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***
“Knowing your own darkness is the best method for dealing with the darkness of other people. One does not become enlightened by imagining figures of light, but by making the darkness conscious. The most terrifying thing is to accept oneself completely. Your visions will become clear only when you can look into your own heart. Who looks outside, dreams; who looks inside, awakes.” - Carl Jung
***
After they leave the island, Violet takes up a job as a lifeguard, so her brother, little sister and adopted daughter have a source of income while they play the waiting game with the damned Baudelaire inheritance. Although not yet legal, Klaus works as a paperboy, biking around the city dawn to dusk with newspapers. Said he was fifteen instead of fourteen. Violet clicks her tongue. Klaus insists she doesn’t have to wage the burden alone.
Before her first day, Violet has a dream where she must undergo a trial to prove her worthiness as a lifeguard. So she stands atop a diving board a hundred feet high, the pool below a puddle. Above her, ceiling lights dangle like teeth, flickering with the carelessness of guardian angels off duty. Violet wiggles her toes. Waits. Hesitates.
When it finally happens, it is more push than pull; as if watching from a theater seat, Violet sees the diving board quiver beneath her, her feet become airborne and the angels twist upside down. She is a bullet crashing into hellishly blue flesh until she isn’t, until her muscles coil for the impact that never comes.
As Violet prepares to send Sunny and Beatrice to daycare, she notices the egg sandwich Klaus fixed for her before heading out.
Thinking of you always. Take care, says the note in Klaus’s careful cursive.
To make a point, Violet leaves the sandwich in the fridge untouched.
***
An armed killer is chasing Violet down the hall of an apartment complex in South Side of Chicago. This was a life she had not lived, yet already lived through. Before she even looks for an exit, she looks for Sunny and Klaus before means of self-preservation; it is the greatest relief and horror that she is alone in facing this armed killer. At the end of the hallway is a window that leads to a fire escape, and Violet leaps down. Volleys of bullets descend upon her, and Violet shouts to the nonexistent heavens.
At the end of the complex’s parking lot is a river, hidden behind the garbage and trees. Violet wades in, the metal of the garbage bin clanking as the gunman advanced closer. Fly-infested rot leaks into the river. It is an awful, frustrating feeling when he joins Violet in the filth. How naïve of her to believe that he wouldn’t join her in garbage-contaminated water: Olaf and his troupe all wanted her dead, chased her across the Earth just to see it through, so of course, this adult would be no different.
Even when the gunfire finally pierces her lungs and exits through her shoulder, Violet is too disgusted to register the terror of having her luck run out, of dying just like her parents had. Scum enters through the holes in her body, violating her inside-out, and blood’s beautiful bloom leaves her, irretrievable in the water. The last thing Violet saw was an apple core. No bites left for her.
***
When Klaus enters high school, he joins the debate club, the chess club, the game board club and the book club. I do not miss his presence at home. She tells herself. He needs to leave the nest in order to fly.
Violet, now in her junior year, has her own troubles: the SATs; researching schools to apply to; two tests, one in high-honors World History, the other in high-honors English; her AP physics paper, due next week; friends, particularly keeping them. Running around the world from a relentless killer as a grieving orphan whose subsequent guardians failed her in every conceivable manner granted Violet an unmatched talent for creating acquaintances — useful, short-term alliances that would dissipate by the end of the school year. The life she lived was a world apart from the dull, angsty, albeit pleasantly sheltered lives her classmates lived.
Socializing with people outside her siblings became a game she forgot the rules for. One time, at someone’s Halloween party, a guy asked Violet if he could cop her a cold one; she, not knowing any better, paled, asking him to not call the cops, and to not touch her, please. His face twisted as if a hairy roach crawled across her face, which made Violet wish had a machine that could dig a hole for her to sink into.
In comparison, Klaus appears well-adjusted. He’s making friends. And always talking about inner jokes he and his game club friends have, and his fantasy about becoming the future president of the book club. He’s even dating that Quagmire girl, Isadora, who they met all the way back at Prufrock Preparatory School. In an even bigger relief, Sunny and Beatrice are doing well in daycare, with Sunny just learning how to count to one-hundred.
Her little brother, sister and adopted daughter are doing well. Violet should be happier.
***
They are on a car ride, the kind that is long, silent with tiredness, with nothing but the smokey, starless night above them. The adult driving is faceless, unknown, until he coughs, revealing himself to be Poe, the President of Orphan Financial Affairs, despite his lousy job at keeping them safe for Olaf.
Yet he doesn’t stir with half-assed chides for trouble’s tendency to find them. Baby Sunny sleeps on Violet’s lap, undisturbed. Klaus was nodding off, leaning his head against Violet’s shoulder. Violet wants to snapshot this figment in her mind forever despite knowing such to be impossible. Dreams are the stuffs of intangibility, despite being spun from tangible musings; any effort to jar them is thwarted by morning, when her memory of this dream, too, disappears into the stream of consciousness’s water.
Then Violet sees three red triangles glowing against the gray; despite seeing nothing more than pinprick blurs, Violet knows she’s looking at an alien.
“You see it, don’t you?” Violet asks, turning to Klaus, only to find he wasn’t there.
***
While bringing Sunny and Beatrice II back from daycare, Violet hears a faint yet distinctly female voice behind the door to her and Klaus’s room.
Not here, Violet thinks, not sure whether she is more mortified by overhearing something not meant for her or by Isadora finally learning that she and her brother share a room.
Violet takes Sunny, Beatrice II and herself out for ice cream and orders herself a butter pecan milkshake, which she shares with Sunny and lets Beatrice II take spoonfuls of. When she returns, Klaus is in the kitchenette cooking, his apron cinching the muscle that’s quietly ripening beneath his taupe turtleneck.
For dinner, they eat puttanesca and Violet says nothing the entire meal.
Later, Violet dreams she is a fox chasing roasted chickens into foxholes, despite chickens not belonging in burrows and being long since dead. She immediately forgets this dream upon awakening, but feels a rush of fury so strong it gives her a headache.
When spring break approaches, Violet makes a trip to the supermarket to buy matzah flour and gefilte fish, jellied and jarred, for the upcoming Passover. Her mother used to cure the fish herself before the recipe died with her.
In the dairy aisle, Violet runs into a familiar face, who is currently contemplating whether to buy blueberry or peach yogurt. Shiny, silver ribbon encircles Isadora’s bowed head, its tiny bow a frozen rose entangled in her dark curls.
“Pretty bow,” Violet says.
Isadora makes an “o” shape with her lips when she realizes Violet is there and giggles.
“Thanks. Klaus says he likes my hair most with a ribbon pulling it back.” She says, blushing and innocent.
Violet does not drop the shopping basket, no, but still she imagines the glass jar shattering, gefilte jelly clumping against the dust storm of matzah, ruining everything.
***
Senior year is top to tail with talk about prom in June. In autumn, Violet’s classmates dart their eyes around the classrooms until someone else catches their eye. During winter, friend groups grow closer, cozier with the warmth and free time afforded by spending winter break inside houses past the city’s scope with fireplaces, pet dogs and hot chocolate. By spring, the hallway coagulates into pairs of people cradling sweet, awkward prom proposals between them, and Violet wades through it, watches time slip like sand between her fingers.
“So, going to prom with anyone?” Klaus asks one Friday after school from the armchair, nose in a book.
“Don’t you have a club today?”
“Not on Fridays.”
“Ah.”
“So, prom.” Klaus clears his throat.
“Think I’ll pass. It’s hard to find a good conversationalist, even harder to find someone smart and good-looking.”
Klaus suspends the book on his lap. “You mean no one’s asked you yet? I’m surprised. You’re the complete package: smart, kind, pretty.” The book immediately returns to Klaus’s face.
Violet laughs, fighting the lightheadedness from spotting the earnestness in her brother’s eyes before he hides behind a book.
“Thanks, Klaus. We’ll see.”
“It’s okay if you don’t want to go. It’s your life, Violet,” Klaus adds, rambling. “Just trying to be encouraging. Think about it.”
“I will.”
Turns out there is no thinking to do when Duncan, her study buddy in Pre-Calculus and Psychology elective, shows up at her locker the following Monday with a single rose.
Dreams transform into memories, and memories into dreams; their existence is fluid, intertwined, water which takes the shape of its container. That night, Violet dreamed of her first kiss, which happened beneath an empty staircase at Prufrock, just where the note said to meet Duncan after class. With fondness, Violet remembers his shoulder-length dark hair, how he touched her shoulders before they kissed. She leans in, ready to relive the faint, electric flashes in between chapped lips and accidental teeth. But then she feels the cold lens against her cheeks and awakens with a silent scream.
Three days later, Violet turns eighteen, and the first thing she does with her newfound access to the inheritance is move into a studio apartment on the opposite side of the city.
***
During her first year in college, Violet has a recurring dream of becoming an object in a museum, between the dinosaur bones and taxidermy beasts. She’s still herself, only with a fork lodged in her left eye; she pounds on the display glass, begging for escape from the countless eyes that gawk. Worse is when the visitors walk by without seeing her at all — looking right through her.
***
The first time Violet has sex is with a fellow university student she meets at a club in Tokyo’s red-light district. They make their way back to a love hotel, take the ticket for their allotted time, and have sex on a bed surrounded by the blue lights of a holographic aquarium. Violet strips, bends over the bed and stares at the seaweed carpet. He empties himself into her and they don’t say a word. The dolphins and blue tangs disappear when he turns off the lights, and he holds his bare, skin-warmed arm for Violet to take as they close their eyes.
Violet does not sleep. She makes communion with the blank, knowing ceiling above her until exactly 1:58 A.M. She redresses. Before she leaves, she tiptoes towards the holograph switch, pen and notebook in hand, and ties her hair back.
Late night in Tokyo’s streets during summer is tireless, colorful, and starless; Violet enters the first ramen restaurant she sees. The place is roughly the size of a matchbox, and there are dividers between each seat, which makes it impossible to see the face of whoever is eating next to you (if anyone at all). Violet orders miso ramen with extra ramen and extra noodles. When her bowl arrives, Violet slides the extra butter she ordered into her bowl, the heat transforming it into a golden island, and almost moans when she tastes how its fat glosses each noodle. She was hungrier than she expected she was, a ravenous wolf who found her full moon. By the time she emptied her bowl, then a second, Violet forces herself to reckon with her insatiability.
It scared Violet, what this implicated. She fiddles with the folded holograph note in her purse and thinks about how nice a holographic aquarium in Sunny and Beatrice’s room would be.
***
Back stage, Violet stands before a mirror, adjusting the graduation cap swimming against her hair. A wolf stares back at her, naked. Smiling.
Go for him. You’re safe now.
Violet frowns. But he never left. I did.
Her reflection vanishes. The image scatters a million crystal droplets at Violet’s feet. When had she taken off her shoes? She’s expecting the pearls to cut into her feet like glass, but the pain never came.
When she enters the stage, Violet finds endless farmland has eaten away at the theater, its grassy teeth tickling stumps of wood. In a straight line of toadstools sit all the ages of Klaus Violet has known. At two, Klaus’s suit swims over him, glasses falling around his neck; four, six, and eight-year-old Klaus’s glasses still overtake his face; at ten and twelve, Klaus’s clothes actually fit him, but he’s still boyish. Fourteen to sixteen see Klaus’s trousers grow from fitting to too short; sixteen’s jaw takes shape, shedding his baby fat, and then there is eighteen, who shed his blazer completely, leaving his buttoned shirt open because his clothes could no longer hide the way his shoulders have broadened.
“I’m ready,” eighteen-year-old Klaus tells her, his voice a deep, musical lilt of self-assurance that Violet could no longer contradict.
Klaus was no longer the boy he once was, as Violet was no longer the girl she once was. Perhaps, like his clothes from their orphan days, Klaus had long since outgrown Violet’s preconception of who he was.
***
When Violet returns from Japan, she sells her studio apartment and moves back in with Klaus.
Happy, hurt, nervous, hopeful — Violet can see all these expressions flicker across Klaus’s face when she rolls in with several suitcases.
Now more than ever it is apparent how much Klaus has changed: the past two years Klaus spent enduring high school without Violet have afforded him a bewildered, weary air that breaks Violet’s heart. For the first time in either of their lives, he is the one who has to look down to make eye contact. It is immeasurably bittersweet for reasons Violet can’t verbalize.
“Going to Harvard to study medicine,” Klaus says, a touch self-conscious.
Sunny, now six, wears her hair in pigtails and likes ponies. “Mommy, I’m seeing Auntie Strauss soon!” She shouts, gliding her pink pony plush in the air.
Violet and Klaus both laugh, love bursting through their teeth. Sunny holds her pony close to Beatrice II, who's two, and Beatrice bangs her spoon in excitement. If only their lives started and ended at this table, the perfect fairytale finale.
But Violet must turn the page.
“You plan to dorm, then?”
“You know I’ll always write. I already made the arrangements with Strauss. Plus, you’re away, too, with your studio and all.”
“I chose a community college here with the express purpose of staying near the kids. You know I visited every Tuesday, Thursday and during weekends to do my duties.”
“That’s the word — visit. You were a visitor, Violet.”
“That’s not the issue, Klaus.”
“The inheritance you received should cover tuition costs. We can afford it,” Klaus says, defiant yet approval-seeking in a tone only younger siblings bear.
Violet knows the resentment she feels towards her brother leaving is inappropriate. He has the right to grow and see the world for himself, free from the burden of teenage parenthood and the weight of mutual survival thrust upon him during the years they spent on the run for their lives. But Klaus didn’t understand why Violet had left at eighteen: it was for his sake that she separated herself during his last two years in high school. Doesn’t he understand how love necessitates sacrifice, severance?
“We can. And I will pay for it. Your education is important. Enough of that, now. I brought you something back from Japan,” Violet says, reaching for the tome inside her tote.
It was little use for Klaus to hide how much it meant to him, getting a new book, getting any attention from Violet; oh, how fatal his mistake of looking Violet directly in the eyes, revealing to her the words galloping along the pages of his soul.
“It’s exquisite,” Klaus states, careful and with restraint. “The cover and spine have a texture I’m not accustomed to.”
“It’s a genuine antique. I invented a mini translation machine and slipped an English manuscript at the end of the book. It’s the memoir a Japanese soldier from World War II. You’d be gobsmacked how many old books are lying around. In Japan, there’s a superstition that old items carry the spirits of their old owners long after they pass.”
“Oh, Violet…”
“Sunny, Bee, I also have something for you. I hope you like fish, because tonight I’m installing a holograph aquarium in your room.”
The girls squeal in delight.
“I missed you all dearly. It is good to be back.” Violet rises to collect everyone’s plates and clean them.
After depositing the girls in their room, Klaus wraps his arms around Violet’s waist and lays his chin on Violet’s shoulder.
“I thought about you every day,” Klaus whispers, husky and shy in Violet’s ear.
Violet’s mouth goes dry. Klaus’s relationship with Isadora ended years ago; it is impossible to not notice the man Klaus has become. He’s still the bespectacled bookworm that speaks before he thinks, but he is no longer the boy Violet left two years ago.
So when Klaus, now working as a florist over the summer, returns home the next day with a tulip bouquet, Violet does not ask. Klaus has already answered.
***
The most sound-insulated place in the apartment was the closet in Violet and Klaus’s bedroom. How ironic they should share a room again at eighteen and twenty, despite no longer sharing a bed; neither of them bothered with a light switch, the moon’s ambiguous silver already too much. Klaus shut the door, enclosing them in darkness. Not even God wanted to see what was next.
Sex with Klaus was a warm gun: he seemed to know everything Violet wanted, about each ticklish spot from her neck to the back of her knees, having spent a lifetime knowing her. Ripping the condom open, Klaus braced Violet against the closet wall, one hand braced by her head, the other sheathing himself. Violet lifted her leg. And Klaus, with his finger on Violet’s trigger, blew her mind out between the brooms and vacuum.
“I love you, Violet,” Klaus says, leaning down to touch their sweat-crowned foreheads together.
“I love you, Klaus,” Violet says back, and it is the truest thing she ever says.
***
Later that night Violet has a dream about slowly falling from the sky, umbrella in hand, gazing at the cherries and strawberries which hooted carnival music along candle-lit roads, the music growing louder as she descended into the meringue of a colossal wedding cake.
***
Morning crawls from dawn’s drapes hungover and dewy-eyed. Raindrops pepper the window while Klaus readies his umbrella. Violet sits at the kitchenette table, stirring honey in her Earl Grey long past its dissolution.
“Should we tell her?” Violet asks, not looking up from her tea.
“Tell her what?” Klaus takes out his keys.
“That we’re not her mom and dad.”
Klaus’s hand lingers on the doorknob. “Wouldn’t it be easier if she did?”
Tink, tink, tink. Steel spoon against ceramic mug.
“But we’re not,” Violet eventually says. She stares at Klaus, lips pursed, praying her gaze freezes him in place. Violet hates the swooping, souring feeling in her gut at how Klaus hangs between the doorframe, waiting for her to let him leave.
“What else were you expecting?” Klaus says with a sudden flash of exasperation. “We act like Sunny’s mom and dad. We feed her, we bathe her, we dress her. After Olaf died, the first thing we did was adopt and name a baby. We call Beatrice our child in front of Sunny. And Sunny doesn’t remember our parents. Even when I try my best, it’s hard for me, too… I can’t recall what our mom and dad’s faces look like anymore. Whenever I think about mom, I just end up picturing…you.”
The confession, said out loud, is damning, renders whatever words come next hollow.
“But what kind of example are we setting for our little sister?” Violet says, despairing. “What if, in the future, she and Beatrice…”
“Please don’t finish that thought.” Klaus’s hand leaves the door and slides under his glasses, covering his eyes. “I’m sorry. I have to buy the textbooks for my first semester. We can talk about it later.”
Klaus throws his emptied backpack over his shoulder and finally looks at Violet. The outlines of his eyes are red, glossy; they remind Violet of that twelve-year-old boy from all those years ago, crying on the beach.
“I’m sorry,” Klaus repeats, and locks the door.
Violet wasn’t upset. Felt no urge to cry. Just let the realization that she, too, can barely remember her parents, can only look back at that lifetime through the hazy distance of a telescope, twist inside her dagger-deep. Family, father, husband, best friend, lover, brother —— survival has long since washed away these lines in the sand, leaving in its place the reality that no matter if she redraws those lines, Klaus will return to her, this sinking ship that will drown both of them.