by Sara O'Leary
I sit down beside him and wait for him to say something. He doesn’t, so we sit in silence for a long time. He finishes his glass and then refills it. There is a sort of electricity emanating from him. If he were a cat his hair would all be standing on end. Picturing this makes me laugh and he looks up at me, shocked.
“Are you still unhappy with me?” I say finally.
He sighs. “I would be,” he says. “If I thought it would do any good.”
I’m looking at him. Trying to gauge his mental state. The bleariness around the eyes is superficial but there is something deeper there too. He looks grief-stricken. I realize I am getting a glimpse of how he must have looked in the days after I died. When he was here in the house alone.
“They’ve gone away,” he says. “To the island. Janet’s sister still lives there. Janet thought it would help Dee to see family.”
I’ve gotten what I wanted all along. I have Alec all to myself. So why do I feel so awful?
“I’m sorry,” I say. “I’m so sorry for everything. All of it. And I’m sorry I came back.”
“Don’t say that,” he says.
“I wanted to be with you,” I say. I know I sound foolish. I am foolish. “I would have married you that first day if you’d asked me. I wish I had. I wish when people asked about the day we’d met we could have said that we went straight downtown and got married. Then they would have known what we always knew,” I say.
He shakes his head at me.
“I wish I’d had your children. I wish we’d had a family. I wish I’d had more courage,” I say.
Alec sighs again. “Why are you doing this, Fay?”
I look at Alec sitting there and think how alone he looks. I have done this to him.
I think about telling him again that it wasn’t me who moved the dollhouse and then realize it doesn’t matter.
“Alec—” I say. And then stop, because what can I say? How can I make this right?
“I wish we could go for a walk,” Alec says, finally. He turns and looks at me. He is so close. “That’s what I used to imagine after you…”
“Died?” I say.
“After you died, yes. I used to go out alone. I’d walk the paths in Pacific Spirit Park that we used to walk back when we first moved into this house. If there were no one around I would talk to you. I would pretend you were walking with me…maybe a few steps behind, so that if I stopped and turned my head I would see you.”
Our walks were the time that we talked best—talked widely and freely about all the things that mattered and lots of things that mattered not at all. Sometimes we talked about the children we were going to have. We talked about ourselves as children and pretended to be hearing stories for the first time. I could picture Alec easily as a child. His serious little face. His narrow shoulders pulled up square. We talked about how my job working for Mira was not what I wanted to be doing and how miserable it made me even though I still couldn’t manage to quit. We talked about whether I should go back to school and do something else. I told him all my big ideas for art projects. We talked about the first time we met. We talked about being cremated versus being buried. We talked about the word cremains and how horrible it was. We agreed that whoever went first would save the ashes of the other.
I want to ask now if he had me cremated. It makes me queasy to think about.
“I miss those ferns,” I say instead. “Those huge, lush ferns that grow in the woods. Such strange, prehistoric-looking things.”
“Yes,” he says.
“And the sweet taste of the air when you get into the forest proper. The way the city just vanishes, and time becomes meaningless.”
I see the two of us paused on a path, looking up to see where the treetops touch the sky. The rush of that feeling, how small you feel in comparison. I’m picturing the way that two trees can grow together to the point where you can’t tell where one ends and the other begins.
“I miss you,” says Alec. Present tense.
Where am I? I wonder. Where have I gone?
CHAPTER TEN
WE ARE ALONE. The two of us. Alec is changing the sheets in the bedroom so that we can sleep there tonight. Or so that he can sleep, and I can watch him.
The house feels different without Dee and Janet. It still looks wrong, but it somehow feels right.
“I was happy. I didn’t even know how happy I was.”
“You weren’t happy all the time,” he says, and he gets up and crosses over to the light switch. Then he takes off his pants and shirt in the dark before lying down on the bed in his boxers. My eyes are adjusting to the dim light in the room and he is just a moving shape. I wish he’d done it the other way around and undressed before turning out the light. He’s embarrassed around me now. Given that in the old days he would cook breakfast buck-naked, this strikes me as profoundly sad.
“What do you mean?” I ask.
“You were always at least a little unhappy. You always wanted something you didn’t have or imagined you didn’t have. You complained all the time, Fay. All the time. You always thought that you were missing out on something. I thought this house would make you happy. I moved back here to make you happy—never would have come here of my own volition—and what good did it do?”
“I loved this house,” I say. “I was happy here. I was so.”
“Okay,” says Alec. “You were happy.”
“We were happy,” I correct him.
“Are you coming to bed then?” he asks and I feel suddenly nervous.
“In a minute,” I say.
I go into the bathroom to look around. I loved this bathroom. Then I open the medicine cabinet door and all the wrong things are in there. Lipstick. I take the cap off to look. There is a dent in the centre where her lip must fit. I put it back, resisting the childish urge to wind it up and smush the lid down on it. A bottle of sleeping pills. Alec’s name on the label. Perhaps they’re from when I died? But no, they’re new. Now that is sad. There is a package of birth control pills. None of them have been taken.
I close the medicine cabinet and then I lie down in the tub with all my clothes on. It’s dark out. I can see the stars out the skylight, and it takes no time at all to slip back into a memory of a bath. The water is steaming hot and smells of rosemary bath oil. I luxuriate in it, lying in the tub until the tingle of excitement is almost physical, and then I climb out and pad down the hall to the bedroom. In my mind I am naked. I can see the wet trail of footprints I leave behind me.
When I get to our bedroom, Alec is lying in bed. Just the two of us together. There is so little light that the room could be as it used to be, as I want it to be. I lie down on my side of the bed, careful not to stray too close to Alec. There is nothing I want more in the world than to stray.
“Remember,” I say. “Remember how big and empty this house felt?”
“It was full of rooms you’d yet to ravish me in,” Alec says, laughing.
I imagine us in each of the rooms of the house. Together. I want those days back. Those early days where we were hungry for each other all the time.
“I didn’t know if I should tell you this, but I did try to contact you,” Alec says. “I played Houdini’s wife.”
“What?”
“Houdini’s wife. She tried to contact him after he died. One year she thought the medium had been successful. But then she changed her mind.”
“When was this? You, I mean. When did you try to contact me?”
“A while ago.”
A while. What exactly is a while?
“What happened?”
“I lost my nerve. The psychic asked me what I wanted to know. I had so many questions. I suddenly couldn’t face it. I paid and beat it the hell out of there. I felt like an idiot,” he says. “You know, Houdini spent all that time exposing fraudulent spiritualists. But really, I think he want
ed to believe. I think we all do.”
“Maybe we all only think we do. Because we don’t know what it will be like.”
Eventually Alec falls asleep. I listen to his breathing as it gets slower and more regular. I am tempted to go back in time to a night when we were truly together. But I’m right where I wanted to be—alone in the house with Alec.
I watch Alec sleep and wonder why I didn’t do that more often when I was alive. All that time wasted. He looks sweet and unguarded. He looks like a boy. Innocent. Untroubled. Unburdened. I long to push the hair back from his forehead, to feel the smooth curls run through my fingers. This longing aches like a deep hunger. And there are deeper hungers below it. I want him, want to be with him. I never thought that much about my own body, but I desperately miss it now. I try to remember what it felt like when he touched my skin. How his touch was different than anyone else’s. Every thought, every memory is immediately translated into mere words. The idea of touch is like something that was once described to me. Something I can only try to imagine.
Slowly, slowly it passes from being very late to being very early. I am in agony. I think about people willingly putting themselves into sensory deprivation tanks in order to relax. They have no idea how deprived you can feel when sensation is forcibly taken away from you.
Alec goes on sleeping peacefully while I go to pieces less than a foot away from him. I am tempted to call out his name, but the fear that I will be unable to make a sound stops me. The night drags grimly on. I find myself tempted to slip into the past, into some moment of intimacy, but am afraid of missing anything here. What if Alec wakes and I am gone?
“World enough and time,” I say. “What’s that from? Or is it time enough? Time enough and world…No, that can’t be right. Sounds like Shakespeare. Do you think it is Shakespeare?”
Alec opens his eyes.
“Were you sleeping?” I ask.
“No, no,” he says. Then: “Yes.”
“Marvell,” I say. “I think it’s Marvell.”
“Did you want to get up now?” he asks. “I mean, it’s early, but if you want to get up I will get up.” He blinks hard. He looks at me, but his eyes are as unfocused as those of a newborn.
“You’ve been asleep so long,” I say. “Did you remember? Did you remember I was here?”
He nods. A little noncommittally for my liking. “Okay,” Alec says. “I’m awake. I can hear your mind working over there.” He throws back the covers and rapidly stands. He is a dark shape against the brightly lit window, a familiar silhouette.
He looks at me looking at him. “What are you thinking?” he asks.
“I’m thinking about pancakes,” I lie.
“I didn’t think you liked pancakes,” he says.
“Yeah, but maybe I didn’t give them enough of a chance. Now I’ll never know.”
“Ha,” he says.
“Back in a minute,” he says and goes straight in to shave. He always used to do that right after waking because I would complain about how bristly his morning beard was, but I don’t bother reminding him that he’s now unlikely to subject me to whisker burn.
While he is gone, I look around the room now that it is almost light enough to see. I’d painted all the walls each in a different shade of blue and it has now all been painted over in a very ordinary white. There is a huge painting over the bed, and it is also white. You have to look very closely to see that it’s a painting at all. White on white. It doesn’t make any sense to me.
Alec comes out of the bathroom with a towel wrapped around his waist. His face is flushed and smooth. All his chest hair is damp and tendril-y. I suddenly wonder if he went to shave for me out of habit, or if this is something he now does for her.
Even when she is not here, she is here.
Alec and I are sitting in the conservatory and I am happy thinking that we don’t need to speak because we know each other so well that we can share a single thought when he suddenly says, “I have to call her, you know. I can’t not call her.”
I react before I can even think about what I am saying. “Has it occurred to you that she might be with her ex?” I ask. “What’s he called? Have you met him?”
I look around at all the lush, growing things and think about Dee. That little face of hers in the old photo of the three of them as a family.
“She doesn’t see him,” he says.
“How do you know?”
“I know,” he says. “She doesn’t see him because he’s a monster.”
“What do you mean?”
“I don’t want to talk about it.”
He gets up and walks away from me. Just walks away. I wait for a moment, shocked, and then follow.
“What do you mean a monster?” I ask, catching up to him in the foyer. I position myself in front of him so he has to stop and look at me.
“There’s the type of man who hits women,” says Alec, not meeting my eye. “And then there’s the type of man who does it in front of his own child.”
I have nothing to say and so I say nothing. It comes to me clearly how much they need Alec. How selfish I’ve been. I could only see Alec as my husband. I couldn’t see that anyone else might need him. Might even need him more than me. Dee could be in danger. They need to come home. Nothing matters more than this.
“Alec,” I say, but he stubbornly refuses to turn. Refuses to look at me. I need to make him understand. “Alec,” I say again, and I reach out and grab him by the shoulder. I see the shock pass between us like a current. I feel it, physically feel it as though it is my body receiving the jolt of energy.
Alec looks at me and his face freezes into a sort of a tragedy mask, misshapen and downturned. His eyes roll back so that just the whites are showing, and his face goes grey and slack. His hands spasm and shake like there is an electrical current running through his body. Then he is lying on the floor motionless.
I scream. I don’t know what to do. I’m afraid to touch him. Afraid to make things worse.
And then I can feel myself fading out even as I desperately try to stay. He’s lying there and I can’t reach him. And then the darkness closes between us.
I am somehow neither here nor there. I feel strange. Drunk, almost. I start to slip into the past. Into the luxury of being with Alec again. I want our first night in this house again. I want that back. But then I stop myself because there is something of the opiate about these memory excursions of mine. They seem to dim whatever is left of me. I don’t want to go back to that horrible dark again. I want to find Alec. If he’s dead he should be with me. If he’s alive then he must still be somewhere waiting for me to find my way back.
I am alone. I had this idea that if Alec died it might be a good thing. It might mean that we could be together again, in whatever form. But there is no sign of him, and I am now more alone than ever. The house is empty. This is an eerie feeling. Like it’s been abandoned. Like the people who lived here have gone away and may never come back. I keep searching for him anyway. Is he in the hospital? Have I killed him? And if so, then why isn’t he here with me?
Alec is alive. I hear him talking to someone. Janet? They must be back. They came back. Fine. I only care that Alec is alive. I go up the cellar stairs and toward his voice.
I can’t believe how happy I am, like I’ve had an infusion of joy. Alec is alive. I thought I’d killed him and I haven’t. When I reach the top of the stairs I stop to think. Janet. What am I going to do about Janet? And Dee. I will get to see Dee again. I’d thought I was going to be alone forever.
I open the door and the voices get louder. “You look terrible,” says Janet. “Were you languishing without me?” She laughs and after the briefest of pauses he laughs with her.
He is sitting on the sofa and she lowers herself into his lap. Puts her arm around his neck. Kisses him. The whole time he is watching me. He has seen me come into
the room. He must have wondered if I was still here and now he knows. I shake my head. I see by his face that he thinks I want him to push Janet away but that’s not what I mean. I need to be alone with him to tell him what I mean.
I smile at him. I smile at both of them. And then I leave them alone.
I am in Dee’s room. Wondering if she will come back here. I wish I’d tried harder to be of use to her. To see more clearly what she needed. I leave Frankenstein on her nightstand. I took it from Alec’s study, so perhaps she will think it came from him. That doesn’t really matter. What matters is that Mary Shelley will help her more through her dark days than any twee tween nonsense about the sexy undead.
Does the fact that Mary Shelley was nineteen when she wrote Frankenstein make her a young-adult author? I open the book and read: “Life and death appeared to me ideal bounds, which I should first break through, and pour a torrent of light into our dark world.”
A torrent of light. I have broken the natural laws by my return. And there are, as always, consequences.
I stay in the dark for a long time. Hours or days or years. I am here and not here. I expect to be overtaken by fear, but it doesn’t come. I realize that fear is nothing but anticipation and I have nothing left to anticipate. I am just here-not here. When I was young, I used to wonder where my shadow went when the sunshine blazed it free of my body. I feel like that now. I am my own shadow.
I can’t garner the energy fully to be—it is like I am nothing but a scattering of particles. In one way this is frustrating. In another way it doesn’t matter at all.
Sometimes I hear voices in the house, but they are too remote for me to make out who is speaking or what they are saying.
Time passes and the dark advances and recedes.
Dee is down in her lair, giving herself a complicated manicure involving little torn pieces of newspaper that she glues down to each nail and then varnishes over with clear polish. It looks ridiculous and scruffy and she is inordinately pleased with herself.