She had died in this room. In that bed.
Nigel kissing her eyelids, gently licking her tears. The remembered sensation—she had wept while she died—a sudden, sharp echo passing through her.
The echo stirred the pain around. Far worse than physical pain, which had a point of origin, could be assuaged. Or at least corralled: the pain is here, not there. But this pain lived in all of her, its intensity constant and unvaried. Her broken heart had become her entire self.
How could he?
She was too close to the bed, she didn’t want to see it poke through her hand or her skirt. The intense urge to move away hurled her toward the window, where her shoulder, instead of cracking the glass, passed through it, a thin black smudge visible on the other side.
Below, the square. Early morning pedestrians. All walked alone, faces in their phones against a screen of naked branches and fog.
Madeleine had timed the email to Charlotte, containing the link to a pre-paid, round-trip ticket, for three hours after she’d ingested the liquid. Maybe a bit brutal. But a week in London, with generous per diems, was a decent deal. The business to be taken care of wasn’t all that complicated, Charlotte would have had plenty of time to herself.
Charlotte had taken a new-age-y turn over the past several years, she’d have brought crystals and white candles and maybe even pentagrams.
Fat lot of good they’d done.
Parts of her down there, crunched beneath the sole of a shoe. Her ashes, clinging to frost-bitten plants, to the desolate tables and chairs of the little Italian coffee stand, where she and Nigel sometimes had breakfast when it was warm.
Madeleine turned her back on the window.
The room was a mess, including the bed—goose-feather pillows misshapen as though they’d been pummeled, linen sheets wadded into a sweaty-looking ball. Even the duvet was rumpled; the velvet and brocade throw pillows looked slept on.
Or fucked on.
Men’s dress shirts were strewn across the settee, draped from the gilded curlicues that framed the floor-length mirror. Along the wall beside the closet marched a ragged row of shoes and boots.
As she reverberated with hopeless longing, something happened to the shoes.
Surfacing through a pair of Armani loafers, their toes polished like mirrors, the sober brown of Nigel’s chukka boots. Calfskin, always Loakes. Slightly worn at the heel, he’d have had to buy new ones next year.
On the bedside table appeared the bottles, the tiny ones, for their last stay in this room, dark blue glass, no labels. One each. The vertigo swept back in as the bottles vanished, made worse by the fact that, when she glanced into the mirror, a blank room stared back at her.
Had her presence stirred the room’s memory of things it had once held? As though in answer to her question, the shirts on the settee darkened, a cloud passing beneath them: her black silk nightgown. Usually her lingerie repertoire was more adventurous; stockings (Nigel preferred garter belts to thigh-high stay-ups), corsets (the real kind, with actual stays, in which she could barely breathe, no wonder women had ditched the goddamned things) but, not knowing who might discover them, she’d opted for floor-length, black, expensive.
But wasn’t she wearing that nightgown?
No, she was wearing a dress, black, a mid-calf thing with fitted bodice, jet buttons, froths of lace at the throat and cuffs. She’d gone through a Goth phase in her mid-thirties, at the tail end of the life stage when one could still follow the students’ fads and not look ridiculous. She hadn’t worn it in years.
Charlotte. Madeleine had told her she could choose the dress, in the directional email. Charlotte choosing this dress was the highest of all possible Charlotte honors, she’d have kept it for herself if she could have buttoned it up. And she’d gotten it right with the boots, through which the grain of the hardwood floor winked in a disturbing way.
Palimpsest. That was the word she’d been reaching for, to describe the surfacing ghosts of her things, of Nigel’s. A favorite of Madeleine’s, but one Nigel had labeled “the most pretentious word in the entire English language.”
Had Nigel found her pretentious?
His folded trousers and shirt materialized—with a clarity that made her sway—through the hotel bathrobe carelessly tossed across the desk chair. The clothes he’d worn on their last day, their last night. He hadn’t wanted to die in pajamas, so he’d climbed, naked, between the sheets, his body warm around hers. Knowing, all the while, what he was about to do.
The clothes vanished. As though Nigel himself had appeared, only to inform her he was leaving again. She was alone, both in the silent room and in the empty cavern of herself.
A phantom-limb tenderness that swelled into an ocean, she was swimming in it. Madeleine tensed for its ebb, for the pain that would follow.
But instead of pain, a thorny little sprout of doubt. Nigel had said, as they’d signed the pact, that he’d never be able to live in a world that did not also contain her.
How, in any dimension or universe, did that square with him dumping her? It made no sense, and things that made no sense were generally not as they appeared. Vital facts were missing, which, when adduced, explained the inexplicable.
From the doubtful sprout sprang a tiny, fragile bud of hope.
Maybe the stag had not been trying to tell her that Nigel was gone, lost to her forever. She had jumped to that conclusion. But perhaps the stag’s message was other. Something less obvious. Medieval exegesis was nothing if not polyvalent. Contradictory, even, with its four possible levels of interpretation—literal, typological, tropological, anagogical—for the Bible and for everything else. Anagogical was Nigel’s favorite; the stag as mystical bridegroom, like in the Song of Songs. She’d let her emotions run away with her—understandably, under the circumstances—rather than thinking the problem through.
If she herself had landed in the hotel, the logical supposition was that Nigel had done so as well. The problem was the unknown quantity of time elapsed between their deaths and the present moment, whenever that was.
Compounded by the fact that Nigel was distracted by the least little thing, which would have him off down the street, only to lose track of whatever it was as soon as something else caught his eye, reaching the corner with no idea why he was heading in that particular direction and not the opposite one.
By Nigel’s own account, his morning walks consisted primarily of wandering along the Thames, or staring up into the trees in a square somewhere. If he got lost, he just wandered some more.
Why should he be any different now? There must be a million ways to lose one’s bearings in this dimension.
And there was no shortage of places in the hotel for Nigel to lose himself. The bar, for starters, with its gloomy old portraits, whose identities Nigel pondered. Or the founder’s library, jumbled with oddities, where Nigel liked to thumb through dusty books with obscure titles and fading jackets. The warren of meeting rooms that occupied the basement, or the 234 guest rooms, each with its own quirky architectural details—he’d stared for a quarter of an hour once at a fireplace bordered in stucco vines, trying to work out the artful symmetry of the twining arabesque pattern.
Nigel was anything but methodical, but she was organized, meticulous. Thorough. She’d scour the entire hotel, room by room, for the next century if need be. She’d have to risk Nigel returning to the suite and not finding her here. Because how did you leave a message for a ghost?
Okay, so she’d come back often and check. Problem solved, or as well as it could be.
Or. How stupid she’d been. He could also be in Newcastle. Because maybe the deal was that you wound up where your ashes did (the British always chose cremation, there wasn’t space for more cemeteries). Alice—
What if she found him only to learn the worst? That he wasn’t here, with her, because he didn’t want to be? The floor seemed to waver and roll beneath her transparent feet.
Well. Just like with her diagnosis, she’d want the truth. Without obfuscation. Not four months, Jag had said when she’d pressed him. More like three. And that was knowledge: it had allowed her to choose between her dwindling options, all awful, but at least she’d had the power to choose. She’d want to know, she’d always want to know. And so she would.
She still felt a little dizzy. But the cold had subsided, and the despair was gone. In its place, a sense of purpose. A goal. A quest—how very medieval. Like the bride in the Song of Songs, she’d fly over valleys and mountains, towers and fortresses, never flagging, never tiring. In search of her beloved.
Because it was the bride who searched, while the stag wandered the hills, nibbling on leaves and tender green shoots, appearing and disappearing at will.
The bride had to do the work (didn’t she always?). That was the message of the window.