Chapter 35
THOMAS AND I drive in silence. He has both hands on the wheel, his gaze ping-ponging from the front windshield to the rearview mirror. Checking for what, I’m not sure. But I can feel his tension.
Outside the car windows, the darkness rushes by. There are no streetlights out here. No road guards, traffic lights. We are in the mountains, carving our way up through vast wilderness. It should be raining, I think. Then it would be exactly as it was before.
“For the longest time,” Thomas says at last, “I thought if we just stayed away, if you just had more time to heal. There were moments, you know, entire months, sometimes even a year, when you seemed to be better. I’d catch you smiling at a bird, a flower, a sunrise. Your face would brighten when I walked into a room. You’d even sleep at night.”
I don’t say anything.
“But then the wheels would come off. Abruptly. Without warning. I read book after book on the subject. Tried to identify the triggers. Some PTSD sufferers can’t handle noise; for others it’s a smell, a color, the feel of the walls closing in. For you . . . I couldn’t figure it out. Ocean, desert, city, country. I tried it all. But no matter where we went, your nightmares found you again.”
My husband turns to me. It’s hard to see his expression in the dark, but I can feel the seriousness of his gaze. “I tried, Nicky. I tried everything. I believed for the longest time that I could be the one who saved you. But then . . .”
He pauses, returns his attention to the road.
“I fell down the stairs,” I fill in.
“Vero,” he states. He sounds bitter, though I understand, somewhere in the back of my head, that his feelings regarding her are as complex as mine. He found a way to move forward, however. I didn’t, and therein lay the difference.
“Days on end,” he says now, “you laid on the couch with that damn quilt and whispered under your breath. Long, involved conversations with Vero. Vero flies. Vero cries. Vero only wants to be free. If I interrupted, you flew into a rage. If I tried to comfort you, you slapped my face and screamed at me it was all my fault. You hated me. Vero hated me. Go away.”
I can picture it, exactly as he says. My need, my all-consuming need, to commune with the past. Thomas, walking into the room. Thomas, daring to interrupt. The sharp feel against my palm as I connected with his face.
It’s all your fault, I screamed at him. I know what you did. She told me, you know. She tells me everything!
Thomas, not even bothering to argue. Thomas, walking away.
“The day you fell down the basement stairs, when I returned from the workshop and couldn’t find you . . . I ran around the house frantic. I thought you’d left me, Nicky. I thought, this was it. Given a choice between a future with me or a past with Vero . . . you’d left. The ghost girl had won.”
I don’t say anything.
“Then I finally discovered you sprawled on the basement floor . . . You wouldn’t respond to your name. Any of them. Trust me, I ran through the whole list. All the places we’d been, the names we’d initially tried on. Finally, I called you Vero. And you opened your eyes. You stared right at me. And so help me God, I almost walked away right there and then. You, her . . . I just can’t do this anymore.”
I can’t help myself. I shiver slightly because I know he’s right. There’s a thin line in my mind, and it’s been that way for a long time. “I am you,” Vero tells me. But I wonder what she really means. As in, she’s a piece of my subconscious, maybe even the voice of my guilty conscience? Or . . . something else entirely?
I would like to say I don’t believe in ghosts, but I can’t.
“I only ever wanted for you to be happy,” Thomas says now, his hands gripping the wheel. “I fought a good fight for twenty-two years, thinking if we can just keep moving forward, once more time has passed. But I’m wrong, aren’t I, Nicky? You can’t go forward. You have to go back. Given a choice between Vero and me, Vero has won.”
I don’t speak. I can’t tell my husband what he wants to hear, which makes it easier to say nothing at all.
Instead, I study the dark night rushing behind him. I smell smoke. I feel flames. But I don’t reach out my hand to him.
We have both come too far for that.
I feel Vero then. She is standing in the back of my mind. Not speaking, not sipping tea, not even sitting in the dollhouse, but more like a lone figure, waiting in a black void. I can’t see her face; more like I feel her mood.
Somber. Tired. Sad.
She is not coming to me, I realize, because for the first time in twenty-two years, I am coming to her.
She finally opens her mouth. She utters a single word: “Run.”
But we both know it is much too late for that.
Thomas slows the car. For the first time, I see it. A dirt road has appeared on the right. Nearly overgrown, it would be difficult enough to spot during the day, and almost impossible at night. Except, of course, that Thomas already knows that’s it there.
“Run!” Vero whispers again.
But there’s no place to go. I’m trapped in this car now, just as surely as I was trapped in my Audi three nights ago.
As my husband takes the turn, headlights slashing across a tangle of shrubs, tiny car heaving up the first divot.
“All I ever wanted,” Thomas repeats, “was for you to be happy.”
As he forces the four-wheel-drive vehicle up the rutted road.
Returning to the dollhouse.
Thomas’s childhood home.