How can I describe the shadow that fell over me then? I didn’t go to see the Skelleys, not even to tell Thomas goodbye before he went away to university. I felt his bewildered sorrow touch me through the intervening air, and tightened my shoulders. I gave up studying and only stared at the corner of the room, or let the muscle memory of a thousand repetitions carry me through my chores.
If I hadn’t murdered, my reprieve was due to the purest luck. I knew that part of me had wanted to murder Darius, had passionately attempted to do so. Worse, that part of me was magic, and I could still feel it flicking, tasting, a snake’s tongue so deeply interwoven with my being that I could not drive it out. How could I know what it would do next? In the dark I felt its caresses, its intimate crawl inside my brain, like a whisper made tactile. It seemed to tell me that, whatever I wished to the contrary, I belonged to Gus’s hidden realm; to Darius; to Gus himself, with whom I turned so withdrawn and dull that he hardly knew what to make of it.
Everyone knew, I thought, even if they didn’t guess what they knew. Reverend Skelley knew. That must be why he made no effort to talk to me. I understand now, of course, that he had shame of his own, and didn’t know how to speak past it—but it was as if my eyes had grown unaccustomed to seeing anything outside my own internal murk.
Into the shadow slipped a year—a whole year, of the nineteen that I lived. The days passed and made almost no impression on me.
Until the next summer, when I heard a knock at the door, a scuffling retreat. On the threshold was a basket; in the basket was a blackberry pie of startling perfection, still warm, and an unsigned note.
Please will you see me, just once? I swear I’ll never bother you again.
“Oh, Thomas, of course none of it is your fault. You’re innocent. When have you ever been anything else?” I said aloud, and started to cry with sharp relief and a sort of wild, waving gratitude. The next thing I knew I was out the door, and running as fast as I could. I could see him in the distance, by that stile where I’d been sitting with Gus and Margo when I learned of my mother’s death.
“Thomas,” I yelled. “Thomas!”
He heard me and wheeled around, as thin and dust-colored and undistinguished-looking as ever. But the joy on his face was like the beating of wings.
Then he saw my tears and lapsed into confusion. I reeled to a halt near him, with a sickened intimation that what I was, and what he was, must not be allowed to touch.
“Thomas,” I gasped out. “You must not think—I forbid you to think—that you’re to blame for anything I’ve done, or anything that’s happened, or ever will. There are things I can’t explain—”
But he was babbling, too, with the pressure of too many nights spent searching for where he’d gone wrong, with words rehearsed to the point of incoherence. “I wanted to say—I never had any expectations of you, Catherine, I knew I couldn’t aspire, truly. Forgive me, if I seemed to? I’m sure you deserve whatever elevation the world will grant you, and more, and I was grateful simply to call you my friend.”
Here we stopped, both realizing that we were reciting lines from two different plays, as it were. A moment’s baffled silence followed before I laughed, albeit a bit hysterically. He handed me his handkerchief and I blotted my face.
“If the world has any plans to elevate me, it’s kept the secret remarkably well! What are you talking about?”
I truly hadn’t understood until he flushed scarlet—hadn’t understood in more than one sense. I was shocked out of my morose inwardness by the urge to protect him, and by the realization of just how delicate that operation would be.
“It’s just, there was something Margo Farrow told my father, after their last sitting. But maybe there was some confusion?”
Margo again! Annoyance heated my cheeks, to find her still interfering with me. “Margo Farrow is hardly an authority on my feelings. What did she say?”
Thomas stared at his shoes.
“You can tell me, Thomas.”
“She said that, since you’d given up studying with my father for your college entrance exams, it must mean that you had an understanding with—only you couldn’t say yet, because of his—” Thomas looked as if he might choke. “I’m sorry.”
“I see. Margo Farrow is entirely mistaken. There is no understanding of that kind, and there never will be.” As long as everything between Gus and me had stayed undefined—nothing but smear, drift, vaporous insinuation—I hadn’t felt it clearly enough to resist it. Since marriage between Gus and me was unthinkable, why should I bother to think it? Hearing Thomas come so close to naming that drowsy undertow put a new stiffness into my spine. “There is a bond between Gus and me. But it’s not at all what Margo seems to think.”
The bond was what we knew of each other; it was the secret, puissant malice that we’d each seen manifest in the other, the guilt that reflected back and forth between us in silent conversation. The charge that laced our common air shook with revulsion, and there was at least as much hatred in it as love.
This was the first moment in all our long years of friendship when I identified that strand in my feelings: that I hated Gus for our connection. And yet I knew how he’d protected me on the day I felled Darius, and felt ashamed.
“But—” Thomas was nearly inaudible. “Would Margo Farrow think it, if he didn’t?”
Gus could not actually expect to marry me. The idea was absurd.
“I’ve given him no reason to. And I can’t imagine that he would. Apart from the obvious barriers, Gus wants very different things from life than I do.” I realized something else then: that I’d been waiting for Gus to grow bored of my depressed spirits, my passive resistance to his plans. I’d been waiting for him to give up and leave for Nautilus without me. Darius, I knew, had retreated there shortly after the incident in the clearing, and it had seemed only a matter of time before Gus would follow.
But he hadn’t. Now I wonder: had I resorted to such a leaden, indirect stratagem because, somewhere far below my conscious awareness, I was afraid of what Gus might do if I spoke plainly?
Thomas said nothing, but something in the quality of his silence made me aware of the inadequacy of my words—and not only on Gus’s account.
“So you see, I had other reasons for ceasing my studies with your father.” How the reality of other people rushed back on me, like a wind across a wide ocean! I’d left both Thomas and Reverend Skelley to wonder why I’d vanished so abruptly, to accuse themselves for a rupture that came from my private reserves of violence. “But I suppose I owe him an explanation.”
“That would be good of you,” Thomas said, very softly. “I know it grieved him.”
Knowing what I was, knowing my own indwelling potential for cruelty and disorder, I couldn’t allow Thomas to love me either. But I wasn’t sure how to stop him, and resorted to changing the subject.
“You said he’s going to sittings with Margo Farrow again? I hope the spirits are better behaved than the night I was there!”
He met this turn toward flippancy with one of his rare glances, sharp with awareness of my evasion. “There’s been nothing.”
“Nothing?”
“Not since the night you came, and that was years ago now. Margo Farrow thought they ought to persist. They’ve been sitting together every week for nearly a year, even brought in different mediums a few times. Nothing at all has happened, not even rapping. My father’s about to give it up.”
I could hardly justify the relief this news brought me—except that anything connected with the derangement of nature now suffused me with dread. “I can’t say I’m disappointed to hear it.”
“But now Mrs. Hobson has promised to visit again this winter. Margo’s trying to persuade him to keep going until then.”
I was seventeen at that time. I could not possibly have known, then, that I had less than two years left to live, and an eternity left to endure. But at the mention of that slight, sly, and certainly powerful old lady, cold mercury seemed to roll through my veins, draining warmth and strength as it went. For a moment terror held me distant from all the bright and breathing world, and I could not say what it was I feared.
I suppose I have a fair idea now.
“Catherine?” Thomas called anxiously. “Catherine, are you all right?”
“Tell your father I’ll visit you both soon,” I said. I was striving for calm, but I know he heard the tremor in my voice. “And thank you for the pie. It looks wonderful.”
As soon as his back was turned, I sat down hard on the stile and tried to master myself: my heartbeat that seemed to be racing away from me, the black dots crowding at the edges of my vision. I gripped a jutting lip of stone and breathed as deeply as I could.
A question had been waiting inside me through all my shadowed year, I realized then. It was the presence of that question, gnawing and yet unacknowledged, that had brought me so low.
Now I lifted my chin and answered it.
In trying to save Gus, I’d only damned myself: that truth seemed unavoidable. I’d made myself unfit for a life of sweetness and decency; for their own protection, I must isolate myself from the likes of Thomas Skelley.
But I would be the one to dictate the form my damnation would take. Not Darius, not Gus, not Mrs. Hobson or Margo, but I myself would choose, and proudly, the terms of my loneliness. If Gus and I were connected, I would not let that connection be my leash. I would never go to Nautilus. And if I could not always stop my magic from overflowing, I could at least keep myself safely apart from other people.
For that, though, I would require an education.