Chapter Seventy. Daye
Daye
Daye learned the perimeter of spring. It twined round the forest, cutting through its eastern flank, just shy of the road.
In the north it snaked through a clearing, cutting off a copse of beeches.
To the northwest it hugged the lake, leaving only its northernmost point out of reach.
It tumbled through the fields on the west, slipping between the rivulets flowing southward.
Rory was right. It shouldn’t have made much difference. If not for that day in the lake, it might have taken her months to stumble across it.
But now, knowing it was there, it changed everything. It hummed in her branch-bones, in her marrow: Trapped. Trapped. Trapped.
She had never quite noticed before, how small her world was. Now, its borders seemed to constrict around her, shifting closer every time she looked away.
Daye learned the exact placement of the border line through trial and error.
Sometimes the change was obvious: on one side, bluebells, on the other, harebells; one side in the full foliage of summer, the other forever locked in the hesitance of spring.
At other times the boundary was harder to spot, and Daye learned she’d crossed it only through a sudden sense of fatigue, a sharp twinge in her ankles—as if, all at once, the full weight of a season had settled on her shoulders.
Once, lost in thoughts, she strayed far enough from the border that blue and purple spots bloomed on her arms, like exotic flowers, and her skin started to split and crack.
She had to crawl back, pulling herself hand over hand back to safety.
She didn’t make that mistake again. She couldn’t, even if she wanted to.
She had promised to be careful, after all.
She learned every nuance of the border line, every dip and curve, drinking in the sight of summer just out of reach. She walked the perimeter until her footsteps drew a trail in the earth; until the border’s outline was inscribed into her, as instinctive as breathing.
There was no reason for her to do it. Nothing to be gained. She walked it anyway.
After all, she had nothing but time.
Years ago, when Rory had just started leaving for the library, he used to punctuate each goodbye with a plea: “Please,” he would say, “is there anything I can bring you from the city? Anything at all you want?”
She always stared at him, mute and helpless. Unable to comprehend the notion of wanting beyond the simplest desires: Rory by her side, his hand in hers. To be with him. To please him. To make him laugh.
‘No,’ she’d answer every time. ‘I don’t want anything.’
He brought her things anyway. Chains of intricately folded birds, made of colored paper. Mechanical toys that wound themselves down. Scarves, embroidered with flowers. But the notion of wanting kept slipping between her fingers. How could she know what it was she wanted?
It was such a strange thing, she thought now, walking the borderlands of spring, to want, to give the want name.
Here, finally, was what Daye wanted: A way out. An escape.
At night, Daye imagined stepping over the border.
There was a place where the meadow melted into fields; where a patch of poppies spilled across both sides of the border, as red and vivid as a splash of blood.
Again and again, Daye imagined stepping between the flowers, the delicate petals fluttering against her calves.
She imagined her bare feet sinking into the grass, the way the earth would feel between her toes: damp one moment, dry the next.
She imagined crossing the border she’d charted with cracking skin and stumbling steps.
Simply stepping over that invisible line.
She imagined it again and again. That single step. A way out. An escape.
It took her weeks to imagine what would come after that first step.
A second step. A third. A fourth. Not looking back.
In her head, she listed the things she would leave behind her: The house. The fortress. The lake. The meadow with its rabbits, and the forest with its profusion of familiar trees. Her birds.
It took her weeks more to add Rory’s name to the list.
It ached. It ached worse than crashing when she skated. Worse than falling apart. Worse than unbeing. It ached constantly. Everywhere, all at once.
You were everything I wanted, she would tell him as she stared upward, where branches had broken through the ceiling they made together, so many years ago.
Why did you do this to me? she wanted to shout at him. Why did you do this to us?
Even in her head, Rory had no answer.
Some nights, she tried to find the root of it, the junction where it all went wrong.
Was it when Rory went to the university for good?
Or when he gave her a voice, the autumn after that?
When he changed her body to accommodate him, two summers before?
Or the first time he kissed her on the lips, with the first blush of a different, younger spring?
Was it when the experiments started? That first time he went to study in the library, almost four years back?
Or when he told her she could never come with him there, not quite meeting her eyes?
When he took over the transitions from his sister?
The two weeks he spent sitting beside her, as her body broke into ever smaller pieces?
Or maybe it was that first time she fell apart, a few months after they first met?
She could never decide. It had been happening for such a long time, in such a steady accrual, drop after drop.
Other nights, instead of tracing the beginnings of it, she probed at the ending.
Again and again, she saw Rory’s eyes harden, his tongue snaking outward, the tip of it tracing his bottom lip.
She replayed it so many times that she could identify the exact tipping point: The moment just after she’d said, “Please, you know I’ll have no choice but to do what you tell me.
” The stillness of him. The careful way his mouth shaped the words “I don’t know what you mean.
” And, immediately after, the precise way his lips moved when he said, “Daye, you have to just calm down.”
It is such a strange thing, she thought over and over again, as nights wound down into nothing. Such a strange thing to want, to give the want name.
It was almost impossible to shape the words, to force them out.
But, eventually, she did. In the early morning hours of an endless spring, Daye finally said it, her voice too loud against the predawn stillness: “I want a way out. I want to be free from this place, from this spring. I want … I want to be free from Rory, even if it means never seeing him again.”
She loved Rory so much. She felt his absence every moment of every day, a phantom limb.
She suspected she’d always yearn for him.
But still, each night she imagined it: How her muscles would bunch.
How it would feel to walk, to keep walking.
Again and again and again, she imagined stepping over the threshold and being free.