“It was my own fault,” Jack said. “I went up to the house, and Father Taggart wasn't there, but Mrs. Perenna was. She told me to wait there for her husband, because Eliot had already told her that we'd been sneaking around again. I did, thinking that I might confront him and tell him that we were onto him, but he just lectured me and let me off, plain and simple. I was on my way back to the church to see if you'd found Father Taggart, thinking that I'd gotten off easy, when Eliot got me.”
“How'd … he ...”
“Mea,” Jack said. “He had her on her leash, and she was barking at me and wagging her tail. I didn't look hard enough – it was dark – and I just assumed it was you. He knocked me upside the head with a snow-shovel from three feet away.”
Jack was silent for a long moment, and then he said in a softer voice, “I think he got you pretty good.”
I could tell from his tone that he meant that my injuries were bad, but either the blow to the back of my head or a sheer disconnect from myself rendered me unconcerned.
“I'm alright,” I slurred, turning to rest my head against his shoulder. “Where's … where'd Eliot go to?”
Jack shifted uncomfortably.
“He – he left,” he said.
“So let's get out of here,” I said, though I was far too tired to move. “We can tell everyone … what happened.”
I could feel Jack's chin digging into the top of my head as he rested it atop me.
“Nim, he locked us in,” he said.
“What?”
“Eliot – he locked us in,” he repeated. “And – and that's not the worst part.”
His hands were cold as he laid them in mine, and all at once I was aware that my body was half-numb in the biting air. Mea was nowhere in sight; I longed to wrap my arms around her for extra warmth.
“What is it?” I said.
“It's … it's just, you were right,” he struggled, the words quivering as he forced them out. “From the beginning. All along.”
“About what?”
It didn't seem to matter at the moment: we should have been making our way up to the stairs to pound against the door, or else plan for a way to get out of the cold. The centuries' worth of dead bodies all around us were oddly disconcerting in the rattling and shaking of his breath.
“Anna killed herself,” he said quietly.
“What?”
I lifted my head up, all at once no longer tired. Though I could barely see him inches from my face in the darkness, the whites of his eyes were clearing quivering.
“She killed herself, Nim,” he whispered, and there was a fear in his voice that I couldn't register. “Eliot told me. He told me everything.”
“But … I don't …” I shook my head, though my neck protested sharply. “That doesn't make sense.”
“It does now,” he said. “And you were right, Nim – about everything. I fucked up. I really fucked up.”
“Don't worry,” I said, shaking my head again in an offhanded way. We would correct it just like we had his mistake about Barker, and mine about Beringer, and everything that couldn't be resolved immediately would eventually come together just as soon as I found a way to get Karl to forgive me. “So we were wrong about Mr. Perenna – we know it was Eliot now.”
“But it wasn't Eliot,” Jack said, his voice so low that it was barely more than a crackling over the crunching of ice beneath our hands and feet. “I was wrong about everything. I was – I was wrong.”
He wasn't explaining himself, and in my weakened state I couldn't begin to make sense out of his broken pleas. Continuing to shake my head despite the pressure building at the back of it, I tried again to get him to explain.
“What did Eliot say?” I asked. “Just tell me exactly what he said, and we'll figure this out.”
“There's nothing to figure out,” Jack said. “I was completely off – I never should have called you up here, and I never should have gotten you involved. This whole thing – this whole thing was a mistake.”
“Jack, please: I can't understand you,” I said tiredly. “Just tell me what Eliot said.”
“Tommy died in a hunting accident,” he said miserably. “Not a staged accident: an accident. And Anna killed herself.”
“But it's too coincidental,” I said. “He was lying.”
“No.” Jack shook his head; I could feel it turning as it brushed over my hair. “He explained everything. Fuck. He explained everything.”
“So tell me,” I said, for what felt like the thousandth time. “Tell me, and then let's get out of here ...”
“Anna looked up to Tommy more than anyone, Eliot said,” he said. “She idolized him, and wanted to be like him. She didn't want to get trapped in some loveless marriage like her mother had, and she never felt like her father understood her, but Tommy seemed to, and so she was always following him around and trying to be like him and do things with him.
“Eliot said … he said that on the day of the accident, Anna went to Swanson's and signed out a gun, too, without permission, and followed Tommy and his friends into the woods. But instead of meeting up with them, she decided that she would try to shoot a grouse first to – to prove that she was just as good a hunter as him. And – and apparently they were on opposite sides of the clearing, and she saw the grouse on the ground. She fired once, and it startled and took flight into a low tree. So she fired again and –”
He didn't have to finish: the scene was all too clear in my mind. I pictured the girl from the exuberant, happy family photo aiming at the bird and hearing the crack as the bullet hit the air, and how thrilled she must have been initially upon seeing the burst of blood shooting through the air as the bullet hit what she thought was her target, and then the utter, unimaginable despair that had followed when she realized what she had hit instead …
“No one knew but the family,” Jack continued after a moment. “The father found out first, of course, and covered the whole thing up. And it wasn't like we thought it was – like I thought it was,” he corrected, turning the blame back onto himself once again. “He wasn't doing it for money or power or anything like that – he did it to protect her. That was it. He just wanted to protect her.”
“And she killed herself,” I concluded, the thought hardly unfathomable as the gruesome scene continued to play out in my mind. I pictured her sweaters lined up in her room, the sleeves ruined from being scrubbed clean of blood from years of her cutting her wrists to clear away some of the damage that had coursed through her flesh, and the song from Dido and Aeneas began to play in my ears before I could stop it …
Thy hand, Belinda, darkness shades me … on thy bosom let me rest …
“I'm sorry, Nim,” Jack said, his head still shaking from side to side. “I'm so sorry ...”
More I would, but Death invades me; Death is now a welcome guest.
“But what about Eliot?” I said, still ever slightly so unclear. “He burned the church?”
Jack brought his hand to his face, composing himself with a shaky breath as he began to speak again.
“He said he tried to warn us to get away,” he said. “And when that didn't work – when he saw us go down into the crypt, and heard what we were saying – he knew he had to do more. He – he said that he tried to frighten you, first –”
“Because I'm schizophrenic,” I murmured unhappily. If I hadn't been, then I would have been able to see his disguise for what it was. And as I realized as much, it occurred to me why I had hesitated when Ava had asked me if my diagnosis was fatal like my father's had been: it was because it was. It wouldn't stop my heart, or halt my breathing or crush my insides or eat away at my flesh, but it was every bit as fatal as my father's cancer had been, even so, because of what it made me do and who it made me be.
“No, that's not why,” Jack said quietly. “He said … he said it was because he knew if you left, that I would follow you, and we'd both be gone from Kipling forever.”
I slipped further down so that I was laying o
n his chest, and I could feel his heart beating against my ear as loudly as the music continued in my other.
When I am laid, am laid in earth …
“And he was right,” Jack whispered. “I wouldn't have – I wouldn't have done this if you didn't do it with me, and you didn't even want to, and I dragged you along –”
“You didn't drag me,” I said. “I wanted to. I wanted to get away from everything at home. And I wanted … I wanted another adventure.”
The wind outside the crypt was whistling loudly, and it seeped through every crevice and crack in the stone to get at us and destroy our warmth with cold.
“We should get out of here,” I said slowly. “We should … we should go before it gets too cold.”
But I couldn't lift my head from Jack's chest, and even though I knew that the temperature was much too low to be out in without jackets for much longer, I didn't think that I wanted to move from my spot, anyhow.
“He locked us in, Nim,” Jack repeated. His chin scraped over the top of my head again. “We're not getting out. Not this time.”
“We'll call Karl,” I said surely, reaching into my pocket for my phone. The plastic was cool against my frozen fingers, and I slid my arm over to drop it into Jack's lap. “He'll come get us.”
“Sure, Nim,” Jack said, his voice tight. “Sure – I'll call him.”
The screen lit up momentarily in the darkness, and even through bleary eyes I could see that there was no reception so far out in the nothingness of the small town. But he would come get us, I knew. He would forgive me, and he would come and bring us home.
But he wouldn't come get us, I realized. Not before it was too late, anyhow. He might discover that something had gone wrong, or become worried, or listen to the dozens of messages that I had left after our conversation about my father in which I had pleaded with him to forgive me, but even if he left at that very second, he would never get up to Kipling in time and he would never find us in the dank solitude of the family crypt.
He would be too late again, just as he had been too late in arriving at the bridge to stop my mother from jumping, and just as Jack had been when he had run for help after Ilona had cracked her skull against the counter-top in Albertson's kitchen, and just as I had been in trying to find what I was looking for in life when I had searched and searched through the nothingness for something tangible to hold onto when it had been there, right beside me, all along.
“It can't be over,” I said wearily, my voice croaking in the chill. “My life had no meaning.”
Jack had pulled off his sweatshirt to wrap around me, knowing how the cold had always bothered me far more than it did him, and the putrid smell of cigarette smoke and familiar scent of the days when we had holed up in the Bickerby dorm room clutched at my form to bring the slightest of warmth back to my skin.
May my wrongs create no trouble, no trouble in thy breast ...
“It meant something, Nim,” he said quietly. “It meant something to me.”
And it seemed to be the only thing that mattered – far more than the movement leaving my limbs and the breath getting caught in my chest, or the thoughts of everything that we might have done or might have been. It mattered more than anything I had ever sought to discover, and more than the missing ending to Turandot and my mother's riddles, and more than whether or not anyone would know what had happened to us or what we had done. It mattered because it came from him, and because it meant that I wasn't alone at the end like I had thought that I would be, or how I had chosen to live, and it mattered because, for once, I felt right somewhere beneath my aching, tired skin.
The hours stretched on endlessly, but they moved much too quickly, even so. I was growing colder and colder beneath my damp sweater and his sweatshirt, and he more so and more quickly in only his light shirt. And it must have been morning, I realized, seeing the slightest hint of light in a crack in the ceiling, but it didn't feel like morning, just as it didn't feel like springtime even though the season had changed the week before: it felt like nightfall, and it felt like winter. It always felt like winter in Maine.
“Jack,” I said, the white of my breath fogging up the air in front of our heads and turning into nothingness as it was pulled into darkness, “I'm glad I'm here with you.”
He made no response, and his arms were locked around me as tightly as ever, frozen in place and unbending, and this time I was certain that we would never let each other go.
And as I waited out until the time when I would go wherever he had gone despite him lying so stilly beside me, my breath turned into something solid that stood before me and breathed itself in turn back upon me in a gentler, easier way. And as I made out the sight of the bare feet pressing against the cold stone floor, I raised my eyes to stare up at where she stood, her white dress draped around her softly and her blond hair crinkled from the ocean water that was now so far away, and my mouth lifted upwards just slightly as I realized that we had been found after all.
And it might have been a hallucination, or some faulty wiring in my head that had begun to fire incorrectly given the hypothermia and lack of air, but I considered that that might have been all that life ever was or had ever been, and so for once I chose to believe that it might have been something else, as well, and that she was every bit as much as the angelic form that she looked, and that she had come to collect my soul from my broken body and tortured mind to lead me somewhere else away from the haze and reverie that had fallen over me years before, and that she would take me somewhere else where at last I would belong.
Remember me, remember me, but ah! forget my fate.
Remember me, but ah! forget my fate.
About the Author
Laura Giebfried was born in Bangor, Maine in June of 1992. She is the youngest child of Joseph and Rosemary Giebfried, who moved to Maine from New York in order to raise their family.
When I Am Laid in Earth (Damnatio Memoriae Book 3) Page 25