Chapter 36
Back in her bedroom, Harper sat in the picture window watching the rain.
She would have to resume her self-guided tour another day.
She was overwhelmed and suddenly exhausted.
Polly slept on her bed; she had been here when Harper had found her way back after the nursery, and offered up a near-silent squawk and curled up to sleep.
Harper was grateful for the company. Other cats roamed the hallways, lounged in the corners.
Nothing here made any sense. Her memories, the familiarity, the cats.
Bell Manor was far more than anyone had warned her about, and greater.
Impulsively, she pulled her phone out of her pocket and texted Carli. She had responded a couple of times to Carli but between both of their work, nothing much had been said.
You’re never going to guess where I’m staying. Your haunted house
Hesitantly, Harper hit send. Almost immediately, “read” appeared under the message and the dots started blinking an incoming reply.
Lies. Pictures or it’s all lies
Harper snapped a photo of her room and hit send.
Jesus Frogging Christsicles. I’m in a lit review right now—can’t talk, this guy’s dissertation is evidently on monotony and how it can be used as a battle grade torture tactic. Call later?
Harper hit a thumbs-up on the message and put her phone away.
Carli was in the thick of her dissertation defense right now, where Harper ought to be, but one had to actually finish their research and write the paper in order to do that.
All of it seemed a million miles away as she lay in the window, a woven blanket over her legs, watching the rain and wind.
Her entire PhD had been an impulse that had quickly gotten bigger than she’d ever imagined or even wanted.
Watching the sheets of rain, Harper’s mind wandered.
Her first year at Boston Scientific Institute, she had set her sights on wildlife conservation, and dreamed of joining a rogue Greenpeace crew that shot paintballs at whaling ships or sprung bear traps in the Alaskan tundra.
It was at her undergrad graduation when it had hit her.
The second wave, she liked to call it, the grief that had lapped at the boat she’d been drifting in since she was thirteen.
She’d been standing in the line to walk the stage, the card with her name pronunciation in her hand, and she’d just crumbled.
No one was here for her. No one who shared her blood, no one who really knew how hard she’d fought to stay afloat.
The staff had thought the Boston heat had taken her down, and sat her in a folding chair with a glass of ice water until she could stand and walk the stage.
It was in that moment that she heard Carli’s voice from the crowd, diploma already in hand.
It had been Carli and Carli alone who cheered as she shook the dean’s hand, who hugged her as she descended from the stage and the cameras flashed her picture in cap and gown.
Her father would never laugh at another of her terrible jokes, her mother would never whistle in perfect harmony to whatever was on her headphones.
Only Carli was there and she was staying on at BSI, so Harper stayed, clinging to the thing she knew.
A master’s degree was easier as a fast-track PhD.
Harper had intended to drop out as the master’s was finished but then kept going, signing onto every field team, every chance to escape the tunnel she was barreling down without direction or vision.
But she had kept going and here she was—almost to an end she’d never really wanted.
“Where do you see yourself in ten years?” Professor Kallen had asked in a fit of frustration over her half-written paper, her improbably vague dissertation topic, her endless and incongruent field research.
Harper had no answer. She didn’t see herself anywhere in ten years, she didn’t see herself anywhere in ten minutes.
What she was unable to express to anyone, especially Professor Kallen, was that she lived her life in a near-constant state of disconnection, as though she were a visitor in her own skin.
Every moment she had to remind herself that this was now, this was here.
It was what had drawn her to octopuses, what had led her research to follow teams up and down the Atlantic, tracking different types, species, looking for answers to a fairy tale that she’d been told as a child.
It was a story from her father’s own childhood in Vestmannaeyjar that he had told her when she was barely old enough to remember, a remnant of an íslendingasour, or fairy story.
She remembered leaning against his chest, one ear on his heart as he spoke, his voice echoing in her ears.
Hafgufa was the ruler of the subconscious, spat out by the gods into the sea to rule the oceans, forever in the underworld, just a shade away from the waking reality of the surface.
The octopus was the descendant of the gods, its body as large as a continent, a creature who straddled this reality with a higher dimension.
Harper closed her eyes and saw what she had seen then, the ephemeral creature gracefully gliding through the deepest waters, not really here or really there, a creature of the in between.
The accident that killed her parents would be noted later as an explosion caused by a faulty ventilation system in the engine room that was ignited by a loose spark.
Even at thirteen, Harper knew that was code for what no one could know, an attempt to explain the unexplainable.
Before the Coast Guard could even send investigators out, Hurricane Audra hit and whatever had been left was destroyed.
Even her parents’ bodies, lost to the sea; somewhere off the coast of Bell their bones lay on the ocean floor, picked clean by the isopods and hagfish.
For years after, Harper would imagine Hafgufa itself, winding its tentacles around her parents’ bones, holding them safe in its underwater kingdom.
She didn’t know when her memories had started fading, it wasn’t a conscious process.
Every day little details faded, her father’s favorite food, her mother’s smile, then the destruction spread until even the flat in Vestmannaeyjar became more dream than brick and stone.
The smell of fish in the air, the gannets overhead, the puffins dotting the hillsides, all of it faded like the lupines in winter.
Harper had packed away her existence in that lost world.
All she carried now were the cursory details of their life there.
It was the only way she had to bear the weight that she had been granted.
Time passed in a sort of half-life, Harper buried all of it—loss, grief, memories—deep below the sea with Hafgufa, with Thalassa, where all the gods of the sea ruled and the waking world was illusion.
A knock at the door broke Harper’s reverie and she snapped back to reality. It was a young woman in a gray uniform.
“Sorry to bother you. Dinner will be ready in thirty minutes. Mr. Nigel wanted me to make sure you had all you needed until then?” she asked hesitantly.
“Would it be a trouble to get some herbal tea?” Harper asked. Her head was ringing from memories and lasting sensation from the nursery.
“Not at all, I’ll be right back.” The young woman disappeared, and Harper buried her head in her hands. There were ghosts in Bell Manor, but Harper was afraid she had brought them with her.