Song to the Moon (Damnatio Memoriae Book 2)

by Laura Giebfried

  I opened my eyes just barely and blinked out at the sun as the car pulled farther from the farm. Knowing that Jack wasn't there made the place seem vacant in retrospect, and the entirety of colorful buildings and beautiful scenery suddenly seemed dull and uninviting. The wind picked up and skirted through the open window to hit me, hissing lightly as it went, and despite the warmth that I had longed for in the days when Jack and I had huddled up in the cold dorm room at Bickerby, I couldn’t imagine why we had ever wanted to come here.

  The farm became smaller and smaller in the distance, turning into a pinprick of pale purple before we turned a corner and it disappeared altogether. We retreated back through the countryside in silence, each watching out opposite windows as the mountains and water turned darker beneath dusk, and didn’t speak again until the car pulled to a stop on the side of a street. I stared out of the window at the unfamiliar buildings.

  “Where are we?”

  “Hotel,” Ilona said.

  “Why?” I looked at her in irritation. The job was over: she had accompanied me to France and gotten me to the farm. I didn't need her anymore, and I certainly wouldn't pay her anymore, either.

  “You need to rest, Eh-nim,” she said gently. “I do not think that you are well.”

  Her eyes lingered on my face, and I pulled my sleeve across it as I realized that I was perspiring far more than the weather called for. When my hands dropped back to my lap, I noticed how badly they were shaking.

  “I'm fine,” I snapped.

  She leaned forward and handed the money to the driver before thanking him and opening the door. I hesitated without following her, thinking that I should simply part with her there and go back to the train station, but I had given her all of my money.

  “Come, Eh-nim,” she said. “You will rest, yes? You will feel better then.”

  I begrudgingly followed her into the hotel lobby. The front counter was smooth and marble, and I longed to put my head down on it and press down on it until the coldness numbed my thoughts away again. The longer that I looked at it, though, the more that it began to look like the rocky beach of Bickerby when viewed from the cliffs, and I clamped my mouth shut for fear that I would be sick.

  The man behind the desk was eyeing us plainly as he tapped away on his computer, and when he produced a key card, he said something lowly to Ilona.

  “We will not be trouble,” she said tetchily, and snatched both the bank card and room key out of his outstretched hand.

  She took my arm and led me over to the elevator. As it pulled up to the correct floor, I swayed in place beneath the orange glow of lights. The place was too small, and the scent of lavender was still on her hands from touching the soaps and perfumes at the shop in the farm; I wished that she would wash it off before it seeped into my skin.

  The hotel room was dark and squished, and she had to let go of me in order to put the key into the slot that would allow the lights to go on. As she did so, I swayed further and slumped against the wall, barely noticing as my shoulder collided with the plaster when my hands did nothing to break my fall.

  “Here, lay down,” she said, taking my arm again to lead me over to the bed. “You will rest, yes? In morning, you will feel better.”

  The statement was reminiscent of the one from Turandot that my mother had so often repeated, all'alba vincerò – in the morning, I win. She had said it nearly every night before I went to sleep, thinking time and time again that the riddle would be solved by then, and it was no truer now that Ilona said it than it had been then.

  “In the morning, you'll go back to Holland,” I countered. “It's over; he wasn't there.”

  “Do not think of this now, Eh-nim. You tell me story instead, yes? Ending of Rusalka.”

  “No.” I shut my eyes and blocked the image of the moonlight out. It hadn't led me to him after all. “No, I don't want to. I just wanted to find him.”

  “We will,” she said. “This is not end; he is somewhere.”

  “‘Somewhere’ means nothing,” I snapped. “Our mothers are ‘somewhere’ – it doesn’t mean that we’ll ever see them again.”

  “I know where mother is: in cemetery in Pargolovo. Somewhere means you can find him.”

  “No, it doesn't. You don't know what's happened, or what this is all about – it's not as simple as just calling him and asking where he is.”

  “No, I am knowing this.” She frowned as she thought it over. “He has stolen passport, yes?”

  “What? How do you know that?”

  “You tell lady at farm that his name is 'Eh-nim Looned.' You give him passport, yes? He has done something wrong?”

  I shifted in my spot my head still swaying as I looked at her.

  “No, I – I mean, yes, I gave him my passport, but he didn't do anything wrong.”

  “People with fake passport always do something wrong,” she said. “His name is bad, yes?”

  “He – he's in a bit of trouble,” I said. “But he didn't do anything wrong. They just think that he has.”

  “And you find him to make it right?”

  “No – I'm not doing anything, Ilona. He wasn't there, I can't find him, and I'm not going to delude myself into thinking that I should try.”

  “No? You are not thinking it is worth it?”

  “No, that's not – that's not what I said. It's – you don't get it, Ilona. It's not easy. It's – it's –”

  “It is what?”

  “A riddle.”

  I said it without meaning to: it hardly made sense given the context. But that's what it was in essence – that's what everything had been and what everything would become: twisted versions of the lies that I had both given and received, and impossible tasks to undergo and unworkable answers to understand.

  “Riddle?” She made a face as she thought it over. “Oh-kay, it is riddle, then. I am good at riddle.”

  I sighed.

  “No, Ilona, you're not. Not this type.”

  “I am. You do not believe me: you are still thinking I am brainless, yes? Because I am prostitute.”

  “No. I think it's impossible for anyone to figure out, not just you.”

  “So you try me, yes? There is no harm in this.”

  “No.”

  “Give me riddle,” she insisted. “I will solve it – you will see.”

  I looked at her steadily, searching for a response that would prove her to be incorrect.

  “What's born each night and dies each dawn?” I said.

  “What?”

  “What's born each night and dies each dawn?”

  It was one of the riddles from Turandot that the princess had given to the unnamed prince. My mother had asked me it before I went to sleep at night, and I had given an assortment of answers for weeks on end, staying up well into the night to try and solve it. It was only after watching her decline so steadily that I had finally figured it out, and it was only from knowing her and how she thought that I had been able to do so.

  “Darkness,” Ilona said.

  “No.”

  “What? This is true: darkness is born at night, dies at dawn.”

  Her tone was of the utmost certainty, but it wasn't the answer regardless. Darkness stayed well past the dawn and covered everything and anything on its way, and no matter what she thought, it didn't disappear with the sunlight.

  “Well, that's not it.”

  “It is. You are just not wanting to admit that I am right.”

  “No, it's not right.”

  “So what is answer, then?”

  I shook my head.

  “I can't tell you; you have to figure it out by yourself.”

  “I have figured it out, Eh-nim. My answer is correct. So you let me help you now, yes? I have proven I am good at riddle.”

  “You didn't even get it right,” I said. “I told you: that's not the answer.”

  “There is more than one answer to everything, yes? And maybe mine is better answer than yours.” She looked at me carefully. �
��You need help, Eh-nim, so why do you not let me help you?”

  “Because you can't, Ilona. It's impossible.”

  It occurred to me that she must have been desperate to have kept asking me. She didn't want to return to Holland any more than I wanted to return to Connecticut, and the promise of so much money only made her more adamant in her resolve to help me. But she didn't realize what she was getting herself into: she didn't know who I was, or what I had done, and if she had, then she wouldn't have been sitting there with me at all.

  “It is difficult, not impossible,” she replied. “I will find him, and then you will be thanking me from bottom of murmuring heart.”

  She hummed quietly to herself when I gave no response.

  “You are not feeling well,” she said. “You are sick, yes? I go for medicine while you rest, then you will feel differently.”

  She stood and put her cardigan on and pulled at her boots to straighten them on her legs. When she had gone, I pressed my head into the flat pillow and let out a long breath against the cotton. The tiredness from the past year had come back with full-force, and yet the thought of sinking into another dream filled with distant music or the haunting images of the ocean was enough to keep me from shutting my eyes. It would surely expand my mind until it pressed against the skull, and I was certain that if I didn't subdue it it would crack the bone into pieces like the image of Cabail was already threatening to do. Worse, I had no desire to return to the memory of standing in one of the buildings on the Bickerby campus with Jack; the constant reminder of the detail that I had overlooked in February was worse than any pain that racked my form from the withdrawal or guilt that I harbored in my chest.

  “I’m not confused,” I whispered aloud, hoping that not hearing a contradiction might convince me that I was right. Yet I had been banking on finding Jack and having him prove to me that what everyone said wasn’t true, and without him I was more uncertain than ever. I knew that he hadn’t killed Miss Mercier like Karl and the psychiatrists so desperately wanted me to believe, and I knew that he hadn’t made up the story about girls going missing on the island as they tried to convince me, either. I had seen the newspaper clippings and had followed the story, and I had heard the man in the convenience store tell us that another girl had run off. Just because no one believed us didn’t make us wrong, and just because I didn’t have the answer yet didn’t mean it hadn’t happened.

  But Cabail had made me doubt everything else. Knowing that he wasn’t real had ruined everything, forcing me to revert back and back to when I had begun to lose focus of what was real and what was not. I remembered the night that the music had floated to me from afar and the panic it had arisen beneath my skin, but Cabail’s hallucination was far worse. He had been something so unassuming, so innocuous and benign, that I couldn’t place when it had all begun. I had assumed I had always known of him from the moment we sat together in Physics, imagining that we had crossed paths before and that was how I knew so much of who he was, but as it had all been created in my head there was no way of telling where it began or ended.

  And the knowledge that I could be so wrong about Cabail but so right about Jack pulled at me unexpectedly, each imploring me to choose their side. I wanted to be the person who I was with Jack, careless and unassuming and ready to take on another of his wild theories, but I couldn't shake the person who Karl and my father had locked in the room at the end of the hall. They each wanted it so badly and for different reasons, thinking that if I could just turn away and reappear as someone else that everything that had gone wrong would be righted again. And Karl was so certain that I was confused about Jack that it felt as though he was wringing my stomach between his hands as he tried to make his point, adamant that I was just as confused about the friendship as I had been about Beringer. But what had happened on the cliffs bore no relation to any of it, I knew, because Karl hadn't been there, and he didn't know. But I knew what had happened with Beringer. I knew.

  I pressed my head into my hands and tried to will the thoughts away. I couldn’t think of any of them now: not while I was in that too-small room with too few people and its broken fan that whooshed and whooshed like waves skimming the top of the ocean, too alone with my thoughts to think clearly at all. Trying to answer my questions was like trying to solve the final riddle that my mother had given me about Turandot: it was no more effective than pressing against a wound where the blood wouldn’t coagulate, and it was better to bleed myself dry than wait for someone to bring me a cure.

  I stood and edged around the chair to go to the window, pressing my head against the glass in the hopes of cooling the skin. The sky had turned to black above the street lamps, and only the moon lit it slightly to show that it was the darkest of blues. I tried to think of the way Rusalka had convinced me that it was the one thing that would never leave me, but I felt no less alone standing beneath it. It pulled the ocean and created the river that had taken my mother away, and caused the waves that had washed me safely to shore after falling from the cliffs when I should have drowned. And even if it had followed me all the way from New England and was the same sight that Jack was looking up at in that moment, it did nothing to bring me closer to him, or to her, or to anyone. Ilona might have believed that her mother was lying beneath the soil in a cemetery somewhere, but I knew that mine was somewhere else – somewhere far and dark and unknown, and somewhere that I couldn’t reach her, even if I dug beneath the dirt and through the coffin door to grasp onto her bones.

  And I wanted to find her so badly, because if I did – and if I could explain who she had been and what she had done – then maybe I could explain who I was, too. I felt as though I was looking for everyone else when I should have been looking for myself, but it was impossible to know who I was without them, and it was easier to think that they could make it all better than it was to know that I never could.

  And with her I had been frightened of it all – frightened of leaving her to herself but frightened of staying and watching her own troubles consume me – but I had loved her because she had loved me unquestionably, and because it had felt right to love her even when everything else was wrong. And I had no right to miss her now, because I had wanted her to leave when I first learned that she would lie in that hospital bed forever, but I did miss her, and I missed her more knowing that I would never get her back.

  I gathered my sweater sleeve and shoved it into my mouth, biting down until the sob that wanted to escape died down into the back of my throat again. There were a thousand reasons why I knew I shouldn’t go looking for Jack, namely because I knew I needed to get the medication before I went into a fully spiraling withdrawal, but I knew that if I didn’t find him I would miss him the same way that I missed her, and I couldn’t return to the treatment facility and wait for something more than Karl's weekly visits to happen, delighting in our arguments solely because everyone else was so set on keeping me calm.

  I pulled back from the window and blinked my eyes. The song from Rusalka had begun in my head, but I couldn’t place if it was just a memory or the beginning of another hallucination. I knew that if I took Ilona's offer to search for Jack that I would run out of time before the lack of medication took its course, and there was no telling if I would wake up from it purged of needing it and reverted back to the person that I had been before my mother's accident or if I would never be able to think without the hallucinations and delusions again, but I wanted to go with her even so. She was only offering to look for him in the hopes that I would continue to pay her the exorbitant fee, but it hardly seemed to matter. People like her and Beringer were the best sort of people, I knew, because they were paid to care; I didn't have to worry why they were doing it, or wonder if any of it was true. It was a job – nothing more – and that was fitting, because no one who wasn't could ever possibly care about someone like me.

  I took a blanket from the bed and wrapped myself in it before curling up on the chair, leaving the bed for Ilona; there was no point in us
both having a fitful sleep. I knew that the only way to get off the medication would be to taper off of it slowly, and even then I was likely to have the violent outbursts that they had barely kept in check in the facility. Yet Ilona's offer was so compelling that I couldn't quite reject it: it was as though she was giving me just a moment where I could be someone else, or something else, and enjoy another adventure that Jack and I might never get to go on again, and for that, I thought that I could take another week or so of the tremors and the visions, and lack of appetite and poor sleep – if only because despite it all, I felt more normal than I ever had on the medicine.

  Ch. 14

  A strange sensation pulled me awake, and I flipped over from my hunched spot on the chair to lean over the arm, certain that I would throw up. After a moment of hanging there, though, my stomach settled and I sat back. The room felt suffocating despite the cold air blowing from the vent beside me, and the blanket that had been wrapped around me was soaked with sweat. I peeled it from my skin and shook it to the floor.

  As the urge to be sick returned to me, I looked over at Ilona's form and considered waking her up, but she was sleeping so peacefully that I couldn't bring myself to do so. Instead, I went to the bathroom and leaned over the sink to stare at my hands beneath the fluorescent lights. The horribly colorful beaded bracelet from Ava glowered up at me. Mine. The word rang in my ears unnaturally and I bit at my tongue to stop my jaw from quivering. But I wasn't like my mother, I reminded myself. We were separate – our thoughts, our goals, our lives – they were different. Any similarities were just pieces that Karl had strung together to make a point that wasn't valid, and finding the ending to Turandot wasn't the same as finding Jack, because Jack was real, and Jack was out there, and I would find him.

  But I hadn't found him. I bowed my head down until it touched the rim of the sink, cooling the warmth of my head with its porcelain, and sank down to a crouching position as my leg protested beneath me. He hadn't been at the farm despite the unmarked brochure that had been sent to my father's house, and it was punishment, I knew. It was punishment for all that I had done wrong, and everything that I had failed to do and failed to say. I had known it since that night at the hospital when I had ripped the wires out from my skin and thrown myself onto the floor, and the hallucinations that had returned were the final reminder that I could never revert back into who I was or who I had tried to be, and that I was like my mother and was doomed to the same fate that she had succumbed to, tormented and alone with all of the riddles that she could never and would never figure out. And I wondered if she had realized as much, and if the reason that she had gone to the bridge that night wasn't because she had figured out the riddle as she had said that she had, but because she realized that she never would, and the thought of living in such a trapped, tortured mind for a moment longer had become unbearable.