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Grace started practicing yoga a few months ago, which is a trite and basic and cliche thing for a skinny white blonde girl to do, but it’s also free when she does it from her cheap apartment while following along with a youtube channel on an iPad that’s so outdated it stopped being able to update itself years ago. She doesn’t believe in trying to be original just for the sake of being original.
She started yoga to calm her nerves after Alex kept shredding them every time he talked up the insanity of his fucked-up family, claiming that he needed to prepare her. She’s managed to stick with it all through the first meeting with some of the in-laws, which she kept referring to as the Day of First Blood, and the wedding recitals, which she likes to call Red Wedding 101, because of the way it makes Alex give a shaky little laugh. It’s nice to not be the only one nervous.
Sometimes, during practice, her mind wanders. Especially during the part where they’re supposed to be meditating, or at least being mindful of her breath. In, out. It seems so simple. But so far, she finds herself unable to be present in the moment.
Alex is a dream, but dreams tend to unravel themselves quickly into unrecognizable shapes if you let yourself get distracted before you can fortify them in your mind.
Grace can talk herself into finding it reassuring every time Alex’s dad sneers at her like she’s a commoner from a Masterpiece Theatre drama. Or when Alex’s brother hands her a Get Out of Jail Free card—like from an actual Monopoly game—instead of shaking her hand. She might be more offended if he didn’t seem to think his touch is radioactive and might taint her somehow. The truth is, spending time with Alex’s fucked-up family makes everything feel more real, rather than a Hallmark movie that’s doomed to shut down mid-production.
Why aren’t you skeeved out, a voice whispers in her ear as her almost brother-in-law sprinkles in a grey area comment here, a douchey-in-a-certain-light remark there, sprinkling poison pixie dust over each of their encounters with each other.
Your skin should be crawling, says the voice of reason.
She doesn’t know why she’s withholding judgment. Is she that desperate to belong to a real family that won’t, at best, treat her like a houseguest?
All she knows is that way in the back of her mind, she imagines there is an unassuming, unlocked door. There’s no lock because it doesn’t need one. A narrow plastic sign clutches the ordinary round metal knob. But instead of the usual Do Not Disturb it says Wait. Just Wait.
This is what she sees in her mind’s eye while the instructor guides them through peaceful water visualizations of waterfalls and the ocean. It’s possible her internal ocean and its loving embrace might be broken. Or maybe water is not her element. Every time she tries to picture air, it traps itself in a coffin. Every time she thinks she’s found her state of stillness, the earth under her feet gives way to a giant sinkhole, taking her with it. But fire . . . fire is always itself. Too hot to touch, but comforting in its way. Cleansing, even. Grace closes her eyes and sits before the most perfect cozy fireplace her imagination can conjure. Sounds of traffic and roadwork and birds and loud neighbors melt away the more she stares into the flames as they warm her face. She loses track of time for a while.
When she comes back to herself, the sun has gone down. Her anxieties haven’t disappeared altogether, but she feels better. More in control. At least of herself if nothing else.
*
Nothing Daniel Le Domas says or does causes Grace to shrink back from him.
She doesn’t need to.
It’s never just the two of them in a room. Daniel maintains a wide gap between them like they’re two different satellites from competing companies that are sometimes within the same orbit, which is fine, as long as they don’t end up on a collision course due to negligence on the part of their owners.
Even though Daniel keeps showing up with his glittering telescopic eyes to remind her that he, and the members of his family not named Alex, are things that exist. In the world. In which she also exists. And that she might come to regret picking up this bit of trivia at some point.
Daniel’s favorite game—apart from playing the part of the insult comic who always harasses his audience—is to warn her off the wedding, with a theoretically amusing anecdote, in a tone always perfectly calibrated to sound like a character in a horror-comedy. Don’t go into the woods, ha, ha. But seriously. Don’t.
It’s the verbal equivalent of juggling or plate spinning. Somehow, Alex’s high-functioning alcoholic brother intuits that if he’s too caustic, she’ll take it as a challenge, and dig her discontinued yellow Converse heels in even more. Somehow, he can tell that she’s the kind of person who, if he were more jokey with, he might unintentionally draw her closer with his teasing. If he was flat-out aggressive—even if only with his words—she might perceive it as an attack. He doesn’t seem to want her to feel unsafe in his presence.
He’s too careful around her for that. Like he already hates himself enough and can’t stomach adding to it.
Grace feels like the raccoon that shows up in your backyard. If you have anything resembling a heart, you don’t wish it harm, but man are you desperate for it to fuck the hell off before it squeezes through the roof and tears up the attic and your sanity, destroying your home from the inside out with its deceptively cute babies until it becomes a too on-the-nose metaphor for everything that’s wrong with your life.
*
Oh hindsight. It loves her like a woman spurned.
*
But if she had known—
*
Here’s a funny little thought experiment:
Try to decide whether or not to regret the most nightmarish thing that ever happened to you, while fully believing that people who say they have no regrets are either fools or sociopaths. And then ask yourself—because it needs to at least be asked—how fucked up do you have to acknowledge yourself as being when you lean towards the non-obvious, batshit insane option.
Actually, in this scenario, you don’t just lean towards it, you make it again, and again, and again. Not quite times infinity, but close enough that it fucking feels like it. As firmly as Grace holds onto her regrets, she doesn’t regret that, but should she regret that she doesn’t regret?
Maybe she needs more time in her pace of stillness with the fireplace.
Maybe Daniel’s right, and she is terrifying.
*
Daniel—Alive-and-in-One-Piece Daniel; newly-minted-not-yet-fired-from-the position-but constantly-making-an argument-for-being-so-brother-in-law Daniel; brother-in-law-in-arms Daniel; saved-by-the-grace-of-Grace Daniel; that Daniel, just waves off her concerns.
”You’re a good person, Grace.”
”You keep saying that, like you know.” It‘s not even like his presumption pisses her off. It bewilders her. It’s so goddamn frustrating that he has this weird confidence in her morality.
”I do know.” Delivered so easily, like there’s no room for doubt. It’s just a fact that Daniel’s aware of:
• 2 + 2 = 4
• His family is—was—straight out of a horror movie
• His (ex?-) sister-in-law, who widowed herself via spontaneous blood explosion by proxy, is a good person
Just because she cleared the very low bar of not gaining a massive fortune through ritual human sacrifice.
“What, have you been compiling a dossier on me? Have you been paying to have me followed all these months since Alex and I got engaged?”
Grace looks up to smirk at him, but it freezes on her face when its met with his own unique level of jadedness that never shifts a millimeter. Not for one goddamn second.
”What! Really?! Jesus!”
The same deceptively open, no-fucks-to-give mask that would beg to be slapped right off his face if it didn’t project despair so viscerally that it hums in her bones. Someone with that much resignation to pain locked into the otherwise fine-boned architecture of his face—for better or worse, she can’t hold a grudge towards that. Daniel has decades of experience occupying a far worse hell than she could ever devise for him.
”How? When?! . . . Why?” she asks the last softly.
He just stares back at her and she knows immediately. The fucker. “To gauge how guilty you should feel if and when you ended up having to sacrifice me to the Devil or whatever-the-fuck Le Bail is.”
Daniel’s strangely compelling warm-but-cold, cold-but-warm dark chocolate eyes bore right into her. He doesn’t hesitate to confirm it. ”To see if you were worth it.”
”Worth—”
”—saving, selling out my entire family and watching them all go up in literal flames . . . ” He waves a hand. “ . . . etcetera.”
”You didn’t watch them go up in flames, I did.”
She can’t stop pushing him. His obnoxious brand of stoicism is driving her up the wall.
Daniel spreads his arms, ice cubes clinking in the drink he still holds in one hand. It’s oddly elegant. “Semantics.”
”And you mean Alex. Alex was the one you cared about.” Besides me, she doesn’t say aloud. It’s too fucking obvious and unbelievable and terrifying. It’s not really an accusation. Alex only seems so unsalvageable in hindsight.
Daniel downs the last of his cheap whiskey. “Like I said: my entire family.” He pauses. “I failed him.”
”I don’t think you did,” she says, gentling her voice.
They’ve been facing each other from the sides of their respective hotel beds this whole time, with their legs planted on the floor in the space between, but the carpet gap between them feels suddenly narrower now, as if it’s collapsed in on itself a couple degrees.
Daniel puts his glass down on his nightstand. If she wasn’t so exhausted on every level she’d laugh at the fact that there’s a Bible in the drawer. Grace leans forward over her knees. The many, many stitches holding her together pull in warning, but she took a painkiller an hour ago.
”Somewhere along the way I let them pollute him with their toxic waste.”
”I think we are who we are, when you pare it all down.”
He doesn’t flinch—he never does—but the light in his eyes takes on an even bleaker, more far-away cast. She can’t help but be fascinated by how, in a blink, he can go from looking haunted, to the thing that does the haunting.
”Was I?” To pull him out of it, she brings him back to the earlier point. “Worth it?” She can barely force the words out in a creaky whisper. It’s not survivor’s guilt. The Le Domas family going up in literal flames is not only personally justified, but a gift to humanity.
But after all the effort she made and the pain she experienced to change his fate, she can’t stand not knowing if he would want his own do-over.
“Was I?” he retorts.
She’s not dignifying that with a response, given the sheer number of scenarios she’s suffered and willed herself through in very recent history, cursing him and his family name each mind-numbing, soul-deadening repeat, all while but fighting for his survival as well as her own each time.
Fighting and failing. And failing and fighting. Rinse and repeat. Over and over again. Playing Le Bail’s Gambit 2.0, by “agreeing” and re-agreeing to having her memory completely reset every time as part of the wager, only to have it returned to her just in time to watch Daniel bleeding out on the floor yet again with nothing she can do, but agree once more to Le Bail’s terms to try yet again without the benefit of her experience of previous tries—not until the pivotal moment when Daniel takes a bullet to the neck. It wasn’t Groundhog Day; she couldn’t take what she’d learned from a previous loop and apply it to the next one. But she’d known there had to be some way to win, otherwise it wasn’t a game. So she kept making the same awful choice, waiting the most minute of changes to move the needle forward.
Le Bail couldn’t claim her in Hell, but he could trap her in her own personal purgatory. At least temporarily, until she leaned down to whisper in Daniel’s ear during his most recent last precious few breaths, See you soon, before dashing off to save herself so she didn’t die and permanently kill them both by losing the original Hide and Seek game.
It turned out it had simply been a test of endurance. She had lost count of the number of times she’d repeated that night, since there’d been no way to keep track. All Le Bail had been waiting for was for Grace to get through Loop No. 666 and make the same insane choice one last time: agree to try to save Daniel’s life while risking her own permanently if she didn’t survive to fight another day on the Merry-go-round from Hell. She would’ve appreciated this bit of knowledge a lot sooner. But that’s what you get when you wager with Le Bail. Seemingly no way out. Seemingly being the operative word.
”Well, it sure as shit wasn’t altruism, I’ll tell you that.” She stands up and walks the two steps it takes to his side.
”It wasn’t?” He sounds baffled and amused in spite of himself.
She climbs onto his bed with the air of someone scaling a great mountain: Mt. St. Daniel Le Domas’s Bullshit. Sick of the illusion of distance, she leans down and breathes in his ear. “No.”
She moves to get back up but she’s jolted to an abrupt stop. A gentle hand wraps around her arm to hold her in place, but she can easily slip out of his grasp if she wants to. It’s the first time he’s touched her because he wanted to and not out of necessity, but it’s not the first time he’s wanted to. That’s just a fact that she’s aware of:
• 2 + 2 = 4
• The entire Le Domas family is burning in Hell save one super-lucky motherfucker
• her brand new brother-in-law-slash-ex-brother-in-law is no saint, but he’d like to be a little less evil
• Daniel Le Domas has wanted to touch her for a long time
And if she’s being honest, and she might as well be honest, since they’ve never technically lied to each other, and also, whythefucknot, it’s not the first time she’s wanted him to touch her.
She whips around using his grip as way to propel her back into his space, knowing there’ll no doubt be plenty of pain and misery to take stock of tomorrow. At least the company will be aggravating enough to motivate her to get out of bed—or to stay in it. His hands move to her hips to steady them both.
“How stoned are?” He pulls back to examine her eyes, which she knows are bloodshot and puffy, but alert.
”0%. They only gave me Extra Strength Tylenol. What about you? How sober are you?”
“I’m a high-functioning alcoholic. But I’m sober enou—”
She pushes Daniel and falls with him to the bed. She settles on top of his chest and says into his chest, “Better luck next time.”
Without looking, they simultaneously flip off the brief golden flash of the goateed man laughing in the far corner of the room. He raises his glass with a horrendous grin on his face before flashing out again. The echo of his laughter rings in their ears and all the places where they’ve been mauled and ripped open. When he’s gone, their headache pain compounds.
“What a douche,” Daniel says, making her snort into his chest and then clutch her head. “Owww.”
He strokes her hair until they both pass out. Grace dreams of a blazing hearth to warm herself by. When she sits down before it, she is not alone.