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Theodora (just Theodora, always, no Miss, Ms., or Mrs. leading the charge and no name bequeathed by a man bringing up the rear) wasn’t in the habit of looking back, ever. If she had to brush someone or something aside in her stately progress through life, they had better get out of the way while the getting was good. So it came as a shock – to her most of all – when one early morning, as she was rushing to get away from yet another argument with Abigail, she brushed past a mousy woman in front of the city garage, just knew that the woman would fall a full two heartbeats before she felt rather than saw her go off balance, and stopped and turned and extended a gloved hand.
“Sorry,” Theodora even said, and smiled. Poor little thing, she looked just abject, sprawled on the concrete with her pocketbook and her coat and her gloves and her cigarette case spilling all around her. “Are you running away too?” Theodora added, pricked by a familiar feeling, like she knew this woman from somewhere, some otherwise forgotten life.
Nell – though she was still Eleanor then, and nothing whatsoever to Theodora – blinked her spaniel eyes up at Theodora as she allowed herself to be hoisted back up to her feet, and blushed, and blurted out, “It’s half my car, you know.”
Theodora arched her eyebrow in what she had been assured by a reputable source was a devastating fashion. “And you’re here to make use of it, aren’t you, even if the owner of the other half won’t like it? You clever puss. I do not have a car, but I could use a lift.” She might have made that last statement a question, imbued it with hope and the possibility of rejection, but she didn’t. She waited for the mouse’s response.
“Where are you going?”
Theodora smiled in beatific sincerity. She only had a few dollars in her pocketbook, and she’d forgotten her gloves in her haste to get away from Abigail’s dull, sour displeasure. She needed nothing else. “I’m going your way. I don’t much care where, just away.”
They spent a week driving around the tristate area, staying at country inns and B&Bs on the outskirts of larger towns. They would always get a room with two beds, for neither of them was flush with cash, and Theodora kept to her best behavior, turning her back to change out of her blouse into her nightgown, shutting the bathroom door firmly when she ran her bath, for though Nell thawed to her quickly while they drove and shared meals and chatted while putting up their hair in curlers of an evening, there was little use in pushing her luck and getting stranded if her sweet little mouse panicked in the face of Theodora’s mounting interest.
After a full week elapsed, Nell dropped her off back at her place in the city. Theodora found the apartment half empty and half uninhabitable, for Abigail had taken her things with her and smashed up most of what belonged to Theodora.
“Oh, Theo,” Nell breathed with tears in her voice, looking at Theodora’s beautiful restored Italian sideboard reduced to kindling, her patterned damask sheets torn right down the middle, her rugs squelching with water or worse underfoot.
“Oh, pish tosh,” Theodora said more airily than she felt. “I’ve been meaning to rotate things from the store anyway.” She checked the phone: Abigail hadn’t cut the cord or had it disconnected. “You’d best call your sister and see if you’re allowed home tonight.”
Not only was Nell not welcomed back, but her sister and brother-in-law turned up on Theodora’s doorstep, demanding the car keys and nattering about the police and wanting to know who Theodora was and what was the meaning of this kidnapping she’d executed upon poor innocent Nell. Barely bothering to suppress a laugh, Theodora gifted them a few words as sweet and deadly as Venus flytraps and shut the door in their faces, blank as empty plates. Turning to behold Nell’s astonished countenance, shining with terror and gratitude, Theodora chanced to kiss her for the very first time, and Nell did not startle away.
*
“We could stop for coffee.” Even Nell sounded dubious as she peered out at the grubby stretch of clapboard houses rimming the highway which dared to call itself anything, let alone a charming name like Hillsdale. “We’re not due for a couple of hours yet.”
They were early because Nell had made Theodora get up before dawn, all aflutter to hit the road. Theodora was not now inclined to be kind.
“Not on your life,” Theodora replied and twisted the steering wheel to get them onto the rutted track past the gas station and the church. “I’ve never seen a more hideous place in all my life.”
Sometimes she wondered what good her gift was if she just went around making such pronouncements, as though life would not conspire to prove her wrong forthwith. After they negotiated passage past the dragon which was Mr. Dudley – whose relish in trying to deny them entry to the estate was outdone only by the dark joy with which he informed them that Dr. Montague would be delayed a day or two, and so they’d be staying at the house by themselves to start with – they burst at last through the dense trees to behold… the house.
Vile. Wrong. Diseased. Mad. Malicious. Watching.
All words they would use to each other to describe it that day and later on, none coming close to capturing the way simply pulling up outside it, peering up at its blank, dim windows and its canted roof made Theodora’s skin crawl.
“Nellie…” Theodora started to say but Nellie, unusually for her, interrupted: “We can’t just turn around and go back. We’ve come all this way. And Dr. Montague will be counting on us to keep an eye on things till he gets here.”
Theodora looked at her, annoyance mounting – during their first week together, they’d agreed that anyone had a right to run away from anything, anytime, for any reason – but Nell wouldn’t return her look. She was staring out at the house with eyes like lighthouse lamps.
“Are you frightened of old Dudley?” Theodora taunted, though she could see how pale Nell’s cheeks were. “I shan’t let him eat you.”
Before Nell could respond or turn her face away and pretend she hadn’t heard, the massive door with the baby’s-head knocker opened and disgorged a pinched-looking creature who proved to be the mate of the dour dragon at the gate. She explained all about mealtimes, and what services she would and would not provide, and the nighttime quiet and distance from any other living thing. Nell clutched the letter Dr. Montague had sent ahead to the house for them, with his profuse apologies and assurances that he would join them before, he hoped, they’d had too much excitement from the house, but Theodora had already had her fill of Mrs. Dudley’s tender mercies.
“Thank you, we’ll find the rooms ourselves,” she said, lifting her suitcase and starting up the stairs without waiting to see if Nell followed. “They will be the only two rooms made up to receive visitors, won’t they?” she added archly. Mrs. Dudley said nothing, but Theodora could feel the woman’s eyes on her all the way to the second floor.
The room to the left of the shared bathroom was green, the room to the right – blue, and both perfectly hideous. Theodora might have been less irritated if they’d been given one double bedroom, but going on the evidence of the actual rooms confronting them, perhaps not.
“Flip you for it?” Theodora said, but then without waiting for an answer from Nell, she marched into the green room and dropped her suitcase.
“Ugh, what a perfectly charming little bower.” She crossed the bathroom, which radiated deep-earth cold from every tile, and inspected the blue room. “This one is just as bad, like the bottom of a dusty old bottle best left on the ocean floor.”
At her elbow, Nell wrung her hands. Her knuckles cracked, a tell that she was nervous, Theodora knew. The sulk she’d started to work up softened a bit in the face of Nellie’s obvious distress.
Theodora put her arm around Nellie, and Nellie leaned into her gratefully, pressed close from thigh to shoulder.
“We’re fellow babes in the woods now,” Theodora teased lightly but didn’t truly feel it. Nell was older by a couple of years, but also younger in some respects, like an infant in Theodora’s arms. Nell had played nursey to her mother, but now it was she who needed looking after, cajoling out of her fears, distracting in the smothering dark.
That night, after the rather splendid dinner Mrs. Dudley had laid out for them, after they’d both been reduced to glancing nervously around rooms where the shadows moved aslant, rattling the knobs of doors they found closed despite having left them open, creeping upstairs on the balls of their feet as though unwilling to wake some crochety invalid inhabiting the house, Theodora paused again in front of their two rooms and gave Nell an appraising glance followed by a knowing, beatific smile.
“Flip you for it?” she murmured.
Nellie blushed, looked down and away, still prone to bouts of bashfulness though six months had elapsed since the night they’d spent clutching each other on the broken sofa in Theodora’s wrecked apartment.
“Mrs. Dudley might make our beds,” Nell said. “We should use both.”
“Mrs. Dudley was very clear about what services she will and will not provide. Turning down beds and laundry services were not mentioned, I remember distinctly.”
“What would Dr. Montague say?” Nell said, but she gazed with longing at the door of Theodora’s room.
Theodora put her lips to Nell’s ear, felt the fine hairs brush her lips: “I think he would remind us that Mrs. Dudley couldn’t hear us and wouldn’t come even if she could. No one will hear when I make you scream in the night, in the dark, Nell my Nellie.”
She spoke quietly, but in the complete stillness which permeated the house, her words were flung out like pebbles and seemed to echo down the long hall. Nell gasped at Theodora’s wickedness, but she followed docilely when Theodora led the way into the green room.
*
The next three days were spiraling hell.
When she thought of them after – when the memories assailed her so she couldn’t push them aside and think of anything else – events succeeded each other like a slide carousel clicking inexorably before Theodora’s mind’s eye:
Despite having gone to sleep in each other’s arms, when they woke, Nellie’s head was hidden under the pillow and the nightlight stabbed at Theodora’s eyes, while a tranquil, golden morning spilled through the window and made the room seem bearable, the furnishings positively verdant. “Do they all find it charming the first morning?” Nell wondered out loud, and Theodora, stung to annoyance, pulled her hair like it was plaited and they wore pleated skirts and bobby socks in the school yard.
“I have a hunch that you ought to go home,” Theodora confided that afternoon, and Nell sat up straight on the bed: “You’re driving me away! You’re trying to drive me away!” “Really, Nell, I thought we were past this,” Theodora muttered.
That night (she couldn’t bear to dwell on it for long), the terror of the knocking laughing gloating presence smashing against the door, Nell snatching up Theodora’s bathrobe in her mad fling at the door, to drive the something away.
The exhilaration of the second morning, artificial like wax flowers under glass. Escape into the fresh air of the hills, gathering wild strawberries in their handkerchiefs and eating them out in the sun, on the lawn, out of the house’s shadow. Theodora cast a narrow-eyed, suspicious look at all the windows with their heavy, drawn curtains, and refrained from flipping the façade the bird (after all, Mrs. Dudley might be watching and might not give them any dinner if offended). Theodora did not refrain from slipping her fingers, red and sticky with juice, under Nell’s skirt, into her drawers, right there in the sun, on the grass, for that bloody house to see, and Nell gasped Theodora’s name in a scandalized, exhilarated tone which was the opposite of counterfeit.
Really, what was the point of her clairvoyance if she went around annoying evil old houses with her defiance? Eleanor come home come home Eleanor, in chalk, in red paint which stank like menses. Dr. Montague’s second letter regretting to inform that he would be detained further. “He won’t admit he’s too scared to come, the scoundrel,” Theodora fumed, dressed in Eleanor’s tweed skirt and a sweater in a hideous shade of grey-olive. The selfish mouse couldn’t have lent her slacks though they’d packed their suitcases side by side, and so Theodora knew Nell had brought two pairs, and Nell refusing to meet her eyes, the selfish little witch.
That night, in the blue room, they fell asleep holding hands, not in ardor or the languor after release, but in primal need for comfort, something solid while the house puffed itself up for more mischief. Theodora dreamed of a black path, white trees, white grass, and an evil glow, like they were walking on the surface of the moon, drowning in its light, each step raising the tide of its sick glow higher, closer to their mouths and noses. Do you love me? Nellie asked her, and Do you love me? Theodora replied, and then Nell’s hand was wrenched from hers and Nell was screaming from the other end of the room, from the misshapen corner by the door, crying out “God God – whose hand was I holding?” Her voice first piercing then smothered by the thickness of night in that house.
*
At 9:55 the next morning, Theodora half fell, half climbed to the bottom of the stairs, carrying both suitcases, one of her arms thrown around and supporting Nell, who barely seemed able to lower her feet from one stair to the next one down, the suitcase in that hand pressed to Nell’s sternum like flimsy armor.
“I clear off at 10,” Mrs. Dudley intoned from the door leading to the dining room. Neither of them had been down to breakfast, it was all Theodora had been able to do to pack their things – her clothes as pristine as when she’d packed her suitcase at home, but the scent of paint which was like blood still permeated the green air in her room – and get Nell dressed and moving. “The dishes are supposed to be back on the shelves…”
“The dishes can choke you for all I care,” Theodora spat. She found anger a better helper that morning than fear or even worry for Nell. “I suggest you send a carrier bat or whatever it is you do, to tell your husband to unlock the gate. If he doesn’t, I swear I’ll mow it down and him with it.”
Mrs. Dudley smiled. Theodora shuddered, then was freshly enraged at her reaction.
“You are leaving,” Mrs. Dudley said, not a question. She might have at least had the good grace to make it a question.
Theodora said something she hadn’t had cause to say since the morning she’d walked out on Abigail, dropped her suitcase to wrestle the front door open under Mrs. Dudley’s marmoreal gaze, picked up her suitcase, and heaved the lot – suitcases, herself, and near-catatonic Nell – down the last few steps to their car.
The car fought her as she maneuvered it around on the driveway and pressed her foot down on the accelerator, twisting the steering wheel and taking the curve by the big oak tree much too fast, then hurtling down the double row of dark sentinel trees toward the gate.
In the rearview mirror, the house watched them go, leering, seeming to reach out and grasp after them. Theodora imagined coming back with a few cans of gas and making herself comfortable on the lawn to watch it burn, but the fantasy lasted barely the length of a breath, for even in fantasy nothing could have ever compelled her to attempt a return to that place. She gripped the steering wheel with one hand, bouncing over the rutted road, so she could roll down her window and flip the bird at the house, the miraculously open maw of the gate, and Dudley standing well back from the road, his lips moving in some curse and his eyes flashing darkly as the car passed him, Theodora’s white hand with its extended middle finger slicing the air.
“Theo,” Nell moaned from the passenger seat, the first thing she’d said that morning, and Theodora chanced to glance at her before she had to concentrate on the uneven, stone-strewn road.
“It’s alright, baby. It’s alright,” she soothed, daring to steer with one hand and pat Nellie’s arm with the other, and felt Nell convulsing terribly, shaking all over, till she let out a high noise and Theodora realized that she was laughing, choking with it, but laughing.
“Theo,” Nell heaved. “I can’t… I can’t… I can’t believe you did that…”
Theodora laughed too, her hands shaking as she steered, for she could see the intersection with Route 5 leap out from among the trees like the paved-over gates to paradise opening to receive them. Then they were out from under the trees, careering right onto the blessedly deserted county road, swerving wide into the opposite lane before Theodora righted them and eased off the gas a bit.
They passed through Hillsdale without seeing it, Nell still shaking in her seat, catching her breath, her hands clasped to her bosom. Theodora concentrated on driving, almost jumped when she felt Nell, her shy Nell, touch her thigh and caress it.
“Theo,” Nell pleaded. “I would like… Could we… Might we get a house?”
“A house,” Theodora repeated blankly. They’d just escaped from a house, what on earth was Nell talking about?
“A house, a little house where we might live together. A house with whitewashed walls, set back from the road, surrounded by oleander bushes…”
“No.” Theodora’s sharp tone shocked her and Nellie both into silence. “Not oleander,” Theodora clarified, her heart thumping. “I particularly loathe the scent.” Abigail’s perfume had been oleander, and Theodora’s mother’s, and that vile woman had had the temerity to name her only daughter Edna. What choice had Theodora had but to run away and gift herself a better name?
Nell’s eyes lingered on Theodora’s face, and when Theodora chanced a look away from the road, she found Nell smiling as though waking from a pleasant dream. “Not oleander, then. Rose bushes, and a blue door, and a white cat to sit on the doorstep and white curtains on the windows to let in the sunlight. Oh Theo, say we might!”
It sounded deathly dull to Theodora, but she supposed she might give it a try if it made Nell happy, Nell who had had so little yet had dared so much. It might surprise Theodora too, and if not, one could always run away. But chancing another glance at Nell’s glowing, dreamy, plain face, Theodora thought that it might surprise her indeed, for she was not what she had been, not when she’d become Theodora, not six months ago, and not even three days ago when they’d first come to that bloody house. She’d never cared to run away and bring someone along before, but now… Now, she knew where her courage was coming from.
She caressed Nell’s hand where it rested on her thigh, fingers to Nell’s fingers, palm to the veined back of Nell’s hand, then shifted her grip back to the gear shift as they merged with Route 39 and passed a sign heralding their return to the city.
“We’ll make the rounds of the letting agents when we get back,” Theodora said softly, then more firmly, perhaps more sharply than she’d intended: “Watch out for someplace decent to stop for breakfast, will you? I could murder for a roll and a cup of coffee. Stone me and burn me if I ever so much as look at a kipper again.”
Nellie’s soft laugh filled the car again, fresh and new like the sunlight through the windshield, and her hand remained on Theodora’s thigh as the car ate up the miles to get them home.