Disclaimer: Playing in JK's sandbox. I brought some toys of my own.
One need not be a chamber to be haunted;
One need not be a house;
The brain has corridors surpassing
Material place.
Emily Dickinson, "Time and Eternity"
The morning dawned clear and beautiful over the Carolina coast on June 28th, 1979. Jonathan and Mary Price watched the sunrise from the verandah of their beach cottage. They sat with their morning meal, enjoying each other's company in companionable silence as watery light washed over the sand and painted the Atlantic with a pink and blue palette. It was peaceful, and calm, and happy.
They did not know that right at this moment, thousands of miles across the very ocean they were admiring, their daughter was being laid into the earth, casualty of a war they did not know existed. Just as they did not know their names were Mark and Deborah Meadowes, they had no memory that they even had a daughter at all. All they knew—all they felt they even needed to know, for they were suspiciously free of that human curse, curiosity—was that they were Jonathan and Mary Price, recent arrivals to this slow, peaceful barrier island along the North American coastline.
They did remember that this place was all they had ever wanted in a home. Neither could remember, however, that holiday taken so long ago with a little blonde girl who played in the surf and tumbled down the sand dunes until the sun set and they would drag her back into the small cottage. A nine-year-old Dorcas had declared that there was no finer place to live in all the world than this empty, quiet little island where wild horses left hoof prints along the surf-swept beaches.
It was a rainy, grey day in England as they buried Dorcas Meadowes, the little blonde girl grown into a woman, a brave and broken woman who had fought and suffered and of whom her parents would be so terribly proud...if only they knew she had ever lived at all. If Jon and Mary could remember the tiny newborn they had cradled through colic, the scowl-faced toddler whose favorite word was 'no!', the sunny little girl who had tumbled down dunes and run herself ragged with excitement the summer she had turned eleven and received the letter, the teenager who had astonished her teachers and excelled in her school work, the young woman who had cried in elation at their kitchen table as she showed them the ring Fabian Prewett had given to her when he'd asked her to be his wife, the woman who had been a warrior.
If they could remember.
Dorcas was buried next to her Fabian on a dreary English Monday, but it was a golden morning on the Carolina shore as the Prices gathered their breakfast accoutrements and went inside. They could not remember.
Twenty years later, as the Wizarding world an ocean away celebrates and mourns and all of Dorcas Meadowes's great sacrifices are given greater, fuller meaning, the Carolina dawn is not so golden.
It is grey and dreary when Jonathan escapes to the verandah for a spare moment. Mary is asleep. She's had a bad morning; the dementia is getting worse. She doesn't recognize him anymore; she asks after her husband Mark and something about a nameless little daughter off at a school. She's so heartbreakingly convinced of the existence of these people that Jon almost believes her. But then the little girl is a witch, does magic and flies on broomsticks, and Jon's despair settles even deeper.
She was on again about meadows this morning, and somehow, Jon feels some sort of significance, more than just a grassy place where horses run about and flowers bloom. He feels like the word belongs to him, somehow, which is ridiculous. Words don't belong to anyone. Deb—Mary, where did that name come from? Her name is Mary.
Jon settles heavily into the Adirondack by the door, weaving his hands through his steel-grey hair. There's a lone horse on the beach, nosing through some brush, and Jon cannot understand why it reminds him of another animal…a gazelle, a graceful, delicate silver animal, and a teenaged girl who looks a bit like Deb. She was frustrated with it, trying over and over again to make it look like this, like the small, wild Spanish mustangs she had adored as a child. The strange not-him person who remembers this cannot understand why she was so unhappy with the small, strange silver gazelle, because it was so like her; a soft-eyed creature that moved like a dancer.
Mary's awake, banging around in the kitchen and she waves at him through the screened door. She's convinced that her daughter's coming home from her school today; she's woken up for the past two weeks with this thought firmly cemented in the forefront of her mind. And, somehow, as Mary prepares another celebration breakfast (because Jon hasn't the heart to stop her anymore; the impending return of this nameless daughter brightens Mary in a way that little has done in the past months, so he just returns to the grocery and stocks up every few days) he can almost believe that a girl with her mother's smile and silky blonde hair is going to wander into the kitchen and sit down to breakfast and he'll remember her and his heart won't be so empty.
Frustration is normal, Mary's doctors tell him, right before they advise him to put her in a special care facility. But this isn't frustration, not the sort he should be feeling. He misses something terribly and he's not sure what. There is a great empty hole in his heart and he cannot remember what is missing. Something so very important should have a name.
Mary smiles at him as she toasts slices of cinnamon bread (neither of them like cinnamon in any form, but somehow the bread swirled with it always ends up on the shopping list, and it sits uneaten until it molds) and he smiles back for a moment until she turns away. She's been getting erratic in her cooking lately; she tried to boil pasta in a plastic bowl three nights before. He has to watch her carefully, but he won't deprive her of it, not just yet; it makes her happy.
The smell of the toasting cinnamon bread stirs something in him again and he imagines a little girl who sits at a kitchen table in a house very far away, carefully biting her toast into a circle before setting in. Something slams back into place in his mind, like a great iron door swinging shut on a cell, and he swears angrily, throwing his half-empty teacup down onto the wood-planked ground. It shatters explosively, white shards scattered amidst the sunburst puddle of cooling tea and he stares at it desperately. His mind must be going now, too.