Jo
Trapped here, I think as I run a finger absentmindedly along the edge of a thick pane of glass, frosted over with ice and snow - a thick crust of impenetrability.
Trapped within these walls, like Rapunzel in her tower of bones.
I’m being dramatic. Even I know that.
Rapunzel’s castle had been made of stones and ivy, not bones.
But my thoughts can’t help but keep chugging along a track towards despair.
I am trapped.
In a way.
The walls here are also made of stone, and ivy crawls and crawls and crawls over them, getting tighter every day until sometimes I imagine the ropes of green giving one last squeeze and crushing the house to matchsticks. Crushing me to merely memory.
But it stays standing. And every day the sun rises and I look outside and imagine leaving.
I’ve brought myself to the edge of trying many times — I’ll walk carefully over cold floorboards, avoiding the ones that creak as if afraid I might wake the manor. I’ll whisper down the many winding, narrow, dark staircases built into the back of the house, probably once used for maids and kitchen staff. And then I’ll pass the drawing room, the library, the dining hall as quickly as I can, until I stand in front of the elegant front doors.
There are no locks on them.
There is no other person here with me, keeping me confined or a prisoner.
No. I am my own jailer.
I am afraid — terrified of the world outside.
I am safe here. I know these rooms and these halls because I had grown up here.
And I am still here.
The others — Kate and Danny and Therese — they’ve all gone, whisked away into the sunlight to live existences free of worrying about what comes next.
I am too scared to follow in their footsteps.
So, despite the loneliness here and the crushing nostalgia of memories, I stay. Alone.
It’s not so bad. I have the entire place to myself.
Oftentimes I sit in the library, legs curled up to my chest in a dusty armchair, staring out the grand windows that reveal a sprawl of green lawn in summer and an intimidating crust of flat-grey frost in the colder months.
From here I can see a sliver of the sea on the horizon. Or, at least, I think I can.
Usually my mind will drift on these long and slow afternoons. Days like today when the snow falls quietly and lazily, slow as if someone has poured honey into the clocks of time just for fun.
I’ll think about how I used to run up and down that lawn, Danny chasing me and Therese watching from her spot in the shade, nose tucked down into a book.
Kate would often sunbathe out there while us younger two screamed and giggled. She’d spread out one of Mum’s fancy towels and stretch out over it like some kind of cat, all golden long legs and arms, dark hair pulled up on top of her head, yellow bikini on.
I remember growing older, awkwarder as my limbs got as long as Kate’s, longer even. I had been all bones and clumsy feet for a time, no good for tag anymore in the backyard.
Instead, I turned to my favorite room in the whole house, the one I spend most of my time in now. The library.
Therese had set spark to my intense love for books, her serious green eyes oftentimes crinkling at the corners with a smile whenever I came running to her for another one.
And then she would reach up, grab a new one, and place it into my grabbing hands. She’d pat my head, smile once more, and then whisk away in a cloud of lilac perfume, off to her fancy college I suppose, or to visit that girl she was always with. The one with the loud laugh and the funny drawings all over her skin.
(I later found out that those “funny drawings” are called tattoos.)
And when I wasn’t reading, I was running with Kate along the coastal road, or playing pranks on Danny at our shared school.
We had been close. All of us. Closer than any of my friends seemed to be with their own brothers and sisters.
Until one day we hadn’t been. One day that stretched into two and then seven and sixty and seven-hundred and thirty.
We broke apart, almost as if the ivy had reached into our hearts and wrapped them away from the others. Crushed them to dust.
I stayed. I stayed here at our house while the rest of them left, suitcases piling up at the foot of the staircase in the foyer.
Kate had cried so hard the day they’d gone she’d gotten sick. I remember that.
Therese had wrapped shaking, blue-veined arms around our sister, had whispered to her, words I could hear as clearly as the sharp pattern of rain on the roof.
“We’ll come back. I promise.”
And then she’d looked straight at me, those green eyes no longer crinkling with amusement, with happiness, but heavy with sadness, bright with pain.
I’d looked away.
I regret it even now, so many years later. Because they hadn’t come back.
Not once.
I no longer let Kate do my hair with cold, steady fingers, or had Therese to cry to or Danny to tease.
All of it faded to memory.
And now I wonder if I were to leave this house, would I see them? Would I find them again?
Would they be different, changed?
Or the same? All dark hair and long eyelashes and easy smiles, freckles along the curve of a nose and that silvery-white scar along Danny’s right knee.
So on days like today, when the hours drip by slowly, when the seconds feel like a countless flap of bird wings against my skin, I go to the front door and I put my palm against the cold knob and I think about turning it, about stepping away and leaving this place.
But today I’m tired. Today I’ll rest here, knees drawn up to my chest in a dusty armchair, eyes fixed outside on that sliver of sea I think I can see.
And I’ll try tomorrow.
---------
It’s the noise that wakes me.
It’s the sound of the front doors opening and immediately I sit bolt upright and listen.
Voices! And footsteps!
The sun has risen high above the horizon outside, turning the snow and ice and hoarfrost to fire, blazing white, and joy explodes in my chest in the same measure.
They’ve come back.
I run. I fly down the hall towards the sounds, tears welling at the corners of my eyes, relief and happiness and questions all welling up inside me until I’m afraid I’ll burst.
“Kate!” I cry out. “Therese! Danny!”
I run, hair billowing out behind me, feet barely touching the cold ground -
And I see him.
He can’t be more than five. A little boy, with cream skin and dark eyes, dressed in a down coat for winter.
He stands in the foyer, looking around curiously... until his eyes land on me.
I suck in a breath.
For a moment we hang suspended in time, looking at each other as the clocks stop completely.
For a moment I feel how lonely I’ve been in one, gut-wrenching tug as the ropes of ivy tighten one last time to break my heart completely.
For a moment I think the boy will reach for me.
But as soon as I think that, the spell breaks. A woman in heels and a green dress and coat appears behind him, cooing and picking him up, her face shadowed by the brim of her hat.
“Don’t go running off,” she scolds, but with no real discipline. “This house is old, very old. We have to make sure it’s safe before you can run around, okay?”
The boy nods but then points, one chubby hand rising, and I feel what remains of my heart give a little start when I realize he’s pointing at me.
The woman looks up then, her face revealed in a patch of sunlight that suddenly streams through the windows. Her green eyes crinkle at the corners with amusement.
“Girl,” the boy speaks.
“Therese,” I plead.
“No,” Therese whispers, the amusement bleeding from her face in a heartbeat, and I see then that her face is lined with age even as the crinkles around her eyes disappear.
And I think she’s talking to me, telling me no the way she used to when I wanted candy before dinner, when she caught me with cigarettes in the second year, when -
But my sister turns to the child, who looks strikingly, heartbreakingly like Kate, pushes his hand down gently.
“No,” she repeats, face bone-pale and blue-veined arms trembling around him. “No, Jo, no girl. You’re just thinking of the stories we told you, about your other aunt, yeah? Don’t go saying that when your mum gets in here, alright? You’ll upset her, and we both don’t want Mummy to be upset, right?”
I sink to my knees, watching as Therese’s eyes flick back towards where I’ve been standing and then over me, like sunlight through water. The old wings of grief flit over her face, crinkle the corners of her eyes much the same way laughter once had.
But nothing is the same.
Jo, the baby Jo, has even looked away, nodding seriously at his aunt’s words.
And I know then, as Therese talks gently to the child, as her eyes linger slowly on dust-lined railings and the cracking plaster and dirt-rimed windows, that it had never been my siblings who had really left.
It had been me.
I remember now. The crash of the ocean. The storm. The waves of a sliver of the sea closing down over my head and stealing me away, locking me in an upside-down tower of drowned lungs and blue lips and the crushing walls of water.
I know. I remember.
I am memory.
I take comfort in one thing and one thing only as I turn slowly and drift back the way I came, back to curl with my knees to my chest in a dusty armchair, my eyes fixed on a sliver of sea I know is there.
My family — Therese, Kate, Danny — they still have a piece of me.
My name.
Jo.