Chapter 6
You don’t have clothes in your room now, but you do have books.
All of them are books that you have already read – Romeo and Juliet is the first of these, and it has pride of place on your shelf. It is a new custom the two of you have created together, although you are certain the blonde woman that is not you doesn’t realize she’s done it. When she dreams, when you wake, you find whatever book is left sitting on her bedside table and take it with you to one of the other rooms, flick on just enough light that you can see, and curl up on one end of their – what is the word – sofa – to read until such a time as you decide to be finished.
Sometimes, you allow her to come to herself still curled up there, but more often than not you take her body back to her bed, let the brunette woman wrap her arms around her waist, and then slowly return through the pathway in the jungle, over the fence with its no longer new barbed wire, and back to the room that is your very own.
Then you fill one of your new cups – one of them a dark blue and bespeckled with brilliantly cream stars – with water from the clean stream that you have found, refill your bowl with the fruit now growing on your side of the fence from the seeds you have planted, and curl up in your own bed with one of your books to continue to read.
The brilliant thing about reading is that it returns language to you – words for things that you had long ago forgotten as well as words for things that you aren’t sure what they mean. Some of them you have learned from being present with the woman whose body you share – stovetop, for instance, and gas range and microwave. Some of them seem to be shorthand for other things – car for the electronic carriages you have often seen outside of their window because these people like to make words shorter; fridge for refrigerator, which is another word that you’ve had no occasion to learn before now; doc for doctor, which you think is ridiculous because who needs doctor to be shortened?
These people are obsessed with things being fast-paced and quick, and you are so used to slow and methodical that the clash between lifestyles feels harsh. You are grateful – a new word, and a new feeling – to your host and her partner for choosing a slow, methodical lifestyle of their own, and you wait for the day when they change their mind and decide to find something much more in tune with the other people around them.
You hope they don’t change.
Hope, too, is a funny word. It’s the thing with wings, you think, although a part of you – or maybe it’s the girl on the other side of the fence – who insists that it’s the thing with feathers. You wonder what the difference is. The feeling isn’t a new one. You think it is the best word for the yawning ache inside of you – or for what it once was, before the rage at its never being fulfilled took over.
Hope deferred makes the heart sick,
but a longing fulfilled is a tree of life.
You remember that one, vaguely, from the church services you had been forced to go to. Her memory says it is in Proverbs*. How odd, that the two of you share that commonality – a religion that you both have, in one form or other, denied.
When you take an apple from your bowl, when you slice it with your knife and bring the knife to your lips, you think about how odd and how astonishing that is – how there are so many similarities between your host and yourself. Sometimes, you wonder if that would have always been the case, that if on remembering more of yourself, those similarities would still exist, or if they are here now only because you have been living on and within the girl herself and thus must, in same shape or form, become molded to little aspects of her.
You are not sure you want the answer.
Jamie takes Dani to a diner a few blocks from their house. It is within walking distance – they’ve found a house downtown, so everything is pretty much within walking distance, and although their backyard isn’t as large as those in the suburbs, the ones Dani remembers from growing up, there is enough room for their slowly growing apple tree, as well as any other plants that Jamie chooses to add – the point is that they’re within walking distance of pretty much everything they could ever need, as well as plenty of other things they don’t need but might want at some point in the future. The diner is one of these; the bar a few blocks in the exact opposite direction of the diner is another. Jamie has taken her to the bar more than once since they’ve moved into their house. They had, in fact, lived there for a few months while deciding if they were going to stay in Vermont or not – well, not in the bar itself, but in an apartment just above it, similar to the flat Jamie once owned above the pub near Bly.
No matter where they go, no matter if they speak of it or not, no matter if the creature living in her mind wanders or not, Bly haunts them. It is there in the back of their minds, just on the tip of their tongues where they do not want it, and as they sit on opposite ends of their booth in the diner, it spills itself out like blood from an open wound.
“Henry called today,” Dani says, pressing the spot at the back of her neck. There isn’t any pressure there now, the creature isn’t wandering, but it has become a habit – something that she does without even thinking, simply because she has done it so often. Her fingers are cool and wet from the condensation on her glass. It’s a soft, comforting feeling. “He said the kids wanted to know if they could see us for Christmas.”
“Don’t see how that’s a bad idea.” Jamie’s fingers drum against the edge of the table, thumb along the bottom of it. One of her gardening boots brushes against Dani’s shoe, but Dani isn’t sure whether it’s intentional or not. She hopes it is. She will believe it is. “You thinking about letting them stay with us?”
Dani stares at the reflection in her glass, but at Jamie’s suggestion, her eyes widen and her head pops up. She doesn’t know why she was looking at her reflection. She looks the same as she’s always looked. “No, no, of course not.” She presses her lips together and bites her lower lip. “That wouldn’t be safe.”
Jamie gives a half nod. “Why wouldn’t that be safe, Poppins?”
“She’s walking while I sleep. I know she is.” Dani crosses her arms around herself. She isn’t cold, but she might as well be. “The lady. Sometimes I fall asleep in bed with you and I wake up curled up on the couch with a book in my hand and a blanket wrapped around me.”
“Doesn’t sound so bad.”
“It’s not,” Dani agrees, voice soft, because she knows how much worse it could be. How much worse she is afraid it will be, one day. “Sometimes, I think I just fell asleep there and didn’t make it to bed with you, but….but I know better.” She shakes her head with a sigh before leaning forward, pressing her fingertips to her forehead. “Anyway, I don’t think it will be safe for the kids. All of her getting up and walking around. I don’t….” She presses her lips together. “I don’t want her to do anything to them. I don’t want….” She looks up and meets Jamie’s eyes. “They can come over during the day, we can see them then, and we can have a good time with them, but they shouldn’t…. They shouldn’t stay with us.”
Jamie nods in understanding. She reaches over and takes Dani’s hands in her own. “You would never let her hurt them,” she says, brushing her thumb along Dani’s fingers, “just like you’ve never let her hurt me. Fact of the matter is, I don’t think she wants to hurt anyone anymore. If she’s been taking as much time as you’ve said she is, if she really wanted to hurt someone, why hasn’t she hurt me?”
It’s the first moment.
You feel her freezing in her skin, and you feel her staring at you from wherever she is to wherever you are.
You are curled up in your bed with one of your books, you will have her know,
and you are quite comfortable sitting here and reading. You weren’t planning
on getting out again any time soon. You have your bowl of fruits right here and
your cup of stars right here and maybe water might seem plain to her but it is
enough for you right now and could she please not interrupt you while you are
reading?
But she’s still staring at you, two blue eyes searching for you, and you realize that just as much as you might hop the gate whenever you so desire, letting it rip your gown and your ankles and your bare legs, she is just standing there, staring at you beyond the gate, beyond the path, and unable to really see you, no matter how much you can feel the weight of it on your shoulders.
You don’t know why she’s looking. She hasn’t really seemed too terribly interested in you for the past several months, except to try and erect new barriers to keep you from getting out of your cell. To be fair, they haven’t exactly worked, but she has tried as unsuccessfully as she can. The barbed wire had been a nice touch, painful as it had been. You won’t fault her that.
She isn’t summoning you. You think, if she was, that you wouldn’t answer. This isn’t a good time.
You are not sure when a good time would be, exactly, but you know that this is not it. If you make yourself present enough in her current situation, you can hear the sounds of a public that you haven’t allowed yourself to really be part of, other than looking out on it, and you can see the brunette who loves her – another word you have learned from your reading, particularly from that first book, and a part of you wonders which of them is Romeo and which is Juliet, if either could strictly speaking be either of them – and you think public is not the place for this conversation, whatever conversation it is she wants to have.
You feel her staring and you return to your book and you try to pretend that it isn’t there.
You haven’t done anything wrong.
This time.
You don’t know why she feels so upset.
Upset is a funny word.
It isn’t angry. It isn’t an all-consuming rage, although there may be rage
elements to it. It isn’t sad, it isn’t frustrated, it isn’t sick. It can be elements of
any or all of those. It can be frustrated. It can be a lot of things that you don’t
have words for – not because you don’t have the words but because there
aren’t words.
You know that she is upset because there isn’t another word to call it, and it is
such an unspecific lump all word that it sets you to feeling unsettled. You want
a more specific word. No, you want a more specific understanding of what she
is feeling so that you can put a word to it.
Upset is a funny word and it is an upsetting word and her upset upsets you by
the sheer upsetting nature of it.
She continues to stare at you with that weight and that upset and that blank, unfocused heat of a glare, and your jaw lowers, unhinging, and you yell at her because you have no other response to make but that one.
Back. Off.
Dani sees her reflection in the condensation of her glass shift, and her gaze moves towards it, and it is the creature, it is that great faceless thing with the long black hair in waves dripping down the sides of her faceless face, mouth open and yelling at her in that low, guttural growl of a thing that she remembers hearing on Bly, and she startles and jumps back and hits the back of the booth – and it is fortunate, oh so fortunate, that the booth is padded in the way diner booths usually are – but she still feels the ache in the back of her head from hitting it too hard, and it is a different ache than the pressure that means that the creature is looming near her – it is a real, real ache – and her fingers move to that spot instead of the one at the nape of her neck where there is no pressure and no presence and still she feels like she is being watched.
“Poppins?”
Jamie is beside her in a less than a moment, pulling her over to her. “What happened?” She tries to meet her eyes, to search them, focus moving from the one light blue eye to the dark one and then back again.
There are a lot of things Dani wants to do in that moment. But she doesn’t think about it – she flinches back, away from Jamie, away from her girlfriend, the love of her life – and it’s a mixture of things: fear of the creature living beneath her skin who she hasn’t seen, really seen, not in reality, not the way she had at Bly, not since Bly; fear of that creature coming forth now, as though being reminded that it hadn’t hurt anyone in so long would make it want to start doing so now, with Jamie; fear of those around them because this is still America, and as much as people want to believe that money makes people listen and care, she knows better than to believe that so many of these people wouldn’t stop frequenting their shop if they knew in a more concrete manner—
It is the late eighties and there are still states where living the way they are is illegal (not here, not here, they would not have stayed here if they were illegal, the risk would not have been worth it, not now), but people still look at them and think of the disease that has been plaguing the country, the disease that the world is slowly but surely taking action to deal with because it is no longer just affecting them, and there are consequences and she is especially aware of them because she has always had to be aware of them – Vermont is better than the southern states where she lived, it is better, but there are years of hiding and being aware and seeing the way the world – seeing the way your loved ones – react to you and people like you – and of course she flinches away because the other reaction is curling closer inward and letting her kiss her forehead and there are consequences, it is the late eighties, and there are consequences and they have moved here and made a life for themselves and she cannot risk the consequences—
Dani meets Jamie’s eyes and takes a deep breath and the first words out of her lips are, “I’m sorry,” and Jamie nods because she understands – of course, she understands – it has never needed to be a conversation because they have both known (but it has been a conversation because she has taken Jamie to meet her parents and they have had to be careful there) – because it was still a miracle when Princess Diana shook the hand of an infected person, it is still a miracle that she is speaking out—
Dani tucks her head under Jamie’s chin and presses against the soft skin of her neck for the briefest of moments, pulling away just enough to meet her eyes and whisper, voice soft, “Let’s go home. Please. Let’s just go home.”
And Jamie nods, and it is a wordless thing, and maybe that is the softest thing of all, that they do not have to speak every time they need to communicate, that words – as important as they may be – are not as important or necessary within the silent space they have made and continue to make for themselves.
They go home, and the creature remains quiet, and Dani is unable to relax.
Something feels wrong.
She cannot put a finger on it. She doesn’t know what it is. She knows that it isn’t like what happened with Miles, but she can’t put words to it.
And perhaps that is the worst part of it all.