Chapter 35
You cannot bear to let yourself leave your room.
That creature – that unending rage – that wasn’t – isn’t – you. But it comes from you. If you cannot control it, if you slip—
You are ashamed of yourself. That’s the word for this feeling, you are quite certain of that. You are ashamed. It is a new feeling for you. Even in that memory with your child – you acknowledge that emotion exists but that you have never felt it. And yet, now, you do.
Every now and again, you step out of your bed, and you see yourself in your long night gown, and you see your bright green eyes and you think to yourself, This. This is what I look like. And the thing of it is, you know that. You can feel the rightness of it deep within your bones. You refuse to remember looking anything else, not even in your childhood – primarily because you still cannot remember your childhood.
And yet that rage that overcame you brought you to another form entirely: soaked, dripping wet, faceless, eyeless, seeing yet unable to see, everything fuzzy and muted, your jaw unhinged – you knew it could do that, you vaguely remember doing that once to scare those around you – and you….
You’d forgotten. You knew, and yet you’d forgotten.
Perhaps this is your curse. Perhaps even here, remembering who you once were, you are cursed to forget. Perhaps the forgetting is necessary. Perhaps, when you remember everything, you will only become that creature again.
You do not remember every being scared of anything before, but this? It terrifies you. Perhaps this is your curse – to constantly be forgetting and remembering and forgetting and remembering – this cycle that you cannot let go. Perhaps—
You cannot bear to let yourself leave your room, and yet you cannot bear to remain within it either.
There are books that replenish themselves, yes, and you could read and reread them again and again for a long, long time. You have tea and food and—
It isn’t as though things aren’t plentiful here. They are. You could be content here. Then you would not be driven to that rage that would so easily devour your host. In truth, a part of you, still frustrated with her, would not much mind that. Squelching her—
No. You cannot think like that. As much as you may have problems with your host, as much as the two of you might argue, she is still a human being who does not deserve such a result, no matter how much she might be afraid of your doing it. Even more importantly, her Jamie does not deserve that either, not after she has been nothing but kind and gentle with you, even if she is only doing so to protect your host. She has taken too many pains to help you. She has offered to host you, even if she hasn’t offered so to you directly. Still, it’s there.
Perhaps—
You cannot bear to remain within your room. The problem with time is that you do not know how long you have kept yourself locked away. Certainly it is far longer than you imagine it is. Time is not consistent here. It feels long to you, so it must be longer to Jamie and your host. But this is a different sort of length than that to which you are accustomed. This is you, in the silence, being silent, making yourself silent.
And those lengths often aren’t nearly as long as they feel.
It is dark when you come to in your host’s body.
You are curled up on her side in the bed she shares with her partner, and yet you are alone. This surprises you and yet does not surprise you. The gardener must have woken early again, while your host still slumbers. This cannot be good; your host will likely want to wake within the hour, and she will panic if she finds herself stuck, locked away in your room. You cannot risk that. Not now. Not after—
Well. You do not know how long it has been. Perhaps she will find this acceptable. (She will never find it acceptable.) Besides, how would you feel if—
No. You cannot know how it would feel to share your body with a ghost when you are the ghost who is sharing the body. You cannot imagine what it would be like to find yourself supplanted when you are the one who does the supplanting. You will, by nature, be biased in a way that your host cannot be: you feel for the ghost in the scenario more than you do for yourself as the host. You would try to both sides it. Your host never would.
Still, you risk it, slipping out of your host’s bed until her bare feet just touch the cold floor. It is still cold here, even though the weather has started to grow steadily warmer whenever your host walks to the library. You slip out of the bedroom and squint in dismay at the figure curled up on the couch – the gardener, not awake at all, but slumbering. How long have you been gone, for the two of them to have ended thusly?
You kneel in front of the woman’s slumbering form, and without thinking, you reach over and brush an errant curl out of her face and behind one ear. She seems sweet when she slumbers. Perhaps, once, someone must have thought of you the same way.
She moves in her sleep, one eye just cracking open, and she stares at you. It’s easy to smile. You feel it in your bones, your muscles – no, not yours, those of your host, these are her bones and her muscles reacting immediately to the woman with the gentlest of smiles – and she reaches for you, cups your cheek, and brushes a thumb along her cheekbone. “Knew you couldn’t stay away too long, Poppins.”
You flinch.
Her eyes narrow in confusion and then widen in shock. “Viola?” She bolts upright, pushing her hands through her mussy, curly hair, and groans. “What are you doing?”
“I don’t know.” You gently clench your fingers – not yours, never yours anymore, always hers, no matter how much you might refer to them as yours – and look away, unable to meet her eyes. It wasn’t anything wrong. You didn’t mean anything by it. You just…acted. “I didn’t mean to wake you.”
“Well, you did. Blimey, can’t I get any rest around here?” The words hiss hushed through her lips, followed by another groan as her fingertips press into her skull. “Now’s not a good time, ghostie.”
You nod. “You’ve been working long hours,” you say by way of explanation that she isn’t giving you. “You’re staying here to keep from waking her. I understand.”
But the gardener gives you a look – strong, sharp – and you understand that whatever you think, it isn’t the case. You raise an eyebrow. “Did something happen?”
“You,” Jamie says with the softest of sighs, pushing a hand through her curls again. “You happened.” She doesn’t reach a hand over, she doesn’t comfort you, she doesn’t do anything to suggest that she feels wrong or incorrect in what she is saying. There’s weight to it. Blame.
The rage bubbles underneath your skin. You have done nothing except exist, and that alone has set them all on edge. You have apologized enough. You have done enough. You have changed and learned and adapted and tried. But what seems enough to you isn’t enough for them. It never has been. Why do you think it ever will be?
“Listen, ghostie, we need to have a talk.”
“No.” The word slips through your lips – your lips, you could make them yours, if you want, only you have never wanted for that – easily enough, and the rage follows with it, darker than you intend. “I have grown tired of talking and hearing the infinite things I have done wrong by you and yours while there is little consideration for me beyond that of the beast lurking in the night, waiting to devour its prey. Even you.”
You hate saying the words. You hate them. This one has treated you far better than your host has, and she does not deserve this. But you grow weary of a mediator who is biased towards your host and to whom your host refuses to listen. “Talking to you does me no good. If she has something she wants me to hear, she needs to speak with me herself. She doesn’t listen to me, and she doesn’t listen to you. I see, Jamie. I hear. And I need more than the table scraps she is willing to offer me.”
It is more than you intended to say, and you hadn’t intended to say anything at all. You only meant—
You do not know what you meant.
You shake your head. “I remembered my daughter.” This is said easily enough. If you meant to tell her anything, it was that. “Do you know what it’s like to know that you had a child and not be able to remember her name? She was so small.” You search your hands, unable to look up. “So small.”
“Viola—”
“I remembered her while I was reading with Rafael. I did not intend for us to keep meeting with him or his sister. Your – my –” You do not struggle with the word, but you hesitate to use her name. You don’t know why. “Dani intervened when his father arrived. She suggested that we be allowed to teach them, and now she is taking that away from me. I don’t understand.” Your fingers clench tighter. Not quite fists, although you are certain you could punch someone’s lights out if called upon. “I don’t understand why she would offer that and then refuse to let me help, and I don’t understand why when I did help – and when I apologized for taking control—” You shake your head, and your eyes flash dark as you look up at the other woman. “She wouldn’t listen to me. She didn’t know how to deal with their father. Not like I did. And she wouldn’t listen.”
“You still shouldn’t’ve—”
“I know that, but she shouldn’t have ignored me.” The words bubble with your rage, your frustration. “If she had listened, I would not have felt so pressed as to thrust myself forward and displace her. I have apologized for locking her away, and it does not matter. She refuses to acknowledge that she did anything wrong.” You glare at the gardener. No. Not at her. Past her. You aren’t truly looking at her anymore. “She only wants to punish me and take away from me something I wouldn’t have known to hope for if she hadn’t put it forward in the first place. She is lying to me. And I cannot—”
You bite your tongue. This rambling is most unlike you, and you detest yourself for so doing. But the words are circling over and over in your head, and this is the only way you know of to get them out. You do not expect her to listen either. Not to this rage-filled rant. You wouldn’t expect this of anyone.
(You might have once.)
“There is this rage building inside of me,” you whisper, “and as much as I try to cool it, that does nothing if she continues to stroke it. A fire cannot die unless it is quenched, and it is impossible to quench while she keeps rebuilding it. You do well enough. I do well enough. But I cannot keep it from consuming me and her if she does not learn to treat me the same as she does everyone else. I am not an animal to be tamed. I am a human being, who lived and who lives still. Pity my existence if you must, hate it if you must, but—”
Jamie reaches out and touches your hand, stopping you. “We met the rage first, ghostie,” she murmurs. “It’s the rage she meant to accept.”
You growl. You cannot help it. “It is the rage she meant to kill, then, and it would do her well to remember that.” You glance up long enough to meet her deep blue eyes, knowing that your own flicker with a kindled rage you cannot suppress. “I am not my rage, but my rage comes from within me, from something I do not remember, from a slight, a grief turned to anger. Perhaps, in the future, I will remember where it began and can cut it off at its source, but until then—”
This is doing no good. You know this. Even if the rage itself did not exist, even if you did not act out in it, even if—
Every movement with your host feels like three steps forward and four steps back. Sometimes two steps back, but then the next time four, so that the forward momentum is halting and stuttering at the best of times. She took you to the library and allowed you more books – that was a step forward. She broached the subject of teaching the children – that was a step forward. At that time, you had no reason to believe she would not have included you in their teaching. Only now.
She is afraid, and there is little you can do to quell her fear, and her fear stems from that thing which you suppress and which she continues to stoke by her refusal to—
It is all another loop, isn’t it?
Sleep, wake, walk.
Forward and backward, forward and backward.
Rocked by the waves of a lake in which you no longer dwell, waves crafted by a storm which, most certainly, was born from you.
“Viola—”
“Don’t tell me to look at it from her side of things, Jamie,” you say, unable to stop yourself. “I have done that plenty of times. But she has refused to look at it from mine.” You remove your hand from under hers, take a deep breath, and still yourself as much as you are able. Her lips press together in a thin line – for they are hers, and not yours – and you glance over to the door. “I think it is time that I take a walk.”
Jamie’s hand reaches for yours as you stand and step away from her. You feel her fingertips brush against yours, and you pull away. “Do not try to stop me,” you whisper, still staring at the door. “I am so tired of being locked away in here and only let out when my host determines it acceptable.” You tuck her hair back behind your ears the way you must have once done with yours. It is an easy movement, habitual, and you don’t even realize it until it is done. “I am so tired.”
You have slept. You have woken.
Now it is time to walk.
Jamie reaches out again, stretches to capture your hand, and holds it just. “Shoes, ghostie,” she says as you turn back and meet her eyes. “If you’re going out, wear shoes. Don’t want glass or cut up feet. And carry a knife with—” She pauses, chuckles. “No, you don’t need that. Anyone tries to hurt you, they’ll learn right quick to back off.” She gives your hand a squeeze. “Don’t get yourself killed again. You’ll kill her, and then I’ll have to come kill you, and then we’ll be in a mess of killing. Don’t think that’s right proper of you.”
You don’t say anything, simply continue to hold her gaze as you drop her hand. The world is bigger than an apartment, than a house, than a library. It is time for you to see it with your own eyes, instead of looking out on it through hers.
But you make sure to put on a pair of slippers before you leave.
Just in case.