The Addams Family: Decimia Returns

The Addams mansion had survived a great many things.

It had survived explosions, murders, and a brief but ghastly occupation by relatives who dressed entirely in pastels. It had survived the arrival of Pubert, and it had even survived the afternoon Wednesday and Pugsley set out to learn whether dynamite performed better underwater, a question the pond had answered at some length and the neighbors had answered with a petition.

But on this particular early afternoon, under a sky the color of dishwater, the house was bracing for something far more dangerous.

Decimia Addams was coming home.

The portraits in the front hall seemed to know it first. Great-Aunt Sloom’s likeness, which had not changed expression since 1891, appeared to lean very slightly forward in its frame, as portraits in that house occasionally did when something worth watching was about to happen. The suit of armor by the stairs — which had not moved on its own since the regrettable incident with the vacuum cleaner — stood a little straighter. Even the chandelier, hung with what the family optimistically called “antiques” and the insurance company less optimistically called “hazards,” seemed to hold its breath.

Lurch had been standing in the front hall for forty minutes with his hands folded, watching the iron gates through the tall windows. Nobody had told him to. Nobody had needed to. On the sill beside him, Thing tapped against the glass with the restless drumming of a hand that had waited years for this and did not intend to wait one second longer.

“Patience,” Lurch said. It sounded like a door being opened in a crypt.

Thing tapped faster.

Somewhere above them, a floorboard let out a long, satisfied groan, the particular groan the house reserved for homecomings, executions, and the occasional Tuesday.

Then, at last, a long black automobile turned in at the gates and began to climb the drive. It moved slowly, as if the driver understood exactly what he was delivering and had started to have second thoughts around the third hairpin turn. The tires crushed the dead leaves into the gravel with a sound like something being very politely mourned. The polished hood gave back the crooked silhouette of the mansion, stretched and darkened like a reflection in the back of a spoon.

Thing slapped his palm against the window.

Lurch’s eyebrow rose a quarter of an inch, which for Lurch was practically a shout.

“Yes,” he said. “I see.”

The car stopped at the foot of the steps. For several seconds nothing happened at all. The engine ticked. A raven shifted on the gutter above, considering its options. Somewhere deep in the house, another floorboard groaned in a way that might have been welcome, or might simply have been the house agreeing with itself.

Then the rear door opened, and a black-heeled boot found the gravel, followed by its partner.

Decimia Vespera Addams stepped out of the car with the unhurried grace of someone who had never once been late to anything, because everything else simply started when she arrived. She was small compared to her brothers, but she carried it as though she’d chosen it on purpose, the way one chooses a well-fitted coat. Her hair fell loose beneath a wide-brimmed black hat, dark as a raven’s wing and past her waist, and she had pushed the hat’s veil up out of her way, the better to look at the house that had raised her. Her traveling coat was black velvet, long and a little worse for the road, with the particular wear that came of being dragged through at least four countries’ worth of underbrush. There was a smudge of something on one glove that she had decided not to identify. A mourning brooch sat at her collar — oval, jet, with a lock of someone else’s hair pressed behind the glass — and on her shoulder, with the settled air of a passenger who had no plans to walk, sat a raven.

The driver did not get out to help with her luggage. He set the antique suitcases on the gravel from inside the car, using what appeared to be a very long stick, and was gone before she had finished thanking him, the tires spitting gravel in a manner that suggested he had been warned about something during the drive and had decided not to ask what.

“Cowards,” Decimia murmured, with great affection.

She tipped her head back and looked at the house.

The crooked towers leaned against the clouds exactly as they always had, like old men comparing complaints. The trees along the drive stood bare and faintly hostile, the way trees do when they’ve been asked to keep secrets. The gargoyles wore their old expressions of permanent disapproval, unchanged by time, weather, or the one unfortunate afternoon Pugsley had dressed them in party hats. The dark, many-paned windows seemed to look down at her the way a family portrait does when you’ve been away too long and haven’t written — which, she privately admitted, she hadn’t, not properly, not in months, only postcards, and postcards didn’t count, not really, no matter what she told herself in foreign post offices at two in the morning.

She had rehearsed this moment on three continents. She’d had speeches. She had planned to say something clever and composed about how well the old place had held up, something with a little polish to it, something that would make Morticia’s eyebrow lift in approval.

Her mouth curved into a smile instead, before she could stop it.

“Still hideous,” she said softly.

It was the nicest thing she could think of.

The raven on her shoulder ruffled its feathers in agreement.

The front doors burst open so violently that one of them came off its hinge and hung there, swinging gently, like something considering its own future.

“DECIMIA!”

Gomez Addams came down the steps in a single flying leap, cigar clenched in his teeth, pinstripes billowing, arms flung wide. He did not so much run as fall toward her at speed and trust the universe to sort out the details, as he trusted it with most things. Behind him, at a slower and considerably wider pace, came Fester, who had gotten his foot tangled in his own coat and was crossing the porch in a series of enthusiastic lurches, like a man rowing a boat that had opinions of its own.

She had just enough time to set down her carpetbag.

Then Gomez had her off the ground.

“Little Decimia!” He spun her once, twice, a third time, gravel skidding beneath his shoes, and Decimia, who had planned to be composed, laughed out loud and clung to his lapels. The raven took off in a huff, circled once in evident disapproval, and resettled on the porch rail to wait this out. “My little sister has come home!”

“Gomez, put me down. I can see that I’ve come home.”

“She can see! Fester, she can see!”

“Deci-Dee!” Fester hit them both at full speed. It was less an embrace than a collision with feeling in it, and for a moment the three of them were one swaying, shouting knot in the middle of the drive. Somebody’s elbow caught somebody’s ribs. Somebody’s cigar burned a very small hole in somebody’s sleeve. Nobody minded. Nobody had ever minded, in this family, when the damage came wrapped in that much affection.

“Baby sister.” Fester breathed it into her hair like it was something holy. He sounded like he might weep. He very well might; Fester’s tears had never required much persuading.

“I’m beginning to suspect,” Decimia said, muffled against Gomez’s shoulder, “that the two of you have forgotten how old I am.”

Gomez set her down and held her at arm’s length, inspecting her the way a jeweler inspects something he has personally been worried about losing. His face was solemn in a way she knew well — the face of a man delivering a verdict that would stand forever, unappealable, carved somewhere official.

“Age,” he said, “is irrelevant.”

“You’re our baby sister,” said Fester, as though this settled several outstanding legal matters.

“I am thirty-one.”

“Exactly,” said Gomez.

“That doesn’t prove anything.”

“It proves you’re still young,” Fester said, nodding along with his own logic as though watching it unfold for the first time and finding it impressive.

“Compared to what?”

“The dinosaurs.”

Decimia opened her mouth and closed it again. She had crossed six continents alone, slept quite comfortably in a crypt outside Brasov, outwitted three separate men who had tried, with varying degrees of competence, to rob her on three separate trains — and she could see, quite clearly, standing in her own driveway in the dishwater light, that there was no winning this particular argument. There had never been any winning this argument. Possibly no Addams in recorded history had ever won it.

“Fair enough,” she said.

“Baby,” Gomez said gently, and kissed her on both cheeks.

“Baby,” Fester said, and kissed the top of her head, and then, because it seemed a shame to stop there, her hat as well.

“Baby,” Gomez said again, on principle, and kissed her forehead.

“All right,” said Decimia. “All right. I surrender. I am an infant. Put it on my tombstone.”

“We will,” said Fester, delighted, already looking as though he were taking notes.

On the porch, in the doorway of the ruined door, Morticia had appeared without anyone seeing her arrive, the way she always did, as though she had simply been standing there the whole time and the world had only just caught up to noticing. She stood with one hand resting lightly against the frame, dressed in unbroken black, watching the scene on the drive with the small, private smile she kept for the things she loved most and showed almost no one else.

“Welcome home, Decimia.”

Decimia’s face softened. Something in her chest that had been clenched since the second continent finally let go, the way a held breath lets go, all at once and without permission.

“Morticia.”

They met at the bottom of the steps and held each other, and neither said anything for a moment. There didn’t seem to be any need. Somewhere above them, the loose door swung another few inches on its single hinge, creaking its own quiet welcome.

When they parted, Decimia noticed that Morticia’s skirts had begun to move.

A small shape was working its way out from behind them, one determined inch at a time, with the single-minded focus of an engineer crossing difficult terrain. It was round and pale and very solemn, with an enormous forehead and the appraising gaze of a tiny magistrate weighing evidence. Two fists clutched the silk. A pair of dark eyes fixed on Decimia and did not blink, and above his upper lip, unmistakably, sat the beginnings of a mustache.

Pubert.

Decimia went completely still.

The baby regarded her. She regarded the baby. It was the sort of silence that ends treaties, or possibly starts wars; with an Addams, the line had never been entirely clear.

Pubert blinked once.

Slowly, with the great ceremony of someone approaching a visiting head of state, Decimia lowered herself into a crouch until they were eye to eye.

“So,” she whispered. “You’re the little troublemaker everyone has been writing to me about.”

Pubert considered this with the gravity the accusation deserved. Then he smiled — wide and warm and utterly without conscience — and Decimia felt her own mouth answer it before she could put a stop to that either.

“And that,” she breathed, “is a magnificent mustache.”

“It’s hereditary,” said Gomez, from somewhere above her, with enormous pride.

“Unfortunately,” said Morticia, in the tone of a woman who had made her peace with it years ago and occasionally still reconsidered.

Behind Decimia, Gomez leaned toward Fester and spoke in a proud whisper, the kind of whisper designed to be overheard by at least one raven and possibly a portrait or two.

“She is going to be terrible for him.”

Fester’s grin nearly split his face. “I know.”

Two dark-clad figures had drifted onto the porch while no one was looking, the way Addams children generally arrived places — not so much walking as simply becoming present, like a change in temperature. Wednesday stood with her hands clasped in front of her, braids hanging straight as plumb lines, watching her aunt with an expression that gave nothing away and missed nothing at all. Her eyes traveled over the veil, the velvet, the brooch at Decimia’s collar, and stopped there with the particular stillness of a cat that has located something interesting and intends to think about it for a while before deciding whether to pounce.

Pugsley hovered at her elbow, chewing contemplatively on a length of fuse, the way other children chewed gum.

“That’s new,” Wednesday said, nodding at the brooch.

Decimia touched it fondly, as one touches an old friend. “Oh, this? It’s from a tomb in Romania.”

“Did you steal it?”

“Of course not.” A pause, precisely timed. “The gentleman inside was finished with it.”

Wednesday considered this with the seriousness it was due and, after a moment, appeared to approve, the corner of her mouth moving perhaps a millimeter in a direction that in anyone else would have been called a smile.

“We’ve already decided,” she said, “that you’re staying, Aunt Decimia.”

“We’re keeping you,” Pugsley added, around the fuse, as though this were simply the logical continuation of the sentence.

Decimia looked from one of them to the other and slowly straightened up, brushing gravel dust from her knees with the air of someone preparing to make a formal objection she already knew would be overruled.

“I see. Is the entire household conspiring against me?”

Gomez slid an arm around her shoulders, warm and heavy and smelling of cigar smoke and bay rum, exactly the way he had smelled when she was small enough to be carried on his hip through this same drive, under this same dishwater sky.

“Not against you, querida.” His grin gleamed, white and wicked and entirely sincere. “For you.”

She looked up at the house again. She looked at her brothers, at Morticia’s quiet smile, at the two grave little faces on the steps, and at the round-headed baby still watching her over a fistful of black silk with the solemn attention of a very small judge — and something warm and unfamiliar, something she hadn’t quite packed for, settled into her chest and stayed there.

She had meant to stay a little while. That was what she’d told herself in the car, watching the gates come up out of the fog. She had packed for a fortnight, perhaps a month, and had not intended to unpack anything that couldn’t be repacked again in under an hour, because that was how she traveled, that was how she had always traveled, light and quick and ready to be gone before anyone could ask her to stay.

But Gomez was already steering her up the steps, one arm firm around her shoulders, and Fester had seized her suitcases in both arms and was carrying them the way one carries sacred relics — reverently, and slightly sideways, on account of his balance — and behind them Lurch, patient as ever, was lifting the fallen door back onto its hinge with the unhurried competence of a man who had rehung that same door more times than either of them cared to count. Overhead, the raven made up its mind and dropped from the gutter to the porch rail, where it settled in with the unmistakable air of a tenant who had just signed a very long lease.

Somewhere between the drive and the doorway, Decimia stopped arguing with herself.

Nobody had asked her whether she was staying. It had simply been settled, the way the weather is settled, the way the house itself had apparently settled it before her car had even cleared the gates — and there was nothing left to do but walk inside, and let the door close gently, almost fondly, behind her.