CHAPTER THIRTY-FIVE
I open my eyes. Something is going wrong inside me.
I pull the quilt back and my shirt up, and there is my chest, rising and falling, normal, black hair standing away from my skin, prickled with gooseflesh in the early-morning chill. Nothing wrong. Why does it hurt? Right in the center, between my ribs, my solar plexus. There's a cramping soreness as though a heavy weight has been resting there while I slept. I press around, rub the sore spot, and with that touch the memory of the night before comes back. Arguing in the cottage. Seamus' eyes dulling, his face turning from mine like a closing door. I recall the wrenching feeling of regret I had, on my knees before his bed, and realize that this is where the pain's come from: through the night, in my dreams, I have been grieving.
I sit up. I've left the window open overnight- I don't remember doing this- and a dry clapping comes from just outside the sill, a hoarse yelp. I flinch, involuntarily, but it's only the crow flying away. He must've woken me. I dimly recall a voice breaking in to my dreams. Outside the window it's just past dawn and the sky is pink-gold, hazy with dew; what I mostly notice is the overturned cup on the windowsill, the reason I left the window open and the reason I am still dressed. I don't drink that much that often.
I can remember watching the cottage in the dark, my chin on my hands, only its outline visible to me. The little flicker of candlelight in the window until late in the night and once or twice his shadow, barely discernible, crossing the wall. I remember waking in my chair, sore all over, and outside the window only rich black moonless night, like endless space. I don't remember going to bed.
The candle till late. I stand up, rubbing my chest. Something is wrong; it is me, I've set a wrongness in motion. The panic in my chest that has been trying to wake me is in motion. Every word I said in the end in the cottage comes back to me but with the clarity of distance: I said the wrong things to the wrong person. I've made a mistake. I've done something bad. I know what it feels like to have it lost to you forever, those were the words I used, that was the way I threatened another of my kind, the only other I have ever met.
How little I understand of myself.
I think of the determination in my voice. I flush. I had thought it was the wolf in me that was the monster.
I remember his trembling hands. Suddenly I see us both as if from above, and so can see his predicament. My vulnerability lies in what I might do, the ways I might be punished for it. His lies simply in what he is. Not a monster, really, more like a siren, or something close to it. Sirens are wanted but they're never attainable. They are the living embodiment of desire: one can never close one's hands around them. Instead you die in the pursuit. Seamus is something different. He can be caught. All it would require is that I go to the cottage and open the chest, take away the pelt, brick it up somewhere in the cellars where all the other secrets live, and he would spend the rest of his days bound here by an invisible chain, in misery, his life destroyed, the ocean only accessible in his dreams.
Or, I don't. The chest stays where it is, rusting, his fur breathing quietly inside, and I do nothing about it. What then? Same as now, it remains at the corner of his thoughts, always precarious, always on the brink of being stolen away from him. This is the difference. I am a wolf, a monster, a beast, but nothing and no one can reduce what the moon creates of me. It's only I that can lock myself up. No one else can take my essentiality away from me. It's mine, forever, just under my skin, sharp inside my mouth, looking out from behind my eyes, indivisible. What I am can only be killed, never stolen. But Seamus... one just has to lift the lid and have the imagination to see the fur for what it is. Then, should they decide it so, his soul is theirs.
I'm hurriedly lacing my boots. The pressure in my chest is a panicked throb. What can I do? How can I take back what I've done? Only I don't know how I'll say it. I don't have any words of my apology formed as I'm jumping down the stairs, two at a time. What I have to do is face him, hold his eyes in mine, and somehow pull us together; what I will tell him, I don't know. All I do know is that his deepest fear is the mirror to my own, and it is something I could never actually bring myself to commit. But he doesn't know that. And I've let him believe I might.
The kitchen door slams behind me. With the first full breath of dawn air the discomfort in my chest sharpens, spreads, and becomes a realization so enormous I stop short. I can see it, now. I see what he's been offering me this entire time, his complex proposition, really so simple: himself. If I can handle it.
It'll be all right if you can handle it. He has been trying to tell me. He has been trying to explain what he wants. Gently and over time, he has been trying to ease my fear of him. So that he can be safe with me.
The enormity of my mistake swallows me up.
Everything is lost in the fury of my thoughts. I don't focus, my eyes don't see, and it's not until I am reaching out to knock on it that I understand that the cottage door is standing open before me.
.
The cottage is empty. He's even swept out the ashes from the fire. Nothing is left of his presence except the candle on the sill, the one I watched last night, burned down to a stump.
I sit on the bed- the blanket folded on top, a neat triangle, ready to be brought up to the house and packed away again- and feel my heart fall from my body and through the smooth earth of the floor and down into the miles of rock, core of the earth. It's no hyperbole. I feel it dropping, I feel it leave, and then I feel its absence, like the ache after a cough. This is what the pain was trying to tell me. Somehow my body already knew. For a long time I sit on the bed and look out the door to the treetops in the sky, with my heart gone.
The corner where his wooden chest was is lower than the rest of the room and this is where a small round stone has rolled, to sit at the juncture of the walls. I pick it up. In my palm the little grey ball warms to the same temperature as my skin. If I leave it there, soon it will heat until it burns. It's the silver musket ball, missing from the frame. Either he left it as a warning not to look for him, or perhaps recrimination. I find I'm not interested in which. I toss it out the door and it bounces off the rock of the path into the grass and it, too, is gone.
As I leave I find I can't make myself close the door. There's no need to, anyhow. The cottage is as empty as if no one has ever been here.
On the walk back to the house I think of how the sun will go down this evening and then it will go down again every evening of my life. I think of the walls of Harthome, silent, absorbing every sound but the ticking of the grandfather clock. I think of the feeling of howling and hearing no answer, never hearing any answer. I think of the hour between dusk and nightfall stretching, stretching, repeating itself every single day, never changing; I think of my long lonesome life, I think of the quiet ticking of the hours, each hour longer; I think of the long quiet patient wait for something that will never come. I think of the silence. I face the pure emptiness of my life.
It occurs to me, for a moment, just a breath, that I could turn back, keep walking, walk all the way to Sea Cliff and up the promontory and then off the edge into the air, and that would be all right; I would be all right with that.
Except I would then be giving Agnes, who raised me, who loves me, the sense of loss that I am feeling now. And I love her. So I come home.