Chapter Twenty-Three. Daye
Daye
In April, Rory brought back a camera and a handful of pictures.
“I thought you’d like to see what the city looks like,” he said. They sprawled on the living room carpet and looked at the photos fanned before them. Smiling people. Stone statues. Wynne making a familiarly annoyed expression in an unfamiliar room.
All the pictures were full of places that seemed almost fantastic—gates as large as trees and buildings huddling together like giant stone forests. It made the city seem suddenly real.
Daye picked up a picture of a boy and a girl with their heads together—the boy smiling, the girl blowing an exaggerated kiss.
“That’s Elliott and Maggie. They’re twins,” Rory supplied.
Daye glided her finger across their pointy chins, their eyebrows, their hair—the exact same shape, the exact same shade of brown.
‘And this?’ Daye asked, pointing at the next picture.
“That’s Noah. And this”—he pointed at a different photo—“is Hanna, and Maggie again.” A dark-haired girl with bloodred lips, arms thrown around the shoulders of the pointy-chinned girl. Daye touched the place where their hands were clasped together.
A bright light flashed in her peripheral vision.
“Sorry,” Rory said, lowering the camera. “Forgot to turn off the flash.”
The next was a picture of all five of them, touching and elbowing and smiling, with Rory in the center. They seemed nice, like there were no sneers lurking in the corners of their mouths. It made Daye’s heart beat faster, with something between fear and longing.
‘I wish I could meet them,’ she signed.
“You would have liked them. Elliott and Maggie, especially.” He chuckled. “They would have loved to meet you.”
Daye stilled. She touched the picture again. The five of them were posing, their smiles firefly-bright and clear. An invitation. Nothing like the way Owen’s smile—
No. She wouldn’t think of that. Instead, Daye took a deep breath and asked, ‘Do you think I could?’
“Hmm?” Rory was fiddling with the camera. “Could what?”
‘Meet them. See this.’ Daye gestured at the pictures fanned before them. ‘Maybe next time, I could come to the city with you?’
“Oh.” Rory looked taken aback. “I never thought you wanted to come to the city.”
‘Why not?’ Daye asked.
“There are no trees or flowers, only streets and houses,” Rory said. “And it’s dirty and loud. And you have to take the train for a million years.”
‘There are some trees,’ Daye signed, pointing at the picture of an owl-crested yard full of oaks and spring-budding grass. ‘And it seems nice. Interesting. Maybe a little scary.’ She paused, her mind supplying hands reaching and smiles falling away like ripe fruit. ‘But you’ll be with me.’
Rory stared at the wall for a long minute.
“I don’t know if it’s possible.” He seemed shaken.
“I have no idea what being on the train for hours, let alone days in the city, might do to you.” He took a deep breath, steeling himself.
“But I can look into it, if you want. See if there are any adjustments we can make in the next transition to make it safer. And we can take it slowly. Take the train for one stop, just to Westbrook—it’s close enough that we could walk back, if we had to—and see how you’re feeling, maybe?
And then, the next time, take it for one more stop, until we’re sure … ”
Daye could feel herself deflating more and more with each word, her smile growing slack and rubbery.
More experiments. More waiting, more things to take Rory away from here, away from her.
And even if it wasn’t so, she could never ask for something that made his lips thin into that kind of anxious line.
Rory was still talking, musing about the steps they could take and the books he should check to make sure the city was safe for her. Daye nudged him with her shoulder. ‘It’s okay,’ she signed. ‘It was just a thought.’
“Are you sure?” Rory asked, turning to her. Somehow, he was taller than her again, tall enough that she had to look up.
‘I—’ She hesitated, her eyes catching on the bright colors blooming across the photos, the way Rory’s smiles seemed even brighter reflected in the smiles of his friends. ‘I don’t want to make you worry.’
“I always worry anyway.” Rory gave her a small, self-deprecating smile. “And you’re right, it’s silly that I never thought about it before. You coming with me. I should look into it.” He paused. “I mean, if you want me to.”
For a moment, Daye tried to weigh the hours it would add to Rory’s absence against the hours she might gain with him.
The anxious press of his lips against the possibility of standing right there with him, beaming at the camera under unfamiliar trees; of meeting the people whose smiles flowed from picture to picture, who wanted to meet her.
The stone owls in the picture seemed to beckon her with their outspread wings.
‘I want to,’ Daye signed haltingly. ‘If you’re sure it won’t be any trouble.’
“Of course it won’t.” Rory started stacking up the pictures. “I’ll look into it, next time I’m in the city. I promise.”
The house was quiet again. Rory was in the city, for two weeks this time, and Mrs. Matthews had already gone for the day. Rain splattered against the window and cascaded down the roof. From Rory’s shelves, the yellow envelope of photos seemed to glow faintly against the gloom, beckoning.
Hesitantly, Daye carried it to the center of the room—where the window spilled a square of thin, watery light—and spread the photos on the carpet before her.
A dozen tiny Rorys looked back at her, smiling and frowning and laughing, surrounded by smiling, laughing people.
She flipped through the pictures, one after another—rooms full of strange angles and foreign furniture; streets filled with more people than she had ever seen; Rory and his friends, in different configurations, against different backdrops, but always close together, always leaning and touching and laughing.
Rory seemed so solid in these photos, so tangible; like she could reach out and touch him.
But somehow, it only made him feel so much farther away.
Now, with his time in the city fanned out on the carpet before her, it was no longer a murky, impenetrable haze that Rory disappeared to each month, but a life. A life devoid of her.
Something hitched in her chest, like when the needle of Wynne’s record player skipped.
He’ll look into it, Daye reminded herself. He promised. Maybe it was simple. Maybe next transition, or the one after that, she could come to the city, too.
She tried to imagine how she’d look in these photos; to picture herself slotted into the empty spaces at their edges: sitting at the corner of the table in one picture, on the arm of a sofa in another; with Rory’s arm slung around her shoulders, while his friends crowded close.
But no matter what, her face never seemed to fit between their bright smiles.
In the hallway mirror, Daye held a picture of the two girls—Hanna, Rory called the black-haired one, and the other one was Maggie—and tried to mimic their expressions.
Again and again, she adjusted the shape of her smile, the angle of her head, the arch of her eyebrow. But even with her lips pursed just so, her eyes and nose crinkled in the exact same way as theirs, she still looked … different.
Her face was shaped like theirs—mouth and eyebrows and irises and teeth.
Her nose and chin jutted just like Hanna’s, and her spring hair was almost the same shade as Maggie’s.
But despite all of it, Daye couldn’t help but feel there was something intrinsically disparate in the way she looked.
It was like the difference between looking at the lake from above and opening her eyes underwater; like her face belonged to a different background than theirs, her features suited to something else altogether.
Looking at the girls in the photo, Daye understood for the first time what Wynne meant all those times she said Daye wasn’t real.
That thing in her chest hitched again, more a stomp than a skip; a long, relentless squeeze.
Daye pressed a hand to her sternum, trying to press the sensation away.
In the mirror, her face looked lost, almost stricken.
Would Rory’s solution make her more like them? Would she fit into the pictures then?
Would Rory want her to?
The gloom of the hallway seemed to curve around her; the tap-tap-tap of the rain was suddenly too loud, almost deafening.
With unsteady hands, Daye put the picture back in the envelope and hurried out of the room, almost running in her haste to be out, outside, away.
As she slipped between the trees, she barely noticed the rain soaking into her dress and sliding down her cheeks.