Song to the Moon (Damnatio Memoriae Book 2)

by Laura Giebfried

  I dug my teeth into my tongue, hoping that he wasn't asking what he seemed to be.

  “What do you mean?”

  “Nothing – only, I was wondering if you'd … if you were able to sort out … if you had come to a realization about what happened.”

  “With Jack?”

  “With Beringer.”

  There was a weight pressing against my stomach despite the fact that I hadn't eaten, and the neckline of the sweater was too tight against my throat. He was waiting for the explanation that Karl had drawn up in the court statement to acquit me about what had happened on the cliffs, not the actual answer to the question. They were all so adamant when they asked me to tell them the truth, and yet none of them could extend past what they wanted to hear to even consider believing me; and in his case, at least, I didn't think that I wanted him to.

  “I know what happened with Beringer.”

  “Oh, good. That's – that's good. Well, you can stay here in Emily's room, and she'll go in with Ava. I think that will work out the best.”

  “Right.”

  “Right. Well, you must be tired – I'll let you rest,” he said. “There's water in the bathroom if you need to take your medicine.”

  He nodded to me and circled around me to get back to the door, not bothering with a proper goodnight or any long-awaited and long-forgotten sentiment to utter before leaving. I listened to the sound of his footsteps return down the stairs and over to the kitchen where dishes were clinking as they were put in the dishwasher, and my reflection stared solemnly back at me in the black glass of the window.

  Taking slow, careful strides down the hall to keep from alerting anyone to my presence, I returned to the bathroom and shut the door, listening intently for any sign of someone in the rooms below me. One of them was my father's office where he was keeping the message from Jack from me. I wondered if he suspected that that was the reason I had come, or if he really believed that I had missed him. My throat burned as I considered as much, and I couldn't help but think that Karl was right to have warned me not to come. The image of my mother lying coldly in her grave rose before my eyes before I could stop it.

  I grappled in my pocket for one of the orange bottles and pulled it out, twisting off the top as the contents rattled against the plastic, and stared down at the mint-green pills. Of course he wanted me to take them – he was worried about what would happen if I didn't, perhaps envisioning that I would morph into some enraged, unrecognizable creature the second past the time that I was due to swallow them down. But the pills had never done anything. I was no different now than I had been at that time the year before, or the year before that. They were all waiting so patiently for the day to come when I was different – or better – and even after all that time, they still didn't realize that it would never happen.

  I turned on the faucet and overturned the bottle to dump the pills into the sink. They swirled about with the water, swelling as they collected together and fought to get down the drain. I pressed my hand down upon them to force them down, my fingers poking down into the pipe to get them to go. When the last of the green disappeared out of sight, I turned off the water and stepped back. My skin was covered in a chalky film, and I wiped it against my pants to get it off. That was it – it was gone. And despite knowing that I should have saved them to taper off them slowly as I had planned, knowing that the sudden stop would result in a series of side-effects that would rip apart my mind again, I couldn't force myself to take them for a moment longer. I wasn't better – I was never going to be better, just as Karl had said – and the fact that he wanted it so badly and that I knew that it wouldn't be so somehow made it alright.

  Ch. 7

  The office door was locked. I tried it the next morning while the five of them were eating breakfast, jiggling the knob repeatedly as though if I twisted it hard enough it might consent to open, but no amount of doing so so much as made it budge. I leaned my head against the wood in frustration, wondering if he always kept it locked to keep the children out or if he had only done so after I had arrived.

  “Enim?”

  I stepped back from the door at the sound of Melinda's voice. She was standing at the end of the hall, having evidently heard the ruckus I was making. Her eyes scanned over where I stood by the office door, and despite her wide-mouthed smile, there was suspicion in her eyes.

  “Is everything … alright?” she asked.

  “Fine.”

  “Of course.” Her smile stretched a bit further as though to compensate for the doubt in her voice, and she smoothed her skirt down in her nervous way. “We were just finishing up breakfast, if you'd like to join us.”

  Given the sound of her voice, I was quite certain that she hoped I would decline. I straightened my sweater and ran my hands down the front of it, wondering what sort of disease she imagined that I was harboring underneath it.

  “Alright.”

  She stepped back as I approached to let me past her into the kitchen. Her children were at the table, but my father was notably absent. His car was still in the driveway, though, and as it was a Sunday, he hardly could have been getting ready for work.

  “Can I get you something to drink?” Melinda asked, her hand on the handle of the refrigerator.

  “Coffee, please.”

  “Oh, I – we don't keep coffee in the house.”

  “No?” I feigned polite surprise. “That's funny. My dad used to drink six cups a day.”

  She smiled again as though it was the proper response and offered me milk or tea instead. I declined both and took a seat at the table. Ava offered me a piece of bread from the plate in front of her, and I slowly plucked one out. It was sticky and smelled of something sweet, though, and I quickly dropped it down to my napkin.

  “Did you have a good sleep?” Melinda asked, coming over to the table with a glass of juice. “I hope Emily's room was alright.”

  “It was fine.”

  “Oh, that's good. I was worried that the mattress would be too small, but your father said you were used to single beds in school.”

  “Right.”

  “So it was the same?” she asked.

  “As what?”

  “As the beds at school.”

  The question was simple enough, but she seemed to be asking something else altogether. I put my arms on the table and gave an indiscriminate shrug.

  “Basically. The one's at Bickerby didn't have faeries on the comforter, though.”

  “They're dragonflies,” Ava said. “Emily doesn't believe in faeries.”

  I glanced over at her.

  “Right. Dragonflies.”

  Melinda cleared her throat and sat down.

  “Well, I'm glad that it was comfortable,” she said. “I was worried all night.”

  Ava looked between us as another bout of silence filled the air, her short legs swinging beneath the table and sending a draft over my own.

  “I know what your name means,” she said excitedly.

  I glanced up at her, but Melinda spoke before I could.

  “It doesn't mean anything, Ava,” she said. “It's just a name.”

  “But it does – I thought about it all night.”

  “No, it doesn't,” Melinda repeated. “Dan said so, remember?”

  She frowned and picked at her breakfast, tearing a piece of the pastry away to dip into her cocoa, and I leaned back as I searched for something to say before the conversation could be picked back up.

  “Where is my father, by the way?”

  “Oh, Dan just had to make a call. He should be down soon.”

  “Great.” I looked down at the sickly-sweet bread as my skull throbbed from a lack of caffeine. “Well, I think I might head back upstairs. But thanks for the breakfast.”

  “Oh, you're welcome.”

  I hurried up the spiral staircase despite the way that my leg protested and returned to the pink bedroom, shutting the door behind me to block out the remaining noises from the kitchen. Being in the hous
e with them was even more suffocating than being in the facility, and I wished that they would leave so that I could try to get into the office again. The pile of mail was the only thing keeping me in the house; every other part of me was aching to call a cab and go back to the airport. I wished that I had listened to Karl when he had told me not to come, and had simply called and asked my father to forward the mail to the facility, taking the chance that he might not do so if only to prevent me from ever knowing who resided in the house with him.

  I leaned back on the mattress and stared up at where little stars were stuck to the ceiling. They glowed in the dark to keep me company through the sleepless night that had resulted from the missed dose of medication. Already I could feel it scratching at my skin as it left my system, allowing the anxiety to return and the cold to scrape at my insides, and the idea that I didn't have more was suddenly far more disconcerting than it had been the night before.

  I shook my head and instead pictured the unknown message from Jack hidden somewhere in the closed room below. As I thought of it, the urge to listen to the aria from Rusalka came over me again. The disk was still in my pants pocket pressing sharply against my leg from the ride over, but as there was nowhere to play it, it did me little good. I looked back over at the suitcase in the corner of the room, wishing that I had crammed the outdated audio player in with clothes, but then shut my eyes on the sight of it. There was no point in unpacking it: I wouldn't be staying much longer.

  “Enim?”

  The door opened just barely and the squeak of a voice slipped around it. I looked over to where the tip of Ava's nose was poking into the room and frowned.

  “Yes?”

  “May I come in?”

  I sat up and swung my legs over the side of the mattress, trying to look more composed than I felt, and nodded. She pushed the door open but lingered on the threshold, her head bent down and her hands hidden behind her back, and swayed from side to side in half-circle motions without saying anything further.

  “Do you need something?” I asked, wondering if she had left a toy in the room that my presence had prevented her from collecting.

  “No.”

  Her voice was so light in comparison to mine, not pressed upon or imprinted with bitterness and resentment, and there was something about the accent that was so much more charming given her youthfulness than could be heard in her siblings' or mother's. I smiled as I considered it, but then my expression fell again. A few more years of living with my father would change that.

  As she continued to rotate to the left and right, it occurred to me that I undoubtedly made her as uncomfortable as I did everyone else, and she simply didn't want to admit as much aloud. She didn't need to know who I was or what I had done to recognize that I was a stranger with no place in her family, and certainly none in the pink-walled room who was keeping her from her toys. I cleared my throat and tried again.

  “I could go somewhere else, if you'd like to play in here for a while.”

  “No, that's alright.”

  She stopped twisting from side to side, but her eyes were still glued to the floor. I slid a bit further off the mattress until I was almost ready to stand and folded my hands in front of me.

  “I really don't mind.”

  “No, I never play in Emily's room, anyhow,” she said, finally glancing up to make eye-contact. “She doesn't like me to touch her dolls.”

  “Oh, right.” I glanced at the shelf where half a dozen glassy-eyed dolls stared down at me and had the sudden urge to reach up and face them another way. “Well, I won't touch them, either, if she's worried.”

  “Can I ask you a question?”

  I chewed the insides of my cheeks and glanced over her head into the hallway to see if either of our parents were there, and though I wasn't in the mood to think up a lie to any of the dozens of questions she undoubtedly had about who I was and where I had come from, I couldn't bring myself to say no.

  “Sure.”

  “How old are you?”

  “I – that's your question?” I gave a brief smile in relief. “Eighteen.”

  “I'm seven.”

  “That's … a good age,” I said, though it was hardly an accurate answer.

  “I think I like it more than six, but less than five,” she said, starting to spin back and forth again. “I hope that eight isn't worse – not if I have to be it for a whole year.”

  “No, eight's a great year,” I said. “It's really … It was my favorite, I think.”

  “Enim?”

  “Yes?”

  “I've made you something.”

  “I – you've what?”

  She finally plucked her feet from the threshold and came forward, pulling her hands out from behind her back as she went. As she reached a closed fist out to me, I unclasped my hands so that she could drop something into my palm. I picked it up and held it in front of my eyes to see.

  It was a little string tied together at either end and knotted at various intervals so that the beads she had threaded on would stay in place. The majority of them were colorful plastic balls the resembled holiday lights, but four of them were letters that spelled out Mine. I stared at it for a long moment before realizing that the beads had flipped over. Righting them, the name Enim stared up at me instead. Something unexpected caught in my throat, and I had to clear it before speaking.

  “Thank you.”

  “I used mostly purple because that's my favorite color,” she said, beginning to spin back and forth again now that I had accepted it. “Is that alright?”

  “Yeah, it's … it's great.” I slid it onto my wrist and noted how much more pronounced the colors were against both the white of my skin and the gold of my watch, vaguely wondering what my father would have to say about such an emasculine bracelet before quickly deciding that I would never show it to him. “Purple's my favorite, too.”

  The sound of Melinda calling her came up the stairs and we both looked towards the door. The voice seemed to break through the reprieve from the hostility that had otherwise surrounded me since arriving at the house, and I pulled my sleeve down to hide the present. Ava skipped back to the door to answer her mother but paused again on the threshold and looked back at me.

  “Enim?”

  “Yes?”

  She twirled back and forth again before answering as her initial hesitance returned.

  “How long are you staying with us?”

  “Just … just a little while,” I said. I glanced over at the still unpacked suitcase. “You and Emily don't have to share a room for much longer.”

  “Oh.”

  “Why?”

  “I was just thinking … you could stay forever, if you'd like.”

  She turned and skipped across the hall as her mother called her to the kitchen again, the green dress disappearing from sight as she descended the stairs. When she had gone, I pulled my sleeve up to look at the bracelet again. It was quite horrible looking, with too-bright beads with uneven spaces between them that resembled the crafts that we were supposed to make at the treatment facility and even less masculine than the flower-patterned room at my grandmother's house had been, and yet I rather liked it all the same. As I made to pull my sleeve down again, though, I paused and read the way the beads spelled out Enim before flipping them over so that they read mine again instead. I was certain that that was what my mother had meant to call me, anyhow, but had been forced to reverse it to hide it from my father.

  I waited several minutes for the silence to fill the house again before realizing that the door to the bedroom was still open. As I stood to shut it again, a voice carried up the stairs from the downstairs hallway. My father must have gotten off the phone; his footsteps creaked on the hardwood as he crossed from the office to join her.

  “Are you done?”

  Letting go of the handle, I gently pulled the door open instead and went to the staircase, pausing at the banister and leaning over slightly to keep from being seen. I could just make out the o
utline of my father's shoulder in the hallway beneath me, but the sharpness of his voice was not reduced from his lowered tone.

  “He didn't answer – it's too early,” he said. “Has he – is everything alright?”

  “I just sent the kids over to Fenna's house. I thought that that would be better.”

  He murmured in agreement, but the sound of it was overtaken by her sigh.

  “I just don't know what to do with him, Dan. I tried talking to him, but he doesn't speak – and he wouldn't touch anything at breakfast.”

  “That's fine. If he's keeping to himself, let him be.”

  “But what does that mean? What am I supposed to do with him?” she asked. When my father's reply didn't come, she let out a breath and continued. “Why is he here? Why did he just show up like this?”

  “I don't know – he won't say.”

  “But obviously there's a reason. He came to see you.”

  “I know. I just don't know why.”

  “But Daniel, you have to know something. After what you said – I mean, I know that you're keeping something from me.”

  “No, I – I know. That was wrong of me, and poor judgment. But I – I've told you most of it now.”

  “But what am I supposed to do with the kids? They're asking questions, and I don't think they should be around him –”

  “No, I agree. It's best that we keep them away from him.”

  “But what does that mean? Do I have to worry about him? Is he – is he safe?”

  “No, he's fine. He's … he's fine.”

  His tone was so unconvincing that it hardly sounded like his voice at all. Had I not been sitting staring at where his square-toed oxford was digging into the rug, I wouldn't have thought that it was him there at all.

  “But is he?” she asked. “He's just so … quiet.”

  “He's always been that way. It's nothing to worry about. He – he was under supervision for a while, and they obviously thought that he was well enough to be let out. He probably just wanted to take the opportunity to get away.”

  From her silence, she hardly sounded convinced, but my father lowered his voice and added in a gentler tone, “Don't worry, Lynn. I know this has been a shock, but I'll sort out why he's here. I'm sure that it's nothing to worry about.”