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Theo’s favorite pastel (a flighty, flamingo pink) breaks, two days after she returns home. The day before she spent attempting to win her roommate, Ruth, back, so it’s the first day she’s sat down and drawn. Undeterred, Theo takes out another one, then another, then her least favorite, and so on until she has only less than a quarter of her pastels remaining. “Well,” she says, looking around her tiny shop. “Sketching was getting boring.”
Eleanor, upon their first meeting, reminds Theo of the girls at boarding school who would cling to the shadows and then to whatever girl chattered the loudest, which would usually be Theo. The kind of girl that would giggle too deliberately at Theo’s jokes and too loudly under her covers after curfew. They all ended up hitched to some boring stockbroker or stuffy doctor, but a ring is conspicuously absent from Eleanor’s finger, and it makes Theodora trust her.
Theo’s already in a terrible mood when the family walks into her shop. None of her drawings have turned out to her satisfaction and her paints keep drying out, while the nuclear unit invading her store look so happy, like they’re in a goddam airplane postcard. The daughter, on the precipice of teenagedom, talks animatedly as she points out things she particularly likes.
“It’s conditional,” Theo wants to scream at her. “Their love, all of it. Don’t you see? Don’t you realize? In the next couple of years things could change. Steel yourself, escape.”
They buy notebooks and a lighter. When they leave, Theo snaps a charcoal pencil in half.
Theodora ate deliberately in Hill House, to say to the evil off-center walls that I am alive and drinking this coffee too quickly it burns hot on my tongue and down my throat.
The house seemed to feast on them too, if the bags under their eyes were any indication. And maybe, it still is. It would explain why she’s in the guest bedroom, awake and sitting in the middle of bed with all the lights on for the fifth night in a row.
There’s a plate of untouched food on the nightstand. She was always hungry in Hill House but outside of it she seems to have no appetite at all.
What frightened her the most is though Nell was as peevish and jumpy as the rest of them, she seemed happier the more time they spent in the house. More confident.
It was almost as if—
“Marble,” Theo murmurs to herself as she lies down, the dawn starting to peek through the blinds. “I’m going to need marble.”
“You didn’t mention you were doing sculptures,” Ruth says, the skylight streaking her hair as she steps into the studio that Theo’s renting. It's a week later and they’re to go out for a riverboat lunch; an olive branch. “Marble! I love it. Did painting get boring?”
Theo wipes the sweat from her brow and shakes her head. “No, just for this project.”
“Which is?” Ruth asks, eyeing the plaster prototypes scattered around.
“In process.” Theo brushes her hair out of her face, studiously not making eye contact with Ruth.
Theo moves back into their bedroom, but there’s still a wall of questions Ruth doesn’t ask between them.
It’s visual, her gift.
Usually it’s more of a fuzzy idea than anything, but if she focuses, flutters to a stop and really looks.
They’re walking to lunch, and Luke’s just made a joke at the expense of his family, to which they all chuckle. Theodora glances over at Nell and accidentally catches her eye, and—
Luke and the Doctor are gone, and it’s just the two of them on the steps of a charming house watched over by two enormous proud marble lions. Nell slides her hands over Theo’s waist, Theo drapes her arms around Nell’s neck.
Nell kisses her with ease, beaming against Theodora's lips.
“You lied about the lions,” Theo hears herself tease Nell. “I don’t think they’d fit on your mantle.”
“I didn’t want to make you feel self-conscious,” Nell says.
She leans back in—
Theo tears her eyes away from Eleanor and quickens her pace.
“Theodora!” Jack sings when he spots her at the city’s biggest Christmas gala, grabbing her hand and twirling her around. Theo laughs and hugs him. Jack’s an old friend with even older money. They exchange enthusiastic niceties until Jack produces a sharply dressed man out of the sea of humanity around them.
“Theo, this is Michael! Oh Michael, you’re going to love Theo, she knows all of the best places in the city. Theo, you must do that trick of yours for Michael here, go on, guess—”
Theo’s blood runs cold.
“Well, Michael, the most interesting thing you’ll find tonight is how poorly dear Jack handles his sherry. If you excuse me, I need to return home to Ruth, who unfortunately came down with a fever yesterday,” Theo interrupts. She presses airy kisses to both of their cheeks and spends the rest of the night at the studio.
She sees Nell around, of course.
On bustling sidewalks and crowded bars, the shadows of darkened rooms.
Theo smiles at her politely, but then she quickly moves on about her business. Unlike Eleanor, she has things to do, and after, they’ll have all the time they need to sort things out.
“It's no wonder she did what she did,” Eleanor's sister says, as they observe the mound. There's only six people at the funeral; no priest would set foot past Hill House's iron gates. Luke's drunk and the fight he's picking with the doctor is starting to get loud. “I’d go crazy too, caring for that woman, all day, all night, no freedom. But the car. A total loss. How horribly selfish of her!”
Theo can't imagine it, can't imagine spending her whole life serving the woman who threw her out on the street at age seventeen.
"Maybe," Theo says, "it wasn't selfish enough."
Theo finds herself in pawn shops lately, though not intentionally. Indeed, she often doesn’t remember leaving the house or the studio, but she ends up in these seedy stores, rubbing elbows with shattered dreams and misspent inheritances. She spends hours pouring through pawned items.
“What are you even looking for in those shops?” Ruth asks one night as she returns from her office job, rubbing at her face with her ink-smudged hand.
“I’m not sure,” Theo says, looking down at her rare purchase, a silver hummingbird brooch.
It feels like days that they search for her, that last, terrible day. All Theo can think about is how Nell must be so lost and scared in the dark. Theo envisions herself outstretching her hand, reaching for her. She had tried to urge Nell to leave she had tried.
But nobody takes her hand. Instead, Theo sees in her mind's eye the floorboards and the walls of Hill House, vibrating with evil, barely contained laughter. The house is alive, but it’s empty and cold in a way that makes her shudder and snatch her hand back. If she hadn't, if she had kept her armed outstretched, tearing out the rotting wood, then maybe, would it have, could she have—?
Theodora arrives fashionably, charmingly late to her own exhibit.
It’s unsettling in a way it usually isn’t to see her work out of its usual context, in a bare gallery dotted with critics and friends.
Some of her old sketches are up on the wall, but all of the focus is on the statue in the middle of the room.
It’s a marble statue of a woman, half-formed, inside of a nearly finished cage. The woman is striking the top of the cage with a hammer, not to free herself, but to nail the top of the cage more securely. If an observer were to look closely through the bars, they'd see the woman serenely, determinedly smiling.
The Post calls it hackneyed and heavy-handed and a mob of Simone de Beauvoir devotees claim the statute for their cause, but all in all she sells the piece for much more than her usual commission.
Truthfully, Theo doesn’t know what happened, in the loud dark of the house. It would only be right, natural to reach out for comfort when you're besieged by all that terror. And they reached out to each other, she remembers that, but how much, and in what state?
The bags under her eyes don’t go away, but no matter, maybe she’ll try portraiture, or clay. Theo’s pulling on her coat to go get supplies when Ruth catches her arm.
“It’s been months, Theo. I gave you your space, but things aren't getting better. I need to know. What happened in that godforsaken house?”
“Does it even matter?” Theo asks wearily.
“How can you even say that? Of course it does. I’m worried about you. You barely sleep and then disappear to goddamn pawn shops and you won't even tell me why! We don't talk anymore, Theo."
Theo smiles, but it’s humorless. “If either of us truly talked to anyone, we’d be in an institution by now.”
Ruth’s hand slips down to grip Theo’s. "But we're not just anyone to each other. Unless this is just a living arrangement for you now?”
Theo squeezes her hand, but remains silent.
“You don’t have to tell me everything. Just what you want. What you can. Please. I hate seeing you like this.”
All Theo wants to do is put on her coat and walk out the door and run far, far away from anyone who has ever said a kind word about her, but, she realizes with a sickening twist in her gut, she was not a creature meant to walk alone.
She sighs and puts the folded-up coat on her arm back on the rack. Theo takes Ruth’s other hand and leads her to the couch.
“I should’ve turned around when I saw those awful gates,” Theo begins.
It’s fitting that, in the end, Theo finds what she’s looking for not in one of the pawn shops she still visited, but from one of her suppliers. If the delivery man is startled by her sudden, pained laughter then, well, she can always get a new distributor.
The years pass in an unremarkable, yet pleasant blur. Theo visits Luke in Paris, an altogether wonderful visit as they exchange very few words alone, Theo having brought Ruth and he having smartly charmed an older Parisian socialite into taking him off his family’s hands. She doesn’t hear from Doctor Montague, but that’s rather a relief. All in all, she escaped.
The muffled sounds of the city hum lazily below her as Theodora wipes her forehead and checks her watch, looking around the red and white kitchen. She still has a couple of hours.
Ruth agreed to deal with the real estate agent if Theo finished packing. She reaches into upper left cupboard to grab the last of the cups and stills. It’s been so long, she’s nearly forgotten about it. She gently takes the cup out of the cupboard and inspects it.
It’s a lovely, delicate blue cup, with a gold rim. Inside the bottom of the cup, though now faded, are golden stars.
Her hand is trembling as she switches on the coffee maker.
When it finishes, decades later, Theo gently pours coffee into the cup until it’s nearly reached the brim. She crouches down so she’s eye level with the cup.
Theo and the cup of stars eye each other, the cup gently billowing steam to mitigate the awkward silence. She straightens up suddenly and grabs the cup and dumps it into the sink, the steam leading the murky liquid down.
She raises the cup over her head and brings it down onto the counter, the sound of breaking china echoing throughout the empty apartment.
“You’re a wicked person, Theo,” she says simply, and then gathers the shards.
The fractured shooting stars hit the trash can with the dull, vengeful force of misskipped stones.