A Breath of Eyre (2 page)

Authors: Eve Marie Mont

BOOK: A Breath of Eyre

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“He got a phone call.”

“Well, honey, take this opportunity to go upstairs and reapply your makeup. Your face is all splotchy and your hair is a disaster. Go now, while Gray is occupied.”

I wanted to scream at her, to tell her how awful it made me feel when she looked at me like I was some kind of mutant. Why could I never be good enough for her? Why could I never please her?

It was on days like this that I missed my mother most, even if I could barely remember her. In my mind she was bright and beautiful and wild—an orange poppy or a beautifully plumed bird. Summer mornings, we used to rush down to the beach to go swimming or build castles, and summer nights we’d catch fireflies until it was too dark to see. The ocean was the place where I felt closest to her. I clutched at her necklace—a silver dragonfly with blue and green glass wings—and felt an ache for her that took my breath away.

I had to get out of there. I had to go to the beach and swim—swim until my head cleared, my muscles ached, and my skin went numb—until I couldn’t feel anything at all. I knew it would be rude to leave my own party and I’d probably pay for it later, but at that moment, I didn’t care. It was almost as if I had no choice.

While the guests were eating their veggie burgers and tofu dogs in the kitchen, I snuck out the front door, determined to walk to the stony beach at the end of our block. The only thing that shook my resolve was seeing Gray Newman sitting on my curb, staring down at his phone like it had just bitten him. I intended to walk right past him and continue with my mission, but he shouted, “Yo, Townsend!”

Startled, I turned around.
Yo, Townsend? Really?

“Where are you going?” he asked. He looked stunned, like he couldn’t believe I was leaving my own party.

“To the opera,” I said. My sarcasm was a defense mechanism. Truthfully, acting cool and aloof all the time exhausted me, particularly when the last thing I felt about Gray was aloof. His face hadn’t registered my joke, and he was still looking mortally wounded. “Are you okay?” I asked, getting serious for a minute.

His eyes crinkled, like he was working something out in his head. “Yeah, I’m okay,” he said. “I just keep choosing the wrong girls.”

His face looked so sad and earnest, but I couldn’t help feeling a sense of joy at this confession. He stood up and walked over to where I was standing. Barbara’s earlier pronouncement about my splotchy face and messy hair echoed through my head, and I felt sweat beading at my temples. Somehow even in the full glare of the sun, Gray managed to look cool and unflustered. “You got a boyfriend, Townsend?”

My face grew even hotter than before. “There’s a constant stream of them coming in and out of my house, haven’t you noticed? I have to beat them off with a stick.”

He laughed out loud, and I was surprised by how good this made me feel. Then he knitted his brow and stared at me. “You know, our schools are, like, five minutes from each other. It’s weird that we never see each other.”

“Yeah,” I said, wondering where he was going with this.

“Do you ever go into town?”

“Waverly Falls?” He nodded. “No, I don’t drive, remember?”

“Oh, right. Are you going to get your license soon?”

“Eventually,” I said. “My dad’s not a huge fan of the idea. He’s afraid if I get my license, I’ll take off and never come back.”

“Is that a possibility?”

“I don’t know,” I said. “It’s tempting.”

“You don’t like Lockwood, do you?”

I paused before answering. “No, not really.” Understatement of the century.

“Why not?”

I couldn’t very well say,
Because of people like your girlfriend,
so I just shrugged and said, “I don’t belong there.”

It was an honest answer, and he gave me an honest response. “I know.” I was wondering whether to be offended by this, but I got the sense he’d meant it as a compliment. Then he added, “I don’t belong where I am either,” and I knew my instinct had been correct.

We stood staring at each other for a few seconds, but instead of feeling awkward like it had before, this time it felt heavy and meaningful. I didn’t want to stop looking at him, and then the staring contest grew too intense and I actually felt a little breathless. Finally, because I didn’t know what else to do, I said, “Well, I’m going to go now.”

“You’re really leaving?” he said, his face an open book of disappointment.

“Just going for a quick swim,” I said, clutching my necklace. His glance flickered briefly to the pendant, then rose to meet my eyes.

“Be careful, okay?”

“I will. My dad’s a fisherman, remember?”

“And my parents own an organic food store. That doesn’t make me a vegan.”

I laughed and nodded. “I’ll be careful.”

He smiled, but his face still looked sad. I think it was because his eyes turned down at the ends. “Happy sweet sixteen, Emma,” he said. Sincerely. Without a trace of sarcasm.

Feeling a little rattled that he’d called me Emma and not Townsend, I turned toward the beach and felt his eyes on me as I walked away.

The beach was practically deserted. The TV and radio had been airing warnings to stay inside, but there were a few brave souls sitting with their beach chairs in the surf. I took my shoes off and stepped onto the pebbly sand, feeling my feet scald the moment they touched ground. I ran to the water for relief.

The tide was running high, the ocean churning up foam and seaweed. I breathed in deeply, inhaling the briny air as I watched a sailboat skim along the horizon. I imagined it was sailing somewhere exotic: Bermuda, Jamaica, St. Croix. Somewhere with soft trade winds that carried the scent of jasmine and hibiscus. I longed to be on it.

I took off my clothes and waded into the water, feeling its coolness envelop me. After a few more steps I couldn’t resist diving in and swimming out a little farther. Once I was out past the breakers, I began a steady and relentless crawl, swimming like I was trying to reach the horizon. My heart was beating fast, but I felt tremendous. Alive. When I finally grew tired, I turned onto my back and let my head float on the water, looking up at a cloudless sky. My ears were underwater, so all I could hear was the magnified sound of my own breathing, hypnotic and soothing.

Somehow I could lose myself in the ocean the same way I could lose myself in a good book. Maybe it was because both involved suspension—a suspension of weight, a suspension of disbelief—a willingness to surrender to something greater than oneself. Cradled by this enormous sea, everything else melted away. I felt alone yet not lonely. I had felt far lonelier back at the house.

Time lapsed in that lazy way it can on the ocean, and after a while, I lifted my head and spun around to get my bearings. I’d never been out this far before, and never on my own. But I didn’t panic. I was a strong swimmer, and I liked a challenge. I turned onto my stomach and began swimming to shore, even though I was reluctant to return to my party and face the wrath of Barbara. When I felt my chest tightening, I paused and treaded water to catch my breath. The undertow was strong; I’d barely covered any ground.

I was feeling pretty exhausted already, and my earlier confidence was waning. I resumed my crawl, hoping I had enough energy left to make it back to shore. Cutting through the waves, I kept my eyes closed, praying that I’d open them to see the beach within range. But when I stopped to check, I’d made virtually no headway at all. The realization made me weak with fear. My breathing was ragged, and salt water stung my eyes and nostrils. My muscles burned from the effort of swimming against the tide, and my limbs felt rubbery and slack.

Panic set in as I tried to find the beach through wet eyelashes. My blood was pulsing in my ears as I took in the first few gulps of water, making me choke and sputter. My lungs burned in my chest, and this sent me into a panic spiral. I stopped swimming and did the worst thing I could possibly do: I began to flail. I could feel myself losing control, sinking under, and for one startling moment, I knew I was going to drown. I, Emma Townsend, on my sixteenth birthday, was going to die of extreme stupidity.

I could no longer see the beach, only water and darkness and foam. My brain suddenly went hot, and my mind grew very still and quiet—so quiet that I thought I heard chanting, an angelic chorus of voices calling to me from beneath the sea. I stopped struggling for a minute and floated, surrendering myself to the music. I knew that if I wanted to, I could let the waves overtake me and sink to the bottom to join those voices. It would be so much calmer down there without all this noise and tumult. It might even be peaceful. And I was so tired of fighting. Letting go would be easy.

It was human voices that woke me out of my trance. They were calling out to me, their voices crystallizing as I regained consciousness. One seemed to be calling my name. There was no panic in the voice, only a deep sense of purpose. Hearing it, I knew that I had to keep swimming.

Back at the house, I had told Gray that there wasn’t anything I wanted. But that wasn’t true. I wanted to go to Paris. I wanted to write a novel. I wanted to fall in love. I wanted so many things.

Buoyed by this revelation, I mustered all my remaining strength and resumed my swim toward shore, letting the voices guide me. I don’t know where this surge of energy came from—adrenaline, survival instinct—but I was swimming now with a power I didn’t know I had. The tide had carried me so far down the beach that I could see the lighthouse blinking out on the point. Just below it, the shoreline jutted out into the ocean like a bent arm, the tip curving toward me like a miraculous hand.

I swam with singular determination, my arms burning, lungs heaving, knowing I couldn’t stop. Not until my palms felt hard sand. As I neared the shoreline, I got caught in the heavy surf. Water came crashing over my head, spinning me under the water, dragging my back and legs along the rocky bottom. I clawed my way along the ocean floor and let the water barrel over me, so long as it was moving me closer to shore. Finally, a mammoth wave tossed me onto the sand, where I collapsed, sputtering water out of my nose and mouth and opening my eyes to the silhouette of my saviors, the beacon of the lighthouse flashing behind one of them like a halo.

C
HAPTER
2

T
he next thing I remember was waking with the feeling that I’d had a terrible nightmare. I lay in the darkness for a few minutes, feeling my heart race as I remembered that it had really happened. I had almost drowned. And now I was lying safe in my bed and couldn’t remember how I’d gotten here.

Thunder rattled the windows, and I sat up, feeling pain seize through my limbs. My body hurt everywhere. As I swung my legs over the side of the bed, I was fairly sure somebody had doped me up with some heavy-duty painkillers. I felt woozy and weak and could barely stand, let alone walk. Feeling drunk, I stumbled to the window and opened it, feeling cool air rush in, along with a fine mist that coated my face. Rainwater was pooling all over the yard and racing down the gutters, making a whooshing sound that exhilarated me.

I stood staring out the window for several minutes, trying to remember what had happened. Vaguely I recalled someone standing over me at the beach, asking me questions. One of my saviors had called 911. And even though it defied logic, I couldn’t help but believe that the person standing over me with the halo behind her head had been my mother.

As I watched rain pummel the house, I half remembered lying in a hospital room as guests from my party came in and out, looking down at me with worried expressions. But their faces were vague in my mind, silhouettes from a surrealist painting. I wondered if maybe I’d dreamed them.

Feeling faint and shivery, I decided to take a hot shower. I stood under the spray for half an hour, letting the water massage my sore muscles and calm my nerves. I threw on a T-shirt and my coziest pair of pajama pants, then headed downstairs to get something to eat. I felt ravenous. As I rounded the corner of the living room, I heard hushed voices coming from the kitchen.

“She’s been so reckless lately,” Barbara was saying. “She’s getting more and more like Laura every day.”

“Don’t say that,” my dad said. “You didn’t know her.”

“But you told me that was what she was like at the end. Withdrawn. Erratic. Irresponsible.”

“It was more complicated than that. She was very, very sick.”

There was a pause, followed by more whispering. “Maybe that’s what’s happening to Emma. She is sixteen. A lot of these illnesses manifest themselves in adolescence.”

“She’s sixteen, period, Barbara. It’s a difficult age.”

“An age when she should start acting like a responsible adult. Don’t you think it’s odd that she has no friends? That she doesn’t go shopping or socializing like other kids? She seems very, very ... troubled.”

Another pause, during which I wondered how my father was going to respond. Finally, in a voice so quiet I could barely hear him, he said, “I wouldn’t say she’s
very
troubled.”
Way to defend me, Dad.

“All she did all summer long was mope around the house. She complained incessantly about having to work at the real estate office, as if I wasn’t doing her a favor by giving her some practical job experience to put on her transcript. All I can say is thank goodness she goes back to school next week. Let someone else worry about her for a change.”

Barbara’s words stung, but my father’s silence hurt even more. How could he let her talk about me that way? And what had she meant about my mother’s “erratic” behavior? Or me getting sick?

I felt betrayed by them both, and more alone than I’d ever felt. I was about to go back upstairs when I noticed a package sitting on the floor by the bookcase. It must have been overlooked the day before amidst all the commotion. I bent down to pick it up and recognized the tree bark wrapping paper. Simona’s gift.

I took it upstairs to my room and tore off the paper. The card inside read:
Happy Birthday, Emma! This was your mother’s favorite book in college. I hope you adore it as much as she did. With love, Simona.

The book had a worn leather spine and marbled covers. I cracked it open, smelling decades of must and age and wear. Turning to the title page, I read:
Jane Eyre. An Autobiography. Edited by Currer Bell. Harper & Brothers, Publishers, New York, 1848.
It was such an early copy that Charlotte Brontë hadn’t even used her own name.

I had always wanted to read
Jane Eyre,
but for some reason, I’d never gotten around to it. For me, reading a book is an experience I like to savor. While I’m in the world of a story, the characters become more real to me than the people in my own life. If I’m having a bad day, I look forward to coming home and rejoining my friends on the page.

Last summer, I’d read every Jane Austen novel, beginning with
Northanger Abbey
and ending with
Persuasion
.
Sense and Sensibility
had been my favorite because I’d always wished for a sister. The summer before, I’d read Dickens—
David Copperfield, Oliver Twist,
and
Great Expectations
—but I’d never gotten that feeling of coming home with Dickens. Pip and Estella never felt like my friends, not like Lizzy Bennet or the Dashwood sisters.

I looked down at the copy of
Jane Eyre
and ran my hand across the cover, feeling the years of the book’s existence fill me up with a sort of longing, a wanderlust to travel into its pages. And since I had nowhere else to go and the rain seemed like it would never stop now that it had started, I turned to page one and began to read.

The book was about a young orphan named Jane who lived with her Aunt Reed, a selfish woman who treated her horribly and punished Jane by sending her to the red room where her uncle had died. I flipped the pages breathlessly to find out about Jane’s banishment to a boarding school and her abuse at the hands of the evil Mr. Brocklehurst. I grieved for Jane when a typhus epidemic killed her best friend and when her beloved teacher, Miss Temple, had to move to another school. I stopped reading right after the chapter when Jane accepted a position as governess of Thornfield Hall. The rest would have to wait until I was back at school.

I had been dreading my return to school for weeks. In some ways, Lockwood was similar to Jane’s boarding school. Sure, ours was for rich kids instead of orphans, and we certainly had better teachers and better food. But in some ways, Lockwood felt like a prison to me, full of rules and bells and social hierarchies that oppressed and confused me.

Lockwood was a little under an hour’s drive from Hull’s Cove, but it might as well have been another world. In Hull’s Cove, the dominant color was brown—old fishing boats, crab traps, hemp nets, lobster pots, seafood shacks. Even the water looked sort of brown. But as we drove farther away from the coast and got off the Massachusetts Turnpike, it was all misty air and rolling hills and farms broken up by stonewalls so they resembled green patchwork quilts.

My dad and I didn’t talk much on the ride. He was still angry with me about the swimming incident. That last week of my summer break, I’d had to endure multiple lectures about the dangers of the ocean. Being a fisherman, he had been fanatical about water safety all his life. He’d warned me dozens of times never to go swimming alone, never to go swimming during riptide, never to get complacent just because we lived near the sea. I didn’t even try to argue because I knew he was right.

I rested my head against the window as we meandered through some low hills and passed by ponds and meadows, briefly entering the town of Waverly Falls, which sat on a river straddled by a red covered bridge. The landscape grew denser as we passed the state forest, woods on all sides and the smell of evergreen in the air. When we came out of the woods and onto Oakwood Lane, the East Gate of Lockwood Prep emerged in the clearing like some golden gate into an enchanted country.

But that was where the enchantment ended. The campus was built on old plantation lands once owned by Thomas Danforth, the deputy governor who sentenced nineteen innocent people to hang during the Salem Witch Trials. As we drove along the main drive into school with its canopy of overhanging trees, I felt a choking sensation in my chest and a knot in my stomach as if I were awaiting a sentence of my own.

The first time my dad and I visited the campus, those trees had reminded me of footservants greeting the arrival of some forgotten princess. I suppose that was the idea—to reinforce the sense of entitlement and privilege one would feel if one came here—but it only served to remind me how much I didn’t belong.

The school was admittedly impressive with its banks of stately oak trees and sloping green fields, its cobbled walkways and nineteenth-century stone façades. But the sight of it now made me queasy. My father parked in the visitors’ lot, and we hoisted my suitcases from the back of his station wagon and walked slowly toward the dormitory. This was my least favorite part of the year, the first day when all the girls thronged the hallways in giddy reunion, giggling and whispering, turning up their stereos to share recently discovered music, crashing into each other’s rooms to speculate on what the new year would hold.

I knew I was getting a new roommate this year. In his infinite wisdom, our headmaster, Dr. Overbrook, always housed the scholarship recipients together so everyone would know who was attending Lockwood by the grace of charity rather than privilege. My roommate from last year, Becky Fulton, would not be returning because Elise Fairchild had seen to it that her life here was a living hell. Granted, Becky was not the typical prep-school girl; she wore fuzzy cat sweaters and dangly cat earrings and went to church every day, lecturing the girls on the consequences of smoking and drinking to their immortal souls. But that didn’t give the other girls an excuse to torture her. Her parents had to pick her up in the middle of finals because she’d had a breakdown right in the middle of our history exam.

My new roommate was named Michelle Dominguez, and apparently, she’d been farmed from the local public school as a last-minute replacement for Becky. Dr. Overbrook had told my father she was some kind of science whiz and that he was counting on me to make Michelle feel welcome. I hoped Michelle wouldn’t be disappointed to find I had no connections whatsoever around this place. In fact, with Becky no longer here, I feared I might be the next logical target for Elise Fairchild and her hellish minions.

When I opened the door to my room, it was clear that Michelle had already arrived, although she wasn’t there at the moment. She had claimed the bed on the left side, where I’d slept last year, and some of her clothes were scattered over it. I couldn’t help but notice that most of them were red. She had already hung some things on the wall—a map of the constellations, a poster of Degas’s racehorses, a postcard of Albert Einstein sticking his tongue out. On her dresser sat two framed photos, side by side. One was of a woman on horseback wearing a red riding jacket, her dark hair tucked inside a riding cap. The other was of a distinguished-looking man with thick gray hair and big white teeth.

My dad watched me unpack my clothes in the dresser and make my bed, but I could tell he just wanted to leave. Good-byes made him uncomfortable. Later he stood in front of me in the hallway, trying to find a graceful way to make his exit. My dad had never been particularly touchy-feely, but when I was a kid he’d at least let me sit on his lap after dinner or give me a hug before bed. But I honestly couldn’t remember the last time he’d touched me. The fact that we were not hugging at this iconic hug moment loomed over us like a giant neon sign.

He stood playing with a tag that had fallen off my suitcase. “Do you have everything you need?” he said.

“I think so.”

“Vitamins? Tylenol? Lifetime supply of Pop-Tarts?”

“B-complex. Advil. Brown Sugar and Cinnamon. Check.”

“Okay, well, I’m gonna head off, kiddo.”

“Okay.”

He made a slight move toward me, and I braced myself for contact. But he ended up only squeezing my arm. “Be good.”

“Always.”

I watched through my window as he exited the dorm and shuffled to his car, hands in his pockets. When I thought about the chasm that had opened between us, I felt like it might swallow me up.

Something rustled behind me. I whipped around to see a girl who could only be Michelle carrying in bags from the school bookstore. I tried to muster up all my roommate enthusiasm.

“Hi. You must be Michelle. I’m Emma, your roommate.”
Duh.

“Michelle,” she said, not offering me her hand. It seemed no one wanted to touch me today.

She was a few inches taller than me and athletically built, with thick dark hair that fell in waves well past her shoulders. Her face was long and thin, the color of caramel, dominated by wide-set green eyes. While her expression was flat and resigned, her eyes looked rebellious.

“Was that your dad who just left?” she said.

“Yeah. He doesn’t like to hover, thank God. Are your parents still here?”

“No. My aunt dropped me off hours ago.”

We stood in silence, staring at the walls, trying to think of something to say to each other. “So, you like Degas?” I said.

“His horses, not his ballerinas.”

“Oh.” We continued standing and staring. “Is that your mom?” I asked, pointing to the photo on the dresser.