“It’s going to rain soon,” she says.
We stop in the doorway. I grab on to Marcus’s arm. I shake his jacket sleeve. His rabbit face bobs. We saw her go into the tunnel. We waited on the other side of the door. No one came out.
“How did you get up here?” I ask.
She turns and looks at us like she doesn’t know who we are.
I hear a crackling in the fireplace. I smell burning leaves. The room is suddenly very warm.
I watch Darcie by the window. I watch her tap her finger against the glass. I wonder if the real Darcie is still somewhere in that tunnel, if the woman who has materialized in the living room isn’t even her, but some kind of double.
*
Darcie is right about the weather. It pours rain for the rest of the day. Upstairs I sit on the floral mattress and listen to water drip on the floor and keep reading about the sea.
I remember my mother speaking on another video I found during an Internet Session, the feeling of her voice being branded into my memory: In another life, I could have been an oceanographer. I love the sea. In another life, I could have been a pirate. I have a mercenary side.
Do I have a mercenary side too? I think I must, with all that stealing.
In our bedroom, I list the things I still do not know about myself.
Later I try to match the voice that lives in my memory to the voice I’ve been hearing in the tunnel, but one is a speaking voice and one is a singing voice and how can I possibly compare those two things?
I look up and Darcie is standing in the doorway. I put the book down.
She sits next to me, her wings drooping over the edge of the mattress. I stroke the soft feathers. She smells of mildew and I know that I probably smell that way too, like something damp and old. I check for signs that it’s really her—the freckles on her eyelids, the stained front teeth—but I don’t get far before she starts telling me about her mother.
“I remember everything about her now,” she says.
When Darcie was a child, her mother would leave her alone for days, and when she returned, the scent of smoke trapped in her hair, she would say that she had met a little girl who was a far better little girl than Darcie. It’s a miracle I ever came back for you, she would say. Why should I want to come back to a lesser little girl?
“I’m cured or getting close to it.” She lies down beside me. She squints and tries to slip an index finger in my mouth. I press my teeth together, blocking her. Her skin has a bitter taste.
No one has ever touched my teeth before.
“How did you get out of the tunnel?” I ask. “Where did you go?”
“I don’t know.” She pulls her hand away. Her face darkens. She looks like she’s about to cry. “I was there and then I wasn’t.”
Fragments of the song drift through me. I can’t decide if Darcie is lying or telling the truth. If this house is a perfectly normal house and she is the one who likes to play these tricks.
My mother’s photo is between us on the mattress. Darcie picks it up.
“Who is this?” she asks.
“I’m still figuring that out.”
“I don’t ever want to go down there again,” she says, still looking at the photo.
32.
A list of things the girl hates about Allston: the old Twin Donut sign; Frederick Law Olmsted’s Ringer Playground, where sometimes people get murdered; the frozen yogurt place on Brighton Ave. that is always out of vanilla; the martial arts center on Harvard Ave. where people who are not her get to learn about self-defense.
*
The girl stands on the Psychologist’s bedroom floor. She is not wearing any clothes. What are clothes? she sometimes thinks, to try to make it all feel more normal. If clothes do not exist in this world, how can she be expected to wear them?
He is kneeling in front of her and dabbing white electrodes on her skin. Where have all these electrodes come from? There’s one on each nipple, one on her knee, a constellation of them on her stomach, all round and cold. The Psychologist is dressed as usual, in his khaki pants and blue collared shirt. His socks are striped like the coat of a tiger. She remembers the wing-shaped sweat marks on his stomach. She remembers his hot rotten breath.
“One hundred billion neurons,” he tells her. “All of them have to be trained.”
She is older than she was the last time she saw herself, but not as old as she will be on the farm in Walpole. This is the in-between.
They are alone in the house. The room is silent. There is no Spanish singing, no Plácido Domingo, and she almost misses him. She misses the familiarity as they move into this strange and terrifying new phase.
The first time they did it this way, he took off her clothes one piece at a time. Her socks were the last to go.
His glasses keep sliding down his nose. He slips an electrode inside her. He sits back on his heels, wipes his forehead with his wrist. This stage is finished. He goes to his computer and she waits for the tiny pulses. Forget her mind. She waits to see what this will do to her body.
A whale sound comes on. She has heard the same wet moans and snorts on a marine life video she saw in school. He tells her she is controlling the sound with her mind. He tells her to keep thinking about the happy thing. To do as he has taught her.
She imagines her hands batting at a ball, trying to keep it high in the air.
Even after the electrodes are peeled away and her clothes returned, she knows the evidence of these sessions will remain; it will cling to her, it will never leave, and there will be no other option except to live her life exactly the way she will end up living it, with a memory that is like a tunnel where you can only get so far before you are blocked by a wall.
One day she will knock that wall down. One day she will be ready.
For months they do this and he tells her that her brain is being forever changed and she believes him. She can feel it happening.