Page 47 of The Seekers of Deer Creek

“Please.” She wrung her fair hands. Her eyes became pools of regret.

I considered what I had done to escape my past. I’d left my son and allowed my family to believe I’d sunk to my depths in a rushing river. I walked for days, suffered unimaginable indignities. I knew I was no hero. For most, I would be nothing more than a coward, a villain. And yet I did not cower when fate threw open its shadowy arms. Even as a ghost of my former self, I embraced the future I was afraid to see. Survival, its own virtue. In retrospect, I imagine that she’d told herself the same thing.

“You’ll regret staying with Marcel,” I said.

“I imagine you’re right.”

“And I will come to hate the memory of this summer.”

“Can’t it be something lovely we recall?”

I did not turn to see her wistful expression. I did not take her cool hand and press my lips to its palm, as I wanted to, and I did not move the curl from her forehead, where it lay like a crescent of color on a flawless canvas. I turned and left her to her flowers, her carefully arranged loneliness, resolving to pack my things that very moment. There was nothing left for me in Arles.

But when I arrived at the cottage, the door was flung open. There was a commotion inside. Emil’s voice was raised. So was Marcel’s. The secret painting, I saw, lay on the floor between them. Pieces of the shattered mirror winked from a corner.

“They are friends, nothing more,” Emil protested.

“Friends?” Marcel repeated. “You think I’m a fool? Those bare shoulders. This is an abomination.”

“Art is not always life. She was painting a fantasy.”

“If this creature’s fantasy is my wife, then that is crime enough.”

Spittle rained from his words. I shivered at the hate I heard in them. This creature. He did not even consider me human. I saw, too, the irony of Emil’s position as my defender, when he had tried to caution against this very thing.

“Marcel, my brother,” Emil gasped. “Don’t do it.”

Then I saw that Marcel was flashing one of his pistols. He had a ghastly smile on his face and in the shuttered room, his teeth seemed to glow like huddled white mice. I knew at once what had happened. Someone told Marcel about the Chaton and me—a servant seeking favor? A guest that had overheard us? Then, armed with the gunpowder of his anger, he’d battered into my cottage and found the painting, which he considered proof of our unnatural crimes. For a man like him, there’d have been a sort of pleasure in the discovery, as ifhe’d finally found a path for his violence to follow, one that glimmered straight and true.

“I swear on my life,” Emil pleaded, “there was nothing untoward.”

Marcel pointed to the smattering of evidence I could not deny, evidence I’d stupidly left in the cottage for too long: a vial of the Chaton’s perfume, the copy ofNightwoodthat she’d inscribed (To my love, from her love), her chemise tossed at the foot of my bed. Where I saw a summer of vital and careless routine, he saw a season of betrayal. We were both right.

He waved the pistol toward Emil. “And you, heathen that you are, let this into our home. I should shoot you for your perversion.”

“Stop, Marcel, and think!”

“Do you expect me, me of all people, to look the other way, like some frail cuckold?”

I came into the light. Surprised, Marcel swung the pistol toward me.

“Don’t hurt him,” I said.

“You.” His eyes nailed into me and I understood that what lived inside of him at that moment was not only hatred for me, but hatred for himself.

I held up my hands. He advanced toward me. He lifted the pistol.

The barrel, luminous and shifting, reminded me of minnows darting in the stream by my childhood home. We’d catch them by the handfuls. Silver and blue, shades of the same fleeting life.

I began to back away. But then, behind me, another body, the Chaton, throwing me out of the way with astonishing force. I crashed onto the ground on my elbows. The air flew from my body.

“Justine?”

Did the question come from me, or Emil, or from Marcel? I can’t recall. I heard it, and then I saw Emil lifting the tea kettle from my stove. He brought it down on Marcel’s head. The sound of cast iron hitting skull bones was so loud, so terrifying, that I screamed. Marcel fell witha thump. The pistol clattered under the bed. Justine crawled to her husband and felt for his pulse.

“Is he alive?” I gasped.

“Yes.” In a voice teeming with finality she said, “Go. Both of you. Go before he wakes.”