Lantern [Part II]
Torn and tattered is my bridal gown
And my lamp is lost
The ship having arrived, Mariana and her mother both returned to town the next day to make purchases. Outside the cloth seller's Mariana caught sight of Daniel Farrier coming out of the public house down the street, once again in the company of his friends.
"Mama," she said, "that's he, will you meet him?"
Mariana's mother was smaller than she, but stouter-hearted, and she took only a glance over before saying, "Come, then."
It must make a funny picture, Mariana thought, her small mother and her small self approaching five big men. It was broad daylight and the middle of town, and she had spent almost an hour in the company of one of those men yesterday, so she was not frightened, but she wondered if she ought to be. She wondered, suddenly, what his friends would think of her. The streets were always full of crude comments when ships came in and sailors came to shore and filled their eyes with women again; if Farrier's friends were those sort of men, she must respect him less.
"Good day, sailors," said Mariana's mother. The group of sailors touched their caps and grinned down at her. Mariana stepped up behind her mother's shoulder. "Which of you is Daniel Farrier?"
"That's me, ma'am," said he, stepping forward. He took off his cap and inclined his head. "May I take then that you're Mrs. Bolton?"
"You may, and you may also take my eternal ill will if you cause harm to my girl."
"Mother!" Mariana pulled at her sleeve, chagrined. But Farrier with a sober face said,
"I will suffer that gladly if I should ever cause her harm."
Mariana felt her cheeks warm. Farrier's friends were elbowing each other and grinning again, and Mariana didn't know what to think.
"Well then," she said, straining for lightness, "now you have met one another, we must be about our business."
"There's a dance tomorrow," said Farrier quickly. "Will you be there?"
"Yes," said Mariana, glancing at her mother, who stayed quiet.
"Then I'll see you there," he said. "Good day to you both. Mrs. Bolton, a pleasure."
Alone with her mother again on the busy street, Mariana said, "Well?" somewhat desperately.
Her mother sighed. "I like him," she admitted. "But, Mariana. Be careful."
"Of course," said Mariana automatically.
_____
THEN
The day her life shatters for the second time, she is gardening.
The serviceman comes to find her in the back yard when she doesn't answer the door. Deadheading geraniums, hands and knees covered with dirt, wearing the stupid pink floppy hat that Don got her as a joke four years ago, she turns around when he calls her name and her stomach drops out when she sees the uniform.
Along with the sick dread, the horrible certainty, comes a vicious spike of vindication that pulses through her whole body before she can shut it off. She knew. She knew this would happen, she knew when he enlisted, and he went anyway.
The days following the notification are a blur, details and neighbours and please, God, just get me through five more minutes of this. The funeral is mostly vague too, details standing out in later memory like bare trees against a overcast sky. The firearm salute. The flag. The weeping of people who barely knew him. Her own dry face, eyes burning and aching, system too stressed to produce tears. The shapes of the clouds when she looks away from the first shovelful.
Every person who offers condolences wears the same facial expression. Pity, underscored with worry. There is a layer of removal between her and every person who speaks to her, a hastily constructed wall meant to keep her pieces inside until they can heal again. It all feels so familiar.
It's not that she isn't grateful for the casseroles and the concern (except for how she... isn't, really). It's just that the weight of her neighbours' sympathy is stifling. The deeply worried looks she's not supposed to catch from her coworkers weigh on her shoulders. The way her father hugs her so gently and lets her sleep until noon while he cleans her house wears a hole right through her weak places.
She kicks her dad out after a week.
"I'll be okay," she says. It's the worst lie she's ever told.
He doesn't ask if she's sure. She would thank him for that if her throat would let any more words out.
She tries to go back to work after that, but apparently her practice has two weeks' mandatory bereavement leave. Which is stupid, because right now there is nothing she wants more than to set a bone or suture something or hand-nurse a kitten that can't suckle. There is nothing she wants more than to get outside herself, go where she can ignore the holes and the weight and every frayed edge.
A lot of gardening gets done, that second week.
Rosa, the left-hand neighbour, takes to working outside when Amelia does. She never tries to talk, but keeps shooting concerned looks over the fence, and Amelia would take inane chatter over worried eyes any day of the week. One day she tries; asks Rosa what fertilizer she uses on her hydrangeas. Rosa gives her such a look, a you poor, bereaved dear, I understand why you're asking look, and she answers, but it's useless, because it was supposed to be a distraction and it isn't, it never is, it can never be when everyone around Amelia treats her like one wrong word will destroy her all over again.
She isn't made of fucking porcelain. So maybe it does feel like she's only breathing with one lung, or like something inside has snapped and left part of her untethered, or like her hands aren't hers and her feet don't belong to her legs and her head isn't quite connected to the rest of her sometimes. That doesn't mean everyone has to go around looking at her like a goddamn tragedy.
The best part is when she goes back to work and they've left her off the schedule for the next month.
"I told you, I want to come back," she says, yet again. She's not doing a very good job at keeping her anger reined in. It's leaking out all those places where she's worn through.
"I just think," says Dr. Klein, "that you need some more time to heal before coming back. This is an emotionally taxing job-"
"Which is exactly what I need right now," she insists. "You don't understand, this is exactly why-"
"Amelia," he interrupts, and she almost snaps. "Just listen. Please." His voice is probably meant to be compassionate, but she just feels patronised as fuck. "You've gone through so much. We all admire the way you're bearing up under it all. We admire your fortitude. I," he amends, "admire your fortitude. But I'm not sure you're ready to come back to work. Look at you right now, you're still so emotional. I can see you shaking from here." He shakes his head. "I can't have that kind of unpredictability in my surgery. We don't know how you'll react to distressed animals."
I DO, she wants to scream at him. She's not shaking from any emotion that he'd acknowledge from her right now. Rage, maybe. This feels a lot like rage.
She walks out.
As soon as she gets home, she starts a job search. There must be an animal hospital somewhere else in Texas that needs a veterinarian. Somewhere that's not suburban Dallas. Somewhere that's as far from suburban Dallas as it gets.
She doesn't tell anyone until after the interview, not even Lucy, who's been her friend since long before vet school. When she's offered the job, she takes Lucy to lunch.
"I'm leaving," she says over soup.
Lucy is understandably upset. "So help me God, if you shut me out again."
Amelia looks down at her bowl. "I don't know what kinds of promises I can make right now. I can't breathe here." Lucy looks hurt. "Not you," Amelia starts, but Lucy cuts her off.
"No, stop, ignore me. I know you didn't mean it that way. I just." She takes a deep breath. "I just wish I could help. I know I can't, I know if there was something I could do you'd let me know, I know that." She makes a helpless gesture with her spoon. "Can you start answering my texts? You don't have to call or anything. Just text me back once in a while so I know you're still-" she pauses, her flinch almost imperceptible. "-so I know you're there."
Amelia nods slowly. "I think I can do that."
She gives her notice after lunch. Says it to Klein's condescending shocked face and walks out and it's the best she's felt in weeks.
need help with anything before you go?
Actually I could use a hand going through stuff.
Lucy helps her sort, takes care of getting rid of shit and renting storage space to keep the painful things that Amelia can't make herself throw away. Amelia gives the key to her dad.
There's not much left to take by the time she's ready to leave.
_____
NOW
There are twenty-seven distinct versions of the tale of the Lantern Woman. Cal has compiled them in a small d-ring notebook, each page containing a different re-telling, the edges colour-coded in a spectrum gradient from red through blue.
"So they're in some kind of particular order, then?" Sam asked when he noticed, before they left the Jeremys' house.
"More or less, but it's a pretty vague set of criteria that I'm comparing." Cal shrugged. "Mostly it just makes sense inside my head to sequence them this way. However you use it, just make sure they end up back in order."
Sam had no problem making that promise. Dean won't help him when the time comes, and they're spread out all over the table right now, but it doesn't really matter. Reading through, he thinks he can see what Cal was after when he put these tales in the order he did.
The basic story is: there is a young woman (seamstress, miller's daughter, farm girl) who meets a young man (sailor, fisherman, pirate) and falls in love with him (instantly, over the course of several visits, from childhood). They (get married, become engaged, have sexual relations) and the man has to leave again. The man (drowns at sea, is lost with his ship, runs away with another woman).The woman (pines, becomes ill, goes insane) and becomes obsessed with his safe return, so she walks the beaches with a lantern and eventually (throws herself in the sea, falls in the sea accidentally, is pushed in by a rival).
Some elements remain consistent throughout several or most of the versions; others change nearly every time. Cal's ordering reflects those shifts in meticulous detail.
The constant is the way she supposedly manifests: a short woman in a white dress, walking the coast with a lantern. She never moans or weeps, but only walks silently and eventually flickers out like a blown lamp.
"So what are we thinking," Dean says, "Woman in White?"
Sam frowns. "Maybe," he says slowly.
Dean nods. "I know, it feels a little off, doesn't it. But we should definitely check this one out. Best documentation of a haunting I've ever seen."
"I'll say." Sam continues leafing through the pages slowly. "I mean, I suppose she could be the one drowning all of them. But if she only manifests on the shore..."
"Could be an effect transference through the water supply. We've seen that before," Dean reminds him.
"True." Sam shuffles all the pages back together. He'll sort them later. "Okay, so we're heading down to the shore tonight, right?"
"Right. Let's see what this spirit's made of."
The sightings are apparently localised within about a hundred yards, which is helpful but only so helpful. Also, while it's still a pretty deserted stretch of beach and tumbled rocky cliffs, there's really no way of knowing if she'll manifest tonight at all.
They stake it out anyway, parking so they can overlook most of the relevant area from the car as the sun sets, torn clouds stained crimson again.
"Sailor's delight," Sam says under his breath. The ocean alternates crystalline and almost black under the mauve sky, pricked with the first stars.
It's a long night. They sleep in shifts, switching off every two hours, and it's excruciatingly boring. Of all the things he never thought to be grateful he didn't have to go through the year Dean was in Purgatory, it's never occurred to him to include this. He should have. It's not likely to get him killed, but he'd infinitely rather a straight-up fight than this immobility. It's just hard enough to stay focused that it's a nuisance, but not a strong enough antagonist that he can really throw any kind of real effort behind it. He just has to keep focusing. Something he's always been very good at, yes, but. He's never liked this.
It's another fruitless night. Nobody at all shows up.
At dawn, Dean prods him awake.
"Nobody here but us chickens, little brother." He sounds disgruntled, like the ghost done him wrong by not showing up to kill anyone.
They've slept enough, so they stop for coffee on the way back to the motel. Time to explore other avenues, get some more irons on the fire. They have a tendency to blinker, get hung up on the first likely possibility that presents itself, but they've learned, over the years, that not looking at all the angles can get you killed.
He's turning over other possibilities in his head, like maybe there's some kind of creature here that's not leaving traces, or maybe it's another ghost that they haven't looked into yet, and when he turns to leave the shitty coffee shop with two large cups in his hands, he bumps into somebody sideways. He's apologising before he registers the person standing stock still, staring at him.
"Amelia." His brain is stuck. She's not supposed to be here. He left her in Texas (he left her) and she's supposed to still be there, working, she's not supposed to be in Maine.
"Sam." She looks as blankly surprised as he feels.
"What are you doing here?" he blurts.
"I. It's a long story. Actually it's not, I inherited a house."
"You. Inherited- I'm sorry for your loss?" he tries.
She shakes off his concern. "Great-aunt. I didn't know her well. I don't know why-" She stops. "Anyway. I guess Dean is around somewhere?" She's keeping her face blank. Sam has a pretty good guess what she's hiding.
"Yeah, he's waiting in the car. I don't suppose you. Well." No, probably Amelia doesn't want to meet the presumed-dead brother that Sam left her for. And, wow, even in his head it sounds so sketchy that he can't even blame her. They didn't end well. This wouldn't end well.
But Dean opens the door just then and says, "Gettin' old, here, Sammy, the hell is taking so long?" before he sees that Sam is talking to someone and pulls up short. "Hel-lo, who's this?" He meets Sam's eyes. Sam can only guess what his own face is doing, but Dean's eyebrow goes up. "So I'm guessing you two know each other?" and Sam can't do this, this is not a situation he can deal with right now.
Amelia turns around. "You're guessing right," she says brusquely, in her nobody better try to feed me any shit right now voice. "And I'm guessing you're the not-so-dead brother, right? Dean?"
The change in Dean's face would be hilarious if Sam were in any frame of mind to appreciate it. "Wow. Okay. Yeah. So I guess that means you're Amelia, then."
Amelia shoots Sam a glance, and he could swear he can hear her saying damn straight you better have told him about me.
"Yeah. I am." Her tone, shit. Sam has to get them out of here before there's blood. "I hope you appreciate how much your brother loves you."
Before Dean can verbalise the what's that supposed to mean? that Sam can clearly read on his face, Amelia turns away and joins the line.
"See you around, Sam. Or not, I guess." They lock eyes for a second, and there is absolutely nothing that Sam can say to make this better right now.
"Yeah," he says weakly, and leaves the coffee shop, Dean trailing behind him.
Part III