Song to the Moon (Damnatio Memoriae Book 2)

by Laura Giebfried

  After a moment it struck me that I was picturing him in the room at the back of my grandmother’s house rather than in his new apartment. Reminding myself that that house had been sold and refurnished to some other happier, more functional family, I tried to picture him in the new apartment instead, but the polished floors and bare walls would not rise to my eyes. Instead I thought of the way that he had pulled a chair into my mother’s bedroom and sat by her side, caring for her even when she knew no differently, and then of how he had simply turned off all of the machines until the beeping and whirring stopped and the house was silent but for his breathing.

  When the train came in, Ilona stood and waved for me to follow her to the correct car. I took a seat by the window, leaning my head against the dirty glass as I watched the other passengers board, while she took the seat across from me and propped her heels up on the chair beside me. A few people passing by threw odd looks at the juxtaposition of her in her insufficient attire and me in my ironed khakis and sweater, but I was filled with the same content that Cabail Ibbot's presence had given me, knowing that their questioning stares were largely because of her; and this time, at least, I could be certain that she was real.

  Now that we were out of the red-lit street, I could finally look at her more carefully. She had a mess of roughly chopped, espresso-colored hair that fell in a line above her shoulders and a thin, jagged nose and sharp jawline. Her arms were thin beneath the cardigan, and the distinct smell of smoke wafted from the material. She wasn’t very pretty, even if I squinted at her, but there was something so enigmatic in her narrowed eyes that I felt she ought to have been, like some creature from a fairy-tale that I had once read. She was something that I couldn’t place any further than being someone that Karl would be horrified to know that I was sitting on a train with, and the idea was immensely appealing.

  “Why do you meet boyfriend in France?” Ilona asked, scooting down in her seat to get more comfortable. I straightened as she did so as though countering the slumped position would somehow make it more acceptable.

  “He's – we had a plan to.”

  “So why do you fly to Amsterdam?”

  “Because my father lives here.”

  “So you visit father?”

  “Sort of.”

  “He is Dutch?”

  “No, he just works there.”

  “And mother?”

  “She died.”

  “So you go to live with father now?”

  “No. She died a long time ago. I'm just visiting my father – or supposed to be visiting him.”

  “So you go to France to find boyfriend instead?”

  “Yes.”

  “But why do you ask for me to come, then?”

  “No reason. I just ...” I tried to find a proper excuse that didn't involve explaining why I needed someone or something to fill the silence. “... wanted company.”

  She hardly seemed to believe me. Instead, her eyes ran over my neat sweater and pants to pause on my boat shoes; she stared at them for a long moment as though trying to discern something from their lack of scuff-marks.

  “You are ill, yes?”

  “No,” I said too quickly. She eyed me carefully.

  “You have limp.”

  “Right. I injured my leg a while back; it's still healing.”

  “So you walk on it?”

  “Yes.”

  She hummed to herself, seemingly in thought.

  “But you are ill in other way, yes?” she asked, though it appeared that she had already decided. “You have sickness.”

  “What? No.”

  I shook my head adamantly, but the action did nothing to change her expression. As she continued to stare at me, I shifted in my spot and smoothed down the front of my sweater, wondering how she could be so certain, and quickly traced my mind for a lie. Even with the promise of so much money, I doubted that she would consent to take a schizophrenic any further than the next stop.

  “I have a – a heart-murmur,” I said, settling on the excuse that Jack had come up with the previous year.

  “Heart murmur? What is this?”

  “It’s … it's when the heart ... has a murmur.”

  She looked at me blankly for several moments before turning to the window. It was impossible to say if she believed me or not, but she didn’t ask me anything further.

  As she drifted off to sleep, I leaned my head back against the window and stared out at the nothingness that whirled by. Judging from the thin line of sunlight creeping over the skyline of the passing cities, it was nearly morning, though I couldn't remember what time it would be in New England. I couldn't decide if it was midnight or noon where Karl was, or whether he would be sleeping or waiting up for news of me, but then I reminded myself that it hardly mattered: I had known when he had dropped me off at the airport that I would never see him again; I just hadn't known that I would care.

  When the train pulled into Belgium, the city was nothing more than an assortment of lights glaring down at me. I wished that I could sleep as easily as Ilona was, or that she would wake up and begin speaking again – even if it was just to hound me with questions. The silence in the compartment was uncomfortably apparent and I had to shake my head as a low sound started in my ear. My hand went to the disk in my pocket, and I wished that I could turn the music from Rusalka on loudly enough so that every other sound but it went away, but I could only hum the tune inside my head instead. When it did little to disperse the other thoughts, though, I stood and leaned over towards Ilona with the intention of waking her up.

  She had taken off the cardigan to use as a pillow and her boots were strewn on the floor between us. I carefully stepped over them and reached out my hand to nudge her shoulder. As I leaned over her, though, something caught my eye that made me pause: her hair had fallen forward and the way it parted gave me a clear view of her neck where juxtaposed red and white skin rippled down from the tip of her ear to just above her collarbone. It was a burn that mimicked water, unlike any I had seen before, as though hot liquid had pooled through her veins and broken through the skin.

  I pulled my hand away and sat back, suddenly unsure of touching her. There was nothing dangerous in her appearance – except, perhaps, the sheer sharpness of her shoes or narrowness of her glare – but something about the scar made me uncertain all the same. I thought back to what the man outside of the tobacco shop had told me and tried to remember his exact words, but nothing came. Running my eyes over her again, I wondered what she had done to warrant such contempt, but then shook the thought away and sat back down, suddenly content to let her sleep.

  I finally consented to shift down in the seat and curl my legs up, feeling as though after several sleepless nights and all that had happened since coming to Amsterdam that I might be tired enough to fall asleep, but upon shutting my eyes found myself more uncomfortable than I had been sitting stiffly. The seat was hard and cold, and a draft from the air vents swept over me in constant chills. Though the air was no longer warm, it was still muggy and seemed to squeeze the space out of the area. I clenched my fingers around the fabric of my sweater as the pain in my leg started up again, and the quiet all around was broken by the thoughts sounding in my head. The leg injury would heal eventually regardless of the painkillers, but there was no telling what would happen without the antipsychotics. I wished that I had stopped taking them weeks ago to give myself time to go through the withdrawal; I didn't know how to explain myself to Jack.

  I had almost drifted off to sleep when the train rattled upon the tracks and shook the car, jostling everyone within. While Ilona remained mostly undisturbed where she lay, only rocking to the side before falling back into place, the cardigan that she had been using as a pillow slipped off the edge and onto the floor. As I reached down to pick it up, something hard and metal fell out from the fabric and tumbled to the ground. Leaning in closer, I could see a long rounded blade attached to an ornate, heavily-tarnished handle. It took me a moment or so before I r
ecognized it as a letter-opener. Sitting back in my seat, I ran my eyes over her twisted form: even given the little that I knew about her, it hardly seemed plausible that she got any mail or that she would ever use such a device to open it.

  I carefully picked it up and made to put it back in the cardigan pocket, but when my hand slid inside it was met with something else. Looking in to see what it was, I could just make out the outline of a passport through the darkness. Considering that she simply had an aversion to flying after all, I gently pulled it out, still curious as to which nationality she was. The cover was the deep shade of burgundy that I recognized from the lines at the airport in Amsterdam, but when I flipped it open and read that it had been issued by Holland, I wasn't content with the answer. I frowned down at the page discontentedly. The photograph on the page was from years beforehand and she still had the same dark hair and eyes in it as she did now, and the name printed on the page beside it matched the one that she had given me, but there was something just off about it even so: it was an imbalance that was neither detectable or explainable from the outside, like the way the heart sat just slightly to the left of the chest in order to make room for something else.

  My eyes went back to her face, softened as she slept, and my brow furrowed further, unable to place why it should matter. The date of birth written beneath her name meant that she would be twenty-four, and it didn't seem to match her appearance even though I couldn't decide whether she looked younger or older. I put both the passport and the letter-opener back in her cardigan and replaced it on the seat behind her head before quickly sitting back in my seat. As the train continued onwards, the moonlight cast itself down upon me to cover my skin in a bluish hue. The hands lying on my lap looked deadened with some unknown disease, their too-thin fingers and wasted skin highlighted with every flaw that the sunlight hid. As I shut my eyes on the image, my thoughts turned to the view of the ocean at Bickerby that was so vivid in my memory, and I reminded myself that the view of the sea would be different. The sunlight would make it calmer, and the smell would be smoother and the waves would be gentler, and it wouldn't be the same place that my mother had cried into or that Beringer had disappeared into. It would be different – it would be better – and it would replace the memories with ones that didn't keep me up at night. And despite trying to block it out, I allowed the image to rock back and forth in a steady rhythm against the back of my eyes that eventually pulled me to sleep.

  I seemed to have only had my eyes shut for a moment when I began to dream, transporting myself to the rocky shore past the boathouse on the school grounds. There was something way out in the water that was just the slightest bit too far away to see, and though I stood on my tiptoes and craned my neck in an attempt to make out what it was, it kept drifting out of sight. Despite not knowing what it was, I had the sudden urge to wade out into the ocean to get to it, feeling that it was too important to let slip away. As I took a step forward, though, something moved behind me, barely visible from the corner of my eye, and vanished through the trees leading back to the campus. My feet pressed into the sharp stones as I debated which to go after, but the knowledge that getting to both would be impossible was rendering me incapable of deciding.

  “Eh-nim. Eh-nim.”

  Something sharp prodded me in the shoulder and I opened my eyes. The sunlight cut strongly across the compartment in a flare of deep-yellow that nearly blinded me until Ilona's form stepped to the side to block it out.

  She withdrew the boot in her hand that she had been using to nudge me with and pulled it back onto her foot.

  “We are in Paris, yes? We get off now.”

  I quickly straightened from where I had been hunched by the window and looked around. The other passengers were collecting their suitcases and moving towards the doors, and the station outside was alive with movement and chattering.

  “Right. Let's go.”

  “You have good sleep, yes?” she asked as we stepped out onto the platform. She had not yet put on her cardigan and the passersby were staring openly as we made our way past them. I glanced down to where the garment hung loosely in her hand, but now that it was morning and the summer sunlight hit the pavement with warmth, I could hardly ask her to put it back on.

  “It was fine.”

  As we crossed to the other side of the platform, I blinked several times until my eyes had fully adjusted to the light. My leg had grown impossibly stiff beneath me and without the usual medication, the pain had worked its way up through the bone and into my hip until my entire side was throbbing. As I paused to lean against the wall, Ilona ran her eyes over me.

  “You can walk, yes?”

  “I'll be fine,” I said, though I didn't move from the spot. The pain was both dull and sharp simultaneously, and walking on it felt as though the bone had been cut away altogether to leave me with a useless limb shaking beneath my form. “Let's just get the next train.”

  I nodded at the ticket machine behind her, hoping that she would go ahead and give me a moment to get adjusted to the feeling in my leg, but she shook her head.

  “No, we change stations now. Local train, yes?”

  “Can't we get to Nice from this one?”

  The place was much too crowded and the commotion was making my head whirl uncomfortably. Despite the coldness running over my skin, my face felt hot and my collar was too tight, though I didn't move to unbutton it. Ilona tilted her head as she watched me.

  “No. Paris to Nice is local. This one takes us only north, yes?”

  “Right. Okay, whatever you say.”

  I pushed myself off the wall and followed her from the station, keeping my eyes fixed on her shoes in an attempt to keep some of the activity from entering my thoughts. As we stepped outside and found the line for taxis, the crowd of people dispersed enough to give me room to breathe but my shoulders still ached from being held so tightly. As Ilona pulled out her lighter and began fishing in her pockets for a cigarette, I took out the pack of Parliaments and offered it to her so that she could light one for me as well.

  The smoking loosened some of the tension gathering in my joints and my shoulders relaxed just slightly, letting my form fall from its rigidness and clearing some of the emptiness in my head to allow me to think again, but the taste was still acrid on my tongue and the nausea that it caused made my head dip forward a bit. The street was surrounded on both sides by high, slate-colored buildings rising up floors above us, oddly juxtaposed with the flat street below. People crisscrossed around us and cars pulled to and from the curb, largely unaware of anything but where they were going, and their voices were lost as the sound of them melded together. The scene was vaguely reminiscent of the times I had gone to New York to see the opera, but whether it was the harsh stones and too-loud cars or the fact that my parents weren't there with me, it felt less grand and cold in comparison, and the place was lost to a language that I didn't understand.

  “You have been to Paris before?” Ilona asked, crushing her cigarette beneath her heel as we made to enter the waiting taxi. I dropped the remainder of my own and stamped it out against the pavement, sorry that I couldn't bring it with me.

  “No.”

  “But you do not look around?”

  As she gave the driver our destination and we pulled away from the station, I gave the street another glance. The corner we had turned gave way to another narrow street lined with iron posts, and the buildings were so high that they blocked out the majority of the sky; I wouldn't be sorry to leave it.

  “So how many hours is it to Nice?” I asked instead, diverting Ilona's attention from my lack of interest.

  “Eight hour.”

  “Eight hours? It was faster to get here from Amsterdam.”

  “Nice is much south – near water, yes?”

  “Right, near the water.”

  “You do not like water, Eh-nim?” Ilona asked, catching the look on my face.

  “No, it's fine.”

  “You are afraid to drown, maybe
?” she persisted.

  “Yes.”

  “You learn to swim, and then you don't drown – yes?”

  She said it as though the solution could be so simple, but I couldn't help but think that I should have insisted that we take a plane.

  When we arrived at the correct station, she bought the tickets for the first train out and we settled into seats across from one another in a middle car. Though the train was rather full and an assortment of passengers filed through it, she had propped her feet up on the seat next to me again and thrown her cardigan and bag on the one by her, guaranteeing that no one sat near us. Looking at her odd attire and chewed expression, however, I didn't think that blocking the seats was necessary to ensure as much.

  “What do you do when you find boyfriend?” she asked as the train began to pull away. She watched the station grow smaller in the distance, her head leaning up against the glass and smudging it with oil from her skin.

  “We have plans.”

  “What kind of plans?”

  I shifted and looked off towards the rack of suitcases down the aisle from us as I chose how to respond. Jack and I had made plans to visit an assortment of places once we got to Nice, going from place to place sporadically and in whatever way we pleased. The idea at the time had seemed solid enough if only because it meant that we no longer had to oblige by someone else's schedule, but now that everything had changed there was no telling where we would go. His passport was useless now that I had a new one, and we could neither stay nor go home.

  “Just plans,” I said.

  I sat back in my seat to avoid saying more, shutting my eyes as sunlight cut through the glass and fell over me. I still had not decided what I would tell Jack when I saw him, and even with several hours to think it through, I doubted that I would come up with an answer that I was content with. He would wonder why it had taken me months to get to him, but though the thought of telling him that I had had difficulty getting away from Karl was enticing, I knew the lie would sit uncomfortably on my chest for longer than I could bear.