Chapter 7 #2
To my credit, I only drag my feet slightly as she pulls me away from Ben’s side.
Being separated from him causes my body to react in unexpected ways.
My heart rate rises, and my breathing shallows just because of his absence.
Margaret pulls me closer against her as if that could remedy the anxiety.
From here, I can feel her own heart racing, and I think maybe she’s reaching for me for her own needs.
She went through hell too, I remind myself.
“You’re alright?” I ask in a whisper as we ascend the stairs to the bathhouse attached to our casa.
She lets out a shaky sigh as she pushes the door open. “I’ve been better, but yes, I’m alive.”
It’s all she divulges.
“I took the liberty of grabbing some of your clothing from our room.” She stumbles forward, hands outstretched to show that she had indeed grabbed a day dress and a set of trousers and a blouse. “I’m sorry, but we’ll have to find you something to sleep in–”
“Margaret,” I begin, “it’s more than enough. Believe me. I thought everything was lost.”
She merely nods; a phantom of what she went through crosses her face, but she remains unspeaking on the topic. “I’ll have James take me to that market we passed by, just for a few necessities.”
Without another word, she slips out, and I’m left to the lukewarm tub in the room.
Exhaustion hits me as I pull my necklace over my head and lower myself into the water. The shift I elected to keep on billows out around me as I sink lower into the tub. My hand instinctively wraps around the stone at my chest and squeezes.
Never again, the whispers hiss in response to being parted from the stone.
Never again, I answer back.
Knowing I have the comfort of the souls that came before me, I let the emotion take over and fully submerge myself. I feel the glow of the necklace and the vibration of it as it paints a new picture for me to study.
The nightmares aboard had been blurry at best, but here, with the necklace around me, I can once again see clearly.
A fragile happiness has shattered. A woman stands over a body, no, no, a corpse. Her deft hands clutch the handle of a dagger dug deep into a man’s chest. Though there are no screams, no sense of fire, I can feel it. Deep in this mountain, there is great suffering.
“It’s too late!” a whisper, my whisper, scolds. The woman with hair dark as night throws her head in my direction, but she looks through me, to those behind her.
“Minha filha, o que você fez?”
My daughter, what have you done?
Older women have come into the chamber now, bleeding, as if they’ve suffered a blow in battle. The youngest among them runs forward and removes the girl’s hand from the hilt.
“Mother,” the whispers call.
The girl turns from the body. Now I can see the necklace she wears at her chest, with the baby strapped to her.
I’ve seen this vision before, or rather, what happened before this. The woman, the man, and the baby, standing there peacefully, before…before…
I feel my lungs squeeze and then the sudden sensation of drowning. The girl with the necklace snaps her gaze toward me again, but this time she shines through her sorrow, this time she sees me.
A burning pain swallows me whole right before the vision relinquishes its grip.
I’m hauled out of the water by two strong arms. Immediately, I’m pulled from the tub and onto my side.
A sharp slap on my back has water pouring from my mouth and nose.
I’d been underwater and hadn’t realized.
Shaking at the prospect of nearly drowning for the second time in one day, I throw myself further onto my side and cough until my whole body aches at the retching.
“Lillian?” Ben’s voice is as shaky as I feel.
“It took me somewhere,” I manage to say through the searing burning in my chest. I cough again at the scratch in my lungs but the water has all been dispelled.
“I saw a—I saw a chamber.” Ben puts another hand on my back and gently taps it.
He eases himself around to face me, those hands only moving to soothe me in a different way.
He pulls a lock of hair free from my face where it had been plastered to my cheek and banishes it behind my ear with the rest.
“I came to bring you the rest of your things. When you didn’t answer my knocks, I just…
” He glances down at the dress that, in its state, leaves little to the imagination.
The feel of his hands instantly leaves me as his cheeks flush.
He reaches for the bag behind him, but it's the last place I want his attention right now.
“I’m thankful to you,” I say in answer to the things he cannot voice. His attention returns, and with a deep breath, I’m able to share with him what I saw, in stunning detail.
“It was different this time,” I say after I share about the last moment in the chamber. I gently roll up to sit, and Ben’s guiding hand finds me again. “It felt so much more real, like I was part of it this time.”
Ben pinches the bridge of his nose, taking one breath at a time. “Lillian, you could have died.” He glances down at the necklace and then straight back to me. “It’s like it was keeping you down there. I had to force you out.”
“I’m confused too. Like I said, it felt different.
More visceral.” Not wanting him to worry and needing to get dry, I change the topic.
“Perhaps it’s just my emotions getting the better of me.
” My mind flashes back to the violence I had experienced the night before, real-life violence done to me.
A whimper escapes my parted lips still hungry for oxygen.
“It's been a long day,” I manage to choke out.
The pain from my injuries sustained aboard the ship returns in quick succession as the adrenaline fades.
“Come here,” Ben whispers, pulling me onto his lap. As soon as his arms lock around me, it's as if everything that’s been holding him back dissipates. “We’ll figure this out. It’s just another jagged piece to the puzzle you’ve been solving since the beginning. It can only help.”
I nod into his chest, fully expecting more prodding.
He asks no more questions. He doesn’t demand that I go through the scene again or share my theories of what I believe it to mean.
He just holds me and runs constant fingers through my hair.
It’s a show of affection that I, of course, appreciate at the moment, but I know I’ll be far more thankful for it in the morning when my curls are manageable and not an untameable mess.
Perhaps then I will have the energy to thank him.
“The team did well today,” I say, a few minutes later. It has been the first in a long line of trials, and we had all held, all of us did our jobs.
A sharp breath expelled from his nose is Ben’s only response.