Part Six

We knew nothing about one another, beyond the boundaries of our physical selves. I suppose that is why Henry chose to take me to New York, so that I might meet his companions and gain a larger picture of who he was beyond a silver-tongued charmer with the gentlest hands. I tried to keep an open mind, the last thing that I wanted to be was someone whose fear of the unknown robbed adventure of its beauty. I had my credit card and could easily find toiletries, coffee and a change of clothes in New York. There was a small convenience store across from our gate where I found one of my typical "meals" of yogurt and sparkling water. I kept it in my bag, eating only half of it in the restroom and sticking the remainder in the sanitary bin before returning to Henry. I loathed myself for how quickly I had let him seduce me and how terrified I was of eating in front of him, of chewing, swallowing, of appearing glutenous. Of being a human.

He whispered in my ear, slipped my hair over my shoulder every which way and stroked my neck with his satiny lips. The high that this gave me, of behaving in such a way in public, was shameful. I had snapped at Todd when he stuck my hand in the back pocket of my jeans and tried to walk across downtown Portland, palm to butt. I didn't ask Henry to stop, I didn't want him to stop. I didn't care about the exposure, the indecency. I marveled at how handsome he was, like a newly wealthy woman might flirt with her first diamond. Next to him, I felt plain and unworthy. The cruelest truth of all, miles away from my sudden dismissal of modesty, was how badly I wanted to please him, to keep him intrigued and engaged. I feared that if he lost interest in me for so much as a second, he would abandon me, and I could not handle another abandonment. He had entered my life without warning or explanation. One misstep and I could lose him just as easily. Not once did this threat leave my mind. Before boarding, I went to the lady's room one last time and exercised my usual ritual of taking command of my body and remaining "pretty" for him. This was the longest I had gone without food, living from blackout to blackout, avoiding Giselle's calls and finding my life force in infatuation.

"I love flying," Henry necked me as we settled into our seats. "You might say that I've developed an addiction for it recently." There was an older couple a few seats over, gossiping and staring back at us every chance they could find. I lowered my eyelids until the white cabin lights died out. The wet warmth of his lips across my neck was enough to keep me afloat. "God, I love this century. You can get away with anything, really. Anything at all."

Thank heavens the aircraft was smaller than what I had flown across the country in. Two seats and then the aisle was the perfect climate for such behavior. The stewardess was younger and didn't seem to mind the scene that Henry and I were making. We were a light crowd on the red-eye. While the plane was in taxi to the runway, the lights inside were dimmed and everyone cast their eyes on the twinkling skyscrapers of downtown Charleston. Numbness and coldness crept through my body, but it was all internal. Quietly, I contemplated how distant we truly were. I was falling apart like a ragdoll in a windstorm, but Henry couldn't see, no matter how close we were.

A jerk came at the pit of my stomach, the plane stopped at the base of the runway. "I'm sick again, Henry," I told him, knowing that he wouldn't understand. I had dropped hints and even asked for his help the night that I collapsed in his arms, but there was a disconnect. He was so lost in this roleplay that he had developed based on my deepest fantasy, that he was a time traveler with no understanding of the peril that I was in. Even so, I thought that he would realize what I meant without me having to say the word.

"Look out the window and breathe." As he spoke those soothing words, his hand moved past the perimeter of my skirt and skyward. My boyshort panties, a full-coverage secret shared by most chronic dress wearers were hardly a barrier for Henry. He had seen a pair of them on me before and knew of the looser spaces on the waistband and the leg.

My comfort zone hadn't only been crossed, it was now a dot on the horizon and nothing more. "We are going to get caught!"

"When you're speeding down a runway at 500 miles an hour, experiencing lift off and the sensation of flight that, when you think about it, our bodies were never designed to do," the speed of his hand and the plane's speed synchronized, "you're a bit more concerned with surviving to notice what is happening two seats over, in the dark."

Our backs were forced into our seats by the sudden, violent change of speed. He knew how to touch me. Slow and deep, then faster and deeper than before. I unraveled at his touch. The secrets of my soul remained anchored, the disease that was killing me and the moment-to-moment, near-death experience of being launched from the earth, shrunk in their proportion. My excitement grew apparent to him, I was high above the ground faster than any jet on earth could ever be. My throaty swoon disappeared in the noise before either of us could hear. I watched the silhouettes of trees and buildings through the window. It was tacky, appalling. Or rather, it should have been. Instead, I found a strange sense of poetry in it. He must have loved the body that I hated to give it such a beautiful experience. Of internal and external flight. The space around us turned weightless and airborne, I tilted my head against his shoulder, gasping and watching the wobbling horizon.

"If you could travel to any date in history," his voice masked over the popping in my ears, "any day and in any location at all, where would you go?"

"Uh," I stammered between breaths, not thinking clearly. All things considered, my brain was hardy in working order, "the 25th of May in the year 1878." His laugh was dismissive, but his fingers had hardly lost interest. "at the Opera Comique in London," I specified further, trying to prove that I hadn't merely plucked the date out of thin air. "To see the premiere of HMS Pinafore."

"If that is what you wish, then it shall be so. I have a friend in New York-" an announcement of unexpected turbulence cut his sentence short.

A dark cloud appeared on the opposite side of the window and spurts of rain tapped across the glass. I watched and breathed, the inhibitions of my body and my soul were being challenged by Henry's touch and the violence of nature. Lightning burned and died in the distance between the walls of clouds. The tiny plane fought gallantly, lancing the storm and shooting towards the clear heavens.

"Marry me," I pleaded, in the place of my usual, trite bellow of love. The sights that I was seeing and the feelings that I was feeling were beyond intoxicating. His spell had worked in a matter of minutes.

The engine groaned and made a shuffling sound that I had never heard before in all of my years of flying. We jerked forward, Henry and I, slinging towards the plastic tray on the back of the seats in front of ours. Divine intervention, that was my first guess. God had seen our sin and decided to strike the aircraft down. We dropped out of the grayness in a level freefall, the lights switched on and the speakers buzzed to life, but our instructions were much too riddled with static to hear.

"If that is what you wish," Henry repeated, hearing only my jarring proposal "then it shall be so." The thunderheads were high above us now. We could see Charleston below us through the clarity of perfectly-spaced rainfall, and yet, the wing remained disguised by a swirling blanket of grey. Something was burning and Henry, foolish, courageous Henry unfastened his seatbelt. "We're the only ones who can see behind the wing," he told me, "they need to know where the lightning struck and fast. Stay low and keep your head covered. I love you."

He disappeared behind the curtain of falling oxygen masks and a heavy miscellany of items from the loosened overhead bins. Doing what he told me to do didn't even cross my mind. I was dizzy enough to begin with and figured that standing on top of a falling floor would worsen my condition, but it did not. I was perfectly stable and agile as I escaped into the aisle. I could see him, gripping the back of each seat that he passed, heading towards the curtain at the front of economy class. Surely, I would catch up with him before he was too far to reach. This was who Henry and I were, when all is said and done, two fools with delusions of grandeur chasing after one another on a plane in a nosedive. I don't know what it was or if it struck me from behind, the side, or above. An airborne carryon, most likely. Or perhaps my body had finally given up on me, but when I fell into the black void of unconsciousness that day, I did not expect to wake up.

A wide window appeared before me in an ornate room with pale green walls. The golden light of a Carolina evening passed through it and glinted in rainbow colors across an overhanging chandelier. Breath, warm and doused with liquor traipsed my shoulders and teased my nose. A pair of hands, too rugged and large to be Henry's worked my hair into a sloppy, three-strand braid. "Have you ever been to a hanging, Annabelle?" I knew that voice. I had heard it before, in a distant dream. I searched the window's glass for the reflection of its owner. "Usually, it is a clean-sweep. But occasionally, the neck does not break and the convicted is left to strangle to death mid-air."

"There is some poetry, even in that fate, don't you think?" The words flowed from my lips and out into the dreamscape. They belonged to me and yet, Annabelle had claimed them. She had stolen my identity in many dreams before. The man behind me touched a book to my shoulders and started to write, using my back as a surface. "What are you doing?"

"Some words for you to reflect upon as you walk to the gallows," I tried to see him, but as I turned I saw that he was ringed with light, just as brilliant as the setting sun. Listening, it seemed, was what I was limited to. "It is my hope that you will find some comfort in them. Now, will you do me the pleasure of letting me hear the last of yours?"

"I might have chosen my fate today, but it is not too late to change your own-"

"-Marigold," the stranger interrupted me from behind and fell to his knees. He held onto me tightly- so, so tightly, and pressed the side of his face to my own. I had never been held like this before in all my life. It was exhilarating at first, but he made the empathetic artery of my heart begin to throb as his heavy tears rolled onto my cheek and lips, "My beautiful one. It is not too late." The light around the crying man, this anonymous angel, filled my eyes and drowned out the scene. But I could still feel his desperate embrace long after the dream faded.

Those mint green walls bordered with palmetto wallpaper did not belong to any hospital in New York. They were the same color as the walls that I had just seen. Whether or not they had influenced my dream, I could not say. I knew that space, the cold rush of saline into the vein on my hand and forearm were disturbingly familiar. What's more, I knew those black pumps on the other side of the curtain, the tapping of her foot bore its own unique rhythm. She was interrogating Giselle and now that I was awake, I knew that I was next in line. I moved, looking for Henry and he did not disappoint. He spread a hot blanket across my chest. Giselle must have told him how often I requested them from the staff.

"The hanging," I mumbled, still lost in pleasant delusion. "When was the hanging?"

Henry appeared to be intrigued by my babbling. My best guess was that he was trying to play along. "You dreamt of a hanging." He said with a nod.

I was thrilled that he decided to forego the trope, Wizard of Oz-style explanation of where I was and what had happened and contributed to my whimsy with his own. "When did it happen? And where?"

"That would be… 1780 on the second of October. New York. How on earth did you-"

"That's where I'd like to go," I laughed at my words. "How hard did I hit my head?"

The curtain's rings screeched, and our perfectly peculiar reunion met its immediate demise. Giselle was the last to enter my machine-plagued nook. Her arms were crossed, her face was stern. The psychiatrist who had worked with me before was a Martin. That should have been comforting, but it was not. She was a rotten apple on their family tree and despite those stellar reviews and the awards that had accumulated on her office wall, I never trusted her. Not in high school and certainly not now.

"Miss Zipp tells me that you dropped off the radar for a few days there," Dr. Martin articulated, piercing my soul with her icy stare. "Were you planning on seeking medical attention in New York?" I looked to Henry, wondering what had been discussed while I was out. "This is starting to sound a lot like your sophomore year of high school-"

"-Damn skippy," Giselle gave a soulful shake of her head, breaking into a full-blown cringe as Henry went to stand beside her. "Except this time, your escape didn't go as planned. This time, you didn't have your parents worried sick, or every cop in the county searching until you turned up in some roadside hotel, too weak to stand up and answer the door. You can't run away from your problems anymore."

I wanted to scream. I had fallen out of the sky and landed in the middle of another soul-crushing intervention. "It's different this time, Zippy. I had Henry with me."

"New York," she pursed her lips, "what's in New York, Mare?"

"I don't know! It wasn't Waterford. I just wanted to be someplace other than Waterford for a while. Is that such a crime?!"

"Well, thank goodness Dr. Martin is here. She can get you all situated up at Fairbanks in Raleigh again. I can visit you on arts and crafts night and you can get better and turn back into a real human-"

"A real human?" I felt my voice falter as I nodded.

"I think what Miss Zipp is trying to say," Dr. Martin began in that cool, soothing voice that therapists have specialized mastery classes for, "is that she misses you-"

"She wants me to move out. She didn't want me to graduate and come back to South Carolina because she knew that she would be stuck with me. You know what? That's okay, because I've started my career and I am getting married, you know, like a real person. So, Giselle doesn't have to worry about having to carry my dead weight anymore! Now that's all on Henry! Go ahead, Zippy! You're free to toss your undesirable potato sack of a bestie to the next unlucky contestant! Full speed ahead, Captain Underpants!"

Dr. Martin clasped her hands and took a cleansing breath, "This is good. I really think we're getting somewhere."

Giselle's face was utterly whitewashed, "You're getting married? To some dude I didn't even know existed only an hour ago?"

Poor Henry finally managed to sneak a word in, "You punched me in the nose once. Lovely to see you again."

"What exactly were you trying to accomplish by not coming to mosaic trivet and fondue night… and avoiding all of my calls and texts? Were you trying to erase yourself from my life?"

"Remember what I told you before Miss Zipp," Dr. Martin, as prissily as ever, tousled her brown bob that was sharp enough to tell time with, "it wasn't Miss Casey who hurt you, it was her-"

Myself and the other two women in the room were so caught up in our argument that none of us realized how flushed and frazzled Henry had become. "This is madness!" He erupted. I thought it was precious for about two seconds, but quickly changed my mind. "Marigold, I adore you. I have never, in all my years of living and traveling, beheld such a perfect and unique amalgamation of radiance, talent and grace. But where I come from, starvation is a cruel circumstance. Your wastefulness and ungratefulness… well… I am just going to say it… your behavior sickens me! I have been so blinded by your beauty, your kindness and your endearing quirks to notice it before tonight. Dr. Martin spoke to us earlier about supporting you and seeing you through this trial, but I am afraid that I just can't bring myself to do so. You know where to find me. I will always be there. But until you learn how to care for yourself, well, I'm afraid I can't… farewell."

I was so used to shaking, so used to being unable to feel my own body that I didn't realize until I tried to stand that I simply was not strong enough to go after him. Giselle, quickly and involuntarily reached out, propped me up and helped me walk to the end of the ward. We were at arms with one another and yet, she knew what I required and wanted to help me. "Not again." If she wasn't holding on to me, I would have melted into a heap on the floor, "I can't have someone leave me again!"

"Just a few more steps, just try to make it to that chair," she sat me down at the entrance to the hallway. From there, I could see Henry's form growing ever smaller.

I looked upward, broken and raw, gazing into my best friend's eyes. She held my head and pushed my tears aside with her wild, acrylic nails. "Why, Giselle? Why does everyone always leave me?" My heart grew sore, just as sore as it had as I dreamt of that woeful angel who shed undeserved tears into my brow. I deciphered that soreness with ease, it was the pain that one feels after they have hurt someone who they love.

"Don't you move, my lil' sweet potato pie," she whispered before turning, breaking into a full sprint and chasing Henry down. They were so far away now, I could hardly see what was happening until Giselle turned him around, raised her fist high above her head and swiped it clean across his nose for a second time.