Every gift a curse, p.15
Every Gift a Curse, page 15
Ask yourself: Who keeps the house?
I WAKE UP ON SISTER ASSUMPTA’S OLD couch. Aaron is cross-legged on the floor, hands knitted together, his nose resting on his knuckles. He must have moved me here. I don’t remember collapsing, but there’s a stiff ache in my joints, something that tells me I hit the floor all at once. I stare at the ceiling for a few moments, the plaster in the corners of the room molded to look like roses. The fire damage has started to crumble away at the petals, chunks missing from the facade.
“So,” I say, without breaking my gaze with the ceiling, “how long have you known?”
He looks past me for a moment, and I can’t tell if he’s thinking or avoiding the question. “Something’s been happening to you,” he says. “Like a disease, or an infection. But something has been happening to me, too.”
“What?”
“You know what my gift is, right?”
“Yes,” I answer, my throat still hoarse from screams. “Finding the worst in people. What makes them the most vulnerable.”
“Right. That’s what I thought it was, too. But what makes people vulnerable? Their memories. The little hidden shameful moments that they don’t want to think about. That’s what I did with the Children, really. Excavating all this shame from people, then using it to control them.”
I don’t know what any of this has to do with me being the Housekeeper, but my throat is too sore to interrupt.
“But then I hang out with you guys and, you know, everyone’s gift seems much simpler than that. Lily and the electricity, Fiona and the healing, you and your telepathy, Roe and the machines. My gift feels very . . . muddy by comparison. But then I started to realize, I specialize in shame because I always feel ashamed. My gift has been sort of warped by my years with the Children, I think. But I can feel my brain . . . calming down a little, for the first time ever, and I think I can feel the real gift coming through.”
“Your brain is calm right now?” I ask, thinking about the insane snatches of thought I’ve caught from his inner monologue.
“Manon has been helping me figure it out. My gift is memories,” he says, as if it’s a relief to finally say it out loud. “My gift is the past. I’m getting all these traces of memory from you, but I don’t think they’re your memories. I think they’re hers. I think that’s what the Corridor is, too. I think she was in that room.”
I bring my hands to my face, my palms still stained with dried blood. “I don’t understand. You think you’re creating the Corridor out of the Housekeeper’s memories?”
“I think you are the Housekeeper, a new incarnation of her at least, and I think we’re creating it together. That’s why we’re the only two people who can get in there. I think this curse is happening to you, taking over your body, and I’m, like, drawing out all these old memories. From her life. From before.”
“From what? Two hundred years ago?” I shake my head. “None of this makes any sense, Aaron.”
“It does, if you think about it in the right way. The Children wanted to call the Housekeeper on you, right? So they do it, only nothing happens. That’s because you are the Housekeeper. I don’t know why. Maybe she needs a new host body. Maybe it’s destiny. But the Children summoning her has rushed along the process or something. Either way, you’re becoming her. All this rage you feel, all this disproportionate anger, it only happens when people are vulnerable or under attack. That’s her whole deal, isn’t it, protecting the vulnerable? Right, Maeve?”
A coldness comes over me as I try to puzzle it out logically. There’s no doubt that my new strange power, my rage and fury that suddenly strikes people blind, arrived as the Corridor did, and when Aaron came back. The Housekeeper portrait is in the Corridor. When I first met Nuala, she said that the Housekeeper was a myth from the Big House days, when Irish servants were so abused by English lords that they called on black magic to help them.
The tiny furniture, the gold filigree, the carriage clock on the mantel. Was it a shadow of the original house that Aaron’s power was hauling up from the past? A memory, belonging to a ghost?
A ghost that I was slowly becoming. A ghost that I would make flesh again.
The pieces fit together in my head so naturally, flowing like a story that I’ve known forever. The Housekeeper must replenish, regenerate, find new hosts to dwell within.
“Cards, right?” he says. “You always have dreams about playing cards after you see me, don’t you? In a dirty, grand house. This house, I think.”
“I didn’t tell you that,” I say coldly.
“I know. But I can feel it. I just thought they were stupid dreams, but then these fragments keep adding to the scene. Something bad happening. Something to her, or to you, or both of you.”
The portrait in the Corridor. It was inarguably a portrait of me.
“So why do we keep going to the Lodge through the Corridor?”
“I don’t know.”
We look at each other, empty of ideas, until finally it dawns on me.
“Oh, my god. The cards. Aaron, the fucking cards. Squirrel Girl had them. Dorey had them on her desk. They had tarot.”
Aaron blinks rapidly, as if trying to let air into his brain to prevent it from overheating.
“You don’t think she’s . . . calling you, is she?”
“Maybe. Maybe she’s calling the Housekeeper, and she’s getting me.”
My blood runs cold. She knows. She’s known this whole time. Dorey has been watching this transformation since long before I knew something was happening.
How? How could she have found out before I did? Was she watching me closely, observing my rages and freak-outs, noticing the shifts in my behavior? Did she have her own Paolo, and did he watch me turn Aaron and Roe blind?
“We’ll find a way,” Aaron says, and I hate his voice this way, I hate that he is trying to be soothing. I hate him. “We’ll go tell the others, and we’ll find a way out. Nuala will know.”
“No,” I suddenly snap. “No, we’re not telling the others.”
“What?”
“We’re not telling them. Not yet.”
“Why on earth wouldn’t we tell them?”
“Roe and Fi have . . . they have so much, Aaron. The gigs, the TV show. Do you think any of that would happen if they knew about any of this?”
His mouth moves silently, too stunned to form a response. “That stuff doesn’t matter,” he says eventually. “Not compared to, you know, you becoming . . .”
“I don’t want to screw up their lives and careers over a hunch,” I say definitively. “We’ve got to make sure first. That I’m really her.”
“How do we do that?” he asks uncertainly.
“Exactly what you said. If I’m really becoming a revenge demon, then . . . let’s get some revenge.”
“No.”
“Why?”
“Because I could be wrong. And we could be killed. What you have to remember, Maeve, is that even with the best intentions in the world, I’m still a fucking nutcase. My whole life has been paranoid delusion after paranoid delusion. I keep seeing all these visions with you, and I don’t know what’s true.”
“Like what?”
“Like stuff with a field. And a dog. You in a field with a dog.”
I wince, remembering my vision from the chicken house. The feeling of a wet nose, the good solid weight of a dog against my leg.
“What else?”
“A girl,” he says after a moment. “A girl who has been kidnapped.”
I perk up. “Lorna?”
“No, it’s in the past. It’s history, you know. It’s this thing of, like, everything repeating itself. But it’s the Housekeeper, or it’s you as the Housekeeper, and you’re trying to get a girl out of a house. And then something bad happens.”
“What exactly?”
“I don’t know. It’s like a dream, where you get the sense of something happening, but not the details.”
“And when do you get these visions?”
“When I’m around you, when I’ve recently spent a lot of time with you. I just ignored them. My brain does weird stuff, it always has. Compulsive stuff, crazy images. But then you kept changing. You’re a different person than who you were a few months ago. Like all the cells in your body have been replaced or something.”
I shiver and hold on to my arms. “I don’t want to change.”
“We can fix it,” Aaron says, suddenly fierce. “We fix everything else.”
“We break everything else, too,” I say, gesturing to our ashy surroundings.
We leave the school. We walk in silence through the city, even busier now, the clubs spilling clumps of drunk people onto the street. Girls with their arms around one another, screaming “Do they know it’s Christmastime at all?” and it feels oddly appropriate. It is the early hours of Christmas Eve, and I am walking through a tipsy city with a death sentence on my head.
Aaron walks me all the way home in the end. I don’t know what we talk about, or if we talk at all. It seems as though we drift into filler conversation, aimless small talk, a lorem ipsum for depleted souls. Too frightened to talk about what we’re frightened of.
“All right, Chambers,” he says at my driveway. “Sorry I ruined your life.”
I meet his gaze. He does look very sorry.
“I used to think you did ruin my life, you know,” I say. “Now I kinda feel like I wouldn’t get by without you.”
We hug then, our bodies stiff. Touching is still strange to him, I think. My arms around his waist, my forehead flush with his sternum. We stand in the hug for a moment, and it feels more like exhaustion than intimacy. We break apart and give each other a gruff goodbye.
“Take care of yourself, kid,” he says as I put my key in the door.
“You say that like you’re never going to see me again.”
Something passes over his eyes, perhaps another vision, or just an obscure piece of Bible verse. “Yeah,” he says. “Yeah, sometimes I’m afraid of that, too.”
WHEN I GET INSIDE, THE DOG IS FRANTIC. It’s past two a.m., but he’s yelping at me and scratching at my legs.
“Hey, Tutes,” I say, holding his face in my hands. “What’s your deal, buddy?”
He moans anxiously, smelling every part of me, unsatisfied with whatever he finds. Like he knows that I’ve changed, too. Like finding out tonight was the last piece of the puzzle. I take him into the darkened living room at the back of the house, where hopefully he won’t wake anyone up.
I hold him on the sofa as he cries, his little doggy voice high and confused.
“It’s OK, baby,” I say, burying my face in his fur. “It’s OK, I’m still me. I’m still me.”
I start to cry with him, rocking his blond body back and forth like he is a baby, the weight of this new information crushing at my shoulders. What happens next? I don’t know how I become the Housekeeper, but I can’t imagine it without the death of myself as I am now. These fierce jabs of cruelty and violence will increase, presumably. My humanity will rot, developing blue and green furry spots, like old bread.
And my parents will lose me.
And my friends will lose me.
And I will lose me.
The heaviness, the panic, the doom, it wraps itself around my chest and squeezes me like a snake. The cries shudder through me, and after a while I have to push my face into the armrest of the couch. The smell of mildew pushing up my nostrils, the fabric getting wetter with each new bout of tears.
Tutu wiggles out of my arms, bored now, and I stand up in the darkened living room. Except it is no longer the living room, and I am no longer me.
I am in a field where some high crop is growing. Wheat, I think. When I turn back around, there’s no room left, and no suggestion of how I’m supposed to get back.
I feel the snag and drag of green things, leaves and branches sticking to me, no clear path to follow. It tugs on the dress, which is when I notice it. I am wearing the white dress.
There’s a building in the distance, about two miles away, and there’s nothing to do but move toward it. It’s in the center of a town, looming over one- and two-story buildings like a predator. It’s Kilbeg, but a small Kilbeg. A Kilbeg that isn’t much bigger than a village. I’m exactly where I was, I realize. I’m exactly where my house was, only back then it was just fields.
I walk with my hands out in front of me, pushing the thick stalks away, navigating while half-blind from the darkness and the leaves. It takes me a few minutes of fighting plants to realize that I’m not alone. There’s a low rustling, the sound of a creature. Something on four legs. I step forward again. The creature is following me, and moving faster than me, the wheat trembling as it weaves through stalks.
I’m about to break into a run when a head pokes out from the green. A long, loping head, the shape of a greyhound, the size of a Shetland pony. Its nose grazes my elbow, and if it were to stand up on its back legs, it could see clean over my head. But it is friendly, whatever it is. It pants softly, wet nose against my waist, its eyes a glinting silver, its coat a shimmer of gray so delicate it is almost lavender. It is here as a companion, rather than a stalker.
It presses its face into my waist, desperate for warmth, hungry for home, and I finally realize: if I am the Housekeeper, then this is the Housekeeper’s dog. But dog feels too generic a word. Wolf? Hound? Hell-beast?
“Tutu?” I whisper. “Tutes?”
Tutu lets out a low whine of excitement, a “Hmmmnnn!,” and beats his tail against the leaves.
“Oh, my god,” I say, wrapping my arms around his neck. “This is happening to you, too?”
His big, almost horse-size head is warm on my shoulder, his breath huffing down my back. I am so sorry that this is happening to him, but so deeply relieved that I don’t have to go through it alone. I may not be able to tell Fiona, Lily, and Roe. But I can tell Tutu. He’s here.
“What are we going to do now?” I ask him, and he walks ahead of me, his big body clearing a path, trampling down wheat as we go. I follow, half leaning on his back, stroking him like he’s an emotional support animal, which, I suppose, he is.
The moon is full and low, and it’s another way of knowing that I’m not in present-day Kilbeg, where it is currently in its third quarter. The white light shines off the dog’s back, Tutu’s fur a reflective plate. I cannot stop touching my face. I need to know if it has changed, but there’s nothing different that I can feel: same coin-shaped eyes, same bump in the bridge of my nose, same wild eyebrows.
I am so confident in Tutu’s leadership skills that it takes me a while to realize that we are walking away from the house. We are walking instead toward a gathering of trees, where it looks like a wood might begin.
“Tutu,” I whisper sharply. “Is this . . . ?”
But he keeps on going, veering toward the shadows, his strides long, rabbits scuttling out of the way as he passes. I wonder if he remembers being a cockapoo.
I think he’s going to lead me straight into the woods, but there is a space at the edge of the wheat field, a circle where the crop has been cleared. It looks new, and unnatural, and like something you might get in trouble for making. The stalks have been pulled out and laid flat, a makeshift carpet woven under the moon’s full beam.
And standing in the middle of it waits a pregnant woman. Mid-twenties. She is holding two dead hares, their long ears filling each fist.
I realize, for the first time, that there is a reason witchcraft happens under the full moon, and it is because of light. It’s so obvious. There’s nothing to do with gods and goddesses here, nothing particularly enchanted. Just a light to weave a clearing. A light to skin a rabbit. A light to call a witch.
“Thank you for coming,” says the woman. She stops, gratitude and fear bubbling within her at once. “I heard hares were the thing.”
The curse, which had been curled up in my feet, suddenly jumps to the base of my throat.
“Hares are the thing,” I say softly. “For him.”
I cock my head, motion to Tutu. He collects the hares, carefully, from the woman’s hands. She jumps backward, letting them go too quickly, and then feels embarrassed. She so badly wanted to hold her nerve.
“And for me?”
She nods and reaches into her pocket. I don’t know when her clothes are from. It’s a simple dress, a dark blue color, made out of a kind of sacking material. At first, I think she has pulled out a coin: something big, gold, something a pirate bites his black tooth on. But it’s not a coin. It’s a brooch. She hands it to me.
“Thank you,” she says again. “You’re so . . .”
“No compliments,” I interrupt her. “And never give me anything that you wouldn’t miss dearly.”
She looks at the brooch, and at me.
“It was my grandmother’s,” she says simply.
“Fine,” I say, and pocket the brooch.
It’s hard to know where this is coming from. It feels as though I’m acting out a scene I have performed thousands of times before, in the middle of an interaction where instinct comes before anything else.
“Sit down,” I say. Although I don’t myself sit down. I walk the perimeter of the circle, touching my thumb to my ring finger, to my middle, to my index, to my pinkie. As I do this, faster and faster, I feel salt start to run through my fingertips. I am not making the salt but calling it from elsewhere. I have a home. I know that for certain. My dress is long and white and it has no pockets, and I carry no bags, and this is a flex. I don’t need to carry anything. When I own something, I can summon it.
“This isn’t your first,” I say. And she is about to correct me and say that it is, it’s the first time she has spoken to a witch of any kind, but then I interrupt. “Baby, I mean.”
“No,” she says. “There’s Una.”
“And Una is why you’re here.”
She nods. “Una is why I’m here.”
My cards appear in my hand. I tell her to take three. The Fool, reversed. Six of Swords. The Wheel of Fortune.
“When does she leave?” I ask.
She looks like . . . what does she look like? Like Squirrel Girl, I realize. Big eyes, small mouth. Nervous, and trying to be brave. Maybe there are no new people. Only new clothes.
