Roses

Luciana was in the kitchen, making breakfast when Caroline came down the next day.

“You don’t have to do that, you know,” she said from the door.

“I wanted to,” Luciana replied carefully, after a pause.

“Oh. Well, thank you. The only time those boys ever make me breakfast is on mother’s day and my birthday, and then they complain about it for days after, so I can’t even enjoy properly because I feel guilty about every cut or burn they sustain, and it just ruins it completely for me,” she paused for breath, sucking down a huge gulp, then beginning to speak again. “Did you sleep well last night?”

Luciana nodded. She hadn’t slept at all, but she didn’t want Caroline to know.

“That’s good, pet. Oh, I bought home the book you were looking at yesterday. It’s on the coffee table, and Robbie said he’d be happy to teach you how to read it.”

“Thank you,” Luciana replied, quietly, serving up a plate of food for Caroline. “Do you want tea?”

“Yes please,” Caroline said, tucking in happily.

Luciana made the tea, and it was possibly the best cup she’d ever had. She said so, and Luciana blushed.

“Aren’t you going to eat?” she asked, when Luciana sat down, and folded her hands on the table.

Luciana shook her head. “I’m not hungry.”

Caroline looked up at her, and pursed her lips. “Are you sure?”

Luciana nodded quietly, looking away from Caroline’s searching gaze and looking at her hands.

Caroline sighed, and turned back to her food.

William was down next, half asleep.

Caroline pushed back her chair, to serve up for him, but Luciana beat her to it, plating up so seriously you would have thought that her life depended on it.

Caroline made a note to talk to Robbie about it when she had the chance.



Aurora and Juillietta opted to go to the café with Caroline again. Luciana emphatically didn’t.

Instead she and Robbie sat in the living room, reading the Great Gatsby together slowly, because Luciana stopped after every sentence to repeat it to herself using first the words she already knew, then the words- if any- she had just learned.

Robbie didn’t mind, because her voice sounded like something fluid- prettier than the prettiest French ever spoken, by far.

They read the first chapter, then Luciana asked, still very politely, if they could stop.

Robbie complied, and watched as Luciana put the book down and got up to leave the room.

He knew it wasn’t anything he’d done, because he’d done nothing, and so he wondered what it could be.

He found Luciana in the kitchen, cleaning things she’d already cleaned that morning, and which hadn’t had occasion since then to get itself properly messed up again.

He stood at the door, watching silently, knowing that speaking would spoil whatever spell she’d woven for herself, and that something awful would happen once she emerged back into the real world.

After thirty minutes, however, when he’d left and come back twice to find her still cleaning, he intervened.

“Luciana, you should stop now.”

She spun around to face him, the calm expression of her face dropped and so did she.

She crumpled in a genteel heap onto the cold tiles of the floor. When Robbie reached her, a whole half-second too late to catch her, she was breathing deeply and evenly.

She was asleep.



It wasn’t the sort of sleep in which speaking or stirring are at all endorsed. Oh no, it was the still, dreamless sleep of the dead, and several times Robbie had to check her breathing to make sure she hadn’t joined them. She was so still he could barely see her breathing.

After a few hours- three, four at a stretch, her lids begun to twitch from the movement of her eyes beneath them, and she started moving. Then whimpering.

She woke screaming, and sobbing, and it took her another twenty minutes before she managed to just partially compose herself.

Afterwards, she sat hunched up on the sofa that Robbie slept on, not caring, for once, about their closeness. She wrung her hands together. It was a control mechanism, so that she wouldn’t scream again, because behind her eyelids she could still see that image of a fire burning so brightly and so hot that her very soul was seared. And it scared her all the more because she could feel the place where the fire had touched her in her dream, and she knew when she bathed she would be able to see a red mark, but no actual burn. It scared her because she knew that somewhere, the nightmare was really happening, and she was more than just a spectator. And that’s why she couldn’t allow herself to fall asleep.

Robbie reached out a hand to pat her shoulder, and she let herself fall against him and be warmed by his heat because the searing blazing fire had burnt her and then left her feeling so cold.



“I’ve made my decision, Robbie,” Caroline said late one night as they sat in the kitchen, waiting for the kettle to boil.

“Your decision about what?” he replied, confused. His mother’s statement had come out of nowhere at all.

“About the girls.”

Robbie’s jaw tightened. The sisters had been there a month now, and both he and William liked having them around. Aurora provided all the liveliness and entertainment of the very young without any of its petulance. She was William’s favourite. Juillietta, while sometimes a little spoilt, and a little rude, more than made up for herself by being perfectly charming and having- they discovered- an extraordinary gift for art. And Luciana, although still quiet and reserved (haughty, was what William had decided she was), was like a little housewifely angel. She’d taken up the cooking of every meal and the cleaning of every room, even the bathrooms and the toilets.

Caroline had begged her to come and help in the café twice a week, on Fridays and Saturdays, her two busiest days, and she had complied, although at that time she’d been afraid of returning.

As it was, she didn’t have any cause to worry, she’d not had a daylight turn like that again.

Robbie was now definitely against the idea of them going anywhere.

“I want to adopt them. I’m pretty sure I can, and that way we can give them legal identities and Aurora and Juillietta can go to school.”

Robbie smiled. “I think that’s a good idea mum. Have you spoken to Will and the girls yet?”

She shook her head, and the kettle clicked off. “No. I wanted to run it by you first, to see that you weren’t completely against the idea and I hadn’t gone completely off my rocker.”

Robbie laughed. “Well it’s good to know you consider me a rationalizing influence. And if I’m to do my duty I will have to point out that you will need to set aside some money to do work on the house. Because I can’t go on sleeping in the living room. It just won’t do.”

“I don’t see why you don’t just go back to your own room, if Luciana doesn’t use it,” her mum replied, pouring hot water into their cups.

“Because she does use it sometimes. And I don’t want her to be downstairs alone. I think that would frighten her.”

Caroline sighed. This was a conversation they often had, but they were never any closer to understanding what, exactly, it was that Luciana was so afraid of.

“Poor chick. She hasn’t said anything to you, has she?” Caroline asked hopefully.

Robbie shook his head, and she pursed her lips, and set his tea before him, before sitting down herself. “Maybe she’s upset about not knowing who her parents are?” she suggested.

“Maybe,” Robbie murmured, although neither of them really believed this explanation at all.

“Well,” Caroline said, after having finished her tea. “I’m off to bed now. I’m knackered,” She leant down to kiss her son. “Goodnight love, sleep well.”

“You too mum,” he yawned back. A look at the clock told him it was just gone one.

Aurora, Juillietta and William had gone upstairs four hours ago, although whether they were actually sleeping was, as always, debatable.

Luciana was in her usual chair, next to the one that Robbie slept in, a book her hand, but the TV on as well, to keep herself awake.

Her distress, whatever the cause, was having very clear effects on her outward appearance. Her hair and skin had lost their beautiful lustre, the glow that put them a cut above everyone else’s, and her eyes never sparkled. Instead they swam, blankly and zombie-like in the black ocean of darkened skin around them. She didn’t laugh much either, or speak to anyone, and she was careful to avoid too much contact, like the touch of other people’s skin wounded her.

She slept sometimes now, voluntarily; when she had worked herself so hard that she was probably due to pass out anyway, but never more then an hour and a half for fear of the return of the nightmares.

She smiled at Robbie as he came in, and he smiled at her in return, lying down on his sofa and watching her alternate between the film on in front of her- Amélie; she was learning French- and the book in her hands- Madame Bovary, for the same reason. There was a dictionary at her feet.

“Are you going to sleep soon?” Robbie asked after a while of the low murmur of the television.

Luciana remained silent while she thought. “Maybe. At six,” she replied finally.

Robbie nodded, and let his eyes drift shut, and his mind drift away.



Upstairs, Aurora, Juillietta and William were indeed still awake. Aurora was telling some story so filthy and so funny that William was impressed. He felt proud of her, and wondered where she could have heard such a thing, or if she had -just possibly- made it up herself.

Juillietta was almost sobbing to herself with laughter.

“So what do you think your sister and my brother are doing downstairs?” William asked, when the story was over.

Juillietta’s giggles faded, but neither Aurora or Will paid her any mind as they launched into a sordid, quite disgusting description of what could possibly be happening.

Both girls knew now that Luciana spent every night in the living room with Robbie, but what they didn’t know was why. It had escaped their notice just how drastically she had changed in a month.

It hadn’t escaped William, but he never thought to bring it up with them, assuming that it was just something normal.

Aurora whispered something in Williams ear that made him splutter, and choke on his own laughter after a stolen glance at Juillietta’s face.

She screwed up her face at them angrily, knowing that they were laughing at her misery, before getting up and leaving the room. It was common knowledge among the little group that she thought herself in love with Robbie, and as clear to all that he had nothing other than a brotherly interest in her, what with his eyes always being fixed on Luciana. It was clear to Juillietta as well, and she resented Luciana for it.

She wasn’t even pretty, or interesting.

Her jealously was another source of comedy to William and Aurora, who never took anything seriously, and made each other ever more irreverent.

“She,” Aurora stated, “is going to smother Cianae one day.”

William chuckled, and nodded.

“Well, I’m gong to sleep now,” Aurora said, lying down on Will’s bed and somehow managing to make her tiny frame take up most of the space.

Will laughed again and ruffled her hair before pulling the covers off her and cocooning himself in them so he could sleep comfortably on the floor.