Maplecroft (The Borden Dispatches #1)(82)

I was shaking so hard that I could scarcely control myself, teeth audibly chattering though it was not so very cold. It was only the water that slipped between my toes. It was only the sight of Nance, calm at last, cocooned and finished.

I reached out with one quivering hand and touched the water’s edge, where one long lock of her hair had crept over the side of the tub, drawn there by some unseen, unfelt eddy, dangling damply.

I touched it.

Her eyes jerked toward me, and I screamed.





? ? ?


I screamed first with shock and then with hope, and the sound of it broke whatever spell I’d wound around myself, around her, the washroom, Maplecroft, Fall River.

I shoved my hands into the water and seized her, tried to haul her out in one fell swoop, but she was too heavy for that—even bone-dry, and even when she didn’t fight me, I didn’t know if I could lift her up over the side, but I tried—I flung my entire being into the effort. Bringing her up into the air, like a baptism.

She wanted the reverse. She fought me.

Her hands moved swift as minnows, shoving me back and shoving herself deeper. The whole tub rocked, heavy as it was. The whole room was soaked, and I was soaked, too. Nance writhed, demanding wordlessly to be left where she was, but I was not leaving her there. She was not drowning right in front of me.





? ? ?


No. She was not drowning.

Even in the violence and water that moved us both I could see it, how she wasn’t choking or bubbling, and she didn’t gasp or gurgle under the water. She simply did not breathe, and it didn’t bother her in the slightest as far as I could see.

Well, it bothered the hell out of me.





? ? ?


Emma’s bell was ringing, ringing, ringing, off in the background someplace, like the water had been dripping in the back of my awareness not five minutes previously. She was alive, then. I’d like to say that relief washed over me, but here while I’m being honest, the only thing that washed over me was the tepid bathwater that Nance splashed out in vast, violent arcs as she rallied her resistance.

But Emma was alive, yes. And that was good, a good thing to know, there in the back of my awareness. I would not worry about her. I had more pressing problems. Frantic, coiling, flailing problems, for Nance was running out of water and there was less and less for her to cling to, barely a foot’s worth to hold her, and she was determined to remain there.

Her foot shot out for the handle and to my great surprise, she grazed it—and water burbled out from the tap.

“No!” I shrieked at her, reached one arm over and wrenched it off.

Her hands pushed against my face, not clawing exactly but not showing any tender gentleness, either. I blocked them, left and right. I used my hands to stop hers, and to hold her wrists when I could catch them—but it was like grasping buttered eels, and I was getting tired.

At first I thought that she was getting stronger, drawing some resilience from our struggles, as if it fed her to fight me; then in a moment’s instinct . . . some weird little snap of connection, I had an idea: I reached for the drain plug and pulled it.

She shrieked, there under what water remained. I could barely hear it, just a wet warble that could’ve come from the middle of the ocean. I halfway thought that her cry would become an earsplitting wail when the water was gone, like that liquid buffer was all that stood between me and her wrath.

She twisted in the tub, feeling for the drain, trying to cover it with her feet, her hands, her shoulders; but I pulled her back, away, and when the water spilled down it wound itself in a circle, and then it was gone, and she wasn’t shrieking anymore.

She was gasping, but not for air. She was gasping for water—I could see it in her eyes, where there was terror if not recognition. Bathwater gushed in coughed-up waves over her chin, down her cheeks, into her hair, and her body convulsed as I ripped it from the tub.

(Not a baptism but a birth, and a terrible birth at that.)

She fell on top of me, knocking the wind from my lungs, but only briefly. I locked my arms around her and rolled until I was atop her, able to pin her in place and holler her name, over and over, demanding that she look at me and remember me, and understand that I loved her and was calling for her. I had to call louder than whatever else was calling her; I had to make myself heard over this maelstrom in the washroom, in her head, in my house.

I do not know if she heard me or not.

When she weakened enough to allow it, I let go of her arms and shoved at her chest, determined to force the last of the water free. She would breathe again. I would make her breathe again.

She cried and cried and cried, and the sobs became drier and drier.

I considered that I might’ve made a mistake. She was weakening, failing right there on the floor beneath my well-intentioned ministrations, though she’d been vigorous in the water. But no—in the water, that was not Nance. That was something else, whatever had overtaken her. And I meant to banish it. Cast it out, like Christ with the Legion, if I might dare to be so bold. And why shouldn’t I? Fortune favors the bold. Maybe Christ does, too.

Her head rolled to the side, and she panted like a nervous dog—that swift, shallow breathing through the mouth that’s one part plea and one part self-comfort. And still she breathed, even after I’d stopped pressing on her chest and belly. Even after I tried to take her face in my hands, but she closed her eyes and I let her go. Back and forth her head lolled. Back and forth, until I stopped it with a firm hand on her chin. I grabbed her with surprise and urgency, and I held her face immobile.