Chapter 3
You slowly learn the names of the fruit. The achingly sweet one is an apple, the bitter one an orange, and the relaxing one that is neither she calls a plum. Sometimes you see through her eyes, and when you learn that you do not eat an orange the way that you eat apples or plums, that instead you peel back the thicker, rubber exterior to get to the better fruit within, you have a much easier time with it. Oranges will never be your favorite – the purple flesh of the plum is – but they are tolerable.
Sometimes, when she is sleeping, you wake, and sometimes, when she lies still, you walk.
There is no easy pathway the way there once was. You do not draw yourself out of an otherwise still lake, and there is no fog to chill against your frigid skin. Mud no longer clings to your bare feet – because there is no mud in their apartment; at least, there is no mud on the floor – and so you leave no footprints behind. There is nothing to indicate you have woken at all.
You look at the face in the mirror, and it does not seem familiar to you. Before you had joined with her, you had not been able to see her, not really. You had only been able to see the girl in your arms, your treasure to be stolen, and the path you were continuing to take like clockwork. But you had heard her, and in hearing, known where she was to imagine her.
The face in the mirror does not look quite like what you had imagined.
You stand in front of the mirror and you stare and your eyes are two different mottled colors and you have no way of knowing that you were the one who caused that. Your lips – her lips – press together in thought, brows knitting together, and you think, vaguely, that you don’t look like that. Didn’t look like that. You remember dark hair, long, against pale skin. Of course, you remember this – you, at least, maintained your form throughout the years, even if the specifics disappeared. You had walked through a lake. It only makes sense that you had seen your reflection.
This is not you. This is not who you were. This is nothing like you.
You return to their bed and you stand and you stare again.
Something beats once, soft, in your chest. A bird, perhaps, beating its wings once before alighting on a branch to sing. There is no singing in your chest. Just the gentle landing of the bird. You remember wanting more than just the girl. There had been something else. You do not remember what it was, exactly, but you remember aching for the shared warmth of a bed.
When you curl up beneath their sheets and the other woman moves against you, wrapping her arms around you without really knowing that you are there, you feel warm. It is not the same warmth, but it is enough.
Almost enough.
You think there should be a cradle, just here, just on your side of the bed, just within reach, so that you can let your fingers drip from the edge of the bed and down into the mouth of a baby girl using them to teethe.
When you look, there is no cradle, and there is no child, but you can still feel your fingertips brushing the curl of dark hair from her temple. She looks at you with bright brown eyes, so much like your own once were, and blinks sleepily at you before yawning. She never cries.
You are tucked away and you don’t even realize that it is happening.
Dani dreams when she sleeps.
This is not true of every person. Some people sleep just fine with no dreams attached, and some people take sleeping pills because they have trouble sleeping and so have few dreams, and some people have such vivid and unrealistic dreams that they can spin stories over breakfast of everything they remember – often not much, just the highlights, just the feelings of them. Dreams, when you wake, tend to fade just as quickly as memories might.
She does not always remember her dreams when she wakes, as is the way of people and dreams, but there is one that she has more and more frequently, and so frequent is it that she begins to remember little bits and pieces of it.
Dani finds herself in bed. It’s not her bed. It isn’t a bed she has ever seen before, but it looks like one that might have existed in Bly. She sits upright and pulls her knees to her chest, and as she does, she finds herself in a floor-length white nightgown. The gown bunches about her bare feet. She curls her toes. They dig into the blankets as she stares around the room.
Straight across from her is something that looks like a large, intricately carved armoire, but somehow it has been laid almost flush within the wall, like a built-in pirate’s chest, although flat. Sometimes the first thing she does is get up out of bed and walk towards it, run her fingers along the carvings, brush them against the handles. She never opens it first. Somehow, that seems just as sacrilegious as her sweetened iced tea is to Jamie.
She turns left to windows covered with dark curtains, and she pulls them aside, hoping to see something that can place her somewhere. But outside the windowpanes is nothing, only darkness, only this deep, seeping inky black worse than the fog that once set over Bly’s lake. And, again, she feels like she must be at Bly, only she has never seen panes like this there – one of them has a crack across one corner that seems to have been filled in with gold. She would have remembered that, if she had seen it. She’s certain she would have remembered it. She presses her hand flat against the pane and continues to stare out, as though that will change things, but it doesn’t.
When she passes by the chest again, her fingers brush along it. Sometimes it feels damp – like the grass just off the lake, settled with dew and mist.
The door is next. Always the door next. She walks to it, bare feet along cold hardwood floor, edge of the nightgown sweeping along behind her, growing dirtier as she walks, and she tries to open it. Locked. Always locked. She jostles the doorknob again. Nothing. Her eyes return to the chest inlaid in the wall, and then she goes to it, then she is determined, and when she opens it to rich fabrics and silks and lace and soft and what she knows must be expensive covered all over with rose petals and reeking with the scent of them, she is resigned. She does not know why she is resigned, but she is.
Sometimes, she takes one of the dresses and holds it against herself, although she’s never been one to want to wear old Victorian-style dresses such as these. It isn’t that she is imagining herself in it – she isn’t – but they’re so soft….
Sometimes, she takes one of the dresses and holds it against herself and moves to the locked door, stands in front of it, eagerly waiting, eagerly expecting…something, someone, although she doesn’t know who.
Sometimes, she leaves the dresses where they are and falls back on the bed and looks up and pretends that she isn’t in this room at all, although she doesn’t know where she would be if she weren’t here.
But the dream always ends the same way. She goes over to the vanity, just to the right of the bed, across from the windowpanes, situated right next to the locked door, and pulls open the drawers. There are countless jewels inside – necklaces, rings, bracelets – gold and silver dripping with rubies, sapphires, diamonds – more than her modest budget would ever be able to afford, certainly more than even the expensive silks and fabrics in the chest. Her fingers brush them, too, and they feel cold and hard. Then she looks up, to where there should be a mirror, only to find it covered, draped with a dark fabric that must have been taken from that chest, even though she was never the one to take it. Curious, she pulls the fabric away, so that she can see herself in the mirror, and as the fabric falls—
She wakes up.
Dani’s hands wrap around her mug as she curls up on their sofa, bare legs tucked up underneath her, and she blows the steam off of the top, staring across at Jamie. It’s been months since the events at Bly Manor, but no matter how much Jamie tries, Dani is still hopeless at making tea. Or coffee. She’d always thought her coffee was at least passable, but one sip of Jamie’s and she just—
Well, she didn’t give up, but she’s not the sort of person who’s going to tell Jamie no if she wants to make the coffee. (Jamie rarely makes coffee. She usually makes tea. She’s called Dani’s southern iced tea a sacrilege, but Dani has seen her sipping at it on her own every now and again when she thinks Dani isn’t looking. Obviously it is better than she is letting on.)
Jamie wraps one hand around her own pink mug, fingers pressed through the handle, just away from the string holding the packet of tea in its place. “So. Tell me about this dream you’ve been having, Poppins.” She meets Dani’s eyes and says, “Sound like my old therapist, talking like that. Hope I picked up a few things.” She takes a sip of her tea, watching her carefully.
And, of course, Dani tells her. It’s impossible not to tell her. She remembers more of it today than she did yesterday, remembers more of that yearning for what lay outside of the locked door, but it’s still not something she can exactly put into words. She looks down into her mug of coffee, and she tells it all, as much as she can remember, and when she’s done, her legs are tucked up even tighter underneath her. She takes a sip of her coffee, feels it warm her throat all the way down to where it sits, warm, in her belly, and looks up, meeting Jamie’s eyes with a shrug. “I’ve had other dreams, too, you know,” she admits, lips pressing together. “It’s not just that one, but it’s the one that keeps coming back. It’s the one I remember the most.”
“Your dreams are a lot stranger than mine are, Poppins.” Jamie sits the way she always sits – one knee pulled near to her, the other leg stretched out – and it seems weird to Dani that she is barefoot and not in the thick gardening boots she loves so much.
No. It’s not weird. This is normal. It is all very, very normal. She appreciates the normalcy of it all, how comforting its day-to-day routine has become.
Jamie taps her mug with her fingers again. “Do you think the dream means anything?”
“I don’t know.” Dani shakes her head, as though to clear it, although that doesn’t really help. There’s a pressure – sudden – at the back of her skull, and she winces, presses her fingertips to it, and the pressure subsides. “I don’t know what it would mean if it meant anything. I just…keep having it.” She looks up, offers Jamie a little smile, and shrugs. “Do you have any dreams that you keep having?”
Jamie’s eyes glance up, breaking the contact, and her head bobs to one side and then the other, as though to a good song, lips pursed in thought, before she finally stills. “Got a lot of dreams, Poppins. Not many worth sharing.” Then she meets Dani’s eyes again, bit of a grin tucked away at the corner of her lips. “And all the dreams I got worth sharing, I’m sharing with you.”
Dani flushes a bright scarlet. She puts her now cool mug to one side and curls up next to Jamie, presses a kiss to her cheek. “I love you.”
“Love you, too, Poppins. Always will.”