ivy screams, tears flowing
down her face (
Help help help me please help)
, and abruptly falls silent when I hand her the piece of paper. She takes it and sighs, shoulders slumping, muscles and mind starting to
relax.
    “You raped Mona,” Ivy says. No hysterics. No anger. No fear.
    “No,” I say. The calm is a welcome change. “I’m in Jonah’s body, but I am not Jonah.”
    Louis sits beside Ivy with the first-aid kit and begins to clean her wound. She doesn’t flinch.
    “I loved Meryl, you know,” Ivy says.
    “I know.”
    “But I didn’t tell her because I didn’t think she was interested in me that way,” she says. The tears fall again, but she no longer sobs. She looks at me. “I should
have told her.”
    I take her hand. “I’m so sorry, Ivy.”
    She frowns, thinks. “You’re not Jonah?”
    I need her like this, slow and vague, but receptive. Or else she’ll be clawing out my eyes, running screaming into the rain again.
    “No,” I reply.
    “Are you sure about this?” Louis says. The lid of the first-aid kit clicks shut.
    “I don’t know,” I say. But I do know. Either we tell her or we kill her.
    I decide to tell her.

Part II
The Mansion with the Isolated Garden

Let’s say my name is Jonah and he is Louis.
     
    Even here, in this story, I can’t make myself tell you our real names.

15
    I WAS NINE years old the first time I saw someone die.
    It was a bright February morning, very early, very cool, the morning light just beginning to touch the trees.
Bring the children so they’ll learn
, Father said, and so we went. The
whole family—aunts and uncles chatting, yawning, shaking their heads, arms draped over my younger cousins—stood in a secluded garden just outside the estate cemetery. I could see our
home, the main mansion, in the distance, luminescent like a pool of water. My grandfather had his hand on my shoulder. The day had a festive air.
    Two servants dragged the sugarcane farmer in front of us.