Chapter 11
You give her space.
To be quite fair, you do not want to give her any space at all, not now that you have to roam farther to fill your cup of stars, not now that she has constructed so many obstacles against you sharing any space with her – you want to make your presence known, more frequently and more powerfully, so that she knows these obstructions only keep you back because you allow them to do so.
But you have seen that she has invited others over. So while you spend time behind her eyes, taking stock of everything, you don’t tuck her away in the little cell of your room so that you can read her new books the way you so desperately want. You do not do it while they are there, you do not do it in the evenings when they are gone, and you do not do it until things seem to return to normal – or whatever can pass for normal around here, if anything can.
You almost tuck her away just as the children are leaving, so that you can brush your her hands through their hair, so that you she can just touch them. Something in you aches around children. You think you must have had one of your own once, because nothing in anything you’ve read can even begin to suggest anything else. But you cannot remember who your child is, whether they were male or female or something else, what your husband – and you even assume that – looked like.
You think you must have had a husband. You remember aching for the warmth of a bed, of someone next to you, and you do not believe you would have had a wife and child.
If it is hard to obtain now, then you think it was far harder when you were alive. You do not know how you know that, but you feel it in the thick of your bones. As it is, you are not sure you want a husband or wife now. You cannot remember, and you do not know. Besides, that would mean separating your host from the brunette, and you have no intention of doing that at the moment.
Not when you have new books to read. Not when you are learning to communicate in some form and fashion.
Not when others are willing to communicate with you.
There is space to breathe between Christmas and New Year’s. Henry takes Flora and Miles away shortly before the New Year celebrations, and while Owen is still around, he chooses to spend this one by himself. Dani doesn’t think that is necessarily the healthiest option, but she doesn’t argue against spending that time with just Jamie. The flower shop is set to reopen within a few days – it was shut, of course, over the past week, from two days before Christmas through to the second day of the new year – and while that might be excessive, most people do not need to get flowers between those days. The shop can absorb the hit.
Still.
Dani spends New Year’s Eve curled up next to Jamie. They watch the ball drop on their little telly, and Jamie runs her fingers through Dani’s hair soothingly over and over again. Sometimes, Dani thinks she is a cat, and she thinks that’s okay. She is content to be a cat. And then she looks up at Jamie and the other looks over at her and bends down to kiss her forehead or her lips or the very tip of her nose – the latter of which makes her giggle. She runs cold fingers along the warm skin of Jamie’s sides, tickling her as a response, and when Jamie retaliates, they almost miss the ball dropping entirely. In fact, they would have, if not for the countdown that the crowd yells through their screen, and they call a truce just long enough to kiss when everyone yells Happy New Year!
They do not yell the words, but they do say them, and the truce deepens into something softer – or something that starts softer and is more passionate and maybe Dani is sore the next morning and maybe that’s okay, maybe sore can be good when it isn’t from the long spindly fingered grip of a corpse’s hand around your neck. They say the words again in place of good morning, and Dani tugs her lower lip between her teeth as she smiles up at the woman she loves, and for a moment – a clear, crystalline moment – it feels like everything is good and right and perfect, and just because she knows that it isn’t, just because she knows that tomorrow will come – or even later, when it grows dark, something might happen – that doesn’t stop this moment, this particular one from being right.
It doesn’t last. It can’t last. But it is there, and she can live and breathe in it.
“Where do you think you’ll go this time?” Dani asks as Owen stands just inside their front door, hefting his single canvas duffle bag over one shoulder. “London? Paris?” She grins and leans forward across the couch, her eyes lighting up with mischief. “Or will you go to the deep barbecue holes in Texas to learn their ways?”
Owen gives her a blank stare. “I believe this is how Hannah must have felt whenever I made batter puns.”
“Oh, c’mon, Owen.” Jamie punches his shoulder. “No one could have made a batter pun than you.”
Owen’s blank stare turns to Jamie, and he blinks a couple of times before smiling. “Thank you. Between the two of you, I feel properly battered.”
“It’s a missed opportunity,” Dani says with a sigh. “We should have had a proper flour fight with the kids. I would pay you good money to see Henry covered in flour.” She wags a finger at him. “Next time, Mr. Sharma, I expect we make gingerbread houses and get ourselves covered in white.”
“You want covered in white, you can go play in the snow, Poppins.” Jamie stares at her as she holds the door open for Owen. “I’m not much on cleaning up after those fights. Hannah was always the one for that, and she didn’t much like it either, if I remember properly.”
Owen takes a deep breath. “No. She didn’t.” He lets the breath out. Then he smiles at Dani. “Thank you for letting a poor penniless chef spend the holidays with you when he has no one else to spend them with.”
“Don’t worry about it,” Dani replies immediately. “You have us.”
“You’ll always have us,” Jamie continues, meeting Dani’s eyes.
Dani doesn’t have the heart to contradict her as the door shuts behind them. They have had a good time. They are still having a good time, even as Owen is leaving, and she doesn’t want to quell that with her own dread. She takes a deep breath of her own now that they are gone. She already misses Jamie. Sometimes, it feels like she always misses Jamie, sometimes even when the other woman is right here with her. She doesn’t know how that can be, though.
The worst of it is that, within moments of the others leaving, Dani can feel that familiar, itching, stretching beneath her skin. The creature is there, and the creature is immediate, and the creature is taut and conformed to her like a second layer of muscles and blood vessels around her bones, and it comes without the pressure that normally comes as an early warning, but as soon as it is there, the pressure is there, too – at the base of her skull, at the top, behind her forehead, and between her eyes.
Dani takes a deep breath, and she speaks into the silence the way she did once, so many months ago, when the creature first read with her. “You’re tired of waiting, aren’t you?” She curls her toes around the edge of the sofa cushion, and her gaze falls on the Shakespearean books she has put pride of place on one of the shelves in their living room. “I take it you want to read one of those.”
Correction: All of those. Dani knows it without having to think about it, knows that the creature will probably read through them even before she has time to read through them. And somehow, that seems right. She hates that it does.
Dani moves over to the bookshelf, kneels next to it, and runs her finger along the spines of the old leather-bound books. “Would you like me to tell you what each of them are about, so that you know which one you want to start next?”
It feels weird, speaking to the creature the same as she might to a child. Flora had told her to give the creature a face and a story, but Dani has not started doing either of those yet. She isn’t sure that she can, not when the creature seems like such a predatory presence that comes and goes whenever it wants, regardless of what she wants. As much as she might speak to the creature the way she would a child, the thing is that the creature – if it’s a human being, if it’s still human in something other than form– It isn’t a child, it’s an adult.
Flora said she had forgotten her name.
Peter said that they would forget everything and their faces would fade.
Maybe—
Dani shakes her head. She isn’t thinking about that right now. She is trying to deal with the beast inside her. Not tame it – she is fairly certain she cannot do that – but appease it, perhaps.
The creature doesn’t say anything, the creature doesn’t do anything, but perhaps the not doing something is an indication that Dani is moving in the right direction? It certainly hasn’t taken over her in impatience to draw whichever story it wants from the shelves, tucking her away so that it can devour the story the way it might, one day, devour her.
Dani’s fingertip stops on one of the books, and for the briefest of instants, she feels as though the creature’s finger beneath her own continues to move only to be stopped by her own. She shivers. “This one,” she says, pushing past the feeling, “is a comedy.” She bites her lower lip. “Outside of his poetry, Shakespeare’s works are separated into three kinds – comedies, tragedies, and histories. The last one you read, Romeo and Juliet, is a tragedy because, um, most of the characters die. That’s the main difference between a comedy and a tragedy: in comedies, everyone gets married, and in tragedies, everyone dies.”
I think I’m in a tragedy.
“The histories are more on historical people and events. Julius Caesar, for instance,” Dani continues, shaking that last thought away, “is about Caesar’s death. It’s less about him as a person – he dies fairly early on – but about the impact of his becoming emperor and how that affected his closest friends – Marc Antony, Brutus.” She presses her lips together. “You don’t know any of those people, do you?”
The creature doesn’t say anything, doesn’t do anything, but Dani gets the feeling that if the creature has completely forgotten herself, then it has forgotten anything it knew about historical events or people such as this, too.
“Shakespeare’s histories aren’t always historically accurate, so don’t rely on them to tell you the 100-percent truth. They’re stories,” Dani says, leaning back on her haunches and staring at the books. “Sometimes what people want – what people need – are stories. Reading about history sometimes feels like a lot of facts, and you can feel really disconnected from all of it. But when they’re written like this, when they’re stories, it’s easier to understand what the people of the time might have felt or wanted, why they acted the way they did.” Dani takes a deep breath and slowly lets it out. “We’re all stories, in the end.”
The creature thrums beneath her, and Dani senses that it is growing impatient. She, too, is not sure what she is doing. That’s a lot of talking to – or at – a creature who hasn’t really seemed like it wants to do much communicating with her. She isn’t even sure that it’s listening.
Still, Dani continues as though it is. “This one is Much Ado About Nothing,” she says, tapping her finger on one of the spines. “It’s a comedy, which means it has a happy ending, and the basic plot is that, well, it’s all there in the title, really. A lot of big fuss about nothing.” She smiles to herself but doesn’t laugh. “A friend of the prince wants to marry a girl he is in love with, but the prince’s bastard brother makes it look like the girl loses her virginity right before the marriage. Everyone gets upset. There’s a lot of fighting, and there’s some detective work to figure out what exactly happened. But it all ends happily.” Her smile eases. “I especially like Benedick and Beatrice. They’re at each other’s throats with banter for most of the story, but in the end, their family and friends set them up and they fall in love.” She shrugs. “It’s a comedy, everyone gets married, except for the villain.”
The creature doesn’t seem interested.
Dani moves on. “This one,” she says, tapping her finger on another spine, “is Hamlet. It’s a tragedy, just like Romeo and Juliet, which means that everybody dies.” She sighs. “It’s considered one of – if not the greatest of Shakespeare’s plays. The main character, Hamlet, sees the ghost of his father, and the ghost tells him that his uncle, the new king, killed him and asks Hamlet to avenge him. Hamlet spends most of the play being indecisive and trying to decide what to do—”
You do not want to listen to her telling you the plot of all of these stories. You want to read them yourself. You do not much care if they are tragedies or comedies or histories or whatever they are provided they are good.
But you do not tell her that. You are still not sure how to speak without tucking her away, and right now, you are content that she is at least talking to you – treating you like a normal person instead of like a beast.
Still, she shivers beneath you, and you can tell that she is still afraid.
You do not know how to address that. You are not certain you can.
Listening in as patient a manner as you can be is perhaps the best you can do. Let her talk. She’ll pick a book eventually.
“This one is Twelfth Night,” Dani continues, unaware of whether the creature actually appreciates what she is saying or not. “It’s a comedy about a girl named Viola. She’s certain that her twin brother has died in a boat crash – one that she survived – and she pretends to be him to serve this duke. The duke is in love with another lady, Olivia, and he keeps sending Viola to Olivia with proclamations of his love. But Oliva falls in love with the boy that she believes Viola is, all the while Viola is falling in love with her duke.” Dani sighs. “It’s supposed to be a comedy, but it isn’t very funny, which isn’t really a qualification for a comedy, but sometimes I feel like it should be.”
But by the time she finishes her explanation, the presence has drawn larger. She can’t explain how or why, only that it has, almost as though it will burst through her skin. Then, all at once, it recedes – back to the bridge of her nose, back across her head, back to the nape of her neck where it throbs once, violently, and then disappears altogether.
Deep in the jungle, she can feel the creature waiting, its rage circulating heated outward.
Dani looks at the book and takes a deep breath and closes her eyes and tries to still herself, all the while wondering: Is it something I said?
You pace back and forth in the room. Your room. Not the room, your room.
You pace back and forth in your room.
You do not wring your hands together as weaker women might. Instead, you walk the length and breadth of your room, over and over again, the soles of your feet seeming to wear away the hardwood floor beneath them, the mud on the edge of your nightgown crusting over as it hardens into dirt. One of the branches has scraped your cheek, and it has left a mark, though not even a single drop of blood has fallen from it.
You stop and you force yourself to look into the mirror of your vanity, pulling down the fabric that once covered it.
You see a face that you know for you own as you meet your own bright, skinless eyes and whisper your name: “Viola.”