“I hate you!” Annie screams. “I hate everything you’ve done to me.”
The darkness in the closet is absolute. On the other side of the door, Annie is cackling, mad. The sound goes on and on.
PART TWO
11
When she sleeps, Aura dreams about her mother—the same dream she’s had since she was young: a house, a long window, a woman with blonde hair staring out. There is a man with her, flat-nosed and gentle, and then children, one by one. The woman dotes on her husband and her children with a love that’s almost desperate. Slowly the woman’s sadness lifts from her shoulders, but settles like cobwebs into the corners of her home.
The woman never leaves the village, although it could just be that Aura doesn’t dream about her anywhere else. The children grow and Aura sees them arrive home from trips, from journeys far away. The mother is always at the door to greet them. When they tell her about their time away, there is a flash of something in the mother’s eyes—longing, hunger, maybe guilt.
Sometimes the woman mentions events in the village. Small things, normal human things. Babies and weddings and death. These are the moments when Aura balls her fists in the dream. Sometimes when she unfurls her hands, she sees red crescent moons across her palms.
No one in her mother’s house ever notices her. No one suspects that she’s there.
But why would they? None of her half-siblings know the story of their mother’s first husband. None of them know she exists.
As the village grows into a town, these children become town children, then town adults. They sail ships to the other side of the world and become teachers and, generations later, lawyers and doctors and accountants. And then they die. They all die. The daughters and granddaughters and great-times-many granddaughters are all, without exception, suffragettes. Maybe this is where the mother’s passion and wanderlust has gone—passed down to the girls, who are strong-willed and difficult, mean and beautiful. They have the woman’s eyes—Aura’s eyes, and her brothers’, too.
She tells her father about the dreams once, when she is small.
“She seems sad,” Aura tells him.
Her father straightens. He is building them a treehouse, like the ones the village children play in, or so he says. The treehouse isn’t really a treehouse—more like a platform that juts out from the tree—but Estajfan and Petrolio already know how to climb higher, to twist their legs and grip their ankles around the trunk. Sometimes they swing from one of the higher branches and do chin-ups.
Aura doesn’t care about the treehouse. She cares about her father, though, so she climbs onto this half-built refuge and waits for him to answer.
“What does she look like?” he says.
She regrets telling him about her dream instantly.
“What does she look like?” he asks again.
“Like me,” she says. The words feel like birds with sharp claws. She feels them push out all around them and draw the scene right there, like magic, and suddenly they are both standing inside her dream, inside the house. Her father turns in a circle, nodding. The plaster walls, the rough-hewn door, the scrap of bright cloth by the fireplace. “Yes, this is the house,” he says and turns to her. “Do you want to see where you were born?”
She swallows, shakes her head. She just wants to leave.
“I think you should see it.” He holds out a hand and she takes it. Her hooves touch spongy moss and floorboard all at once. They are still on the mountain, but they’re surrounded by the house. She wants to run into the trees, but her father’s grip is so tight it hurts. She whimpers.
“Be quiet,” he hisses, and now she is truly afraid.
He pulls her to the back of the house—she’s never seen the back of the house in her dreams; she’s never wanted to be anywhere except where the woman is, and the woman never comes here—and steps through a doorway. There is so much light that at first it’s hard to see. The windows are bare and the outside door is open. The room is so cold she shivers. She’s never cold.
“The rest of the house doesn’t feel this way,” she says.
“No one comes here,” her father says.
She doesn’t ask him how he knows. “Why not?”
The ashes in the fireplace are cold like everything else in the room. Her father stares into them.
“There was a table here,” he says, gesturing. “Our bedroom wasn’t big enough to hold the doctor and the midwives, so they brought her in here and laid her on the table. She fell asleep, after.”
He doesn’t say after what, but Aura knows.
The floor is bleached white and the walls of the room have been whitewashed. Everything is bare, bare, bare.
“Why don’t they tear this room down?”
He drops her hand and walks to the doorway. Aura wants to tell him to be careful, but she’s not sure he’ll listen. What if he is swallowed? Could her dreams do that—whisk him away to some in-between place?
He shimmers as he steps through the doorway. She calls out to him, and he shimmers back into place, instantly. It was only the light playing tricks. But when he turns back to her, he is sobbing—like someone’s stuck a knife beneath his ribcage, like he can’t breathe. The room shines with sunlight and something else. The bleached white floorboards, the blank walls—they pulse with forgetting.
Aura watches her father sob until she can’t stand it anymore. She steps forward—her hooves clack against the wood and it’s the first time in her life that she’s been ashamed of her body, of how large it is and the noise it makes.
“Da,” she whispers. “Let’s go.”
He lets her lead him. In the front room, she’s suddenly terrified that the woman will be there, but it stays empty and she reaches for the front doorknob without letting him go. But when she tries to duck through the front door, he tugs against her, fiercely. His eyes are wild and animal in a way she’s never seen. He twists, she loses her grip on him, and she feels the house hold him tight—the cobwebs of sadness that the woman beats back with her broom are angry now, hard and grasping.
You did this to me, Aura hears, and she knows it is the house talking. You did this to her. You did this to us. Her father moans—high and terrified.
The house is gathering him in. It will pull him into the back room and bleach him away. It will make him into nothing. This house and the ground it stands on—everything wants to forget. To pretend they have never been.
She grabs for him and pulls. The house snaps him away.
“No,” she snarls, and pulls harder—she thinks of Petrolio and Estajfan and how they’ve teased her for being so much smaller than they are, but she is not small here, she is not. She digs her hooves in and pulls with everything she can, with her twin hearts and her love and her hot, hot rage. No, she says again. No. No. No. Give him back.
And then he is through the door and hers again. They are back on the mountain, and you wouldn’t think that they’ve been anywhere except for the fact that their hands are locked together. They stare at each other, breathing hard.
“Don’t ever leave the mountain again,” her father says, finally. “I don’t care if it’s only in your dreams. Do you understand?”
“I can’t control my dreams, Da.”
“The house invites you, and you go in. Don’t go in.”
“But,” she says, “you go down.”