A Little Light Time Travelling
a Witches of East End fan fiction
By Cappuccino Girl
Notes: takes place sometime after Boogie Knight [ episode 205]. With thanks to all the authors and beta readers I've known over the years who make coming back to fanfic writing feel like slipping on a comfortable pair of old shoes.
"COME ON IN," SHE SAYS as the door creaks behind her, and into her secret lair they go. A flip of the switch and the harsh fluorescent light hums into life. Everything before them is covered in grey blankets and dust-sheets, the air filled with the faint stench of mothballs and decaying paper. There are no real windows in this place, and the walls are unpainted concrete blocks. It really is grim.
Wendy looks at the room in disgust and pulls a bottle of wine out of her handbag. "If I've cancelled my hot date to drive all the way out to this shithole, then I'm going to start drinking now if that's okay."
Joanna says nothing, just slips through the gap between two blankets while Wendy unscrews the cap of the bottle.
"You know what you need to do Jo? You need to meditate less and drink more. You'd be way happier," Wendy remarks as she unceremoniously pours too much wine into a red plastic cup.
Joanna peers out from behind the hidden objects and looks her sister up and down. "And you need to put more clothes on."
"I know!" Wendy pours some more into another cup and waves it in Joanna's direction. "Drink up."
But Joanna isn't interested. She flicks a blanket off the smooth wooden surface beneath it, then another, and tosses them across the room to land in a heap. A creak and her fingers hit the surface. Plonk. It is a little out of tune these days.
Wendy tries to squeeze between the hidden furniture in a desperate effort to see, but gets stuck in a dead-end of white sheets. She kicks the wooden whatever in front of her and instantly regrets it as pain shoots up her big toe. "What are you doing?" she exclaims, the throbbing gradually making its way up her foot.
But Joanna doesn't hear. She is lost in her piano, her beautiful, hundred-and-thirty year old piano. The ivory keys are a little sticky under her fingers but still responsive. She presses a key and then another, settling down into the stool as she does so.
While her sister attempts to play Erik Satie, Wendy satisfies her curiosity by pulling off the dust-sheets one by one. A couch, a grandfather clock, closets and sideboards, a Studebaker station wagon, a gramophone and crates and more crates of books.
"What the fuck is this?" she eventually shrieks, as yet another tug of a sheet reveals a gigantic armillary sphere, all glistening brass planets, the science of a bygone age.
"Mind your drink," Joanna cautions her, getting up from her comfortable place at the piano.
"Seriously. What the hell Jo?"
Joanna's shoulders slump forward, and she's starting to question inducting Wendy into this part of her life at all. "Hand me the wine," she beckons with a wave of her hand.
Wendy passes her the other plastic cup and gives her sister a disapproving stare at the same time. She's full of secrets this one, so full of them that Wendy can't help be amazed that Joanna hasn't drowned in them all years ago.
"Alex plays the stock market for financial security. I have antiques," Joanna explains hesitantly, pausing after every phrase to be sure she's making some degree of sense. "Or they are now. They weren't when I bought them."
"Wow."
"I have children," Joanna says softly. "I need to think of these things. College tuition fees aren't what it used to be."
"Do the girls know?" Wendy asks and she doesn't know why because she already knows the answer.
Joanna shakes her head. "Nobody's been here. Nobody but Victor." And his name just rests there in silence for a while.
Joanna remembers when Victor applied for a post at Dartmouth, determined to forge a new life for himself after their last break-up. He falsified some documents and crammed the great historians and philosophers; the rest was all too easy. History came naturally to him, a long lifetime of observing minutiae while she was far too busy trying to solve everyone's problems. He used to love this place.
On the other side of the room, Wendy fiddles with the handle of the gramophone. "Does it work?"
"There are some records over there. Give it a whirl."
Wendy pulls the heavy box towards her and when the first two discs she pulls out are Wang Wang Blues and Elvis, she can't help smiling. "Please tell me you have clothes too. Can we play dress up?"
"What are you? Seven?"
"What? You've never tried on old clothes of yours and been pleased you haven't put on weight in like fifty years?"
"No."
Wendy frowns, then opens the door to the closet which is filled with garments. She pulls a riding habit out and swishes it about on its hanger with glee. "Very goth," she muses. And just like that she's in a heaven she never knew existed, filled with old silk and lace.
Joanna lets out a long sigh and collapses on the sofa. "I brought you here for a reason, you know. I brought you here in case I die. In case the girls die and I die when they are young again."
"It won't happen. Not this time," Wendy says absentmindedly while fawning over a flapper dress. Then… "What was it like, with Alex?"
Joanna stops examining the fabric of the couch for signs of moths and looks up. "Excuse me?"
"You and Alex. What was it like when you were…"
"It was good," Joanna recalls with a laugh. "Different, but good while we lasted. Sadly I found out that my terrible luck with men extends to lesbians."
Wendy places the dress she's been holding back into the closet and closes the door. "You never stop surprising me. Ever," she says with a sly grin.
"It's not like you haven't been with women," Joanna remarks.
"I know but you're so…" Wendy attempts her best prudish expression and puts her hands over the exposed top of her bra. "I slept with a hooker once," she confides. "In New Orleans."
Joanna reaches down to the floor to pour herself more wine before giving Wendy a judgmental glance.
Wendy just tosses her hair back and shrugs. "What? I didn't know she was a hooker at the time."
"Of course you didn't," Joanna assures her in mock confidence. She kicks off her flip-flops and runs her bare feet along the concrete floor. It is remarkably clean considering how long she hasn't been here. She traces the wear marks on the couch with her finger. This used to be in her living room once. Sometimes when she came here after she'd auctioned something off to pay the bills, she'd just lie here and breathe in the smell of old fabric and horsehair stuffing. One time she left a photo album behind and when she returned, she realized that it had happened a lifetime ago and she was still here. Joanna rests her head on the arm of the sofa and stares up at the paint peeling off the iron girders. Everything decays eventually, everything but her.
Wendy has abandoned her plastic cup and digressed to drinking wine directly out of the bottle. "Do you still like Alex?" she asks after she takes another swig.
Outside, the rain begins to drum on the roof. Joanna doesn't have a response for that question. She knows she and Alex were a disaster from the very beginning and they don't show signs of changing anytime soon. This time around she'd barely mourned Victor and there they were making out in the forest like a two horny teenagers and she's mildly disgusted with herself.
"Do you ever forgive and forget?" Wendy asks her more cautiously this time, like it might be too soon to ask this question.
But there are so many things Joanna has forgotten, so many people she has lost that she long lost count of them all. When her neighbor across the street died a few years ago, she realized she couldn't remember how many funerals she'd been to, how many shitty black dresses she'd bought in her lifetime. After a while, Joanna stops running her finger around the rim of her cup of wine. "Aren't we both here?"
Wendy smiles and takes a shellac disc out of its sleeve and gingerly places it on the turntable. "We can pretend it's the twenties again." She waves her index finger in the direction of the gramophone handle. "Canto." The stylus hits the record and Wendy squeals with delight.
The crackle of the speaker is familiar, and if Joanna leans in close enough she can almost smell the city streets, the dirt and diesel and soot. For a moment, Victor's hand is reaching out to her, dragging her into some basement club, but when she turns around to grasp it, she sees it's Wendy beckoning her to dance.
Joanna resists at first but Wendy's enthusiasm is infectious, and she's soon given in and dancing barefoot around the room to Bugle Call Rag. The can both still remember how to dance like this. It's in their blood like riding horses and Latin and sending telegrams.
Over by the sofa, Joanna's phone rings inside her handbag. She rushes over to answer it in case it's Freya or Ingrid, but instead the screen glows 'Alex'. She ignores it and tosses it back into her bag.
Wendy shimmies across to the room towards her, wine bottle still in hand. "Anyone interesting?"
"Just Alex."
"Nobody should lose as many people as you have," Wendy assures her, and her red pendant glistens as she reaches forward to giver her sister a hug. "You really should call her back."
Joanna shakes her head. For now, Alex will have to wait. Because this is family and she is lucky, so impossibly lucky in spite of everything. And so, in this dingy storage unit on the outskirts of town, the twenties roar one more time, and for the first time in a long while they are both carefree and content.
*~ fin.