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The first time I see Mrs. Danvers in one of my own dreams, the projections around the rainy streets of London suddenly go wild. Giles is stabbed from all sides and Clarice is buried underneath their bodies, tearing out chunks of her hair and trying to claw her eyes out.
I lose sight of Rebecca’s wife.
Beatrice never asks me what happened, but that may be because she’s too busy shooting the mark with a single bullet, clean and uniform. There are a few specks of blood on her shirt and she gives a sigh, utterly resigned.
Then the four of us are leaving the hotel trying not to look like murderers. I take Clarice’s slightly trembling hand as we walk outside into cold air that bites both our cheeks and sets our lips to being pressed tight. Some thin protection.
We are young, 17 and 20 respectively. Holding hands in the start of winter. She kept my hand steady the first time I sent a bullet into a so-called ambassador.
I guess I can return the favor.
The second time, I’m in a pale blue summer dress. It’s Tuscany, and summer is slowly, slowly dying. Next to Beatrice and Robert, I’m a child playing dress-up. And they’ll send me from this party to find the safe in the living room because I am, above all things, the Architect.
I’m close. I have to insert the number from a keypad on the underside of a bedroom table, two flights up before a panel in a bookcase gives a deciding creak. A part of me wants to break open that silver box with my bare hands, but that’s attracting attention. I’m listening for the muted clicks.
Then her hand is on the dial, turning it left, left again, right, left. 15-3-9-28.
“You know better than that,” Mrs. Danvers says.
Something creeps up the base of my spine, and it’s a long moment before I can breathe again. Turn my head. She stands in a black evening gown. Raven hair in a half-braided crown, the rest falling to her waist. Her eyes are burning.
The second time we see each other, I know what it’s like to see her shatter her wine glass with one hand. I know what it’s like for her to pin me with my back against her chest.
I know what it’s like to feel the piece cut my throat open, heavy with Sauvignon.
I watch Rebecca, Rebecca with dark red hair over her shoulders, staring into space in an Italian apartment. The gun against her temple gives a click.
“I think,” I slip the weapon from her fingers and sit beside her. “I need a break.”
She gives a distant hum. We watch the ceiling shift into a brilliant sky on another planet. Blue and purple and white. It’s close to a memory for Rebecca, but not quite.
“It’s not possible,” she murmurs. “It doesn’t work that way.”
Because it certainly seems to be working that way and has been working that way for almost three months. I fly to England to meet Clarice, and together we fly to Budapest to meet Robert and the three of us make it to the station for nine hours and twenty-six minutes of quiet.
I’ve never been to Liechtenstein. Clarice adds comments to my essay from her laptop.
I can only sleep if I’m on a train.
Three hours and I open an eye to an overcast sky and Robert turning a half-dollar coin between his fingers. The side profile of John F. Kennedy shows itself, then vanishes, then shows, then vanishes. He’s focused on some files.
“Is that your totem?” I ask.
He looks at me, then out the window, and adjusts Clarice’s head against his shoulder, her sleeping breaths faint.
I dream of Texas and a pink suit splattered with blood.
I hesitate. Climb up onto billowing white sheets and bring my knees to my chest. Rebecca’s breaths are slow. Steady. The limp white of her wrist is linked to a soft whirring PASIV. Her eyes open exactly five hours and 27 minutes later. My phone lights up with a text from Clarice. I ignore it. Music from that device pressed down onto a comforter.
Took the breath from my open mouth
Never known how it broke me down
I went in circles somewhere else
“I know this song,” Rebecca murmurs. I say nothing, but my stiff limbs are coaxed into relaxation by her hands. My body curls into hers, spine clicking. She soothes the base with three fingers. My face in her neck.
I shake and shake and shake.
The third time, I’m sick of ball gowns. Taffeta and grey. I don’t fit, and passing by, Giles gives my shoulder a bit of a squeeze, arm in arm with Beatrice. She’s strapped a pistol to her left thigh. His own hidden by his jacket.
Bullets and devotion. I don’t know why it makes my head hurt.
I look up and find Danny in front of me. She is in a dark blue gown with a slit up to her thigh. A small, knowing smile. It’s my favorite color.
“Liebling,” she croons and smooths her thumb over my cheek.
The dream collapses.
Frank agrees to see me because he’s a nice man and too attached to art and students. My mother would have wanted such a thing. Kind words, security in actuality as well as academics. For me.
I wish she wasn’t lying in the cold, hard ground. I wish it didn’t take me this long to think of her.
“I’ve been a bit worried about you,” even though we are not in Paris and instead at a café in Vaduz. “What have you been doing? What have you been seeing?”
“This and that.” It’s not a lie. But not the truth.
I have no family, and yet he looks like my father in such a moment. He reminds me of Rebecca, moments of pseudo-maternal affection. A hand squeeze. A reassuring smile. The brush of lips over my cheek.
And I know looking into his kind eyes, that I can’t tell him about the tugging of a red string underneath my rib cage.
“Do you remember your mom? Before everything.”
Clarice leans against the balcony, taking a drag of a cigarette. My finger twitches at the trigger and steady the barrel aimed through a window three stories down.
“No.”
Maxim DeWinter falls dead with brandy in his mouth.
What Rebecca asks me, my head is against her shoulder in the back of a car in the middle of the night. What she asks me is, “Do you think the dead come back? As ghosts or desires?”
I don’t understand what she means.
I keep myself grounded in reality with places and people because it doesn’t make sense why a dead woman, a dead wife, would choose me. And it certainly doesn’t make sense why I want to follow her like some dumb child.
I dream of my mother. Warm and living against me. I wake up cold with a start.
My totem, my silver sundial, stays at 1:00 exactly.
In the fourth, we sit in silence across a dinner table that holds the body of a dead stag.
I wake up laughing with blood in my mouth.
What Rebecca says, her fingers carding through my hair in a Paris suite at 2 am. What she says is, “You can’t, you know. Have both.”
“You’ve tried.”
A sad laugh. “That is grief unhinged. You have me.”
“Yes,” I murmur. “But why not her too?”
Wind disturbs the curtains from the open window. Rebecca pulls a blanket over us both.
When I step barefoot out of the elevator, they’re conversing in a kitchen. Rebecca’s finger strokes over the back edge of a knife. Danny looks at me and smiles. It’s the safest I’ve felt in years.
“I understood something,” I murmur. It doesn’t make sense to be soothed into sleep inside of another’s dream.
But they seem to have a way of making things work.
My breaths steady against Danny’s neck, Rebecca’s hand smoothing continuously over my own. Then, she kisses my palm.
Danny’s finger trails over my spine. “What did you understand?”
The kitchen knife slides between my third and fourth ribs.
“Do you remember your mother? Before everything.”
Rebecca sits across from me. Watches me watching the clouds outside. 40,000 feet. First class, inconspicuous as ever. 4 mg of Midazolam in Jack Favell’s drink three seats away. He’s already slipping under, and an attendant rolls back his sleeve.
“I do now.”
A cat’s grin. Rebecca brushes her lips to my palm before the needle enters my wrist.