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They say that ghosts like to stay where they died and perhaps that’s why Violet never leaves the bath in which her unfortunate suicide happened. Maybe the water will calm her down when she put her head inside the water and goes into a trance thought to be true death. In her head there is no mother, father, babies being hunted, ghosts, Murder House, sad and broken boys, cigarettes that she can no longer buy, the time that she doesn’t know how to count anymore and how impossible it is to access the internet now that the last family fled.
She is the dead body in the bathtub and will always be. Not a mass was performed in her honor, because the reality for the living is that she still one of them. Ironic and funny. While still a creature of heartbeat believed to be dead – even if it was in the inside – and then when she was in the literal sense of the word, the sad hope of the people that believe someone survived Murder House, kept its clean image. Nowadays everybody survive, so the young girl was forgotten. But she does not care anyway – to the priest, for Mass, for the people – even as a floating ectoplasm, still she did not believe in God.
But Violet believes in the devil. And she feels his gaze on her back as she rises from the bathtub. Her clothes are wet and her hair too, but the cold is not what shakes from her toes to the last thread of her blond hair.
✗
Man never truly possesses anything
Neither his strength, nor his weakness, nor his heart
And when he opens his arms
His shadow is that of a cross
And when he tries to embrace happiness, he crushes it
His life is a strange and painful divorce
✗
In the course of time, she learned to make friends with the others in the house, and even the presence of Hayden became bearable. The teenager would never let these thoughts reach her mother, but she felt compassionate for the woman, it is not as if they had gone through very different situations. It's not like the two interact, or the house was too small, they only tolerated the existence of each other and the youngest could not have a certain solidarity, perhaps empathy.
Both love beyond measure men who have proved themselves monsters and in the end were destroyed by them. Hayden perhaps did much more than Violet, because all creatures of the house even having gone through thousands of things, can agree that the redhead did not seem very sane. She is not been ‘right’ for a long time, said Nora one day. Both even died at the hands of those who loved, the difference is that Tate was not the cause of Violet’s death, as his father was to Hayden.
✗
His life resembles those soulless soldiers
Who have been groomed for a different fate
Why should they rise in the morning
When nighttime finds them disarmed, uncertain
Say these words and hold back your tears
✗
Chad has a sharp tongue and ironic tone, Violet likes him because of their similar moods. Nobody touches Tate's name, there is no reason to do so, but some (like Patrick) still feel anger for the one who was the cause of their deaths. But one day, while talking to Chad on the couch that used to be in the room, they laughed at a joke the other told until the lamp bulb near them exploded for no reason, startling her.
If there is anything this kid haunts in this house, it’s not it, but you. He commented on his acid way, before getting up, taking the whiskey and cigarettes.
There is nothing she can do but keep quiet. She won’t demand the boy’s presence, she won’t fight with him and protest for he always chase away all her friends, living or dead. Violet knows that his only defense against his ex is pure silence.
The nearby residents end up redecorating the room.
✗
There is no happy love
✗
Tate lives up to his death and is a fucking ghost. In the abandoned bathroom she can feel his presence. If the young girl pay close attention, she can hear the sound of footsteps on the wood, whether it be distracted too, can feel his breath on her neck. She can see a figure in the corner of her eyes, but in the moment she turns around there's nothing there.
Because Violet sent him away.
✗
By the time we learn to live
It's already too late
Our hearts cry in unison at night
It takes many a misfortune for the simplest song
Many regrets to pay for a thrill
Many a tear for a guitar's melody
✗
Her mother often seems regretful. Violet doesn’t like it, because whenever she remembers the times both were still alive, the girl has conscience of what a shitty child she was. And if it weren’t so inconvenient, she could’ve made Vivien’s life a little bit more peaceful — easier.
The only time where the eternal adolescent doesn’t feel his presence is when her mother is with her; when the woman serves a cup of tea when she is reading something, when she is covering the body of the blond while she sleeps in her room: when Vivien is just being a mother.
It keeps on being her room because maybe others in the house do not see much interest in the place, there is no longer any emotional attachment to those who have already lived there. But for the blond, there is too much of it: addiction, feelings, memories, meanings. And that’s why she only goes back to it when she wants to sleep, pretend to be asleep or just to pass the time. Her mother anyway, still likes to spoil her. She wanted go give in death all the attention she wasn’t able to give her in life.
When she appears, the atmosphere is lighter and her girl is no longer sad. They are lying in bed, talking about everything they can. Vivien is glad that it’s been long since she last saw her daughter cry, but she knows that she is not really happy, not like Ben or even herself are. Returning to her mother-wife ghost life, all light is gone and the atmosphere goes back to it common sorrow.
✗
My beautiful love, my dear love, my torn heart
I carry you in me like a wounded bird
Those who unknowingly watch us walk by
Repeat after me my words and sigh
They have already died in your bright eyes
There is no happy love
✗
Getting out of the tub is difficult, but the girl is fed up with the boredom. She drags her wet clothes through the floor and walks to the window. There is no reason to get a dry change when you know you will not get sick; it is also good to feel something from time to time, anything, even if it is cold.
The wood cracks.
– How old would you be if you were alive?
The house that is never truly empty falls into an abysmal silence. From the window’s glass reflection Violet can see the surprised expression of her ex-boyfriend, it is difficult to see his dream coming true after so much time wishing for it. Violet talking to him, asking something, noticing his existence, even if only through a dirty glass. It could have passed hours or days or lives until the blond boy took courage to answer it, time did not matter anyway, but he feared she would push him away again.
– Now? – He asks fearfully.
Violet drops a nasal laugh because after eternities without talking, refusing firmly each other’s existence, she finally gives him what he wants and so that's all the blond can answer. A scared kitten.
– At the time you met me…
She heard him pulling his breath before answering.
– In my twenties.
And nobody says anything for a long moment. Twenty years must have passed since the last time the girl looked at the stars like that. There is no one in the early morning streets, the world is just dead as they are.
– Or maybe ... I do not know well, it's been so long that I forgot – He tried to continue the subject, desperate for crumbs of attention.
– We could have known each other, didn’t we?
His reflection is confusing.
– You're not much older than me, we could have known each other in this city...
The focus on the glass changes from Tate to herself. He looks at the girl's face which will never grow old, the blonde hair that will never become gray and she would imagine being in the twenties that the other also never got to reach. He gazed upon her face and imagined if she, as an adult, would be the femme fatale type or if she would just keep on being boring. Violet was so used to death that she would often catch herself wishing to have died just a little bit older. Being eternally stuck in adolescence is your personal hell, along with her ex, course.
– That's what kills me inside. We could have met. We could have lived out of here. right? We would have been happy, alive, and you know, with a real life, not this bullshit I put us at. I'm so sorry Vi, so sorry, because if I only hadn’t been such an idiot, I would be alive and so would you. Your whole family and maybe we… We… – His voice died in his embargoed crying. All this victim-play comes like a gift to the boy with his sorrowful voice, fearing shoulders, his eyes filled with sadness, taking the girl back to the day where she left that sad and broken boy and sent him away forever. Forever never seemed to have arrived.
– You said to me that I was like the sun – The reflection of her eyes looked blankly while she recited what she swore to be the best day of their lives – The only light inside this house.
– And it was. And you are. – He replies, unable to keep up with the sudden changes of topic.
– I thought the same about you and spent years trying to get this idea out of my head, when it passed over, I just rephrased.
– To what then?
– If I am the sun and the stars, you're the big black hole swallowing all the light that one day I could reflect. And you do not rest Tate, until you don’t swallow everything around you I'll never have real peace, because you will always be there. And though I know about that, I got carried away and today there is nothing here but darkness.
The other doesn’t answer, only shrugs, letting the tears flow down his cheeks. Violet doesn’t like it when he makes her feel like a mother scolding her child. Crybaby, she thinks.
– But it’s alright. – and such understanding surprises him. He expected the cries of his girlfriend – he would never consider her his ex, for she just was not aware that the relationship continued – their hatred, tears, but not the fucking understanding that reminded both of her mother. Which resembled of the horrible mistake. It was not enough having the woman wandering through the house, forgiving him and being the living memory – in the figurative form – of shit that beloved would never forgive.
– W… What?
– About you having caused your own death, about us not having known while being alive, everything is fine. Because you had it up to your limit, right?
And like a lit lamp over his head, the boy finally can understand why she wanted to talk. Why she let him see her, why they could talk. She had reached her limit of pain, anguish, of everything bad that was accumulating in her chest since the fateful day where they split. Violet was venting to him at last. Violet was venting to him, finally.
And Tate was ready to start the monologue of apology and forgiveness, ready to put himself at her feet and ask for another day, time, years, eternities around the young one, but Violet turns and and looks into his eyes for the very first time.
– So, you can go away now.
And he's no longer there.
Taking advantage of her short moment of peace, until Tate can materialize in the room again, she runs to the window and opens it, breathing hardly into the cold wind blowing her hair away. Her chest is now lighter and she can afford to smile minimally, but she knows it's all totally temporary. Tate may wait until the next millennium when Violet comes to her limit again, because she's a very patient person now, but he is even more.
Thoughts fly together with her golden strands and she imagines a universe where the two would be alive. Violet infinitely younger, insecure and Tate probably the teacher, with a very different mind from when he was young, why not? While still living in that city and even in the school she hated so, she had many younger teachers. And it would be so easy for Tate seduce her, full of problems and needs, her parents gave the girl so easily to that boy.
Her mother would probably love the baby that would come from the combination of the two (pretty blonde and pale, she supposed) and his father would love Tate after passing the professor-who-wants-to-fuck-my-daughter phase. Which would be fast because Ben was quick to back the 'complicity' with the kid, even before Vivien forgive him. No wonder why she never sympathized with her father.
It probably hurt so much for Tate, more than the bullets that hit his chest or than other deaths he’s had. It should be the worst of tortures knowing they could have had access to this fairy tale, which was right there at his reach and he let it escape from his fingers, just as the smoke of cigarettes they’ve smoked.
For Violet it made no difference. With years and years living with her parents, Hayden, Chad and his husband, the symbolic presence of Tate, Moira, Nora and many others, managed to absorb more than the former examples of love given to her by the house.
She told to the empty room:
– There is no happy love, anyway.
And the light from a light bulb went off.