Mist upon the Marsh: The Story of Nessa and Cassie (18 page)

Episode IV

Chapter XXI:

Embie

I
t was the decision of Morachi, after a prolonged period wherein no sign whatever was seen of the Ziruk, that Dog’s Hill and Ulo’s Head must be refilled, so as to ward off the Westward spread of the Ziruk, and maintain a distance between their hidden safe-house and Mindren. Meanwhile, the occupants of Mindren organised into a hunting party, directed solely towards locating the safe-house. This party was led in shifts, with a high-ranking Endalin as head of each. Only the strongest and swiftest were sent as constituents of these parties; and so, naturally, Nessa and Caramon were regularly called upon to participate. Dechtire grew angry, when Morachi denied her request to join with them; and Caramon comforted her as best he could, though he was forced to part with her when the time for departure came.

It should be noted, too, that the hunting parties searched extensively for the bodies of Huro and Kael; but with no success. Finally the burial rites were performed simply with the heads.

On the third day of September, the houses of Dahro and Huro (the latter still called thus, in respect to the very recentness of the death of that head of house; for Gallow, elderly and incompetent – the latter description was perhaps more the opinion of Nessa, than anyone else – as he was, was neither fit nor willing to accept such a title; and his eldest son, Finn, was not eligible for it, until after the joining ceremony) came to Dog’s Hill. All but Nessa expressed at least some mild sort of fear at leaving Mindren. Unprotected, they felt; but Nessa only awaited the moment with the utmost impatience, when she should finally receive from her parents permission to leave the house.

This permission did not come, however, till a whole two weeks had passed. Grown sick of their daughter’s supplications for freedom, Dahro and Ceir gave her the word that she might leave Dog’s Hill – so long as she was extremely cautious, and did not remain away too long.

And so, on this day in mid-September, Nessa broke the bonds which had been so long imposed upon her. She dressed herself carefully; donned her Turin; and fled what had once been a beloved home, but was now only a packed and unyielding prison.

~

It was three o’clock, and Cassie had only just finished readying herself to depart. She had her keys in hand, and her bag on her shoulder; but she found herself somehow, even when she meant to be leaving, sitting again at her desk, and reaching for the photograph of her sister. She studied with great concentration the faces of both Embie and herself, so young and happy; and she could draw no conclusion, from this scant amount of evidence, as to how things had come to be the way they were. But she looked for long moments into her sister’s face, and felt several tears trickle down her cheeks, cold as winter rain.

So intent was she upon the photograph, that she scarcely noticed, at first, the sound of a
rap-tap-tapping
at her window. But finally she raised her head, and set the picture down with some force, irritated with what she thought could only be that damned sparrow, come back again to peck at the glass. It did just such a thing, perhaps three times a week. She knew not what was wrong with the bird; but surely it was not normal behaviour
for
a bird; and she suspected that such behaviour owed to nothing more than a faulty landing against someone else’s
window.

“I swear to God,” she hollered, “I’ll take hold of your disturbed little head, and wring your scrawny neck . . .!”

Now, normally she would not have been so shamefully hard with the bird. Oftentimes she even enjoyed its arrival. But today she could allow for nothing; today she was at peace with no one.

And so she turned towards the window, but saw no sparrow there – disturbed or otherwise. Instead she saw a familiar white face, and two black eyes beneath a head of white hair.

She stood for some seconds there in the middle of the room, staring at the face, which seemed to hover in some unnatural way, just above the sash of the left casement. She could not deny the surge of emotion that started up in her heart, upon seeing the face; but she tried very hard to ignore this feeling, for she wanted it known that she was something less than pleased.

Yet she went to the window, and pulled it open. “What do you want?” she asked.

Nessa did not even attempt a smile. She seemed to know that it would do her no benefit.

“I had to see you,” she said. “I know how very horrid it seems of me, not having come all these days in a row; but I hope you believe me, when I tell you how very sorry I am.”

“Days?” echoed Cassie. “It’s been more than a month, Nessa.”

“I know. I know it has! But I couldn’t come. I just –”

“You couldn’t come?” said Cassie. “And why is it that you couldn’t come?”

“I promise you, Cassie – there is a very good reason. Please, won’t you let me –”

“You could have written,” said Cassie. “Granted, you couldn’t have called, seeing as my mother always manages to break the telephones. But you knew where I lived! You could have written. And I find it hard to believe, anyhow, that you couldn’t spare even an hour – to come even once, either here or to the diner! I just don’t understand it.”

“I know you don’t,” said Nessa; and now her voice seemed even to take on a note of pleading. “I know you don’t, Cassie; but I want to explain it to you. I just want to talk to you! Won’t you please let me in?”
             

“I’m busy right now,” said Cassie, taking great pains to make her voice cold and unfeeling. “I have somewhere I need to be.”

Nessa dropped her eyes, and seemed to search her mind in desperation, for something more to say. But she found nothing; and only looked back up at Cassie, with shining eyes.

Finally, Cassie stamped her foot. “Oh, all right!” she said. “Get off of the damned house, and meet me in the driveway.”

Nessa nodded, with an expression most incredibly relieved, and loosed her hands from the windowsill. Cassie watched her drop down to the ground; and even in her state of aggravation, she could not help but to marvel at the movement.

“What in the world is she?” she said aloud. “A damned monkey?”

~

Nessa was waiting already in the Pontiac, when Cassie opened the pink door. She stepped out onto the stoop, shut the door behind her, and went down into the drive, doing her best all the while to appear nonchalant, and not to look at all towards Nessa. She took her place behind the wheel, pulled the car into the street, and started on her way to Junction Road, where she would retrace the path to the forks, and take this time the middle route. She drove silently, with her eyes fixed straight ahead, and her left hand tapping nervously on the steering wheel; for, as little as she wished to show it, present company was causing her to all but lose her composure. She wished, on the one hand, for Nessa to simply get out of the car, and leave her to herself; and this fact led her to wonder, exactly why she had allowed her to come in the first place? But then she realised that her anger was quickly fading, and was replacing itself quickly with nothing but the desire to reach out, and take Nessa’s hand.

But no! She would not play the fool; not this time. So why let her follow, to the very most cherished and secret place in Cassie’s world? Why not make her go? Why not leave her behind?

All of these unanswerable questions flustered her so, that she could feel her skin flushing, even in the face of the silence; and she could hear her own teeth clicking. Her hands tightened on the steering wheel – tighter and tighter, till her knuckles turned white.

“Where are we going?” Nessa asked finally.

“To my sister.”

“Where is she?”

“You’ll see.”

Almost two hours (and not a single word) later, Cassie turned into the lot of a large building; the kind with many storeys, and hundreds of square windows, all shining clean and bright in the afternoon sun, some with shutters pulled over their opposite sides, so that their contents are invisible. Cassie’s eyes strayed to the upper North-East corner, exactly seven glossy windows from the North wall.

A block of white stone, neatly carved, sat in the grassy divider between the lot and the sidewalk. It read: Baton Rouge Mental Health Hospital.

Cassie sat motionless for a little, staring transfixedly at the sign. She forgot, for a moment, that Nessa was beside her; and remembered not at all, till there came a hand upon her arm.

“Oh,” she said suddenly, pulling her arm away. “Let’s go, then.”

She exited the car as if it were aflame, and strode briskly across the divider, down the sidewalk, and through the front door. She did not look, to see whether Nessa was following. But when she halted before the elevator, beside a little group of people who it seemed were going up, she saw her out of the corner of her eye; and left a little space for her by the mirrored wall, smudged nauseatingly with fingerprints, when she had stepped into the elevator after all the rest.

Her destination was the fifth floor. By the time the elevator arrived there, all others had exited; and so she ventured out into the corridor only with Nessa, wrinkling her nose, as she always did, at that particular brand of hospital smell, which is made up of equal parts disinfectant, plastic, soiled linen and insanity.

She stopped at the nurses’ counter, over which was positioned a sliding glass door. A red-headed nurse sat behind it, in the midst of a telephone conversation, her eyes fastened to the pages of a harlequin romance with an unpleasantly revealing cover. She looked up at Cassie; looked back to her book; spoke for perhaps another thirty seconds to the opposite end of the line; and, finally, set down her book. Then she looked again to Cassie, slid open the glass, and said: “Can I help you?”

“I’m here to see my sister, Embie MacAdam.”

The nurse narrowed her eyes, pursed her lips, and passed Cassie a clipboard, to which was attached the daily visitors’ register. “We’ve been having a good deal of trouble with Miss MacAdam today,” she said. “She screamed all morning, threw her apple sauce at Nurse Jones, and attempted to break the window of her room by repeatedly flinging herself against the screen.”

“Well,” said Cassie, dropping the register over the counter; “it seems to me that, if you had been watching her as you should have been, she wouldn’t have had the chance to fling
anything
more than once. What do you think?”

The nurse scowled, and closed the glass, perhaps a little harder than was either prudent or necessary.

Cassie clenched her hands into fists, and took off down the hall. Nessa hurried along after

her.

~

The nurses’ counter was located at the head of the hall. Once passed, there opened up a bright dining room on the left, filled with five cafeteria-style tables, two sinks, a refrigerator, and a row of locked cupboards over a plastic counter. On the right-hand of the room was another glass window, this one with a cardboard sign hanging over it, which read “medications.”

On the right side of the hall was the door to the common room. There were two plastic sofas, and several plastic armchairs lined up neatly along the walls. In a corner of the room was a small television; but the far wall consisted mainly of windows: tall, wide windows, with thick screens placed over them, that diffused the sunlight into something cold and unnatural. A goodly number of people were gathered into the room, some with their eyes on the television or the windows; and some merely sitting, rocking to and fro, and muttering quietly, either to themselves, or to someone who was not at all present.

Cassie passed the dining room, and the common room. There appeared on both sides of the hall numerous doors, which led into the patients’ rooms. She walked nearly to the end of the hall, and turned right, into room number eighteen. Like the common room, the left-hand wall contained three large, screened windows juxtaposed. The walls were pale green. Two beds were the only furniture.

The bed by the windows was empty; but there lay on the second bed, covered mostly in shadow, a very slight young woman. Cassie went to sit beside her, and reached out to touch her shoulder. She did not wake, till Cassie had shaken her, with gradually increasing vigour, for almost half a minute. But finally she turned her face from her pillow, and looked at Cassie. Her fair hair was rumpled and tossed, and sticking up in knots in several places. To look at her face was to see even more clearly how painfully thin she was, with cheekbones that shoved against the skin, and wide eyes that veritably bulged from their sockets, ringed all around with blue shadows. But there was still, for Cassie, a remnant of the loveliness she had once possessed; a memory of the full, round cheeks, covered with a cheerful blush.

“Hi, Cassie,” said Embie, sitting herself up to lean against the wall. “Is it Friday already?”

“I suppose it must be.”

Embie yawned, and rubbed her eyes; and caught sight of Nessa, standing by the door. “Who’re you?” she asked.

“This is my friend, Nessa,” said Cassie. She held out a hand to Nessa, and beckoned her forth. And so Nessa did come, albeit rather slowly, and what seemed a little uncomfortably. But she came finally to stand beside Cassie. She smiled at Embie.