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Annie paused at the doorway of Room 315 for what she knew to be a little too long before knocking. Though second thoughts were something she was trying not to indulge in of late, it was—well, late, and she was a little concerned with the frequency with which she had been finding herself at this very same door: since first meeting Agent Cooper at the Double R, it had jumped exponentially with each passing day. In fact, the whole thing had become a familiar scene in a world which rarely offered her familiarity: the drive to the hotel, the short walk up the stairs and brief hush as she closed her eyes before stepping inside. The short chat with the bellboy, the quick prayers she said on the stairs to the second and third floors, the reasonable yet infinite distance between the front desk and Agent Cooper—Dale’s—room—it had all become routine, so routine that she hardly had to check her surroundings at all when she entered the first double doors.
Since leaving the convent, and maybe before then, maybe before she had met the nuns at all, Annie had developed a habit of cataloging every detail of the scenes she found herself in. Noticing everything, and making sure she remembered for later. Agent Coop—Dale—probably thought it was some kind of charming intuition, but in reality she couldn’t explain it, even to herself. It was a kind of anchoring, maybe, a way of making sure she didn’t slip back inside herself without warning. It was a way of making sure that even when she couldn’t control anything, she could be sure of all the possibilities. Her instincts, long-buried but blinking now in the light, told her it was safe now, but she kept watch anyway. She couldn’t help it.
Annie tried not to let it bother her, that inability to stop thinking and reacting. You could never be too safe, after all.
Besides, no matter what her instincts told her, she couldn’t quell the uncertainty that laced through the excitement in her stomach whenever she found herself at this door. Somewhere down inside of her, something old wouldn’t let her knock on a door without first half-convincing her that the person behind it would rather do anything but see her, whether or not she had been invited.
And tonight she certainly hadn’t been.
Truth be told, Annie wasn’t even sure Agent –Dale—was in his room. He could be out with Sheriff Truman, or talking to a witness to their case, or any number of things. It was true that she didn’t know very much about him; for all she did know he could be off camping somewhere in Ghostwood Forest with Major Briggs. And if he was inside the room, what guarantee did she have that he was awake? What if her knocking woke him up? For that matter, asleep or not, what guarantee did she have that he was alone? I should have called first, I should probably go, this can wait until morning, until I don’t feel uncertain—and then her hand rose in front of her, and knocked neatly on the door just under the number.
Knock knock knock.
Annie watched the hand fall back to her side in surprise and was almost tempted to look down the hallway for an exit, but she had catalogued this hallway many times, and she knew already that if he was inside, there was nowhere else she could get to in enough time to hide. She huffed a sigh and tried to relax, counting the beats of her heart as she waited for the door to open. All she could do now was wait and see what his reaction was, and though Dale was by far the most approachable person she had met since coming back to the real world, she couldn’t pretend that his reactions were always something she could predict.
He’s going to tell me I’m strange, isn’t he?
She couldn’t always predict his honesty either. Truth be told, she was glad that he was willing to forgo social norms when talking with her, but it lent an edge to their conversations that Annie guessed wouldn’t have been there otherwise. The promise of honesty could be a scary one, especially when she knew she was hardly a usual person. Maybe in Twin Peaks she could pass as normal—but as much as she wanted to trust Dale wholeheartedly, he had seen more of the world than she had, and that meant that however strange he may have been himself, he had a pretty damn good idea of what normal was.
And what it wasn’t.
After about 20 heartbeats, the door opened to reveal a certain half-undressed and wary-looking FBI agent, whose demeanor Annie watched change from “whoever this is better have a good reason for being here” to something less specific, but much friendlier.
She smiled timidly, and raised one hand in a short wave hello.
“Annie Blackburn!” he exclaimed in delight. “What are you doing here?”
“Dale Cooper,” she replied softly. “I… wanted to talk to you about something.”
Was that a good enough excuse for showing up at someone’s door late at night? Annie wasn’t sure that the two of them even had the kind of relationship yet that deemed things like appearing unannounced at each other’s places of residence to be casual, but there had been something on her mind ever since their “nature study,” and she knew she had to tell him before she lost the nerve.
Luckily, Dale seemed rather un-annoyed by her presence.
“Well then! Talk you shall,” he said. He opened the door wider and stood back, gesturing for her to come in. “You weren’t interrupting anything, I was just getting ready for bed.”
Annie walked through the door and began to talk as soon he closed it softly behind her, trying to explain herself. She noticed that the small room was, if not messy, a little rumpled—Dale’s suit jacket lay across the chair, there were a few loose socks on the floor by the window, and the bed looked as though it had been interrupted in the process of being made. That must have been what he was doing when she knocked. The man himself was still wearing dress pants, but his feet were bare and his torso was clad only in a white undershirt.
“I’m sorry I didn’t call over before I came here,” she ventured, “I guess I was just afraid of chickening myself out before I started, if you know what I mean.”
“Annie,” Dale said, “I understand completely. You just have a seat and get comfortable and I’ll, uh—” He looked around the room with a slightly nervous expression, as if he had just realized it could be tidier, and settled for crossing the floor and straightening his tape recorder, which was lying on the edge of his bedside table.
“Would you like a glass of warm milk?” he asked with a gesture towards the phone. “I just had one myself, but I can call down to room service for another if you’d like.”
“Oh no, that’s alright—I wouldn’t want to inconvenience anyone, and besides, I don’t know how long I can really stay, I don’t want Norma worrying about me any more than she already does. I just hope I can keep this brief.”
She sat on the edge of the bed beside Dale, and turned towards him, looking down at her hands folded in her lap. You can’t chicken out now.
“You see, it’s about that boyfriend I mentioned earlier, the one I said I didn’t want to talk about. I want to talk about him now. I thought about what I said about the fear, and facing it, and… Dale, sometimes you think too much, and I don’t want you to assume anything about what happened. I don’t want you to think I was… a Juliet, trying to kill myself over poor Romeo.”
Dale had been looking at her with a patient, interested smile, but at this he gave her the quietly serious look he always did when they talked about the darkness, and put up his hand in protest.
“Say no more, Annie. I can assure you I didn’t think that at all. In fact, I tried not to think about any of it until you were ready to tell me. You know what they say about making assumptions—it makes, pardon me, an ass out of us both.”
He smiled and reached across the bed for her hand, rubbing a thumb across her knuckles, and she half smiled herself in self-consciousness, casting her eyes down at her feet. Sometimes looking at Dale was like looking at the sun, and it was impossible to look him in the eyes and say what she wanted to say at the same time. She could tell the darkness was inside of him, too –she could see it in his face the same as looking in a mirror—but he clearly had practice at keeping it in the back of his mind. If she hadn’t known better, Annie almost would have sworn that Dale had spent some time in a convent himself. Is that something you can just ask a person?
If not, she would have to ask Norma later what she knew about Agent Cooper’s personal history.
“Good,” she said. “I’m glad to hear it. To be perfectly honest, I must say I wouldn’t have been able to resist the curiosity if I were you. I’m sure there’s someone in town who could have told you if you’d asked around—but thank you for waiting to hear it from this particular ass’ mouth.” This elicited an even wider smile from Dale, who squeezed her hand encouragingly.
“I’m ready to hear anything you’d like to tell me. And if you’d like to stop at any time—just give the word, and we can change the subject, no questions asked. I’m happy to listen to whatever you have to say.”
“Thank you. I wasn’t so sure I should have come to your room tonight, I thought you might have been out, or asleep, or—something.” Coming from her mouth like that, the words sounded crazy, and she nearly apologized by instinct (“I’m sorry, I know people aren’t supposed to say things like that, I don’t want you to think I’m crazy”), but something about the way Dale was looking at her stopped her in her tracks.
“Is apologizing for sounding strange just as strange as what one said in the first place, or does it make one sound less strange?” she asked him instead.
“I don’t know,” he said. “Did you think that what you said sounded strange?”
“I’m afraid it did.”
“I didn’t think so.”
“You would tell me if it sounded strange?”
“Of course.” He held up his hand again, palm facing her, that habit he had. Annie had already filed it away in a corner reserved for getting to know him, and knew that roughly translated, it meant You can trust in me.
“I’m glad we have that sorted out,” she said playfully, and then briefly stalled as she tried to think of how to begin what she wanted to say. Where was a person supposed to start when telling a story they had only told in full once, and that time to nuns? Well, I was born on December 24th, 1966…
“I’m actually not sure how to start this,” she admitted. “The only other person I’ve told it to was the mother superior at the convent, and that was a long time ago. It seems so far away now, and yet it’s so present on my mind.”
“Tell you what. Why don’t you start by, oh, telling me how you met this boyfriend?” Dale asked. “You don’t even have to tell me his name if you’d prefer not to.”
“I think I’d prefer not to… but let’s see, we met in high school, he was in my English class. Like I said, I lived mostly in my own head back in those days, which wasn’t always a bad thing, but it got rather lonely. Norma had married Hank and moved out of the house by then, so I was left alone with our parents and a couple of pets. Mother never understood me, or really tried, and they were on the verge of divorce then. I often wanted to get out of the house, only I didn’t have anywhere to go. Hank and Norma both worked at the diner all hours of the day, and I could have gone there, but I felt in the way, and anyway it wasn’t the same as having friends. So when… the boy… when I met him, and it seemed like he understood me, it was a welcome surprise.”
“I can imagine.”
“We seemed to have a lot in common at first—we read the same books, and he loved animals as much as I do. I even liked his handwriting, the way the n’s in my name would slant in the notes he passed me. We went on a few dates around town, and we fell in love very quickly, at least what I thought love was at the time.”
“And what did you think love was?”
“Oh, he said things that girls who haven’t got a lot of friends want to hear—he told me that he had never felt that way about anyone else, that I was the most pure and wholesome person he had ever met in a world of imbeciles. He told me that it was the two of us against the world, and it sounded nice, and I fell for it. Eventually he became the only person I ever spoke to. It was funny, in a way. I thought that what I was doing was leaving my own head, but all I was really doing was pouring myself into his. And no matter what strange neighbors I had, his were stranger. It was like the most beautiful dream, feeling that kind of connection to a person for the first time. Mistakenly, I thought that kind of devotion was what love was supposed to be.
“For the first few months, everything was alright. Good, even. It felt like we were the only people in the world, and in a way, we were. We spent all our time together, talking about everything in our lives, all our plans. Eventually our plans became the same plans, and I couldn’t remember what future I had ever conceived of without him. He made it seem as though my life was empty without him, he was always reminding me that I hadn’t had any friends before him— really I had had a few, but it was just one of his ways of making sure that he kept me in my place. You see, when we had been dating for about six months, he started to change. Or, I don’t know, the more thinking I’ve done about it since then, the less I’ve thought that he was changing, and the more I’ve thought that he just stopped hiding so much from me.
“He started to get jealous of petty things—how much time I spent at the diner helping Norma, whether or not I said good morning to anyone else in school besides him. He started to pressure me into situations he knew I wasn’t comfortable in, socially and, uh, otherwise. Because I didn’t know anyone else very well, and I had come to depend on him, I guess, I didn’t think much of it for a while, and even if I had I wouldn’t have been able to tell anyone about it. But things built up little by little, and by the time we were near graduation and we had dated for seven or eight months, it felt like the dream had become a nightmare. He took up so much of my time and expected so much of me that it was like I wasn’t myself, I was just someone he had made up inside his head. And there were… other things.”
Annie closed her eyes and paused to get her thoughts in order, and Dale broke the silence with a low reassurance.
“Annie, if there’s anything about this that makes you uncomfortable, don’t feel as though you have to tell me. I know this how hard this must be for you.” She exhaled deeply and opened her eyes, offering him an apologetic smile.
“It’s alright. I’m just trying to keep it brief, I don’t want to bore you and I don’t know exactly what point I’m making except that I wanted you to hear this… but I do want you to hear it, I think it’s important. If we’re really going to get to know each other, and if I really want you to help me, I need not to be afraid to talk about these things.
“Like I was saying, it was… like a nightmare. I felt trapped between staying with him and shrinking so far into myself that I no longer existed except to please him, and leaving him and having no one to tell me how to act anymore. I was so afraid that if I left him, there would be nothing left of me. He scared me, but he was familiar and comforting, and I didn’t know what to do without him. Twin Peaks is a small town. I knew that is he started any rumors about me, or the things I had done with him, I wouldn’t have any way of stopping everyone from hearing about it. I even turned down going to college because it wasn’t part of his plans. I was afraid that without him, I would have nothing left.
“It got to a point where he was making me do things—things I didn’t want to do, things that scared me. I felt like I was just a body he used when he needed to… to feel something. I was nineteen and I didn’t know what to do. It went on like that for several more months, even Norma was noticing that I had stopped coming to the diner. I was planning suicide, but I didn’t know how to do it, or how to justify it. He had given me everything I thought I wanted, but I didn’t want it anymore. I just wanted out. I wanted to feel like a person again, but I didn’t know how. And then one afternoon… one afternoon I came home from seeing him, after he had talked me into having sex with him again, and I was thinking about how he had told me that he wanted us to be together forever. And I couldn’t do it, Dale. I couldn’t even go inside my head anymore, it was all screams. It felt like the only way to make everything quiet again was killing myself. Then I could be away from him. I could stop shrinking, I could stop hurting. So I went to the bathroom and took apart my father’s razor, and… and I remember this very clearly, I said a prayer. And then I walked to my bedroom, and I sat on the floor, and I did it. It was like a storm had built inside of me, and the first cut I made—that was the rainbow.”
Annie paused for a long moment, and a silence settled in the air, the only sound the distance rushing of the waterfall on which the Great Northern sat. She was conscious of every part of her body, from the hair that fell around her shoulders to the tiny hole she could feel in her left sock. She could feel something building in her now, something fast and old and desperate, and she said a Hail Mary in her head and tried to list every item of clothing on her body before the old building thing overtook her—right shoe, left shoe, right sock, left sock, skirt, bra, blouse, cardigan, ring on her left index finger, earring in her right ear, earring in her left ear, hairband. The storm began to calm. She took a deep breath.
Beside her, Dale was perfectly still, waiting for her to continue. After a few minutes of silence that Annie was all too aware of, he said, “You deserve better than that, Annie. I’m so sorry.”
Annie registered his words, but hardly acknowledged them. She was thinking of other things.
It had been a long time since that evening in December, so many years. Just before her 20th birthday. She could still remember every detail; none of was it dulled by intervening years, or the fuzzy confusion that memories of their relationship often had. The sharp pain, the dizziness, the feeling of all the blood around her on the floor and the feeling of peace that had settled into her bones as her vision started to fade—but Annie stopped herself from going any deeper, realizing she still had an audience to explain herself to. She took another deep breath, pushing the thoughts from her mind the way she had learned from the nuns, and started again.
“I’m sorry, I got caught up in—anyway—like I said before, and I guess obviously, I failed—My mother came home early and found me lying there, and it was all kind of a blur after that. The hospital, and Doc Hayward leaning over me, and my mother crying. I don’t think I’ve seen her cry before or since. I kept coming in and out of consciousness. Dale, I felt so odd—disappointed, but like I was floating. Like for the first time in a long time, no one could touch me. It was a strange feeling, and I wasn’t sure what I wanted. I thought maybe I wanted to try again as soon as possible. But when I woke up for good, I heard my father praying next to my bed, and I thought… I thought maybe God had made me fail for a reason. I thought maybe I had to leave Twin Peaks. That if there was any kind of answer looking for me, it would only come when I was free of the things that held me back. That boy, my parents, everything. The woods, even. A month or so after they released me from the hospital, I packed my things and left for the convent. I guess… I guess that’s the end of the story.”
She looked up at Dale, who was strangely quiet, but his face was unreadable; the darkness in his eyes seemed to creeping towards the front. She squeezed his hand and he didn’t squeeze back, but leaned forward until their foreheads nearly touched.
“Annie,” he whispered, “did you ever think that God wanted you to succeed? That after everything that had happened, your death was the only thing that could end it? The… only thing that could stop the pain?”
“Yes,” Annie said. She noticed that their fingers had become laced together while she talked, and ran her thumb along his, trying to reassure him that she was fine.
“So did I,” he replied evenly.
“I’m sorry, Dale.”
In the heavy, still air of the room it was all she could think to say. I’m so sorry for us both. Then, as the past tense of his statement sunk in, she asked, “How did you stop thinking of it like that? I mean, I had a long time to think about it, and a long time to reacquaint myself with God and His ways, and that’s mostly what worked for me. How did you do it, if you don’t mind my asking?”
With what sounded like some effort, an almost sunny tone crept back into Dale’s voice as he answered.
“Well, like you said before Annie, one must face one’s fear or it only becomes stronger—self-awareness, a good yogic discipline, some bureau-sanctioned therapy, and a whole darn lot of coffee have done wonders for me. And of course, it’s been a long time since Caroline died, and many things have happened in between to convince me of the restorative powers of the universe, and of people’s hearts and minds. Those thoughts haven’t been so strong in quite a while.
“But Annie?” and here the sunny tone slipped for a moment, down somewhere between them while Dale’s voice followed it into a lower register and he moved his thumb across her wrist, “Do you want me to answer you honestly? How I stopped thinking for good that the pain would end if I could just disappear? If I could un-exist?”
“Of course,” Annie said. “Of course I want you to answer honestly, Dale.” I promise it won’t sound strange, not to me. After everything I’ve told you tonight, it’s only fair. Was she really curious as to how he had done it or was she looking for a cure to those nagging thoughts that still hung in the mist on bad days? Does it matter?
“I don’t quite know how to explain it, but—well, I met you,” Dale said, and she looked up and saw him looking at her, and meeting his eyes was like the blinds had just been raised on a window that rarely saw the light. She saw the darkness, stronger than she had ever seen it in his face before, but all around it was a glowing something that Annie found herself unable to look away from. “I met you,” Dale repeated in a whisper, and her hands found his face and his hands fell to her waist and they were holding each other, forehead to forehead, his breath coming in wondering drafts against her mouth, arms wrapped around her cardigan.
“Dale—” she said, and he apologized almost immediately, drawing back to look at her.
“I’m sorry. I don’t mean to put any kind of undue pressure on you—this is all very new, and it’s unfair for me to say that you… you healed me in a way no one else could, or—well, please know that I don’t mean to say that this trauma is the kind of thing that can be fixed so easily, and I hope you’ll forgive the oversimplification, but. Well, meeting you has already changed my outlook so much, and I also hope you won’t mind my saying that our conversations have made me feel more truly alright than I have in a very long time. If you do mind my saying it, well, know that I don’t expect anything more from you than what we have, unless you are willing to give it. I know—”
“Dale,” Annie said again, pushing her left palm against his cheek, “Not that I’m one to talk, but remember what I said about thinking too much?”
He looked at her, and slowly brought one hand up to his face to place over hers. The darkness was retreating back from his expression, replaced by a mild embarrassment.
“Annie, I—”
“What I mean,” Annie continued, “is that I understand. I understand that the kind of pain that makes you want to un-exist isn’t something that just goes away when you meet someone. I understand that it’s more complicated, and I appreciate that you want me to be comfortable, but I also understand what you mean when you say that our conversations have helped you feel alright. I feel the same way—I trust you, Dale, and I feel safe when we’re together, which is more than I can say about most people and situations even now. The dark tunnel you mentioned before—I know it’s not something that ever goes away, but it’s something you can climb out of. And I think maybe… maybe we’re giving each other a hand.” She trailed her own hands off of Dale’s face and clasped his hands in hers.
Dale gave hers a light squeeze and leaned in to kiss her forehead, beaming gently.
“Here’s to giving each other a hand,” he said, and Annie smiled back.
“Yes. Here’s to helping each other poke our heads out of our respective tunnels, and to looking into the light together.”
“Amen,” Dale intoned, touching a fingertip to the cross she wore around her neck, and as she leaned in again to kiss him, all kindness and soft lips and like looking into the sun, Annie could have sworn she felt an old weight lift from her, and float through the ceiling to be gone with the wind in the trees.