SelfSame

by Conway, Melissa

  Finally, she said, “I want to stay, but I cannot.”

  He nodded, his forehead rubbing up and down against hers.

  “When you are well, we will escape together. That is what I wish.”

  He moaned a little and tilted his head to meet her lips with his, more fiercely than could possibly be good for him. She allowed herself to enjoy it only briefly before turning her head away.

  “Don’t. I know it must hurt.”

  He laughed, a sound that could be produced without a tongue, and shook his head. He was telling her the pain was worth it, and she smiled back through her tears.

  It took all her strength to leave him. As she walked the same meandering path as the one she’d taken to find him, she felt his eyes follow her. She only looked back about a dozen times.

  At the longhouse, her mother was waiting.

  “Where have you been?” she demanded. Then she appeared to soften, “Have you been weeping?”

  Enid’s eyes felt sore and she realized they must be red. She thought fast. “I was betrothed, did you know?”

  Bluebird’s face hardened again. “And you miss him? Love has no place in marriage. I loved your father, and I got his fist in my face as payment. Tomorrow the medicine man will see you. He will discover for himself how many souls you possess.”

  The defiance with which she said it told Enid she no longer believed her story. Enid, like Sorcha, was a terrible liar. She dreaded tomorrow, like she was beginning to dread all tomorrows.

  Chapter Fifteen

  Sorcha

  Joseph’s eyes were burned into her soul. Sorcha saw them when she woke, a brown so dark they appeared black when the light was low. As the light had been inside the shelter of the thicket. She saw them when she showered, how he’d had a single unshed tear trapped in his lower lashes when Enid left him. His face may not be handsome, but he had the best eyes…they would help him convey emotion where his voice would fail him.

  She completed her morning routine by rote, but quickly. Her parents had already left on their long commute, and Grammy Fay appeared to be sleeping in. Sorcha skipped breakfast so she’d have more time to do some research on her father’s computer.

  There was surprisingly little information on the Internet about tongue injuries, or at least ones as severe as Joseph’s. Most of the articles she found dealt with simple bite wounds, but she was partially reassured when she read that they rarely got infected and the tongue tended to heal quickly. There was nothing more she could do for him in Enid’s technologically lacking world. She did find hope in an article about aglossia, which said that people who were either born without a tongue or had to have it removed often compensated for its loss by using other structures in their mouths to produce adequate speech.

  Still, it depressed her, the thought that she’d inadvertently caused him such great pain. He may be able to overcome the worst of it in time, but his life had been forever altered. She wondered if his parents, who’d taught him such good English, had also arranged for him to learn to read and write. It wasn’t as uncommon as people might think for a Native American in those times to be literate; many tribes had converted to Christianity and were motivated by trade to work with the Europeans who were slowly and inexorably invading their territory. If Joseph could write, he had a way to communicate with anyone who could read.

  When she went outside to meet Paula, she felt disoriented at first that there wasn’t any snow. It had been a long time since Enid’s world had encroached upon Sorcha’s enough to confuse her. She was not surprised to see Luanne in the front seat and Ben in back. He smiled at her when she got in, but Sorcha found she couldn’t even force a polite response.

  “Everything okay?” Luanne asked.

  They drove past a parked car with partially frosted windows. The two occupants waved at Luanne. It was a little thing, but for some reason seeing the protection detail lurking like vultures waiting their turn at a carcass set Sorcha off.

  “No, everything is not okay. Why would you even ask that? Everything is really freaking not okay.”

  Ben put a hand on her knee and she turned on him, aware of the peevishness in her voice but unable to stop herself. “Are we still playing boyfriend and girlfriend? Because I don’t remember agreeing to that. Stop pawing me, and stop…stop looking at me with Joseph’s eyes!”

  To her mortification, she burst into tears. Ben immediately made a move like he was going to put his arms around her, but she shook him off and said incoherently, “Nuh!” She turned away and bent nearly double, arms hiding her face. Her skin felt like it was too tight under her clothes, like she was encased in a suffocating cocoon, compressing her entire being until her heart felt like it was going to explode from the pressure. She couldn’t breathe; the sobs came out in quick, gulping gasps. If asked to put into words exactly what she was crying about, she wouldn’t have been able to comply except to say, “Everything.”

  After a while, the sobs subsided into shallow, shuddering breaths. She straightened up slowly, too wrung-out to care what she looked like. A handful of tissues was suspended in front of her face. Luanne, the practical one, trying to be helpful.

  Paula had parked near Luanne’s bus stop, but since Luanne hadn’t gotten out Sorcha took it to mean she was waiting for the tear-storm to pass so she could ask – or tell – Sorcha something.

  Sorcha snatched the tissues and said shortly, “What?”

  “Tell us about Joseph,” Luanne said.

  Sorcha blotted her face and blew her nose, gathering her thoughts. The intense look on Luanne’s face told her how important the information was to her. Perversely, it only made Sorcha want to clam up. She suspected they already knew about Joseph, though, and maybe if she just told them what they wanted to hear, they’d back off and give her some space.

  “He’s a Mahican man who tried to help Enid. Mohawk braves cut out his tongue.”

  Her voice broke and tears began to form in her eyes again. She pressed the wad of damp tissues to her eyes impatiently.

  “When?” Ben asked. “When did they do it?”

  He didn’t ask why, just wanted to know when. She remembered before when he’d asked her what day it was for Enid. She’d told him Enid was exactly two-hundred and thirty-six years ahead of her to the day, yet here he was still asking when. Then it occurred to her.

  “You don’t know exactly when things happened, do you? That’s why you need me to tell you.”

  She saw confirmation in his face. They had a chain of events, but no timeline.

  “So something’s going to happen, but you aren’t sure when?” It was a shot in the dark; that she might catch one of them off guard enough to confirm what she suspected.

  Luanne didn’t bite. “You know we can’t tell you.”

  Sorcha released a shuddering sigh. “Fine. Enid brought the medicine man, Bear Talker, to see Elizabeth the day before she died, and that’s when she met Joseph, Bear Talker’s nephew. Joseph was attacked the day she was kidnapped, so that would be her Saturday morning.”

  “Poor Joseph,” Paula murmured.

  Sorcha looked over and the sympathy on Paula’s face reactivated the tears. “They cut out his tongue and he still came for her.”

  Paula’s eyes widened and an unspoken question hovered in the air between the two friends. Sorcha’s lips turned down at the corner and she nodded slightly, sending an unspoken answer: Yes, I care for him.

  She glanced at Ben and caught a quickly-hidden expression, like he’d eaten something that didn’t agree with him and it had just come back up to surprise him. She didn’t have time to contemplate it since Luanne shifted in her seat and opened the car door.

  As she always did, she leaned in for that final word. To Ben, she said, “Don’t screw this up.” To Sorcha, she offered, “I know this is tough for you, but don’t do anything stupid, okay?”

  Like what? Sorcha thought. The past had already happened.

  After Luanne gently shut the car door, Paula pulled back on
to the road and drove to school like it was just another day. No one said anything. When Paula parked, Ben didn’t try to stop Sorcha when she got out. She and Paula walked together, with Ben following several paces behind. Sorcha left Paula at their locker and went straight to the restroom to splash water on her blotchy face. Then she went to her first class and did her best to focus on the teacher and his lecture. When lunch came around, she sat on the stage with Paula, nibbling on the crackers and cheese she’d tossed into a bag that morning. By unspoken agreement, they made small talk about Halloween, which was only a few days away.

  Sorcha tried not to look for Ben but found her gaze searching the crowded gymnasium again and again. He was absent for the first half of the lunch hour, and when he finally appeared, he sat with his friend at the table in front of the stage. For the first time, his back was to her.

  If he was trying to get her attention, he was succeeding, and it irritated her. She’d been distant in the car because she was still so raw from Enid’s feelings for Joseph. Plus, Ben’s assumption that she would welcome his attention was annoyingly arrogant. Even so, and even though it had only been a few days, she’d become accustomed to the idea that he was her Ben. And now he was ignoring her.

  She remembered what Skip had said, “We’re also pretty sure who our Ben is, but if any of the rest of you want a shot at it, she’s easy on the eye.”

  At the time, his words had baffled her, but since then Ben’s attempts to get close to her made it clear it was just another bit of information the WPS had about Enid. Sorcha figured that one day Enid would tell someone in her world that Sorcha...what? Had fallen in love with a guy named Ben? Despite her attraction to him, it was hard for her to even consider the idea. Her heart – Enid’s heart – seemed set on Joseph. It felt wrong for her to want to be with both of them.

  And yet, that had always been more than a possibility – that she would love a man in each of her worlds. Had it only been a week since she’d been confronted with the certainty that Enid would marry the odious Jedediah? Just the thought of being intimate with that man had made her sick. Sorcha suspected it would have colored her future relations with men in this world as surely as if she’d been raped. Was that why Enid had been so eager to become romantically involved with Joseph, a man she hardly knew? Or was it merely the prospect of him saving her and taking her away from all the people who wanted to own her: her father, Jedediah, her mother, and quite possibly, the Haudenosaunee medicine man?

  It was all so confusing when Sorcha tried to justify her feelings – and keep them separate from Enid’s.

  “What’s his deal?” Paula asked.

  Sorcha had been lost in her thoughts and assumed Paula was referring to Ben. She started to say, “He’s just playing hard to get,” when she noticed Dalton Boyle and a couple of his friends were sitting with their legs hanging off the edge of the stage not far from them. He was wearing his football jersey and he and his buddies were laughing too loudly.

  “Oh, God. Is he trying to start something with Ben again?” Sorcha asked.

  Ben didn’t even turn to look at Dalton, but at the next table down, Kristin Barber sure did. She had her blonde hair up in a perky ponytail today and when she stood, Sorcha wondered if she’d had her jeans specially spray-painted on. She sauntered down the aisle and just about everyone in the vicinity watched to see what she would do. They all knew Kristin had recently broken up with Miles, the quarterback who’d fought with her so publicly at Saturday’s game. Dalton would be a fool to flirt with her, since Miles was his teammate and rumor had it he hadn’t taken the break-up very well.

  Sorcha saw the eager look in Dalton’s eyes – and the miserable one in Paula’s. She started stuffing the leftovers from her lunch into her sack, fully intending to drag Paula out of the room so she didn’t have to witness the oncoming train wreck. To her surprise, Kristin’s destination was a little short of Dalton. She stopped next to Ben’s table and leaned her hip against it.

  “Hey, Ben.”

  Kristin’s voice was a throaty purr, but it carried in the near-silence. Sorcha clenched her jaw and muttered through her teeth, “Oh, no she didn’t.”

  Before she knew it, she’d abandoned Paula and her lunch, jumping off the stage to stomp over and grab Ben roughly by the back of his hoodie. A few insistent tugs to the fabric and he got to his feet.

  “Let’s go, Romeo,” Sorcha heard herself say. She pulled him past an astonished Kristin and marched him in front of her down the aisle and out the door.

  In the hallway, he looked over his shoulder and asked mildly, “Where we goin’?”

  His eyebrow had disappeared under the lock of hair on his forehead and he had a grin on his face, an infuriating one that made her want to grin back at the same time she wanted to strangle him. She let go of him and stood there awkwardly as he turned to face her, tugging his hoodie back down into place. Her cheeks had been burning the entire trip across the gym and now she felt them reignite under his amused gaze.

  “So are you still mad at me?” he asked.

  “I wasn’t mad at you.”

  “Coulda fooled me.”

  “I was upset,” she said, “but not with you. Did you not hear what I said about Joseph?”

  “That I was looking at you with his eyes? I heard. Didn’t make sense.”

  “Not that. The part about him having his tongue cut out because he helped Enid. It was horrible, you can’t imagine. She felt so guilty.”

  “Do you love him?”

  The question came out of the blue and took her aback. After a few seconds, she responded, “Enid thinks she might.”

  He grimaced. “You are Enid. Why do you talk like she’s not you?”

  “You live two lives and tell me how you’d handle it,” she snapped. She started to turn away, but he let out a groan of capitulation and threw his arms around her, drawing her close. She struggled a little, but he tightened his hold and said against her hair, “Just stop, okay?”

  She did stop, suddenly aware that other students were in the hallway. The fifth period bell was about to ring.

  He ran his hand down her back and up again, a soothing caress. “I just – I’m trying to understand how you could feel that way about someone you just met.”

  “Enid just met him. And her world is this…intense place. Things we see in the movies happen in her world for real. It’s not like here and now.” Even as she said it she realized the here and now felt plenty intense pressed up against his body.

  He inhaled and let it out slowly. “I never thought I’d be jealous of a man who’s been dead for two hundred years.”

  She used his own logic against him. “How can you be jealous when you only met me a few days ago?”

  He relaxed his hold enough to look into her face. “I grew up loving you. I wanted it to be me.”

  His confession took her breath away, but she managed to say, “I thought you didn’t believe.”

  His grin reappeared, but now it was sheepish. “It’s like religion: when you’re raised to believe in something, it sticks whether you think it makes sense or not.”

  The bell rang, and students began pouring from the gym into the hallway. Ben released her and backed off, shoving his hands into his pockets. He was staring into her face in exactly the same way Joseph had – as if he wanted to memorize her features. The constant reminders of Joseph were beginning to blur the two together in her mind. It haunted her how they were so different and yet strangely similar.

  Sorcha didn’t know if it was this similarity, or the expectant look on Ben’s face, or the fact that Kristin Barber was walking towards them with her nose in the air, but she acted on impulse and stepped close to him.

  “I’ll see you after school,” she said, and brushed his lips with hers in just the same way he’d kissed her yesterday, lightly, like butterfly wings. The last glimpse of him before she walked away should have reassured her, but it didn’t. He looked pleased enough, but it was mixed with something else, a warine
ss that hadn’t been there before.

  She did her best to concentrate in her last three classes, but the wary look on Ben’s face bothered her. He’d just declared his love for her, and then the second she makes a move to reciprocate, he backs off? Although to be fair, all he’d admitted to was having a schoolboy crush on her – and not even her, really, just the legend of her. Just like Dalton for Paula, she doubted the real thing could possibly live up to Ben’s expectations. Especially after she’d lost control in the car this morning.

  After school, she waited for him with Paula under the flagpole. The flags hung limp in the cold, stagnant air. In the distance, a haze of fog and smoke particulates partially obscured the hills.

  “You’re not going to believe this, but Kristin spoke to me in Art Class today.” Paula made jazz hands like it was a big deal.

  “She apologize for putting paint on your chair?”

  Paula scoffed. “Yeah, like that’s gonna happen. But actually, she kinda surprised me. Told me she thought Dalton likes me.”

  Sorcha’s mouth dropped open. “No way.”

  At Paula’s raised eyebrows, Sorcha hastily amended it to, “I mean no way Kristin said it – not no way Dalton likes you.”

  “Well, we both know it’s not true. She’s ignored me since she moved here, and the day you happen to thwart whatever skanky plans she has for Ben, suddenly I’m not invisible anymore?”

  Sorcha studied Paula’s profile. Her nose was tilted up at the end, just slightly. It made her look younger than her almost-seventeen years, and very vulnerable. “You know, it’s not that far-fetched that Dalton would like you.”

  Paula gave her a knowing look. “Kristin wanted to start a conversation with me so she could ask about you and Ben. Transparent much?”

  “Did she? Ask about us.”

  “Nah. All I had to do was ask her about that tube of paint and she decided she had other things to do.”

  Sorcha nodded approvingly. “That’s my girl.”