Chapter 8
The weather outside grows ever colder. Jamie spends more and more time at the flower shop, keeping her plants warm and alive, which means that Dani spends more and more time at their house alone. It is not that she does not help out at the flower shop – she does! Often! But there are certain things that remain in Jamie’s specialty, things that it would be easier and faster for her to do herself than to try and explain them, so while Dani can – and often does – finish some small tasks, especially with the more business and monetary side of things, the bulk of the work rests on Jamie’s shoulders. Dani doesn’t like it, but there isn’t much she can do beyond what she does.
Dani has been forbidden from making coffee and tea. She’s tried to make it again – even more often than before – so that Jamie has something warm to come back to, but after the last disastrous attempt (where Jamie gave her a look and bit her tongue and pressed her lips together and turned away, pouring her mug down the drain), she accepted that maybe her hot drinks are making things worse. At least she is good at hot chocolate – which is more than appreciated in the colder weather – and where Jamie is not a great cook, Dani excels. She is nowhere near as good as Owen, but neither of them make the comparison. She is good enough. She is decent.
Jamie burns water. An interesting thing for a gardener, but as Jamie herself says, “You don’t have to heat water for plants!”
She doesn’t really say that, but Dani likes to pretend she does. It brings a smile to her face, and when she says it, Jamie gives her a look and then sticks her tongue out at her. Sometimes, it feels like they are children just playing at house, but other times, it feels nothing like that at all.
The pressure at the back of her head abates.
She is not sure what to do with the newfound freedom.
Something tells her that nothing good can come of this, but Dani feels better about spending time with Jamie when she doesn’t have to feel a faceless monster spreading beneath her skin as she reads Shakespeare. She feels safer – not as in her safety, but as in Jamie’s.
She still doesn’t know why the creature never attacked her girlfriend, and she doesn’t want to risk finding out why.
The first time she has a migraine again, Dani panics.
It feels like the creature has decided to wage war on her mind, one piece at a time. She holds her head in her hands and she cries and neither of those things help in the slightest. She is too afraid to take her normal routes – to stay in the bedroom she shares with Jamie, to turn all the lights out and shut the curtains, to give herself that still, cold, dark space so that her mind can heal. But all of those things feel like a tomb, feel like death, and the panic sets in even more, twisting her heart in her chest until she can’t breathe. Which is worse, because she remembers the creature’s icy fingers wrapping around her neck and the struggling that had done absolutely no good because it felt like the creature didn’t even acknowledge she was there and only dropped her because she needed both hands to carry Flora. And even then, Dani had struggled to breathe around the pressure tightening around her neck.
Jamie brings her a mug of steaming hot tea. “Do you want company?”
“No,” Dani says, shaking her head as she leans up against their headboard. Their curtains are ever so slightly open, the cold breeze from outside filtering through. Her head needs the cold for her to feel halfway to normal, but she shivers every time the breeze hits any other patch of her skin. “I’ll be okay. This is just—” Her stomach lurches with the nausea that her migraines bring, and she shuts her lips tight. She won’t be sick. She knows she won’t be sick. She only feels as though she will. “It’s a migraine. I’ll be okay.” She smiles up at the love of her life, and she feels calmer, although she can’t say why.
Jamie brushes her fingers along her forehead, sweeping her hair back just long enough to place a kiss on her forehead. “If it gets bad,” she says, eyes searching Dani’s, “if it gets worse, call the shop. I’ll answer.”
“Yeah.” Dani nods. “I will. I will.”
“And if you need them,” Jamie places an aspirin bottle next to the mug of tea. “I know you don’t like them, know you don’t want them. But if you need them.”
Then Jamie is gone and Dani is alone in that room with little light and little air and the panic sets in. She closes her eyes and tries to rest – but she is afraid to rest, afraid that the creature will tuck her away and get up and wander the way she was only a month ago, when she would wake on the couch with no warning. She looks at the aspirin bottle that Jamie left, and she shivers – although whether that’s from the cold breeze brushing against her skin or from other reasons she cannot tell.
The pressure builds, spreading in orbit from the front of her skull to the back, and she presses her fingers to the same spot she always does, hoping the cold will alleviate some of the pain.
It doesn’t.
It never does.
You stand atop the wall, the edge of your nightgown blowing about your bare feet, a frigid breeze pushing it back, pushing your hair from your face and tangling it in the barbed wire. You rip what you can away from it, out of it, and it doesn’t sting nearly as much as you might have thought. You tuck your hair back in a braid – you know this now where you didn’t before, not from your reading but from seeing the blonde do it with her own hair – and your own longer, darker locks curve into the pattern easily enough. Much more easily than her lighter ones do, almost as though your hair remembers it better.
Sometimes, you think the physical body remembers things much better than the human mind does. Even though you might forget where they came from, your body carries scars, your hair carries waves, and your eyes—
They are slowly but surely coming into place. The skin covering them grows thinner every day. At least, you assume every day. It is hard to exactly keep track of the time where you are. Time doesn’t seem to follow an exact pattern here. Instead, the light/dark cycle seems to follow something else entirely. Moods, perhaps, or your expectations.
You look down on the frost-covered ground below you, and you jump.
The cold doesn’t bother you – how can it, when you are a corpse made cold by your own death? – but you can see how it has torn the trees once growing on either side of the path. It confuses you, however. You would not have made this trek at all, if not for the dark ashen soot clogging up the steam from which you took your water. You can accept a wall. You can accept barbed wire. You can even accept a locked gate. You will not accept this destruction to the water stream. Not after it took so long for it to appear on your side of the gate in the first place.
There is rage within you. Of course, there is. When she created the path from your room into the jungle, the one that leads to the rusty, locked gate, she described you with three words: empty, lonely, rage. In fact, the one she is most afraid of is the one that has laid the lowest since you have been here. You did not have the words to explain why that was at the time, but now you do, if she would ever deign to ask, and in the lack, the rage bubbles ever hotter. You do not poke at the coals of that fire, but she does, unknowingly.
You look at the hazy sky overhead, and you follow the smoke through the jungle, follow the scent of fire, follow the trail to the stream where you first found it, where the ash and soot is even worse than it is further down on your side of the gate. (You do not know where the stream ends. You haven’t thought to look. You’re not sure it does end. Perhaps it loops in on itself. For some reason, you do not think she would appreciate knowing that.)
Finally, you see it. The slightest bits of fire and flame, deep in the jungle, so far that it is almost the farthest you have traveled. And the closer you get to it, the more flame you see.
Your eyes – such that they are – narrow. Such inflammation. Why would anyone do this to themselves?
There is no hypocrisy in your question. You do not consider what you have done to yourself. How could you? First, you would have to remember it. And a part of you believes – truly believes – that what happened to you, whatever it was, was not your fault. In fact, you are almost certain that is where the rage comes from. You just cannot remember why.
You do not remember how to stop a fire. Or – more to the point – you remember enough to remember that you pour water over a fire, even though you do not remember having done so before – but you do not remember or, rightly, know how to put a fire out in a frozen jungle. You do not know how one would even start.
But ice and snow is just another form of water. Heaped on the fire, it should melt and put it out. That stood to reason.
You take a deep breath, glare as much as you can towards her, wherever she is, and start putting out the fire. Who else would have started it? Who else would want to destroy the water you don’t really need, being dead, but at least want?
The rage bubbles inside of you like another fire, and covering it with snow does not help the way it does with this.
Dani cries out in pain, only to find the cry suddenly cut off in the back of her throat. The aforementioned pain – harsh, sharp, on the left of her head – has just as suddenly, and without any apparent reason, begun to rapidly, rapidly, rapidly recede. She breathes easy. The panic still rests in the center of her chest, but it, too, feels to be quieting. As the pain subsides, she can feel that pressure, the one that meant the creature is nearer, spreading from the same spot the pain once was, and wherever the pressure touches, the pain recedes, disappears, replaced by a cool, gentle calm.
She blinks.
Something is wrong.
Something is wrong.
But she doesn’t know what it is.
The pain fades away into nothing, leaving only the pressure in its place. Dani feels as though she should say something to the creature, but she isn’t sure what. She doesn’t believe that the creature actually helped her. Everything she knows about it suggests that it would only hurt her, that if it is somewhere the migraine and the pain is, then it is the one causing it, and if the migraine disappears as it leaves, then that only serves to prove her point.
And yet.
Dani takes a deep breath, presses her cool fingers to that spot on the back of her neck, and almost feels the creature’s frustration with her – the smallest bit of that unending rage she once noticed, only now directed towards her personally. She sits upright, turning on the bed so that her bare feet brush against the hardwood floor, cool from the breeze flowing through the window, and moves to the same, to shut it, because now that the pain is gone, she feels only frigid from its touch.
The window shuts closed, and her reflection is not her own.
Dani jumps backward, but the faceless creature that is her reflection doesn’t move. Instead, it seems to stare at her with those eyes covered over, blinded with skin. There is no hatred there. Only that hot frustration radiating outward. She takes a deep breath to steady herself, and when she raises her hand, the creature does as well. She reaches forward as though to touch the windowpane in the same manner that she often did when she was shut up in that little room in her dream.
She blinks.
Her hand touches the windowpane.
The creature has vanished.
Dani takes another deep breath. This is perhaps the sort of thing that Jamie would want her to call about, but she cannot bring herself to do it. She is…not fine, she can’t be fine, she isn’t sure if she will ever be fine ever again, but she’s as close as she thinks she can be right now. There’s no need to pull Jamie away from her work.
Still, loneliness crawls up, taking the spot in her chest just next to the subsided panic. Her lips press together. She won’t call Jamie away from her work, but she will go to her. Right now.
She just doesn’t want to be alone.