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Theodora left, of course.
She hadn’t much choice in the matter, not after. Not after Nell. After Nell they all left, bustled out by the maddeningly organized Mrs Montague, who somehow in the face of everything could still muster the energy to make comments about how things should have been done, about the natural consequences of approaching the spirits from a place of obvious fear and not purest love, about how she would let the spirits calm themselves before she came back later, properly, to provide all possible means of support to the nun.
The nun! Absurd. Theo wanted to scream, but instead she made murmurs of assent, her body operating like she was a completely different woman, Theo peering out through the windows of her own eyes. She packed her things and Nell’s red sweater, and drove back to the city, to her home, to what had been their bed when they were still a they, albeit fractured. Before she had decided to go to Hill House. Before she’d met Nell.
She slept for three days, cocooned deep within blankets she’d pulled out of seasonal storage, trying desperately to be warm, trying desperately to forget.
She did not dream.
On the third day Theo emerged, a pale moth, unable to settle anywhere. She picked up books and put them back down again, poured drinks and left them around the apartment. She thought she should be sketching, thought she should visit her shop, thought she should unpack her bags, but the thoughts did not resolve themselves into actions. She felt eyes on her, heard the unasked questions, offered no answers. She had been away less than a week. She had been away forever.
::
On the first day at Hill House, the version of Nell that Theo meets is masked, is laughing down the stairs, is pretending just as hard as her to not be afraid. We can pretend for each other, Theo thinks. She reaches out, touches her shoulder, coaxes a smile, meets her banter, and feels comfort in this, in Nell, in someone immediately on her side.
They take the afternoon to explore, forcing normalcy on this strange space, trying to do the things you would do in a summer vacation home, even in one from hell, even with strangers. “Follow, follow,” she says, seeing in Nell a person who needs to be asked, a being uncertain in the world who needs to be told her presence is desired.
::
A month after leaving, or perhaps immediately, Theo found she had returned. She looked at the blank face of Hill House, a chill curling around her spine, but when she thought back on her journey there it was impossible to know: was it the memory of that day, of that drive? Or was it the memory of the trip of early summer? She thought of oleanders and bad diner coffee, and wondered whose memories they were if not hers, and then forgot every drive entirely when she saw Nell step out of the front door and raise her hand in a small wave.
Theo put her things away, the first time in the green room, every time after in the blue. In Nell’s room. She just knew, and anything she didn’t know, she thought she never would. Questions rolled off of Nell like water. How are you here, how are you, how are you, how are you alive?
“Are you alone here?” Theo asked once and Nell laughed and said, “You’re here with me.” There was a space inside her with the truth, a space Nell couldn’t look at, and Theo thought in the end that was fair. We all keep secrets from ourselves, and it was true that Hill House felt different now. Still alive, but no longer lying in wait like it had earlier in the summer.
“I have to go back,” Theo said. Knew if she didn’t say it then, she might never. She thought of Nell near the end, the brave madness in inviting herself to Theo’s. “Will you come with me?”
“Of course I’ll come with you to the gate.”
To the gate, never beyond it. We can’t go far from the house, Nell had said on that first day, and for her, of course, that was true both then and always.
Nell rode with her to the gate, kissed her on the cheek, and leapt out of the car. Theo wondered what it meant all the way back to the city.
::
Theo sees Nell starting to slip away. She tries to call her back, to unmoor her from the house and tether her to the world outside it, and it’s only when she tries reminding Nell of her life that she realizes the game Nell has been playing all along. The apartment was a dream of a life, Hill House is a nightmare of one, and Nell can’t see a third path.
::
How do you tell someone they’re a ghost? It’s a question Theo only ever pondered after she’d left, on the drive back to her studio and her work, as if it had been a normal visit to an old chum. She never thought of it on the way to Hill House, because she was never aware of the journey at all, only the arrival.
When she arrived Nell always looked the same, but wasn’t. Theo began to doubt her visits came in the same order for Nell as they did for her, especially after the third visit, when Nell pushed her up against a tree and kissed her, and her fourth, when Nell seemed as nervous about casual touch as the day they’d met. Before they’d held hands against the dark. Before Theo had held her tight. Before she’d died.
Hill House let them explore, let them read, let Theo make sketches that somehow never made it back to the city, no matter how many times she put them in the car. They had a little picnic, finally, boiled eggs and no ants, warming themselves in the summer sun. Always the summer sun.
Every time Theo stayed for longer. Every time it was harder to leave and harder still to remember why she should. She hadn’t known before that a ghost could be like this, like Nell, brighter even than she’d been in life for that strange week so long ago. Sometimes she would find herself thinking about it, as she lay curled around Nell sleep-warm in the night, that she had known her longer like this, like they’d only ever been meant to know each other this way, like those early summer days were the dream and this was their real life.
::
Nell says that she’ll go home with Theo in the end, once it’s over, and it’s then that Theo should have understood about her will, about how to Nell, Hill House was the building and the people, and if she couldn’t have both, she’d hold on to one with everything she had.
It was the same willpower that had kept her spark of hope burning through eleven grueling years nursing her mother, that kept her from being ground down by the maddeningly small and henpecked life, that willpower kept the core of her strong and sharp and ready to cling to the longed-for something that had finally happened to her.
Instead Theo sees it as a game, like all of Nell’s other imaginings, tryings-on of other lives, spinning-out ideas of life with each of the others. Maybe it is, but after all, you have to imagine what you want before you can know if you want it. Let alone that you can have it.
Eleanor knows now, and she’s ready to cling to what she wants, ready to call Theodora to her across time over and over again.
::
The last time Theo found herself staring up at Hill House she knew, somehow in the sharp core of her own being, that she was never leaving again. She was a little slower, a little greyer, and Nell stood at the door, young as always, and held out her hand.
“Follow, follow!” Nell said, pulling Theo inside, pulling her free from her years, pulling her into her orbit, into the walls, inside the skin and bones of Hill House to walk there hand in hand, to dream through the maze of it together, to never roam too far from the house.