Chapter 29 #2
Nelle can’t die, and she is more powerful than ever.
But Penelope can. And in the dream, she was crying out for help.
“What’s the matter?” Terry asks.
Nelle sips her latte to buy herself a moment to think. Then, decision made, she says, “The man in the corner booth is my father. Wallace Quill. When we told you about the obituary . . . we . . .” James flashes before her with every blink.
“Wallace is your dad?” Terry whispers. “He shot you?”
“An espresso,” Nelle says. “I need another espresso.”
Terry crafts the perfect shot of espresso, and she knocks it back. She shakes her head at the bitterness and the shock of energy. With a newfangled bravery, brought on by sheer anger at seeing his face again, she charges between high-top tables until she is standing before their booth.
Penelope and Quill both look up.
“You were asking for me?” she says.
“Nelle . . . I . . .” Penelope’s mouth falls open. “I didn’t know you were here.”
Why are you still seeing Quill after he tried to kill James? she thinks, but first, she has to face her fear. She turns to Wallace Quill. Technically a father, but never to her.
His beetle-black eyes blink once. “Hi, Nellie.”
“Don’t call me that,” she seethes, her anger fermenting into bitterness. Suddenly she feels the weight of exhaustion like a thick rope draped across her shoulders. The last thing she wants tonight is an emotionally draining confrontation.
Nelle drops down beside Penelope and thanks Terry as he brings her a cup of tea. To her amusement, he gives his old classmate Wallace a withering glare with his coffee.
“I had a dream,” Nelle sighs. “Both of you were in it, and you were screaming out for me. It was too real to ignore.”
Penelope and Quill flash identical expressions at each other.
“What was that?” Nelle says. “That look.”
Penelope starts to inch out of the booth. “We should have this conversation somewhere more private.”
“I want to have it here,” Nelle says. “What is happening? Why are you two meeting in the middle of the night?”
Quill locks fingers around his mug. “Because I want to end my life.”
Nelle stares at him like he struck her. She searches his aging face for an inkling of a joke, but every line reads dead serious.
“Why?” she asks.
“I shot you, Nellie.”
That wretched nickname jumps off his tongue and crawls spiderlike down her spine.
“And?” She retreats to her tea for some comfort. “Neither of us can die. We both know that, so what’s the big deal?”
“The big deal is that I was aiming for James,” Quill says, and though his eyelid twitches on James’s name—Nelle has the same reaction for different reasons—he goes on, his voice even.
“I was so enraged, blinded, that I wanted to kill him. When the shot went off, and I saw you standing there, that bullet hole in you . . .”
He tries to hide his tears. Nelle is glad.
She doesn’t want to see him cry for a single fucking second.
Not after the years of abuse and trauma she carries like a disease, the flashes of panic and deep-rooted self-hatred that gnaw at her soul.
The constant fear. The numbness to pain. The need to run.
“I was relieved that it was you,” Quill admits. “I regretted it as soon as the shot went off. I left thanking the heavens that I hadn’t killed him, though I can’t deny I still want him dead on a level I can’t tame.”
“And you think you should end your life because of it?” Nelle doesn’t really give a shit what happens to him, as long as he never bothers her again, but she does care about her own future, and suddenly this conversation with Quill seems more like an argument with Penelope.
Nelle defending her right to live, despite the debris amassing in her shadow.
“I know I should,” Quill says. “It’s what my mother did, when her time came.”
“And you’re fine with him doing this?” Nelle asks Penelope, accusatorily.
Penelope crosses her arms and shrugs. “I know the kind of person Wallace is. If he doesn’t do this, he will only cause more harm to innocent people. And one of those people, eventually, will be James.”
Nelle’s chest pulls tighter with each word, until she snaps and says, “Stop it. Stop speaking so coldly. You did it that morning you came to the cottage. When you told me I should end my life.”
“You misunderstood me,” Penelope says. “I only meant to warn you that, if you find destruction trailing you like it does Wallace, like it did Lily, then you may have to alter your plan.”
Nelle desperately wants to share her experiences, the horrible events she inadvertently caused across the world. People died because she couldn’t control herself, couldn’t keep them out of harm’s way. Out of her way.
Pain will follow me wherever I go. The thought intrudes in her head, and she can’t shake it out.
Quill sets his coffee on its saucer. “So, are we ready?”
“What, you want to end it in here?” Nelle stammers, a little too loudly. She glances over her shoulder, but Terry is preoccupied with a shelf of mugs behind the bar.
“Of course not.” He drops a folded ten on the table. “But I wanted a cup of coffee before I go.”
Penelope straightens the hood of her parka and clears her throat. “So, Wallace, where do you want to die?”
I suppose blunt questions run in the family, Nelle thinks, remembering a night of fireworks, her first conversation with someone other than Quill, the bees in her stomach.
James. He pierces her memories of the last six months like an arrow.
Where is he now? New York? Why isn’t she there . . . Why did I fly back here?
“Calton Hill,” Quill says. “Before the sun rises, so we can be alone.”
The hike from Terry’s café in New Town to the foot of Calton Hill is hard.
Nelle trudges up the lamplit streets behind what she can’t believe she thinks of as her family, wrestling with her guilty conscience.
A part of her can’t wait to see Quill die.
Never to be scared that he is going to hurt her again.
He doesn’t deserve her forgiveness, and yet .
. . her chest twinges like a wounded bird when she imagines him dead.
“Quill,” she says.
He flinches. “Yes?”
“When the police officer came to our house, you told her that Eleanor survived. That she moved to Scotland with her grandparents after the fire. Why’d you lie?”
His mouth hardens. “The night of that fire was the worst of my life. Eleanor did die. She and Bianca both. I dragged them both out to the front yard, but it was too late. Carbon monoxide poisoning.” He laughs bitterly.
“I just wanted to bring my baby back.” Tears choke him up, but he continues.
“Eleanor’s birth certificate, social security card, and passport were all I could save from the fire.
I knew how my mother was created. And how she made me.
So I did the same. I lied to the police officer because I’d lied to the government.
Legally, Eleanor never died. Legally . . . she became you.”
Nelle tries to imagine the little girl who came before her.
“Do I look like her?”
“When you were an infant, you did.” Quill studies her sideways. “I had plans. I lied about her death because I wanted you to fill her place. To live in the world as Eleanor.”
“But you didn’t let me leave the house.”
“I’ll admit, I was scared for too long. But before James, I was starting to loosen up. I let you go to the library, remember? And then on the Fourth. I was testing your limits. How you responded to the world. How dangerous you could be if you weren’t writing for yourself.”
Nelle scoffs. “So it was never your plan to let me be free?”
“No.” Quill’s dark eyes fall onto her, and Nelle is not sure what he sees. Maybe shards of himself, maybe the truth of her last couple of months. “That was never my plan.”
At the top of the hill, a castellated Gothic tower stands over them like a shadowy spire with a cross at the top.
Down a path, the National Monument’s long line of columns rises like a structure out of ancient Greece.
Beyond that, the glittery city crawls to the sea.
It’s no Paris or New York, but from above, Edinburgh has its own starlit shimmer.
“Here?” Penelope gestures to a shaded bend in the path, where roots have grown over dead grass and lichen.
Quill shakes his head and cuts through the trees.
Nelle ducks beneath low-hanging branches, climbing over rocks and roots after him.
She emerges on a stretch of grassy hill dotted with ancient stones.
All of Old Town splayed out in evening blue, windows reduced to luminous or dark squares, the peak of Arthur’s Seat like the hunched back of a sleeping giant.
“Right here,” says Quill.
If Nelle were the one choosing to die, this place wouldn’t be half bad. The wind is rough, and the air splices to the bone, but the utter freedom of the view . . .
Penelope catches up to them, impressively composed after the long hike.
“I’ll only ask you this one last time, Wallace,” she says. “Is this what you want?”
He looks his grandmother dead in the eye. “Yes.”
“Then you know what to do.”
Nelle holds her breath, confused by the feeling of gratitude that fills her.
Somehow, she is a witness to this strange wrinkle in the fabric of the world.
A man created by mystical means, leaving by mystical means.
A balance struck. It suddenly doesn’t feel wrong at all, but almost correct.
Like Quill’s purpose has always been to return to the liminal space from which he originates.
Wallace Quill opens a pocket-size journal, pulls a fountain pen from his coat, and writes.
He looks up, surrounded by the shadows of dawn, and meets Nelle’s eye.
Then he’s smoke, coiling away in the mist.
And he is gone. Really gone.
Nelle feels a twist of pain, registers where it pulses in the back of her stomach, and rationalizes it. He’s one of the few people to know I even exist.
And she knows why he did it, knows the shattered path she herself has walked since leaving James at the cottage. The flood, the man on the sidewalk—what else did she cause without realizing? What about the men she left in the gray hours of dawn? She never followed up to check on any of them.
I’ve been playing with life like it’s not real.
Suddenly, Nelle feels a hot queasiness. She falls to her knees in the damp grass.
Penelope floats in like a radiant angel, the sun rising behind her.
Nelle stands but immediately crumbles into her great-grandmother’s embrace. She tucks her head under Penelope’s chin and, blasted by wind on the hillside, tries to fight her trembling tears.
“I miss James,” she says. “I really miss him.”
“Do you need to do what Quill did?”
“No.” Nelle can hear Penelope’s heartbeat through her sweater. “Not yet.”
Nelle pants and shoots awake, flipping back sheets and a comforter and a quilt. She needs her legs out, needs them, yes—she flings her limbs free and jumps off the mattress, onto the floor of the small bedroom.
A small voice calls through the wall. “You awake, dear?”
“Yes!” Nelle yells, but her voice is too raspy to carry, more of a quiet croak. She follows the smell of potatoes frying to a kitchenette attached to a small den. There is a love seat and a TV, one chair and a tasseled table lamp. A painting hangs on the wall, a stale portrait of fruit.
“Does anyone live here?” Nelle asks.
Penelope is at the stove. “Yes. Well, no. I bought it years ago as an investment when I had a bit of money. Now it’s my secret hideaway. Quaint, but I love it.”
Nelle stands in front of the living-room window, overlooking a street two stories below. Cobblestone puddles reflect dark, twisted clouds. People bundled in coats scurry past, carrying umbrellas.
“I love it, too,” she says, admiring the bookshelves. One title stands out, the first mystery she read in New York, when she fell in love with the genre. Old feelings rush to fill her. James on the beach in France, James typing at his desk, James’s tongue between her legs . . .
A familiar need for him crushes her. She wants to get on a plane as soon as possible. Back on the path she already chose. She examines her outfit. White sweater. Charcoal pants. Camel coat. Simple, sleek, casual. Good enough for a reunion.
Penelope puts two plates of potatoes, eggs, and peas on the table and sits.
Nelle joins her. “I’m going to ask you for a favor. And I know you’re going to lecture me about being a danger to society, and I promise I’ll take what you say into consideration, but while you’re lecturing, could you drive me to the airport?”