Skylar Brown

The Roses

It was unsettling, returning to the Woolridge house after what felt like so many years. 

It had not been a long time, not really—five years, from the time of Justin’s senior year. He and Aurora clutching each other for professional photographers out at some park in Vancouver, an unseasonably cold and rainy day for June, fur stole draped around Aurora’s shoulders, shivering in her pale blue gown. There had been something unselfconscious about the way they were then that had not translated to the present day.

And now: here. Five years later, five years older, a resigned slowness in his own step that Justin had come to recognize and dislike.

The Woolridge estate was at the very end of a long, winding road. It started uphill but then sloped downward sharply until you began to feel that you might fall off the edge of the Earth. And at the end was the Woolridge house, still palatial, monstrous: grey brick held up by pillars that looked distinctly Roman. Bordered by a long, winding driveway with glittery, colored bricks, the centerpiece of which was a huge, spouting Italian-style fountain. Two marble lions, both in mid-snarl, greeted him as he approached the front door, and in spite of himself, he winced. It was all coming back to him now, the fact that this house seemed to him to be an awful place. Not an evil place, perhaps—surely that would be too strong a word—but an unpleasant place. Even the street itself, beautiful and sloping as it was, felt lonely, unkind. Justin could not imagine anybody ever walking their dogs here, though he supposed that people must, sometimes.

He rang the doorbell, steeling himself to face Roger Woolridge. The few times they had met before, Justin had always felt mildly uncomfortable, and he knew it would be worse now. He knew enough of Roger to dislike him: the author of a series of bestselling paperback books found in every supermarket, technically deemed non-fiction, about how you could manifest everything you ever wanted through meditation because Roger himself had done it. Never mind the fact that Roger’s father, the family patriarch, was a well-known furniture designer who’d no doubt given his son’s career an invaluable launching pad. Not only did Roger write about his own experiences, but the experiences of countless others as well: examples of people who’d wished away illness, who’d manifested a great fortune. Never mind that these people often did not stay success stories for very long after Roger’s books were published. A quick search would tell you the various calamities that had befallen these people: arrested for insider trading, their bodies having given out on them. Though nobody who read Roger’s books was at all aware of these facts. To his readers, his followers, time stood frozen at the moment of publication, every passing character in his books immortal in their moment of great success.

Yes, he was a difficult man to like, certainly. And as the door opened, Justin arranged his face into a purposefully bland, inoffensive smile. Though it was not Roger who answered the door, nor a housekeeper, either, as Justin had half been expecting, but Aurora herself.

He cataloged every detail about her, very quickly: her long, wavy auburn hair, her small body in a fuzzy pink crop top. The way she stared at him from beneath her long eyelashes. Critical, unblinking. The way her shoulders melted, and she smiled, when she finally did.

“Justin,” she said. “Holy shit. It’s you.” She took a brief stutter-step back, right hand to her heart. 

“And you,” he said out loud, without meaning to. But it was her: he was certain of it. She’d recognized him, which was obviously the first clue, but also, he had recognized her. The same pale-white shade of skin, the twitchy half-smile. She even stood the same way, weight slightly distributed to the left. Could another woman really embody her so perfectly? He doubted it.

“Well, you know, this is my house.” And her voice—was it the same? He thought so. Still slightly uppity, with traces of the spoiled child she’d once been, but maybe a little bit lower now. She tapped the door frame as though checking. “I don’t really know who else it would be.”

“I know,” he said, taking in that soft, weak little smile playing across her face. How awful this must be for her—all the hangers-on coming over, everybody checking to make sure it was her. Aurora had always been a solitary person, and he felt a sudden rush of sympathy. “I’m so sorry. You must think I’m such an idiot. But I had to know—with what everybody’s been saying…”

He trailed off, gazing into the perfect clearness of her gaze, feeling that he could almost see through her green eyes. He’d always believed she was special for her eyes alone. Green eyes were rare, inherited from her mother. She had always been a gem.

“Oh.” The syllable escaped her lips like a death rattle. If anything, she looked even more fragile now than she had at eighteen. Her lips were pale, her skin translucent. “Yes, I know.”

“I’m so sorry,” he repeated, and he was. How had this happened to her?

A pitiful offering, but for the moment, she seemed to accept it. Tilted her little, red-tinted head. “Well, anyway, I’ve really missed you,” she told him, and he let himself believe her. “Wanna come in?”

**

The real Aurora was dead, according to the concerned teens on social media. Killed off for finding out too dark of a secret about one of her father’s powerful friends and replaced by a mind-controlled actress. 

These kids were so certain of it, that was the thing. Speaking into their phone cameras authoritatively, lenses too close to their face, pimples and all on display. Alternately whispering, ever the actors, impressing the distinct feeling upon the viewer that even speaking these words out loud could be a suicide of sorts. Then, thirty seconds later, preaching smugly to the camera. What an idiot you, this anonymous viewer, must be, they seemed to be saying. That you didn’t know the truth already, that you had to be presented with all of their exceedingly obvious evidence.

Most of their evidence seemed to consist of the fact that the Aurora Woolridge of today looked slightly different than she had five years ago at eighteen when she was last seen most frequently in the public eye. She (meaning the actress) was not as beautiful as Aurora had been, apparently. Justin had been struck by the casual cruelty of these people, their charts and diagrams, comparing the exact shape of her head in different photographs, her teeth. Her teeth were crooked now, it was decided. Two pictures were placed side by side: eighteen-year-old Aurora, white bouquet in hand, clad in a little blue bodycon dress, flanked by both her parents. Her smile was a mile wide, teeth perfectly white and straight. Compared to a picture taken at an event within the last four months. This time her dress was shorter and black, and her smile was far more uncertain. And her two front teeth overlapped slightly.

Also, it had been decided, her lips were thinner now. She had always had that nice rosebud mouth, and how was it possible for this to just change? Who would voluntarily make their lips thinner?

Justin hated everything about these videos—the clearly clueless, unkind children filming from their bedrooms or the family basement, the fast-talking college girls in their sweatpants and dorm rooms. And yet, for the past month, he’d found himself unable to look away. More than that, unable to shut the door on that little sliver of doubt. He and Aurora had fallen out of touch after high school, but it didn’t matter. He had to know for certain. To eradicate any flicker of uncertainty.

He watched her carefully now, as she led him up the little stairway and into the sitting room. Mercifully, the inside of the Woolridge seemed to be calmer, more muted, than the outside was. A gentler place than the silent, sloping street beyond the windows. The main room was nautical-themed and surprisingly jaunty. The walls were painted a light cream, little blue accents seeming to spring up out of nowhere. A pretty, aqua-colored sea glass painting on the wall, a little bowl of shells set down on the coffee table, a vintage toy sailboat sitting up on the bookshelf.

It was likely, Justin surmised, that while Roger had been the one to buy and decide on the exterior of the house, Aurora’s mother, Stella, had been the one to decorate its interior. He had long believed that she was the soft inside of the Woolridge family, the thing that made them seem approachable, even while Roger bellowed like a drill sergeant that the only one who could change your circumstances was you.

But this was the same Aurora. She put on the kettle for tea, arranged pretty organic cookies on a plate in the shape of the sun. Macarons, ladyfingers, shortbread, bird’s nests. He watched her pad around in her grey leggings and bare feet and felt a sudden constriction in the back of his throat. Where had she been, all these years?

**

The story was that she had died in Europe. In Marseille, France. To be specific.

This really would not have been believable at all, were it not for Nathaniel Renwick. Nathaniel was a friend of Aurora’s, though he was nearly a decade older than her. This was the extent that Justin knew of their relationship, though he expected there was more to the story, considering they had been vacationing together in the south of France.

Nathaniel was big on the far-right corners of the Internet, though Justin suspected he wasn’t particularly right-wing himself, but rather could see all the obvious ways he could profit off of their ideals. He was getting too old to be a respectable Internet folk hero, but he looked at least five years younger than his true age of thirty-two, and there was a certain boyish charm to his face that resulted in a kind of resounding sweetness that people could recognize. (And his curly blonde head of hair was very ‘90s boy band, which absolutely did not hurt.)

“Listen,” he’d said four months ago, holding the camera up to his tear-stained face, “I saw her. Aurora. She was standing at the top of this—you know, these… these cliffs, right by the water—and she lifted herself over the barrier, and she just… she just jumped.” He appeared shell-shocked, horrified, even in the retelling. “I was too far away—I was screaming at her, begging her to get down, running to her, but I couldn’t physically stop her in time. I was too far away,” he repeated, desperately.

“But she wouldn’t have done it… not herself. I knew her so well, and she was always such a happy girl. She was so excited to be on vacation in France, she’d been waiting all year. I know… I don’t care what anybody says, how you never really know what’s inside somebody’s head. I knew her, I did know what was in her head, her heart, and I know she wouldn’t have wanted to jump.”

This was where Nathaniel’s story—if there hadn’t already been huge, glaring red flags—would have begun to lose credibility with Justin. Aurora was a sweet girl, a kind person. She had a naturally gentle disposition that could give off the vague impression of happiness. But a happy person? Justin did not think she’d been one when they were teenagers, and very much doubted that she was one now. And if Nathaniel had really known her, the way that he said he did, he would have known that, too.

If Nathaniel’s story had ended there, it would have been believable to nobody beyond the truly crazy. But the second part of Nathaniel’s story: this was what gave it the veneer of truth along the dark corners of the Internet, and then, trickling down, even to the frayed edges of the mainstream.

“I looked over the side,” Nathaniel had gone on, voice in a high-pitched whisper, tears miraculously gone, “and he was standing over her. Standing over her body.”

He was. A man who would remain faceless, obscured in the shadows, but not nameless. No, certainly not nameless.

The world knew his name. The world was very much aware of him, and to most people, his name meant nothing. But to some, to others, his name meant everything. It could invoke fear, hatred, visceral disgust, horror, contempt…all in five syllables.

And there, the story went, he had stood over Aurora’s beautiful, broken body and licked her clean, the very life force draining out of her. This was where it became that peculiar mixture of humorous, frightening, and darkly sexual. A young girl who’d learned too much, up against a very powerful, very dangerous man. In the end, she was no match for him.

**

When Aurora was a child, Lillian Rose had given her a little tarot card pack as a Christmas present.

Lillian Rose was not her real name; her full name was longer, and as a child, Aurora had not committed it to memory. But she knew her last name began with “rose,” and so that was how she had thought of Lillian and her husband, Joseph: Lilly and Joseph Rose. The Roses.

They were not really friends of Aurora’s parents, but acquaintances. Enough to rub shoulders at a holiday party or play a round of golf. And at this particular Christmas party, Aurora had snuck out of the dining room during the nativity scene re-enactment and found herself alone in the family room.

The party was at someone else’s house: she wasn’t sure whose, but not her parents. This house was even larger, grander, than hers. Every surface seemed to shine aggressively, blindingly, and to her child’s mind, it looked like a castle, all sweeping staircases and marble countertops. Everything was bumped up a size or two as well, as though she’d sipped a little bit of shrinking potion and was now off-kilter. The Christmas tree was overlarge, towering above her with its twinkling baubles and an obscene pile of presents.

Aurora did not know their party hosts, but she knew enough to understand that to these people, their Christianity was a joke. Obviously, they were Christians: they believed that Christianity was the only good religion, but they still didn’t take it seriously. These men with their golf shirts and their big, shiny white smiles took Christ’s name in vain as the children were acting out the nativity scene but snapped at them if they didn’t know where a little lamb or wise man was supposed to go.

And so Aurora had found herself sitting alone in the family room, swinging her legs listlessly on the black leather couch. Wavy hair French-braided, wearing the bejeweled little dress her mother had bought her for this party specifically, and starchy white tights. A light pink shade of lipstick she had begged her mother to apply five minutes before leaving.

Just when Aurora was starting to get bored, sitting all by herself, Lilly entered the room, nursing a glass of red wine. “There you are! I saw you sneak out.”

Aurora smiled up at Lilly, vaguely. She didn’t know her well, but she liked her. In large part because she had very long, wavy, red hair and wore lots of bangles, but also because she was a quiet, restful sort of person. The complete opposite of most of her parents’ friends with their ostentatious cars, their huge houses, their loud laughter, and their suspiciously tanned skin in winter. She and her husband, Joseph, were much less flashy.

“I have…” Lilly seemed almost shy, taking a quick sip of wine before continuing. “I have a little present for you, actually. I was going to give it to you later, before we left, but seeing as we’re both here, maybe I’ll just give it to you now.”

“Thank you,” Aurora said through her surprise, automatically. She hadn’t been expecting any gifts tonight, save for the goodie bag of expensive chocolates all the children were always given on their way out. Then, “Yes please, I’d like to have it now.”

Lilly smiled, rummaged around in the black handbag over her shoulder before scurrying over to sit next to Aurora. She placed her wineglass on the end table beside the couch, and Aurora took this unguarded moment to examine Lilly’s face carefully. She liked to study people when they weren’t looking: at seven, she was old enough to understand now that people didn’t take kindly to being stared at. 

And Lilly was very beautiful, Aurora decided. Not perfect-looking: her nose was slightly too long, proportionally, but instead of being an unattractive feature, it had the advantage of pulling you in more. Drawing your eyes to everything that was gentle and pretty about her face.

“Alright.” Lilly handed her a little gift bag decorated with pretty kittens playing in the falsely glittery snow. Aurora paused for a moment, studying the bag, and Lilly said, “You can open it right now, if you want. I know you’re not really supposed to open presents before Christmas—” Christmas was still a week away— “but just one is alright. Santa doesn’t mind.”

“Okay, then, thank you.” Aurora, who did not need a lot of encouragement to open up a Christmas present early, was already lifting out the soft pink tissue paper, which had revealed itself to cover a little box, embossed with carefully sketched pictures of fairies lounging in a field by a river, gossamer wings spread out lazily on the grass. “Wow.” She didn’t know what this gift was, but she knew it was very pretty. “Thanks, Lilly. This is so nice.”

 Lilly laughed, reaching out to take a sip of wine. “I’m glad you think so. It’s a tarot card pack.” When Aurora did not look enlightened, she asked, “Do you know what tarot cards are?”

Aurora shook her head, and Lilly leaned in and explained—in a way that managed to be both informative and child-friendly—what exactly they were. “See, they connect to the energy in the universe,” she told Aurora, hazel eyes gleaming, “to help explain your past, your present, even your future. And this energy… really, it’s just like magic. These unseen frequencies in the air. And you believe in magic, don’t you?”

Aurora nodded, eyes wide, because she really did. It wasn’t merely a belief; it was a feeling, a sense of knowledge. Aurora felt the magic in the air always, but especially around Christmas Time, when the very ground itself seemed to shimmer with its knowledge of a great secret, of a promise of divine things to come. The thought that these pretty cards she held in her hand could help her tap into that knowledge seemed a thing beyond her wildest imaginings. She thought this tarot card pack was the nicest present anybody ever gave her, and she told Lilly so.

“I’m so glad you like it, I really am.” Lilly smiled, placing her wineglass back on the glass table. “I knew you loved fairies—you told me so last time, remember—and so I saw this at the bookstore and, you know, I just had to get it for you.”

Aurora did love fairies, it was true. And so, very quickly and in the simple way that children do, Aurora decided then that Lilly herself was perhaps part pixie. Likely it was an association born by the magic of Christmas omnipresent in the air, and the little set of cards she held in her hand. But it was also true that there was a sort of bewitching air about Lilly. And sitting beside her, smelling her expensive wine and designer perfume, it was near impossible to believe that there was not something otherworldly about her.

Years later, as a teenager and then a very young woman, Aurora would look back on that moment with real fondness for Lilly. Her genuine thoughtfulness, the gentle way that she had spoken to Aurora, who had been a painfully shy child. 

But even as an adult, she could still remember the magic of that night. The way Joseph had sidled into the room a few minutes later in his plaid shirt, whistling a cheerful little tune, and then the two of them had ushered Aurora back into the dining room to sing Christmas carols before she could get in trouble for having left. The whole interlude had felt like a dream, except she still had the tarot card pack in her bedside drawer even now, with all those pretty little pixies who still always made her think of Lilly, and sometimes she wondered…

Currently, Skylar is a private English instructor in Vancouver, Canada. She has been passionate about writing and poetry for years, and has had a few pieces of work (both poems and short stories) published in various anthologies. Her Instagram handle is @skybluecreatrix.