Cutlass Keep

The Governess (2)

Anais was not born in Cutlass Keep, and had been given a true farmhouse childhood in a box-shaped state in the center of the country. The city is foreign to her, which is much more obvious than it should have been. There is something about Cutlass Keep natives; they can always tell who is their own, and who isn't.

Elsa Kastell is a Cutlass Keep native, as is her husband, though they come from opposite sides of the river, and might as well have come from two different worlds.

Anais knew all of this from her research, but it's different, learning about the Kastells from the Kastells. She learns them slowly, and over time. The boys are born on their exact due date, two weeks after she starts, and she suspects Elsa Kastell had simply demanded that they show up on time. Elsa does not tolerate tardiness, and she is not a patient woman.

Anais doesn't like the Kastell boys at first sight, not like so many people she knows, who fall in love with a baby the moment they see it, and it slobbers on their finger. She doesn't dislike them, but they're small, and can't even hold their heads up. There isn't much to have an opinion on, either way. They cry, and make messes, and sleep at irregular times. They are fleshy and loud, made of smooth skin and downy hair and bodily fluids.

Mrs. Kastell, in the meantime, doesn't look at all the way a woman who has just given birth to twins has any right to look. She looks how someone who has never seen a new mother in real life might imagine one to look. Her curls remain perfectly coiffed, she loses her baby weight in what feels like hours, and she can still walk up and down the marble staircase in very expensive heels.

"It's all in the prenatal vitamins," she says, in an interview about a gala she's hosting. Her smile looks like a secret.

Anais respects Elsa Kastell the same way that she respects most things that can kill her, but she doesn't start to understand her until the boys are six months old and she walks into the kitchen to find Mr. and Mrs. Kastell getting drunk on expensive sherry and eating leftover pie from a bodega.

"Ana!" Mr. Kastell crows, and Anais still doesn't know if he knows the truth about her name, or if it's just some sort of pet name. He feels like the type to use pet names. "Pull up a chair, my dear!"

She does, and he pours her a glass unprompted, which she doesn't decline. She's covered in stains from that day's lunchtime, when both of his sons threw up on her. She deserves alcohol.

"We were just reminiscing over how we met," he adds, waggling his eyebrows at his wife, who swats him on the shoulder.

"Don't," she warns, but she doesn't sound like she means it.

Mr. Kastell chooses to ignore her, and Anais is secretly glad. She's been too run down by constant newborn duty to really do much investigating of her own, and she'll take what she can get at this point.

"Ellie here was a regular old alley cat," he says, and Mrs. Kastell blows a raspberry at him, the most undignified that Anais has ever seen her. Her hair is starting to fall out of its careful up-do, and she doesn't even seem to care. Her lips are stained dark from the pie. "Oh, hush, you were! She hated near everyone--"

"Not everyone," she argues.

"That's why I said near everyone," he says, unconcerned. "Anyway, so she came from the streets. I cam from high society," he says it with an air of mockery that makes it sound endearing, rather than a brag. His wife still makes a face.

"You were a spoiled rich prick," she says, both brows raised, like she's daring him to contradict her. He doesn't.

"I saw her first, smoking outside a liquor store. She was trying to get a bum to go in and buy her some cheap vodka, but he wanted her to let him feel her up."