Chapter 5
You stand and stare at the gate and its rusted lock, your head tilted ever so slightly to one side, dark hair brushing against your white nightgown. The edges of your gown are dark with the mud of walking the path what feels like day after day, and there are new tears in the fabric from the branches of the jungle trees, which catch in it as you walk past, from climbing over the gate and letting its newly made barbed wire slice against your ankles. Sometimes, you have brushed your fingers against your skin after the tear and brought them away bloodless, although you are certain the wire has broken the skin.
The rusted gate stares back at you, beckoning. You haven’t felt the need to climb over it in quite some time. You’ve had your fill of the forbidden fruit on the other side, and you ache for something to which you still cannot put a name. Certainly, that new barbed wire doesn’t help things either, but since it does not hurt you as much as one might imagine, it isn’t quite as much of a deterrent.
Yet still you are learning new things all the time. You have found a creek through the jungle that brings sweet, clear water, and you drink from it when you are thirsty. Sometimes, you look at your reflection in the water – that is how you learned that your hair is dark and full of curls, that is how you know that your nightgown is stained with mud and dirt. The lack of features on your face no longer startles you when you see it. In fact, sometimes when you stare, you think you can make out bits of how you might look. Not because you remember it, but because something in you knows.
Your nose has grown sharper. The skin covering your eyes has grown thinner. Your eyelashes, dark as your hair, have begun to peek through. If you stay here long enough, you might reclaim a real appearance of some sort. Something significant.
The rusted gate stares at you, tempting you, but you remember the last time you rustled its lock – when you opened the door, took the girl’s hand, and thrust her from the room that you sometimes share. You are not ready to be caught out again.
You turn and go back to the room that is your own, the room where the girl is confined just as surely as you were before she mentioned the jungle, the room where she waits when you tuck her away and wander in a body that isn’t your own. Sometimes, new things appear there. You haven’t checked today. There are things you hope for but still cannot name; there are things you hope for and can name – cup, bowl, knife.
Clothes.
There are clothes in the chest, but those are not yours. Those belong to someone else. They are meant for someone else. You cannot remember who. The name is on the tip of your tongue, and you think perhaps you will claim that before you claim your own.
You had a name once. Everyone has a name.
The shape of where your eyes would be narrows, and you decide to wander on the other side of the gate again. Not to take or to tuck away, but to learn. There is so much more you can learn on the other side of the gate.
Dani knows better than to get what some would call a legitimate job. As much as she wants to get back into teaching again, to pass what is needed to be able to teach here in Vermont, where they have landed, she doesn’t think it would be fair to the kids. Even with as settled as she is, even with the infrequency of the pressure that starts at the nape of her neck and travels to the bridge of her nose, she knows that she only has each present moment. If, for some reason, the lady of the lake decides to take her over right before Christmas break, then what would happen to her kids? The school would scramble for a new teacher over the break, and a substitute would likely take her place until then.
No. That wouldn’t be fair to anyone, least of all to the kids she would want to help.
At first, Dani is comforted with not working. Then, she begins to help out at Jamie’s flower shop. It’s theirs, technically, Jamie always refers to it as theirs, but Dani knows that it is Jamie’s shop first and foremost. Jamie knows each of the plants by name; Dani names some of them and then is heartbroken when her favorites are bought by customers while she isn’t there. Jamie knows the best way to take care of a plant that seems to be dying; Dani just stares at it hopelessly, guessing that something is wrong and usually thinking it needs more water or more sunlight, which she has since learned is not always good – some plants, like cacti, don’t do well with a lot of water, and some plants, like certain ferns or ivy, don’t do well with a lot of sun. Jamie knows all of this; Dani is just drowning under all of the plant knowledge that she doesn’t have.
…drowning is a bad word. She isn’t drowning. She’s never drowning. She’s—
—curled up on one corner of the sofa with that old, oft-read Shakespeare play, Romeo and Juliet, in one hand, thumb holding her place as she takes a sip of her coffee. She’s gotten better at coffee. Moderately. Jamie still won’t drink it, but then, Jamie doesn’t like coffee. She still isn’t allowed to make the tea, and that’s fine. She makes her own sweetened iced tea and drinks most of it herself. Jamie points out the American sweet tooth. She doesn’t disagree.
Thinking of this, she smiles.
The pressure starts at the back of her head. Dani presses her fingers there, but either she isn’t fast enough or her fingers aren’t cold enough because the pressure moves, taking that same route that she has grown accustomed to. She winces and tries to ignore it, tries to go back to her reading, but the words in front of her eyes seem to swim as the pressure finds the bridge of her nose.
It feels like the creature sinks under her skin, into her bones, stretches to fill the tips of her fingers and toes, skin-covered eyes hovering right behind her own, and when she moves to continue reading her play, the creature moves, too, and reads with her.
It is an unsettling feeling, but she is still present. She is not tucked away.
Dani breathes deep, and she feels like the creature within takes a shuddering, open-mouthed breath, too. She shivers, and the creature shivers with her. She draws the blanket from the back of the sofa and pulls it about herself. It doesn’t help. Of course, it doesn’t help, but she tries anyway. The pressure between her eyes fades; the creature remains.
If the creature were a human being like Rebecca Jessel, then Dani might try to communicate with it – with her. But she has little reason to believe that the creature wants to communicate with her at all. It had ignored her attempts to free herself when it was choking her, and it had ignored her screams while it was carrying Flora away. It had ignored Henry, other than choking him near to death, and it had ignored Flora’s desperate cries to be released. It seemed less like an actual person and more like a stubborn sense of will, and Dani knows better than to try and communicate with a stubborn sense of will. It’s why she hasn’t brought up that Jamie is her girlfriend with her mother, isn’t it? Stubborn sense of will, indeed.
But even with her mother, there are some pathways, some routes that can be taken. Dani isn’t sure there are any she can make with this creature.
Still.
She begins to talk in the silence of the house to the creature within her the way she might to someone too old to know new things, or to one of the children in her classes – although she’d never had occasion to read Shakespeare to any of them.
“Have you read this?” Dani asks, in the still silence of the house. She lifts the book with one hand, knowing that the creature can see it just as clearly as she can. “It’s one of Shakespeare’s plays. You…probably haven’t read it. I’m not sure he was alive in your time. I’m not sure what time you’re from. Um.” She presses her lips together and tries again. “It’s about two people from opposing families who fall in love – Romeo and Juliet.” She tucks some of the hair that has pulled itself out of her ponytail behind one ear. “The story tells you from the beginning that it is going to be a tragedy, but as you read it, you think maybe, maybe they’ll make it through and survive. But, by the end, no matter how much they try to be together, the story ends with both of them dead.”
The creature hasn’t moved. Dani thinks it is paying attention to her. That’s…that’s something at least. She isn’t sure the creature has ever really listened to her before. She certainly hasn’t listened to it.
“You can read it with me, if you want.”
The offer is a small thing. Dani doesn’t really think she could deny the creature; if it wanted, the creature could stay hovering just beneath her skin until it is prepared to take her over. Maybe that’s what it is doing now. Maybe reading Shakespeare will distract it. She doubts that.
But it’s a fortunate distraction for her.
The creature doesn’t move, and Dani doesn’t know if that’s an acceptance or not. She hopes that it is, that this remaining isn’t something much more morbid. She hasn’t gotten very far in the book, and she turns back to the beginning, feeling the creature stretched taut beneath her skin the entire time. It never feels any better. She isn’t sure how it could.
Dani startles into awareness when their house door hard shuts. She takes a deep breath. Her fingers curl around the edges of her book, and she glances up, to the door.
Jamie walks towards where she sits on the sofa, thick boots clunking along the entrance. She takes them off just past the entryway, unlacing them and then tucking her fingers beneath the edge to push them off. “Want a bit of light, Poppins?” She reaches over, flicks a light on, and Dani winces with the sudden brightness of it. When had it gotten so dark? Jamie’s eyes graze over her. “You been reading?”
“Mm.” Dani nods, closes the book around her finger to keep her place, and holds the book aloft. “Romeo and Juliet,” she says with a little sigh. “It’s one of my favorites.” She bites her lower lip and smiles. “Think you’d like that new version more – the musical?”
“I’ve heard of it.” Jamie curls up on the sofa next to her, resting her head in one hand, elbow propped on the back of the couch. “Wasn’t much a fan of Shakespeare, myself. Always seemed too highfalutin for someone like me.” She reaches over, tucks a strand of Dani’s hair back out of her face. “But you can tell me all about it, if you like.”
Dani shakes her head. “No. I’ve had enough of it.” She reaches across and presses a kiss to Jamie’s lips. “Let me just find a bookmark.”
Jamie’s the sort to dog ear the pages, but that seems sacrilegious to Dani. They both have their little tells. Jamie is particular about tea and plants; Dani is particular about books. She finds one of her bookmarks – an old bit of receipt paper from a handful of them kept on the side table for just this purpose – and places it neatly in the book before noticing – before realizing—
This is the end of the play.
Dani blinks twice. She doesn’t remember finishing it. Point of fact, she doesn’t remember much past the first scene with Friar Lawrence. Perhaps she dozed off. She doesn’t remember.
And in all of that, the itching, unsettling, stretched feeling of the creature stitched taut beneath her skin seems to have disappeared.
Dani isn’t sure how to feel about that.