When he was finally assembled, when the clock on the wall had smeared the time of night into mystery. Nell stood and admired him. The room smelled like hot steel. She half shut her eyes. Yes, it was a him for sure. In the blur between her eyelashes and reality, she imagined him rising, light pouring from his eyes, his kettle face suddenly warm, suddenly more human, suddenly boyish.
His mismatched glass eyes and their minuscule delicate cameras stared up at the ceiling above them both. He was so thin. A wire frame. Nell placed her hands on her hips; they would be alike. Two spindly, terrible monsters. Quite a pair.
Now, she thought, what next? She had to charge him, somehow. She scanned the room: The little socket there wouldn’t be enough; she’d have to find a way to—
The first strike of lightning hit the bottom of their garden with a crack and a flash. Strange, dazzling joy roared through Nell as the window flashed again.
There it was. The lightning rod above her ate it all up, all that power. After all this just the spark she needed.
She couldn’t wait to meet him.
CHAPTER 22
Days of tremendous importance rarely announce themselves in advance. No one just wakes up to a calm knowledge: today she will fall in love, or today her father will die. These shocks of diamond on the clock, these new sets of wings arrive with no warning. Summer does not announce itself as over, but before you know it, the leaves are falling and lips are chapping and everyone’s wearing gloves to go outside. The world has no time for grand announcements.
Nell became different as he became whole. She’d been changing since his hand came out of the water. Being obsessed felt good. Before, she had forgotten what being interested in something really felt like, what being happy and challenged and thinking really felt like.
It was late, or early, or the blurry space in between and Nell crept down the stairs to her father’s laboratory. Now was the time to ask for help, to take the olive branch he’d offered her. She ran her hand along the old wooden door and considered knocking but instead leaned a little harder than she might have a month or two before. He had, after all, said that it was never closed to her. That it was always open.
“Da?” she called brightly, as the crack of the new room, the new world, split open before her. “Da, I wanted to ask you something. I have something to show you. I need—I need your help!”
There it was. It was the first time she had ever said these words, but Julian was not there to hear them. The room spread out before her was huge, far bigger than she had imagined it, far whiter than she had dreamed it would be, far emptier.
How had she missed the scale of it, even from outside the house? How had he disguised a structure this large? Nell stepped forward silently over the threshold, jaw slung low with marvel. Now that the door was open, she would never close it again.
It was so clean! The air was thick with those same bleachy notes, that same sterile bouquet that the Lighthouse’s workshop had. Clean rooms were where discoveries were made. Not amid the clutter of paper; she shuddered to think of the state of her own room.
The walls were lined with shelves. Neat white shelves, housing careful arrangements of shining glass beakers. Steel tools clung to magnetic boards on the wall: pliers, knives, wrenches, in order of size, weight, sharpness. How unlike her raggedy father this all looked. How unlike his burned coat, his wild mane, his scorched glasses. This was not how she had imagined the inside of his head would look. This ordered.
Even the light was clean, so much so that it was almost blue. It was a little strange, making the edges of things bend. This was not Nell’s home. It was her house, an extension of it, but not her home. She counted long seconds with each breath. She wasn’t going to panic. Nell felt filthy under this light, as if she could see too much of her charred, sweating skin. Her ticking filled the whole space; it almost echoed.
This was the room her father had changed the world in, and he was absolutely nowhere to be seen. His desk—complete with a lamp, a tall microscope, and a set of test tubes containing a rather menacing red liquid—was unattended.
Nell stepped, her footfall silent, through this uncharted city of her father’s mind. She was dwarfed by the knowledge that filled these shelves, these desks, these op—
Operating tables?
As Nell ventured further, she began to notice things that made her skin crawl. Jars with contents that looked like they were moving slightly. A heartbeat, then another. Tiny things that she didn’t want to look more closely at. She kept her eyes on the tools and away from the long table at the back of the room covered in a sheet. She saw it, but she ignored it. She pretended it wasn’t there.
Those knives on the walls were long. Mostly they were clean, though the occasional one was still darkened with something that must have been blood.
A box of discarded latex gloves. Red on white is a terror, Nell thought, her pulse leaping, but part of the job. That’s all. Stained sheets heaped in a basket. The long table at the back wall. The long table with the sheet. There was something under the sheet. Tick, tick, tick.
A tall, thin machine, featureless, familiar, loomed like a veiled threat against the wall. Four of five lights were illuminated green; one blinked an amber “almost.” It was rigged to the ceiling with fat steel wires. The generator. The amber light blinked.
Nell circled the long table that she’d been trying to ignore. It was covered in a clean, thick plastic sheet. The ticking in her chest slowed down. The brightness of the room made it feel so honest, so clinical, but on this one table, so far back, was . . . something. This plastic covering . . . something. Those thin wires, red and blue, spilling out from under it, neatly leading to the generator with the blinking lights. Nell wasn’t quite sure why she did it, when she looked under the sheet. She hadn’t riffled through any of the neat stacks of paper or drawers or peeked at the slide still waiting under the microscope. She hadn’t squinted at any neatly marked labels or dipped her fingers into any curious-looking liquids. She had been a responsible interloper, for once.
But she pulled on the sheet, and it easily gave way, slipping to the floor in a heap at her feet.
Nell’s scream rang loudly through the lab.
Her mother, her mother. It was her mother.
There were wires in her mother’s wrists. Her neck. The spots where they entered her cold flesh were charred black little craters on her dark skin. Nell dropped to her knees and wailed again. Outside, the weather had come into itself, become fully grown. The oncoming evening’s anger was a hurricane. Nell’s sorrow was a monsoon. She was drowning.
Cora’s eyes were closed. She had been dressed in simple crisp gray linen, so unlike the pieces of her life hanging in Nell’s wardrobe or on Nell’s body. She looked so young.
A slim dark scar ran from her lip down her neck and her sternum and disappeared beneath the terrible linen she wore. The stitches were still in place. Her hair was combed straight and neatly. Nell had no air left to keep screaming with. The hows and whys dissolved to pure terror, to sorrow, and back. She knelt at the end of the table where her mother lay. Cora can’t have wanted this, can she? Had she asked Julian to do this? But it was so wrong, so sick.
Ruby’s father, Daniel, had seen this. Her father had told the neighbors before he had told his own daughter that he was—he was trying to resurrect his wife. Was he ever going to tell her? Or one morning would he walk into the kitchen hand in hand with this scarred imitation of Cora, straight haired and pajama clad, looking to reclaim her wardrobe and take up right where they left off?
Nell placed her hands over her face to black out the sterile, hungry light and screamed again, an incomprehensible roar, a prayer in rage.
WHERE IS CORA CRANE?
WHERE IS CORA CRANE?
Who had written it in the Gonne Hospital? Who had known? Who had known and kept their silence?
Julian had been trying to bring her back. He’d been trying and failing. The char at the entry points of the wires said as much.
They said failure. They said try again. And again. They said he’d been trying for some time. For years.
When Nell stood again, she had made up her mind. Whatever Julian reawoke, it would not be Cora. Could not be Cora. Her soft touch and wild curls gone. Her hair was flat, and her face was closed; it was not restful, but something else.
Her mouth was a hard line, defiant.
I will not wake up. I am gone.
But Nell couldn’t just leave her here.
The whole funeral, the cremation—Nell gasped—had been some terrible pantomime.
WHERE IS CORA CRANE?
WHERE IS CORA CRANE?
She’s here. She’s always been here, protected by all that smoke, and all those mirrors. Cora Crane would never go through such a thing again.
As Nell removed each wire from her mother’s skin, she recalled in bright detail the days after her death. The first morning.
Tiny Ruby at the door with a huge cake and Daniel behind her with white flowers. Julian, absent. They ate the cake with their hands, and Ruby said, “It’ll be normal again. Soon. I promise.” Ruby knew a world without a mother better than she did. She was little still, but she was wise.
Nell didn’t remember much else. Childhood is a clever thief.
Her mother was so light. She wasn’t frozen or stiff at all; she almost relaxed into Nell’s arms as she lifted her. The static from Cora’s hair rose in strands like blades of grass curved to a slow breeze. Nell’s feet padded against the tiles on the floor. She walked slowly. This was her fury and her ceremony.
The hallway, the kitchen. Frogs all over the floor. Kodak opened his black eyes and watched Nell carry her mother out the back door and into the garden. The stoat padded to where the house ended and the rain began. Nell disappeared into the storm.
CHAPTER 23
You hardly feel the rain or the cold of the soft earth under your bare feet. The dull symphony of weather feels a thousand miles away. The lightning cracks, and thunder rolls; but you are carrying your mother to the lake, and that is all that matters.
You are not sure if she is light from twelve years of death, her muscles disintegrated, or if you have become strong lately. Stronger. You wonder about strength. About what it is to carry a dead mother. You wonder how long you have been carrying her. How many years. Maybe you are so used to carrying this horror that now it weighs nothing. Now yours are the arms made of steel.
The path is narrow, and the light from the house behind you is dimming in the distance. You feel something change in the air as you approach the lake; despite the rain, the atmosphere lifts around that body of water. A freshness arrives: a newness.
Rain hammers onto the surface of the lake, each drop a small explosion, a heartbeat of ripples, a thousand tiny fountains. You cannot feel your legs, there at the shore where the water kisses the wet earth. You keep walking into the lake. You do not take off your boots.
If the air were still, it would be a solemn good-bye; but the storm is raging, and the water barely notices your arrival. The elements don’t care about your flesh, her bones. The water against your body is warm. Just because the weather has broken doesn’t mean the heat is gone. There is barely a chill.
As the water rises past your ankles, your calves, your knees and thighs and hips and waist, you slow. Each step is long and heavy. The water bears what little weight your mother has, and the linen she wears begins to catch on the surface. She is already soaked as the water pulls her hair around her head out like a black halo. You shouldn’t have looked at her face, her hard face. The burn marks at her temples are kissed by the new water like a promise of healing. You have to hold on to her to stop her drifting.
Then you stop. You loosen your grip, and the water carries her for you. The water is past your waist.
She drifts a moment, then begins to sink. The lake swallows her, and the rain helps this hunger. You would scream again, but there is no scream in you. You are so relieved. She is dark as the night and invisible in a moment. The lake has eaten her and she is gone and you are not carrying her. You do not say a word.
When you are sure you cannot see her anymore, you turn around and wade to the shore. You never have to carry her again.
The light in the house is a beacon, and you follow it home. You know what you have to do.
CHAPTER 24
The muddy footprints led across the kitchen floor and through the hallway. A left boot, a right boot, little fallen heroes. One footprint on every second stair. Nell had gone with determination. The floor was splattered with heavy drops of water from her dress and hair. She hadn’t even thought to wring herself out before going into the house. Her clothes weighed a ton in lake water, but she hardly felt them. She hardly felt anything. There was nothing to feel.
Kodak followed her, but she barely noticed him.
One by one, pieces of drenched clothing fell to the floor. Nell stepped into a loose black cotton smock and slippers. She did not pick up a scarf to conceal her scar. It was pink now, as were her cheeks and nose. She wound her hair into a knot. For a moment she eyeballed the scissors, silver and tempting, in the mug where her toothbrush stood, a frayed soldier.
The scissors told her to cut off her hair. Her mother’s hair. She already bore too much to be carrying all those damned curls; the curls were the last of her mother, and they should go, too, amputated like something broken and toxic. Like her damn heart. Taken. She’d been left full of cogs and steel.
Nell had no idea what she would look like or who she would be without it.
She blinked and clawed herself back to reality. Wake up, wake up. Don’t stand here cutting bits off yourself. Don’t be doing that.
He was heavier than she’d thought he’d be, his awkward, limp limbs staggering her. This was graceless and difficult. She carried his weight as she had carried her mother, cradled over both her aching arms. Nell took the junk pile of hope out of the privacy of her bedroom and down through her home. When she almost dropped him, it occurred to her for the first time whether or not his soldered janky frame could handle a fall. The door of the lab was still open. Wherever her father was, he had not come back yet.
She padded to the back of the gleaming sanctuary and placed her creation on the long table where her mother had been laid out. Before taking in this sight, she went back to the door, turned the fat key in the lock, and pulled the bolts across; there were five of them on the inside. Maybe the door really hadn’t always been open to her. Maybe he had been keeping her out. Of course he had. WHERE IS CORA CRANE? Now it was not open to him.
Nell walked back across the lab to the table where her creation lay.
He was grimy and patchwork there in the stellar cleanliness of the white locked room. The fabric on him looked pathetic. His kettle head was almost frightening. Nell tried for a moment to attach some of the wires that had been linked to her mother to his wrists, his head. But she couldn’t, not really, not properly. She could hardly see straight with the grief. She sank to the floor and cupped her face in her hands.
The amber light on the tall machine was green and pulsing now. The terror outside had directed itself just right; the lightning had fully charged the generator.
Cold tendrils of panic began to coil in Nell’s gut. In the pristine genius of her father’s world, it was starkly clear that this thing she had made was little more than a mannequin. A doll. A kettle and ladder. Some spare parts. Some found parts. A mess.
The equipment and education and drive her father had, that’s what had made him the pioneer he was. He could build and unbuild his arm in ten minutes. He was learned. A scholar. An engineer. A doctor. A genius.
Nell had only an apprenticeship she’d bluffed her way through; she was a recluse who hadn’t been invited to the revolution.
Her father might have been a madman. He might have preserved her mother, but he’d been about to bring her back to life. Who knew how full of new parts she’d been? How little Cora and how much fine wiring had been laid out on that table
? The woman that had been there, the woman in the lake now, had just been a more sophisticated and maybe even more tragic version of what Nell herself had made. How dare he have done this? How dare Nell?
Nell was immediately overcome with an urge to hold her father, be held by him. Sob into his shirt. Tell him she’d had to put Cora in the lake.
The creation, in Nell’s gaze, became sadder and sadder, shrinking from a grand design and contribution, a friend, a partner, somebody who would keep her company, who could love her, down to a mechanical sculpture wrapped in bandages. A heap of scrap. A series of thefts. A mistake. An abomination. A monster.
Nell crumbled. She wished Ruby was there, she wished she wasn’t doing this all by herself. Even Oliver. Ruby would keep her standing straight, tell her to pull up her bootstraps. Neither of them had even tried to contact her. She didn’t blame them.
They would have fled at the sight of the dead woman in the lab.
Ruby and Oliver didn’t want anything to do with this. They were better off away.
The thunder outside unhinged its terrible jaw, and the dark sound rolled from the heart of the night. Three beats later, if not less, the sky outside snapped white. The generator with its five green eyes began to bleep.
Each bleep was a plea. Each bleep said, “I’m ready.” Nell gazed up at it.
The bleep was impatient, off sync with the ticking in Nell’s body. The rattling of the storm on the tiny window above them made it all a discordant symphony.
“One more time . . .” Nell sang to herself, a last note of hopelessness, her voice cracking under sorrow.
At the other end of the room the door handle shifted. The lock was jiggled from the outside. And then a banging so loud that Nell let out a yelp.
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