by Rumer Haven
“It’s always felt too close to me, too visceral, to not be Sophie. And in a strange way, I’m happy to bear my sister’s grief if it might mean she doesn’t have to, wherever she is. Though it’s more than grieving some of the time. Most of the time, actually, there’s been something much stronger, the same as you and I felt today after the pain and sorrow had passed.”
“Great love,” Margot said, quoting his earlier whispered words.
“Which I know she was also capable of.”
“Like her big bro.”
“Yes, well, I’ve always known I’m capable. It’s more a matter of… But getting back on point, you have actually seen the woman, you said.”
She nodded. “Which does make sense if she wasn’t the one attached to me but to you. Because the other one…in the dreams and hallucinations…she was me. I mean, I saw everything from her point of view, not her image unless vaguely in a reflection.” Drawing lines in the faint condensation on her glass, she mulled over the previous night. “If Chloé were to be right that this isn’t about people who are dead but still living in, like, some other dimension, I can see her concern that sort of ‘living’ this other person’s life could’ve meant dying with it as well.”
He screwed his mouth to the side and looked to the table.
“Today in eighteen seventy-four,” Margot said, “Charlotte Pidgeon is dead. I can say that much for sure. But that’s all. And I can’t help but think if we were meant to know or understand any more than that, it would be easier than this. For any of us.”
The room fell quiet to match their silence until Duran Duran’s “Ordinary World” crooned into the atmosphere. Margot’s gaze slow-danced along the swirled pattern of the pub’s dark velvet wallpaper as she sang along in her thoughts, taking the evocative melody of mourning and moving on as a sign. Picking up Rand’s hand and intertwining their fingers, she said nothing more to contradict or affirm his beliefs, only hoped to impart, through her eyes and the way her thumb rolled over and under his, the wisdom of what he needed to do.
He pinched his lips with a small nod.
She felt the truth reverberate onto herself, and cradled it in her lowered eyelids as the must of aged and ale-dampened wood wafted to her nose. She nodded as well and thought of her impending return home.
Another hand wrapped around hers just as she was about to take it away.
“I’m sorry I never got to meet her,” she said to puncture the heavy silence, wondering which of his traits Sophie had shared, if she’d had his warmth, his humor.
“Me, too.”
Within the soothing heat of his palms, she weighed her next words carefully. “I think it’s best I never meet her, though.”
Rand bobbed his head at the reference to his other “her.” After a labored pause, he said, “I care for Gwen. I do. Though I’ve come to wonder if that’s enough when I don’t seem to…that is to say, the way I have been, the way I do for…”
His mind and heart seemed at war again. Margot had no idea what she expected him to say, but it definitely wasn’t what he did.
“I suppose it could have been this Charlotte haunting me. Or being me, as it were. Her weakness tapping into mine. Here it was her death day, and I felt I might have died. With you suffering beside me, through it all.”
He tightened his grip on her hand and stroked her forearm as he had the night before. Slowly, just slowly, his fingertips dragged and glided, tickling at the delicate skin of her inner elbow.
“Well, I can say the same of you. This entire summer. Rand, I…” Margot cleared her throat, then swallowed, a deliberate delay to keep her voice from breaking. “It’s just that I never would’ve gotten through all this without you. I have this amazing support system back home that I purposely left, never expecting to walk into another one here. It’s like I deliberately pulled the rug out from under myself to see if I could land on my feet. I’ve always had everything so good; things have always come so easy, I never felt truly tested until this year.”
“Life throws us enough challenges that are outside our control. Why choose to bring them on yourself? Enjoy it when things are good, easy.”
Such similar words to James’s but by such a different speaker, which colored them with profoundly more meaning for her.
“Says someone who’s had to deal with grief beyond my worst nightmares,” she said, “and lived to tell about it. While I’ve just been sitting pretty and waiting to get blindsided. I’m so unprepared.”
“For what? How can you prepare for the unknown?”
“I just want to know I can handle it, whatever it is. That I’m who I’m meant to be and can get on by myself if I have to, in case, I don’t know…” She looked to the table and cleared her throat again, feeling her expression crumple into the emotion she’d hoped to hide. “In case everyone else leaves.” Rand’s light tracing along her arm became a firmer caress. “The thing is, I walk before they can. It’s easier to be the one running away than the one left behind. Even when I already am.”
“Who’s ‘they’? Who’s left you behind, Margot?”
She heard her mother’s voice: “Margot, what is it? James? Your job?” She shook her head and closed her eyes, concentrating on the warm friction on her arm as Rand’s palm soothed the thoughts from her.
Yes, Mom. It’s James. The job. It’s you and Dad, aging every year away from me when all I really want is to be your little girl and forever feel that security. It’s George growing up, getting married, and having a family of his own, playing Ghost in the Graveyard with his daughter instead of his kid sister. It’s friends starting to do the same, professionals and parents displacing me in their priorities while I’m in some stunted state of adolescence. Rand and Gwen’ll play house someday, too… And Derek and Chloé might still be figuring out their shit, but people like them are at least more worldly and comfortable in their skin than I’ve ever been… Or Sylvie, whose perpetually positive attitude makes me feel like I quit before I start…quit before the Peter Principle inevitably ties my shoes together and I trip, right? Never get fired, never get dumped if I make the preemptive strike? I was never enough for James to stay behind for and never would’ve been. It was only a matter of time…
Rand just sat silently as all these thoughts flooded her. He didn’t stop stroking her arm, and he didn’t press her to answer his question. Margot looked up and met his gaze, considering what those eyes had witnessed that summer. Her, at her absolute worst.
Yet there he was. Sitting beside her. Looking back at her with a depth in those eyes that said a lot of things she couldn’t be certain of but calmed her all the same. She opened her mouth to speak, but instead just breathed softly through it and kept staring at him.
“You’re right,” he finally said, “to assume we’ll never know the answers, really. But what I do know now is that I also feel light, like I can breathe again as well for the first time in years. I do think I’m ready to let Sophie go. I feel she’s let go of me, at any rate.”
He raised his hand to brush his fingers up Margot’s cheek and tuck her hair behind her ear, his thumb lingering at her cheekbone to dust back and forth across it. He pressed his lips together and appeared to measure his next words as he searched her face.
“What I don’t think I’ll be ready for, is letting you go.”
Turning the corner on their way home from the pub, they walked side by side in silence. Margot kept her eyes focused on the sidewalk, watching the play of light and shadow from the streetlamps and wrought iron fencing until something pale crept into her peripheral vision—and then just as soon streaked out of it.
A moment later, it returned. A hand, hesitantly reaching for hers. Catching it and clasping it in place. She looked up and returned Rand’s shy smile.
Once they entered the square and stepped into the shadow of the church, she felt her arm lag behind the rest of her body. Rand had stopped walking, and, with Margot still in his grip, his moonlit grin beckoned her back.
R
aising an eyebrow at him, she backtracked the couple of paces and let him take her into his arms. Night obscured his face, but it couldn’t extinguish the sparkle in his eyes.
He cleared his throat. “I, uh…I’ll need a little time,” he started. “Just to sort things properly.”
Dumbly, Margot nodded.
“But she already knows it’s over. She’s in denial of that, but she does know how I feel.” When Margot furrowed her brow, he explained, “I broke up with her weeks ago. At least I tried to, but she insisted we work things out. Take a break first, if we must. So I compromised with her just to buy a little more time. Not for me, but for her, to adjust to the idea and hopefully accept it. See that it’s the best for both of us.”
Margot slowly tipped her head back in realization.
“But I don’t want to be deceitful in all this,” he said. “I need to call things off officially, and she deserves to know the full reason why.”
She swallowed. “And what’s that?”
He released an arm from her back to brush the hair off her face. Leaving his palm at her jaw, he again swept his thumb across the apple of her cheek.
“Well, first I’ll tell you what she doesn’t need to know.” With his other hand at her waist, he drew her even closer. “How keen I am to kiss you, Miss Margot.” He shuffled on his feet, lowering his face to hers until their foreheads touched. “How I’ve wanted to hold you like this for some time. And how if you ever run away again…” He tipped his chin up slightly, which touched the tip of his nose to hers. “I will follow you, cheeky girl. If you’ll have me.”
Standing there in the square, surrounded by stately Victorian columns in the still of the summer night, Margot reckoned she had just been made love to in the traditional sense. Feeling his breath dust across her lips, she lifted her chin, too, to where their mouths could meet. With eyes closed, she savored the nearness of his scent and the tickle of his eyelashes blinking against her own. Then, feather-light, his tentative lips brushed hers. Once. Twice…
They both leaned into the kiss, slowly eased into it, taking precious time exploring each other’s contours and drawing energy from the magnetic charge of the connection. Rand held Margot’s face as her fingertips glided along the firm curve of his back, down to the waist that pressed against hers as a modest preview of the wonderful yin and yang their bodies would make. Two beings exchanging thoughtful breath, filling each other as they surely had for lifetimes.
In the quiet space that followed the eventual separation of their lips, Rand cupped the back of her head as he brought his forehead to hers again. Nudging her face up to give him an affectionate peck, she then leaned back to focus on him and process that she wasn’t dreaming he was standing there, with her, like this, in the flesh. Then she looked to the sky.
Gazing at the moon for several quiet seconds, Margot contemplated how in running away, she’d been running toward this, the entire time. She hadn’t wanted to belong to anyone, not understanding until now how it felt to have someone want to belong to her, and that it wasn’t really about belonging to each other in the end, but with.
She tightened her arms around Rand’s waist and nestled her head against his chest. Listened to his heartbeat fall into step with hers. And like this, she gave up the ghost.
Postlude
SUNLIGHT LICKS THE LEAVES of late afternoon. I stride with purpose, tickling the tall grasses with my fingertips and picking a few of the blooming weeds.
I sidestep the pigeons flapping around the bounty of seeds scattered at their feet. I smile at the elderly couple seated on a bench, holding hands and pointing at a crow. I laugh with the young couple moseying behind a pram as their little girl runs squealing from an aggressive squirrel.
By light of day when graveyards are supposed to be their most dead, it is not.
Coming to a stop, I fumble with my fingers. Rather than wring out anxiety, the twisting and pinching produces a daintily bound nosegay of wildflowers.
I whisper:
“Though nothing can bring back the hour
Of splendour in the grass, of glory in the flower;
We will grieve not, rather find
Strength in what remains behind.”
Stepping forward to kneel, I lay my impromptu bouquet on the grass to kiss the twinkling grains of Charlotte Pidgeon’s headstone.
“Wordsworth,” I say, then glance around to ensure I’m out of earshot—not because I’m embarrassed to be seen talking to myself, but because this is a private conversation, after all. “See, I did do some research, Charlotte. I’m more of a Whitman fan myself, though. You know, free verse, liberated from convention. Though I guess all that was after your time.”
I only recently found Wordsworth’s ode in Rand’s anthology and recognized some of its other lines, the ones I’d fallen asleep to in the cemetery.
“At first I thought it was you, Charlotte, who recited that to me. But now I wonder if it wasn’t one of the Pierces.”
I look over my shoulder at the family plot I slept on that unusual Bastille Day. I ran past it earlier during my daily jog—a new regimen—and finally took a closer look at the headstone. The fact that the Victor Albert Pierce buried there matches the initials on Chloé’s pocket watch wasn’t lost on me. Nor was the rush of familiarity I felt on uncovering another name at the bottom:
HERE ALSO REPOSES
HAZEL PIERCE
WHO WAS MOST DEVOTED
AND AFFECTIONATE
TO THE ABOVE
“NOT LOST BUT GONE BEFORE”
Hazel. The color of my eyes. But maybe we share much more in common than that. I could consult the National Archives, really “dig up” the Pierces’ story, so to speak. See if Victor had owned Rand’s house, if he’s related to or employed a Charlotte Pidgeon, or if he looked at all like the man Chloé sees in her mirror. Little way to prove, though, if it was Hazel who returned to London this summer to rest her head on the same patch of grass where she’s buried.
A union of two bodies with but one soul between us.
A shiver rolls down my spine at the possibility. “Maybe this is all meaningful coincidence, bringing us together like this,” I whisper to Charlotte. “Explaining why you’d take my pin as a kid and start talking to me so many years later through that spirit board.” Squinting at the grass at my feet, I contemplate what might lie below. “If you do have Grandma Grace’s brooch, it’s okay. I don’t need it anymore. I’m finding peace in life and hope you find it in death.”
I go to turn, but stop.
“And maybe you aren’t dead, Charlotte,” I say, “but I’m definitely not, so it’s time to break some cycles and reset others.”
That was advice I did take away from Fitz, whose help was ironically the first cycle I decided to break after one more session. I like to think I was gracious about it, though, expressing my gratitude at our final meeting, then kindly asserting I’d take it from there. It really hurt when Fitz’s hug mashed her enormous cowry shell necklace into my breastbone.
I also heard back from my boss—finally—who said that, unfortunately, my replacement is staying on in my old position and another won’t be opening any time soon; times are tougher than were anticipated in the first quarter of the year. They could use a long-term temp, though, that could turn into a full-time role if things get better. While a huge demotion from what I left behind, it would be working with my same creative team and is mine for the taking if I want it.
With a laugh and shake of my head, I have to congratulate myself on managing to come full circle and even moonwalk back a few steps…
And yet, I think I will take that job. At most, it’s the un-easy way out I was apparently looking for in the first place, the challenge that could make me work harder for what I want.
And at the very least, I can save up starter money to open that vintage shop with Sylvie. I can’t wait for her visit, when we can hash out the details, the real ones, centering on an inventory that will combine the old with the new-t
hat-repurposes-the-old, even if it can only be sold online at first. After a productive brainstorm with Rand, the broad strokes of a business plan and website design already dance across the pages of my diary, moving one pipe dream into the pipeline. Maybe it won’t happen in the short run, and maybe it won’t succeed in the long one. But it’s a spontaneous whimsy that can still be planned on and worked for, a beautiful opposition from my point of view.
Sylvie’s clapping and squealing left a ringing in my ear after I pitched the idea via video chat.
Even Chloé is pleased to play a part. Fortunately, forgiveness has come easily to her as she attempts to give up her own ghost by reconciling to live with it…and all the others she sees. She’s already planned an itinerary that will tour us three ladies through the boutiques of her Paris. She insists those places are the best for stylistic inspiration and for starting the store’s collection. As it is, our stock is already plus one silver pocket watch, thanks to Rand’s eager donation.
Only after he’d reimbursed Gwen for it, of course. It was only fair, considering…
“You could be my soul mate after all,” I tell Charlotte. “Not in the way I first thought, but as the one in this century who’s complicating my heart in a most inconvenient, lovely way.” Yes, being with Rand means another long-distance relationship for a while, but this isn’t a doomed-to-repeat-history situation. It’s not about either of us trying to have our cake and eat it, too; visas, jobs, and property just aren’t easy to sort. I look up at the sweet face appearing before my mind’s eye and smile. “We’ll see. Time will tell.”
Until then, I still have over a couple of months left on my student visa to exploit. When school ends, I’ll stay on in London at Rand’s flat—spooning with my Lady Grey—until my temporary leave to remain expires.
And with his guest bedroom now available every night, I look forward to hosting two sets of visitors there in the near future: Sylvie, of course (much at the envy of Derek, who can’t spare the airfare to England but did finally call his old pal at the end of his ego’s respectable recovery period), as well as my mom and dad, who can’t wait to bring all sorts of Union Jacked-out souvenirs back to George and his family. Of all the faces populating my vision in this instant, I see myself reflected in each one, multiple facets that make me whole. Reminding me that being myself doesn’t mean having to be by myself.
