“Are you…” But I cannot bring myself to ask what I want to ask, so I ask the question to which I know the answer already. “Are you Nora?”
“Nora, yes,” she says in some surprise, as though unused to the sound of her own name. Her voice is uncertain and pale, like the wind in the rushes, like old-age regret. “And who are you? I have never seen you here before. I return to this house every night in my dreams, you know, but it is always empty, my sisters are always away at their dances.” She sighs and, not waiting for me to answer, gestures for me to sit by her; when she raises her small white hand, the chain tinkles dejectedly. “I used to be just like them, once upon a time. Bright and reckless and fast. I made up poems—poems about music, about having wings, about boats in the sky—and many said I had a real gift, but I believed all gifts were meant to be tossed away freely, so I never wrote anything down. Every night, we climbed the stairs to the clouds and met with our lovers. Our lovers loved to watch us dance. We had such pretty feet, they said, and mine the prettiest. Every sunrise, in parting, we took off our beautiful shoes and threw them into the air, and our lovers caught them and drank champagne out of them, toasting our joy to come on the following night.
“But our fathers grew suspicious of all the shoes we kept buying, so they threatened to cut off our allowances, and when their threats had no effect, they sent men to spy on us. Men came, with butterfly nets, with magnifying glasses, with church hymnals, with thesauruses, with rulers, and tried to catch us, but we were clever and avoided them all, and some of them fell out of the skies and broke their necks. We watched them fall and cheered at their deaths, and perhaps that was wrong, and perhaps it was for our lighthearted cruelty that we were punished. For, after a while, there arrived a man with a perpetual frown and a white beard pointy as a knife, a man who hid his thoughts under a bowler hat. We heard rumors that he knew how to dissect dreams, knew why some women dreamed of balconies and kings, while others dreamed of wells and walking sticks, and that he would chase us through our dreams until he knew us and, knowing us, trapped us.
“We laughed at the rumors, and we laughed at him, at his arrogant folly, behind our hands, but in the end, he got the better of us. He followed us one night, dark as the night itself, up the golden ladder into the sky, and, once there, took copious notes of everything he saw—and as soon as he wrote something down, whatever it was vanished clean, just like it had never been. I cried for the moonbirds. I cried for the pearl lilies. I cried for the diamond-leafed trees. I knew it was only a matter of time before he spied the magnificent cloud boats with the splendid-toothed lovers. And so, to save my sisters’ happiness, I spoke to him, I promised to come down with him if only he would leave the rest alone. He was glad to have me, then, for I was like a bird in his hand. He took me home with him, and he put these on my wrists and my ankles, for, in spite of my promises, he did not trust me not to fly away. And every day now, I sit chained to his desk and recount my dreams for him, and he dips his dragon-claw pen into his golden inkstand and writes my words down in his thick notebooks, and he tears out the pages, and he swallows them after much mastication, and he grows ever fatter with fame. But I have my revenge on him, too, for every day I lie to him. I make up empty nonsense, fill his head and his belly with balconies and kings, wells and walking sticks, while in reality, what I dream of every night is this house, this dark, empty house of my former youth, with the vast blue skies above it and my young, beautiful sisters dancing free and joyous in the clouds. So, whoever you are,” and she points a see-through finger at me, jingling the chains lightly, “you are trespassing in my dream. And it is dangerous for you to be here, for the man in the bowler hat may begin to suspect the truth any day now and go back on the prowl through my soul. You’d better leave my dress behind, quick, and return to wherever you came from.”
And just like that, as though released from a nightmare, I am back in my own somber clothes, stumbling to the trolley stop through a pale pink morning, my bucket in my hand. On the trolley, on the train, my head is pounding, and it seems to me that all the other stern, darkly clad domestics are staring at me with disapproval. When I limp through the park toward my sister’s house, a short man, possibly wearing a bowler hat, darts out from behind a tree and flashes a camera in my eyes, and my insides grow heavy with ominous premonitions.
Melissa intercepts me by the front door, her forehead etched deep with insomnia.
“Where have you been, we’ve been worried sick about you, gone all night like that! Miss McKee is in the living room, waiting to speak with you. You should wash your face before you see her. And what in heaven’s name happened to your hair, who chopped it off like that?”
“Miss McKee?” I repeat, my temples splitting at the blazing trajectory that the sun is now drawing across the wintry sky. “Who is Miss McKee?”
Melissa gives me a withering look and strides off into the house, and I meekly follow her inside to discover Gwendolyn the witch sitting on my sister’s couch, tapping a pen against reams of paper spread out on the coffee table before her.
At the House in the Pines
“Perhaps I haven’t been sufficiently clear.” Her tone is stern, and yet again, she looks both like and unlike her previous incarnation, her gray hair cropped just as before but her face made colder, more impersonal, by a pair of glasses poised on the bridge of her nose, which seems to have shrunk even more in its dimensions, a far cry from the potato-shaped bulb of the chicken-legged hut and farther still from the hooked monstrosity of the crossroads. She is dressed quite formally, too, in a tailored pinstriped suit, which makes her look slimmer; or perhaps she has lost weight. “Your position is precarious as it is. Staying out all night, drinking, by the looks of you”—she gives me a chilly glance, the color and texture of steel, over her steel-rimmed glasses—“should not be permitted if you hope to reunite with your children. Now, when does your husband expect you to move back in with him?”
“Two weeks,” I whisper, chastised. “But I can’t. I won’t.”
“I should think not. In two weeks’ time, then, he will file for divorce, which will give him even more advantage over you. I recommend that we file ourselves before the time is up. We need to pick proper grounds for it, of course. Desertion is out, since you were the one who left him, and as for abuse, well, he was cruel and unpleasant, but he never did hit you, did he? Which leaves adultery, and here, I trust, we have ample—”
“No,” I interrupt. “I do not want to file anything.”
She clicks her tongue, impatiently. “As your lawyer—”
“No. Please. I do not want to do anything.” Panicked, I am pleading now, with her, with myself, with him, with the Powers That Be, in whose smooth, impartial workings I used to believe, used to not know not to believe, but which, I now fear, do not watch over me any longer—if ever they have. “Maybe he’ll see that parting is the best ending for both of us and agree to resolve everything peacefully?”
She drops her pen onto the table with much clatter to demonstrate the full extent of her exasperation. “The man is a classic bully in love with his own power. He will never agree to a peaceful resolution. Tell me what happened between you two in the last months of your marriage. There might be something there we could use.”