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I don’t know what to feel.
That, that was the only thing Oleta could say about her current situation with any certainty. Well, her current emotional situation. There were many, many things she could observe about her current situation in every aspect other than the emotional.
Recovery in this empty cottage by the sea had been slow. The infection had been awful, but the effects of the antibiotics had almost been worse. They left her weak and nauseated, her heart racing and sweat beading on her forehead. (She took them anyways. Every single one. She knew what the alternative was. She knew she could not afford to be hospitalized, even for a short time. Questions would be raised, and there might come back into her life people with sunglasses and cigarettes, walking unpleasant dogs.)
It was while she was still recovering, while she was still weak, while sweat still rose on her brow with even the slightest bit of exertion (I used to be so much stronger than this) that the mailman came to her door with that oddly-shaped package. Oleta thought it was something for Hester—she was the legal owner of this cottage by the sea, after all—but it was her name on the package, and her curiosity had overpowered her sense.
When she first realized what was inside, saw those glinting plastic cassette tape, she nearly dropped the package in alarm. Her stomach swooped and Oleta was racing for the bathroom in moments, bile coating the inside of her mouth like a caustic paint. It was days before she could work up the nerve to play the tapes.
She had considered, seriously considered, not playing it at all. Just throwing it out. It wasn’t that she was full of hate, not that she hated Hester and had no desire to hear her voice again. She thought of cassette tapes and she thought of lozenges that tasted of aluminum, thought of needles and carpentry and blood flowing from a nurse’s neck like a river crashing over a waterfall, and she just couldn’t.
But she listened to them after a few days, and oh, Oleta did not know what to feel.
She was still weak. As of the cassette’s arrival, she’d not even considered moving out of this cottage by the sea and finding somewhere else to make her home, because she could barely walk down to the bakery without feeling like she was going to collapse from weakness and resurgent pain and moving out would have been completely beyond her.
Oleta did not know what to feel at all. She had a few ideas of what she ought to think of all of this, but thoughts and feelings weren’t on the same plane as each other and ultimately Oleta’s disordered feelings carried more weight with her than the clarity of her thoughts.
She had just escaped the Institute. If she ever went back to the Institute, it would be a door she would never leave through again, and they would change her, they would damage her beyond repair and she would never be herself again. She could not know for sure if Hester was trustworthy. Even if she was, she could not know just how well Hester had covered their tracks, just how well she had disguised her connection to this cottage by the sea. Even if her rescuer acted in good faith, she could not be certain that she would live her life in freedom, if she stayed here.
But she didn’t know what to feel, and somehow that had always been more important to Oleta than what her mind told her. It was how she had wound up in the Institute in the first place, but…
She stayed in that cottage by the sea, even as her confusion tried to drown her.
In the meantime, Oleta kept looking for traces of Hester in this cottage by the sea, in this town where she had lived, though Oleta did not know how long Hester had lived here, nor how long it had been since she was last here. She kept trying to find pieces of this woman reflected in the furniture, in the glass display cases, in the eyes of the friendly people Oleta spoke to every day. Hester knew so much about her, but she knew so little about Hester (knew a woman she had met in the park one day, a woman she had spoken to a few times, a woman she’d thought was pretty even as she found her behavior a little unsettling at times), and the disparity was never keener than when she stared at that painting Hester had spoken of in her last tape and tried to imagine the loving glances Hester must have spared it, and couldn’t.
She was looking for traces of a woman in a place she may have left behind years ago, a place that might not have borne even the faintest echo of her existence any longer, and she did not know what to feel. She knew she wanted to understand, wanted to make sense of her new circumstances and the person responsible for delivering her to them.
(She kept trying to remember Hester from the time before they were ten. It was locked far away from the shores of her mind, and whenever she tried to brave the dark water all she met was oblivion and the memory of a voice telling her to breathe.)
The house was neat and well-appointed, but Oleta had found it coated with a fine layer of dust that she had lived with discontentedly until she felt well enough to clean. It told her nothing, not really. It was sterile, and empty, incomplete without the person who was meant to live in it. It was like reading a book with half of the pages missing. She couldn’t get a sense for the story at all.
And the town told her nothing else about Hester. Oleta couldn’t ask about Hester, couldn’t ask what she was like, not without drawing attention to herself that she absolutely did not want to draw to herself. (You are not special. Remember, you are not special. They should not think you are special.) She could guess at nothing. She didn’t like not being able to guess at anything. It was a challenge whose rules she did not know, and she did not like that.
Oleta thought she knew one thing she felt. She wanted to know more. She always wanted to know more, but this time, she knew exactly what she wanted to know more about. She wanted to unravel the mystery.
It was a gray morning on the seaside when she was given the chance. The sky was misty-silver, a faint drizzle turning the whole world shining and sleek. Oleta liked the shore best at this time, when there was scarcely anyone else around at all, and her ears were filled with the sibling voices of the surf and the wind. When those voices spoke to her, her own mind was quiet, and there was none of the endless loop of topics that had nothing to do with each other, none of the endless internal chatter that could sometimes leave her exhausted and confused. There was just the world, and the way it spoke to her.
A dark blur in the mist resolved itself into the figure of a slim woman, some fifty feet away from Oleta, walking down the sand at a slow pace. Oleta watched her, and her pulse quickened as the woman drew nearer, and her hazy features resolved themselves into something familiar.
Her brown hair was loose and wet from all the moisture in the air, clinging to her cheeks and her neck. Her cheeks were pinked from the wind and her eyes were so very, very blue. Not the blue of neon, but the blue of a placid lake on a sunny day. Eyes to fall into and drown in, but that wasn’t the sort of completion that Oleta sought.
Their eyes met, and it was as if the world held its breath. Hester faltered and stilled, her hands twitching and her shoulders stiff with tension. Oleta regarded her, blinking sand and salt out of her eyes with more difficulty than she should have. Water beaded on her skin like tears.
Finally, with the slowness of lead in her arms, Oleta held out a hand.
She had no idea what to feel. She was willing to wait long enough to find out.