PANDORA

by Rebecca Hamilton

  What if you don’t like me anymore? I honestly can’t think why you would. I speak funny now. My clothes are probably funny as well. I have a scar on my head and the bones in my ankle get stiff on cold days for reasons I should not like to ever go into. Also, I drink too much on Fridays. Truth be told, I drink too much on Saturdays, too.

  There are monsters in this world, I’ve learned, and sometimes I have fallen victim to them and sometimes I have been one. I don’t think you should marry me, yet I’m selfish and I want you more than anything. Use this money and these instructions to come to me or, keep the money and never write to me again. I won’t make you tell me no, but nothing would make me happier than to have you for my wife.

  Iago

  I was buried deep in thought when the car rocked to a stop. For several disorienting moments, my memories and the hands clutching the arms of my train seat blurred together, becoming the same shimmery colour found only in dreams and on the flipped-over sides of slipper limpets. The journey between that old life and this new one seemed improbable, yet here we were, little Iago and me, in a place called the Nickel Plate Depot on the other side of the world. It seemed a lunatic plan suddenly, me, with my frighteningly tall green hat, and Iago, somewhere in the shoving masses sprigged with a flowery parasite, both of us searching for something familiar that might speak to us from across time.

  That last goodbye on Six Bells Hill felt an eternity ago, yet the wind was no less gusty on this day. A few steps into the crowd, a stiff breeze whisked the tottering hat from my head. I chased it into the crowd only to watch it disappear in a sea of moving feet.

  It was up to me then to find him by his lapel.

  Everyone was looking for someone, or so it seemed. Americans were a pushing/shoving lot and, so far, I didn’t like them much. My journey had been long and crowded, always crowded. I missed the simplicity of Dolgelley and the untidy lump of quack grass under which my father had been buried less than a year before. Dead as he was in a box in the earth, Father was real and far more comforting than this noisy, bustling place. Where were the pippin-green knolls Iago spoke of? I saw only trains and people and more people.

  After a spell, a man with a black bushy mustache and dark eyes took me by the arm and smiled. Relief washed over me like a warm bath. My eyes flew to his lapel, but he was carrying his coat against what turned out to be a highly prosperous waistline. While he looked me up and down scratching his bald pate, I tried to see something of my young friend in the sunburned crinkles around his eyes.

  “I believe this is yours?” he said, speaking the old Welsh language of Cymraeg with an American accent, and he proceeded to produce an accordioned hat.

  I smiled and nodded and, just as I’d promised myself I would do, kissed him squarely on his big shiny head. I was about to throw my arms around his neck when someone tapped me on the shoulder from behind.

  “Lilabet?”

  Turning toward the sound of my name, my nose brushed the pale, two-lipped bell of a toothwort bloom. Slowly, I raised my eyes, observing, in order of appearance: a rubbed raw neck in a stiff shirt collar, a clean-shaven chin cut in several places, two black irises rimmed in blue, and a head full of thick dark hair threaded with three rebel strands of silver.

  I wanted to laugh at myself for ever thinking I wouldn’t recognize him. He was taller, yes, much taller than me, and his face was not soft and round like it used to be, but otherwise, there was an odd boyishness about him that had gone completely unchanged. It was a sweet if not sobering face that looked back at me; so sweet I found that every thought had been emptied from my head. It took the bald man to remind me of my vow.

  “Thanks for the kiss,” he said.

  Taking Iago by the crown of his head, I touched my lips to the very spot where my lips had touched him last. The uneven trail of a scar pressed against my mouth even as I said a quick prayer, thanking God that I had Iago Godwyn back in his proper place again.

  For his part, he did not look so sure. He gave me a wooden nod. “You look good, Lilabet.”

  Did I? I had planned to look better, but the train and the heat and the wind had left me undone.

  “It’s nice that you have hair,” I answered awkwardly. I took the flower from his coat and, even though I didn’t say it, I was pleased to see that he was not half so prosperous as that first fellow I had mistakenly kissed.

  We did a crazy thing then. We drove to the judge and got married after Iago said, “Do you still think you want to be my wife?” and I said, “I didn’t come here to do anything else.”

  We’d never even kissed before, except for once on a dare in Nudd Pawl’s barn under a saddle blanket, and that had been a sloppy mess. We did it hard and long because it was the first chance we’d ever gotten to do it, and afterward, we both agreed it was horrible, at least in front of Nudd and his brothers. Really, I’d rather liked it and had dreamed about it all these years. I always remembered how Iago squeezed my hands under the wool as he kissed me.

  Standing before the judge, we did not kiss. He nodded at me again, which was disappointing.

  “What if you don’t like the house?” he asked.

  “Is it crowded there?” I wanted to know.

  “Just you and me and Old Mrs. Blevens.”

  “Will I be able to hear the brook when I lie in bed?”

  “Every night,” he promised.

  “Sounds like a dream come true.”

  3

  After traveling twenty bumpy minutes down a washboard road, we arrived at two houses huddled close on an otherwise empty horizon. The first was a sun-bleached clapboard place with ripply windows and a weathervane that could not make up its mind. The second was something altogether different. Whereas the clapboard squatted on a thirsty square; the other enjoyed row upon row of neatly-turned soil and land as green as Wales herself. Pippin-green. A new house rose up from the green, as spry and proud as the other house was neglected and grim.

  The new house was Watersplash.

  Take a boy and give him a pail, a shovel, and some bits of sea glass, and maybe he will build you just such a place. Might as well keep the trowel, though. Straight edges won’t be necessary. I approached Iago’s house as I would a castle built of wet sand, cautiously and in awe.

  I will tell the best part first: Diamond-shaped windows winked in the sun on both sides of the crooked entry where a mortared arch with drunken posture revealed an unexpected surprise.

  “Seashells?”

  Iago sunk his hands in his pockets and rose up on the balls of his feet. “I couldn’t keep them when I was moving around so I buried them in a box under a rock by the swamp. When I built the house, I dug them up and put them in the archway here. I wanted them here because they’re from Cymru, and because the house is called Watersplash.” He kicked a pebble with his boot. “I put them here for you.”

  I spun my finger round the sleek coil of the Threaded Fig we’d fished from a rock pool at Cardigan Bay. I’d begun to think I would never see it again; finding it here was an unexpected surprise. A piece of home I could reach out and touch in this strange new place. With a smile, I ran my palm over the prickly peaks of a much bickered over Sting Winkle.

  “Hello old friend,” I whispered.

  The Mulberry Whelk was there, too, the very one I’d cut my toe on when I was eight. At the time of the Whelk, Iago was a full head shorter than me, yet he piggy-backed me home while I bled buckets all over his new bathing costume. Some shells had been chipped, others were cracked in two, but they’d survived the journey. Pressed skitter-scatter round the crooked arch, the memories formed a mosaic that were a part of this most unusual house.

  The rest of the place was a bit harder to define. Pilasters and mullioned windows gave it an Arthurian look, while the clay chimney stacks and hipped roof made of it a little cottage. Two oil wells pumped beyond the silver ribbon of a stream, and there was a gabled wing on the south side of the house but not the north.

  “The locals call it ‘The Te
apot’ because it looks like it has a handle,” Iago explained, pointing at its funny shape, pronouncing the words in that funny Welshican accent of his. That’s exactly what it looked like. A lumpen teapot carved of sand.

  Of course, a Welshman will name anything, from his brook (Iago’s was Bibble Babble) to his own front door. In accordance with this, the derricks were called Genesis and Revelations because, as Iago put it, “They had the potential to be the beginning and the end of me. I sunk everything I had into them and prayed they’d pay off.”

  “How did you decide where to look for oil?” I asked him.

  He looked at me with his black and blue eyes. “Majik.”

  Inside was another matter still. The darkness was so complete, it did, indeed, feel rather like sticking one’s head in the sand. There was something rather purposeful about the shadows, as if they’d been plotted precisely so. They draped off corners and striped across furniture, secreting the room away like the lock on a jewelry box.

  “Did you warn her about me?” a voice asked from one of those secret corners. So ruinous was the voice, it was difficult to judge whether it belonged to a man or a woman. Thanks to my father’s obsessions, those six words sounded as doleful and disagreeable to me as the ghostly sighs of a dreaded cyhyraeth, and (father’s influence aside) everyone knows that a cyhyraeth only makes itself known before someone dies.

  Iago stamped his feet on the doormat and spoke through grit teeth. “I don’t need to warn her. Quit hiding like a criminal and come and meet my wife.”

  I liked the sound of that, I must say—the wife part anyway. As for this spectral voice that addressed Iago from the sharp angle of a shadow, I was at once deeply curious, if not thoroughly alarmed.

  One minute, we were in the dark, the next, a match hissed, and I came eye to eye with a face that looked as though it had been turned inside out. Puckered scars stood in for eyebrows and an eyelid. A melted nose topped the lipless slit that served as a mouth, its sneer-like cut revealing every tooth in her head. Only her chin went unmarked.

  “Old Mrs. Blevens, meet Lilabet Godwyn.”

  By the time I found my voice and said hello, the strange woman had melted back into the shadows.

  “She has a room in the attic,” Iago said.

  “What happened to her?”

  “A fire. But she does all right for herself. You’ll never meet a better one-handed cook.”

  Indeed. The smell of lamb and laver sauce served to subdue my shock and made my stomach rumble. I’d not had a decent bite of food since coming to Iago’s country.

  “Why do you call her Old Mrs. Blevens?” Never mind that I had imagined her to be the very portent of death. To call her ‘old’ to her face seemed needlessly rude.

  Iago shrugged. “That’s her name.”

  “Well, I look forward to making friends with her,” I said, and I tried very hard to mean it. I was beginning a new life here in America, after all. Suddenly, I was as eager as Unc to put the monsters behind me.

  But Iago shook his head. “That isn’t necessary, Lilabet. In fact, I’d prefer you didn’t.”

  Staring into his stony eyes, I was reminded that I didn’t know him at all anymore. There was a hard, unfathomable edge to him and I found myself turning his every expression round and round in my head like a puzzle piece.

  He set about lighting the rest of the lamps. “Shall I give you the full tour?”

  A set of uneven wooden steps led upstairs where crystal knobs opened strap-hinged doors on little rooms with cold fireplaces and colder beds. Dimity curtains blocked the light and held back the witches, or so that’s what Father would have said. Dust collected where no soul relying on a single good hand could ever hope to reach.

  “This last one is my room. Our room.” Iago chewed on his lip. “Your room.”

  The dimity was thickest here.

  “You don’t intend to share it with me?” I joked, parting the drape and peeking out.

  Iago closed the curtain. “No.”

  I looked at my new husband. Since disembarking the train, I’d noticed that American women appeared to fancy little round eye-shades. Pair upon pair had followed us all afternoon long, reflecting Iago’s fine young face in every circle of green glass between Watersplash and town. Iago had been the most beautifully-made child you could possibly imagine. As a man, he was better still. “No?”

  He withdrew one hand from his pocket then quickly put it back. “You used to have braids I could tug on. Now I don’t know where to put my hands.”

  “I’m sure we can figure out something.”

  He shook his head. “I want to court you, Lilabet. It wouldn’t have been proper to bring you here without marrying you first, but a lot has happened. We need to get to know each other again.”

  “Are you disappointed with me?” I asked, suddenly aware of how unsophisticated I looked in my flannel petticoat and my grandmother’s shawl. The women on the train wore fine, trim suits of a manly cut and shiny boots without scuffs. I’d felt like a milkweed pod in a tulip garden ever since I stepped off the boat.

  As a child, Iago Godwyn didn’t give birth to a feeling without it screaming across his face. Now I wondered if he had any feelings at all. His features were sleek as a marble stone, and yet, when he stepped closer, I glimpsed signs of a heartbeat at the corner of his lips. He took a deep breath. “I have wanted to make love to you since before I was old enough to understand what I wanted. You’re more beautiful now than I dared hope, Lilabet, and I will need to sit in a cold tub after we say good night, or I’m doomed to lose a night of sleep. We’ve waited this long. Don’t you think we should do things right?”

  Right? I watched his hands curl into fists. His Adam’s apple did battle with his collar. Maybe all he wanted was for me to argue the point and then this silly nobleness would topple away like a sand castle in the tide? “Where do we begin?”

  “I’ve seen men and women having picnics on the beach at Wolf Ditch. We could go there tomorrow if you like?”

  “We used to have picnics, Iago. Don’t you remember?”

  In my mind, I saw a boy sitting cross-legged on a yellow tablecloth weighted with peaches and plums. He was sharpening a hickory stick and laughing as he shot curl after curl of whittled wood at a little girl’s braids.

  “That was a long time ago,” Iago said. “Anyway, I’m tired now. Driving into town always upsets my stomach. We ought to say goodnight.”

  It was then I spotted the flower hanging over the door. “What’s this?”

  Iago shrugged. “Wallflower. Old Mrs. Blevens must have put it there.”

  “Your father wouldn’t like herbs hung over your door,” I teased.

  “My father isn’t here, is he?”

  I felt a shiver run down my back for more reasons than one.

  Where I came from, wallflower was used for one thing and one thing only—to ward off impotence.

  4

  My first night at Watersplash began with a little poking around. Iago left me alone in his bedroom on our wedding night, and I aimed to get something out of that. I opened drawers, I’m ashamed to say, but his clothes didn’t tell me very much. In Dolgelley, I’d kept the top drawer in my bedside table for odds and ends that had no other home. A smooth blue stone, a spool of thread, birthday cards, buttons, a velvet bookmark, and a coiled up hair ribbon of my mother’s that smelled of roses and vanilla—these things I horded in my hodgepodge drawer.

  Iago had no hodgepodge drawer. His shaving cup sat beside a ring of keys at his bedside. His bible was face down on a shelf furred with dust. His dresser top was empty. There was nothing to remind him how his mother’s hair smelled. No saved button off a long-gone coat. For all my trouble, it appeared his was a room of plain furniture, drab curtains, and neatly folded shirts. It wasn’t until later, when I was brushing my hair at the mirror, that I notice a strange word printed on the silver glass in white soap. Like ink through paper, the letters seemed to almost form across the reflection of my face
, but they must have been there all along.

  MOONSTONE

  That’s what a girl gets for snooping, I thought. No answers and more questions.

  That night, I fell asleep to the burble of water, which was all well and good, but in the fevered channel of my dreams, that peaceful bubbling quickly changed.

  In my dreams, Iago stood in the stream, calling my name. The voice belonged to a boy, and when I ran toward the water, I saw the child rather than the man.

  “I’ve killed it,” he said. I feared to draw closer because the water at his knees was dark and red. “Will you help me, Lilabet?”

  Well, he was a child and I was full grown, so I waded into the blood.

  Across the rocks was a dog with a twisted neck. It was bleeding from its mouth and nose. Iago stared at his stained hands, and I noticed a scar shaped like a clover on the heel of his right palm.

  “What’s become of me?” he sobbed.

  I woke up on the banks of the Bibble Babble with my nightgown soaking wet. Trapped between a dream and cold green water, I saw him still, a child crying in the current with blood on his hands, pleading for my help.

  Then he was gone.

  Shivering, I stumbled back over the rocks, bruising the arches of my feet as I went. I’d never sleepwalked before, and it left me unnerved. I felt foolish and began to hurry, fearful of being caught. I beat away cattails as I rushed for the house, squishing through the mud, heart pounding. How would I explain myself if I should be discovered dripping wet on the banks of the stream in the middle of the night? It was the sort of thing that sent otherwise reasonable people off for a stay at the asylum.

  In my desperation to reach Watersplash, I nearly stumbled over it, a limestone grave cut with one word, the childish letters stark and trembly as a bad dream:

  MOONSTONE