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Dana was awake with the barely risen sun. Her eyes were painful, opened too wide too quickly. She stared at the ceiling, darkened as it was, she could still make out the ugly swirls of plaster she and Cassie vowed to change when they bought the ‘fixer upper’ seventies semi-detached building. Fancy remodelling everything but the ceiling, Dana thought bitterly from their four-poster bed. The walls were all painted, wallpaper removed and wooden paneling tastefully installed in the bathrooms. Doors were replaced, sanded and varnished beautifully by Cassie’s careful hands. Everything new, everything modern and either sleek or delightfully kitsch, except for the thing Dana finds herself staring at most often.
The bed was empty, again. The sheets were unchanged for weeks, maybe even a month now. The pillow that once had a head shaped dent had leveled itself out again, perhaps from all the beatings it received. Fists pummeling expensive feathers as if they might reform the dent. Trying, trying again, trying harder and harder but still the dent cannot be remade. Dana regretted ever delivering the first blow on it, tampering with the exhibit.
Technically speaking, she could belong to her bed for another three hours at least. Time evaded her, she theorised a while ago that it works hand in hand with joy, seeking to deprive her of any anchoring to the ground beneath her feet. Often, she felt as if she was floating around, soles of her shoes unmarred like the smooth pillow she sleeps beside. It doesn’t feel as idyllic as drifting would feel. It’s more like fingers wrapped around her bicep, tugging her forcefully from one room to another or from one hour to the next. Even when she watched her feet land on the wooden floor beside their bed, it didn’t feel firm beneath her step. It didn’t feel assuring the way solid ground should. Dana sighed weightily, almost annoyed at the human need to breathe.
Cassie left. She didn’t mean it the way it happened, but she still left. Dana told her to, of course. That’s the only way she would possibly go, is to be ordered. No matter how the execution came about, the result is the same, the sky is still blue and blood still pumped in Dana’s heart, even though Cassie left. Her blood was red and warm under a microscope, just like it used to be. Dana, however, knew something about the temperature of herself that the microscope would never, and persisted with layering trailing scarves and thick cardigans just to lounge on her sofa and stare at the pictures she tore from the wall when Cassie left. The nails still litter the floor by the mantel; a barbed wire of sorts. Or, just rubbish Dana is simply too tired to pick up.
Stoicism was her whole thing. Stiff upper lip, keep calm and carry on, all the cliches parroted by women who were taught their needs come second to those around them. All the words uttered by the martyrs before her. Stoicism left her the same way her commitment to martyrdom did. Cataclysmic, suffocating depression. The food rotting in the fridge type, hair matted at the back and fingers shaking either from low blood sugar or just from the heaviness in her chest. She rattled around the house, entry to every room more like being slammed against the wall and winded by the unrelenting nature of just remembering.
She watched her feet on the ground with disinterest, she could practically see yesterday's footprints. The same path was followed every day. Over to the chair in the corner, where dirty and clean garments mingled together counterintuitively. The scarf she wore was striped with red and white, an affront to her own sporting taste, but it smelled like Cassie even now. Musky, old shampoo and cologne and mothballs from being shoved into the junk cupboard. It was so long she could wrap it around her neck twice. Next, the bathroom. Cold and dusty, visited only when necessary. The white tiled floor had lost its shine, and in the corner where the bath met the wall, laid a pile of Cassie’s old clothes. Dirty, shed from her last shower here. Dana doesn’t dare move them, they’re another exhibit in the museum.
Dana washed her hands like always, she skipped the brush of her trembling hands on the towel that hung limply from the silver ring on the wall. The water dripped from her fingertips onto her bare feet, onto the wooden floor. The stairs were imposing, it was a different world down there. Down there… There were shoes, scattered and not in Dana’s size. Pictures, too. The museum ground level appeared haunted, this visage unaided by the relentless darkness; there was not a single gap in the light blocking. Curtains pulled to their extremes, blinds lowered and blankets shoved where sunlight might leak through and impinge on her self-entombment.
The descent felt swifter than normal on this day. Dana felt as if she landed hard from the floating, shoved into the floor until the breath in her lungs felt like hot pokers in her throat. She opened her eyes at the bottom of the stairs, her breaths were tight and tired. One wheeze and a cough later, the door opened. Light swept in, she shut her eyes so hard that colours and patterns - yellows and browns like the old seventies wallpaper - waltzed on the inside of her eyelids.
“What are you doin’ down there?” Cassie asked, softly. She bent a knee to level herself with Dana.
“Wha- what?” Dana opened her eyes, but the rest of her stayed still. Entranced, paralysed by the view before her.
“What are you doin’ down there, huh? I go away for a few months and you just start lying on floors,” Cassie scoffed in a way that didn’t register as mocking.
“Three months, four days and…. Some hours,” Dana tried to shrug, but nothing moved. She didn’t mind.
“But who’s counting?” Cassie’s nose scrunched. The light died down a bit behind her, but the front door was still open. A breeze swept through, a new lease of life for Dana’s struggling lungs.
“Me… I guess,” Dana’s eyebrows wrinkled, her forehead tense from the realisation. Cassie’s smile felt warm, warmer than the scarves around her neck, warmer than the ray of sunlight that strained to touch the very tip of her toe.
“Come on, get up,” Cassie’s hand enveloped Dana’s, that was warm, too. Dana was tugged from the floor, her legs strong underneath her with the aid of touch. Her vision clear, her once sore eyes no longer fought against light. Her lungs felt just fine. Cassie twirled her, once, under her arm. The baggy sleeve of her linen blouse touched the top of Dana’s scalp, the waft of Cassie’s deodorant was closer to a direct hit of morphine than a simple smell.
“Are you really here?” Dana reached out, she pinched at Cassie’s waist. It felt real, flesh under her fingertips forgiving and cloudy soft.
“As much as you are,” Cassie replied, her hand caressed Dana’s cheek. Something warm smudged from the corner of her hairline onto her cheekbone.
“Your hands are wet,” Dana said.
“Don’t worry about it, angel,” her voice carried like a song, her footsteps rhythmic as they led Dana through the house. “Remember our wedding? I insisted on the formal dance, to that song you love-,”
“You always bring that up! I told you, it meant a lot to me as a teenager. Nobody made you dance.” Dana argued instinctively, it felt as natural as the hand that went to Cassie’s shoulder. She squeezed it, and it was solid. She smiled. The muscles didn’t reject it, either. They gave way easily, like a dam made of tissue paper.
“Nobody’s makin’ you dance, either, yet look at you.”
Cassie looked at her then with as much love, if not more, than she ever did. As if Dana hadn’t told her to leave three months, four days and one hour ago. Her eye, the one flecked with amber, seemed almost translucent. In her more confident moments, that’s how Dana viewed her. Obvious, absolved of sin and scheming and the only person on the planet who she could see clearly and be seen by.
“Look at me,” Dana whispered, into the dark kitchen where Cassie twirled her again. She laid her head where it fit perfectly in the crook of her wife’s neck when their bodies returned to one another. “I’m sorry that I said to go.”
“Oh, angel,” Cassie’s smile was impressed upon the side of her head, where an overly wet kiss was placed. “You just said ‘go’, you didn’t cause any of it.”
Dana was in bliss, dancing on an unwashed tile floor in a room that hadn’t been used as more than storage for three months, four days, one hour and seven minutes, Dana believed her. She shut her eyes, but when the breath in her throat felt like a knife again, she opened them wide to stare at the threads on Cassie’s shirt.
“I should have told you to stay, it was dark and cold and you-,”
“I was OK. I thought of you.” Cassie mumbled in response, Dana heard the rumbling in her chest with the words. The archway to the living room was just behind Cassie. Dana swallowed the swords, knives and pokers and squeezed her eyes shut. “The entire time.”
“I missed you,” Dana stated bluntly, she pried her eyelids apart again when the pain of her breathing became too much and her limbs started to feel like hunks of tarmac she was forced to drag with her.
“For how long?” Cassie separated their bodies in time with the joke, and moved her hand to the small of Dana’s back gracefully, colliding them gently. She squished herself as tightly as she could to Dana. As their feet danced over the threshold into the living room, Dana tried to focus on all five fingertips pressed against her spine. Her head went to Cassie’s shoulder again, her eyes were so desperate to close.
Cassie was here, and when her eyes were open, her lungs didn’t send warning signals to her brain and her breath didn’t rattle. Cassie was here. Dana dug her fingers into Cassie’s flesh. They seemed to dance slower here, in front of the flowers that were shoved away to wilt near the barbed wire of bent nails. The unopened cards, the opened ones, their meaningless texts glared at her maliciously. Dana’s breathing quickened as they passed the coffee table. One, two, three, four, five digits against her back.
One little booklet, a white background with a small square picture in the middle. Cursive font above, the director specified the font size but Dana didn’t listen. Smaller font underneath. Cassie’s face, smiling and dimpled, one arm around Harrison and her head tilted towards Dana’s. ’Doctor Cassie McKay: mother, wife, friend. Order of Service, February 24th, 10 a.m.’
“Cass, are you,” Dana’s breath catches even though her eyes are open, like a belt look on a drawer handle, but there’s no pain with it, “are you…”
“As much as you are,” she smiled sadly, her eyes twinkled with invitation. “Come with me,” Cassie offered, she danced them past the order of service pamphlet, to the archway near the stairs. “Just one more round, and then you can come with me.”
“What about everyone else?” Dana reached for martyrdom one last time, Cassie’s touch was respite from the sedating depression.
“What about them? There’s nothing we can do, Dana.”
Dana glanced one last time at the order of service. “Yeah.”
“So, dance with me, huh? One last time?” Cassie spun Dana with a dimpled smile, past her dying body, and easily into another room.
“And then come with you?” Spellbound, lost in her own brain, glee rose at the prospect of going with Cassie. Like she should have last time.
Eyes as real as ever, touch as firm and more assuring than hard ground could ever be, Cassie’s voice filled Dana’s ears with promise.
“And then come with me.”
Three months, four days, one hour and fourteen minutes after Cassie left, Dana joined her.