A Lesson in Vengeance

by Victoria Lee

  Where is Alex, Felicity?

  What happened to Alex?

  I can’t stand anymore; my legs feel fragile as flower stems, and I sink to the ground. I’m shaking, and Ellis leans over me, touching hesitant fingers between my shoulder blades.

  “They never found her,” I whisper. I know that now. Ellis is right. I remember, I—

  Ellis shakes her head. “Divers searched the whole lake and half the Hudson shoreline. Eventually the police said her body had probably floated out to sea.”

  Why did I think she’d died climbing? That wasn’t true. I’d never even gone climbing with Alex—I don’t even know how.

  Was that story easier than the truth?

  Why was it easier?

  Maybe I just wanted to believe Alex had died doing something she loved. I didn’t want it to be up there on that ledge, the two of us fighting about, about—

  And then she fell.

  I tip forward, pressing my brow against my knees.

  I can’t escape the memories rising in me like a briny tide.

  Alex, her cheeks pink with anger.

  Alex, shouting.

  “I tried to save her,” I sob. I don’t know when I started crying. It chokes me, the tears salty when they catch on my lips, soak my tongue. “I tried. I tried. I swam out after her, but she…she already…”

  She must have hit her head too hard when she fell; she would have lost consciousness immediately. There was no dramatic struggle to stay afloat, no flailing limbs or splashing water. Just terrible silence. I dove under again and again, eyes straining against the black water, searching. I dragged my fingers through the silt at the lake bottom. I cut my hands on the rocky edge of that cliff, clinging there and gasping for breath as I realized it was too late.

  Alex was gone. The lake had swallowed her up and carried her far, far away. She was never coming back.

  “It wasn’t your fault,” Ellis says.

  “You don’t know that,” I say, and I laugh. I know how I sound—wild and unhinged. The same crazy girl they all think I am.

  This is just what Ellis wants to believe. It’s what I want to believe, and that’s precisely why Alex won’t let me go. She haunts me because she knows, as I know, that if things had been different…if I’d climbed down after her faster, if we hadn’t argued in the first place, if Alex hadn’t been drinking…

  Ellis’s mouth puckers, but she doesn’t pull away. Instead she reaches for my wrist, fingers curling light around my bones and holding there. “How did she fall?”

  Ellis says it so gently, and I want to trust her. I want to trust her more than anything. I want there to be someone in this terrible and twisted world I can trust.

  “She slipped,” I whisper. “She’d had…We’d both had a lot to drink. We’d been at the Boleyn end-of-semester party, you know? And we…”

  Alex in her black beaded dress, pearls in her hair. Her fingertips smelled like cigarette smoke. Her lipstick was smudged.

  “We fought. I’d run out of the party. I just wanted to be away from her for a little while. To calm down. But she followed me up onto the cliffs. She kept yelling at me. And I—”

  I don’t want to think about it. I don’t want to remember. I don’t.

  But I have to. Ellis is right; Dr. Ortega is right. I have to face this. I close my eyes and see Alex’s lips parting in that O of surprise, her hair catching on the rings on my fingers. Too late. Regret always comes too late.

  “She was, you know…gesturing a lot. She did that when she talked. Especially when she was angry. And I guess she…lost balance. And she…stumbled. She…”

  “None of that is your fault. You didn’t force her to drink; that was her choice. You didn’t make her fall.”

  I laugh, a strangled, bitter sound. “I don’t know why you can’t…why you don’t understand—you’re a writer, aren’t you? You know nothing’s ever that simple.”

  “What, because you argued first? People argue, Felicity. People get angry. It’s tragic that she died while you were fighting, but she didn’t die because of it. Alex’s death was an accident.” Ellis’s hand slips into my hair; her thumb strokes my cheek.

  God. I wish I were just a little bit less broken, a little less humiliatingly weak.

  My mother would be so ashamed.

  It’s that thought, more than anything, that makes me suck in an unsteady breath and lift my head. I scrub the tears from my cheeks with the heels of both hands and stand, moving away from Ellis’s touch and forcing a trembling smile onto my lips.

  “I’m okay,” I tell her. “Sorry. I don’t know what…I’m not usually like this.”

  The words ring false; the version of me that was in the hospital, that lay curled up in a thin bed for weeks, drunk off grief and medication, knows the truth.

  I’ve always been like this.

  And Ellis knows it now, because she saw me break down in the middle of this antiques shop. She—god—she knows I made up a different story about how Alex died. And she knows that I believed it.

  “I don’t know why I said that thing about the mountain,” I tell her, letting my gaze drift away from Ellis’s face to fixate on the gloves on my hands instead. The leather has worn at the fingertips, a relic of someone else’s hands, someone else’s life.

  Only that isn’t true, either. Now that I’m here, now that I’m thinking about it, I remember. This was something Dr. Ortega had come up with. An exercise, trying to convince me that Alex’s death hadn’t been my fault.

  Write me a story, the doctor had said. Write Alex’s death as it might have happened in another universe, without the fight.

  I’d written about mountains and snow and autumn storms, about a rope and a knife. Dr. Ortega had read it at her desk while I sat in the chair across from her, my hands folded primly in my lap, awaiting her verdict.

  And how did writing this story make you feel?

  “One of the articles I read about Alex said that she’d had a fight with another professional climber,” Ellis says, pulling me back. “She’d gotten violent and broke the other girl’s nose. She got kicked off the Youth Olympics team.”

  That’s right. That’s right, she did. Alex had called me in tears that summer night, crying so hard I could barely understand her over the phone. I’d shut myself away in my bedroom where my mother couldn’t overhear and begged her to explain how this had happened. Only she couldn’t.

  There’s no excuse, Alex told me. I messed up, I fucked up, I’m so…And between sobs I pieced together a story of relentless bullying, hazing, sabotage.

  Alex’s temper was something vicious and vibrant, flaring up bright as lit magnesium—although it never burned out nearly so quickly. It didn’t matter if Alex’s tormentor deserved it, if this assault was the period at the end of a very long sentence—if Alex, like anyone sick and tired of being treated as less-than because they can’t afford the best equipment or the newest shoes, finally snapped.

  Alex had attacked that girl, and she’d ruined her career over it.

  “Yes,” I say quietly. “Everyone wouldn’t stop talking about it, even once we got back to school. Alex hated that. She…she hated the way people looked at her. So maybe that’s why.”

  I’d wanted to give her a better ending. A happier one. One that was less violent, one where Alex hadn’t been angry.

  I sniffle and wipe my cheeks again, then finally look back at Ellis. “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to make a scene. I’m…fine.”

  “Are you sure?” Ellis says, and I nod. She presses her mouth into a thin line and turns away, pretending interest in the ancient, wilting books that line the shelves behind her.

  A part of me doesn’t ever want to leave this shop, doesn’t want to step out that door and go back to campus, to the place where Alex died. I don’t want to leave the reality I wrote for Dr
. Ortega.

  But I have no choice, of course. I don’t want to lie to myself anymore.

  I try to remember being on that mountain again, but this time the memory feels muddy and distant, like one of the framed sepia photographs atop the store’s antique piano. I can’t remember how the snow tasted on my tongue anymore. I can’t remember the texture of the rope.

  We spend another half hour or so in that shop without speaking. Ellis buys the hat and I leave with a beautiful vintage copy of Rebecca that has a forget-me-not pressed between the pages.

  We don’t talk on the ride back to campus. But Ellis reaches over and touches my shoulder before we get out of the car. It’s just for a moment, but I feel the heat of her hand there for hours before it fades.

  * * *

  —

  I don’t know how I fall asleep that night, but I do—only to lurch awake in the dark with my heart on my tongue and Alex’s screams in my ears. I swear her voice still echoes off the walls of my constricted bedroom as if the scream has penetrated my dream from the real world and not the other way around. I look at my alarm clock with one hand cupped around my brow, squinting against the glowing red numbers: it’s three in the morning.

  My stomach is uneasy, pitching like a sea at storm. I get up and turn on the lights, both arms hugged around my neck and my back to the door as I stare at my empty room. No one is here. No shrouded spirit emerges from hell to haunt me.

  Then my gaze lands on the window. It’s like getting shot in the throat, air cut off, ears ringing.

  Fog had risen overnight, clouding the window behind my desk. And in that mist a perfect handprint presses against the glass from the outside, little rivulets of water dripping down the chilly palm.

  In the light of day—on the other end of hours curled up under my covers, sweating and sick to my gut, in and out of the bathroom until I’ve vomited so much it feels like I’ve expelled my spleen along with my stomach contents—I try to entertain mundane explanations for what I saw. But I couldn’t recall ever pressing my own hand to my bedroom window, and it’s too high up off the ground for a passerby to have touched it from the other side. I imagine some sinister creature slipping out from the forest, tall and faceless as the tree trunks, peering through the glass and watching me sleep. I imagine Tamsyn Penhaligon swinging from the oak tree.

  I would have preferred the wildwood explanation, but I suspect the spirit who left this mark lives closer to home.

  * * *

  —

  “Are you sick?”

  I lift my head from my book. I’ve been reading in the main library since it opened at eight, escaping the dark shadows and slanted floors of Godwin for the comforting glow of fluorescent light. I couldn’t stay there. Everything reminded me of how sick I’d been overnight, from the water glass to my toothbrush on the bathroom sink. And every corner felt like it shrouded secrets, Alex watching me from the shadows. Since coming to the library, I’ve finished The Haunting of Hill House and moved on to Rebecca, which, although a favorite of mine, is nevertheless consistent with the whole theme of eerie mansions haunted by the ghosts of dead women. My nausea throbs below my breastbone, insatiable.

  It’s been hours now, or it must have been; the campus, outside the library windows, has taken on the golden hue of late afternoon.

  Ellis stands with her hip tilted against the wall of my carrel, long legs crossed at the ankles. She looks relaxed enough to have been there for a good while, myself too absorbed in du Maurier’s words to notice.

  “What?” I say, too belatedly.

  “You look pale,” she says, taps beneath one eye. “Dark circles. Are you sick?”

  I don’t know why she’s asking, after yesterday. She knows why I’m upset. Maybe this is Ellis’s way of showing concern without letting that concern bleed into pity.

  But I don’t need her concern. I slept last night, sort of. I got out of the house this morning. I’m far from Alex now; I just need time.

  “I’m fine. Are you following me?”

  She doesn’t dignify that with an answer. “Get up. We’re going.”

  “Where?” I ask, but I’m already shoving the book into my satchel and getting to my feet. Even the library gets tedious after nine hours. Ellis could be bringing me to Persephone’s underworld and I’d be glad for the change in scenery.

  I follow Ellis back to the Godwin House common room, where she pushes me down into the armchair by the window. “Stay here,” she orders, and vanishes into the kitchen.

  When I agreed to go with her, I hadn’t thought she meant back here.

  But I sink back against the cushions with a sigh, tilting my face toward the sunlight. It might be chilly outside, but the light is warm on my skin through the window; I imagine it sinking through flesh and taking up root in my marrow. There are no ghosts. No dead memories—of mountains or otherwise.

  I won’t let Alex get to me anymore.

  Ellis emerges with a tray in hand, a teacup and pot balanced atop it. She slides the tray onto the ottoman and crouches down, pouring a steaming cup of jasmine I can smell from where I sit, the long petals unfurling against white porcelain. There’s only one cup.

  “Aren’t you drinking any?” I ask.

  “I can’t stand anything decaffeinated,” she answers. “Would you mind opening that window for me?”

  I obey. The latch is old; it takes a second to get it unstuck and shove the glass up enough to let in a soft breeze. I don’t think this window has been opened in fifty years. Perhaps longer—since the Dalloway Five lived in Godwin House and spilled blood on its ground.

  Ellis perches in the other chair, drawing a cigarette case from her inside blazer pocket. “Want one?”

  “No, thanks. I quit.” Which is true. The taste of cigarettes reminds me of that last Boleyn House party with Alex.

  I hope, whatever Ellis wants now, it doesn’t have anything to do with that. With her. I was vulnerable yesterday, and allegedly that’s a good and healthy thing to be, but I’m not terribly keen on a reprise.

  She strikes a match and tips forward to light the cigarette, the cherry at the end flaring as she inhales. A familiar sweet smell curls through the air and my brows lift.

  “Is that—?”

  “Changed your mind?” Ellis says archly and passes the joint. Judging by her sly smile, she knows the answer already.

  Her lips have left a crimson stain behind on the paper.

  I take a deep drag, my mouth right over the imprint from Ellis’s, and hold the smoke in my lungs until it goes stale. When I do exhale, all my tension goes out with my breath. Now this…this is something familiar, but something that isn’t tied to Alex. I smoked for the first time at Silver Lake, a joint my roommate had smuggled in. The pair of us shared it out on the back steps, surreptitiously blowing smoke into the chilly winter air and counting down the weeks until our release.

  Ellis draws one leg up onto the seat cushion, her posture long and graceful as a nineteenth-century dandy’s.

  “Drink your tea,” Ellis says.

  I obey without argument and watch Ellis over the rim of my cup as she brings the joint to her red-lipsticked mouth, lips pursing as if in a kiss.

  “Didn’t you sleep last night?” she asks.

  That chill rolls through me again, like a cold bead of water cutting down my spine.

  “Not much,” I admit. “I woke up at three and couldn’t fall back asleep. Nightmare.”

  I mentally cross my fingers that Ellis doesn’t bring up yesterday and try to tie my bad dreams to those revelations. I want her to think I’m normal, not…fragile.

  She grinds out the joint against the tea tray. “Well, it is the devil’s hour,” Ellis says, pointing to the grandmother clock. I suppose she was never able to fix the thing, after all.

  Three o’clock. The same hour I woke up last nig
ht. The hour Alex first slipped into my nightmares here at Godwin House and the grandmother clock stopped working. I’d calculated it after that: three was also the time it had been when Alex and I left that party, when she chased me onto the cliffs.

  “An unlucky number, three,” Ellis muses. “You know it took three years after Flora Grayfriar’s murder until all of the Dalloway Five were dead. Three years to the day.”

  I do know.

  “I see your research is going splendidly.”

  Ellis smiles. “Don’t act so cantankerous about it, Felicity. I’m hardly going to start believing in magic and demons and so on just because I read about them.”

  Well, that makes one of us, I want to snap—but Ellis doesn’t mean anything by it. She doesn’t know.

  Ellis Haley is a lot of things, but willfully cruel is not one of them.

  Even so, I have to fight not to let my reaction show on my face. I don’t want her to know how sharp those words cut. “An unlucky number,” I agree instead.

  “Are you done with your tea?”

  “Oh. Yes. Thank you.”

  “Excellent.” Ellis produces a book out of her satchel and sets it on the table, tapping her fingers against the spine. “Bring it here.”

  I don’t question her. It occurs to me only after I’ve adjusted my position on the sofa to face her more properly and slid my cup and saucer across the table that it was a strange request. Still, now I’m here, sitting opposite Ellis in her brown pin-striped blazer, with the dregs of my tea going cold against the porcelain.

  “Have you heard of tasseography?” Ellis asks. I can see now that the book she pulled out of her bag is titled Reading the Future in Tea. She must have gotten it out of the occult collection in the library.

  “Tea leaves?”

  A smile curls one corner of Ellis’s mouth; her lipstick isn’t even smudged. For some reason that frustrates me. “I thought you might. It seems very like you, with the whole interest in tarot and so on.”

  “You make me sound like—” I can’t finish the sentence, but I’m sure my flushed cheeks communicate most of what I’d intended to say.