Page 29 of This Vicious Hunger
“Thank you, Leo,” I say, giving him my best winning smile. I’m not sure it’s entirely convincing, but I also think the poor man would thank me for scraps if it meant keeping our gentle friendship alive. “It must have been hard to bring this up, and I wish you hadn’t lied to me before, but I’m glad you’ve told me. You’re a true friend.”
Chapter Sixteen
Idon’t visit the garden for nearly a week after the new moon. The first two days the delay is intentional, anger and frustration warring with possibility as I turn Leonardo’s words over and over in my mind. How could Petaccia keep Olea—and the garden—from me? I thought we were supposed to be partners. And Olea… why didn’t she mention Petaccia when I told her I was studying botany? This lie feels bigger, almost too big to address head-on.
I mourn the valuable time I’ve wasted assuming I might learn some secret knowledge from Olea that I could use to impress the doctor—but the more I think about it, the more I know I’m repeating this phrase,valuable time, like my father repeated his mantra to me about how I was anormal marriageable girl. No funny business here, no daughter who looks at men like loose pebbles in her shoe but studies women as if they are uncharted territory on a map. No, sir.
Perhaps my interest in the garden started as a way to impress Petaccia, but I’d be a fool to pretend the plants alone are what draws me to that damned gate every night. It is the plants I dream of most, curled thick around my wrists and neck, squeezing tight,suffocating me—but it is still my dreams of Olea I fight waking from more.
I feel like nothing more than a child, naive, trickable. Leo, Petaccia, Olea—all of them have kept information from me. Do they not think I can handle the truth? Am I so stupid? Or do they each wish to manipulate me? My thoughts spin, and I am wounded by Olea’s omission most of all, because with each hour that goes by I miss her more and more.
By the third night the reason I don’t visit the garden is different. It isn’t because of my mixed-up thoughts; what started at first as a semi-voluntary escape from the garden’s midnight clutches now feels like a punishment. As if the garden’s presence is leaching itself from my very bones.
I wake that morning with cramps in my belly so severe I question the date, but my courses aren’t due for another two weeks and this ache feels somehow… deeper. It’s a clawing sensation, as if somebody is scratching at my insides with a rusty knife. And on top of that I’m so hungry I can hardly think.
I lie in bed and try to recall when I last felt such pain. I’ve heard of stomach flus that can make you sick, and Petaccia herself talked about some sickness that causes hydrophobia in its victims, which also extends to a fear of food due to the painful spasms it causes, but I’ve not heard of anything that can make you feel this hungry. Maybe my body is fighting something off, an infection—that’s the most logical suggestion, but other than tiredness I’ve felt fine until now.
I skip three days of classes, lying in bed until the arc of the sun convinces me it’s time for dinner, when I make sure I’m ahead of Leo and gorge myself on platefuls of fresh bread and olives and syrupy balsamic vinegar before he even shows up. The first twonights of my illness I’m too exhausted to leave my rooms, curled beneath my worn sheets, praying that the morning will find me hale and well once more.
The dreams are rotten, too. The heat of the flames licking from inside my body, a fever that builds until I’m ready to explode; I dream of Olea’s skin on mine, but the heat is too much and her skin sloughs away like the dead leaves of Petaccia’s failing plants. Olea is Leo. Leo—he looks like Aurelio. And then it is Aurelio who is burning, screaming, skin crumbling to ash as the whole world burns.
When I wake the heat is sticky, the air building with the kind of static that signals we’re due for a big storm—only it never comes. Every time I move, my skin sticks to something, my hair, my dress, my pillowcase, and I wonder how much of it is fever and how much is simply the weather.
When I begin to feel better, my first thought is the garden. And not just the garden, but Olea. It doesn’t matter what Leo says, whatever the truth may be about the plants in her care, and whatever the illness or disfigurement that keeps her in that garden is, I want to know now for the sake of knowing. It is like a scab I have picked once too often, finding watery blood underneath, only now I must keep picking for the scar.
Thursday, when I’m finally well enough to go to the garden, I have a plan.
Olea is there, waiting.
There is a track in the earth across the front of the gate as though she has done nothing these three days but pace it. There is no basket in sight, none of her usual snipped blooms or wax paper. The hem of her dress looks dirty, as if she’s worn the same one for several days, and her fingertips are stained with soil or ink, thenails unkempt. She jumps off the stone bench hidden between the fronds as I approach, wiping her cheeks hastily. They’re streaked with translucent tears, her dark eyes still brimming with them.
The sight of her is a cooling balm. Instantly I feel any remaining anger drain away, my whole body relaxing as the familiar scent of the garden envelops me. It has, if possible, grown thicker and lusher since I saw it last; I notice fresh white blooms atop the goddess’s arrow plant near the bench, and two new, thick tubular fruits the colour of emeralds from the one called widow’s row.
Olea, too, is radiant with the thickening silver moonlight. I drink in her creamy skin, her dark gaze, the sway of her hair against her gown. My stomach swoops, and it is like staring at the ceiling in an unfamiliar chapel, the cradle burning at your feet.
“Thora!” she cries excitedly. “Oh, I thought you’d forgotten all about me. I was turning it over and over trying to see if I’d said something to upset you. If I have, I’m truly sorry. I only sent you away for a break because I was worried about you. I’m just a stupid girl—”
“Be still,” I say. So many more words swell on my tongue. I want to tell her how much I’ve missed her, how the world out there feels like grey and brown dust but the garden is all colour. I hold it back, not afraid now, just waiting. The ghost of my father’s disapproval does not belong in this place. “You’ve done nothing to me. I just haven’t been well, that’s all.”
“You haven’t?” There is a gleam of something in her eyes, not exactly pleasure, but close. Now that I know she is Petaccia’s ward, there is something in this expression that reminds me of the doctor; it’s subtle, a faint look of almost calculated curiosity.
I shake my head. “I wouldn’t have stayed away otherwise.”
Olea folds her hands nervously in front of herself, her eyes jumping from my face to my chest and back up again hurriedly.If she can feel the difference in me she doesn’t say, but I sense the acknowledgement between us the way I can feel the change in the air, storm clouds gathering in the distance. She missed me the way I missed her. She islike me—she has to be.
I produce the basket I have brought with me tonight, scavenged from the greengrocer’s in the village. It’s the first time I’ve been off campus since my arrival and I did not relish the experience, but it was worth it for the contents.
I beckon Olea to come a little closer, and she does so—skittish, like an untamed horse, eyes wide and wild. I tilt the basket up so she can see inside. Layered beneath a festive chequered cloth in white and blue and several embroidered napkins are a bottle of rare chocolate liqueur and two freshly baked Romesco-style Romeras pastries, their golden tops encrusted with flecks of sea salt.
Olea cocks her head curiously.
“Poplinock. Have you ever had one? They’re delicious. My mother used to make them on the holy days, and when I got older my father and I would sometimes get them from the bakery after we worked. Would you like one?”
She licks her bottom lip, her dark tongue darting like that of a serpent. In all the time we’ve known each other, I have never seen Olea eat, but she has never mentioned any intolerances. I lift the basket up towards the gate, but it is too awkward for Olea to reach inside. I gesture—May I?—and gather one of the pastries in a napkin before holding it through the bars.
Olea stares at it. She doesn’t come any closer, but I can see the tension in her limbs.
“Go on,” I say. “I’ve not poisoned it.”
