– Fiona is still turned away from the house and she feels fingers pulling on the back of her coat, trying to drag her back into the house to go through it all again. Fiona still cannot forgive herself for not staying in her parents’ bedroom with her mother until the end. She fears her mother’s end (all ends, for that matter) are cruelly eternal and that her mother is still there alone and waiting for Fiona to finally and forever come back. Go to here THE FRONT DOOR
– Fiona is still turned away from the house and she feels fingers pulling on the back of her coat, trying to drag her back into the house to go through it all again, or maybe pull her away from everything, pull her away, finally, until she’s hopelessly lost. But she doesn’t want to be lost either. Fiona walks around the car, tracing the cold, metal frame with one hand, to the driver’s side door, and gets in the car and starts the engine, which turns over in its tired mechanical way, and she shifts into first gear. The tires turn slowly, but they do turn. Go to here THE END
THE END
HALLOO
Gemma Files
A voice in the dark, that’s how it starts, when you don’t even think you’re listening – words breathed breathless into darkness, in a whisper, never returned. A voice made from your own blood’s secret echo, like waves: that endless hissing surf, the sea inside every shell. They disappear into its open black maw, eaten alive, one by one by one.
Hello?
Are you there?
I can’t—
I need to talk. To someone.
Can anyone hear?
If you hear me, please say. Please.
Tell me, please.
I can’t—
I need to speak. Need to – tell somebody. To tell them, tell them…
…what I’ve done.
Winter makes you want to sleep all day, even when you’ve already slept just fine all night – just fine but not enough, obviously. You never feel fully awake. Each time the year turns, the sky just seems to gray out, color draining, and there’s a sudden sensation of pressure everywhere at once, pulling you down. Like if you actually bothered to go outside once in a while, you’d fall through the sidewalk and just keep on falling, all the way to the Earth’s hollow, kindling core.
“It’s just Seasonal Affective Disorder,” Mom tells you, dismissively, over the phone. “Lots of people have it; you could go to the doctor for that, get some pills if you wanted.” Because: It’s no big deal, Isla – no bigger than anything else you complain about, anyhow.
“She’s a bitch,” is all Amaya says when she comes home that evening, for neither the first time nor the fiftieth. To which you can barely raise enough energy to agree beyond a hollow-sounding laugh, four cups of strong-brewed coffee notwithstanding.
“Uh huh,” you reply. “Me too, so I come by it honestly. And in other news, water still wet, ice-caps still melting, the president still a tool. Plus gravity still sucks.”
“You need a vacation, babe.”
“We need, you mean.”
“That too.”
But it’s not like either of you have that sort of extra money, so the next weekend finds you both still hanging around watching Home & Garden TV in your underwear together, exclaiming once more over the sad fact that every house-hunting couple in North America apparently wants an open-plan kitchen with stainless steel appliances, or hooting at yet another pair of idiots who seem utterly convinced they’ll be able to live the rest of their lives in a three hundred square foot tiny house on wheels without killing each other (or their kid, or their dog, or their two kids and two dogs).
Mom rings just as Flip or Flop Atlanta comes on. “My Stratford student tenant defaulted,” she tells you, without even a hello first. “I need you and Anna—”
“Amaya.”
“—that girlfriend of yours to go up and check if there’s damage. She has a car, right?”
You glance over at Amaya, her eyes still on the TV, trying to figure out a lie Mom might believe: it’s in the shop after an accident, she lent it out to friends, it got stolen. But you can’t, so: “…yes,” you have to admit, at last.
“Well, perfect.”
Hardly. But there isn’t much to say, not really; the Festival’s on, so Mom offers free tickets to Twelfth Night to sweeten the pot.
“Plus we can stay as long as we want to, after,” you add, as Amaya – no big Shakespeare lover – groans slightly. “If the place isn’t too wrecked, I mean.”
She frowns. “You expect it to be?”
“Not really. Mom’s usually pretty good at picking the Waterloo students who’re least likely to hot-box the bathrooms or set up some sort of off-campus brothel, or whatever.”
“Except for when they run off without paying rent,” she points out.
“Yup.”
* * *
The Stratford house is always cold; that’s what you remember most about it. It was your grandmother’s, Nan’s, once – the only place she’d ever lived, and ultimately where she died, barricaded against the outside world amidst piles of filth and mail-order delivery boxes full of rhinestone jewelry bought off the Shopping Network. When you helped Mom break the front door down, almost ten years ago, the soundtrack from Camelot had been playing on endless repeat from a boom box in the living room. You still remember hearing “If Ever I Would Leave You” coming faintly through the walls, counterpointed by Mom’s breathless sobs and the splintering thud of sledgehammer against wood.
The place looks a whole lot better this time around, thank God: no bodily fluid-stained carpet, no peeling vinyl wallpaper, no nicotine-yellowed ceiling paint. Mom’s designers have tricked it out in what the HGTV people would no doubt call a “beachy, rustic” sort of color scheme; all light blues, bright whites and sandy accents, hardwood floors milk-washed to brighten the space overall, while mirrors gleam from every corner. Of course, this is the part of the house reserved for theater-going “guests” and seasonal vacationers booked through Airbnb, while the student tenants – and thus, for the time being, you and Amaya – always occupy the apartment in what used to be the basement. Which might have been insulting, if it wasn’t just a confirmation of something you’ve known ever since you told her Amaya’s gender: on some level, Mom doesn’t really consider you family anymore, let alone guest bedroom-worthy.
“I kicked a hole in this door once, you know,” you tell Amaya in front of the kitchen door that leads down to this place you’re both supposed to check, clean and (maybe) repair, fishing out the master keys Mom gave you years ago. “Nan was livid when she saw; Mom had to pay to get it filled in, and she made me get a second job so I could pay her back. See, right there? You can almost see the seam.”
Amaya frowns prettily. “Why would you do that, though?”
“God, I don’t remember – wanted to get down there for some reason, but it was locked, and I got pissed; I was probably on the rag, or about to be. Story of my adolescence.”
“Yeah, yeah; whatever, babe. You’re one scary lady, all right.”
“You don’t even know.”
The lock finally yields to the key, and the door opens. The stairwell beyond is black.
* * *
There was a time in your life, and not actually all that long ago, when you didn’t want anything to do with darkness – you were raised in it, just like your mom, and hers. All of you used to live there, both together and apart, as if it was your shared home address.
They say scent carries memory and vice versa, and that might actually be true. For yourself, there are certain smells you still loathe on contact, smells that fill you with terror: the rose-scented hand cream Mom used during those first few years after the divorce, for example, when you moved into a nightmare-nest of a house three streets over from where she, you and Dad once lived. On its own, it was nothing special, but at the time, its very atmosphere seemed to signify and embody the violent death of everything you’d known up to that point. Even now, you can’t help but flinch whenever Amaya slicks her dry, flaking elbows wit
h something squeezed from a tube, at least until the scent (almond, lavender, some combination of the two) reaches you.
You were always “finding things to be afraid of” when you lived there, as Mom used to put it: the grates full of dust, through which distant voices always seemed to be whispering; the upstairs bathroom, with its painted-shut window and its high, cold toilet. The constantly knocking pipes, like Morse code messages sent from behind the walls. Like something trapped in plaster, frantic to find – or make – a way out.
Fear is anger turned inside out, Dr Lavin told you, later on. And maybe that’s where this rage that haunts you comes from, Isla, have you ever thought of that? All these tantrums, these destructive fits, the disassociation afterwards… You want to explode, to go off like a bomb. And then, when you see what you’ve done, the fear takes over, wiping your mind. Making you forget all about it.
A lot of people do things they feel bad about, after, you replied. But they remember them, still; they can’t forget, no matter how much they try. Why am I different? What’s so special about me?
She shrugged. What’s so special about any of us? Things are as they are. I’m just here to make sure you understand yourself well enough to forgive.
She’d never said who you were supposed to forgive, though. Yourself, your dad, Nan, your mom – all equally unlikely prospects, in the end.
* * *
“That’s weird,” Amaya says.
You’re cleaning out the basement, going through the closet, and amongst all the crap there’s a bottle you’re almost sure you’ve never seen before. It’s pearly, frosted, vaguely translucent – more blue than white. You can’t see through it. Raised letters on the side: Atwood’s Jaundice Bitters, Moses Atwood, Mass. There’s a cork in the top, almost rotted through.
“How old you think this is, exactly?” Amaya asks.
You shrug. “Old,” you reply. “Like… turn of the century? The twentieth century, I mean.”
“‘Jaundice bitters.’ The fuck are those?”
“Heroin, probably, or morphine. They put that shit in everything.”
“Laaaauuudanummm,” Amaya intones. “Absinthe.”
“It’d be green if it was absinthe.”
“Yeah, I guess that’s right.”
Amaya starts to up-end it, and you suddenly feel the urge to reach out, blurting: Oh, I wouldn’t do that. No idea why. But you know better than to say shit like that out loud (these days, anyhow), so you don’t.
So the last of the cork falls out, hits the floor and skitters, instantly gone. And when you hold the empty bottle back up to blow across the top, trying to make her laugh, the flute-like note it produces is lower than low, so soft it’s barely audible, a mere murmur. It hisses.
Like blood in your ear, your inner ear. Like the sea.
* * *
Amaya claims to like the bottle, so you stand the open bottle carefully up on what will hopefully become the next student tenant’s bedside table, planning to lose it somehow before you leave for home. Then you snap the light off and lie there beside her with eyes wide open, staring into nothing. You’re not sure when you fall asleep.
Later that night, though, you dream you’re walking down a long, empty beach. Sand squeaks beneath your bare feet, a slippery, volcanic shade of black. The tide is coming in somewhere to your left, the surf a repetitive shusssssh sound, half lullaby, half warning. Still, you just keep on walking forward, only stopping when you feel something frail about to crack under the sand as you step down.
It’s a shell, half-buried. You brush it off, turn for the waves, let one wash it mostly clean; it is nacreous, pale to transparent in places, curled beautifully in on itself like the abandoned home of some long-dead giant snail. You raise it to your ear, and hear—
That voice, faintly echoing out of a darkness you can almost see, more red than black; not night, not some windowless room, some closet. Interior, in every possible way. You feel it in your chest, your clenched jaw, the delicate facial bones set humming, pulsing, aching. As though, the more you think about it, it’s somehow coming from inside...
(you)
* * *
What I did, I have to tell, please listen—
Are you there? Can you hear me?
Anyone, I need
need
please
* * *
It’s been too long since you were last here to remember much of the place, so distinguishing what might be theft or damage from what’s just age and change is a lot harder than you’d expected. As a result, you still aren’t done with the basement apartment by the end of the next afternoon, at which point it’s time to get ready for the theater – off to the Avon for the promised Twelfth Night. It’s excellent, as always.
It’s only walking home afterwards you remember how quiet this town is. You’re used to sirens, shouts, airplanes, car alarms, never-ceasing traffic, streetlights lining every block. Stratford, Canada, at night in winter, the two of you walking arm in arm past a river already dammed up to prevent freezing damage to its bridges, all icy mud rather than gently flowing water, with the swans, ducks and geese safely housed away until spring… Well, it’s not exactly “quiet as the grave,” but it’s no place you’d ever particularly want to live. Which you know because – as you tell Amaya – you’ve done so.
“It was back when my nan was still alive,” you explain, eyes skewing to keep watch on the pools of shadow bracketing your path. Your breath plumes in the frigid air. “My mom and I had a… thing, and she threw me out, so I didn’t really have any other choice – I came up here, got a shit job, paid Nan rent. Just lucky it was between semesters, I guess.”
“You lived down there?”
“Yeah, for almost three months. So some of that stuff in the closet probably used to be mine.” You pause, disengaging to blow on your hands, numb even through thick wool gloves. “I’d have thought she’d thrown it all in the trash by now, considering, but no. Christ, she was an odd old broad.”
“How so?”
“Well, things eventually blew up between us, like always. I mean, you could practically time it – there was always something. Like… I listened to music too loud, or I flushed the toilet too many times during the night, woke her up. Or I must’ve been sneaking up and stealing her food out of the fridge, which I very much was not doing, because all she ever ate was shitty casseroles made out of, like, two cans of Campbell’s stew mixed with a box of Kraft Dinner, heated up in the microwave. Oh God, the stink of it. It was like living in a greasy-spoon.”
“So she was a bitch too, is what you’re saying.”
“A bitch who birthed a bitch, who birthed another bitch in turn. The blood breeds true.”
Amaya suddenly stops, turning. “She locked you out,” she says, dots connecting visibly. “Your nan. Changed the basement door lock so your key didn’t work, with all your stuff inside. That’s why you kicked a hole in the door. Wasn’t it?”
“You got it.” A sigh. “She was out, at the Legion Hall – same dance every weekend, all these busted-up human wrecks sitting around listening to swing music and flirting. Used to dress up and everything, like Betty fuckin’ Grable.”
“But she knew you still had a key to the front door?” Amaya tilts her head. “Wasn’t she afraid you’d return the favor? Smash her stuff up or something?”
“She didn’t care.” You shrug. “On some level, I think she knew everything in her half of the house was total shit… and besides, so what if I wrecked it? She had insurance.”
“Wow.” A slow, bemused head-shake. “Babe, don’t take this the wrong way, but sometimes I’m amazed you’re as sane as you are.”
Maybe not as sane as you think, you consider replying, then change your mind. Innocent Amaya. Kind Amaya. Who knows so much less than she thinks she does, including about her current topic of conversation.
A swell of love lights your ribcage, and from the back of your mind you hear Viola’s speech from tonight’s performance repeat its
elf, those glorious iambic pentameter lines – Viola as Sebastian, a woman playing a man written to be played by a man playing a woman, wooing Olivia the way she wishes unperceptive Prince Orsino would know to woo her. So breathtakingly beautiful, no matter who it’s meant for.
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