Chapter Seventy-Two. Daye
Daye
For a while after that, Daye lost sense of time.
Maybe she lost her mind, or misplaced it.
She slept. She woke. She slept again. At some point, she moved away from the border.
At some point later—or was it before that?
—she had her left foot again, though she couldn’t remember weaving it back.
Days continued to pass. She felt sluggish all the time.
She didn’t know if it was the drag of the season or the fatigue of despair. She didn’t care either way.
In a sense, this incessant sleeping was a mercy.
But this, too, didn’t last. After a while—days?
Weeks?—she became restless, unable to keep still.
Her feet, spring tanned and whole, kept pushing her away, away, away.
She circled her land, her loops growing larger and larger.
Concentric circles were the closest to elsewhere she could get.
Finally—and it was never a question of whether she would end up there, but only how long it would take—she was back at the border.
Time found her there. It hung like ornaments on the bare branches, lurked in the patches of frost in the grass.
How many days had she missed? How many weeks?
No green leaves remained. Fall was hanging on the precipice, one nudge away from a headlong tumble into winter.
Daye’s body was taut with tension as she opened the door of the house, even knowing that there would be nothing but silence to greet her. In the kitchen, the dust that accumulated in Mrs. Matthews’s absence was a heavy blanket on the furniture, muffling the sharp edges of memories.
On a hook on the wall, she found the calendar, still open to August, the date of Rory’s last visit circled in green ink.
She flipped forward. September. October.
November. As if there would be some sign, some neat green circle to tell her in what square of time she was standing.
The end of October? The middle of November?
Daye couldn’t even guess. Time used to be instinctual.
She used to simply feel it, the ebb and flow of the season in her limbs.
But all she could feel now was the cloying sweetness of a perpetual spring.
On the last page of the calendar, she found two circles she hadn’t drawn: one on December 17, the date Rory’s program ended, and one on December 19, the day after Saint Winebald’s Day. The date of Rory’s return.
She let the pages fall back into place.
Daye softly closed the back door behind her, feeling easier once her feet sank into the muddy ground of the back garden. As she passed by the shed, a sudden sound of scraping flared, paws and talons frantically scrabbling at walls and glass.
Daye flinched. She didn’t know they were still there. Though of course they would be. Held suspended, halfway to withering, by the endlessness of spring. Scrabbling. Always scrabbling.
Even now, she couldn’t bring herself to look at them. Like looking might dissolve the flimsy separation between her and them. Like if she watched them long enough, she might find herself right alongside them, scrabbling at the windows and doors of a shed that was never going to open.
Even now that it had already happened, she still couldn’t help but look down and hurry away.