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The water in the infamous lake at Bly Manor was freezing cold as Dani waded into it, but she couldn’t have told you that. She couldn’t have told you anything, didn’t feel anything, didn’t know anything aside from the anger, dark and twisting and violent inside of her, and a deep, lingering sadness.
And so, as she went under, rather than thrashing at the water around her in attempts to pull herself back up to the surface as her head began to pound and her lungs began to ache, she simply lay on the lakebed while the edges of her vision darkened and slowly expanded until there was no edge, no center, just an endless well of black.
There, among seagrass and rocks and sand, she slipped away from life as she had always known it, like so many others before her.
Now, as Dani Clayton begins the ritual of walking the grounds of Bly Manor after her death, she finds herself unable to rid her mind of the thought of her wife’s hands.
As she wakes beneath the water, lungs free of the pressure and pain that she ended her life with, she thinks of the way Jamie twisted the ring on her left hand as she crouched somewhere between the shore and the depths of the lake after her failed attempt to save her wife.
As she floats up to the surface, and trudges swiftly out of the lake, she thinks of the way Jamie’s hands cut through the water, fighting it, as she swam down to the bottom where her wife already lay dead.
And as she walks through cold mud, she finds her own hand grasping at the air on instinct, as if searching for her wife’s to hold on to. Searching for familiarity, searching for comfort, searching for home.
Her hand falls limp at her side after finding nothing to grab on to, cold and heavy like dead weight. For a moment she cannot remember if there was any reason for this part of her body to exist before Jamie. What were her hands if not something to hold Jamie’s, to hold Jamie herself? She honestly isn’t sure. They feel as if they serve no purpose now.
She wanders the manor for what feels to her like mere minutes, but ends up being hours. Hours spent padding through the halls, over hardwood floors on which, if she looks hard enough, she can imagine the outline of muddy footprints that so often lined them. Her cold fingers trace over the fading wallpaper of the forbidden wing, a dark background with a floral pattern, peeling at the edges.
It’s different than she imagined, this whole ghost thing. She finds that she doesn’t need to be asleep to slip into a memory, or get “tucked away,” as Flora used to call it. As she walks out of the front doors, she finds she has walked herself into the memory of the night she first held Jamie’s hand.
It isn’t particularly a favorite memory, Dani is quite indifferent towards it, to be honest. It was the night Owen’s mom died. The four of them, her and Jamie, Owen and Hannah, walked out together after they put the children to bed. She finds herself now standing beside Jamie as they walk to her truck. She’s different from how she was the last Dani saw her. Younger, much more distant. Seeing this younger version of Jamie attests to just how much the two of them grew together in all those years together.
It takes her a moment to remember what she said that night, more than a decade ago.
“I’m so glad you… stayed.”
“I am, too,” comes the familiar response.
Now they’re stopped just in front of the truck, and it’s only slightly awkward when Dani gently grabs Jamie’s left hand. Even now, the touch sends sparks flying through her bones, just as it had the first time. The warmth inside her runs through her arm, to her shoulder, and pours into her chest, soothing the empty pain that had been residing there ever since Jamie turned to Owen with the phone in her hand and apologized.
Jamie is looking back at her now with wide eyes. She drops her hand, alarmed at the effect that the touch had on her.
Dani steps back, Jamie gets into the truck, looking back with an eyebrow raised, and says, “who the hell knew?” It’s only now that Dani realizes this is only a memory. Not real, not present. Jamie will slam the door shut and drive off down the dirt road and leave Dani here alone. This time, no Hannah, no Miles, no Flora.
Alone, alone, alone.
The lake water is frigid as Dani wades back into it. She feels it for the first time as she sinks back toward the bottom, limbs heavy and somewhat numb, goosebumps rising on her arms and across her chest. As she drifts off to sleep, she imagines herself back in her bed in her and Jamie’s apartment in Vermont. Jamie’s arms are around her, strong but gentle, and so incredibly warm. Her head rests on her wife’s bare chest, and she could swear that here, under the water, at the bottom of the lake, she can hear the faint echoes of Jamie’s heartbeat.
Dani wakes, she walks. It’s dreadfully constant, but a little too new to be boring yet. She briefly wonders what she’ll do when the ritual begins to bore her. Will she have to endure it forever after that? Or will she eventually fade and forget herself, and lose the ability to determine whether something holds her interest or not?
It is quite a beautiful day. The early morning sunlight makes the grass glimmer. Before she even realizes it, she’s walking toward the greenhouse. As she walks through the doors, she notices that she is suddenly holding two mugs of coffee. In front of her, tending to the plants, is Jamie again.
And when she hands a mug to Jamie, she finds herself distracted by the way the other woman’s hand curls around it.
Even as the memory plays out and dissolves right in front of her, as she is standing alone in the greenhouse surrounded by wilted and decaying plants, she longs to be able to intertwine their fingers again, if only one last time.
Dani had never really cared for physical affection before Jamie. Whenever Eddie touched her, whether it was intimate or only a chaste hand on her back, she counted down the seconds until he was no longer doing it, always much too uncomfortable, never able to relax into his touch, especially toward the end.
With Jamie, though, she swears she could have touched her forever. One of her favorite things about Jamie - and there were a lot of them - had to be her hands.
Jamie was always gentle. A hand on Dani’s knee when they sat beside each other in restaurants, or rubbing small circles into her back while she recovered from a panic attack.
Hands clutching Dani’s arms when they kissed, or cupping her cheek and lightly running her thumb over Dani’s skin. Hands that ran down the bare skin of her back, which gave her the chills every time, slender fingers that grazed her thigh ever so lightly, that twisted and curled inside of her, and drew circles on her shoulder as Jamie held her in the aftermath. Her wife always held her like she was fragile. Not as if she would break easily if she didn’t, but as if she were something to be treasured, or some sort of artifact.
Jamie was always gentle, until she wasn’t. It always caught Dani by surprise when she remembered that the woman she loves didn’t treat anyone else with nearly as much care as she treated Dani.
The most prominent instance Dani can remember of this was when Jamie broke the nose of a man who came into The Leafling. Granted, the man wasn’t exactly innocent, his “flirting” with Dani was bordering on harassment, and he didn’t seem to be getting the hints that she was trying to give him that she wasn’t interested and was extremely uncomfortable. Jamie just so happened to be walking back into the storefront from the back room when the man put his hand on the small of her back and started slowly moving it downward. Dani jumped away and Jamie started shouting at the man, incoherent threats mostly, and before she could do anything to stop it, Jamie punched the man right in the face. In the blink of an eye, the man was staggering back, hands flying up to the center of his face, blood trickling from his nose. He stumbled his way out of the shop, but not before Dani saw the way the bridge of his nose was now jutted to the left.
Dani hated violence. She tried to justify Jamie’s actions, she was defending her, after all. But she had to admit that she was shaken by the incident.
She recalls now the way Jamie’s hand shook as Dani inspected her bruising knuckles, the way she winced as she wrapped her hand in gauze.
It awed her that these hands - these usually soft hands that arranged flowers in beautiful bouquets, that stirred half-burnt pasta sauce on the stove in their apartment - could cause so much harm to another being. It terrified her, in a way; though not for very long, as Jamie’s good hand held Dani’s as tenderly as it always had.
Now, back in the present, Dani returns to the lake. There is nowhere else to go, after all. Her limbs feel heavier as she sinks back down to the bottom. She is exhausted, if that’s even possible. She isn’t sure how it can be, not when she sleeps for days on end, not when she isn’t even alive to feel anything. Even still, her eyelids feel as heavy as lead as she closes them and falls back into darkness.
This one is her favorite. She would stay in this memory forever if she could.
She walks through the door of her and Jamie’s apartment, holding a cold terracotta pot in her hands. The plant inside is holding on by a thread, its leaves are beginning to yellow and they droop over the side of the pot. If anyone can save it, Jamie can, but there’s more to it than just the dying plant.
Jamie’s hands are all she can focus on this time around. Jamie’s hands pulling the plant from the pot and lightly pushing dirt aside to get to the roots, ever so carefully plucking the gold ring from where it was nestled inside the soil.
The ring, still held between Jamie’s thumb and index finger, as her arms come to wrap around Dani’s neck. Her left hand cups Dani’s cheek as they kiss. Dani thinks that she could just die here in their kitchen, safe in Jamie’s arms, the two of them whispering that they love each other endlessly.
And later, lying in bed together as the sun sets and casts golden light across their room, the gold ring on Jamie’s finger - two hands holding a heart with a crown on top of it - looks like it has always belonged there.
Dani could stare at it forever. She wishes that this is what death is, staying in her absolute favorite memory forever and ever, with the woman she loves the most. But it isn’t, and she can’t. It feels like much too soon when she is pulled from the golden haze of the memory, back into her reality - floating alone in a much-too-deep lake.
It really is cruel, that she gets snippets of the happiest moments of her life, that they feel just as real as they had before, but that she gets ripped from them too soon for her liking.
But it’s better, she supposes, than still being alive and waking every morning wondering if that day would be the day she hurt the woman that she loves. It’s better than endless staring at a faceless dark-haired ghost that replaced her own reflection. And the memories, however fleeting they may be, are better than the dreams of dragging Jamie by the neck into the lake with her, her fingers clamping around her wife’s throat until the other woman ceased to take another breath.
Yes, the memories are far better than that. And she knows she made the right decision by leaving Vermont that night and coming here to end it all. She hopes Jamie will be able to forgive her for that. It’s for the best, anyway.
Dani will return to Jamie one day. She will learn that she is not confined to the lake, not confined to the manor, not confined to Bly at all. She will return to Jamie, who wears her wife’s clothes to bed every night, who fills the sink and the bathtub with the hopes that she will catch a glimpse of her own lady in the lake, who - albeit dangerously - leaves doors open a crack as if a ghost would have any difficulty getting into a locked room.
Dani will return, and she will be with Jamie every night. She will follow her to Northern California for a wedding, and she will listen to Jamie tell her story to a group of strangers after the rehearsal dinner. Dani will be there, in Jamie’s hotel room, when her wife falls asleep in a chair facing the door, opened a crack like always. Dani will be there with a hand on her shoulder, the ring still on her finger after all of these years, and Dani will never leave.