The Vial

Talia Barnoy

Before my lover passed she pressed into my hand a thin long vial of her tears, kissing my hand as she pushed my fingers in around the cool orange glass. She hadn’t been contagious and I knew how to enter her room without being seen. I am glad that I did. She had already been so fragile since being hit in the gut by a horse.

The funeral was a private affair, but I went anyway. The family didn't know I existed in her life. They didn't know the secret moments we had at the abandoned cabin on their estate.  Here in the shadows of a thick old oak, I heard their whispers of private mourning and wonders of where her vial of tears they had collected had gone. I heard them reassure her mother that they would have all year until the ceremony to search for it. My hand clenched tighter around the gift she gave me.

When I saw that the family had all left, when the sun had begun its slow descent into the earth, I snuck to her not yet marked grave and fell to my knees, pouring myself over the dirt. I could only imagine later what a sight that could have been. A girl, barely seventeen, lying in hand me down mourning clothes atop a pile of dirt belonging to the Earl in the big house.

The year went on, I continued my work at my father’s tea shop, welcoming guests in and sitting them at tables. Each time the bell rang to indicate a customer, a part of me saw her walk through in that blue dress I first saw her in. 

She had been alone, saying she was waiting for someone but he never came and I had to close the store down. I went to tell her, politely, that we were closing. "What a shame." She had said. "Sit with me." She had smiled in that glittering way of hers and I was so dazzled I could not refuse. And she simply asked me about my life and listened. I spent that whole time not knowing she was the daughter of the Earl, just thinking that this beautiful and high status person was interested in me. It was then that she invited me on an outing and told me to meet her at the road outside the Earl's estate on my off hours.

Now, on my breaks between customers, when I snacked on some bread and cheese, I found myself staring into the vial halfway empty of liquid., shifting it between my fingers. Throughout the day, I kept it in the pocket of my apron. 

It was on such an occasion, close to a year after her death, when I started at the vial that the Earl’s son entered the shop. I left my seating area, stuffing the vial back into my apron, and greeted him with as warm a smile as I could muster. This was her brother. I had seen him many times before, riding bareback on his horse or joining his friends at the local pub, but his plain delicate features had lost their cheer and he looked at me almost embarrassed with his top hat clutched to his chest.

“You knew my sister.”

I nodded, slowly, attempting politeness while my heart jackhammered against my chest. He was not meant to know.

He looked up at the shelves of tea canisters behind me, a small wistful smile dancing on his lips. “What was her favorite?”

My body relaxed. He knew she frequented my father’s shop. That was all.

I looked behind me, my eyes resting out of habit on the bergamot with cornflower blossoms that my father had nicknamed ‘Sapphire.’ There was a part of me that wanted to lie to him, tell him she liked the plainest of them all just so that ‘Sapphire’ could be my memory and mine alone. My hand reached into my pocket and I felt the comfort of the glass. I knew how much she loved him. She almost always spoke of her youngest brother and how proud she was of who he was becoming, even when he was slow to get there. If there was anyone to share this memory with, it was him.

I looked back at him. “The Sapphire, sir.”

He nodded and the wistful smile deepend. “I’ll take a cup to sit down with.”

I poured him a cup and brought it to him at the seat by the storefront window. He had a book with him, one I didn’t know although that didn’t say much as I knew enough to read the signs on storefronts and for the teas and herbs we had at the shop. I set it down beside me and without looking at me he said:

“I know.”

“Beg your pardon?”

“She told me.”

I stood up straight. “I haven’t the slightest clue what you may be referring to.”

He shook his head. “I know why she gave you her vial rather than us.”

My breast ached from the speed in which my heart went.

His story spilled out of him. “She left clues for me to find you. She told me what to do because she didn't want us to be alone in our grief.” He lifted the book in his hand. “She put it all in here, in the margins of her favorite book, hidden where no one could find it.” He laughed. “It’s too scandalous for mother and father.” He paused. “I’m sorry it took me so long.”

I nodded, still unwilling to relinquish my fear of him.

“Please,” His eyes seemed to redden as if he were fighting against his emerging emotions. “My parents have already moved on, they gave up on the vial ceremony. They’re focused on trying to find a suitable husband for their other daughters and my sisters are only concerned with that and my brother with the estate of his own home and his own family but I’m not done and I know you aren’t either.” He paused. “You know those tears aren’t meant to be held onto.”

He wanted me to pour the tears over her grave. I faltered. I hadn’t dared visit her grave again after the first time. I wasn’t sure if I could handle it. But I looked into his eyes and I saw hers, a pale blue that changed as easily as the ocean and such a deep yearning for me to sit in his grief with him. 

I softened and consented but I told him he would have to wait until the shopping day had gone its course. He agreed and sat there, reading his book and ordering her tea, never moving or shifting even as customer after customer poured in seeking warmth or herbs for an ailment. At the end of the day I locked the front door and began to close up the shop.

Her brother was surprised as he watched me sweep up the leaves from the floor and record the count of the money in the till. “Doesn’t your father do that?”

I bit my lip so that I wouldn’t say something I regretted. He was still the son of an Earl. 

“My father is away for the month.” I told him. “He's gone to England to sample what they have there. And my mother died a few days after I was born. I am the only one who can.” I closed the till as if that ended the conversation and by the hint of red in his cheeks and his refusal to look at me, it was.

He followed me out the back door and into the street, leading me to his father’s estate. I had my hands in my pockets, my fingers curled around the vial. It was dark when we reached the hill with her grave and I felt the same emotions I had felt when I was here a year ago rush over me. All the pain that I had had been building up and I didn’t want to let it go. It was comforting to feel hurt, to feel the last of her pain jostle itself in the vial. Yet, there was her brother clutching onto her book the same way I did her vial. Her pain in testimony rather than in essence. It made me wonder how long it had been since he had found the book and how long it had taken him to approach me.

There was a grave marker over the earth where her coffin rested now. It said her name, how much of a loving daughter and sister she was, how she was killed in the prime of her life, but it didn’t say that she made birdhouses and that when she smiled it was as if the world glowed with honey. There was nothing about how she inspired you to be the best version of yourself, thinking about who you were rather than what others wanted you to be. Nothing about her fascination with the makeup of the earth, the sciences. Nothing at all about the weight of her beside you and the silk milk of her skin. All that was left was the things that could never die, her role to her family and the fact of her death.

Her brother walked over to the grave and began to dig a small rectangular shaped hole beside her. In it he placed the book and covered it back over with the dirt he had removed, trying to place grass over it in order to make it seem as though nothing was amiss. He returned to standing beside me.

I felt her brother's eyes on me and I looked at him. He didn’t want to touch me it seemed, his aristocratic sense of being still preventing him from even reaching out a hand to get my attention. There were tears in his eyes, though. Long rivers glistened down his cheeks. 

I knew what he wanted me to do. I took out the vial. The warm droplets, all that was left of her, sloshed around at the tips edge. I held it to my chest, kissed it, held it to me once more, closing my eyes and finally allowing myself to cry, to feel her absence. I kissed the vial again and this time I uncorked it. I uncorked it and poured it over the small bits of grass that had grown over the dirt that held her.

There was no bringing her back, no parts of her that I held would ever be her. The tears that she shed were long dormant and dead, just as she was, and I was just putting dead things where they belong. But the things that had made her alive, the memory of her smile and the glint in her eye when she saw a beatle nuzzle its way through the grass, were not. They were all alive in my head and, I realized, in her brother’s.

I turned away from her, looking at him, and said, “Tell me about your Elizabetta.”