Song to the Moon (Damnatio Memoriae Book 2)

by Laura Giebfried

  “He kept calling,” she repeated.

  “Who?”

  “Uncle.”

  I shut my eyes.

  “Oh.”

  “He tells me that you are ill – that he worries.”

  “He shouldn't,” I said. I looked at the wall beside me rather than at her; the skin on her neck was still red, and a blackening of bruises had begun to form in the imprint of my fingerprints. “And you shouldn't have, either.”

  The shaking had not returned to my limbs, but there was cold scraping like ice over my skin and something was stuffed into my throat preventing me from breathing. As my eyes flittered around to scan the hotel room, it wasn't the sight of the overturned bedside table that had strewn the lamp and bible across the floor or the phone that had been ripped from the wall that was spewing horrible beeping noises through the air that made the place such a wreck: it was the fact that Jack wasn't there, and that he would never be there again.

  And it didn't feel as though he was dead – it felt as though if I shut my eyes and waited for the welled-up feeling inside to die down again, that he would be alright – but the room was cold and bare even so, and my breaths rattled as I tried to think of anything else. The entirety of the trip to Europe seemed unreal, just another grand hallucination that I had managed to create in my head, but the withdrawal had finally ceased and the room had not dissolved, and it was quite apparent that I was really there, and that he was really gone.

  And the thought of it was too much and too unbelievable, because even if it had been the images of Cabail and Beringer that had appeared in the outskirts of my vision to haunt me with their lifelikeness, it was Jack who felt as though he was close enough for me to touch. He was waiting for me – he had to be waiting for me – because there would be nowhere else to go and nothing else to be if he wasn't.

  And as I thought of him pressed down beneath the cold and blue, separated from me by the ocean that I had crossed in order to get to him, it felt as though I was shielded on all sides by walls of glass that I had hoped would protect me; and though it was still possible to see the world and know what was going on, it would still keep us apart, even if I pressed myself up against it and laid my palms directly over his. He was gone someplace where I couldn't reach him, and there was no togetherness in death that mimicked what it had been in life; we would each fade away but fade separately, and I would never see him again.

  “Eh-nim?”

  And I missed the room at Bickerby that we had holed ourselves up into, not just to escape the cold but to escape the world; and I missed the walk into town down the unofficial path that we had made in the forest that we took to stock up on his cigarettes; and I missed the smell of it in a way that no amount of smoking them tirelessly by myself would ever fill, and the cracked window in the wintertime that had let more cold and frost in than it had ever let smoke out.

  I missed Maine despite how I had hated it for all that time that we had attended Bickerby; and I missed New England even though we had made plans to escape it from the time that we were fourteen. And I missed him for everything that he was and everything that he would never be, and I missed how he had made the world close in on itself so that it felt as though nothing mattered outside of him or me. And it wasn't enough to miss him, or to think it all over, or to wish that things were different or squeeze my eyes shut until I could go back to that memory of him slipping out the door to escape the island. It wasn't enough to regret not making him stay, or to find a way to go with him. It wasn't enough to do anything or be anything when there was no one to do either with.

  I had let my mother die, and I had killed Beringer, and I had as good as killed Jack as well: I had sent him to the ocean even though I had known that he would never be able to reach the mainland with or without me to help him row when he was so broken from the fight with Trask and the others in the dorm room. And as the guilt swelled every part of me until it felt as though the skin would break and my insides would pour out upon the floor, I realized why I had always been so infatuated with Rusalka. I had been wrong to conceive that the titular character's longing was reminiscent of my mother's, or to think that the characters' actions were anything close to Ilona's. It wasn't Ilona who masqueraded as something else to fool others into drowning themselves in the water, it was me. Even without touching the world or stretching a finger outside of my tightly wound form, I had killed them all, and it was worse – far worse – than whoever had killed all of those girls and Miss Mercier, because none of them had meant anything to the killer, but all of them had meant something to me.

  A pain shot through my hand and I grasped at it momentarily, expecting to press down upon the hot stickiness but finding it dry instead. The wound had been sewn up with short, tight stitching that created evenly-spaced blue lines over the hardened black blood, making it look like the mouth of an old patchwork doll smiling on my skin. I let my eyes linger on it for a long moment before raising them to Ilona. She looked back at me carefully.

  “I have been thinking about story,” she said. “Ending to Rusalka. She is water-sprite; she is not meant to live on land. This is why she becomes creature of death to live in river: to be where she belongs.”

  When I made no answer, she turned the phone away so that the blinking was out of my sight.

  “She is home, yes? This makes it not so sad.”

  My mouth was dry and my head weighted down as though filled with dust, and it took me a moment to answer.

  “It's supposed to be sad, though,” I said.

  “But it does not need to be.”

  She waited for me to counter her, but her interpretation of the opera meant little to me anymore. I scanned my eyes over her form, noting the way her hair and clothing had dried in crinkles and the redness had looped around her neck, and I slowly sat up. My legs reached the floor but I couldn't feel the carpet beneath my feet, and my head throbbed as though being pressed forcefully into the plaster walls.

  “How'd you stitch it?”

  “I use needle and thread, yes? From front desk.”

  “Like a sewing-kit?” I said, thinking of the small case of needles and colorful threads that my grandmother used to carry around in her pocketbook. “Is that safe?”

  “It is better than bleeding.”

  I murmured but gave no answer. Ilona noted my silence and gave a smile.

  “I choose blue thread, yes? To match sweater.”

  “But why?” I let my face fall to my hands, rubbing my head as I tried to get it to work again. “Why did you come back?”

  “I tell you: uncle calls. He is very worried about you.”

  When I didn't answer, she sighed and dropped down to the chair that had been pulled up alongside the bed.

  “You are right, yes?” she said. She waited until I raised my eyes back to hers, her mouth squirming back and forth as she made the admission. “I carry other passport. I am not who I say I am.”

  I shook my head; it hardly mattered anymore.

  “That's not a reason to strangle you,” I said.

  “No, but this is not reason, yes? Uncle tells me you are sick. He tells me what you are.”

  I scratched at my skin. There was a film on it from a lack of showering, and my hands had grown dry and cracked as though I had aged ten times the amount that I had just been. The diagnosis didn't seem to matter anymore. It wasn't the schizophrenia that had made me into the person that I was, it was just another reason to hide behind as I continued to trick the world into having any concern for me.

  “Is boyfriend knowing?”

  My voice caught in my throat at the mention of Jack, and before I could stop them, tears pricked at the corners of my eyes. I quickly shook my head.

  “He will not mind,” Ilona said. “You will see. We will find him, and he will not mind.”

  I turned my head away from her and screwed up my face, willing myself not to break any further. Every part of me longed to think that she was right, but there was no room left in me to belie
ve in the myriad of lies that I once had. He was gone, and there was no such thing as fairy-tales or long-awaited answers, and the moon would never lead me to him or look down on both of us again.

  “Do not be sad, Eh-nim,” Ilona said, leaning forward and placing a hand on my arm. She still smelled vaguely of lavender and Parliaments underneath the scent of the other cigarette brand that's smoke had covered her flesh; I wished that I could smell it forever. “You call uncle now, yes? He is worried for you.”

  “No.” The thought of speaking to him was unbearable. Worse than the thought of how he had lied about allowing my mother to die was the one of how he had allowed me to believe that Jack was still alive. “No, I'm not calling him.”

  “But he will not believe me, I am thinking,” Ilona said. “He is wanting to hear from you.”

  “I don't care what he wants.”

  “But Eh-nim,” Ilona said, leaning closer to peer into my face. “They are so few, yes? People who care.”

  I shook my head.

  “That's not what he's doing,” I said. “He's just – he just wants me to come back.”

  “This is what caring is, though. Difference of opinion does not make it less true.”

  “I'm not calling him, Ilona.”

  She leaned back and clicked her tongue again, silently disproving of my decision.

  “Oh-kay, choice is yours. But you will call him after we find boyfriend, yes? Just so that he is knowing that you are alright.”

  I clamped my eyes and jaw shut, unable to answer. I couldn't tell her about Jack: the thought of speaking the words aloud was too much, and the thought of him being anything less than what I had thought was worse.

  “Because I have been thinking,” Ilona continued, unable to see my expression with my head turned away, “and I realize something. All this talk of lying makes me wonder if lady at farm tells us truth. I am thinking that she is wanting to get rid of us – because of how I am dressed. She thinks we are looking for trouble, yes? So she pays no concern for what we are asking. But if we go back –”

  “No.” I cut her off before she could go any further. “No, Ilona, I'm not going back to the farm.”

  “But boyfriend might still be there. Brochure is saying that harvest ends late September, not early like she says.”

  “I don't care; I'm not looking for him anymore. I'm – it's over. I'm done.”

  “Why do you say this, Eh-nim? You come all this way to give up?” She surveyed me carefully. “He is waiting for you.”

  “No, he's not. Not – not anymore.”

  “But this is not true: he has not given up, either.”

  “You don't know that,” I snapped. “He's not – I should never have tried to find him. I – I didn't deserve to.”

  “Eh-nim,” Ilona chided, “do not say this. You are upset, yes? Because of what has happened. But it was mistake. I am knowing this: I am not angry.”

  I shook my head and turned away from her further. The time between when the hallucinations had begun and the present had been filled with dense air, muddling my memories of it just enough so that it was distant but recognizable, and I considered that that was all that life would become: some jumble of indistinct memories that left a longing in my mind and an aching in my ribs. It seemed such a waste that I had been saved again, just as it was a waste that Beringer had saved me from jumping off the cliffs and Karl had saved me from overdosing on the medication at Christmastime. It was too easy to die and too hard to live, and I didn't deserve to be granted either.

  “I tell you story now, yes?” Ilona said.

  “No.” My voice cracked unexpectedly, and my jaw quivered as I tried to speak. “No, I – I'm sick of stories.”

  “This one is real.”

  She looked at me imploringly, but the mystery of who she was was lost along with the rest of the riddles that I had no hope of ever solving. It didn't matter who she was or what she had done, because there was nothing so horrid hiding beneath the overly-done face or resting beneath the heaviness of her tongue. She wasn't worse than I was: I knew that now. I had always known it, but I had allowed myself to think otherwise solely so that I would allow myself to feel anything other than horrid in her company.

  She took out her passport and tossed it onto the table beside the phone before retrieving the letter-opener and doing the same. It glowered in the light from the desk lamp, the ornate handle tarnished and worn from age, but the blade was still sharp enough to puncture the skin. I wished that she would change her mind and drive it through my skull; I no longer had the will to do so.

  “When I am still young, mother dies,” she told me. “Same age as you, maybe.”

  “It doesn't matter, Ilona. You don't have to tell me.”

  “No, I do not,” she said. “But I am wanting to, yes?”

  She ran a nail over her cracked lips, scraping some of the makeup from them that lodged under the white.

  “My father does not like to live without her, and so he is drinking to be somewhere else. And he is someone else, too, when he is doing this. Someone … not good. Not like himself.” She paused again and tapped her teeth together as she thought. “But I am staying with him even so. He needs me, yes? And he does not mean it.”

  I could tell where the story was going and shook my head. It wasn't the same as what I had done, regardless of what she thought, and the idea that she had finally given up on him to lead her own life was hardly unfathomable.

  “I stay and take care of him for many year. But … one day he is drinking too much. He is violent, and he is angry at me, because I am not mother, and he is missing her so. And he … he is hurting me, yes?” She pulled her hair away to show the burn that ran down her neck. It looked far worse now that the bruising was added to it. “And I do not mean to hurt him back – this is not intention. But I take letter-opener from table, and I try to get him to stop.”

  She stopped and shivered, straightening the blanket over her arms for warmth.

  “He is surprised, I think, by me,” she said. “Because I do not mean to kill him. But I do.”

  She eyed the letter-opener lying beside me again, her dark eyes drawn beneath a frown.

  “I cannot stay then. Maybe I should, maybe I should take blame and punishment for what I do, but I go to Holland instead. I go other place first, but after I get passport from other girl, I am thinking that I look enough like her. I am not real prostitute, just as you say. I pretend so to attract men, and then I steal money and move on.” She paused and looked over at me. “So you are right. I am like rusalki, yes?”

  But she wasn't, not like I was, though I couldn't bring myself to say so.

  “I am twenty and seven now,” she said. “I do this for … three year. When you offer me money for this, I feel it is reprieve – like I have paid for what I have done, and life is turning around. And when you strangle me, I realize I am wrong. Life does not turn around, and there is no payment for wrongs.”

  “It was self-defense,” I said. “No one would blame you.”

  “I blame self, Eh-nim. I know it was mistake. I know what I have done, and I know it every day. It is horrible feeling, knowing I have killed someone who I have loved.”

  She smiled, but it was an expression that was sadder than any that I had seen before. But I had felt it, I realized, and the knowledge stirred in me with a solemnness that filled my insides with something other than guilt.

  “And this is not really punishment, yes?” she said. “Because it is not so bad – to be someone else.”

  “It's not so great, either,” I said lowly.

  “No, this is true. But maybe I am not someone else after all. Maybe I am still same, underneath this all.”

  She scooted to the edge of the chair to bring herself closer.

  “Eh-nim? You call uncle now, yes? I am thinking that you are needing each other.”

  “No.”

  We had never needed each other. We had needed my mother, each in our separate ways, but now that she was
gone there was nothing but the bitterness that her death had brought to tie us together, and it was no way to need someone at all.

  “You speak in sleep again,” Ilona said. “'Burying her. Burying her.' Is this why you will not call?”

  I shook my head. Her accent was still rendering the truth incapable of coming, and there was no way that she could know what I had really said without me telling her. It wasn't my mother that I had been speaking of in my sleep, tossing back and forth as the memories of what had happened haunted me: it was Beringer.

  “You will feel better if you call,” she said. “You trust me, Eh-nim? You call: not to ease his mind. To ease yours.”

  She took the cellphone from the bedside table and placed it in my hand. The juxtaposition of the cold plastic and her warm hand made me unsure whether to shiver or relax, but I nodded all the same. She mirrored the motion and stood to go to the bathroom to leave me in privacy.

  I stared at the phone for a long time before switching it on. There was nothing to say to Karl other than to argue – to accuse him of what he had done and hate him for what he had never believed and let me believe – but I dialed the number anyhow. It only rang once before he picked up.

  “Hello?”

  His voice was sharp with anticipation, and I shut my eyes as it sounded.

  “It's me, Karl.”

  “Enim? Thank God – how are you? Where are you? What's happened?”

  “Nothing.”

  “I spoke to that – to your – to the girl who had your phone,” he said, unwilling to linger on who she was. “She said that you had been acting very strangely – that you were violent. Were you – are you alright now? Is it the withdrawal?”

  “Yes.”

  “So you did stop taking your medication.”

  “Yes, Karl, I did,” I said angrily. “You were right: are you happy?”

  “Enim, I – no, of course I'm not happy,” he said. “I was worried – I've been worried. I didn't know what had happened to you.”

  He paused and waited for me to say something, but I had no desire to do so.