Chapter 7

Let me back up.

It seemed kind of fitting that I was returning to my parents, because a great part of the time lately, I'd been feeling like a child. New to walking, bad at talking, giant head, poor hand-to-eye-coordination, hungry all the time, kind of needy, and loving women a whole lot. That might also make me sound like a drunk. I think there are more similarities there than we acknowledge. For a child everything is new, you don't know what goes where, things hurt but you don't know why, and you fall down a lot. So that was me, talking with Ginny Weasley upstairs at my parents' house before dinner. A drunken child.

I'd been apparently successful at steering her away from turning me into something you wouldn't mind stepping on, at least for the moment, and this was good. I mean, you hope that no conversation you have with anyone, friendly or otherwise, meets its end with you having too many legs. I'd also managed not to drool, beat my chest, groom her or forage for grubs during our first few moments alone together, so the ape-suppression mechanisms appeared to be holding. But only just.

"So," I said conversationally, "what's been happening? Did I miss anything?"

She gave me a sidelong glance. We were seated at a small table of the kind I imagine you would find in the rooms of large old houses where there's so much space you've got to start adding tables and chairs or else it'll look like a showroom for your bed and you'll feel a little like the floor model. There was a bit of lacy stuff covering part of it, and a few books and a photo that moved in its frame were lazily spread out over its surface. I'd seen a moving photo in a store in Manhattan a few days before, so I wasn't going to let a little thing like that throw me. Even if it was of my mother, and even if she was blowing me kisses. Okay, hi, picture-of-my-mom, you look very nice, how do you turn it off, can you at least hold still.

"You clearly missed most of the whole 'magical community' bit," she said.

"Yeah, all of that," I said. "Arthur kept me in the dark about all of that. Is there…well, that's stupid."

"What?"

"Is there a … a book or a video or something that I can watch, to kind of, catch up?"

"I'm not sure," she said. "What's a video?"

Oh, yeah. Two-way street. "Well, it's, uh…" I looked around and my eyes fell on the moving photo of my mom. "It's like this," I said as I grabbed the picture and turned it towards her. The woman in the image was thrown from her feet, and got up looking a little irritated. I – well, I'd just get back to that. "Sorry, mum," I said. Ginny smirked. I went on, not wanting to lose momentum. "It's a moving picture with actors and sound and often explosions and driving very fast and giant gorillas. And it tells a story, though not always a good one, and some of them are funny, and some are sad, and some are – okay, I'm wandering."

She was trying not to laugh. "Like a movie, you mean."

Find dignity, D. "Y – yeah, like a movie."

"James took us to one once."

"Oh."

"It was lovely, if a bit unrealistic."

"Was it."

"Yeah. Not enough gorillas."

"I see."

"You're a little new to the movie thing yourself, I take it."

"I might be."

"Well, as far as I know there's nothing like that to get you going here."

"Ah."

"Suppose I tell you a few things, you tell me a few things."

"All right."

"Why's Dad in a dress?"

"Chabbpth."

"What?"

"That was actually me making a startled sound, not saying anything yet."

"I mean business, Deasil." And she did. I could tell that this was not the time for any foolishness on my part. Unfortunately, that's what my pistol was loaded with.

"Well, I didn't buy it for him or anything."

"I didn't –"

"He could have worn a nice pants-suit or a skirt. I don't dress the man."

"Right." She frowned, and I felt like – well, imagine if cheesecakes were sentient, and that they loved, I mean loved to be sliced, like that was the way they reproduced or something, and so that first slice was something excruciatingly wonderful to them, as a species or whatever you would call them, whatever it would take to have them far enough from us on the genetic tree and have it make sense, but anyway when her dark red brows moved and a crease appeared in her forehead, the creamy perfect skin now incorporating a shadow, well, I felt it move, and it cleaved me to the center of my being, and I wanted very much to find a pastry tool of some kind and serve her a big slice of me.

"What I mean to say," she said as a throw rug began to sidle up to her adoringly, "is what brought him to this? I mean why did he start dressing as a woman? Was it because he missed my mother, or was he retreating into another…stop that, you," she said as the rug began to get a little familiar. She pushed it away with her foot, looking puzzled. I for one was wanting to crawl under the table. I knew I'd made that happen, I knew it wasn't intentional, and I knew that given the source of the rug's personality it was fairly obvious that my thoughts weren't platonic. She looked at me sharply, realizing the first one. I was hoping I could tell her the second and completely avoid the third.

"Sorry, it just sort of happens," I said.

"Okay, then," she said, and she was being good about it a little, as the rug was having a problem taking "no" for an answer.

I said, "Give the woman some space," and after a moment's rebellious pause, the rug retreated to the edge of the bed, where it wrapped itself sulkily around one of the dark wooden legs and moped, again (as I find myself saying repeatedly) insofar as a rug can be said to mope.

"At least you can control it," she said.

"Does that really look like control?"

"No," she said, smiling, "it looks like negotiation. It's wonderful magic, though – I'm sure you'd be great with kids."

"I don't know any," I said.

She took that in. "I know a few now, but I grew up the youngest – I was always the baby in the family. Would have been nice to have a younger brother or sister – though I don't know I'd really wish that on anyone."

"You asked me a question," I said after a pause.

"Yes," she said, and focused her face on mine, a listening expression on her face.

It was quiet.

"Well?" she said finally.

"Well what?"

"Do you have an answer?"

"To…"

"To my question."

"Have I mentioned I have a memory problem?"

She took a deep breath. "You'd better remember I have a wand."

"A 'wand.'"

"This," she said, pointing it at me a little. I think my eyes widened.

"Like a magic wand."

"Not 'like'," she said.

"Now, you use that to – do magic?"

"Yes."

It was funny, it never dawned on me that those chopsticks were actually not chopsticks. For some reason I was aware of the proverbial magic wand but, having never seen one in action, had been unable to draw a link between the two. This is how memory works – you have an experience, you associate it with other experiences that have commonalities with it, and you are thus able to find your way back to your memory via a lattice-work, a web of strands that quiver and shake and help you locate your thought by leading you from node to node. This is a thing my mind does differently – I leap straight for something that I don't know I'm seeking and there it is. All intuition. And no common sense, which is why I thought "a group of men waving chopsticks at me" instead of "a group of magic guys waving wands at me". I know that may sound like hearing hoofbeats and thinking zebras instead of horses, to someone not in this world, but I'm trying to fix my perspective a little, and mostly these days, it's zebras. Or something even weirder.

"So why don't I use one?" I asked.

"That's a tough one. How about I answer that after you answer my question." She looked triumphant.

"Which was…"

Her lips parted, then closed. "oooOOOOOhhh," she growled. "I can't bloody remember."

"Dress. Why wear one?"

"Errr."

"No, I mean, why Arthur wore one. Them. Not why wear a…"

"Fine, get on with it," she said.

"He was hiding, I thought."

"From what?"

"Whoever it was that wanted to – 'get' me."

"What does that mean?"

"I'm not really sure. He'd said a lot of things all at once, when I finally started to remember things. It all sounded a little unclear, like it was unclear to him. It was like he was at the end of a very long tether and it wasn't even tied to anything on the other end. He seemed lost." I felt for him, whether I wanted to or not. "We were both – lost together. I still find it really hard to get mad at him, because he clearly meant no harm and in some way, he was trying his best to save me."

She frowned again. I'll just keep my thoughts about it to myself.

She said,"Clear…as…mud."

"Well, maybe you'll do better than me. It's hard, you know, trying to explain something that to you seems strange and to me is just what's going on, and when everything you're trying to explain is just all completely new to me – of course everything's new to me. Why are you a midwife?"

She thought for a moment. "Why am I one?"

"Yes. I mean, why that instead of a magic farmer or a magic lawyer or a magic singer or something?"

"You know, everything isn't called a 'magic' something. I mean we all are magical, so we don't differentiate."

"What's the other thing then?"

"Huh?"

"What's the thing that's other than normal to you called?"

She cocked her head at me. "I'm sorry, can we start over – oh! Right. Non-magical folk. Muggles."

"Is that a swear word?"

"'Muggles'?"

"Yeah."

"No, not at all." She looked confused.

"Oh, I thought you were saying it like, 'Oh, muggles, I left my shoe in the … something."

"No, it's not like that at all. Muggles are people who don't use magic."

"It kind of sounds like a slur."

"A…"

"Like it might be insulting to non-magical folks. Do you call them that to their faces, or do you wait until they're not around?"

She blushed faintly. "I never thought about it."

"In the non-magical world, there are lots of words like that. For instance –"

"That's quite all right, we don't use those."

"What's the difference?"

"I suppose there isn't any. Non-magical folk, then?"

"Okay. Not any non-magical folk around here, are there?"

"Well, no really. The community of witches and wizards is fairly insular – we keep ourselves separate because non-magical folk tend to be put off by the magic bit. I mean there are some people among us who are born unmagical, but that's a little different."

"Do you have a name for them?"

"Not one I'm going to mention, as I'm clearly being insulting to someone somewhere." She looked a little disgusted with herself.

"Oh."

"Can I have my go, then?" she asked.

"Your go?"

"My turn to ask a question. The more I answer the worse I appear, to you and me both."

"Okay, my turn to show my lack of knowledge."

Her eyes narrowed. "I wasn't lacking in knowledge just now."

"What? No, I mean, that's what I do on my turn. You're fine."

She appeared to be slightly mollified. "Sorry, Deasil. You ask very direct questions, and that's surely the shortest way to an answer, but sometimes it's a little… "

"I'm sorry about that. I'd probably be referring to previous conversations I'd had with people, and trying to do what worked then, but…you know."

"Yeah. It's all right. Was my dad … good to you?"

"Oh, well, yeah, I mean she, he looked after me, I was always well-fed and healthy, we didn't laugh a lot as far as I know but I was never unhappy, until the point where I started to remember things, and then I was kind of upset, but she, I mean he was so sorry, and I know he loved me dearly and it was really hard what he had to do. He gave up so much to do it, and I could really see that in the days before we came here. I'm sorry, this is coming out stupidly."

"No," she said, a little sadly. "I'm glad to know he was good to you.

"One question, though," she said.

"What?"

"How shall I say this…well, looking at him."

"Yeah."

Impatience won out over diplomacy. "There is no way you thought he was a woman."

"Why not?"

"Let's see. Low voice, broad shoulders, adam's-apple, hairy arms, narrow hips, can't walk in heels."

"He was…he was just my aunt. He was all I knew."

She looked a bit defeated by that. "You really take people as they are, don't you?"

"I thought he was Italian."

"Isn't that a little…"

"What?"

"Never mind."

"He was a woman, he had dark hair on his arms. What's wrong with that? You didn't know either," I added.

"I am seriously not going to open my mouth around you," she said, pursing her lips for emphasis. "Besides, I had maybe a couple of minutes, and you had…" She trailed off, thinking.

I was feeling a little pressure around me - the weight of otherness was getting a little oppressive. "I'm goofing this, aren't I. "

"What? No, of course not."

"Yes, I am. You need to know some things, and I'm kind of an unreliable witness."

"You don't have to feel bad for that. You're doing your best – you can't help what you can't remember. You can't help what happened to you."

"I'm sorry. I'm doing my best to put this together for you, and I know I'm not doing too well. I'm really trying here but it's not working."

Her hand was on mine.

"You are not here to do for me," she said gently, shaking her head, taking control. "I'm wrong to let you think that. I should be here to help you."

"But you have as much in this as I do."

"Right now, I'm a healer, and you need help, and I forgot that for a minute, but you helped me remember." She sat up straighter.

I said, "I thought you were the youngest child of seven whose father came back after fourteen years, wearing a dress, which was something he hadn't been doing before, and you needed answers to make sense of this. I think you need this - " I gestured between us "- as much as I do, and you want to ask another question or two."

She looked very surprised, then angry. "What makes you think you know what I want?"

"I just think I do," I said. "Don't be mad at me for that."

Her eyes were flashing. The rug went under the bed.

Abruptly she sighed and her shoulders relaxed. "I guess I wouldn't be so mad if you weren't completely right. I want to ask a thousand questions, but I'm a little sc- er, I don't know that I want to hear the answers, and a part of me wants to just be professional and handle it that way, but a part of me wants to just – what am I doing? Why am I telling you everything? I don't even know you!"

"We're talking," I said, trying to speak softly. "I'm listening to you, loud and silent."

"Loud and …"

This was hard for me, mostly because I didn't know what I was talking about. There was this pulling, at the back of my mind, this drawing of my thoughts and my awareness, towards the woman who sat in front of me. The funny part was, as I felt myself opening to this thought, I found that the effort I experienced was not in trying to reach for her, but in keeping myself in check.

The holding back.

"I hear you, inside and out," I said, my voice sounding like an old record in my ears. "When you talk to me, I hear your voice but there's this other…knowing that I'm getting from you."

"Are you reading my thoughts?" she asked in a low voice.

"I don't know what that means," I said, "but it doesn't feel like I'm taking anything from you – just that I'm not stopping it from coming in."

"Do you feel that from everyone?"

Yes. Say yes. Don't make her feel awkward.

"No," I said.

"Are you making me blab like an idiot?" she said, her voice rising.

"No! I don't – I mean I wouldn't, I don't even know how, I would never do that. I can't help it, I'm not making you blab like a – you're not blabbing like an idiot, you're telling me how you feel! It's you doing it," I finished, feeling very defensive.

Her breathing was rapid, her bosom rising and falling, liquid brown eyes gone almost opaque with anger at me. "Why would I tell you everything? Why would I do that?"

"Why are you asking me? I don't …know… anything! I'm completely useless!"

Okay. Tears. That was new for me. And this other thing. Agony. And failure. I was failing. None of this life belonged to me. I was from nowhere, in an alien place, and I wasn't fitting into this, there was something wrong with me, I'd been away too long and this place wasn't mine anymore. Maybe it wasn't supposed to be mine.

And my father had left when I was little, and when he came back he was strange and I had wanted so much to feel close to him but I couldn't, he was still far away from me, like I'd never had a father, and the memory I had nursed and fed until it didn't even resemble him was now being exposed for what it was, a lie I told myself, and it was one of so many lies that covered up what I really wanted, to have a normal mum and dad again, the dreams of a stupid little girl.

My eyes had been tightly shut – they flew open. She was holding my hands in hers, and tears were streaming down her cheeks, and my entire insides gave a great howl of despair to see her weep. Before I could think any more I was holding her in my arms.

There might have been a hurricane over our heads. It would not have mattered.

It's hard to describe what I was feeling. I'd hugged my dad and that's it for me, as far as contact went and as far as I could remember. So she was close, and warm, actually a little hot, and it was terrifying because I was afraid she would hate it or be mad at me or it would just be the wrong thing again, but she was crying and I knew, I heard her, and she needed this and I needed it too and I could not argue with that simple truth.

We had known each other, we were children together. Chances were that we'd hugged a long time ago. Yet another time when I wanted something to feel familiar but it just wasn't. Not to me. This was something I wished I had a right to, because it was really one of the best things imaginable, and I wanted to belong in it very much.

But it was her. She was so…– and I was only…, my thought went. But her arms were around me, and she held me tightly, to the point of choking almost, and I could not be worthless, because she was holding me.

We rocked each other, and held on. The very last of it – the last flash of knowing – was her shame at wanting freedom from all of it, and beneath that, her will to not give up, that if it was wrong it would not be accepted, that a way would be found, that nothing would ever get the better of her. And I knew this was true about her. Nothing would get the better of her, ever again.

I spoke into her hair, which was redolent with a sweetness I could not place. "I like you."

She held me tighter. "I like you too."

We were quiet for a time.

I think it's the silence, that creates a vacuum around me, exerts an inexplicable pressure on me and begins to suck out things at random to fill the void. They always leave me via the mouth, and someone usually says "What?" I'm trying to get used to it.

"Ever again?"

"What?" Ten points to me.

"What got the better of you before?"

She shuddered against me. "It's hard to explain."

"You don't want to talk about it."

"Not really."

"I wonder if you have to."

"It would be brilliant if I never had to," she said, not letting me go yet. "People want to hear about it like it's a bloody tourist attraction. It's all very well when it happens to someone else – then it's bloody interesting, isn't it? But when it's you then there's always someone who wants to nod their head sympathetically and go on a little thrill ride with you and after a while every one starts to look like a vulture." She sighed. "It just doesn't seem to bring out the best in people."

I wanted to keep holding her forever. There was just not enough shelter that my arms could provide, not for her. I wanted to protect her, foolish and impossible as that felt at the moment, with all I had.

"I won't ask anything of you," I said. "What's yours is yours."

Another shuddering. The differentness of her, the textures and scent, her shape, bones, her hands, the warmth and humidity of her breath on my chest; wondering if this were something I would become used to, if this would be a regular part of my life, what that would be like, and hoping, hoping. Yes, another new thing, hope.

She pulled back and looked at me directly, right at me. Her eyes were a little red, but her gaze was clear.

"You don't know anything," she said.

I didn't know if I should smile at that or not. But I did. "No."

"Then you're perfect to tell this to."

"Right. Huh?"

"You'll just hear the story, won't you," she said, her gaze not wavering. She was holding it in place. Making her mind up. She seemed to be good at doing that. "It'll just be a story about me, and you'll accept it."

"What else would I do?"

"As I said. Perfect."

"Where do you start?"

"Let's see…"

She was a girl of eleven. It was to be her first year at school, and she was very excited. She was taken by my mother and father to Diagon Alley, a sort of mall for magical folks, so that she could get books and supplies, and a pet to take with her, as it was a boarding school. She'd chosen a white snowy owl, as apparently owls were used to carry messages over great distances. They didn't really require any training and could apparently understand speech perfectly. (I wondered if that were the case for all owls or if these were special magic owls, and if it were all owls then why didn't all of them gravitate towards magical folks unless some just liked the rustic life and didn't want to spend all of their time running errands, but I didn't want to ask questions yet.) She still had this owl, which had been named Hedwig by someone in the store. They had gotten through most of their shopping and were picking up textbooks at the bookstore – there was a large crowd there because one of the professors at the school was something of a celebrity. At some point my father had gotten into an argument with this "pompous rich arsehole" (her words) named Lucius Malfoy over some snide comments he'd made concerning the Weasley kids' parents getting what they deserved, and a few punches were thrown, mostly by my father, who apparently had a bit of a short fuse where that was concerned. During the struggle, a small book had found its way into Ginny's things. A diary.

She found it on the train to school, and had written her name in it, only to find the book writing back to her. She was a happy girl, mostly, but she'd always wanted for things to have been different with her family, and she'd had no one to talk to about that for a while, not since her brother Bill had left home. The words that appeared were comforting, encouraging even, and she'd readily unburdened herself to her invisible confidant. It was a very regular thing, a secret thing, and she treasured her secret, nursing it in a way. No one knew about it, no one would understand it, it was hers alone.

But some secrets, she thought now, are hurtful to keep, like a wound one tries to hide, and somehow even though she was pouring her heart out to a ready listener, she felt something wrong about it, and it was hard to say what that was, but she had times that she couldn't remember, things she could not account for, and the whisper in her ear promised not to tell anyone about these times, these doubts, and when things began to happen that were bad, the whisper became sly, and told her it knew she was doing these things, but it could help her, and all of the secrets she told to her diary were held up around her, glowing in her mind, and she knew she had somehow given all of herself away without knowing it, and the sly quality of the voice made her understand that she had entered a different world, far from home and help, but she had been bad, and she had nothing, nothing left of herself, so it was easy to take one step after another and wander down a hall, into a bathroom, hiss some forgotten words in a rasping tongue, and descend into a deeper darkness than she'd ever known.

The next thing she was aware of was cold air scraping her lungs and being shaken awake by her brother's friend Neville Longbottom. He, Ron and their friend Luna Lovegood had found her there, drained to the point of death by a spirit that had been placed in the diary by an evil young wizard years ago, waiting to be awakened by the right person. The spirit was a piece of his soul, and the diary was a thing called a horcrux, made to contain the fragment using the most horrible of all dark magic. The three young people had fought and killed a giant snake that had been roaming the school at the spirit's command, paralyzing students, including Hermione, since Ginny had unknowingly freed it from the chamber beneath. Luna had known the weaknesses of the snake, Ron had planned the method of its death, but it was Neville, a shy boy who stumbled in his speech and kept to himself mostly, who led them after her and killed the snake with a magic sword before waking her and guiding her over to its mouth, and helping her to pierce the diary with one of the snake's great fangs. He'd whispered to her after she'd sluggishly done this thing, "This was something you needed to do." She would always remember his horror at the giant corpse of the snake and the blood on his clothes, how the trauma had caught up with him and he'd cried openly when it was all over. He told this shivering girl full of self-revulsion that what had happened to her would have taken his life, that he would have folded in a second, but that she had held out against this insidious evil for a very long time, that it had taken over people older and wiser than she, but she'd fought it like a hero. These words of kindness were unbearable to her. He was very much a real hero, someone who does what must be done though the consequences are terrible and the toll is great.

It was funny, she said, how her friends found him so much more attractive afterwards, and some asked her why she hadn't just fallen completely in love with her rescuer, and she'd had to give it some thought, but in the end she'd realized that beyond what someone may do for you, and beyond gratitude and respect for the person who saves your life, that you love who you choose to love, and she had not chosen him for that. But she became his friend, and was close with him to this day.

"He did something to me," she said, meaning the spirit in the diary, "that I've never been able to forgive myself for. He convinced me to give up, he took me over. I hated myself for telling him everything, and for letting him turn me against myself, and because he had done this to me and I felt used, and invaded, and ruined. I still have my days where I remember that feeling of being dirty and worthless, and sometimes I feel it a little. But I won't let that end my life, and I won't let it keep me from living and doing what I have to."

"You don't give up on yourself," I said.

"I suppose not. I have friends, and my stupid brothers whom I love, and people that need me, and I can't just fold up into nothing because I'm having a bad day or I'm mad at myself. I keep moving, and after a while I forget about holding this over my head."

"Why can't you just forgive yourself for having been a girl who had something bad happen to her? It sounds like you did as well as or better than anyone could."

"You would have to be inside me to understand that. And maybe you could manage that, but maybe I don't really want you to understand. Maybe it's too ugly."

No part of you, I thought, could ever be ugly to me. "What if I don't go looking for it, but I promise you that if you want to tell me about it, that I will listen with everything I have?"

I know you would. I don't know how I know it, but I know you would be all right with it. You might help me make this better, we might banish this from my life, but that scares me a little, because it's my hurt, and I've had it for so long, I don't know what would remain if this were gone from me. Don't rush me.

That is what I felt from her, through the cracks, like a wind in my mind. All I could think was, never give up. Never give up.

"All right then," she said.

There was that glow again.

"Midwife." I said.

"Oh, yeah," she said. She looked amused.

"Well?"

"Well what?"

"Why?"

"Why what?"

"You're doing that on purpose," I said.