Elly
THEN
The guests whisper amongst themselves, exchanging worried glances across the table. Barely anyone eats. Margot chews one of her curls in her mouth, replacing it with another when it becomes sopping wet.
“This isn’t good,” she whispers. “Something bad is going to happen, Little Mouse. I know it.”
“She wants to speak to you,” she says.
Elly follows Siobhan down the hallway and into the study, feeling eyeballs on her back.
The curtains have been drawn and it’s sour in here, like bad breath, like unwashed bodies.
It takes Elly’s eyes a long time to get used to the gloom, but when they do, she can see that Haina is slumped in her armchair.
She is so thin, her clavicles jutting like a pair of bike handles from her chest. Her cheekbones look like they could cut clean through the skin.
“Come and sit down, my angel,” she says, her voice a rattle.
Elly does. She remembers all the other times she’s sat in this very chair, when she was the one who’d felt frail and fragile, sitting across from a Haina who was vital and urgent and powerful.
She has the sense of something ending, or of something huge approaching, but she can’t stand back far enough to recognise its shape.
“Have you enjoyed your time with us?” Haina asks.
The hairs on Elly’s forearms prickle. “You’ve changed my life,” she hears herself say. “You’ve changed me.”
Haina smiles. Siobhan is hovering by the door, silent. “That’s good,” Haina says. “I’m so glad. Because I’ve been thinking about your ceremony, and I think that it should be tonight.”
Elly’s mouth goes dry. “Tonight?”
Haina coughs, her body wracked by the force, as if it’ll split her in two. “You’re ready,” she says eventually, once she’s recovered enough to speak. “Aren’t you?”
Elly sits on her hands to stop them shaking.
She’s been flying nightly for weeks now, and feels more at home in the air than she does on the ground.
But the thought of what she needs to do to pass her ceremony, and the thought of walking free of the house and never coming back, makes her feel sick with fear. “I don’t know,” she says.
“It’s the final scene Theo and Siobhan need for their film,” Haina says, and there’s a new desperation to her voice now, an urgency.
“We have to get this film into the world, Elly. We have to bring more people to this house, don’t you see?
” When Elly doesn’t answer, she says, “Please, my angel. You’re the only one who’s ready. ”
Elly watches her, and so badly wants to say yes.
She wants to give her what she needs – she wants to be pleasing and obedient.
The first time she’d met Haina, she’d felt with an iron conviction that she should never say no to her, and she feels the reverberation of that now, clanging and insistent.
It would be easy to say yes, she thinks.
And yet, she can’t, because deep in her belly, she knows that while she’s almost ready, she needs more time.
To do her ceremony tonight – it could be dangerous.
And for the first time in her life, she feels enough steel in her blood to refuse.
“I’m sorry, Haina,” she says. “I can’t.”
She can sense Siobhan’s eyes boring into her back. “We really need that scene,” Siobhan says, her voice hard and cold. “Then we’re done.”
“I just need more time. A few days.”
Haina coughs again, doubling forward with the effort.
Siobhan rushes to her side, but Haina waves her away.
Elly swallows, feeling as though there are rocks in her mouth.
It’s so stark that she can’t believe she didn’t see it before.
Haina is dying. They might not be able to wait days.
Somehow, she realises, her ceremony could save Haina.
She doesn’t know how that can be true, and wishes she had all the puzzle pieces in order to see the whole.
“What’s happening, Haina?” she hears herself whisper. “To you? To the house?”
Haina lifts her head, her breaths ragged and slow. Her eyes land on Elly’s. They flash like coins in the gloom. “You can help, Elly,” she whispers. “You’re the only one who can.”
That feeling again – a resistance, a knowing, deep in her bones, that something isn’t right. “I can’t,” she says, but her voice is quieter this time.
“Because you’re scared?” Siobhan says, and it’s not cruel, but close. “Don’t you want to show everyone that you’re not weak? Don’t you want to show Thomas?”
Haina says nothing. She sits very still in her chair, watching.
Elly bites down hard on her lip. She holds it all in her hands: the documentary, Haina, the house, all of it.
It’s so heavy, but at the same time so sharp.
It needles its way into her body, into her mouth.
She knows she should still say no, that something about this is very, very wrong, but then she thinks of Thomas.
Those tiny hands, those eyes she feels like she’s always known.
He deserves a mother who is strong, who is brave.
And hasn’t she been making excuses all her life?
Isn’t this new form she now inhabits capable of feeling fear and still surging forward?
“Tonight,” she whispers, and in the half-dark, Haina smiles.
* * *
Elly spends the day with Thomas. If she passes her ceremony, she’ll take him with her, but it still somehow feels necessary to soak up the details of him, to memorise the slight upturn of his nose, the wrinkles between his forearms and his elbows, the way he seems to look past her and then suddenly focus, peering at her with so much knowing that it makes her eyes water.
At first, she had wanted to pretend that there was nothing of Ethan in Thomas, to pretend, even, that he’d come to her in some other, unearthly way.
He was a gift to her for being strong, for being good.
But now when she looks at him, she sees Ethan in the way Thomas’s thin covering of hair shines auburn only when the light hits it directly; the way his eyes are beginning to turn a warm hazel, the colour of a woodland in autumn.
It’s not as painful as she expected to see these things – instead, it makes her almost miss Ethan, makes her miss the pieces of him that she had loved fiercely.
There’d been plenty. When he blushed, it would travel all the way up from his neck to his forehead.
In sleep, he made quiet, content noises, like a puppy.
There was an unguardedness to the way he laughed, throwing his head back so you could see all the way into his mouth.
She aches for him, sometimes. Thomas feels like all of Ethan’s most wonderful parts, redelivered to her as a second chance.
She keeps Thomas close to her chest while she walks the grounds of the house, and when he reaches out to touch something – a dangling tree branch, a drooping strip of wallpaper – she lets him.
She has all the patience in the world for him.
At dinner, Margot offers to hold him while Elly eats, but she keeps him on her lap instead, bouncing him as she chews on strips of rare steak.
She lets him pull on her hair and bunch it in his tiny fists.
His every move is miraculous to her, an unlikely wonder.
She wants more time, but before long, night starts to close in on the house, turning the sky a milky lavender, and she knows that it’s time for her ceremony.
The night air is harsh and unforgiving when they step outside.
The guests wrap layers of clothing around themselves, teeth chattering.
Elly barely feels the cold. She is barefoot, wearing only a black slip dress and a hairband Margot had made for her out of intertwined ribbon.
She’d given it to Elly the night before, cheeks flushed with pride.
“Thank you for being my friend, Little Mouse,” she’d whispered into Elly’s ear.
“I might not pass, Margot. Maybe I’ll stay right here, with you.”
Margot had smiled sadly. “Maybe.”
Now, Margot holds Thomas at the front of the loose crowd of guests, and Elly stands alone by the treeline. Some of the women come up to kiss her and squeeze her arm before resuming their places in the throng. When Theo approaches, he’s frowning.
“You don’t have to do this,” he says. “I know Siobhan has been pushing you, for the film, but don’t let them pressure you into it.”
Elly reaches out a hand and pushes one of his curls from his face. “I’ll come and find you,” she says, “out there.” He bites his lip, drawing a fat bead of blood, but he rejoins the crowd.
When Haina appears in the doorway of the house and begins to limp towards them, everyone turns.
It strikes Elly again how broken she looks, especially away from the safe cocoon of her study.
There is a bone-white streak through her hair that wasn’t there this morning.
When she takes Elly in her arms, Elly can feel each and every rib through the skin of her back.
She thinks she hears them creak with effort.
“Are you ready, my angel?” Haina whispers in her ear.
Elly thinks about what it would mean to leave, tonight.
To wander naked through the forest with Thomas, back towards the life she knew.
Only, she won’t go back to the village, or Edinburgh – that thought is already forming in her mind.
When she tries to picture where she will go, she can’t quite see it, can’t see herself anywhere else in the world.
She remembers what the woman had told her, all those months ago in the bathroom at her wedding.
It’s the woods you need. Just keep going and don’t stop.
She can only hope that the woods will come through for her a second time, that they’ll show her the way forward again.
“I’m ready,” she tells Haina, who pulls away from her. She feels very lonely, all of a sudden, standing solitary in front of the waiting crowd.
“You have the love of the whole house,” Haina says. Her thin voice is barely loud enough to hear.