I took her hand with a feeling of deepening unreality, as if I might blink and find we’d never left her office in the first place, and everything in between had been a disturbing daydream. “Is it—will it be enough? Will they—” The sentence caught on the barbed wire of my throat and went down, thrashing.
Vivian softened, just slightly. “They’ll remember her. I promise.”
I swallowed several times, my hand shaking badly in hers. “As will I,” I said, and that, too, was a promise. The world might remember you as I wrote you, but I would remember you as you were: hard and strange and silent, your hands bloodied and your soul sick with it. I would remember the line between your brows. I would remember that you were not beautiful, not really, but that the sight of you struck me as a hammer strikes hot iron, reordering my very atoms.
“As will I,” I said again, thickly.
Vivian smiled fondly down at me. Then her grip tightened without warning, crushing my hand in hers until I cried out, until the crusted beds of my missing nails burst open and bled fresh.
Both of us watched a fat drop fall from my hand and splash, lavishly, across the open book.
Vivian’s smile had not faltered. She said, “Oh, Mallory. You never do.”
And time unraveled again.
THE
SECOND DEATH
OF
UNA
EVERLASTING
10
SEVERAL YEARS AFTERthe war, during the mid-afternoon hour I generally put aside to fantasize about setting fire to my manuscript and disappearing into the countryside to raise goats, I received a book in the post.
(I wonder sometimes: What if I’d refused it? What if I’d let it sit on my desk, unopened, or set fire to it, or thrown it out the damned window? But of course I didn’t. I never did.)
I tore away the wrapping. Observed your device carved into the cover and your name on the title page. Concluded unhappily that the doctors had been right about me, after all, and the pressures of academia had proved too taxing for my delicate mind.
They hadn’t wanted to discharge me, even once the war was won. My throat had healed, and the infection eased, but I’d remained unwell, prone to odd anxieties and lapses of awareness. I would touch my own cheek and discover I’d been crying without knowing it. I would wake sometimes from a bad dream to discover I was standing at the sink, washing my hands over and over.
But, as I wasn’t technically dying, they sent me home with several diagnoses, a recommendation to avoid crowds and loud noises, and the Everlasting Medal of Valor.
I’d found ways to lessen the frequency of my lapses, since my return. I avoided crowds and loud noises; I stayed out of the cold and slept with the lights on. I tacked a poster of you to the back of my office door, so that I could glance up from my work and remind myself that you were a figment, a fable, a stranger who’d died nine hundred years before I was born.
But perhaps I was getting worse again, because there I was, absolutely certain that I was holding a book which did not exist.
It was doing a very good impression of existing—I could feel the weight ofthe wood on my palms, smell the wintry scent of the pages, like woodsmoke and frost—but my body was no longer a reliable narrator. For example: Was I standing on thin carpeting, or deep loam? Was that ink smudged on my fingers, or did it glint red in the light?
“—you quite alright, Mallory?” The tone (irritable, becoming alarmed) suggested the speaker had asked before; the voice (a solicitous drawl, of the kind they teach at boarding schools) told me who it must be.
“Sorry, Harrison, just distracted.” I set the book on my desk slightly too hard, provoking a small landslide of old term papers and library notices. I made a show of gathering them up again, keeping my hands obscured just in case it wasn’t ink.
There was an expectant silence, which told me Harrison had asked another question. Probably about my manuscript, because he was, as I think I’ve mentioned before, a bastard.
“Oh, it’s shit and you know it,” I said, surprising us both. Our enmity was the type that was conducted through a pantomime of friendship. “Now if you’ll excuse me, I was just leaving.”
“Of course, of course. Mustn’t push yourself too hard—doctor’s orders, I’m sure,” Harrison said, demonstrating that he, at least, had not abandoned the rules of engagement.
I shoved past him, book hidden in my armload of folders and notes, scurrying past Professor Sawbridge’s office and out into the sodden heat of late summer.
On the train home, I sat beside a boy—redheaded, long lashed. About the age I was when I first read your story.
I showed him the book, softening the scrape of my voice as much as I was able. He couldn’t read the title, but he could describe your sign on the cover—at length, with enthusiasm. Not a hallucination, then.
