Chapter 38
Dr. Lundy’s house is not what you expect, but then, Dr. Lundy herself is not what you expect either. Part of that is Emilio’s fault; the man is such an image of the pompous windbags that you were accustomed to during your time on earth that you expected any therapist he suggested would be of an equal sort. Certainly, she wouldn’t appear of an equal age to his eldest. You expected someone older – not maternal but perhaps grandmotherly, with hair pulled back into a tight bun and wicked eyes behind thin glasses.
But the therapist is none of those things. She is young – far too young – with tired eyes and short brown hair swept back out of her face. There is a feather tied back behind one ear that you just barely catch before it disappears behind her hair again. She tucks her hair back, and as she does, her fingers pull out the feather. Her hand clenches on it so tight that you can only see the slightest tip of it, and as she leads you through her house, she throws the feather into a drawer, hiding it entirely.
The house itself seems as old as you expected the doctor to be. The furniture is more in tune with your own preferences – or your assumed preferences, given the room you find yourself in when you aren’t seeing out of your host’s eyes. Dark wood, a lot of what you’ve heard described as character or Victorian pieces. There’s a glass cabinet to one side filled with glass knick-knacks – trinkets and treasures that you suspect aren’t from this time. They seem more in line with your own.
Even the girl herself. She seems to belong to a different time altogether. Not your time. But not this one either.
“I never should have agreed to see Luisa,” Dr. Lundy murmurs as she moves into the living room. “She knew they weren’t playdates, and Emilio shouldn’t have given out my address.” Her eyes narrow as she turns back to you, sitting on a large antique chair. She curls up to one side, one leg crossed over the other, and stares at you, waiting for you to sit on the couch opposite her.
“You look like a child,” you murmur, “but you aren’t one.” There is always the possibility that children can be therapists in this time, but you don’t think that’s at all likely.
“You look like a human being,” Dr. Lundy says without the hint of a snap, “but I suspect you aren’t one either.” She takes a clipboard from one side, holds a pen in one hand, and taps it on the pad a couple of times. “Am I to meet the both of you today, or just the one?”
You clench your fingers, not into a fist, but on the edge of the sofa cushion, tight. The cushion isn’t as soft as Dani and Jamie’s sofa is, and it feels firm under your grip. That isn’t helpful. “I am not at all certain of how this sort of thing works. Therapy was never like this, and I—”
Dr. Lundy sighs, interrupting you, and puts the clipboard over to one side. “Let me make this easier for you.” She clasps her hands together and rests them on one knee. The sharp contrast between her more adult actions and her younger body feels odd. Wrong, even, in the same way that looking into a mirror and seeing Dani’s reflection instead of your own is. “Therapists, like myself, meet with their clients on a schedule. Weekly, biweekly, monthly. Sometimes more, if you feel like you need more. But each of those sessions comes at a cost – usually a fixed rate per hour. Usually I carry my sessions over the phone instead of in person. Most people won’t take therapeutic advice from a child, and as long as I look like one, they will assume I am one. You might be different, but that doesn’t mean the other person cohabitating that body with you will.” She takes a deep breath. “You’re probably here for some sort of relationship or couple’s therapy, which is not my specialty – but you’re different, which is my specialty.” A smile tugs at the corner of her lips, but she doesn’t let it loose. “We talk. That’s really all therapy is nowadays. A lot of talk. Medication, if I think it will help, but in your case? Not likely.”
“And what is my case, Dr. Lundy?”
The young girl across from you – certainly she cannot be older than the girl you and Dani are meant to tutor, and yet you know that, somehow, she is in just the same way that you are not Dani even though you wear her body like your own skin – flinches at your words. “Lundy,” she corrects, flicking a hand through an errant strand of hair. “I worked hard for that title, but it feels weird for you to say it.”
“Lundy, then.” You repeat her name again, but you don’t say it aloud, just let your tongue taste it. Lundy as a proper first name and not a real last name, then. Without the title, it feels disrespectful, but surely it would be more so if you forced her to accept your use of it. After having yours again, after going so long without it, you aren’t sure that you could just change it to something else. Viola finally feels like it fits, even if you don’t always know the woman you were – the woman to who it truly belongs. “What is my case?”
Lundy smiles, but there is no mirth to it. You think she must do this all the time, like she’s holding a secret and you just can’t see it. “Why don’t you tell me?”
For a while, you consider her words. You consider a lot of things. You consider what you would say, what you could say, and how you could say it. But most of all, you consider—
“You said that this comes at a cost.” You clasp your hands together over your host’s knee. It would have been much more comfortable for you to wear a skirt – and looking through your host’s closet before you left, you had found one or two – but you also know that those don’t make her comfortable. Even now, even tucking her away and taking over her body, even doing something you know doesn’t make her comfortable, you’re still thinking about…making her comfortable. You are sure she has never thought about you in the same way, never wanted to think about you in the same way.
It hurts.
It hurts.
“Why don’t you tell me what you need,” Lundy says, her voice very measured and calm, “and I’ll tell you how much it will cost.”
You press your lips together. “I don’t have much money.” It is an admittance that stings you to your core. You had money, once. You would have been able to pay for this, once. But that once was at a time when you wouldn’t have been able to do this at all. No – you would have been able, but you wouldn’t have done it, wouldn’t have trusted it would end well.
You still aren’t sure this will end well, but Emilio made it a requirement. (You could continue to lie to him, but you have a feeling he would figure that out eventually.)
“I don’t believe I said it would cost money,” Lundy says, keeping a careful eye on you. “It could cost something else entirely. An hour of your time, perhaps, spent with the other person stuck within you – or that same hour given to them to let them be or do whatever they want.” She shrugs. “Or a good shot of vodka. They won’t let me have anything in the bars, given my appearance.”
You look her over. “I take it that isn’t how this normally works.”
“Not at all. But it might be the way it works with you.” Lundy drums her fingers on the arm of her chair. “I don’t want to keep you from getting the help you need just because you don’t have the money to pay for it.”
Your eyes narrow in confusion. “But you mentioned that – the telling me how much it would cost – before I admitted to not having much money.”
“I’m a psychiatrist,” Lundy says, meeting your eyes. “I have learned to be good at reading people.”
This is a lie. You can feel it in the marrow of Dani’s bones. It’s a lie. But one that you won’t be able to push your new therapist into explaining to you. You know that well enough.
Still.
You clasp your hands together, and you give a little nod – more to yourself than to the young woman sitting across from you. “Fine,” you say, your forefinger tapping against your knuckle twice. You cross one leg over the other and slowly lean against the back of the couch, trying to let yourself get comfortable. It isn’t as easy as you would like it to be. You are nervous. You feel as though perhaps this is something you should have discussed with the gardener or your host before jumping immediately into it. And yet, here you are.
You take a deep breath. “Let me tell you what I know.”
Even Hannah Grose’s mind kept trying to return to itself. She kept reliving that same moment with Owen over and over, like a safe space in the whirling, blending of the past and present together such that she couldn’t quite keep them straight. Hannah Grose became quite good at making the best of whichever situation she found herself in, but there was always that part of her mind – that scene with Owen, that Owen himself, trying to get her to see and understand the truth of the situation.
Dani is no Hannah Grose, and she is not dead – no matter how much she might think that she’s living on borrowed time, she is not dead yet – and so her mind, as well, keeps trying to let the light of the truth shine in through whatever crack it can find.
When she and Jamie are finished, Dani allows herself to relax. It’s the first time she’s felt like she’s been able to relax in— Probably since Eddie, if she’s honest with herself. She wakes the next morning refreshed and reaches out for the young woman.
There’s no one there.
Dani sits up, blinking, as the sun floods through the light into her childhood bedroom. She stares at the window; stares at the bright pink shade of her room, barely muted by her adulthood; stares at the white furniture, at the lavender canopy frilly overhead, at the light soft through its sheen. This isn’t where she was. This isn’t where she is. She’s somewhere…somewhere else.
A rock hits her window.
No. He’s dead.
Another rock ticking against her window, and Dani props her palms on her mattress and pushes herself out of her bed. She pulls her white nightgown a little straighter, making sure she’s relatively more modest than she was (something in her hates white nightgowns now, but she doesn’t know why that is – perhaps they’re too girly, but something says that isn’t it, you know why you hate white nightgowns, you know why you—). When she makes it to the window, she stands to one side, trying to hide herself behind its lacy white curtains as she glimpses through to see who might be outside.
Eddie.
He’s younger than she remembers him, but his hair is still that tangle of messy brown curls. His glasses are silver frames this time, instead of the gold he’ll be wearing when he dies, but his cheeks are flushed red with that excitement he always used to wear when they were together. Even now, when they aren’t really together. Just almost.
She stares out at him, still hidden by the curtains, but he stops throwing rocks at the window. He grins. The curtains are too sheer – even if she’s trying to hide, he can still see the form of her behind them. He gives her a wink.
In the same moment, he shifts and is replaced with that other version of him. His glasses turn that gold and broken and they flash white with the glare of a light that isn’t really there, a light reflected from the truck barreling at him from a future that he hasn’t reached yet. (He has already reached it, that’s how you know it’s coming, you have to—)
Something knocks on the door behind her.
Dani jumps and turns—
“I think,” Lundy says, finally, when you have finished telling her everything you know, everything you’ve remembered, and everything you have been told about what happened, “that I should meet this Dani Clayton of yours.” Her voice isn’t sharp or taut or tight in the slightest. There’s nothing in it to suggest that she is at all afraid of you for what you have explained. She considers you for a moment. “Right now, your cost for telling me all of that is to let Dani and I have our own conversation, completely alone, just as I am sure she has allowed you and me to have ours.”
You do not tell her that Dani really didn’t have a choice. Somehow, you believe that Lundy will not appreciate that.
“I will try—”
“You will do,” Lundy interrupts before you can finish, “or you will not have paid for my services, and I will not continue on as your therapist.” She leans forward, resting her chin on her knuckles. “If I were you, I would not like to owe me a debt. That will not go in your favor.”
You blink a couple of times, and your teeth – Dani’s teeth – grit together. “Next time,” you mutter, “I would like to know the cost ahead of time, please. If that can be arranged.”
Lundy smiles, and there’s something wicked, something wrong in it. “Of course,” she mutters, but her voice is very clear. “I can make sure of that.” Then she raises her brows and nods once. “Until then, I still should like to meet Dani. Will you get her for me, please?”
You meet her eyes, and they glimmer with something you don’t like. “Of course,” you murmur. “Just a moment.”
Dani doesn’t know what is happening.
She’s here. She knows she’s here. It’s real, she can feel the mattress beneath her fingers, but this isn’t Bly like she remembers, it’s Bly like – well, she isn’t even sure it is Bly, but it looks almost like the room she stayed in, but it isn’t the room she stayed in, and if she thinks about it long enough, then this one, too, should be familiar, but—
Something happens. Something dark and dreadful rips through into her world and grabs her arm and pulls her out all at once.
It hurts.
She didn’t know it could hurt this badly.
Her breath catches in her throat as she comes to in a room she does not know, in front of a young girl she does not know, in a time she does not know. She takes a deep breath, her eyes widening, and she clenches her fingers without thinking about it, letting her nails dig into the arm of the couch she sits on. She doesn’t even know this couch. She looks around her. It feels old, but the young girl across from her doesn’t feel old in the slightest.
This must be her grandparents’ place. She must be visiting this girl’s grandparents. Or this girl is visiting her grandparents and she just happens to be here.
Dani takes another deep breath, and the air is harsh against her lungs – harsher than wherever it was she was just previously. Where is she? Where has she been? Did Viola—?
“You seem confused,” the girl seated across from her says, and her lips creep into a little smile. “I take it Viola didn’t tell you anything. Did she just drop you here?”
Dani grits her teeth together, and she looks up, as though looking into her mind, but she isn’t looking for Viola. She’ll have a talk with her later. “Where am I?” she says, trying not to grit her teeth, trying to stay as calm as possible while sitting across from this young girl. She forces herself to remain calm, to sound calm. Still, something else bubbles within her. “And how do you know who Viola is?”
The girl grins, taps her fingers on a clipboard just next to her, and crosses one leg over the other in a manner similar to her mother when she was frustrated with her. “My name is Lundy,” she says, “and I will be your therapist. Now, let’s get started.”