This Monstrous Thing(66)
When he was finished, he gave me my coat, and I turned without putting it on and walked out of the station. I didn’t say a thing to Mary, but I heard the door catch as she followed me out.
The day was gray and foggy, with a canopy of sparkling mist blotting out the sunlight and making the snow look silver. The streets were crowded with holiday shoppers, and I could hear sleigh bells down the way. Christmas Eve, I thought again, and my eyes found the clock tower silhouetted against the sky. I started down the street, my unslung hand fisted in my pocket and my face turned into my collar, away from the wind. Behind me, I heard Mary call my name. “Alasdair.”
I didn’t stop. Her bootheels clattered on the cobbles. “Alasdair, wait.”
She managed to catch up, and suddenly she was in front of me, blocking my path. Her dark hair whipping out from under her bonnet trailed behind her like a kite string.
I stopped. “What?”
She crossed her arms, breath smoking white against the air. “How’s your shoulder?”
“It’s fine.”
“If you’re lying to me, I’ll skin you alive.” I couldn’t stop myself from laughing, but I was so weary and sick it came out sounding meaner than I meant.
Mary scowled. “What are you laughing at me for?”
“If I’m lying. What a joke coming from you.”
“And what’s that supposed to mean?”
“You know damn well what I mean. Mary—” I broke off and looked away from her. The two years between us were building at my back, the weight of all those unsaid, unexplained things, and it felt so heavy that I nearly sat down where I stood. I was angry—at her for Frankenstein and the way she was looking at me like she didn’t understand, at myself for this whole tangled mess, at Oliver because I had been certain there was something inside him worth saving but then he’d put the pliers in Geisler’s throat.
Mary looked away from me, up at the sky with the clock tower cut like a cameo against it, then down at the cobblestones, muddy snow congealing in the cracks between them. “I’m sorry about your parents,” she said. “And Oliver. And . . . everything.” She reached out and took my hand, just for a moment, and squeezed it. A bolt went through me, somehow both ice and electricity, and I pulled away. Mary looked up. “I need to tell you what happened.”
“I know what happened,” I said. “You took my life and Oliver’s life and you made them into this book. You made us into monsters, both of us. I don’t see much more than that going on here.”
“That’s not it, Alasdair, I never meant—”
“Mary, I don’t have time to talk to you about this right now.”
“Well, maybe I need to talk about it!” she cried, and for a moment she was the same fierce, beautiful creature who had captivated me two summers ago. Then she looked down, face shadowed, and I lost her again like a reflection in a lake cracked by ripples. “Will you listen to me, please? There are some things I need to tell you.”
I only had a day. It felt like no time at all, like I didn’t have a second to waste on Mary Shelley, but there were answers I needed whether I wanted them now or not. It didn’t feel like the right place—three doors down from the police station, on a street corner in Geneva on Christmas Eve—but I couldn’t think of anywhere that would ever be right for this.
I sighed and sank down onto the stoop of a watchmaker’s shop. Mary hesitated, then eased herself down beside me. She pulled off her bonnet so I could see her face, and her dark hair unfurled across her shoulders. Our arms brushed. For a moment, we both sat completely still as pedestrians and carriages clattered by. Cathedral bells were singing from the square.
Then Mary said very quietly, “Here’s the truth of why I spent so much time with you and Oliver that summer. All my life I thought I was a wild and brave girl who was not afraid of anything, but then I came here with Byron and Shelley and they were so much wilder than me. With them, everything felt so real and dangerous—all that sex and opium and acting as though we were living inside dark stories. I was frightened of the things they did, and I started to feel cowardly, like perhaps I wasn’t who I had always thought I was. Perhaps I wasn’t brave at all. But then I found you and Oliver, and you were . . . different. You were danger without ever feeling dangerous. You did adventurous things and I shocked you by doing them with you, and you made me feel wild without my ever having to do things that truly frightened me. You especially—I always felt so daring with you. And I loved you for it, because it was like you gave me myself back when I thought I’d lost it.”
She pressed two fingers to the bridge of her nose and closed her eyes like she was drawing these memories from a deep darkness inside of her. “But then Oliver died, and it was so messy and complicated and the realest thing I’d ever seen. I was so frightened because I was a part of it. It wasn’t me doing the work, but I was there. I was complicit. My God, Alasdair, look at what you did. You changed the rules of the universe. I think you were so caught up in the fact that it was Oliver, you didn’t realize that. But I did, and I didn’t know what to do with it. After it happened, you wouldn’t talk about it, and I couldn’t tell anyone else and I needed to make sense of it somehow. I tried to leave it behind—I went back to London, but it was still haunting me and I couldn’t run from it. You can’t hide from the things inside your own mind. So I wrote it all down, just to try and be free of it. It started with just you bringing your brother back from the dead.”