Blue Glass

Svetlana

I had always imagined Lea would do interesting things with her life, but never had I expected something like this.

I stood at her bedside looking down at her comatose face, unmarred except for a few angry red scratches marring her pale cheeks. She looked so at peace now, all traces of worry, fear, and sadness gone from her face. It almost looked like she was asleep, chasing away the nightmare that was these past few weeks in her dreams.

Her neck was completely covered with a wire brace, keeping it straight. It was a miracle, they said, that she hadn't snapped her neck or hadn't been decapitated from how long she had dangled on the makeshift noose. She had tied a handful of brightly colored scarves together to make it, then tied it firmly to the chandelier in her room. The knot had been too loose to kill her, but tight enough to asphyxiate her and keep her suspended in a state between life and death long enough for me to find her.

The multitude of doctors that had come in and out had said many varying things, but they were all in unanimous agreement about one thing: the only place left for Lea to go was an insane asylum. They didn't say it outright, but High German and Standard German weren't very far apart, and I thought I heard the words "mentally unstable" and "asylum" repeated multiple times during their hushed discourses.

Word soon got around to the nurses that they were dealing with a case of failed suicide on their hands. Before I knew it, more than half of them avoided Room 27 like the plague, only going in there out of necessity or to view the unconscious "abnormality" inside. It just wasn't heard of for a woman to try and kill herself in such an ostentatious manner. They probably thought that she had deliberately botched the attempt to get attention. They didn't know how close to death she had actually been.

If only they knew...

That day, I had been downstairs doing the laundry, distracted by the laborious task of heating water for the metal tub I washed clothes in, when I heard a deafening crash.

I assumed Klothilde was having one of her rage induced episodes and that she had knocked down one of the many heavy pieces of pottery sitting around the house. Heaving a heavy sigh, I set my bucket of water down and seized the broom leaned against the wall. Lea had told me she wouldn't be back until after dark, meaning it was up to me this time to do my best to mollify her mother.

Not without a heavy heart did I trudge up the rickety stairs leading up out of the laundry room, the broom's bristles whispering on the wooden floorboards. I made a beeline for the stairs...and stopped. Lea's shoes were lying on the woven doormat in the second ballet position, the heels neatly together, toes pointing outward.

I lowered the broom, heaving a sigh of relief. She was home and most likely upstairs; she would deal with it. I had just hurried downstairs, leaned the broom back against the wall, and was about to go back to doing the laundry when I heard another crash, significantly louder than the first one, followed by an ominous clang. I turned to look up the stairs, suddenly filled with an urge to run upstairs and see what was the matter.
I stood there for what seemed like an eternity, listening, waiting. I expected Lea to come storming down the stairs griping about her ordeal any moment now. Nothing. Just silence.

Fast, urgent footfalls made me look up. A portly young man in a rumpled gray service uniform came tearing down the hall, skidding to a halt about a foot away from me.
"Svetlana?"he asked. The shock in his voice was evident as he shook my hand. "What are you doing here?"
"I suppose I could ask the same of you." I cast a telling glance at the door. "Then again, we both know the answer to that question."
I dropped my gaze to the floor. We watched as a nurse carrying a tray with a row of syringes neatly lined up on the metal surface gently nudged the door to Lea's room opening and vanished inside.
"I came as soon as I could," Heinrich said. "How is she? What happened?"
I sighed. I had yet to rehash the happenings of that day to myself, to understand exactly what I had witnessed when I swung the door to her room open.
The silence had been unnerving to say the least. I went back to the task of heating water, all the while listening for any sound or sign of movement from upstairs. I heard none.
You're just being silly, I told myself as I began to lower clothes into the steaming tub, poking and prodding the growing pile with a long, stout stick I had with me for the purpose. She probably took Klothilde back to her room and went to sleep. Or maybe she's writing letters to Richthofen asking him for more money.
I immersed myself in doing the laundry, and before long everything was hung up on the clotheslines at the back of the house, the water was dumped into the grass, and the tub was put away. I went to make myself a cup of ersatz coffee and sat in the parlor. My gaze flitted to the clock on the table—it was almost eight in the evening. I was confused—Lea wouldn't be sleeping at a time like this. She couldn't possibly be having a conversation with Richthofen, either, since the telephone was down here.
"You look surprisingly well, Svetlana," Heinrich said, scattering my thoughts. I blinked and turned back to him, meeting his worried gaze.
"What do you mean, 'surprisingly'?" I asked him. "I haven't been worried too much about Lea. She's strong, and she'll recover quickly. It's just a matter of letting the muscles in her throat heal from—"
"I'm not talking about that." Heinrich sinks down into a metal chair against the wall, crossing his ankles. "I'm talking about the malignant brain tumor you've had."
My heart feels like an iron fist just squeezed it. I gape at him, the blood draining from my face.
"Brain tumor...?"
"Weren't you in Petrograd before this happened?" He gestured to the door. "One would think you'd look like shit from all the treatments they'd have to do on you."
Petrograd...?
"Heinrich..." I began, my voice trembling. "What the hell are you talking about?"
"I'm talking about the brain tumor Lea told me you were diagnosed with." Heinrich sounded wary now. "She told me you needed to be taken to Russia and that she needed money to fund for the trips and the medical care."
The world seems to stop. For a moment, I feel like I'm going to pass out as the realization slowly hits me.
I should have known that money never came from Richthofen. He never would have been able to procure that much money on such short notice. Lea had told me enough about the financial situation of military personnel for me to know that officers were more often than not broke or in debt for the traditionally manly lifestyle they needed to fund off of a meager salary.
She could never tell Richthofen what was going on, either. More than anyone else, she knew that aristocratic men are fickle creatures and won't hesitate to blow things out of proportion given the chance. She also knew Heinrich had the means to keep Klothilde at bay while she plotted a more permanent way to get rid of her for good...
I rose to my feet and started up the stairs. The hallway was eerily silent when I got to the top. I headed for Klothilde's door, knocked, and listened for the characteristic raspy voice telling me to come in. It never came. I knocked twice, three times to no answer.
She was probably asleep. Normally, I would have just walked away by now, but something told me to check and make sure she was inside.
Taking a deep breath, I pushed it open, expecting her to shoot out of bed screaming curses. To my utter surprise and confusion, the room was empty. I checked the bed, the closet—nothing.
So where was she if she wasn't in her room?
I went back out into the hallway, looking up and down into the gloom. And suddenly, I started to hear noise coming from one end of the hallway. At first I thought it was coming from outside, but the longer I held my breath and listened, the more certain I became that it was coming from inside the house, from the left side of the hallway...from Lea's room.
It was a sort of prolonged creaking sound, like the sound of ropes straining against something that restricted it, or the sound of metal cables struggling to hold the weight of something heavy.
"Lea?" I called. My voice sounded small and echoed throughout the dimly lit hallway. "Lea!!"
No answer. I now knew that something was very, very wrong. Taking a deep breath, I walked briskly to the door at the end of the hall and yanked it open. A salty, metallic smell hit my nostrils, and I pulled a face.
The room was dark, so I flipped the switch on the side of the wall. The chandelier lit up, and as light flooded the room, I set eyes on what could only be a scene out of a horror movie.
Klothilde Schwarz lay prostrate on the floor in a pool of blood, her dark eyes glassy and unseeing, staring up at the ceiling. Her body was surprisingly unmarked from the front—no blows to the face, no stab wounds or postmortem mutilation.
I didn't have to look far for her killer. My eyes traveled upward, to the chandelier, and I nearly had a heart attack when I saw her.
Lea was hanging about six feet off the ground from a noose made from a handful of colorful scarves tied together and suspended from the chain of the chandelier. The chain creaked and groaned loudly in protest against her deadweight and the weight of the chandelier. Her face was deathly white, her jaw slack, her eyes half-open. My gaze traveled down to her hands, covered in blood—her mother's blood.
I can't move. I'm utterly frozen in shock and horror. But even from here, I can see a slight rise and fall of Lea's chest as her lungs feebly expand and contract. By some miracle, she has failed to tie the noose properly and only succeeded in knocking herself unconscious if anything.

Heinrich is staring at me now, a thoroughly annoyed look on his face. "What's the matter?"he asked.
I don't know what else to say to him. I'm at a total loss for words at how far Lea was willing to go for Richthofen. To resort to lying to her cousin to get money under the pretext that I had a severe medical problem, and to kill her mother and even kill herself?
"Heinrich," I begin shakily, "I'm so sorry to tell you this."
"Tell me what?" His hardening expression immediately softens. "What are you sorry for?"
"I never had a brain tumor to begin with."