When I Am Laid in Earth (Damnatio Memoriae Book 3)

by Laura Giebfried

  “Bye,” I said to her with a curt, careful nod. “Thanks for … letting me in.”

  “Of course,” she replied.

  She was sitting in the chair by the bookshelf, but she didn't appear to be reading. Mea was no longer on the carpet where I had left her.

  “Ava's playing with her in the yard,” she said, noting my glance. “I told her it was alright.”

  “Right, sure. That's fine.”

  “Enim?” She called me back before I could leave the room. “I – I just wanted to thank you. For coming, that is. It … it means a great deal to my husband.”

  I nodded and stepped from the room without giving a better response, knowing that nothing I said would do either of us any good. I didn't dislike Melinda, but I didn't like her, either, given what she was, and I wouldn't ruin the small amount of regard that we were still able to hold for one another by telling her that she wouldn't have had a husband – at least not the one in the upstairs bedroom – if not for the horrors that had overtaken my life in the way that they had.

  “Hi, Enim!”

  Ava looked up from her spot in the yard when the back door shut loudly behind me, and I stood on the porch to wait for her to dislodge herself from the snow and run over to me. We took a seat on the steps and watched as Mea ran about before us, falling and then reappearing in the thick snow.

  “I'm glad you brought Mea,” Ava said cheerfully. “She's already a bit bigger, isn't she?”

  “Maybe. I don't know.”

  I rubbed my hand against my mouth. It was too cold to be late March; winter should have receded by now.

  “Are you staying for dinner tonight?” she asked, leaning forward to look at me better.

  “What? No, I … I've got to get back. I was just ...”

  “Visiting Dan?”

  I looked at her carefully. She was a bit too straightforward, I thought suddenly, and not in the way that my father was. It was as though she had never quite learned that emotions were things better left unseen and unsaid, and I worried that she would discover as much far too late.

  “Yeah, I was visiting … him.”

  “You could stay for dinner,” she went on. “We've still got some puppy food for Mea, too.”

  “Oh, thanks, Ava, but I … I've actually got to get back, so … maybe next time.”

  “Okay, next time.” She swung her legs a bit off the porch, her boots upsetting the topmost layer of snow as she did so, but then quite suddenly stopped. “Are you sad, Enim? About Dan?”

  “I … I don't know,” I said numbly.

  “I am,” she said. “I know he's not my real father, but I like to think of him as though he is.”

  Mea was still circling the yard in excitement, unaware of the heaviness that had descended upon the rest of the residence. Choosing to look at her rather than Ava, I pressed my fingertips into the space beneath my eyes as I tried to think of what to say. It seemed impossible that Ava could see my father in such a different light than I always had, and even more so to think that he had been someone different for all the time that she had known him. But it wasn't such a bad thing, I reminded myself: she saw me differently, as well, and though I couldn't agree with her or commend her on it, I couldn't say that I disliked it, either.

  “Enim?” She tapped my arm lightly when I didn't respond to her, and I unwillingly returned her gaze. “Can I ask you something?”

  I gave a halfhearted smile, remembering that that had been one of the first things she had said to me when we had met nearly four years beforehand.

  “Sure.”

  “Are you going to die?”

  Having expected something more similar to her initial question about my age, I couldn't help but be a bit surprised. Straightening where I sat, I gave a shrug.

  “Well, sure,” I said. “Everyone dies, Ava.”

  “I know. I meant, are you going to die, since you're sick, too?”

  I frowned. It had finally occurred to me that my father had never entirely let on what my illness was, and so her worry that it was anything even remotely similar to what was presently affecting him became more clear.

  “I'm not – I don't have cancer or anything, Ava,” I said. “That's not … I'm not sick with anything like – like Dan is.”

  “Oh. That's good.”

  “Yeah,” I said hollowly. I rather thought that I would have preferred the cancer.

  “So it's not fatal?” she persisted.

  “It's …” I shook my head, unable to tell her that it wasn't for some reason that I couldn't place. “It's not anything like that, no.”

  “What it's like, then?”

  “I ...” I scratched at my lip with the jagged tip of my fingernail, unsure of what to say. “It's … It's just that I sometimes – I sometimes hear things, or see things, that aren't really there.”

  “Like a dream, you mean? Except that you're awake.”

  I shrugged.

  “Sure.”

  “So then how do you really know it's not there?” she asked, her curiosity forming as a frown over her eyes.

  “I'm – I can be sure, Ava.”

  “But are you?” she said. “What if you don't see things? What if other people just don't see things?”

  I looked at her for a long moment, but was saved from answering when Mea hurtled herself into my lap with a long tree branch twice her size that she had found buried beneath the snow. As I patted her head in an attempt at approval, Ava seemed to forget her previous question.

  “Why did you name her Mea?” she asked.

  “It just seemed fitting. At the time, that is.”

  “Because you like May?”

  I slid my hand across the top of the dog's head, and she stared up at me with such a brightness in her eyes that I couldn't think to lie.

  “No. That's … It doesn't mean 'May.'”

  “What's it mean, then? Is it an anagram, like your name?” She screwed up her face momentarily as she tried to think of what it meant, but could only come up with a lackluster one. “A me?”

  “That's … closer,” I said, and then sighed heavily. “It's Latin for 'mine.'”

  “So it is like your name!”

  “Yeah,” I replied, but couldn't share in her excitement. I felt as though the name had been every bit as much of a mistake as my own had been, just as the majority of my decisions always seemed to be, and it occurred to me that Jack had been right to suggest that I needed someone to tell me what to do and who to be, just like Karl had suggested years ago that I had never done well on my own. And I couldn't quite decide between them at the moment, because I knew who I was with one but not who I could be with the other, and each situation seemed as detrimental as the next.

  But if I thought about it in another way and twisted it into something that it was not and would never be, then I could see who I wanted to be with both, and who I would inevitably end up as, as well, and all that I could think as I sat on the steps with Ava and the small, patchwork creature that she had somehow known to pick out for me was that I should have taken Jack up on his offer and allowed him to choose her name.

  Ch. 12

  The apartment was empty when I arrived; Karl was still at work. The place looked every bit the same as when I had left it, though, as though time had been eradicated from it much in the way that dirt and dust had been due to his cleanliness. As I stepped into the hallway and shut the door lightly behind me, Mea ran ahead to slide across the polished floors, undoubtedly looking for him, and I placed my bag down and wandered into the main room after her.

  “He's not home,” I told her, crossing into bedroom where she had gone to look for him. “He's at work.”

  She had flattened to the floor to peer under his bed, evidently thinking that he might be hiding underneath the box-spring. As I rarely frequented Karl's room, I hesitated on the threshold as though entering without his permission would cause some sort of vault to lock around me and hold me there as a prisoner until he returned to let me out, and I co
ntinued to call Mea in the hopes that she would listen to me and come back out into the hall.

  “Mea, just come here,” I said, scooting down to keep an eye on her as she wriggled beneath the bed. “I'll give you a treat – just come here.”

  Her tail flopped from side to side, but she merely seemed entertained by my distress.

  “Come on,” I said, finally giving up and coming into the room to get her. “You're not allowed in here. You can run around in my room.”

  I knelt down to pull her out from beneath the bed, but she scurried away from me to crouch on the other side. Sighing, I heaved myself half-beneath it to follow her, but only succeeded in smacking my head against the wooden frame as I tried to grab her before she ran out and went to his closet.

  “Mea,” I said tiredly, holding my head as it throbbed in agitation. “Come on: I'm serious. Let's go.”

  She had begun to dig around in his immaculate closet, upsetting the perfectly pressed shirts and neatly-lined shoes before clambering over them into the very back. Straightening up again, I shook my head to clear it and followed her over to pick her up.

  “Mea – no – let go –”

  She had pulled a sweater from the back shelf and was tearing it apart between her teeth and claws, and as I made to snatch it away from her, she circled about me and thrashed it around as though we were playing a game.

  “Mea, stop –”

  I grabbed ahold of one of the sleeves and tried to tug it from her, but she clamped down on the other end and braced herself to pull it from my grip. As my fingers tightened on the soft gray fabric, though, I faltered. The sweater was light and thin, and it smelled faintly of salt in contrast to the detergent that overwhelmed the rest of the clothing in the closet. It wasn't Karl's sweater at all that she had found: it was my mother's.

  I let go of the sleeve and fell back, and Mea grabbed it and ran through the house to squirrel it away. As I lay on the floor in stunned disbelief, staring up at the ceiling where little white lights had begun to form like distant street lamps in a crowded city, it finally occurred to me that Karl must have kept the sweater as a keepsake after my mother had died. For some reason, I had always thought that she had been buried in it – it seemed fitting, after all, as she had always worn it over her white dress even when the weather was far too cold to permit such a light outfit – but either he or my father must have decided to put her in something else to lie in for all of time. I frowned as I considered her locked beneath the earth in some foreign dress that she had seldom worn, and with her hair smoothed and fixed instead of crunched and curled from the ocean water. That wasn't how she was supposed to have looked, I thought quite suddenly, and I almost preferred the thought of her flesh rotting away into bones beneath the fabric to lie in skeletal remains if only because it meant that she wasn't hidden beneath something that she had never been.

  Something pawed at my chest and I looked down to see Mea. She had returned to see if I was alright after falling, and had seemingly given up the game now that I was no longer chasing her about. Gingerly sitting up and rubbing my head again, I made a face as she dropped the gray sweater into my lap. There was a large hole in the side of it where the knitting had come undone.

  “Karl's going to kill me,” I said, shutting my eyes. Mea gave a whimper. “And you're going to be put up for adoption,” I added, but patted her on the head even so.

  I folded the sweater back into a neat square and replaced it at the back of the closet, hoping for both of our sakes that Karl rarely looked at it closely, though I knew that he was bound to realize that the breakage in the fibers was due to being mishandled rather than a sign of age. Shutting the closet door tightly, I scooped Mea up and brought her back out into the hall before closing the bedroom door, as well.

  A light humming had come to my head, brought on by both the silence and the sight of my mother's old belongings, and it rose over the pounding in my skull. Before it could grow louder, I went to the piano and took a seat on the bench to stamp it out with the sound of actual music. The song from Dido and Aeneas was the only one that I could think to play, though I rather thought that, given the hallucinations that had returned up in Kipling, I should have forced myself to play something different before it became another of my obsessions.

  When I had cycled through the aria several times, Mea began to howl from her spot on the floor beside me. I looked down at her warily and raised my eyebrows.

  “What?” I said, giving her a look. “It's a good song.”

  Her tail flopped back and forth a few times, and she cocked her head at me questioningly before giving another howl.

  “Well, it is a lament,” I said, turning back to the piano. “So I guess that's an appropriate response.”

  But now that she had begun the doleful vocalization, I couldn't bring myself to continue playing. Running my hand through my hair, I gave another sigh before taking out my phone and dialing Karl's work number.

  “Do operas ever have happy endings?” I said without giving a proper greeting.

  “I – what? Is this –?” Karl spluttered for a moment upon hearing me speak, but then returned to his usual tone. “Oh, Enim, it's you – sorry. I was expecting a call from a client.”

  “Right.”

  “What did you ask?” he said, seeming to shift the phone to his other ear as he changed away from thinking about his work.

  “Operas. Do any of them have happy endings?”

  Though he was fairly used to my abrupt requisitions, I had still managed to catch him off guard. As he paused for a moment to think the question over, I shut the fall board so that I could lean my elbows on the piano without making any noise.

  “Of course they do,” he said.

  “Right. Just none that we've seen.”

  “Dido and Aeneas wasn't too bad,” he proposed.

  “He left her and she died at the end,” I said. “That's not a happy ending, Karl.”

  “Right, true.” He hummed thoughtfully. “Well, there's always –”

  “Don't say Turandot,” I cut in. Though the reworked ending had the titular character and the prince end up together, there was no way that I could begin to believe that it was anything but haunting after what it had done to my mother.

  “No, I wasn't going to suggest that,” he said.

  “And not Rusalka, either.”

  It occurred to me that Ilona had had a point when she had told me that I only liked depressing operas, and before I could stop myself from thinking it, I considered that if she had not died, I would have very much liked to prove her wrong by seeing something uplifting with her.

  “I was going to say Orfeo ed Euridice,” he said, “but then I remembered that you hadn't seen it yet. We could though, when you get back, if you wanted to.”

  I frowned.

  “She dies at the end, too, Karl,” I said, noting that his idea of a happy ending was rather skewed. “And he's miserable for all of time.”

  “No, that's just the mythological story that you're thinking of,” he said, his voice straightforward. “In the operatic version, after he goes down to Hades to get her and mistakenly looks back before they get back to earth again, she does die, but after he decides to kill himself to be with her, the gods decide to let them be together. It's happy.”

  I rubbed at the back of my head, which was still throbbing from where it had smacked against the bed and the floor.

  “They changed the ending?” I said, a hint of irritation in my voice. “They can't do that.”

  Karl sighed, seeming to know that I was thinking about the ruined ending of Turandot.

  “Maybe they didn't change it, Enim,” he said. “Maybe that was the way it was supposed to have been all along.”

  “Right. Except, as far as I know, people don't come back from the dead.”

  Karl hesitated.

  “Are you alright, Enim? How's Jack?”

  I shook my head, glad that he wasn't there to read my expression.

  “I'm f
ine. I – I just wanted to call.”

  “To ask me about operas?”

  He knew as well as I did that there was another reason, but I couldn't bring myself to tell him that I was back in Connecticut after fighting with Jack. Without mentioning the hallucinations, it sounded childish beyond belief; and with mentioning it, he would insist upon coming to get me to bring me home. And though I was already seated in his apartment, I felt much farther away than if I had been back at Kipling as he thought that I was.

  “When did your parents die, Karl?”

  “What?” He waited for an explanation as to why I had asked, but as I couldn't give him one, I simply stayed quiet. He sighed. “It was right before I went to college. I was seventeen.”

  “And how long did you miss them for?”

  Karl hesitated.

  “I … I don't know that I ever stopped missing them, Enim,” he said at last. “It doesn't work that way.”

  “You know what I mean.”

  I wanted a time frame – a proper one – so that I could prepare myself this time around. I wanted something other than the knowledge that I was only supposed to grieve for six months before life became breathable again, which had never done anything more than make me feel less like a person for being unable to untangle myself from the constant grief that followed me around in the form of things that were all-too real and not real at all, and Karl seemed to be the only one capable of giving me a suitable account.

  He let out a heavy breath.

  “I think it was … sometime around when I met your mother,” he said, his words uncertain but his tone anything but.

  I nodded quietly to myself; I had assumed as much.

  “So I just have to wait around to find someone to replace them with?”

  “Enim, that's not what I mean,” Karl said. “It's not – we never replace people. We find ones who make life bearable again.”

  “And what if that never happens?”

  “Enim, are you alright?” he asked again, no longer willing to continue the conversation. “You sound as though you're … having some difficulties.”

  “When did you realize that you and my father would never get along again?” I asked, forgoing his question for one of my own. I could picture Jack out somewhere in the distance, trudging his way through the snow as he walked from the town to the church, and I couldn't decide if I wanted to be there with him or if I simply wanted to be anywhere but where I was.