4. Blizzard
Melena does not sleep.
Not well, anyway, and never for long. She devises strategy after strategy to outwit her own restlessness and learns every square inch of the wall in the process, tossing, writhing, squandering hours as she races around the memory of the day that is over and the dread of the one about to begin.
These hours spiral into entire nights, then entire weeks' worth of nights, and she feels only the balm of relief when she admits that she is no match for herself and gives up. Instead, she leaves a gap in her drapes and stares into the void outside her window, then the light that gathers on the horizon, and sinks so deeply into her cocoon of solitude that the world could be her own. Challenges arise, naturally, when Frex pays her visits – and sometimes there is company of her own choosing, but they are easily chased away with false tales of revenge or idle gossip or the threat of excessive affection. They slip out as easily as they slipped in and her ideal doesn't truly crumble until the maid raps on the door and calls her to breakfast.
There are no more children.
She could very well be barren, for she hasn't been regular since before Nessa, but she tracks her cycle with assiduous care and only issues invitations on nights of reasonable certainty. Frex is predictable to a fault, rearing before every path that winds between himself and guilt, and so there is no danger of him questioning her act. Even so, the trauma of Nessa's birth (and worse trauma of Elphaba's) has left him somewhat disillusioned with the business of child-bearing. He exhibits no desire to endure it again, but does develop a habit of blindsiding Melena with unwarranted displays of consolation, squeezing his fingers around her shoulder and making grand claims about the future. His life has been a study in the traits that make a governor worthy of their office, he tells her, and Nessa possesses all of them.
Melena's entire body stiffens and when she manages to close her lips over the laughter that bubbles to her throat, she refrains from pointing out that Nessa is only four and growing more volatile by the day. The last three councilmen to do so were swiftly removed from their posts.
("A son might inspire more confidence in the people," one had the nerve to say, "or at least an able-bodied daughter." Able-bodied daughter. It is a phrase that will haunt Melena for years.)
Anyway, they've reached another stasis in their marriage, the two of them, and she refuses to be the one to overthrow it again. Backed into the corner by the Wizard's cruel joke, she relinquished her last scrap of pride and confessed to the affair somewhere between the outer gates of the Emerald City and the switchover at Mockbeggar Hall. She waited patiently as Frex froze, thawed, and then reached out once more, appealing to her through his worsening opinion of the forces extending from the capital, for it becomes something of a common interest between them. Melena will never again be doted on, she is aware of this, and her shortcomings have left him with a precarious sense of loyalty, but when they take their tea together at the end of the day it's almost a partnership – at the very least they tolerate each other's presence, even going as far as to welcome it on occasion.
("And that means, sir," another says, "that perhaps it is time for you to consider dissolving the marriage.")
Melena welcomes other things too: news, usually, and rumours of merit. Anything that satisfies the itch she has to map out the other life, the one that skulks below the drudgery of her daily routine like a sentient shadow. With the stacks of newspapers that Frex imports from each state and the rotation of chatty dignitaries that make themselves comfortable in her dining room, it's a temptation that she can't shake, so she allows her eyes to stray back in acknowledgement. Everyone seems to have a stake in the conversation that circles the future of Oz, the hands it will fall into, but pitches nothing more than names and platitudes. There's Nessarose, of course, and a prince in the Vinkus said to be wild beyond refinement, a dozen or so sons of Gillikinese margreaves.
And Elphaba. They will all answer to Elphaba.
("A most extraordinary girl – quiet, but astute. You'd be wise not to doubt her capabilities.")
Monitoring the girl with barely restrained curiosity, as she once monitored the father, Melena pinpoints the day when he disappears behind the curtain and Elphaba stands in the light alone. It's no easy thing to grow up when the instinct is to curl in, and the pain of scrutiny is apparent in each snapshot, but Elphaba fares well enough to impress the masses. She holds herself rigidly in front of cameras and stoically during public events; aloof, guarded – as she should be. Melena goads Frex into attending the functions the bring the girl to Munchkinland and tears whole pages out of the papers that he discards, absorbing each photograph until she needs nothing more than an off-hand glance to place it on the timeline of Elphaba's adolescence.
Nessarose blossoms; Elphaba sprouts, all at once, and with all the wild determination of a weed.
Melena herself buckles under the same pressures and lands somewhere in between. Her posture improves, she's gracious with the officials sojourning on the estate, she's mastered every smile that is expected of her, and for the first time in her life people are obliged to take her seriously. She operates her household like a well-oiled machine, developing a sense for each wheel and cog, resolving malfunctions before they happen and with an expertise won through hard years of trial and error. The truly terrible experiences were few and far between, but the blame has a knack for snaking its way back to her and being amplified throughout the state, and she is cognizant of the fact that no one will volunteer corrections when she's in the wrong.
(She frequently recalls sleeping in the library – though she could not bring her eyes to close – on the Lurlinemas Eve that turned up more guests than they had rooms, for she assumed the Count and Countess of Ugabu were spouses rather than siblings.
Or the incident in Traum that saw them arriving for a ball and finding not a thread of formal wear in their trunks. Melena was left to contemplate her failure while Frex acquired suitable garments for himself and set out alone. The next day, their hosts expressed sympathy over the illness that kept her from attending, remarking that she did indeed look flushed.
Worst of all – the episode with the High Duke of Kvon, that bastard, who snickered for hours when she gave the cook leave to retrieve a visiting in-law and a storm impeded his return. Melena didn't think to have someone else on retainer and suffered greatly for it, making silent pleas to the wretched cuckoo clock on the mantle. The duke leaned in towards Frex and muttered, "At least she's charming," and Frex replied with, "She lost her mother to the Glikkun Flu at a young age," and neither stooped to addressing her directly.
Her eyes burned with tears of shame for days.)
Even now, seven years on from her vows, she knows that she juts into the former flow of life at Colwen Grounds like a boulder and that majority of the staff resents her for it, but she studies their habits and sands her edges and perseveres in her medium until it is a happy one, until her diversions are smooth enough to be taken as natural. Her judgement is deferred to because it is worthy of deference: she knows which linens to request, who merits what china, the crops that are in season and the dishes they best lend themselves to. She buys the flowers herself, tops up drinks herself, arranges the soirees herself, and when the governor deposits his colleagues at the train station their impressions of the Thropp family home are more wholesome than they've been in decades. Divorce is no longer in question. She is valuable, if not content. She is a wife.
She is not a mother – not yet. Days are long, but the months compound in an instant and Nessa is seven, and then ten, and then fourteen. But first she is five, and Melena is baffled by her, cataloguing the tics and the tantrums and making no headway.
Nessa, for her part, is a keen little thing, loving and vicious by turn, with a pair of innocent hazel eyes that could convert the most practiced cynic. She insists on smelling every flower that she passes and pressing handprints into every pristine bank of snow. She hates the prospect of bathing and then splashes about for hours. She thrives on attention, but must be bribed into abiding strangers, and exercises her power over them as though it comes to her as naturally as oxygen.
Melena observes all of this, unable to think of a time when she didn't find the little girl captivating, but endearing is a harder trait to access. They were one for seven months and Nessa wears Melena's features better than Melena herself does, which is surely proof of that, and still Melena can't determine where to begin construction on the bridge that parents are meant to cross at the sound of the first cry. She makes herself available, contorting her emotions every which way, but she never finds Nessa's powers of manipulation any less alienating. They break over everyone – Frex, the nanny, the tutor, the guests – except for Melena, and so she is left on the outside, fending off the uneasiness that swallows every slat that she tries to string over the abyss.
It all comes to a head when Nessa's sixth birthday dawns and a craftsman is hired to assemble a wheelchair, which is quickly inspected and approved and concealed in a shed on the furthest reach of the grounds. Somehow seeing Nessa carried from room to room is less painful, so they prolong it. But Nessa is getting heavier and more petulant. Their silence has fostered her belief that it's merely a delay, that one day she will swing her feet onto the cold floorboards just as she's seen them do, and her impatience is erupting beyond their control.
For a time, Melena presides grimly over many of these outbursts, and then she tires of doing so and supplements Nessa's frustration with her own, refusing to draw the farce any further. On the day that Frex concedes and rolls the wheelchair into the light, she sees that the arms that once gleamed with varnish have accumulated a thick layer of dust. They swipe their fingers through it and look away.
Naturally, it is Melena who is tasked with introducing Nessa to her condition.
Frex is present, yes, but he waits for Melena to hoist Nessa onto the seat and close her hands around the wheels. Nessa scowls and demands but why and Melena is confident in this moment that the meagre progress she's made with her daughter is lost. She should have fought against Frex and his requests and his cures, she should have fought, and she deserves to be stranded, but she watches Nessa throw her arms around Frex and thinks this is his fault just the same. Even after the pointed animosity lapses and Nessa no longer behaves as if her mother camouflages perfectly with the wall, they do not recover, not really, and Melena carries her heart through the halls like a heavy stone.
It is not until Frex is marooned in Appleton by an unrelenting blizzard and Melena is obliged to answer the calls ringing out into the night that Nessa deigns to remember they are family. They've learned to coexist again, but it's all been laid bare – the strain, the distance, the lens of skepticism through which they regard each other. Melena knows that there are no nightmares and doesn't pretend otherwise, Nessa knows that she knows, yet they end up in the same bed anyway.
Transferring her in, Melena fluffs the pillow beneath Nessa's head and turns the lamp down, and it is then that Nessa airs her predilection for interrogations at midnight: but why isn't the gardener's daughter in a wheelchair, but why does she have to be governor when she grows up, but why doesn't she get to have siblings like other girls do, but why, but why, but why. Melena is evasive at best, dishonest at worst, and terrified by Nessa's ability to read the darkest parts of her soul.
She waits until Nessa slips a thumb into her mouth and the gentle rasp of breathing shallows, then turns towards the window and watches flurries wheel about the skeletal tree branches, glittering in the light from the groundskeeper's hut. She thinks of the life she returns to when she can't make sense of the one she lives: the smoke and the spires, the foreigner with whom she has three days but seven years of history, the girl in the clippings that she stores in the bottom drawer of her desk – straight-backed, alert, tall for her age and too skinny. Nessa does not have a place in that life. Melena does not know how to feel about that.
And then she does.
When Frex bursts through the door with heaps of snow on his shoulders and his face frozen into a grimace, Nessa calls for him with unrestrained joy and the jealousy that gushes into Melena's veins alerts her to the change. Nessa retreats to his chambers that night and Melena misses the tickle of whispers too close to her ear and the sinless secrets they bestow. She misses the feeling of a little face pressed between her shoulder blades, cold feet against her shins, and the way her heart swooped when Nessa leaned in and murmured, "I love you, Mummy," before nestling in and nodding off.
They cleave for a day and collide the next, clinging harder, and Melena concludes with certainty that there will be no more solitude; for better or for worse, her world has a population of two. Even three days on, when Nessa shrieks about having to eat her vegetables before her dessert and Frex enables the madness, Melena does not recoil into herself. She realizes that the Nessa who throws fits over green beans and the Nessa who slaves over family portraits for hours, unveiling them with a flourish of pride and a semi-toothless grin, are parts of one whole – and one that she may very well love.
("Thick as thieves," Frex remarks, finding them giggling in the library. They've been there for hours.)
All at once, she is Nessa's mentor, her confidante, her best friend and her worst enemy, and something deep within Melena relishes every moment of it. She resolves to be present, to let the other life ride a gust of wind into irrelevance like so many aimless snowflakes.
This attitude does not last long.
In fact, it doesn't last a day.
