Aísē: My Five Supernatural Wives

The trouble, when it started, started near the street maps.

This was Eva's fault in the way that things were Eva's fault, which was as expected….

She did nothing wrong….

She simply existed in a space the way she existed in everything, and the situation arose around her naturally.

She was holding a rolled map of London. Not buying it — studying it, one finger tracing a road with a focused interest as she was genuinely curious about it.

The shop was quiet. The late-morning light came through the old glass and landed on her Light green hair and her expression of focused contentment she got when she was learning something.

I was two shelves away.

"You're going to memorize the whole thing, aren't you," I said.

She looked up. The expression shifted to the small smile that started in her eyes first.

"I already have the main routes," she said. "I'm looking at the ones that aren't obvious."

"The ones that Victor won't take us to."

"The ones that no one thinks to take anyone." She tilted the map slightly toward me. "Look. There's a walled garden here that isn't on any of the tourist materials. Old churchyard, converted. The gate is unlocked on Tuesday mornings."

"That's specific."

"I asked a pigeon."

I blinked.

"The birds here are very communicative," she said, with the mild sincerity of someone reporting an unremarkable fact.

"Eva," I said.

"Mm."

"That's remarkable."

She looked at me, her expression was what she wore when someone confirmed for her that the thing she'd found interesting was worth having found interesting.

Not exactly surprise.

Just….a small warmth who was received properly.

"The walled garden," she said, "would be nicer at noon when the sun gets in. We could go after this."

"I'd like that," I said.

The smile reached the rest of her face Slowly but certain.

"Then we'll go," she said, and went back to the map.

....

Victor was three feet away.

He had been three feet away for the entirety of the last exchange, ostensibly examining a section on cartography with deep scholarly interest.

His posture was entirely invested in this endeavor.

His jaw, however was working very hard not to be doing what it is doing.

Mariabell appeared at his elbow.

She looked at his jaw.

She pinched his side. Swift, targeted, no malice.

"Ow," said Victor.

"Hm," said Mariabell, in the tone of a scientist whose hypothesis has been confirmed.

"I wasn't —"

"You were looking."

"I was browsing. Those are spatially adjacent activities."

"Victor."

"Mariabell."

She regarded him with a calm affection as someone who has known him for enough time to find his patterns endearing and has also decided that this does not mean she will allow the patterns to continue unaddressed.

"She's his wife," Mariabell said. Pleasantly.

"He talks to his wife."

"I know that."

"So why does your face look like that?"

"My face," he said, "looks perfectly normal."

Mariabell looked at his face.

"Hm," she said again, the same tone, and tucked her hand through his arm with the ease of someone claiming territory they already owned.

Victor exhaled. He did not move his arm. He also did not, after a moment, look in the direction of the street map section again.

That was a brief victory which appeared in Mariabell's expression that she chose not to draw attention to, because she was the type of person who understood that pointing at a win diminished it.

....

Éve had drifted toward the natural history section at some point. She was standing with a narrow volume open, not reading it so much as examining it as it was a collection of properties rather than a story, taking each page's information apart and setting it beside the last.

I came to stand beside her.

She didn't look up but she was aware of it.

With someone like Éve, you were always aware that she was aware of things.

It was one of the constants of her presence.

"What are you reading?" I said.

"Sixteenth-century herbal. The illustrations are wrong, the descriptions are wrong, but whoever drew them clearly loved the plants."

She turned a page. "You can tell when someone knows a thing versus when they love it. The errors are different."

I looked at the illustration over her shoulder. Fern. Inaccurate. Rendered with the kind of devoted attention that made inaccuracy somehow beside the point.

"That's generous," I said.

"That's accurate." She glanced up at me. Side-on, close. The cold composure at rest, and that for Éve meant the warmth underneath was closer to the surface.

"Generosity is when you decide to see something a certain way. This is just what's on the page."

A pause.

"You do that too," she said.

"What?"

"Love things before you understand them." She looked back at the page. "Sometimes after you understand them. Often at the same time."

I said nothing for a moment.

"Is that an observation or a complaint?" I said.

Éve turned one more page. The illustration was of a type of moss rendered with such precision that the inaccuracies in the plant beside it seemed even more like love by comparison.

"It's a compliment," she said simply. "I should have said so first. That was my error."

She closed the book, replaced it on the shelf with the same care she gave to everything she decided was worth the attention.

"Buy me something," she said then, looking up at me with the calm expectation of someone making a request they already know the answer to.

"The herbal?"

"No. Something you choose." The corner of her mouth. "I want to see what you pick."

I looked at the shelf beside her.

I chose without much deliberation — a thin volume, natural history, older than the herbal, the cover worn to something softer than the original. I handed it to her.

Éve looked at it. Turned it in her hands. Opened the first page.

Her expression did something small.

"Pressed flowers from a previous owner," she said.

"I know."

She looked at me for a moment. The full look, not the side-on one. Then she tucked the book under her arm and didn't say anything else, which from Éve was as unambiguous as a declaration.

....

Victor made a sound somewhere to the left..

"Sigh…."

Not a word.

Not a complaint.

Just the involuntary exhalation of a man who has seen something and has chosen, as a matter of personal dignity, not to have seen it.

Mariabell's hand tightened on his arm.

Not a pinch this time. Just a steady, affectionate, absolute grip of a woman who understood that some things required less correction and more anchoring.

Victor looked at the ceiling.

"This," he said, with great feeling, "is going to be the whole day, isn't it."

"Yes," said Mariabell, cheerfully.

"Every single part of it."

"Very likely."

He closed his eyes for a moment.

"Fine," he said, the word carrying the weight of a man who has computed a situation, found it entirely out of his hands, and decided to be at peace with it.

"Fine. Does anyone want coffee? I know a place on the next street that has been doing it correctly since 1983 and I would like to go there now."

Liliana raised her hand immediately.

Aisha said "please" with quiet sincerity.

Mephistopheles, without looking up from Continental philosophy: "If it has an alternative."

"They do a tea that Old Man Braham specifically approved of," Victor said. "He told me so at length. I didn't ask."

Mephistopheles considered this.

"That's a credible endorsement," she said, and closed the book.

....

We left the shop.

Victor held the door…. for everyone, without being asked, because underneath everything Victor did, there was a person who had been raised to hold doors, and crisis and supernatural exposure and general humiliation hadn't changed that particular thing.

Mariabell patted his arm when she went through.

He tried not to look pleased.

He looked pleased.

....

The coffee shop was on the next street, exactly where he said it was.

Warm inside, the warmth of a room that has been warm for a long time and has absorbed it into the walls.

Old wooden tables.

No music. The kind of quiet that felt earned rather than imposed.

We found a table large enough for all of us, which required two tables pulled together and a rearrangement that Mephistopheles oversaw with the quiet authority of someone who understands spatial optimization intuitively and cannot stop herself from applying it.

I ended up between Aisha and Liliana.

Across from Eva and Éve, who were sitting with the companionable closeness they had not touching…..not exactly, just in easy proximity, occupying the same warmth without requiring it to mean anything beyond what it was.

Victor sat at the head of the pulled-together table and ordered for himself with the relief of a man who has arrived somewhere he was going anyway and brought more people than anticipated.

Aisha wrapped her hands around her cup when it arrived.

She didn't say anything for a moment. Just the warmth of the cup, the warmth of the room. The white eyes slightly less careful than they were in rooms with people she didn't know.

"This was a good idea," she said. Quietly. Not directed at anyone in particular.

Liliana looked at me.

I looked at the window.

London, outside. Grey-gold. Old and indifferent and exactly what it was.

'Yes,' I thought. 'It was.'