When the Time Comes

You’d do it again.

That’s all you can think as you step your right foot into the cold water. You can barely feel it. You know it’s cold, you know it, and you can feel that it’s lapping against the sides of your calves, the sensation of it all. But you can’t actually feel it’s icy rot burn your skin. You can’t feel what’s coming next.

You can’t feel how toxic this filthy pond is. You can’t feel the death that lies under its surface. You can’t feel the evil that has haunted this fog for years, decades, centuries. You can only feel the pull at what’s buried deep inside you tethered to the bottom of that lake.

You can only feel the warmth of the bed you left what feels like days ago but it was probably yesterday. You don’t know. You can only think of what that bed has brought you for the past thirteen great good goddamn years. 

You can feel your wife’s breath on the back of your neck. You can feel the safety you’ve cocooned yourselves in for over a decade. You can feel the memories the two of you made in your small apartment above your small flower shop in your small adopted hometown in Vermont.

The first place that truly felt like home.

You can smell the perfume she bought you. You remember it, the one she bought you your first Christmas in the states. It smelled like cardamom and lemon and it didn’t suit you, not really, but she loved it and you loved her so you wore it until it ran out and then you bought another bottle. And another and another and the way she put her nose in your neck and just breathed was worth every drop.

You’d do it again.

The water is up to your neck now and it’s soon. The cold has begun to numb every part of your body and soon it will numb your lungs as it fills them up and you float to the bottom where you belong.

With her. 

Because for thirteen years you’ve belonged to her. 

Not entirely, not in the way that it consumed you. Not in the way that didn’t allow you to be you. Not in a way that kept you from becoming who you always longed to be. No, not like that at all.

But in a way that your soul was stamped. In the way that you could never belong to anybody else. In a hauntingly beautiful way that made your bones ache and your heart tear inside your chest. 

Your head goes below the eerily still surface and you search. Your eyes try to catch up to your heart because your heart knows exactly what it’s looking for. Your heart has known since you left the apartment with nothing but your wallet and the clothes on your back and you boarded a plane and you don’t think you’ve blinked or cried or breathed because-

Your heart is already at the bottom on that lake.

And when you see her - oh, God, when you see her. Any air that has been in your lungs is gone because it can't, it can’t. 

You scream and you cry and it’s for nothing because she’s gone and she’s not taking you too.

Dani would never.

But why can’t she? Why can’t she just this once be selfish?

If you can just hold yourself under long enough, you’d be with her soon. You’d be with her forever, like you promised her when you put a ring around her finger, and you could put this nightmare behind you. But she won’t let you.

Something pushes you up - up, up, and away - and your arms start to give out and you’re losing the battle you came here knowing you weren’t going to win.

You never won with Dani. You couldn’t. You never wanted to.

And so you sit on the bank of the lake and you look at your wedding ring and you cry. You weep because your heart is at the bottom of that lake and it’s never coming back and it was only thirteen years and why couldn’t you have more but-

You’d do it again.

You were ten years old when your mom walked out and you were left alone with Mikey and your dad and the bottle he took to nightly.

You loved your dad, you did. He was gentle and warm and he would sit you on his lap and read you stories and he always smelled of soot and dirt and scotch. 

But he was never there. And he couldn’t be. Not when your mom ran off one morning with some bloke named Charles and nothing but a note on the kitchen counter for you to read when you got home. It was too painful for him to be in that house. Not alone, not without her.

And when he was there, his mind wasn’t. His body was present but oftentimes it was filled with poison and his mind was somewhere else, somewhere far - somewhere better, likely.

So you picked up what chores you could. You cooked and you cleaned and you washed the soiled linens and dried Mikey’s tears and you ducked from Danny’s open handed blows. And it worked for a while. Your dad would come home late at night and he would pass out on the couch with an empty bottle beside him and you would pick it up in the morning and make him toast.

And you felt like if you could just do this, if you could just make his life easier, maybe he wouldn’t walk out on you too. Maybe you all could be a family again.

But then one day while you’re trying to make porridge for Mikey because he’s pulling at your legs and he just won’t stop wailing, a pot boils over and the stove catches fire. And you try and you try and you try to get Mikey to safety but it’s just so much and you’re just so small and you fall to the floor below the stove and the water boils over and you and Mikey are caught in a cascading waterfall of heat and flames and-

You burn on your right shoulder and it hurts and blisters and bleeds. You have no choice but to take you both to the hospital and soon they are calling Danny and your dad and the police and you’re sleeping in a boarding house with twelve other kids waiting to find out where you go next.

Mikey cries at night and you wait for him to wear himself out to fall asleep. They come and get him the next morning and take him to a nice home in York to a family who always wanted a baby but could never have one.

You don’t see him again. 

Nobody comes for you, not for a while. Nobody wants a ten year old with a scar on her shoulder. So you hop around from house to house, and some of them are fine and some of them are rotten. The rotten ones stuck with you. You remember the way the men would grab at you too rough, too intimate, too much. 

It got worse when you turned fourteen and you started to look less like a child and more like a woman and you cursed and you drank and you fought back. That just made them angry and it made you start to lose a little bit more faith in the world.

So you left. 

You hopped a train to London and you lived on the streets for a while. You found a few more boys like you; alone and cold and hungry. You became a family of sorts. You would share places to huddle in the rain and split a bacon sandwich from a kind stranger.

And then you met Eliza. And she was beautiful and haunted and she found you sitting on the Tube one day. She gave you a bag of crisps and a bottle of water and offered you a shower and a couch and you didn’t know why you said yes but you did.

And then Eliza moved you from the couch to her bed and you let her kiss your neck and feed you as much Indian food as you wanted and it seemed so perfect. Until it wasn’t.

She was ten years older and you worshiped everything she did and said and thought until one day you couldn’t tell where you ended and she began and you felt her twisting inside you and pulling at your veins. 

You belonged to her and in every way that she knew it. It was her flat, her clothes, her food. It was her way, and you were meant to do as she said. She possessed you; mind, body, and spirit.

She taught you so much. She taught you how to make love to a woman like you were in love. And then she taught you how to fuck like you were angry and numb. She taught you how to smoke, and drink, and shoot up.

She taught you how to score from the lowlifes on the corner. And then she sent you out on your own to score for her. And you wanted to stop but you also wanted to stop feeling so much because you knew that people weren’t worth the heartache that crept up into your throat each and every time they let you down.

And soon, scoring turned to using which turned to buying which turned to selling which led to you living back on the street. And you were comfortably numb and it was fine because you were so sick of pouring your love and effort and tears into people that left you behind. Everyone left you behind.

It was too late when you felt the cold cuffs being slapped around your wrists. You were sixteen and you were so far gone.

You got off easy, only four years. You’d be out just after your 20th birthday and you were going to keep your head to the ground until then. 

You slept, you woke. You barely spoke to a soul.

It put a lot of people off - namely, the group of women twice your age and twice your size who looked at you like a free pass to push around and push into dark corners when nobody was looking. 

It was miserable and it was humiliating but you bit your lip and kept your head pointed down because you wanted out of here in one piece and you wanted to start somewhere new - far away from London and Leeds and streets and cities.

You slept, you woke. You barely spoke to a soul.

They made you go to group therapy 3 days a week and at least one hour of designated alone time bi-weekly. You absolutely hated it. You didn’t feel the need to talk about what had or hadn’t happened to you in the painfully long but terribly short six years when your life fell to pieces.

It was done and you were done and nothing was going to bring Mikey back or your dad out of the ground. People weren’t worth it, you aren’t worth it.

That’s how you felt sitting alone every day in your cell, staring at the ceiling, counting the cracks in the tile. You counted the times the sun went up and down. You avoided going out into the yard, you avoided eating in the mess, you avoided the showers and the halls. You became just like your dad; surrounding yourself with nothing but dark and cold and things that would burn and die.

But then your counselor, Tamara, told you that you weren’t going to get anywhere in life being brash and stubborn and young and dumb.

So you started talking, and before you knew it you were lighter. The burdens of those years fell off your shoulders and you began to sleep through the night.

You slept, you woke. You barely spoke to a soul.

In the evening you buried your head in books filled with gothic prose and tragic loves. 

In the day, you buried your hands in soil and roots. You kept busy tending to the garden and making life out of the death that surrounded you.

You liked how it felt to hold these fragile foundations of life in the palm of your hands and gently cradle them into their womb in the ground. You liked that level of power over the things that happen in this rotten, rotten world.

Soon, you were adding books on botany and bulbs and you were learning about how these beautiful petals and stems can bloom from mud and ashes. 

You learned how to rebirth yourself out of the same mud and ashes. You learned that you could bloom and become a bud anew. You taught yourself how to breath and fight and nobody helped you, not a single soul.

It was just you and the plants. The plants that wouldn’t, couldn’t, leave you behind. No, they would die, and they would be reborn, and you would care for them in any phase of their journey. 

Before you knew it, your four years were over and you were thrown out into the world again - determined to make yourself better.

You were 22 when Henry Wingrave met you at a corner store putting together a bouquet of flowers - for the woman he loved in the echoes of the dark - and offered you a job. 

You get a flat above the only pub in the quaint town of Bly. 

It’s tiny and it’s dark but it’s yours and you’ve never had anything truly yours before.

It feels nice to have your own space, your own bed. You aren’t staring down two other cell mates or a woman who you swooned into letting you sleep in her bed for a night. You aren’t having to pretend you are something you're not when you’re in your own space. 

You sleep, you wake, you read, you drink. You sometimes bring back a girl but she never stays the night. You never want her to stay the night. You don’t even like to know her name, not really.

Along the way you’ve realized that people aren’t worth it, they aren’t worth the trouble of loving them only to lose them in the end. It never was, it just took you a few years to figure it out.

And you don’t really need anybody, no not really. Not really at all. You never have. You like your life just the way it is.

You were 30 when you walked into the kitchen at Bly Manor - that wretchedly wonderful place - and saw her.

Henry told Owen who told Hannah who told you that she would be here today. She was expected, but she still caught you off guard. She was beautiful which you had expected. She was fresh like morning dew, which you had expected. But she was something else, something more-

She was a nervous little thing, she was. She stumbled over her words and she fidgeted with the ends of her sleeves. You didn’t need to get attached to another one, not after what happened the last time, so you put your head down and your hands in the ground.

You thought about Rebecca often. Flora found her and you found Flora and you’ll never get the image of her bloated body lying lifeless in the middle of the pond. You never quite believed the story - that she had waded out into the water out of sheer heartbreak when Peter left. You didn’t understand how a person could have that sort of hold, that sort of tether. Dying for somebody, dying because of somebody, dying from the pain of losing them - it just didn’t seem like something that another person, a sane person, would do. [you would come to understand just how wrong you were.]

Rebecca was pure, but she was flawed. She loved too hard, she loved the wrong person too hard. And you knew, you knew that their relationship could only end badly.

But you don’t get involved. You didn’t get involved with her and you aren’t about to get involved with-

She was grotesquely American. Unfortunately so. Her voice was high and sharp and she moved about quick like a mouse. She always teetered on the edge of timid and spooked and she only seemed to settle when you looked at her.

You could see darkness drowning in her eyes and you weren’t going to get tugged down below the surface with them. You weren’t.

What good could it do you? So what if she was beautiful and weird and mysterious in a way that had to leaning in to watch the way words formed on her tongue. 

You really, really weren’t.

Until-

She walked into your greenhouse, opened up her mouth, and she said-

“I, uh, I- I- thought you might want a sandwich.” She shuffles towards you and cautiously hands you a plate. You contemplate it for a moment, before taking it from her hands and nodding.

You look up at her through your eyelids. She’s really quite beautiful when the sun streaks through her hair.

You look at her for a minute while she rocks on her heels, unsure of what to do next. You can tell she’s nervous with the way she shoves her hands in her back pockets and looks over her shoulder.

“Okay well I’ll just-” She moves to go back into the house and you find yourself protesting against your best judgement.

“You can sit.” She whips back to look at you, unsure if you were speaking to her directly. You motion to the chair besides you. She doesn’t move and you suddenly wonder if she wants an excuse to leave. “Well go on then, I won’t make you.”

She shakily perches herself on the edge of the seat while her hands rub at her knees. You can’t help but watch her. Watch how she moves about, like she’s waiting for something to catch up with her. Waiting, waiting, waiting.

She sits like somebody, somewhere, something, is going to spring up behind her and pull her down into the dirt. She waits and you can see questions in her eyes and wonder in her heart. You see the spirit of a child with the soul of a woman who is longing for peace. 

You weren’t.

“So.” You take a quick bite of the sandwich on your plate and watch as she waits on your next words. “Tell me how why you decided you wanted to be Mary fucking Poppins.”

She laughs and you decide right then and there that you’re going to do stupidly reckless things to keep hearing that laugh as long as you can. 

This damn Dani Clayton and that damn laugh.

It’s later when you see her crying outside the front door that little piece of you desperate to make her smile rears its nasty little head again. 

You can hear how her voice shakes and you know how dangerous it is to get involved here. Just another heartbreak waiting to happen because everyone leaves you, eventually. Her time, too, will eventually come to move on from Bly Manor. It’s no use, it’s no use-

But still, her breath is catching in her throat and you know this is beyond Bly, beyond what you’ve seen her accomplish already with those blasted children in such a short amount of time. This is deep rooted and you can’t help yourself from wanting to fix it, fix her.

“So if it's child rearing advice you’re after.” You finish and she laughs despite herself. A watery chuckle but you sigh in relief because you’ve done your job and now you can move on. “There we are. It’s not so bad, right?”

She takes a sharp intake of breath and a soft yeah falls from her lips. 

“I cry three, maybe four times a day around here. Five if I’m really being honest with myself.” She turns back to you. “How else do you think I keep these fucking plants watered? With my endless well of deep inconsolable tears. That’s how. That’s how I got the job in the first place.” 

She breathes once again and rubs at her nose. You know her panic has subsided now. And it’s time for you to move on too, but she’s so pretty and she’s so delicate and you just can’t leave until-

“Look, you’re doing great.” She seems unsure at your words so you say them once more, once harder. “You’re doing great.”

“Thank you.” She looks over her shoulder at you and smiles.

“Anytime.” And lord help you, you mean it. “Alright, well, back to it then. Chin up, Poppins.”

You weren’t. You weren’t.

You have a way of doing things.

It’s not so much about the boy, or the lack of respect, or even the fucking flowers. Not really. It’s about so much more and so much- so much- 

You do your own thing on your own time and you cut your own damn roses when you damn well please and-

“No, you’re right. You’re right.” Dani may just be placating you but it works and you settle. “I’ll talk to him.” 

-and maybe it’s not about the roses. Maybe it’s about how somehow, someway, in just a short week, this girl, this obnoxiously American girl has settled into your mind. And the thorns of her own demons are poking at your resolve and you so badly want to trim them away. You so badly want to place her in soil and watch her bloom and grow and spread open to the sunlight and take in the water from the trees and the sky.

You have a way of doing things and it’s slowly being threatened by this family and this girl and you can feel it starting to eat at you already. And the worst part is that you like it. You like being part of this family and this place and you don’t want it to change and that’s the big problem.

“Look can we just go back to the bit where you were being mental and I had to talk you down.”

She laughs but you mean it.

She swears she saw Peter Quint and Hannah believes her even if you aren’t so sure. 

You believe she’s seen something. Most of you had, even though you never talked about it.

The first time you saw something that most definitely was there when it most definitely should not have been was only a few months into your first year at Bly. You were out in the greenhouse when you noticed a soldier standing at attention in the center of the drive. You yelled and yelled at him to go, get off the property, he was trespassing - but he never moved and then he just was… gone.

It was an old house with a sordid history, so the legend about town went. You weren’t naive enough to believe it wasn’t possible for ghosts to be there, to be present in your presence. 

And it wasn’t customary to scare off the new girl with tales of ghosts and haunts so, better to let her believe it’s just Peter Quint. 

Despite you believing he was scarier than any dead soldier.

But, you sit and wait with her, nonetheless. And you drink and you talk. She tells you her story, albeit you know there are parts missing. Big parts. The parts that cloud her eyes.

She tells you about how she was overwhelmed with work and the midwest religious family and how she was going to get married and instead she decided to come to England in search of starting over. 

You understand because you did that too - started over. Here. At Bly.

She tells you about how she likes to paint and how she loves kids, even wants one or two for herself one day.  She doesn’t talk about her family or her friends or her former fiance who she left behind. She doesn’t talk about any of her demons and you don’t ask her.

You want to know more, every inch, every nook and cranny of her mind; you want to know it like you know your own. It’s a deep seeded urge to crawl up under her skin and embed yourself into her soul. But it’s dangerous, too dangerous so instead you just say-

“Rather that was you curled up there?” You flick your chin in the direction of Hannah and Owen. You almost want her to bite. 

“Every girl in the village is mad for him. He doesn’t even know it, which makes it even worse.” You wish it was that easy for you, you do. To receive kindness and love and the warmth of a woman by your side. You’re jealous. You’re jealous of Owen but mostly because Dani’s answer could be yes.

Instead, she turns her attention back to the polaroid in her hand that she’s been studying all night, “they look like Bonnie and Clyde.”

You scoff because Bonnie and Clyde is just wrong, for her. She wanted so much for herself, so much for her future and he just… stomped on it. And she contorted herself so much into what was good for him, so much until she gave up and walked into a lake and… her death haunted you more than you care to admit. He was selfish and he was manipulative and he reminded you so much of Eliza and-

“The wrong kind of love can fuck you up. Follow you. Make you do some really stupid shit. And those two were in the wrong kind of love.” 

You’d done stupid shit. Toxic love, that’s what it does. You were swallowed whole by a woman you thought, you wanted to think, wanted the best for you. But you were wrong just like Rebecca was wrong.

“And those two were in the wrong kind of love.” Sometimes, you weren’t sure if there was a right kind of love. A love that made you whole instead of left you as half a person. You’d never felt it, how can you be sure it exists?

“We’ve all been in the wrong kind of love for one reason or another.” 

“Mmh but I saw how he twisted himself into her. Burrowed in deep.” It was a healed scar for you, your own wrong kind of love. But when you poke a scar, it’s sensitive all the same. “I know why so many people mix up love and possession. 

It took you a long time to understand that what you had, what Eliza was, that was possession. That wasn’t love, it couldn’t be. You weren’t sure you actually knew love, or believed in it. 

“But guess what that means? He didn’t just trap her, he trapped himself. And I hope she haunts that fucker forever.” You believed in the ghosts more.

“People do, don’t they? Mix up love and possession.” Dani’s eyes begin to swirl once again, and once again your heart begs to know what lies under them. 

“Yeah, they do.” And you know, you really do.

“I don’t think that should be possible. I mean they are opposites really; love and ownership.” You know she’s felt this too. You know she understands.

“Yeah.” You know you’re getting lost, lost in her, lost in this moment. Lost in how you even turn around from falling down this tunnel that you’ve spent your life scared of.

And you think maybe, just maybe, love does exist.

You were 30 when you fell in love.

She kissed you once in the greenhouse. She kissed you again in the rain.

You told her about the moonflowers. About how they bloom and die and how they need such meticulous care but their beauty remains. You told her how precious, how delicate their life cycles are. And she just lets you talk and you think it's refreshing to have somebody hang on the words you say. You’re so used to jokes and laughs that you think maybe, maybe your words - your deep words - were only meant to be heard by her. 

You knew it the moment your lips touched that this was it - this would be the last woman you would kiss. You didn’t know it was love, no not yet. But you felt it somewhere deep within you that you’d never be the same. But somehow, someway, this was your moonflower.

You took her to bed, that first night you were together, and laid her down gently. You asked her if she was sure. 

“I have been waiting for this my whole life.” She whispered in your ear and you laughed. You laughed because you haven’t known her more than a few weeks and how could she know that she’s wanted you her whole life?

You laugh because you have been waiting for this too.

She tastes like honey and rain. She smells like lavender and a new perspective. And when you taste her, when you finally taste her, she tastes like forever.

You wake up absolutely panicked. 

Your tether is being pulled. Something inside you is screaming no, no, no and Dani, Dani, Dani. Something is lasso’d around your heart and dragging you to Bly in the middle of the night. And you know what it is, it’s dread.

You can’t breathe and somehow you know it’s because she can’t either.

You ring Owen just before you leave your flat and he picks you up because he feels it too. You feel bad, the way you tell him to go faster, faster. You’re running out of time. You’re losing yourself and you’re losing her and you don’t know why but you just know.

When you arrive, you run to the lake and you scream for her. 

Dani, Dani, Dani.

You pay no mind to anything but her. Your tether, being pulled into that lake and you just know you’ll jump in after her if you need to. You’d do anything.

You hear her, you hear her cry - you, me, us. 

But then, she’s there and she’s next to you and your forehead is against hers and you are telling her to breathe.

But then, you’re holding her in bed while she cries.

But then, you’re listening to her telling you that she’s still there. She’s scared and so are you. She’s scared because of what’s inside her and you’re scared of it too. But mostly, you’re scared because you’ve chosen this and she hasn’t.

But then, you’re promising her you were never going to leave her.

And you know you won’t. You weren’t. 

You’ve chosen that the work of loving her is worth the pain of losing her.

You were 30 when you nearly lost her before you even had her.