Chapter 30 Clara
CHAPTER 30? CLARA
Lake District, England
I was in the water again with the satchel, floating through the countryside to join the Thames in London and then toward the sea on a storm-tossed river. I cried out for help, but there was no one nearby. I floated in the sea and held my hands over the moving waters, my legs pulsing beneath me to keep me afloat until I was too tired to kick. I closed my eyes to sink, but a great force rose beneath me and brought me to the surface, where I gasped for breath and woke thrashing in the tangled sheets.
I awoke in a strange canopied bed, my voice crying out for Mommy, a name I hadn’t used in twenty-five years. Image fragments appeared in the delirium of a half-sleep fever: rushing rivers and frosted fields, words floating on paper in torn fragments, unreadable and untranslatable, and Wynnie turning blue.
When the fevered dreams broke, I had no real idea of the day or time.
Wynnie.
I reached my hand across the sheets for her and found only empty space and dented pillows. My heart stuttered and I sat up and brushed back my hair, oily with soot.
I took stock—I wore a white cotton nightgown, now damp and crumpled. I rested under the soft sheets of a bed in a room of creamy vanilla plaster walls, a canopy of lace over the four-poster bed.
Sawrey. Cumbria.
The past days rushed back to me with a full blow of memory.
The travel from London with a lantern.
Poisonous air, burning lungs, cows dead on the road, birds dropping from the sky, and wandering strangers who tried to rob us. No, who did rob us. Wynnie wheezing. A doctor.
I shuddered with the memories and slipped from the bed, wondering where Wynnie might be and how long I’d been asleep.
A black-armed brass clock on the bedside table pointed to nine a.m. What day? My body ached with a combination of the worst too-many-beers night and a stomach virus. My head floated and conversely felt heavy. My tongue was thick with raging thirst.
I stood slowly, my legs shaking. A glass of water sat on the bedside table, and I downed it. Black smudges had ruined the white cotton pillowcase. The sheets, too, were gray and streaked with the leftover soot of London.
I walked to the window and gasped.
Outside stretched a breathtaking landscape with a heartbeat both familiar and wholly new. This bedroom was on the second floor at the back of the house, overlooking a sloping, heather-colored field that flowed down to a pewter lake skimmed in the glitter of ice. Stone walls, flinty and gray and white, snaked around the fields. To the right, three cottages squatted below my sight; their slate roofs with orange rounded chimney pots was all I could see of them. A dirt path set with flagstones wound its way down a sloped lawn toward a pasture that ran to the lake’s edge.
Even in winter, the landscape was sublime, bare of its finery and revealing its perfect bones. The mountains undulated, flecked by evergreens and naked hardwoods. I wanted to know the name of every one of these trees. The valley was nestled in the upturned bowl of these mountains, dotted with silver-gray sheep on a patchwork of pasture. Patches of green fern and copse, a forest enchanted at the edges of everything.
I wanted a canvas, a palette of paints.
The whole of it made me feel a certain at-homeness, as if I’d been there before, as if my illustrations were looking for this. The lake of light glittered and winked beneath a sky shrouded by lead-colored clouds.
This was a forgotten lake, one I once knew.
I nearly laughed at the unbidden thought. The fever must have been giving me absurd notions while the mist rolled off the mountains and across the silver waters. All was a symphony of colors and textures, and my eyes couldn’t find one place to rest.
Inside me, something opened. I’d seen this land before, hadn’t I? But that was impossible.
Frost surrounded the window frames, and I breathed on the pane and fogged the glass. I set my hand against it, creating a handprint, as if proving I was real in a geography so far removed from the dailyness of my life that I felt free-floating, separate from myself, as if I stood outside the window looking in at myself. There she is, some other part of me said, a woman wearing a stranger’s too-long white cotton nightgown, her hair hanging in sooty fever-drenched tangles.
A soft knock at the door, and I turned to see Moira standing there with a tray of food and a pot of tea hidden under a red quilt cozy.
She beamed. “You are up! Oh, Miss Clara, I am so happy to see you awake. I’ve brought you breakfast.” She set the tray on the pine dresser.
“Where is Wynnie?” I asked.
“With Charlie. She’s well!”
“What day is it?”
She went through the motions of pouring tea and adding milk and sugar, of preparing a cup even as she spoke without seeming to take a breath. “You’ve been sleeping on and off for more than a day. I found you twice at the window and I helped you to the loo, but for all that, you’ve had nothing to eat. You must eat. Mr. Jameson wants to make sure you have some decent breakfast. We’ve all been so worried. Dr. Finlay told us you’d be fine, seeing as your lungs are clear and all that. Just exhaustion and cold, he said.” She covered her mouth. “I’m babbling on when you must be so tired and weary, so confused.” She handed me the teacup with violets around its edges.
I smiled at Moira and remembered her dancing in the London library, a look of sheer ecstasy as Vivaldi played on a phonograph. She had been oblivious to the world around her as tears rolled down her face. She’d given herself over completely in the library of a man she admired and grieved.
I took a long swallow and felt the warmth, the sweet and bitter taste that was such a comfort I understood the British infatuation with tea and all its accoutrements. “Tell her to please come here?”
Moira smiled. “She was having breakfast with Mrs. Jameson, but I believe she’s already gone out walking with Mr. Jameson. Might you want to eat and bathe before you see them?”
I almost laughed and felt the weakness in even that, my body awake but not fully. “I must look a fright.”
“Not nearly as frightful as you were when you were red with fever and delirious with hallucinations.” She opened her mouth to speak and then closed it again.
“What is it?”
“Nothing that matters.”
“The papers?”
“They are over there.” She pointed to the desk, and I looked closer. Yes, there they were—the crumpled, smudged, and ruined papers in a much smaller pile than the original.
“I promise I didn’t read them. Most of them are too waterlogged to read as it is. I put them there straightaway so you can look at them when you’re ready.”
“That’s all that remains.” This wasn’t a question.
“Yes.”
“Thank you, Moira.”
She smiled with such eagerness that her eyes crinkled with it. “Come down whenever you please. Mr. Jameson said to tell you that there are clothes in the wardrobe that should fit you. Miss Adelaide and you are the same size, but I will say she’s a bit taller.” Moira nodded toward a large wooden wardrobe at the side of the room, its doors shut tight and a cracked mirror on its surface where Moira and I were reflected in zigzag shapes.
“Adelaide?” I asked.
“Charlie’s sister-in-law. Archie’s wife.”
“Ah,” I said.
“Dr. Finlay will be here again soon.” Moira closed the door, but the aroma of the sausage and eggs, along with the bitter bite of the tea, had me ravenous. I took a wool blanket from the back of an ivory silk settee and wrapped it around my shoulders.
I set the tray on the oak desk, moved Mother’s tattered and mostly unreadable papers to the side, and ate slowly while staring out the window. Every bite of biscuit was rich and saturated with flavor and warmth. The landscape shifted with the rising sun, and the shadows morphed and receded. The naked branches stretched toward a sky they’d never reach.
I looked for Wynnie and Charlie but didn’t see them. Smoke rose from cottage chimneys just below my window to the right. A huge, fluffy white dog ran toward a house on the left, and a tall woman bent down to rub its ears.
I avoided looking at the papers, the proof of loss, and the remnants of Mother’s language, not nearly enough for me to be able to translate her sequel.
It was clear now: all hope for understanding her—for pulling back the veil that covered her life in language, and for finding reasons and meaning in what she’d done—had vanished, spread across a frosted field, snatched by a thief in the middle of the country.
I covered the finished food plate with a linen napkin to take to the kitchen. It was peculiar to think that I’d been attended to by both Moira and Dr. Finlay, and yet I remembered nothing but my own fevered dreams.
After a long, hot bath with rose-scented soap, wrapped in a soft bathrobe that hung on the back hook of the door, I approached the papers. On top rested a sheet with one word, an ink-bleeding word, talith , with the definition:
When the sky breaks open; transformation that changes you into who you are meant to be; into your very essence.
When the sky breaks open.
This was what Mother had been writing about when the fire started. She’d wanted her sky to break open and reveal to her all she wanted to know, to show her all that was hidden from us.
It was possible that this was the word that had sent her from us to transform herself like Emjie, who found another world in The Middle Place .
I’d never loved Emjie’s ending, no reader really did—how Emjie left this earthbound world for another and became stuck, unable to find her way back to those she loved. This ending hinted that Mother had done the same.
Most of my life I’d believed that if I could translate the sequel and discover that Emjie made her way home, Mother would do the same.
It was a foolish childhood dream.
Here was the thing: I saw it now as if the fever had cleared the fog not only of London but also of my thoughts. I’d believed—and it might be true—that the pages of her sequel held her true self, that there was another mother, and she was hidden in the story. I wanted to know that mother so badly.
I wanted not Mother as she was, but Mother as she was hidden from me.
This desire had been germinating in me for so long that my life warped around the idea. Knowing that I would never fully translate her sequel or find meaning in her or her leaving, I sensed peace as it settled over me like the sky settled over this landscape of mountains, valleys, and lake.
In hopelessness, there was a great and wild letting-go.
I stood and walked to the window again and found my hands palm open and facing upward as if something had flown away from my once-clenched fists. Whatever I’d held in desperation floated away, and with an exhale I saw Charlie and Wynnie walking the flagstone pathway toward the house. The mountains ascended behind them and the lake flashed an azure blue, the poplar, the oak, the elm, and the sycamore forming the woodlands around them like an embrace.