In the Blue Hour

She always returns in the blue hour, when twilight stains the glassy surface of the tarn with sky. Torn, stained, still smelling of charred flesh or powdered with quicklime, waxen lips curling into a wan smile. Most detested cousin. Most wanted inheritance.

Why Emmeline saw fit to bequeath her body to me along with the rest of her estate is a mystery. We were never close. Perhaps she had some inkling that it would refuse to rest. Or perhaps her reasons were simpler, and I was merely the least disliked of a family that shunned her deeply.

A good deal of resentment arose, after all, in the wake of our grandmother’s death, in the willing of everything—the house, the hill, the tarn—to Emmeline, whose father was foreign and whose mouth twisted strangely around the simplest of words. We did not play with her as children. She was not one of us.

Naturally I refuse the inheritance of her corpse, assuming it a poor attempt at humor or perhaps a macabre expression of her grievances. Though we are uncertain of her faith, my cousins and I lay her to rest in consecrated ground. We hold a simple service and lay lilies on her grave. Within the day she has clawed her way back up and is sitting at my breakfast table, fingering her locket as she stares mistily out at the tarn with its sliver of captured sky.

I burn her next, chagrined by the thought that there might have been something objectionable about the grave. I have the gardener construct a pyre in the midst of the rosebushes that would put the ancients to shame. A priest sits vigil with me as her bones char and crumble into pearlescent dust.

Emmeline is back just after sundown, haunting the grounds. My husband flees the house, unwilling to cohabitate with a revenant. I remain, though he begs me to join him. My task is yet unfinished.

I burn Emmeline again. Have her bricked up in the basement. Mummify her body with lime. Still, she returns. 

At last I decide to sink her in the tarn, chained to an enormous stone harvested from the hillside. She may refuse to stay dead, but I hope to confine her somewhere she can no longer disturb my daily life. Our cousin Hubert helps me roll the stone into the water. Afterward, he tells me not to write to him again.

Emmeline rises to the surface at dusk some three days later, one porcelain hand extended as if to bestow a sword upon Arthur. Furious, I seize the hand and hoist her from the water, hating her for persisting where she’s clearly unwanted. Her slimy hair tangles around my wrists. I want to shake her, to snap her sparrow neck, to pin her by the throat to her grave-dirt until at last she stops resisting and merges with it—but in the face of my rage she simply smiles, as if in apology. It is a child’s expression, the sort of juvenile gesture meant to placate a guardian whose anger she does not understand.

That look arrests me. Before her illness, Emmeline was the eldest of us. In my memory her face is haughty, but I can find no evidence of that here. This woman is a stranger to me. Where is the vanity, the disdain which I’ve returned in kind for as long as I can remember? Were they ever there at all?

The fire goes out of me. There is nothing to be done.

I bring her into the house and dry her off, dressing her in one of my old gowns. She looks better, somehow, in familiar clothing. Like something that belongs. Because she seems to love the tarn I arrange her at the breakfast table, where she can gaze upon it unimpeded. In the blue hour I join her, watching the basin slowly fill with sky.

Emmeline cradles the locket in her hands. Its silvered eye captures the portrait of a girl with her own dark tresses and angular brow, dressed in a gown far too severe for her age. In the girl’s arms squalls a child who wears the baptismal gown of my mother’s family.

Fondly, Emmeline’s fingers graze the glass. Most detested cousin. Most unwanted inheritance.

Something in me softens.

How much time has passed? How long have I forgotten that we, despite our idiosyncrasies, are flesh and blood? The years yawn wide between us. Emmeline is dead, the bond that could have been now unrecoverable. In a walled-off past we play, laughing, on the shore of the tarn. We grow and change. She writes to me in the winters. I visit in the spring. When the consumption comes to take her, she does not die alone.

As stars begin to bloom in the waters of the tarn, I reach for her hand.

Gently, she squeezes back. The children we were embrace gladly. The adults we are mourn what was lost. 

Emmeline breathes a wistful sigh. 

A breeze ripples the water, curling around us where we sit by the open window. Fine dust streams from Emmeline’s skin. It sifts through my fingers, and I grasp her hand tighter. 

This time, I will stay with her until the end.