10. Impact

There is no funeral because there is no body.

This is what Melena is told when the new governor deems her strong enough to bear it. She listens mutely to his secretary – a polite young man of, perhaps, twenty-five – and wonders what it could mean. No body to inter? Nobody to attend? The probability divides evenly into these reasons. Nessa's regime has burned her name into Munchkin history: the second most despised governor, the third briefest duration in office, the most gruesomely cast down. Melena spends too many hours with the Unabridged History of Munchkinland splayed across her lap, labouring over these rankings as if they mean something.

They don't; they only make it apparent that Nessa must be mourned in the face of Munchkinland's wrath and relief – or else in secret. Melena lauds the decision to forego a ceremony and asks, "Who was behind it?"

"It was Glinda the Good, naturally," the man says, and it is the naturally that quashes the feeling of solidarity and stokes a fire in its place. As if the goodness lies implicit in every swish of fabric, every flounce, every cloying word that drips from Glinda's tongue, though she has chosen to embed herself in a band of frauds and fiends. The Captain of the Gale Force and Morrible and the one Melena won't think about and this little girl, Dorothy, who is poised to be Glinda's deputy for all the yapping that's done about her virtues. The champion of their freedom. The heir of the notorious jewelled shoes. Trapping the daylight and sending ruby sunbeams across the road as she flits towards the capital to receive her due. Melena thinks she could very well crush the air from that skinny throat with her bare hands.

But she couldn't. She wouldn't. She doesn't even think that – not really. The girl is eleven. She will stand before the crowds in the Emerald City as Elphaba did at that age, radiating uncertainty, and she will churn out the same naïve faith that Nessa had in humanity. The fits of malice that engulf Melena stem from confusion. She does not know how to navigate this loss. She only knows that anger weighs less than remorse – and, even so, she is not so quick to succumb to it anymore. She is returning to herself, gradually, painfully, assembling the wisps of information that filter through the mist distorting all memory of the days after Dorothy's landing.

There was that first sight of the house. Melena recalls springing from the carriage before the driver pulled on the reins and bounding towards the wreckage, just off the estate. A white clapboard shell. The roof caved in. Furniture buckled in on itself and strewn across splintered wooden planks. The world lurched, just then, as it all became real to her, and she thinks she must have fainted, for she woke up in her bed and promptly resolved that she would never leave it again – and almost succeeded in the endeavour too. She drank her weight in wine and lay there for nine days, rising only to spiral down the black throat of her own guilt, sleeping in increments that were too long and then too short, eating nothing and retching anyway, and repeating the process until she reached blindly into her trunk for another bottle and came away with Alice in Wonderland.

Fear revived her, even if just a little, and compelled her from her chambers to ensure that Elphaba was alive. She tracked down a recent issue of the Munchkin Mirror and read its installment of "Witch Watch" and in accepting the fact that Elphaba was still fighting a war that Nessa could not, she accidentally inured herself to the truth of the loss. This is better in some ways and worse in others. She can recollect her own name, but also the last words that Nessa said to her. She can loop a bridle around the few emotions still rattling about her brain, but she suffers them just the same. She can tolerate the stares of others, but she thinks endlessly of the wrongs that Nessa did them. Wrongs, she knows, that will not be forgotten any time soon.

It almost doesn't seem that way, however, and Melena credits the residents of Colwen Grounds for their grace, even as she finds their wary conduct disquieting. They don their liberty like ill-fitting clothes and dip their heads and murmur sorry for your loss or you're a welcome sight in these halls, but mostly they flee rooms and duck around corners and avoid contact if it bodes prolonged conversation. This is because she carries the mark on her: of grief, of shame, of the hole in her chest where twenty years is scrambling to fill the ninety that could have been. It is not natural for a mother to outlive her child; it reeks of failure – years of it or one colossal lapse. Or both.

The de facto governor, Bfee, is chief among these judges. He is crude and coarse and grasping, a mediocre cheat who's been upjumped from a mayoral position, and he fancies himself subtle as he informs her that her time at Colwen Grounds is up. He has the endorsement of the Wizard of Oz – it can be found right here on this decree, which was presented to him by Glinda the Good. The implication of that? His word is practically law. Melena chews on the inner flesh of her cheeks and struggles to pay attention through the frenzied thump of blood in her ears. She hates to see him in Frex's study, squat and florid and dwarfed by the high back of the chair, issuing commands as if he has any right to, sporting that beady glint of cruelty in his eyes.

He clears his throat, loud as an engine, as if he is aware that she is not listening. "I'm sure you realize that it is highly improper for an unmarried man to be occupying the same lodging as a widow."

"Perhaps you ought to leave then," she says.

His face puckers in outrage. He gesticulates and blusters and finds himself flustered by her recalcitrance so he dismisses her, receiving the smile she shoots over her shoulder like a clip on the jaw. They are three strong, she and her family of ghosts, and as long as she inhabits Colwen Grounds he will remain under the thumb of the Thropps – a hierarchy she clings to, if only out of spite. He moves in his staff and discharges half of hers, confining her to small wings of the manor and stationing sentries where her territory meets his. But she carries on as if unperturbed. Her roots span for miles in every direction, gnarled and cumbersome, and he is only a weed that's sprung up in the aftermath of a storm. Let the Wizard send an ordinance to bully her off the premises. The only thing that can be taken from her is of equal value to him. She is untouchable. She will stay.

She has to.

Because they don't know, these invaders, that this is the garden that yields the most promising banks for snow forts and this is the library where Elphaba spent an entire summer and this is the table where Nessa drew clumsy portraits of anyone who would sit for her. And maybe, just maybe, if Melena enters at just the right time, in just the right frame of mind, Nessa will be there drawing and she can explain everything from the beginning. Elphaba. Milkflowers. Dormitories. Letters lying about Frex's condition. The day she crept into the Emerald City and said I've heard tales of secession and thought I will put Elphaba under Nessarose's protection and never once considered that it was Nessa's life she was gambling on.

I didn't mean for this to happen, she will say. I never thought it could. You deserved better in everything. Better than I did by you. The night of her return. The eerie stillness as she ascended the stairs. When Nessa stood on wobbly legs and forced a note into her hand and it was Melena's wildest dream and worst nightmare all at once, because she opened her mouth to gasp an inquiry and Nessa said, "Why would they send this if you were at his bedside?" and when Melena looked down, she saw that it was a message informing her of her father's death.

The world ripped in two – she recalls this with clarity – and her vision fuzzed as she was confronted with the decision to plead guilty or deny, deny, deny. She opted for the latter, of course, and Nessa went pale with the pain of it and the pain of everything and Melena knew in her heart that it was all over.

How was she to tell Nessa that she had borne a child that wasn't Frex's – and not a year after their marriage? That she gave Elphaba away and turned Nessa's life into a series of contrived events with the singular goal of rectifying that mistake? That their happiest memories were mired in lies? Melena cast her lot in with a plan that had never been on a course for fruition and it was over before it began; doubly so, when she saw that the doors of her wardrobe were hanging ajar and the clothing crammed to one side. From there, she took a minute to realize that Boq was absent. Elphaba had turned up, this was clear, and Boq had left and the combined blows destroyed Nessa even as they filled her deepest desire.

To this day, details of the altercation have not found Melena, for Boq didn't return and Nessa could finally afford to discard her mother like a threadbare stocking. She tottered about the manor, eschewing every circumstance that would have put them in close quarters, and Melena didn't see her for days – not until she heard from the porter that the governor sought her presence in the courtyard. Melena nearly burst with joy, thinking herself forgiven, but she flew down the steps and saw a carriage waiting. The driver was seeing to the horses while two men wrestled a trunk into the cab and Nessa stood – a sight that never lost its novelty – before the bustling group, maneuvering them like puppets.

The joy curdled into an apprehension that quickly drew Melena to Nessa's side. "What is this?" she asked.

"You ought to see to your father's affairs," Nessa said, almost flippantly. "I've had your things prepared – and I believe you've eaten. There's nothing to hinder an immediate departure."

"Immediate departure?" Melena said. "I had hoped we could—"

Contempt flashed in Nessa's eyes. "You're his only issue, after all, and you owe it to him. Though I understand that loyalty is something of a foreign concept to you."

Melena will always envision Nessa as she was that morning. Her tall figure could have cut an impression that was almost imposing, but she was so small on the inside, so frail with hurt and rage and thwarted trust. An uncertain child filling an adult's shoes.

Nessa shifted. "I just…I'd like to know one thing," she said. "Were you in Munchkinland? It only requires a 'yes' or a 'no.' You can manage that much for me."

"Nessa…"

Nessa's face fell.

"Can we—"

"No, it's alright," Nessa said smoothly. "I wouldn't have believed you anyway." She dropped her arms to her sides and walked away with painstaking care and an awkward lunge, as if each step was a leap of faith, and this is the last Melena was to ever see of her daughter, for she was in Dead Tree Heights when they brought her the news.

Melena wants to believe that she started awake with a premonition, that it was raining heavily and the skies were a foreboding black and she was on the brink of penning a warning. Something is not right. Don't go out today, Nessa. Don't go. She closes her eyes, however, and she sees herself as she was, standing dumbly in her father's study, breathing in air that will always be redolent of dust and smoke and the soul-searing dread of failure he instilled in her. She was sighing in frustration, contesting the clause that bequeathed the estate to his hounds when a terrible howl ripped through her head and knocked the wind from her chest.

She tried to pass it off as inconsequential – age, illness, imagination – but within the hour a messenger barged in, panting, squawking the phrase "urgent news" over and over. He sat her down and began the tale and she knows that she felt the sofa beneath her, but it was as if she was floating above her body, looking down on the conversation. She was paralyzed by the absurdity of it and her head swam, out of the sky, and she could hardly keep calm but she did, piloted by some girl from a different world, because she did not understand, dead on impact, she did not understand why anyone would play such a horrendous joke, Glinda the Good is on hand, to pretend that her daughter had been smothered by a house.

When Melena finally spoke, her thoughts reeling in and out of comprehension, she could only squint her eyes and ask, "Different world?"

"Kanziz? Kanzaz? I wasn't clear on the pronunciation."

"Kansas," she said numbly.

At this point, the thread dwindles into nothing. Nessa is dead. Nessa died at twenty-one with her heart split down the middle and a state full of enemies and no one to share the burden. Melena stands in the shadow of this realization and does not know how to break free. She has never been religious. It always seemed foolish to her, to toss one's faith at the sky, but she regrets this now. She's sick to death of the translucent veil of denial; she longs for the opaque solace of delusion – anything so that she doesn't have to go on thinking of her daughter as decaying flesh. Stray particles. The subject of an unspoken eulogy that beats relentlessly against her skull and never materializes.

Nessa. Nessarose. Daughter of Governor Frexspar Thropp. The baby that Melena wanted and did not want, tiny and pink and broken, delicate as porcelain, cooing and squirming and budding into the brilliant little girl who clamped motherhood around her like a manacle. Melena, mid-twenties, vain and petty and determined to hold herself separate from everything and everyone, foolishly believing she could float through life without attachment and then falling unthinkingly into the trap of love, thrumming with hope and fear and pride so powerful that it couldn't have been real. But it was. It was. Wasn't it?

She can't help but treat those days like a dream – an era that is worse than gone; relegated to memory, past tense, tearing through her when she unwittingly takes up a key to something that has been locked away in the recesses of her mind, quelled with no small amount of solitude and wine and sleep. Nessa, my love, I would have kept out of it if I had known. Elphaba would be nothing to me. I would stay with you, here, forever. Just the two of us. I would be here and you would be safe and nothing would ever hurt you.

Melena does not mean this. Even now, she is lying.

It helps, though. Keeps her afloat. Melena breaks the surface and treads and it becomes clear that she will survive the stupefying flashes of pain. She contends with the gravity and the misery and when she has finally battled it all into submission, diminishing the voices to a soft but steady hum, she finds only an absence. She stares at the walls that have witnessed so much of her history and wants, more than anything, to hear Nessa laughing and talking – about the weather, about lunch, about her deepest fears and loneliest days. Melena would even take a silence. But there is nothing beyond nothing.

The grief wraps itself around her core and tries to pull her under again. It is so hard not to give in. She squeezes her eyelids shut and sees Nessa receding down a corridor, a door slamming shut in her midst. But which way? What door? Whereabouts unknown.

Fists bunch in the sheets, breathing evens, and Melena pretends that she is nothing but limbs as the mist crawls in. She dozes, lightly, but does not recuperate, and this is the state that she is in when her maid appears in the doorway and half-guides, half-muscles her to the room at the end of the hallway. Melena wants to claw and wail and run as they merge with the staff members who crowd the door that once opened on Nessa's nursery, but she holds herself rigid and hears them out.

"Bfee finally got up the nerve to clear out the study, ma'am," Holly says. "Jerminy caught him ordering his people to dispose of the governor's things. He had them all piled up by the door and…well, we snuck in and took them." She studies Melena's face, as if expecting to be admonished. "We figured since Glinda already gave away the shoes, you should have your pick of what's left. Everything of hers that was in his wing – it's all here."

Melena, trembling, grasps the knob and peers into the room. It is a mess. The canopy hangs askew. There are crates scattered across the carpeting. Dolls that Nessa hadn't touched in years. Clothing ripples out of the wardrobe; the blue sleeve of the Shiz uniform. Pink wallpaper and shelves dotted with figurines from various trips. And letters – piles of old letters, tipping, fanning out across the desk. If Melena focuses, she'll make out her own penmanship.

Her hands grope hungrily over everything in reach, as if to absorb an energy that is long gone, and then Melena thanks each of the servants in turn. It is so strange, to have someone on her side, and she bears nothing less than gratitude for what they've done here, but she rushes them off and collapses against the door in exhaustion. Someday she will return to this room to sort through the squalor or give it all away or set it on fire, but now the mist unfurls again and pries at her like cold fingers and she must do her best not to submit. Nessa. Gone. Bruised bones and torn skin ground into the earth. Nessa. Everywhere. All these vacant rooms. A rising chorus of recriminating voices.

There is a bottle in Melena's dresser, half-empty. Bottles, smashed, split into shards with jagged edges, and there are places on her body where the skin is so thin that the vessels show through.

She has had this thought before, but this is the first time she renders it before herself with any kind of impartiality, with no call to oblivion. Just naked fact: there is a bottle and here is her skin. Whether or not they will meet is yet to be decided. It may not happen – not this time, not any other time. Melena can't forget that she touched those objects and stayed upright and it was her first victory in so long. Infinitesimal. Still a victory. That is Nessa's life, packed between four walls, and Nessa's life is linked inextricably to Elphaba's, still going, and to her own. Perhaps she won't need that bottle. Her heart will learn to bear the load. It always does.

After this, Melena begins taking daily walks to the house.

It is, bizarrely, the one place where Nessa's ghost does not chase her down. Melena can dwell at the site for hours without feeling a thing. The wind roars through the leaves and squirrels skitter across cracking branches and she almost admires the world for being so full of life. Sometimes she studies the clouds, or the birds, or the fragments of Dorothy's past, but one day she comes across a bunch of rotting poppies on the sunken porch and their presence is nothing short of consuming. There are no footprints in the vicinity. She knows only one person who could steal onto a scene like this.

That night, Melena locks herself in her chambers and packs a satchel. She puts thought into this one, gathering candles and inkwells and a comb and fitting the items around the book that she slides in before anything else – the one about the little girl who fell into a world that grew curiouser and curiouser until she had no choice but to acclimate. Melena flicks through the pages and is not especially sorry to be passing it on. She knew from the moment she seized it off the table that it would not remain in her possession.

"You should have an escort, ma'am," the guard says, as Melena sets out the next day. "The Witch has been spotted in these parts."

Melena is all but buzzing with anticipation. "If I haven't returned in an hour, you'd best send out a search party," she snaps.

The leaves are still swaying. There is a storm on the horizon; Melena tastes it on the breeze as she drops onto the ground and splays her palms in the dirt. She will wait all afternoon if she must, but she does not have to, because Elphaba brushes aside an overhanging branch and steps from the grove with another fistful of poppies.

Melena feels for the first time in days that she might cry.

"How are you?" Elphaba asks.

From anyone else, the inquiry would be met with little to no response, but an upsurge of relief allows Melena the strength for an ambivalent shrug. She even parts her lips to try for some trite response that will alleviate the tension – this hole in my chest is not half as severe as it looks, I swear – but it congeals too thickly in her throat and she can't wring it out.

"It's a worthless question, I know," Elphaba says, catching on. "I just wondered if you're – if you're recovering." The circles around her eyes are as deep and purple as bruises. "I hate that she died this way. I mean, I hate that she died – but especially this way. She deserved so much better in everything."

"She was a terror," Melena says, and the truth spreads sourly across her tongue. "There was so much anger in her, even from the time she was a child, and I never truly figured out how to contain it. I know she was lovely, I'll never forget that she was lovely, but she was just as destructive."

Elphaba slants her eyes down and wavers, as if expecting to be sent away, and then she drops inelegantly to Melena's side. "You don't have to pretend any longer," she says. "I know she was manageable before…before me. I put that anger there. I'm the root cause of all of this."

"Is that what you think? Don't think that."

"But—"

"Don't think that," Melena says. "She was plotting a secession. They were going to take action regardless."

"You didn't see what happened, though, so how can you determine that? It was awful to see her so – and the last thing I said to her was—" Elphaba's face scrunches in confusion and she halts halfway. "Didn't you hear anything that night? The shouting and the…the clanging. It was a commotion. I thought when I came through your wardrobe that you must have been in the library or the parlour—"

"I wasn't there."

"Oh."

The three words echo through Melena's head like someone else's voice, like three incriminating bells, but she tries not to make this apparent as she asks, "Where did you go afterwards?"

"You don't know?" Elphaba stares for a brief moment and then irons the surprise across her features into blankness, realizing suddenly how removed Melena has been from the world. "I went to the Emerald City," she says. "He made me an offer I couldn't refuse and I refused it." She nods vaguely at the ruins. "This isn't just the result of a secession. I can guarantee that much."

"What is it, then?"

"A trap, I think, if not outright punishment," Elphaba says. "They knew she was like family to me and figured they'd draw me out – and they were right. I keep coming back and I don't know why."

"I'm sure she would appreciate you being here," Melena says.

"No, she wouldn't."

Melena laughs.

A bird calls from the branches thrashing above them and they both glance up in unison, stealing glimpses as it hops and swoops and disappears into the sky. Elphaba is first to turn her chin down, sighing, and then she shakes her head with no subtle amount of incredulity. "The Wizard of Oz," she says. "Glinda the Good. Captain of the Gale Force. The Wicked Witch of the East. Everything's a front, isn't it? Just roles that we've been assigned…and by whom?"

Some vindictive deity, Melena thinks, or else no one, because the world is act upon act until you can't be sure there was ever anything real underneath. But she hardens her heart around the opinion and softens her expression into one of sympathy and remains silent.

"I don't think I can do it anymore," Elphaba says quietly. "Life gives you things just to take them away."

"Maybe so, but it has an odd way of continuing to give."

Elphaba peers sidelong and makes no effort to wipe the tears that slide from the corner of her eye to her jaw and then through the air, spreading stains that can't be discerned on the dark fabric of her skirts. She finds Melena's hand in the dirt and squeezes. Melena returns the pressure.

They are still for some time and then Elphaba laughs bitterly and says, "A secession?What was Nessa thinking?"

"She wasn't," Melena says.

"There had to be something more going on," Elphaba says, "or else how would my father have known enough to pre-empt it? She must have been planning a strike or colluding with someone sinister – something must have pushed her."

Melena retracts her hand from the cold green palm and studies her daughter. The stillborn baby. The girl with the wide owl eyes. The Wicked Witch of the West. The only honest thing. Melena is no more and no less prepared to explain than she ever was, and she knows with certainty that it is now or too late, but she has so many things to relate and not nearly enough words with which to relate them. They come to her, half-formed, half-true, or simply wrong to begin with, and then fizzle into nothing.

She relinquishes them, failing, and merely says, "The Queen had only one way of settling all difficulties, great or small. 'Off with his head!' she said, without even looking round."

"But that's from—" Elphaba freezes, interrupted by the sweeping calls of men's voices and the swish of boots through grass. There is a gravelly growling that might just be hunting dogs.

"Hell," Melena says.

Elphaba springs up in alarm. "Who is that?"

"Bfee's guards."

"No," Elphaba says, as if in disbelief, and then resignation infiltrates her bearing, in the slump of her shoulders and the play of unspoken words across her face. This is her cue to leave. She must. But she hesitates. "If I don't see you again…thank you. And I'm sorry."

Thank you, Melena thinks dully, and I'm sorry.

The words enclose her, like an embrace, like a vise. She wishes she had the courage to return them. She wishes she could tell Elphaba that eight thousand two hundred and seventy-nine days ago she stole into the Emerald City with a baby that was neither normal nor her husband's and every night since the knife has been twisted a little further in. It is buried so deeply, she wants to say, that it is as much a part of her as her fingers or her spine or her heart.

But Melena does not do this. Instead, she shoves the satchel into Elphaba's hands and grits her teeth and hisses go and Elphaba is gone.