Song to the Moon (Damnatio Memoriae Book 2)

by Laura Giebfried

  “Thanks.” I flipped it over and looked at the seal. “Did you open it?”

  “No, why would I?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “It’s illegal anyhow,” Karl said. “I’m a lawyer, in case you’ve forgotten.”

  “Right, so you could probably get away with it.”

  “Don’t be paranoid, Enim.”

  “I’m a paranoid schizophrenic, Karl. It comes with the territory.”

  He clenched his jaw at my tone and straightened his tie again rather than responding, and I sighed at the lost argument.

  “Besides, don’t you have legal right to take care of my finances?” I asked. “I thought you had court-ordered guardianship of me since I’m ... sick.”

  “What? No, your father has that,” he said quickly. “He's your conservator. Normally he'd be the one to collect your mail.”

  “Right. And visit me, and make sure I’m taking my medicine, and check in with the doctors about my progress, but you're doing that, too.”

  “It’s not like that, Enim.”

  “Of course not. You only took care of me last year because of my mother.”

  “It’s not like that either. Not – not anymore, at least.”

  He looked at me oddly as though hoping to see something more in my plain expression, but upon finding nothing sighed and lowered his voice.

  “You didn't want him here, Enim.”

  “Is that what he told you?” I asked. “Oh, right, I forgot: you two aren't speaking.”

  “You sent him away. He came to visit you in the hospital, and got you transferred to one of the best facilities in Connecticut, and you told him to leave. You remember that, don’t you?”

  “There’s nothing wrong with my memory, Karl.”

  “There seems to be.”

  I looked at the window behind him without answering. Just like the myriad of doctors who had scrutinized the relationship I had with my father, Karl didn’t understand why I had told him to go back to Holland. He didn’t understand that my father’s absence for the past year was like a stretch of impassible water beneath an unbuilt bridge, and that so much had changed not only between the time he had left, but also the time he had come back, that his presence made things more foreign than familiar. And though I would never admit it to either of them, I felt closer to Karl than I did to him.

  “I asked him if I could take legal guardianship of you until you’re well enough to be on your own,” Karl continued. “He said no.”

  “He probably doesn’t want you to get the money from my inheritance.”

  “He doesn’t need that money, Enim. He has plenty.”

  “I doubt he’d want you to have it, either.”

  “Neither of us is interested in the money. It’s legally yours regardless of your illness, though we’ll both be happy to advise you of how best to use it.”

  “Whatever. I don’t want to talk about this anymore.”

  Karl sighed.

  “Alright, that’s ... that’s fine. I really came to see if you wanted to come with me to visit your mother’s grave today.”

  “What – now?”

  I turned to the window again. The sky outside was so blue that it made Karl’s eyes appear dull and gray, and the summer light pooled down on the buildings opposite us with a deep orange hue. The view was warm and inviting compared with the cold, blank expanse of white walls inside the facility and chill from the air conditioning, and yet the thought of crossing the grass to the weathered gravestone seemed to press me into the ground and render me incapable of moving.

  “No. No, I – I don’t think I can go.”

  “I’ve cleared it, Enim. They’re allowing you to go out.”

  “No, I really can’t. My leg’s been bothering me all day, and I can barely walk ten feet ...”

  “I’ll ask them to give you something for the pain, and we can take the wheelchair.”

  “No, Fisker said he couldn’t give me more. And the wheelchair’s impossible to maneuver, and –”

  “Enim,” Karl said. “I know it’s difficult, but it’s her birthday. We all think that it would be good for you to get this ... closure.”

  “She died. I think that’s about as final as things get.”

  “You know what I mean, Enim. We know how difficult it was when she died, and then everything that happened afterwards sort of ... pushed it to the back burner, and I don’t know if you ever really gave it much thought after that.”

  “I’ve given it plenty of thought, Karl,” I snapped. “She’s my mother – of course I think about her.”

  “She was your mother.”

  “That’s what I said.”

  He didn’t argue, choosing instead to wipe a stray piece of lint off of the table and onto the floor, and didn’t look back at me when he spoke again.

  “You can’t continue to blame her forever, Enim.”

  “Blame her for what?”

  “For jumping off the bridge.”

  There was a sharp edge brushing beneath his cushioned tone that threatened to cut through at any moment.

  “I don’t blame her,” I said. My voice had begun shaking in time with my hands, and I hid them below the table and pressed them against my legs. “You and my father are the ones who blame her – and me – for being sick.”

  “We have never blamed either of you, Enim. We wished that it had never happened, but we’re well aware that it was unavoidable.”

  “It wouldn’t have been unavoidable if she had taken her medicine, though, right? That’s why you two aren't speaking – because you're both waiting for the other one to admit whose fault it was that she jumped?”

  “We’re not speaking because there's no reason to, not because of what happened with her. If she had taken her medicine, things might have been different – but probably not.”

  “She jumped off the bridge because she heard voices.”

  “No. She listened to that song because she heard voices,” Karl countered. “She stared at the water for hours because she thought there was an answer hidden in the depths. But she jumped off the bridge because she was unhappy. That’s all. She was unhappy – and nothing could have changed that.”

  He stared at me for a long moment wondering if I would contradict him, but I could not. Laying his hands upon the table, he made an odd grimace before leaning towards me and continuing in the same quiet tone.

  “Enim, I was really hoping that you would come to the cemetery today. I think it’s important that you do.”

  “I can’t.”

  “There’s something that I had hoped to discuss with you there. Something about that letter.”

  “You can tell me here.”

  “I ... I really thought that it would be better to discuss it somewhere else.”

  He was staring at me imploringly, but the throbbing in my leg had grown worse and even the promise of more pain medication didn’t increase my desire to cater to his request. As I shook my head in a final refusal, he sighed and dropped his eyes to the metal surface between us.

  “Alright, then.” He straightened and tugged at his tie again before systematically smoothing it down. As it fell back into a straight line, I had the urge to reach across the table and disturb it again. “I ... As you know, you've been cleared of all involvement with regards to what happened at Bickerby in February. They know you didn't participate in what Jack did –”

  “Which was nothing.”

  “– and they're not charging you for what happened to Beringer. So … as of last week, your conservatorship has ended.”

  “Is that it?”

  My voice was as flat as ever, neither accusing nor disappointed nor angry as I spoke, and when Karl stuttered a response I only shrugged.

  “I … yes, that's it.”

  “Okay.”

  “That’s ... that’s all?” Karl asked. “Isn’t there ... would you like to talk about ...?”

  “There’s nothing to talk about. I can leave the facility – big d
eal.”

  “It is a big deal, Enim. You're legally independent now, just like any other adult. You can choose what you do, where you go … where you live. You – you have full access to your inheritance money, as well.”

  “Great. Too bad there's no where to go.”

  “There's – that's not true, Enim. You could come home.”

  I waited several moments before responding, staring at him with such vacancy that it was a wonder he was able to keep eye contact.

  “Home?” I repeated. “Where's that, Karl? With my father in Amsterdam? At some university where I can pretend to be normal again?” I waited for him to speak, but he was so silent that it seemed to echo in the overly air-conditioned room. “You can't mean with you.”

  “You could come and live with me; I wouldn't mind.”

  I scoffed.

  “No, thanks. I think we both know how well that went last time.”

  “So what do you plan to do, then? You're just going to live in your own world and stay here forever, making paper-crafts and avoiding treatment until someone gets fed up enough to say that they believe you?”

  I shrugged, though something in his words made my face twitch on its own accord. Karl's jaw shifted to the side.

  “What is this, Enim? Is this really because you can't accept what happened to Jack, or is it because you can't accept what happened to Beringer?”

  I narrowed my eyes.

  “I know what happened with Beringer.”

  “You think you know.”

  “I do know. I was there, not you. I know what happened with him.”

  Karl's jaw stiffened at my definite tone and he shook his head as his usual dissatisfaction with me returned, too unsettled to answer.

  “If you’re not coming to the cemetery, then I should go,” he said at last, his voice still entreating me to change my mind.

  “Alright. See you next week, then.”

  “Fine. See you next week.”

  He pushed his chair back and left the room. When he had gone, I lifted my leg to rest on the vacated seat and shut my eyes momentarily to clear my head of the last part of the conversation. The news about my conservatorship meant little given that I had forgotten what day it was did. I had forgotten her birthday, just like I had forgotten the exact shade of her eyes and the number of smile and frown lines around her mouth. Soon I would forget her altogether, and for the life of me I couldn’t decide if I was dreading it or looking forward to it.

  I collected the envelope and limped back to my room at the end of the hall. It was the only private room in the facility, which had been both requested for me by my father and determined necessary after my multiple outbursts. Taking a seat on the edge of the mattress, I pulled out the drawer to the bedside table and threw the envelopes inside. The name Enim Lund printed in black ink upon the smooth white meant nothing: the world had as good as forgotten me.

  Ch. 2

  The last note of the aria faded into the walls, leaving a distinct silence in its absence that pressed down upon me in the small room. I opened my eyes and looked over to where the outdated audio player was perched on the desk. One of the speakers was dented in from its previous owner, and it had a habit of spewing static at random intervals even when turned off, but as it was the only one that the staff could dig up that didn't have a cord long enough for me to strangle myself with, it was the only one that I was allowed to have.

  Karl had finally consented to bring me my collection of opera music after months of badgering him for it. Though he said that the delay was due to the majority of my belongings being taken from the dorm room at Bickerby as evidence, it was clear why he didn't want me to have it. It was only after an especially heated argument in which Dr. Graves had been called in to mediate us that he had caved, and the next week he handed it over in a box that organized each disk alphabetically. Turandot, however, was notably absent.

  I flipped over onto my stomach and reached over to replay the song. It hardly mattered to me if he wanted to keep the opera from me: it had never been my favorite anyhow. More so, I was quite certain that after the number of times I had heard Nessum Dorma, I would never willingly listen to it again.

  Rusalka had been my favorite for as long as I could remember. When I was seven my father had driven us into the city to see a performance at the opera house. He hadn’t loved the opera, though he went often enough because of my mother, and had chosen Rusalka based on a brief summary thinking that it would be a blithe, enchanting fairy-tale of sorts in contrast to the tragedies that my mother always opted for. I vaguely remembered how he had shifted in his seat midway through when he realized it was just as sorrowful as anything she would have chosen.

  Regardless that it wasn’t what he had expected, to me the story had been just as enthralling as any fairy-tale I had ever heard. I had leaned all the way forward in my seat as I watched the titular character, Rusalka, gliding about the stage in her pale blue dress as she sang her aria to the moon. She was beautiful in a fascinating way: a water sprite with glowing eyes and long blond hair who gave up her speech to be human. I had been so absorbed that I didn’t notice the tears in my mother’s eyes until the drive home when my father took his hand off the wheel to place gently over hers, and both their faces seemed hollowed from the heartbreak the story had told. After seeing it, though, when my mother would withdraw to her room for days at a time, I convinced myself that she had been a water sprite, too, and had simply given up her voice to be there with me and my father.

  Easing back onto the mattress, I shut my eyes and folded my arms across my chest. The song drifted over me like dirt being sprinkled over a coffin door, and I wondered if I laid stilly enough the world might consent to go on without me. No sooner had the thought come, however, than a knock sounded on my door. I didn't bother to move as the nurse opened it and stepped inside.

  “I've been looking all over for you – you're supposed to be in the activity room.” She maneuvered the wheelchair so that it was as close as possible to the bed to prevent me from walking on my leg. “Your meeting with Dr. Graves starts in two minutes.”

  I kept my eyes shut as I listened to the soprano's voice; the song had at least four minutes to go.

  “Enim.” The nurse jabbed her finger at the player to stop the music and I opened my eyes. The room was too bright at that time of day. “Get up. You have to stick to your schedule.”

  “Right, or else who knows what could happen,” I muttered, but my voice was too low for her to hear.

  I heaved myself up and over to the wheelchair and she swiveled it around to bring me down the hall. Graves' office was at the other end from Fisker's, and even with my complete dislike of the latter, as we passed his door I found myself wishing that the appointment that afternoon was with him instead.

  “I'm sorry he's late, Dr. Graves,” the nurse said as she situated me in front of his desk. “We had a little trouble getting out of the room today.”

  She said it as though the wheelchair had gotten stuck on the rug and rendered her incapable of pushing it out the door, but it hardly escaped Graves what had kept me. He smiled as he thanked her and sent her on her way.

  “Well, you're here now, Enim, and that's all that matters,” he said once the door had eased shut.

  “Right.”

  “Though if you'd like to discuss it, we certainly can.”

  I looked up from the ground where I had been staring at the leg of the small coffee table situated between us. Whereas Fisker’s job was to prescribe and monitor my medication, Graves’ was to look after my well-being and check in with how I was adjusting to my surroundings. He was a younger man than Fisker, with a soft voice and gentle demeanor that allowed for the well-placed compassion and concern that made him a favorite among the other patients, but I disliked him all the same. His hair was a flat shade of brown as though he seldom went out in the sunlight, and his skin was a bit too even and absent of wrinkles. More than anything, though, he was the type of man who drank tea instea
d of coffee, and there was nothing remarkable or good that could come from that.

  “No, thanks.”

  “Well, that's all right, too,” Graves said. “We can talk about anything you'd like.”

  I chose not to answer, my eyes still boring into anything that wasn’t Graves’ appearance. He was wearing navy socks with brown shoes, and the look of the contrasting colors irked me more than the way he cocked his head in feigned intrigue as to what I might or might not say. As we sat in silence for several moments, I looked around the office for what felt like the first time. He had shelves upon shelves of books ordered by volume lining the walls, a computer desk and chair to one side of the room, and an end table with a lone box of tissues resting off to his side. The formalness of it all made the place uncomfortable and the supposed preparedness only made me certain that I would never break down or need a tissue while in his company. More than anything, though, the entirety of the office made me miss the haphazard one that Beringer had put together for our meetings, and a pain shot through my chest before I could push the thought away.

  “What’s wrong, Enim?” Graves asked as I shut my eyes and screwed up my face.

  “Nothing.”

  “You look upset.”

  I opened my eyes again and relaxed into my usual expressionless expression before giving him a shrug.

  “My leg hurts.”

  “Well, that’s not ‘nothing,’ is it?” Graves said in an attempt to be kind.

  “Apparently it is. Dr. Fisker thinks I’m making it up.”

  “Dr. Fisker – I believe – thinks that the extended pain you feel in your leg might be a result of some unresolved feelings you have towards what happened a few months ago with your friend Jack and Dr. Beringer. He in no way feels that you’re faking it for attention.”

  “I’m just faking it for the drugs, then.”

  “Are you faking it for the drugs, Enim?”

  “No. I would like more, though.”

  Graves nodded.

  “I know. But unless Dr. Fisker feels otherwise, the dosage will remain the same.”

  “He won't change his mind.”