Gallant(31)

When she surfaces again, it’s to the white noise of heavy rain.

Hannah has come through—a pot of tea sits on the ottoman, but there’s no steam, the contents long cold. The shutters are open, but the light outside is a waterlogged gray. The kind of gray that belongs to another world, another life. Her stomach tightens at the sight of it, the memory of gravel hissing beneath her shoes, abandoned flower beds and collapsing sheds and buildings like dull teeth.

Olivia swallows and listens to the storm, some small part of her afraid that Gallant has been nothing but a dream, that she is about to wake and find herself back at Merilance, crouching in the garden shed while rain drums its fingers on the old tin roof.

But then she hears Edgar’s voice on the stairs, calling down to Hannah, and the fear unwinds. She is still here. It is still real.

And yet, just to be safe, Olivia searches her mother’s wardrobe, dresses in the brightest thing she can find, as if the vivid blue of the dress is a defiance, a color that would never be found at Merilance. She is finishing the buttons when she hears it, beyond the window.

It’s low, half-hidden by the steady curtain of rain, but she catches the rasp of tires on gravel, the rumble of an engine.

A car.

Panic lurches through her, and for a brief and terrifying second, she is sure that it has come for her. That she will look out the window and see the same black car that drove her away from Merilance, waiting like a hearse to take her back again. But when she brings herself to look past the fogging glass, down at the fountain and the drive, she sees Edgar jogging out to greet a butcher’s truck, the trade of crates, a wave, and the man is back behind the wheel and pulling away.

Her fluttering pulse begins to settle. Her fingers relax where they were gripping the desk. She retreats, returning to the bed to collect her mother’s journals. She finds the sketchpad among the tangled sheets, tucks all three beneath her arm and heads downstairs.

It is a wretched day outside, but inside, it’s rather pleasant. There is a sleepy air to everything. Wind whistles faintly against the house, rattling the open shutters, and with the sun buried behind so many clouds, it’s hard to tell what time it is. It could be ten in the morning or six at night or anywhere between. Edgar is humming softly in the kitchen, but the low crackle of wood draws her toward the sitting room, where she finds Hannah tucked in a chair, feet propped before the fire, a novel open in her lap.

She has declared it a reading day, she says. Nothing else to do when the weather turns. “My bones are getting old,” she says, “and they don’t like the damp.”

A ghoul sits in the other chair, unnoticed. A young man, little more than an elbow on a knee, a chin in a hand, mimicking Hannah’s posture. Olivia tries to place him from the portrait hall, but there isn’t enough of his face, and when he catches her looking, he dissolves into the velvet cushions. Olivia hugs the journals to her front and slips out, wondering how many ghouls there are at Gallant. One for every gravestone? Do the dead always come home?

Her feet carry her through the house, back to the music room.

Rain falls in a steady sheet beyond the bay window, making the rose heads droop, the distant wall blurred by weather and fog until it looks like an unfinished sketch. She half expects to see Matthew out there, kneeling among the flowers, head bowed despite the rain.

But there’s no sign of him. Perhaps he is still in bed. She thinks of his face the night before, the exhausted slump of his shoulders, the shadows beneath his eyes, and hopes he has found sleep.

The piano sits, waiting, but Olivia resists the urge to sit on the bench again, stumbling across Matthew’s melody, lest it wake him if he’s resting. Instead, she sinks among the cushions on the window bench and spreads out the journals and the sketchpad.

They lie there like pieces in a puzzle, waiting to be solved.

I went beyond the wall, her mother wrote. And I met Death.

I did not tell my brother that the shadow let me go.

And then, I wrote to him last night.

Those words snag something in her. She turns to the first entry in the old green journal, even though the line is burned into her memory.

If you read this, I am safe.

It always struck her as a strange first entry. Now it strikes her as an introduction. She knows the “you” in the journal to be her father, based on the way her mother wrote to him, the way she mourned his loss.

Don’t leave. Please, hold on a little longer. You cannot go before you meet her.

If that’s true, then her father was the “tallest shadow,” the one Grace claims she met beyond the wall. But there is nothing beyond the wall, as far as she can tell, and her father was not a figment of her mother’s mind, a ghostly figure in a fairy tale—Olivia is proof that he was real. He lived and breathed. . . .

And wrote.

Olivia turns through the red journal until she finds the line.

. . . when I checked, I found that he had written back.

She frowns, looking from one journal to the other. She has read the green book a thousand times and found only her mother’s sloping hand, her shifting thoughts. She turns through it again, searching for any sign of her father, and finds only the same entries and illustrations she knows by heart.

Frustration wells inside her, and she flings a cushion across the room.

What were you doing? she thinks, the words directed not at herself, but her mother. What did you mean? Help me understand.