And even though she had found his number, she never bothered to call her father. She might have been able to guilt him into paying the expenses, maybe even helping her with the rest of the affairs, but she just couldn’t bring herself to do that. He left when she was only six. It had been in the middle of the night and in the middle of an argument. Her mother always changed the subject when asked what had happened, so Ren stopped asking. Even if he’d regretted his choice, he’d never made it known to her and had never bothered to find her; she had decided he wasn’t worth the trouble at all.
She felt pressure on her hand and realized that Josephine was holding it tight. She had drifted off. Those golden eyes drifted back to her focus and she realized that the girl had stopped to collect herself.
“We’ve both been there. All of us have, actually. You’re going to get through this too. We’ll be with you every step of the way.” Josephine half-smiled through wet eyes.
Ren hated her body more now than any moment of glaring self-conscious behavior had ever made her. She needed her voice to protest, her hands to throw themselves around in frustration, her legs to stride her out of this room in a huff. But mostly, she needed to scream uncontrollably, and to cry. She needed to cry for this loss of self, for all the confusion, for the things that had and had not happened in her life, and for all the things that might not happen now. She wanted to punch something. She had never done that before: hauled off and punched something out of frustration. It had always seemed so barbaric, but now she realized that she simply had no point of reference before.
Yes, she wanted to scream until she shook, to punch until things hurt, to rage until she collapsed.
But nothing moved, nothing raged. Not a single part of her responded to her bidding. Only her own thoughts rattling around in her brain, and the certainty that they would slowly drive her insane.
Josephine looked up and smiled, brushing away one hot tear as it rolled down Ren’s cheek.
“That’s it, girl. You’ll be back with us in no time.”
As if to cue the bittersweet triumph of the moment, violins sang sweetly in the background. Lost to the moment and her thoughts, Ren had never noticed Mariel slip away. Josephine rolled her eyes and held up a finger, leaving Ren to her place in the chair, where she could mostly see the exchange about to take place.
“Oh no. You did that to me, I’m not going to let you do that to her too.”
“What are you talking about?”
“This. Brahms. No way.”
“She needs something soothing right now, Josephine.”
“But Brahms isn’t soothing to everyone. Mostly just to you.”
Mariel crossed her arms, her mouth pursed and she looked like she had been slighted. The waves of her hair shook as if they too were offended by Joe’s opinion.
“And you are suddenly the resident expert on all things Florence Weatherbee?”
She could only see Josephine’s back but imagined that she was sticking her tongue out at Mariel.
“I’m observant.”
Mariel looked between the two girls, as if they had been conspiring behind her back, then stepped aside with a flourishing gesture.
“By all means.”
She saw Josephine click away at a keyboard and realized that if she could, she would be smiling. It was starting to sink in that they might be telling her the truth. She might be sitting here, dead or dying or vice versa, in a room with a couple of complete strangers, but she wasn’t alone. And against all odds, they did truly seem to care about her. It was a small comfort in the world of weirdness she found herself swimming in.
All things considered, she didn’t have any of the heavy thoughts and creeping fears that dying people usually contended with. If she was already dead, there was no worry about dying. No worries about if there was an after, because there was – for her, anyway. For Ren, death wasn’t scary at all. Maybe it was because her death had brought her a new family, or because her death wasn’t much of a death at all.
Maybe it was because Josephine had, whether by plan or accident, decided on Dead Can Dance and – oh, how Ren wished she could dance right now. Was it the speakers or her new perspective that made the melody sound so rich and inviting? She didn’t care. She wanted to close her eyes and fully immerse herself in the music, in the moment. She promised to give Josephine a hug as soon as she was able. She had missed the end of the exchange between Mariel and Josephine, but it sounded as if Mariel had conceded. Josephine returned, holding her hand.
“I really hope this is tolerable,” she lowered her voice and gestured toward Mariel with her eyes. “Because Brahms, right?” There was another huff from Mariel, whose hearing seemed to be exceptional. “We’re going to give you some peace and quiet now, let you rest.”
Mariel had returned as well, none of the former bickering present.
“Try to relax. I know it is not easy, but your thoughts will drive you crazy after a while.” She smiled as if from experience. “We will see progress before you know it.”
It was a lingering moment, and Ren almost expected them to keep talking. Or maybe kiss her goodnight. Something. They dimmed the lights as they left the room, the music continuing to churn around her, the melodies swirling, pulling her along, away from her thoughts for a while. She smiled inwardly; Mariel sounded pretty confident. What it all meant, she wasn’t quite sure, but she assumed it meant that she might be back on her feet before long.
TWO
“Dammit Joe, I don’t want to!”
“Ren, stop being such a baby! Get out of the chair and walk!”
“No!”
“Do it!”
“You can’t make me!”
“Want to see me try?”
“No. I am tired of these lessons. I give up!”
Three months ago, throwing up her hands in frustration was a dream. Now she did it daily, sometimes more than once. She was still a long way from storming out of the room in a huff, however. She couldn’t even shuffle out of the room, huff or no. Josephine did her best to keep Ren moving forward in her recovery, but three months of the same sights and the same routine had made her stir crazy. So had Mariel’s strange sense of rewarding progress: until she could walk again, she was confined to the common rooms on the first floor. She understood that it was mostly for her own safety and benefit, but having a place to storm off to would have been nice on occasion.
Slowly, over the last three months, she had reclaimed every one of her natural abilities. Her sight and hearing seemed to come first, as well as her other sensory nerves. Her involuntary functions followed. She had grown so accustomed to being without a heartbeat that when it began again, she was terrified. Ducts and glands and organs all began full-scale production once again, although as Joe pointed out, they had actually never ceased to function except at the time of her death. Her heart was moving so slowly in the beginning that it wouldn’t register, even on the best machines. Her lungs were acting on a similar set of directions, only giving her what she needed at the time as the rest of her body rebooted. Fortunately, when none of your functions are actually functioning, there isn’t a lot of need for oxygen. It was mostly there to keep her brain going, which had only been down long enough to reboot.
Josephine did what she could in the way of basic tutoring. She had been through the same process and remembered a lot of the questions she had asked herself amidst recovery. There were no in-depth explanations, but she was able to provide a pretty solid set of answers for the questions Ren was unable to ask yet.
“Yes, it was a real death. No, it doesn’t make us zombies or vampires or any other supernatural creature. Yes, it is still technically supernatural. No, we don’t know of anything else like us. We stop aging at the time of death, and continue on from there. We never grow any older, no matter how many years pass. No, no one has been dumb enough to test whether or not we’d come back again. Don’t give it another thought.”
When the small muscle functions returned, Ren was so di
sappointed she couldn’t cry out. She spent a full day just enjoying the luxury of closing her eyes on her own. She enjoyed her first night of peaceful sleep that same evening. And then it occurred to her that her eyes could help her communicate as well. Fortunately, Joe seemed to understand. She could communicate in yes and no answers with the movement of her eyes. It wasn’t speaking yet, but it was something.
Slowly, her small muscles recovered, and then bigger systems began to wake up. She found that she could wiggle her toes and fingers, and then her arms and legs. Eventually, all the little groups that worked together to create her voice got together and the struggle to learn to talk began.
The problem was not that her muscles didn’t function, they would return to her, without any atrophy, even. The problem was being able to do something with the finesse of a fully functioning human being. She could lift objects in her hands without a problem. It took time and patience to be able to hold a glass of water and drink from it without spilling the whole thing all over herself. Soup wasn’t even a consideration for the first few months. Likewise, she could make noises all she wanted, and she knew the words, but being able to force those sounds to become words took time.
She worked at it, and she worked hard. She was able to wheel herself all around the ground floor in her chair. She could prepare meals and get around like a champion, but her legs frustrated her beyond belief. She could not force them to cooperate with her, not like the other muscles in her body. There were too many things that she had no conscious control over, and the longer she failed to make it work, the more unbearable she became around the others.
Mariel had surrendered to Ren’s frustrating tantrums early on, only checking in when she was certain that Ren was in a good mood, or utterly defeated by the day’s struggles. Joe, on the other hand, welcomed a challenge and happily volunteered to participate in Ren’s recovery. She enjoyed having someone to butt heads with.
“If you can walk out of this room, I will surrender.” She gestured to the door. “After you, mademoiselle.”
“Oh, sure. Pick on the girl in the wheelchair.” She locked the wheels and braced herself on the arms of the chair.
Joe laughed. “You’re only in a wheelchair because you refuse to get off your lazy butt.” She crossed to Ren’s side, ready to help if she was needed. “Which I believe is getting bigger, thanks to all your sitting around.”
“Shut up.” Ren groaned and pushed herself up on her arms, trying to get her feet under her. She hated this part. Sometimes her legs cooperated; sometimes an impulse would cause her to wind up in a heap on the floor. Whether Josephine understood or not, it was embarrassing. Ren wasn’t terribly athletic in her former life, but she was no slouch. She had a gift for walking. Boots, heels, or flip-flops, she could walk in anything through anything, and never get tripped up. Now she was having trouble keeping her bare feet beneath her.
You get hit by one bus and everything changes.
Mariel had explained what she could, in as plain of terms as she was able. Her answers weren’t much beyond Joe’s, unfortunately. Resurrection wasn’t an exact science. Death was like a blackout to the physical body. Everything but the brain went through a hard reset and needed retraining from square one. It was all a matter of telling the brain where all the pathways connected, which no one could consciously do, unfortunately. Manual dexterity tests made Ren want to throw things. Ironically, she needed the dexterity she couldn’t master to throw anything hard enough to feel vindicated. With Joe’s insistence, she re-mastered abilities that she had once dominated as a child. Even meeting with success time and again, Ren was reaching a boiling point easier and more often.
Mariel greeted instructor and student at the end of each lesson with tea. Ren pointed out that she didn’t like tea, but Mariel insisted. At least it wasn’t being served to her in a sippy cup anymore.
“The tea itself is not important,” Mariel smiled softly. “What matters is that we can take ten minutes out of the day to sit calmly and enjoy the company of our sisters – regardless of how we feel about our day and our routine.”
Ren knew what she meant. These were the people she was going to start her new life with; she could be a little nicer. She didn’t want to be nicer, though. She wanted Joe to suffer with her, to feel her anguish as she felt it. The whole experience had formed a hard shell around her heart, and though the logical part of her brain told her otherwise, her emotional center didn’t think that her housemates truly appreciated the hardship she’d gone through.
“Well, the routine blows too,” she hadn’t meant to say it out loud. There was time to take it back, to apologize, but she didn’t. She let the words hang in the air until Joe stood up.
“On that note, maybe we should give you some alone time and –“
“No, Josephine. I do not think she has finished.” Mariel turned to Ren. The refined exterior usually operated as a wall to shield something soft and fragile inside. Ren could see it in her eyes that wasn’t the case today.
“No, it’s fine.” Ren spoke the words into the room, but the room knew she didn’t mean them.
Mariel set her cup down on the table, folding her hands across her lap. “Please, speak your mind. It is obvious there is something you need to get off your chest.”
“I don’t think you understand how hard this is,” she slapped the arms of her chair, wanting to emphasize the point she was trying to get across.
Joe hid her face in her hands, peeking through her fingers as if she was watching a scary movie.
“Ren, you should –“
“Hush, Josephine. Let her speak.”
Ren continued to flail looking back and forth at the two women, one passive and the other dismayed.
“I am exhausted. Every molecule in me is bruised and all you can say is ‘Good job, Ren!’, ‘Keep going, Ren!’, ‘Let’s have tea, Ren!’ You’re not helping.”
Mariel didn’t move. Her face was still, unreadable. Then, slowly, she blinked and stood up. She turned and walked toward the study. She did not turn when she spoke.
“You can be excused from tea time then. I apologize that we are not assisting your recovery.”
Ren watched the door close. It occurred to her that she had won the argument, but it didn’t feel like a victory. All the frustration that had been building up simply deflated, leaving her empty. She turned to Joe and her breath caught.
Joe was still holding her face, but it wasn’t in fear, it was sadness. Tears were streaming from her eyes and she cupped her mouth to silence the sounds.
“Joe, I –“ She wanted to tell Joe that she didn’t understand what was going on. Joe stood quickly, turning the wheel chair violently and pushing Ren into the guest room she’d been staying in. Ren tried to speak again, but Joe whirled the chair, catching Ren by surprise. When Ren looked up, she met a wide and burning gaze. Joe mashed the spacebar on the computer and then pressed hard on the volume button. It didn’t matter what played, Joe needed something to cover up the noise.
“Mariel is almost 200 years old,” Joe spoke as evenly as she could. Her voice had a consistent quiver to it, as she ignored the tears streaming down her face. “She did not get this far because she is a thoughtless, inconsiderate woman.”
“I didn’t mean –“
“She rescued you without a thought for her own safety. We could have been arrested – and that would mean being discovered. She took you in and has been nothing but kind to you.”
“Joe, I’m sorry.” It was all she could say. The weight of her mistake had started pressing on her as soon as she got mouthy with Mariel. The longer Joe spoke, the worse she felt.
“No. That’s not going to cut it. I’m not who you need to apologize to.” Joe backed away from Ren, retreating to the wall where she sank to the floor. “You have no idea what kind of hell she has been through – what she goes through every time she finds one of us. It’s like re-opening her own house of horrors.”
Joe wiped at her face, smearing mascara
and tears.
“She was the first; she didn’t get rescued.”
Ren shook her head. She didn’t understand what Joe was talking about. The words echoed in her brain, rebounding and sharpening themselves against her wits until it was clear that she would never unlearn the meaning. The regret hiding in the pit of her stomach was now a crushing pain in her heart as the understanding took hold and she realized how childish and selfish she was, how terrible she’d been to both of them.
“Mariel doesn’t talk about it, and no one knows how long she was buried.” Joe glared at Ren, to be certain she wouldn’t make another false step when speaking to Mariel. “She had to relearn the basics wrapped in a death shroud, under six feet of dirt, inside a coffin. She saved you from a hell you can’t even fathom.”
The hard shell around Ren’s heart dissolved in the sadness that flooded her. She felt cold pouring out into her extremities, emanating from a hole in her soul. She felt like a monster; a bitter, selfish monster. No amount of apologizing was going to fix this, but she had to start somewhere. She would not let the silence linger a second time today.
Joe sniffled, wiping her eyes and nose on her shirtsleeve. She looked up and saw Ren locking her wheels and then gripping the arms of the chair as if she meant to stand.
“Let it go, Ren, training isn’t going to help anything now.”
Ren gritted her teeth, focusing on the door.
“I’m not training,” she took a breath, puffing it out. “I need to go apologize.”
Her arms quaked as she pushed herself up. Her leg muscles felt tiny, useless, as she tried to move her legs underneath her for support. She fell back in the chair, growled, and started again.
“Ren, stop.”
“No,” Now it was Ren’s turn to look crazed with a face full of hot tears. “You’re right. She has been wonderful, and I was a brat. I can’t leave it like that.” She ignored the screaming in her muscles, begging her to stop and pushed herself up on wobbly legs, holding tight to the chair and the wall for support. Joe was on her feet too, watching.
House of Thirteen Page 2
