“What’s there?” I ask.
“The family mausoleum.”
“Oh.” That’s all he needed to say.
It’s awkward for a moment, and I clear my throat.
“You said Lucinda Scafoni is your stepmother?”
“My mother died when I was two. Lucinda lived with us. She’s my aunt, actually. My mother’s sister. She married my father soon after my mother’s death.”
“Oh.” That seems to be the only word I can speak today. “That’s…weird.”
“I guess.” He actually smiles. Like a genuine smile.
“So your brothers are half-brothers?”
“Yes.”
He’s tight-lipped about his family, and I want more of the story, but there are more important things than his family history right now.
“Can I have contact with my family?”
He studies me.
“Just my Aunt Helena, maybe. She’s very old. I’d like to call her.”
“Tell her about our brutal ways?”
“She knows your ways. She was the Willow Girl seventy years ago.”
He grows serious.
“I don’t know how much longer she has.” I don’t say more because I already feel the backs of my eyes warming, as if the tear ducts are preparing to do their work.
“I’ll think about it.”
I almost want to argue, to push, but something tells me it’ll be wiser to just give him some time. After all, he didn’t say no.
I walk toward the pool, slip off a sandal, and dip my toe in the water. He follows me and takes a seat on one of the lounge chairs, legs wide like men tend to sit.
After slipping off both sandals, I walk to the edge of the tiled area and onto the grass. It’s soft and cool beneath my feet as I make my way to what I think I saw from my room, a vegetable garden. It’s much bigger than I realized. I pass two fig trees bursting with the fat, ripe fruit. I pick one, break off the stem, and watch creamy milk run down my palm. I eat it and pick another as I continue walking to where I hear the animals.
I see they have chickens and some lambs. One comes right up to the fence when he sees me, and I pet his curious head. I had a pet lamb when I was little. Well, it’s not like she was given to me as a pet, I just made her that. Named her Honey. She was slaughtered soon after.
I still remember being made to sit at the table until I ate hours after my sisters had gone to bed. After that, I refused any meat.
When I head back toward the pool, I notice something up on a slight hill at the opposite end of the vegetable patch. It’s the only ugly thing in sight, and it takes all I have to drag my eyes away. I only do when I hear him come up the path to meet me, and I know he’s seen that I’ve seen it.
What had I thought, that he was joking? That it was a figure of speech?
I clear my throat. “Thanks for the tour. I’m going to go inside.”
“But we’re not finished.”
I glance over his shoulder at the whipping post again and take a step away, but he steps in my path and takes my arms.
His eyes grow dark, intense. I concentrate my attention on his neck. I can’t hold his gaze.
“You didn’t ask what that was,” he says.
“Let me go.”
“Ask.”
“I don’t need to.”
“Ask anyway, Willow Girl.”
I look up at him; I’d been avoiding his eyes. “Is this like Simon Says? You call me Willow Girl, and I have to do what you say?”
One side of his mouth curves upward. “You always have to do what I say.”
“I’d almost forgotten.”
“Ask me what it is, Willow Girl.”
“I don’t need to ask. I know.”
He remains studying me so intimately, I can’t look away.
“Say it.”
“No.”
“Say it, Helena.”
“It’s the post where you whip us Willow Girls.”
His eyes have gone almost black, and I see his throat work when he swallows.
I shake my head, drop my gaze.
“This is archaic. This…reaping, the blocks, the whipping post,” I say, and again, heat burns the backs of my eyes.
“It’s tradition. It’s the tradition of our families. You’ll do it too, with your daughters, if you’re the one to birth the quadruplets.”
I shake my head. “The Willow Girl is never the one.” The ring on my finger burns, and it’s like it gives me strength. Like it’s Aunt Helena giving me courage. “And if I were, I wouldn’t give my daughters up, not without a fight.”
“Your parents didn’t fight.”
“You think I don’t know that.”
“Would you have run? Is that why they bound you, shackled you? Would you have bit me? Is that why they gagged you?”
“I would have killed you if I could have.”
He smiles, his eyes glow. “I like you, Willow Girl.”
“I don’t like you.”
“You don’t have to like me. You just have to obey me.”
“I’m not afraid of you.”
He laughs. “Yes, you are.”