Chapter Forty-Two
“First things first, you’re in hospital. Good news, huh?”
She holds her hand out to me; the skin of her arm embossed with that network of old scars, a road map in braille. Her skin is warm and soft. She is alive, and that means that by extension, I am, too. Alive. I blink slowly as she pours a glass of water from the jug on the bedside table.
“How long have I been here?”
Owong ave I binere?
“This is day six. You want the headlines?”
I nod. Fern holds the cup to my lips so I can take a sip of water. It tastes stale and warm and plastic, and it is so good she has to stop me gulping the whole lot down.
“Ah-ah,” she says, “you’ll be sick. How’s your tongue?”
“Sore.” I can feel it in my mouth, huge and puffy, throbbing in time with my pulse.
“Well, the good news is that Bert didn’t manage to pull it all the way out. He just tore it. It’ll heal, although you may lose a bit of sensation. He did, however, do some major tissue damage to your throat and he dislocated your poor jaw.”
“How do you know all this?”
“I read your notes, Mina.” She gives me a small, mischievous smile.
“What happened to Bert?”
“First, let’s talk about what happened to you. You think you’re ready for that?”
I nod.
“You sank. I thought you had to be dead. It was Sam who pulled you out. He waded right in once he realized what was going on, and he lifted you and carried you to the shore like the Swamp Thing. You looked like a fucked-up Ophelia. Your eyes were wide open but you weren’t seeing anything. I thought you were a goner, for sure. Sam checked you for a pulse and when he couldn’t find one he started doing CPR. They reckon that’s what saved your life. He kept you going till the paramedics took over.”
Her eyes are shimmering.
“You were clinically dead. Do you remember anything?”
I shake my head as much as the pain will allow. I remember the pond, the dark water, surface slightly ruffled by the building storm. Everything after that is a blank.
Is it, Mina?
Something stutters, like a short circuit in my brain. A handclap, there and gone in a moment. Eddie, smiling that goofy grin he did when he knew he was making me laugh. No ice, no oxygen masks hanging from bed frames. No cold, no rain. A warm patch of sunlight and the huge beanbags we had in the attic that smelled musty and old. An open book on his lap, Mysteries of the British Isles, dust motes in his hair.
Eddie had been there.
“I want to say I’m sorry, Mina. About Bert. I didn’t believe you. I should have listened.” She looks down at her hands, and a tear rolls down her cheek. “I was so scared when you mentioned Stevie—that he might have—he looked after her for me all the time, Mina.”
She sniffs, swiping her tears away with the back of her hand.
“You know the first thing I thought of? How he used to call her ‘Stevie-Beans.’ She wouldn’t let anyone else use it, do you remember? Only Bert. His special name for her. What does that say about me as a mother? That I let my daughter visit every day with that monster? I was angry when you said it but not at you, not really. I was mad at me and I just felt so sorry for who I was back then. That messed-up little girl in the photograph. I wish I could go back and save her.”
She lifts her eyes to the ceiling, catching her breath.
“I don’t remember picking up those Polaroids but I must have done because I took that envelope upstairs and threw it right in the bin. I tried to forget it but like the heart in that Edgar Allan Poe story, it just kept right on beating, reminding me it was there, so I pulled it back out again and then God help me I opened it. I looked at those pictures for a long time, long enough for Stevie’s bathwater to get cold. By then I was shaking all over. It was in my jaw and in my legs, I couldn’t stop.”
Fern picks at the bedsheet anxiously. I can hear the tremor in her voice.
“After that I made Lisa look at them. I think I scared her. I admit it. I meant to, because she had to listen to me right the first time. I asked her straight out about the Bertinis and the headaches and the holes in our memories. I told her what you’d told me and her face lost all color, like she was about to throw up. She kept saying Bert wouldn’t do this, he wouldn’t, not Bert, until the tears started. I didn’t hear when Alice came in but we both turned around when she said, ‘Mum?’ She had something in her hand. Something about it made me feel queasy, like I’d seen it before, only in a bad dream.”
“The pricker,” I mumble. She snorts.
“Is that what he called it? Horrible thing. I didn’t know where Alice found it—I just know she held out her hand, palm facing up, and said, ‘Mum look at this,’ and then she drove the needle down hard into her hand.”
I flinch. I remember how it felt when it had skewered into my side. I can even look down and see the wound on my arm, clotted over with a nasty scab.
“But here’s the thing. The needle went into her hand—all the way in—but nothing happened. Alice just stood there, pulled it out, pushed it slowly back in. Lisa didn’t get it, but I saw what it was straightaway.”
I think of Alice driving it into my leg and how it had left no impression.
“Witches don’t feel pain,” I slur. I don’t know if she understands me but Fern nods all the same.
“Oh, they do. But this was a trick. The pricker has a mechanism—a simple thing really, no more than a switch—that allows the needle to retract inside the handle. When Alice hit her hand, the needle disappeared, but the mechanism made it look as if it had gone right in. If you flipped the switch the other way, the needle locked in place. Lisa was staring at it with horror and I suspect she’d been on the blunt end of that instrument more than once while staying with the Roscows.”
We both fall silent. I keep remembering the way Bert handed Alice the witch pricker, how carefully he placed it in her hand. He must have flicked the switch as he did so, mindful that when she drove it into me it would then retract, making it seem as if I were impervious to it.
“Did Alice see the photos?”
Fern nods.
“I hadn’t meant her to, but it was like trying to hold back a tide. Something happened to her that night, Mina. She changed. It was like watching a Valkyrie rising. Something took over her.”
My brain skips, skimming like a stone. I can see the expression on Alice’s face as she drove that pricker into Bert’s neck, the brutal, boiling rage. Daemonia eicere.
“Is Alice okay?” I manage. A runnel of spit runs out the corner of my mouth and I wipe at it, alert enough to feel self-conscious.
“The Webber family haven’t been seen since the Riddance. At some point that night their house caught fire and carried on burning till morning. The statement from the fire department claims it was a chimney fire but that can’t be right. No one was having log fires in the middle of a heat wave.”
I think of the clicking of old bones, the pattering of soot. Alice saying “She watches me through the cracks in the bricks.” I am numb, at the edge of sleep I think. Drifting.
“Where’ve they gone?”
I open my eyes and turn to face her, wincing at the throb of pain on my right side.
“The police say the younger two were picked up from the grandparents about half eleven that night and then the family drove north. That’s as much as I know. What remains of the house is boarded up but already a lot of ghouls have been in there taking photographs and souvenirs. Hey, that reminds me—this came to the video shop this morning.”
She hands me a postcard and at first I think, That looks like me, and then I see it is me, me in my yellow dress in Crete a million years ago with Eddie reaching toward me. My photograph, slightly creased. When I turn it over, I discover it has been stamped and postmarked and the writing on the back is brief.
He 4gives U!
The photographs in Alice’s bedroom, the writing beneath them in the same curved, giddy swirls. Best M8s 4 Ever!
He 4gives U!
I make a sound, somewhere between a laugh and a sob. Fern’s eyes widen in alarm but I’m smiling. I take a look at the postmark but it is smudged and illegible. Probably just as well. I’m near the edge of sleep now. Everything is getting heavy. The lights are fuzzy, haloed. But I have one more question for Fern, one more answer I need.
“Sam?”
“I spoke to him yesterday. He’s desperate to see you.” Fern leans a little closer to me, whispering, “You didn’t hear it from me but he calls the hospital every day to see how you are. He pretends to be your cousin.”
“He’s got form for that.” I laugh, despite the way it sends sparks of pain into my damaged jaw.
“He feels terrible about what happened. He blames himself. I think once he saw Bert fall into the fire, he…”
Fern trails off. She doesn’t finish the sentence but she doesn’t need to. I know what happened. The spell broke. That’s why he’d come into the water to save me. I think of how I last saw Sam only moments before, blank-eyed, wistful. That shoe, scarred and scuffed and tiny in his hands. I don’t blame him. We were both lost, both unglued. The witch had got under our skin, just like she had with Alice.
“Tell him to come and see me when I’m better.” I manage a small, exhausted smile. “I’d like that.”
I close my eyes and feel my body, cushioned by painkillers. It’s like being suspended in a cradle of stars. When I open my eyes again, Fern is still looking at me and I know there is something else and that I won’t like it. The morphine will be wearing off soon and the edges of the pain will start to show through the thin blanket of protection and it’s going to hurt. I hold my fingers up to her, wait. I have something to say, first.
“Oscar left me.”
“I know, Mina, I’m sorry.”
“Don’t be. It was coming. He told me right after they brought me in.”
I was half-conscious when Oscar walked in and took a seat in the chair beside the bed, the one Fern now occupies. He tugged at the knees of his trousers as he sat, an old Oscar affectation, one I still find warm and comforting. I suppose one day that will fade.
“I can’t marry you,” he said stiffly. “I don’t even know who you are anymore.”
It might have been the morphine but I like to think there was some relief for both of us. He went on to tell me he had already canceled the venue and rescinded invites.
“I called to cancel the caterers and they told me you’d never even made the appointment.”
“I’m sorry, Oscar. I should have told you.”
“My mother is furious.”
“Oh.”
As he walked out, I said, “Tell Lucy I said ‘hi’.” Perhaps he didn’t understand me, with my tongue fat and heavy. He paused, but only for a moment. Then he kept right on going. Safe. Careful. A man who knew all about the heavens and nothing about love.
“It’s for the best,” I tell Fern, yawning. Ish fordabesh.
She nods, lacing her hands around her knees and looking at me steadily.
“I’m going to leave you to get some sleep, Mina. They think you’ll be out on the ward tomorrow and discharged maybe the day after—and at some point the police will want to talk. Do you have someone to support you?”
I think about it for so long my chest tightens with sadness.
Fern notices, and nods. “Then I’ll come. Every day if I have to.”
“No, you don’t have—”
“I do, Mina. For my own sanity, I do.”
This reply is so funny to me in my dreamy, zoned-out way that I burst out laughing. Fern waits politely for it to fade away before saying, “I should tell you about Bert.”
I stiffen, suddenly cold. From somewhere down the corridor, I can hear the hush of the nurse’s footsteps, the beeping of a distant alarm.
“What about him?”
“He’s here.”
I immediately try to sit up, gasping at the flare of pain in my ribs.
“Settle down. He’s not even on this floor. He’s in intensive care. Been there since they dragged him out the fire and they brought you both in.”
Silence. My heart is racing so fast I think I might be sick.
“He’s going to pull through. That’s what they reckon.”
“Fern—”
“I’m just telling you, so you know. He’s badly burned, and he’ll never look like he used to. He’ll probably be talking through a hole in his throat the rest of his life, but—he’s alive.”
She stands up as if preparing to leave, her face carefully composed.
“Which ward?”
“Uh, I don’t know.”
“Yes you do.”
Yesh oo do.
Fern looks away from me, keeping her voice steady and low.
“He’s in a private room. Trelawney Wing, second floor. Third door on the left, number nine. I went up there but I couldn’t go in. Guess that makes me a coward, huh?”
She leans forward, kissing me gently on the head.
“I’ll be back for you, Mina.”
I watch the pneumatic door swing slowly closed behind her. I don’t doubt that she means what she says, that she will return. It’s a good feeling. I lean back into the pillows, feeling sleep overtaking me, the painkillers lifting me upward among asteroids and satellites and into the hearts of stars.
I dream of Eddie. Of my mother saying “He’s always been a sickly boy.” Maybe that’s why no one was worried at first, when he started shivering, his temperature climbing dangerously high. Another cold, another sore throat. Two days after I fell through the ice, I came home from school to see Eddie with his feet in a bowl of hot water and a towel over his shoulders. A few days later he started coughing. Deep and guttural, like something was clawing its way out of him. He was tired all the time, shadows swimming beneath the surface of his skin. By the time the snow had melted and the rains had come in, Eddie was breathing in long, hard gasps, frame too bony and eyes too sunken to be my brother. It’s not him, I thought, as I carried the pillow toward his bed. It’s not Eddie in there, just a sick imposter.
“Tell me about the ice, Mina,” he whispered, mist fogging up his oxygen mask. “So I’m not afraid while you do it.”
The story always started the same way— “Remember how the snow had smelled like metal,” I said, “how it was so cold it burned our fingers?” I slipped the mask off his face, left it hanging from the bedpost. When I lowered the pillow, we’d reached the lane that would take us to Brewer’s Pond, the ice cracking beneath my feet as his hands clenched and unclenched, hitting feebly against my own, the rooks taking flight as his heels drummed into the mattress, and by the time he stopped his feeble struggling he had saved my life and the lethal cold burrowed into the soft tissue of his lungs and ruptured an eye bloodred.
I don’t take my painkillers that evening. I don’t want to risk falling all the way asleep. I clench my teeth as the opiates wear off and the world swims into focus, raw and sharp edged. The nurse leaves a tray of food by my bed at six-fifteen. Soft things that my tongue and throat can manage. Warm soup, mashed potato, jelly. I eat the jelly.
At eight o’clock I sink into a fitful, sweaty doze infused with dreams of an abyss, a great gulf of space beneath my feet that cracks like ice. When I wake panting around midnight, I am in such pain I almost call for the nurse. Instead I force myself to sit up and drink a glass of water, swallowing against the burning in my throat, the jarring pain in my jaw that shortens my breath with every movement. I put on the television and watch old shows and the nightly news, stories of how the heat wave was broken in a series of storms across the country, flash floods in the Highlands. I watch the clock move past midnight, then toward one o’clock. By one-thirty I carefully, so carefully, swing my legs out of the bed and onto the floor, the tiles blissfully cool beneath my bare feet. It takes me a moment to stand and another for my legs to steady beneath me, and I walk a slow circuit around the room before I’m confident enough to open the door and slip out into the hallway, following the signs for the lifts and using the wall to hold on to when I need to catch my breath. My chest crackles noisily and my breathing is short and hard, making me dizzy. There is a pain all the way down the side of my neck like something has me in a metal vise, squeezing.
I take another step and another, and then I’m in the empty lift and pressing the buttons for the second floor. I’m shivering, feeling something rupture as I lift my arm. A spot of blood blooms on the bandage. My gown flaps around me like a winding shroud. The lift chimes as the doors open and a sign welcomes me to the Trelawney Wing. “Third door on the left, number nine,” Fern said. I can see it up ahead of me. I look up and down the corridor but there is no one around. Distantly I can hear the muffled squeak of shoes as the nurses pass along the wards. I wonder if Sam is still hearing that sound in the night. I hope not. I hope it’s over for all of us. I stagger past the first two rooms, sweating heavily, gritting my teeth against the pain, one hand pressed against my side.
I can’t do this.
Keep going, Meens.
My hand is opening the door to room nine and I feel like I’m floating away. Even the pain recedes briefly, like an ebbing tide. I see a figure on the bed wired up to machines that beep and flicker, an intravenous drip, blood bags glowing red in the low light. Bert’s bandaged hands are folded on top of the coverlet. His chest is a slow rise and fall, head turned slightly to one side. Carefully, so carefully, I close the door behind me. I consider putting a chair in front of it but I need to conserve my strength so I have to just hope I can be quick. It’s not like it’s my first time.
There is a burn mask over his face—a rubbery, flesh-colored shield with tiny holes for his eyes and nostrils. The name on his notes reads Albert Roscow and when I lean close to his face I think I detect a shift in his breathing, a quickening perhaps. Deep in the mask, the eyes open. I smile at him as I slide the pillow out from beneath his head and I think he is trying to say something but it is muffled, made unintelligible by the mask. A wasp, striped bright yellow, is crawling over his raw pink scalp. I don’t know where it came from. All the windows are closed. I think of Alice, of witches’ familiars and heat waves and bright red wax. I lean closer, close enough that he can hear me when I whisper, “Goodbye, Bert. Good Riddance.”