Before I return to the warmth of my bed, I open my window and let my curtains wave out into the night like white flags of surrender. He’ll see them when he comes home and know that I know that he didn’t invite me. It’s childish and spiteful, and a move more punishing to me than to him. I’m shivering considerably by the time he returns almost two hours later.
I hear him scale the tree outside my window, and he knocks quietly at the frame before he climbs into my room. He closes the window behind him without a word and then turns to face me, his cheeks flushed with cold and his hair wet and darkened with sweat. He is breathing heavily, as if he ran all the way home.
I cross my arms over my chest. “Have fun?” I ask pointedly.
“I didn’t realize you needed me to invite you,” he says stiffly. He stands rigid and straight. “I figured George or Beas did.”
It’s like a knife to the heart. “I told you last time I wanted to go with you.”
“And then you promised my father you wouldn’t.”
“So did you,” I retort. My cheeks blaze.
“I’m sorry.” He looks away. “It just gets complicated. With us living in the same house. With you not being from here. I wish things could be different.”
“Do you?” I ask cruelly. “It seems like things are working out pretty well for you and your family just the way things are.”
“Okay, Aila,” he says, his jaw setting in that way it does, letting me know that I’ve stung him just where I wanted to. Making me feel as though I’ve both won and lost when he leaves, closing the door to my room soundlessly behind him.
My head and chest ache all the next day. “Where were you last night?” Beas whispers at lab. “I was looking for you.”
“Didn’t feel good,” I mumble, and barely say another word to anyone the rest of the day.
After practice with Mrs. Percy I don’t even bother waiting for Will. I start walking in the breath-catching cold, the sun shearing through the clouds overhead, remembering what Mrs. Cliffton said about different sorts of Catalysts. I can feel the curve of Mind’s Eye in my pocket and the sharp corner of the Shakespeare book poking through my bag. I think about how someday soon we can go home again and leave this wretched place behind us.
I keep my head down until I turn onto the long lane that soon becomes dirt. An early March snow has fallen between the rows of harvested corn, white and raked as evenly as part lines.
Mother’s house appears earlier than it had in the fall, its dull gray peeking out from behind the grove of naked trees. I steel myself for the onslaught of slurs across the decaying boards. But the shadows are falling in such a way that for a moment, I can’t see them.
I walk closer, my bag heavy with books and hitting against my leg with enough force to leave a bruise. The trees rustle like summer rain. I stop and listen. Blink, and blink again as I look toward the house.
It wasn’t a trick of the shadows. The words simply aren’t there anymore.
The house has returned to a smooth, single layer of gray paint.
My heart springs open like shutters.
The snow is cleared from the ground. The word Catalyst, once carved everywhere in the dirt, has been raked away. Edges for flower beds are marked off with a small rudimentary fence. The craggy ends of the boards are smoothed. Even the chimney’s waterfall of bricks have been collected and mounted into a smart, finished bench. Mother’s house no longer looks desecrated and condemned. It looks more like a memorial.
Who did this?
I sit on the brick bench and drop my bag heavily into the dirt, my face burning at the memory of Will sneaking off all those times with his toolbox.
I don’t understand him. One minute I think he’s flirting with me, the next he’s treating me like a pariah. He invites Eliza to the ball, but then sometimes he almost seems jealous of George.
And now this.
I do think he’s come to care for me. I’m just not sure in what way.
I survey the grounds and consider which flowers I will plant here in the small flower beds, which seeds I will push down deep into Sterling soil to bloom whether I am still here to see them or not. I pull Mother’s Shakespeare book from my bag. She would like mountain laurel, I think. I trace my fingers absently along the name she has written. The note I found on that very first day on the train.
Stefen. I will always love you.
There, in the resurrected shadows of her house, I have a sudden thought. I reach into my bag and pluck out the vial of Mind’s Eye Mrs. Cliffton gave me. Put the smallest whisper of it on my fingertips and touch it to my eyelids.
Stefen, I think.
A string of memories floods in front of me, short and clear, like water droplets spilling onto my eyelids and casting ripples. In one I’m nine, standing next to a younger version of Mother as she looks at her reflection in the chipped vanity, brushing her cheeks with rouge as she calls out “Stefen” and then corrects herself to call for Miles; another she’s out in the garden, her hair long and tangled, her eyes haggard with sleeplessness as she chases my brother as a toddler. There are only five of these memories altogether: just a series of her calling Miles by the wrong name, and the last one of her at the sink, talking to herself under her breath as she scrubs the dishes and watches a blood-colored cardinal out the window.
I’m no closer to understanding who Stefen is. But I almost don’t care.
Because I can see her.
A deep chill is snatching the feeling from my fingers, but once the images fade back into blackness, I dab one more touch of Mind’s Eye on my eyelids. Frogs and fish, I think, and take myself back to us in the garden. She laughs in the gray morning, the ring glinting on her finger, her skin glowing and as ripe as a peach in its prime. I want to stay and watch her this way, and I try to hold on to it until my tears have washed all the Mind’s Eye away.
I wipe my eyes, and the wind rustles the pages of the book, still open in my lap, to a poem we’ve both marked. Had she kept making these notes long after she left Sterling? Had she stayed up late into the night circling these passages, still haunted by this mystery? Stalked by guilt, and wondering why she alone had been set free?
My love is strengthened, though more weak in seeming; I love not less, though less the show appear; That love is merchandized whose rich esteeming The owner’s tongue doth publish everywhere.
Our love was new, and then but in the spring, When I was wont to greet it with my lays;
As Philomel in summer’s front doth sing,
And stops his pipe in growth of riper days:
Not that the summer is less pleasant now
Than when her mournful hymns did hush the night, But that wild music burthens every bough,
And sweets grown common lose their dear delight.
Therefore like her, I sometime hold my tongue: Because I would not dull you with my song.
I pull my hands out from where I’ve tucked them into the warmth of my sleeves. My heart lifts in tandem with the cluster of dried leaves at my feet. They swirl and rise, spun into new life by the wind. Because I suddenly see the thing I’d missed before. The most important one of all.
Philomel, I think. Of course.