“No.” The whisper doesn’t reach my own ears, much less hers, and by the time I can get my breath behind the sound she’s at the door, pressing her back flat against the frame so she doesn’t have to touch my uncle on the way out.
“Brigit.” Long, thin fingers come down like spider’s legs on the doorknob.
He closes it behind him.
He flips the lock.
If I threw up down the front of my dress right now, they’d have to cancel the wedding.
“I had three gowns made,” he says casually. “In case you weren’t cooperative.”
Pinpricks of cold crawl up the back of my neck, the muscles there tensing into painful bunches as he approaches. Thinning gray hair. A sallow face covered in his own makeup. He’s not much older than my father but he looks like it. But he’s not skeletal, no. That would make me brave, I think, if he looked like he could be shattered with a swift kick to the rib. For all the ways his face has deteriorated he still has muscles left beneath the jacket.
I can’t take my eyes off him.
And he watches me with those pale, almost colorless eyes, as he gets closer and closer and closer.
One hand rising.
It hovers above my shoulder and then—
Then it comes down.
My skin is bare. The sweetheart neckline with its off-the-shoulder straps offer no protection. “You look just how I imagined,” he says.
“You imagined marrying your own niece?”
He yanks on my shoulder and the styling chair I’m sitting in gives, twisting to face him. It’s even worse like this. His teeth are unnaturally white, and I can see all of them because he’s openly leering at me. “You know, Brigit, you could make this easier on yourself if you wouldn’t take such a tone with me.”
“I’m not here because of my tone.” My jaw sets, seizing up, like my teeth don’t want to be apart for any reason. “I’m here because—”
“Because your father and I made a deal,” he intones. “You don’t want your daddy to lose his house, do you? You don’t want him on the street.”
No. I don’t want my wide-eyed, stupid, grasping father on the street. Right now I want him dead. But a very old instinct won’t take its last breath and die. My mind conjures images of my dad with red eyes and hollows in his cheeks, struggling to navigate a homeless shelter. Someone would take advantage of him.
Just the way he’s taken advantage of me.
“Think of it,” my uncle goes on. “This time tomorrow, his accounts will be settled. No more debts. The house your mother loved so much will stay in the family. All because of you, Brigit. All because you’re going to be such a good girl.”
What’s left of my stomach rockets through the floor.
If Zeus said the words good girl I would be melting.
Coming out of this man’s mouth, they make my skin crawl. I want to claw at it, just to get it to stop.
My uncle leans down so that we’re face to face. The wretch is involuntary, though it’s not full-on sick, and he sniffs. “I’ll help you with that.”
“Help me with—”
Before I can finish one hand is clamped around my jaw, forcing my mouth open. Those thin fingers are stronger than they looked, horribly strong, crushing at my jaw. I suck in a spit-soaked breath on a whistle of air. Scream. Once my mother told me to scream fire if I was ever attacked in a public place. You scream fire because no one looks twice at a creepy old man. No one looks twice at a woman screaming.
My mouth is full of silk before I get the chance.
He shoves it in so far that it triggers my gag reflex but he covers my mouth, keeping it in place. I’m suffocating. I’m going to die. Hands around my neck lift me from the chair and I’m limp, useless, entirely focused on trying to cough up the handkerchief. I’m missing my one opportunity to fight. I can’t coordinate my feet and my hands at the same time.
I can’t get his hand off my face.
I can’t do anything but walk, like a puppet on strings, to where he takes me. The wide countertop in front of the mirror in the bridal suite. All the lights are still on. They’re just like natural light. That’s what the makeup artist said.
So it’s in just-like-natural light that I get a close-up glimpse of myself choking on a silk handkerchief the color of dead lavender. One corner pokes out onto my bottom lip and the sight of it makes me want to vomit as much as the sight of him behind me.
My uncle is barely visible above the tulle.
But I can feel him.
I can feel him pushing at the skirts and the petticoat and the slip.
The makeup artist was the one to do all the buttons on a set of complicated lingerie meant to form a base layer for the dress.
It’s the lingerie that’s his only stumbling block.
I can’t get the handkerchief out of my mouth. I manage to inch one hand up toward it but he takes my wrist and pins it behind my back into a deadly cloud of tulle, wrapping the skirt around and around and around until I can’t move.
This is an awful way to die.
The alternative is to keep living. The future yawns up before me with glistening teeth, flexing long, thin fingers.
My uncle’s fingers are tugging at my panties now. Does he think they’re a chastity belt? Is he looking for a fucking key? All the tracing at the edges of the fabric can’t be necessary except to hasten my death.
Don’t. Don’t find the snaps.
He finds them.
The snaps are very clever. The snaps mean that you only have to contend with an enormous skirt and miles of slips and petticoats if you’re wearing a princess gown on your wedding day. You don’t then have to get out of your lingerie. These are manufactured for brides, made specially for convenience.
My uncle is finding them very convenient.
My vision blinks out, and I’m left with only the sensation of silk packed into my throat. The muscles there reject it, trying to create space, but it still won’t come all the way out.
Maybe this is how I save my sanity.
What sanity?
My feet stay planted on the floor in the demure kitten heels my uncle picked out for me while he presses my thighs apart with rough hands and peels back the lingerie, and then that’s all very distant, too. The air between my legs. The fingers probing there. Shoving inside despite how dry I am, how resistant.
Anne Boleyn did not die on the block. Did you know? Some movies and books portray it like that, but most accounts agree that she was only kneeling when she died. Only. Like a queen. Not tossed over some countertop.
Not tossed over a block, I mean, not laying on it, not offering herself up as a sacrifice, just kneeling there.
They say the swordsman distracted her so she didn’t know it was coming. She did know. She knew with every fiber of her being what was coming, what was already happening, what was whispering in the air. There was no running from it. Anne was surrounded by people who would not save her, who in fact would make it happen.
It was May.
My legs shake and it’s not from pleasure, it’s the farthest thing from pleasure. The opposite. It’s hell. It’s happening to someone else, someone else, not me, not me, not me, not me.
The hurt between my legs doesn’t belong to me. It’s the same as this gown, or this makeup. It’s not really mine. I don’t lay claim to it. Honestly all I lay claim to is air. Is that so much to ask? A breath or two. I would like a breath that’s not filtered through a silk handkerchief. My head knocks against the mirror.