by Tabitha Vohn
***
Tabitha sat in her room later that afternoon, surrounded by boxes. She had lugged the last of them up the iron stairway at the back of the house. It curved like a musical note, like Aurora’s thorn-shrouded stair that led to the enchanted spinning wheel. The light from a high window cast a prismed glow along the open balustrade. The room where she stayed was white and open, the queen comforter a soft cloud, puffed over feather pillows, and the old-fashioned wardrobe made of cedar. She wanted to crawl inside it and enter into a forbidden land of pine and snow, where it was always winter and never Christmas. She smiled at the thought of it; she and the White Witch would have a lot to talk about.
Glass chimes tinkled in the wind on the balcony overlooking the garden. She tried to remember the last time she was in this room, but all her mind’s eye could follow was the familiar smell of pine and musk, two rooms down, deepened in the heat so that it permeated into her clothes. Later, she would slip into that empty room, maybe just to stand with eyes closed in the ghost air, maybe to rest her head on the bed, left side, maybe just to remember a time drenched in possibility, and happiness, and hope.
She took a deep breath, and opened the first box. She smiled, thinking how funny it was that there were clothes in it that she had forgotten she owned, glad to have them back. Other boxes contained her books; she remembered the meticulous order with which she had arranged them on the shelves in his library that he had designated “her” shelves. They were placed in the boxes just the same. Music, DVD’s, expired toiletries & make-up, prints she had framed and hung on her walls, folders filled with the notes that she had worked on for her next book, a lamp she bought-how could he possibly have remembered all this stuff?
Finally, she pulled over the last box. On it was written, “Tabs-??” She opened it tentatively, half expecting something to pop out of it. Her heart sank; in it was everything he had ever given her. A handbound book of his lyrics to her favorite songs, her favorite perfume in a bottle that he had designed for her, a photo album filled with pictures of them and the cities they’d traveled to, her goofing around with James, pretending to hit him over the head with his guitar, her and the band giving devil horns to the camera, the two of them standing on the balcony in this very room, waving to Mona below. She pulled out a sweatshirt-the sweatshirt- with the band’s faded emblem on it. It brought a deep-rooted pain to her heart, threatening to turn her over. Without thinking about her year’s worth of resolve, Tabs lifted it over her head, overtaken in the familiarity of it. She pulled the cuffs over her hands and lifted them to her face, filling her head with the faintest smell of her own perfume, its being worn too many times to unveil its owner interweaved in its threads. She took it off and laid it in her lap. There was one black case left in the box that she didn’t recognize. She turned it over in her hands, trying to remember its significance. She opened it and gasped, unleashing a fervor of grief that had been buried deep in the black of resolution; it awoke, gnashed its powerful jaws, and howled. She buried her head in the sweater, hoping that Mona wouldn’t hear her.
Mona heard her cries from the library below and ran to her, knocked at her door with insistence. She let herself in and found Tabitha doubled over on the floor, clutching the sweatshirt to her face.
“Tabitha! What is it? What’s happened?”
Tabitha couldn’t speak. With her head still buried from sight, her body wracked with a dreadful tremble, she reached out the box to Mona. In it was a huge, ornate cross, hung upside down on a thick chain. Around it was tangled a smaller, simple cross, right side up, knotted over top the other. Mona closed the lid and held Tabitha in her arms, rocking her, the only sound that filled the air the heaving concerto the soul offers in the language only sorrow understands.