Louise walked into the forest from the last reach of the orchard, through a bower of younger, shorter trees sprouted from the seeds of fallen apples. Even the sound of Edward had vanished, but she knew he was in the forest, and that he couldn’t have gone past its shallowest outer reaches without eyes. She tripped over him while feeling her way past a sycamore with enormous roots.

  Edward was lying on his back, his legs torn a thousand tiny times, each wound white-lipped.

  “Edward. Move for me. Your hands, anything.”

  Edward didn’t move. He was bent backwards over one of those roots, totally still. The old, tidied gore at his groin, the opening that had never sealed, was the only redness on his front when Louise pulled him by his ankles back into the relative openness of the orchard. She felt her exhaustion when she tried to speak to Edward, when she felt the copper in her throat as she searched for his breath and tried to find her own. Pulling him into the moonlight had been wild, incautious, the kind of foolishness that was never expected of her at the hospital, but that the qualified nurses always hoped she would exhibit. Here she had done it without thinking, done it to the patient who mattered most.

  Dragging him over the root had turned him, upflung his arms, and the rotation continued as Louise fell backward and let his ankles go. Edward, extended on his side with one arm stretched out full and one gathered closer to his head, looked like a diagram of a swimmer, a terribly ravaged swimmer. Louise, sitting, knowing she would be unable to stand for some moments, saw his final injury.

  It’s taking my back in now, he’d told her just an hour ago. He’d told her he would show her after the story he never finished telling, because his body interrupted him. But now he had rolled and was showing her what he meant, the ultimate result of his back being taken in.

  Louise’s first curiosity was to know how the injury looked on the inside, from an impossible angle that could only be achieved by prying open Edward’s ribs. There was no evidence that a spine had ever been where the gap was now, the enormous opening that was like Edward’s tongueless mouth, scaled and expanded. There were no jagged edges, no visible rips, which is why Louise thought of how this must look from the inside: like a flower that had opened, she imagined, petals of flesh now flush with the inner walls of his back, leaving this ovoid, smooth-walled, bloodless opening.

  Her second curiosity was about Edward’s blood. Where all of it had gone, how it could have left his body without reddening his skin. Why the whipped branch-cuts on his legs looked like the incompetent sawings of children into cooked whitefish.

  Then Louise looked at the dragged path she’d made from the elm root. Edward’s body had shifted leaves and branches, not clearing them, but moving them, showing the clear line of the husband and wife’s movement. She saw what was advancing along that path, a form that almost answered her curiosity about what the inside of her husband’s body looked like. It did look like a strange flower, without leaf or stalk or stem: a dark blossom that ambulated on the tips of its six petals, with a heavy hidden pistil that glowed an obscure red against the arterially dark curtains around it. Louise didn’t move as it approached her, as it stopped in front of Edward’s body.

  Inside that flower, in its hidden workings, were eyes and a tongue, for it tilted: it mimed looking, as Edward had when this thing had taken its eyes for its own use.

  “I can tell you what he couldn’t.”

  Louise followed the flower back to the little Wilk house, carrying the last Wilk, who was now lighter than many children, weighing only as much as his bones. Louise could sense the flower restraining its pace, could see how it sometimes leapt forward a few feet in a whir that the moonlight couldn’t make discernible, and wanted to apologize for her slowness.

  When it reached the threshold, a few feet in front of her, she saw that each petal had a hard tip that looked like a fingernail, white and thick against the red-black of the flower’s velvety flesh. The light of the lamps she had left burning beamed through the thing on the porch, showing the long thrumming centre of it, which beat and twitched like a heart, and was surrounded by twining spheres and tendrils and lashing oblongs that, when the light first penetrated, all went dormant, wrapping around the centre until Louise could only see the unspecific shape of a core.

  As she climbed the front steps, seeing that it wanted her to enter first, Louise also had the scent of it for the first time, away from the pine and apple of outside, and knew why she had followed instead of rising and running. When she smelled the flower, she knew where Edward’s blood had gone.

  7

  And when it spoke again, she knew where Edward’s voice had gone. Edward’s body was back on the green couch, where Louise had put him, heedless of stains this time. Setting him down felt more like laying out a stiff dress than a body. She wanted to put a blanket over him, but when she bent her knees to lower his body, they kept bending, and she was on the floor with her head inclined into Edward’s hip, the bone there communicating with her skull at the forehead. She wanted to keep pressing until it pierced her, until her skull cracked and his skeleton touched her brain.

  “You may not need to mourn, if you listen.”

  Louise turned, still not rising, and rested her back into the couch. The flower’s hard-edged petals were clicking along the hardwood floor at the perimeter of the room, quickly, as though it were doing a soldier’s scout of newly infringed territory. Like the impatient tapping of fingernails, the sound of its walk grew more rapid, then slowed as the flower came around the back of the couch, passing near Edward’s head. The core of it seemed to sink closer to the ground, the petals acquired a bend, and this tension was released in a light leap toward the fireplace. It crossed a distance of six feet and settled next to the hearth, hovering close enough to singe, if it could be singed. The mingled scent of blood and Edward enriched as the flower drew in heat.

  “You speak in his voice,” Louise said. “But I threw that away. I burnt it, right there.”

  “You burnt his tongue, not his voice, and only the part he was using. Tongues are deep, they have a root. That root is now mine.”

  Louise let the words hang, tested them again with her ear, hearing Edward in the crisp ‘t’ at the end of ‘part’ especially, an enunciation that Edward always hit because he used to swallow the letter as a child.

  “How did she make you from him?”

  “I wasn’t made. I led her to believe, through guidance, suggestion, through the floating motion of the form I had before this one, that she would be making something new if she followed the processes and rituals and chemical regimens found in various books that I also guided into her hands. She thinks she is coming here to find something she created, but I am something old that she has helped to bring back. And I’m sorry your husband was used to make me again.”

  “You’re made of his blood.”

  “His essential fluids, his eyes, his tongue, every organ, much of his marrow. It’s how I return.”

  “If you’re sorry to have taken him, why do it at all? Why not stay in your floating motion.”

  “There are no ethics to wanting life. I’m not alive when I’m not incarnate. I wish to be alive.”

  The flower trembled again, or perhaps coiled. Louise thought, for a moment, that it was going to make one of its leaps, that it would cross the room and touch her skin before she could move a hand. She had been matching its cool tones, the talk of a carnival hypnotist speaking in an obscene, deepened imitation of her husband’s voice, this root-version of it, echoing from the bell-shaped interior of a thing that had not existed an hour ago. It helped her to feel calm herself.

  “That woman, Jean, will come here expecting to own you?”

  “Yes, though her name isn’t Jean. It’s Isabel Pallant. I tenanted a body in her father’s line, seven generations ago, which made it easier to speak to her, to guide her.”

  “To guide her to my husband.”

  “I can’t choose where I will be born. I can choose who I wish to occupy. Isabel won’t leave the house with me in this form. She will want me to leave inside you. But I’ve already harmed you enough. Let me help.”

  “How?” Louise used the heels of her hands and the strength in her arms, for there was little left in her legs, to climb onto the couch, perching next to Edward’s desiccated face. He hadn’t had any wrinkles until the last few months; now he was all folds and creases. The flower clicked towards her, its approach silent as it crossed the carpet, audible again as it reached the floor at her feet.

  “I began again inside Edward’s brain,” it said. “That’s where the seed splinters into blossom. I grew down the stem and around his spine and only then reached out into the organs. The cock falls off almost immediately, but I have never understood why, even after thousands of years, never. Nothing of the like happens when I begin in a woman. But I began in Edward’s brain, and its electricity dictated my growth, organized it. It would requisition what I needed, divert energy toward my needs, run his organs on almost nothing as I took what I needed to be alive. I love that brain, and owe it much. I want you to know it and understand it as I do. And I believe—I know—that Edward would want to know you just as intimately, that he was frustrated that his weakness, his enormous childlike spoiled failings, created distance between you. He felt you drew comfort from having him: not from being graced by his presence, nothing like that, but from possessing him. Not his status, not his home, but him. It meant something to you.”

  Louise was holding Edward’s dead hand.

  “It did.”

  “Would you like to have him entirely? And for him to have you entirely?”

  The bloom bent and tensed its petals again and sprang up, perching on the edge of the couch-arm like a bloated raptor. Louise didn’t draw back, but leaned closer to smell it, to smell the living Edward inside it.

  “You don’t have to do that,” the flower said. “I have kept his brain alive and warm. I have left enough of me within the husk to preserve him for your decision. Do you want him?”

  When Louise agreed, she took the body from the couch and placed it on the carpet in front of the fire, on its front, waiting for the flower’s next instruction. She stared at the blossomed hole in Edward’s back, at dimensions which she now recognized as a fit.

  “Put your face to the gap,” the flower said. “Press. Then I will do the rest, if you will allow it, if you will stay still and suffer it for only a very few moments.”

  Louise bent her face, while it was still her face, to the hole that had been formed for her, molded as ideally as a death mask. For a second, she was breathing inside Edward’s body, the arid red dust of it, the bone powder, a digestive burn at the edges of the scent. Then she felt the flower settle on the back of her head, and a moment later, felt her head cease to be strictly hers. Cease to be solid. After that, she knew what Edward meant when he said he was being sipped at. This was a greedy swallow, not a sip, and her arms were following her shoulders to vanish into the trunk of his body, her eyes being drunk toward sockets that had been cleared for them months ago.

  8

  Louise felt the outside of her fingers against the inside of Edward’s as their hand curled around the doorknob. The brief suction of the two appendages, the surrounding one and the interior one, would soon become a graft, a bind, with nothing left of that gapped sensation, the flower had promised Louise. Outside, Isabel Pallant’s hair was yellow, and the scarf around her head was the same black one with the odd peak that she had worn when she crouched by Edward’s chair in Manhattan.

  “I didn’t expect you to be so intact,” Isabel Pallant said, walking past Louise and into the warm home. The bay mare she had ridden was untethered, and Louise—for while Edward was silent, while he came back together around her, she had to think of their self as Louise in order to get through these next minutes with Isabel Pallant—watched the horse investigate the crushed remnants of an apple that Louise had tracked nearly to the front step when she was following the flower inside. The horse took the scent in and wandered toward the orchard to eat. Louise shut the door and turned.

  “Jean,” Edward thought at Louise’s periphery, while they stared at the woman poking at the fire, at just the spot where Edward’s tongue had burned. For a moment Louise was terrified that Edward had moved their lips, that he had spoken, not thought, but Isabel didn’t move. Edward’s thoughts were around Louise’s as his fingers were around hers, though their brains were more melded than gloved in each other. He felt like the edges of an unfinished container, with bumps and sharp irregularities prodding at her, the contents. When she had washed the body, it hadn’t felt like she was inside it. When she dressed it, in Edward’s dark tweed, the fabric had confirmed the reality of his body around hers, as the suit clothed them both.

  “Isabel,” Louise said, and the woman turned and smiled.

  “I thought I was cold when I came in but I was simply chilled with excitement. It’s you, then, if you’re calling me by my proper name. I thought this—I thought you’d be loose, but you’ve stayed in that man, somehow? And this isn’t exactly him, is it?”

  Isabel Pallant moved across the room to Louise. She was tall, taller than Louise had been, but shorter than this shared body. Isabel put a finger on the nose. Remembering Edward’s account of the slim thumbnail, Louise shut his eyelids before Isabel could nestle a thumbnail between Louise’s eye and Edward’s socket.

  “You’ve grown back the bits you used up,” she said. “Why? Why do that?”

  “A body to move in,” Louise said, with Edward’s larynx and her tongue, the new voice resonant with a fluting peak, one that she wanted to speak in for hours once Isabel Pallant was gone, when she and Edward could speak to each other aloud or quietly for hours, days, nights, while they were awake, while they slept. Their eyes began to mist, and Edward’s lips smiled, as Louise’s lips within them tried to pull them back straight an instant too late.

  “It’s beautifully done,” Isabel said. “But I wanted to take you loose, or in the woman. I at least wanted to see you. I’ve been imagining you for months, and wanted to see if you were more like the drawings in that book, or the image I’ve grown of you. I thought, even, that you may have taken shape exactly as I imagined you, that you would be compelled to be what I saw. Now I suppose we’ll have to unhouse you for me to properly find out. I don’t know if this was your choice to make.”

  “It was the only choice. The woman tried to kill him before I was formed. He begged for it. I had to stop her.”

  “Is she in the house? The body?”

  “No. At the woodpile.”

  “And is there any of Edward left in this?” Isabel tapped Louise’s forehead. “His mind?”

  “Just the parts I wanted.”

  “Well, this body will be more useful than the woman’s, really. I didn’t realize there was any chance that we could keep it, not after the state I saw him in in the city. Plagued. Rotted through. But we can really use this repaired version. I can travel with him and expect fewer questions.” Isabel’s hands began feeling around their body, and Louise had to plant Edward’s feet, pushing hers all the way into them like tight boots, in order to keep still. Isabel’s hands traced what felt, to her, like an absence at the crotch of Edward’s pants.

  “This isn’t back.”

  “I don’t need one, so didn’t bother to grow it.”

  “We need to name you. I should choose something, but that would perhaps be too motherly an act. But we can’t leave it at ‘Edward.’ There’s still too much of that man in the face. Someone may chance to recognize him if the name is the same. Do you have an idea?”

  “No, not yet. Why did you choose this man? You didn’t tell him that night, or when you visited. I would have kept the answer from his mind if you had.”

  “I chose a seat in a tavern, and he chose the seat next to mine. That was all the choosing that occurred. We have some relevant choosing to do now, however, and I don’t want to do it alone. Henry? Gregory? One of those odd nicknames like ‘Stamper’ that erases the original name? I suppose those lead to questions.”

  Isabel Pallant took off her coat and laid it across the back of the green couch, then removed it when she saw the body stains and dirt on it. She placed it on the back of a stiff chair near the fire. She was slight beneath the coat, despite her height. Built more like little Nanda than Louise. Edward’s thoughts tried to surround the comparison Louise was making, to suffocate it, but Louise continued to look and think of Edward’s hands on Isabel’s light body, about what those legs would look like bare. She pushed the thoughts through, overpowering Edward’s, and gradually felt him relent, pushed into accepting that she was going to explore the image of Edward and Isabel Pallant in “rut,” the word he has used to describe the other fornicators in that hotel. In another fractured second, she didn’t need to imagine; the images themselves opened up from Edward’s mind, uniting with her imagination, and she heard his heaving grunts and orgasm, her squeaks and sighs. Louise saw the other naked women he imagined as he thrust: a half-dozen, including Louise. She kept their mind in the image long enough that Edward understood she didn’t care, that it wasn’t possible to care about this any longer.

  Louise walked toward Isabel Pallant and lifted Edward’s hand to the tight knot in her headscarf. She gently worked it loose as Isabel looked up at them, smiling.

  “You’re masterful for a newborn. And very tall,” Isabel said.

  Louise took the scarf off and folded it, tucking it into the pocket of Edward’s suit-jacket. She took a step back as the flower came down from the banister above Isabel’s head, drifting like a parasol. The swirl of its ganglia drifted around one great eye, the green-flecked blue of Edward’s, open wide over the oblong pistil, which concluded in a great thorn of a nail, its edge vanishingly sharp. When the point touched Isabel’s yellow scalp, pierced it, she did not have time to look up before the petal-tips caressed the crown of her head and the pistil vanished into her, the flower closing over her head.

 

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