Page 55 of This Vicious Hunger
“Exactly.”
Olea is right. My whole life I’ve been trained to believe that grief is holy, that serving mourners is an honour. But my father, the holiest man I’ve ever known, was so disgusted by the idea that his daughter did not want to marry that he found her a husband as his dying wish. If I thought the sepulchre was a tomb, then my marriage was a prison—still of my father’s creation. Aurelio’s thirteen-day mourning Silence is only a reminder that my husband’s detention of me was, deep down, approved by the man I trusted most.
“Either way.” I brush it off. “It happened, it’s in the past.”
“That’s my point,” Olea says. “Aurelio made you mourn him in the wayhewanted after he was otherwise dead and gone. So you could argue that ritual is all about guilt, rather than grief.”
“Guilt?” I push back from the desk and carry my mug to the sink. It’s still half-full, but I refuse to let Olea see my face. “What’s guilt got to do with anything? Do you think Ishouldfeel guilty about the death of my husband? We’d hardly been married five minutes—”
I see the flicker of flames behind my eyelids. Blink.
“I’m not accusing you of anything, Thora.” Olea’s voice is soft.
She is on her feet now too. I hear the scrape of her chair and the light pad of her bare footsteps as she crosses the room to my side. I hold my breath, not turning. I don’t want to talk about this. Aurelio is gone. I should not have to feel guilty for something that wasn’t my fault, even if it brought me here. To her.
“I’m not saying you should feel guilty,” she murmurs. “I’m saying that he wanted you to. And by following his instructions for how you should grieve—”
“I don’t want to talk about it,” I cut her off, my back still towards her. “I’m sorry. I know you want to—”
There is a loud crash behind me. I spin, nearly throwing myself off-balance. Olea is on the floor, supine, hair flowing around her head like spilled ink. I rush to her without thinking, instantly grateful I kept on my gloves and then cursing myself for the way they get in the damn way. I hesitate only a second before grabbing her chin, checking her temple for bruising where it’s pressed against the floor. Her eyelids flutter and she groans.
“Are you okay?” I say in a rush. “Olea, can you hear me?”
Her skin glistens with a sheen of sweat. I can see the rapid pulse firing in her throat. Her lips have paled to the shade of a healing bruise, the dark circles under her eyes now grey-toned where therest of her skin is pallid as off milk. I try to shake her shoulder, but she is limp and unresponsive as a doll.
My throat thickens and I feel tears prickle uselessly behind my eyelids. It is too warm in here. Can I open the window? Will the sunlight hurt her? Can I get her to drink? I have to do something. I pull her head into my lap, trying to raise it as gently as possible. I wipe the sweat off her brow and attempt to blow cool air across her face.
“I didn’t think this would happen so soon. I hoped it wouldn’t happen at all, but you’ll be okay,” I soothe. “It’s your body trying to purge the toxins. Just hold on. It will pass.”
It will pass.
Itwillpass.
It doesn’t pass.
I manage to get her into my narrow bed, though my lungs burn and I can feel my old dizziness returning the longer I battle with her limbs and the dead weight of her. She comes to briefly, long enough to moan for “Water, please,water” but not enough for me to fetch it so she can drink.
I gather a damp cloth, sponging at her skin when the heat of the fever rages and covering her with sheets and blankets when it abates. She is conscious enough to feel pain but these moments are fleeting, her eyes glassy and her skin dull as paper. I remove her nightgown, barely registering the state of her body, bruises blossoming everywhere, some turning yellow already; I can see her ribs.
The second evening I pull back the sheets to bathe her and yelp. The blackness at her hands has spread to her elbows, and at her feet it has seeped up her skin nearly to the knees. It is like aslowly creeping necrosis—and it smells like it in places too. The cut between her knuckles has opened up again and weeps continuously, reopening every time she reaches for a glass or flails in whatever nightmare wracks her body.
“Just a little longer.” I can’t keep the urgency from my voice. “Just until your fever breaks. Come on, Olea, you can do this.”
But the fever doesn’t break. It comes in wave after vicious wave; the sweat pouring out of her smells entirely of the garden, that same bitter green perfume. She shivers between punishing waves of heat, her lips cracked and dry and bleeding, the blood nearly black. It stains the bedding, the wooden floor; there are even splatters of it on the walls where she has lashed out with an arm.
At first I do not leave her side, but unlike Olea I need to eat. On the second day I venture out. I avoid Leo in the dining hall, making sure to send a note to his rooms explaining that Petaccia has me working late on a project and that he shouldn’t worry, and then I load up on stacks of bread and cheese, hiding napkin bundles in the pockets of my trousers and carrying the rest. I run back to my rooms with my heart pounding in my ears, near convinced that Olea will not still be breathing when I return. She is—thank god, she is—but she appears to fresh eyes like a living corpse, pallid and damp and shrunken.
By the fourth day it is clear that the sickness is not running a natural course. Whereas when I was unwell, that deep, painful sickness and the accompanying dizziness rose and fell, in Olea it is so persistent that when she is awake she can sometimes hardly speak. At first I try to encourage her, desperately urging her on—and then I know that no amount of encouragement will drag her through this.
“Olea,” I say, waking her gently with a fresh cup of warmherbal tea. “It’s not working. None of this is working. I think it’s time we…”
She rouses, bruised eyelids flickering. She opens her eyes and they are black slits. I can see hardly any whites, no iris, just pupil from lid to lid. For a second I am drunk with panic. She is not herself. I don’t know what lurks in the darkness of her smile, but I know it’s nothing good.
“Thoradarling,” she enthuses. It all comes out as one word.
“We’ve got to try something else,” I insist. “Olea, you’re—”
“No, no,” Olea groans, sounding more like herself. “Don’t.”
