Chapter 22
You have started pacing again.
That’s the word for it – when you walk about your little room, from one wall to the other and then back again, opening your chest, opening your vanity, glancing at yourself in the mirror, placing your hand flat against the windowpane and staring out into what seems like an endless black expanse – that walking and retreading, the word for it is pacing—
You find yourself doing it more and more often over the time following your last discussion with your host. She didn’t seem very appreciative of your efforts, but you made them all the same. Made yourself useful.
Like a good little wife, you hear something in the back of your mind saying, but you don’t know what’s saying it, and whatever it is – whoever it is – makes you feel extremely uncomfortable. There’s no suggestion that you and your host are any form of married. You aren’t, and you do not want to be. But, still, there is something in you that thrums with the remembrance of marriage and what it was for you, just out of reach.
You know, and yet you cannot remember.
It’s something to do with the sister that you still only vaguely remember. Perdy. That can’t have actually been her name. That must have been a nickname, a shortening of it, a familiarity with her. It can’t be her real name. But you can’t remember what her real name is either.
This is almost worse than remembering nothing at all – having only these fragments (or, when it came to marriage, these feelings), vague and uncertain and there all the same – and having no way of piecing them together or making sense of them. Excavating your own mind and what it gave you to figure out some semblance of who you might once have been….
It is frustrating.
You clench the edge of your vanity, and you look down at the simply carved wood, and you grit your teeth together, and eventually you go back to the chest in your wall, open it, and stare at the dresses inside of it. They aren’t for you. They aren’t yours. They belong to someone else now. They’re for her – whoever she is. The last you remember of your daughter, she was still a child, and you still don’t know what happened to her.
Your lips press together in a single line, and you take one of the dresses out, hold it against you, and find that it is fitted, tailored exactly to your shape and size. Your brow furrows. If they aren’t yours, then why does this one fit you?
Without a second thought, you discard your nightgown – which feels like it should be growing more and more threadbare from how long you have been wearing it, but apparently it is just as stubborn as you are in terms of continuing to exist when perhaps it should have faded away long ago – and lift the dress over your head. It fits almost like a glove, but you can’t reach the back to lace it up. The dress won’t stay as it should and slumps forward, its arms slipping over your hands, and even so, you feel as though there should be something else beneath it as well. Something to hold her…steady.
You have wanted clothes for almost as long as you have been here, and although you have figured out ways for food and drink and books and utensils, clothes are still beyond you. Perhaps it is that you only see yourself in the nightgown. Perhaps it is that when you tuck your host away, you see her and you know that the clothes are her choice and not your own.
There is not anything you can do about that. The clothes she wears will always be hers. Even if you tucked her away and bought clothes of your own, they would be tailored and designed to fit her frame and not yours. There isn’t a way—
You press your lips together, and you fall back on your bed with the dress still wrapped around you.
You stare at the ceiling.
You close your eyes.
You come to in her body.
This is significantly easier than traveling through the jungle and across the fence. It’s a new way of doing things, one that you have only begun to figure out since she came to see you. It seems to you that this is the way she must travel, and so it is one that you have learned to mimic. There is less of a threat here. Less she can do to you. Less of an obstruction.
Of course, you do not tuck her away when you wander like this. There would be little purpose to tucking her away at random moments throughout the day. That would require you to have a much more intimate knowledge of her day-to-day life, as opposed to the tidbits you have picked up during your other wanderings, so that you might best mimic her when you need to. Or, perhaps, not even truly mimic, just make sure that you do the things that need to be done.
She sits under a tree in the backyard, a blanket spread about her, resting her back up against its trunk, and she looks up at a sky that isn’t quite clear but is sunny all the same. White clouds like cotton are stretched here and there across the blue expanse, and you draw images from some of them. One of them looks almost like a rose, and that one? It looks like a heart with an arrow piercing it. Another one looks like—
Then she winces, and you can’t see the clouds anymore. She presses her fingers to the back of her neck, and you feel a rush of cold air. It doesn’t mean anything to you, although once, when you knew her less, it had turned you back to your own room because you hadn’t understood what it was and hadn’t had enough awareness to continue going. But as you became more aware, you’d pushed through. In fact, the first time you’d been in front of it, it had only pushed you further ahead, and you’d stopped when she pinched the bridge of her nose because the path had abruptly stopped. You’d stayed because you were uncertain where to go until whatever it was that had compelled you to wander had, eventually, compelled you to turn back around and return to your room.
Back then, you hadn’t been entirely conscious of anything. Certainly not the way you are now.
Sometimes, you aren’t sure if that is a good thing or not. There is a certain appeal to that lack of consciousness, that following of impulse. When you are less aware, you don’t have to be aware of what you have forgotten or the negative feelings your host has toward you. A part of you is certain that once you remember everything fully, you’ll want to forget again.
The thing about faded memories is that they don’t hurt near as much as new, sharp ones. Learning your life again will likely make it all new and sharp. Perhaps it is better to have forgotten.
She pinches the bridge of her nose, and you sit just at the edge of the path that you haven’t traveled.
“I know you’re there,” she says, annoyance littering her tone.
At first, you don’t say anything. What she doesn’t know – or perhaps she does know, somewhere, but hasn’t realized – is that you have heard everything she’s said when you sit here behind her eyes. Everything bad she has said about you, every worry. You haven’t always understood them, but you’ve heard them.
You don’t ask if she wants you gone – the answer to that, you know, is yes. Instead, you ask, voice calm as you can make it, Is this your garden?
“It’s Jamie’s.” Her voice is soft, and she reaches up to touch the bark of the tree behind her. “She planted this tree a month after we moved in, right after—”
She doesn’t say it, but she remembers it, and as she remembers, you see it – she remembers herself coming to sitting on their kitchen counter with a knife in her hand; you remember sitting on the counter, not knowing who you were, and offering a slice of your apple to someone who ended up not being who you remembered.
You remember that someone else used to eat apple slices from your knife, but you do not remember who that was.
I did not mean to startle you.
“Of course, you didn’t.” There is a bit of bitterness to her tone. “You never mean to do anything, do you?”
I mean to be here now. You press your lips together, considering, and then choose not to say anything on that further.
She reaches back and tucks strands of her hair out of her face, but the breeze ruffles them back anyway. It has been so long since you have felt any breeze at all – air conditioning, although nice, is not the same thing in the slightest, and you have refused to tuck her away in most times when she would be out. How, then, would you feel the breeze? You can’t help but sigh with contentment.
Of course, you are not truly feeling the same breeze that she is. But she allows one to exist on this side of the fence so that you might feel it anyway. It is…oddly considerate of her. More considerate than you would expect her to be.
“Enjoying this, are you?”
Quite. You take a deep breath and let it out through your lips. There is silence for a few moments as your host leans her head back against the tree. It is still small, thin, more so than the ones you have planted on your side of the gate, but then, this one is real and so grows much more slowly than those within…wherever it is that you go when you are not here. She glances up through the thin branches and the few leaves that are finally beginning to sprout back to the clouds above. It is almost – almost – calming.
Still. Something feels off.
Is my being here bothering you?
Her lips press together into a thin little line, and she continues to stare up at the sky. It takes long for her to respond – far longer than you would like – and you think that perhaps she will answer with that angry spite that you have often heard her use. Something about how your being here always bothers her.
She lets out a deep breath of her own and continues to stare at the sky. “No more than you normally do.” It’s another second before she continues, “Actually, I would say it’s less than you normally do. I don’t feel like you’re sitting there planning to kill me.”
You should never have thought that in the first place.
“You already tried to kill me once—”
Which I have already explained I do not remember.
“—and how was I to know that, exactly? You were the monster living in the back of my head. You still are.” Her teeth grit together, but she shakes her head. “Forget it. This is just as bad as it normally is.”
You close your eyes again, but you remain where you are. You are still afraid of me.
“You haven’t given me any reason not to be.” Your host rolls her eyes. “You can say whatever you want, doesn’t mean you might not still kill me at some point in the future if you change your mind.” She lets out her deep breath.
There isn’t anything you can say to that. Not anything helpful, anyway. In fact, a part of you is quite certain that whatever you might say will only make things worse. You bite the tip of your tongue so that words do not fall from it.
“This is an apple tree, you know,” she continues when you are silent. She reaches back and knocks her knuckles against the harsh bark of the tree. “Sprouts like this can take eight years or so before we get any fruit from it at all, and there’s no way of knowing if the apples will actually taste any good. Just because you plant seeds from good fruit doesn’t mean more good fruit will grow; that is apparently not how apple genetics work.” She smiles – you can feel it at the corners of your lips. “Jamie says that this one is from a creative crossbreed, so it should be good. I hope, for her sake, that it is. If not, she’ll have to find someone who can make pies with the fruit. Maybe she can get Owen to come back and open a restaurant just next to her flower shop. She can supply him with all of the fruit he will ever need.”
You speak as though you will not be here any longer.
Your host takes another deep breath and nods. “I expect that you will have taken me over completely by then.” She doesn’t give you the space of a breath to interrupt her, forcing onwards. “Whatever grace you are having with me now, I expect you will be tired by then. You already want more and more. Eventually, you will want so much that I will be the one who fades. Isn’t that how this works? One of us thrives and the other…. Well.” She flops one hand.
I do not know, you admit. I haven’t done anything like this before. In the silence that follows, a bird lands among one of the branches of the apple tree. It says something – and, like so many other things, you cannot understand it. And yet, you can’t help but appreciate hearing it. This, perhaps, is something she allows as well. But I believe that if you do not want to fade away, then you will not fade away. I suspect whatever this is must be built between us.
“And if I do not want to build anything?”
Your head tilts just so. I do not think that you have that option. There is so much I have learned and relearned just by being here, despite everything you have done to prevent me from becoming. Your efforts unfortunately seem to have no effect on me. You are the only one who suffers. You consider this for a second, and then you correct yourself. Perhaps you are not the only one who suffers.
She nods once. “You have been remembering more?” she asks, and for once, it seems like she is not mad at you. She is still upset – you can feel her upset – but it doesn’t seem to be with you personally. That is a new relief.
I have, you answer, tentative. In bits and pieces. Not much. Your brows furrow. You remind me of someone, but I cannot remember who.
“That isn’t helpful,” she murmurs.
I was not trying to be helpful, only to answer your question. You lean back on the palms of your hands and look up, away from whatever it is she is searching for and into the feigned sky above you. This isn’t the real sky. You know that. You can admit that, can accept it. Still, you see clouds above you and can try to find images within them just as certainly as she can try to find them in the ones above her. Your images might be more intentionally placed.
“No, I meant,” she says with brows furrowed, “if you don’t know who I remind you of, how can I know if that is a good thing or a bad thing? What if you hated whoever it was?”
Does it matter if I cannot remember who she is?
She crosses her arms. “It matters to me.”
You laugh, a small thing. Well, if I remember who it is, then I will let you know. Even if it is bad. Even if you would perhaps prefer not to know. You sigh. Although I am quite sure that I will not have occasion to remember. I barely remember my own name.
Your host grows quiet then. It is long enough that you think that she must have decided to ignore you entirely again. Well enough. You have had more than enough of a conversation with her to squelch your growing boredom and distract you from the pacing you have been doing. It is something, and that is enough.
But before you are given chance to recede entirely, you hear her say, her voice soft, “You have a name?”
It’s a small thing, and you almost miss it entirely. Yet as soon as she says it, you feel something within you still. Every creature has a name, you say, hesitant, considering your words carefully. You may not always know it, and they may not always be able to communicate it. In some cases, it is possible that some of them have forgotten that they have had a name at all.
“You,” your host says, one of her hands clenching ever so gently on the fabric of the blanket beneath her. “You forgot your name.”
Yes.
“But you remember it now?”
Yes. That is mostly true. You are certain that part of your name is still missing. Both your host and the woman she knows have surnames. You likely had one as well, something to identify you separate from other Violas. That, though, you do not remember. You are not sure how you would. Then again, you still do not understand how you have remembered anything so far, so perhaps, in time, you will remember it as well. You pick out what looks to be the shape of a bird in the clouds overhead. Something small, with a beak and wings stretched out and no legs to speak of.
“What is it?”
I thought you would prefer not to know, you say immediately, the words biting from your lips although you do not intend for them to bite. You seem desperate to continue to imagine me as something less than human. Being nameless helps with that pursuit. Are you truly sure that you wish to hear it?
Your host sighs. “I’m Dani,” she says. Her head wobbles a bit in annoyance. “Danielle Clayton, though no one has called me that in years. My students always called me Ms. Clayton, but you aren’t one of those, I should hope, so Dani will suffice.” She appears across from you in the pathway, her arms crossed, and stares at you. “I would rather you have a name for me. I don’t want you to see me as less than human.”
“I have never seen you as less than human,” you say, “once I realized that you were there at all.” It is a small thing – the closest to an acknowledgment of the raging, faceless being you had been before that you can give her. As much as she might say you were that thing – and as much as a part of you may have been it – you cannot see that thing as the full of you and are not sure you will ever be able to.
“And how do you see me?” Dani asks, staring at you.
A stare might be better than a glare, but it doesn’t mean that you will answer that question in the slightest. To answer it means that you will have to consider it, and since you haven’t considered it at all, you have no answer. Still, you cannot remain silent. “Full of light.” You smile, a playful thing.
Dani continues to stare at you, and she asks again, “What is your name?”
You don’t want to say it. You do not know why, but you do not want to say it.
“Viola,” you say, and the word seems thunderingly loud, so much so that you can feel your insides flinch even as you remain standing still. “My name is Viola.”
Dani nods once, more to herself than to you. She mouths your name without saying it, brow furrowing, arms still crossed. “And your daughter?” she asks – because she pushes, she does, she makes you uncomfortable the same way you guess that you must make her.
“I would prefer not to talk about her. I believe I have said this before.” In point of fact, you know you have. It is unfortunate that your host refuses to acknowledge that.
Dani nods once again, and then she is gone. You feel as though you could press yourself up through her again, so that you might look out into the real world, onto the grass that is just beginning to sprout through the remainders of the snow, grass that still appears just as bright and green as it did in the spring when it rains so cheerily, and yet…you have no desire to do so. As you decided before, this is enough. For now, this is enough.
And yet, you still want more and you will still want more.
You are not sure you will ever be finished with wanting.
As soon as Dani feels the creature – the woman – Viola’s presence vanish, she gets up. The ache between her eyes is gone, far past the path across her skull, not even the smallest gleam of pressure in that familiar spot at its back. She leaves the blanket beneath the tree, leaves the plate behind, and goes immediately back inside, into the living room, where the Shakespearean books rest. She remembers something – something from her dreams, that little bit of writing at the top right hand corner of the first page of the books – that small thing that looks a bit like the writing on the note did – and she pulls out Twelfth Night. No wonder the writing looked similar, no wonder that name had been circled and underlined so many times. It must have been her conscious – or subconscious – mind trying to tell her what it already knew: Viola’s name.
And there – of course – written in small handwriting, in a cursive print that she can only barely begin to read, is a name that, by now, she knows. Not necessarily well. Not quite well. But it is certainly one that she recognizes.
Viola Lloyd, written in that tiny script, and beneath it, in a much more haphazard but barely legible script, was the name Perdita Lloyd, and, finally, beneath that in even smaller, tidier script similar to that of the first writer was the name Isabel Lloyd.
Dani stares at the names. Of course, just because a name is written in the tops of these books doesn’t mean that this Viola is the one living in the back of her mind, but she recognizes the name – Viola Lloyd – from the rubbings Flora did while they were at Bly.
This must be her, Dani thinks, her lips still pressed together, and these were her books long before they were ever mine.
Her brows furrow with thought. The rubbing Flora gave her – she hadn’t kept it, hadn’t wanted to keep it – but if she remembered correctly, it was a rubbing of her gravestone. That means there should have been dates. There should have been birth years, at least, which would give her some sort of idea of when the ghost in the back of her head might possibly have lived.
Not that she particularly cares.
No – the worst of it is that the more Dani considers the creature in the back of her mind as an actual, real woman, the more she does care. She isn’t sure what that caring can do or how it will help her situation. If anything, it doesn’t help. It makes things worse. Her body is her own, not something she wishes to share with another human being with thoughts and emotions and a life separate from her own.
The worst thing about having a heart is that sometimes it aches for someone that it shouldn’t ache for, someone detrimental to its continued existence. Viola might not mean to devour her, might not mean to destroy her, but the threat....
Sometimes, Dani thinks the continued belief of a threat is a lie, one that she is forcing down her own throat. But as much as she might want to touch Viola, that doesn’t mean that she can. Not entirely. Not after only two conversations. That isn’t enough for a normal person, let alone for a ghost who, regardless whether she meant to do it or not, did try to kill her.
Dani takes a deep breath, runs her right thumb over the names etched into the top right hand corner of the scarlet front page of the book, and then closes it, placing it back into its place on her shelf. Having names and a potential direction – returning to Bly – means nothing in the face of her current predicament. She isn’t going to be going back to Bly to chase the memories of her ghost. Not right now, and not any time soon. Not if she has anything to say about it.
And as long as the ghost isn’t aware that it is an option – or even something she might want – then she won’t ask for it. In fact, Dani isn’t sure Viola would ask at all. She doesn’t seem like the sort to do much asking.
So Dani straightens back up, nodding once to herself, and stares at the books as though they expect her to make a different, better choice. But books don’t have to live as she does, and they don’t have the right to judge her.
No one does.