Application for Emma Jean "Emmie" Silvey, Caitlin R. Kiernan's Daughter of Hounds

[emmie_silvey]

((Daughter of Hounds is the sequel to Low Red Moon, Chance Matthews Silvey's canon. This application posted with the permission of Chance-mun. WARNING: Contains spoilers for Threshold, Low Red Moon, and Daughter of Hounds.))“Shit

Comments

[emmie_silvey]

Emmie has seen the face of this lady in pictures many times, this tall lady with brown hair, broad shoulders, and eyes the same green of the shingles of the house two doors down on Angell Street, eyes just a shade or two off from the green of Deacon's eyes. But she has never heard her voice, and for some reason it's not what Emmie expects. Or maybe Emmie never really expected anything in particular, and it's just weird to finally have something specific to replace the non-voice in her head. The lady has a touch of a Southern accent, not quite the same as Deacon's, but discernible nonetheless.

Maybe the weirdest part of it all is that Emmie finds herself focusing more on the voice of the woman she had, for most of her life, known as her mother than on the fact that said mother is standing right in front of her instead of...well, being dead.

Which means her answer to question 4 is now wrong, but Emmie isn't about to bring that up at this moment.

"Yes," she replies after a pause. At least that's the truth. "And you're Chance Silvey."

Or maybe her answer to question 4 isn't wrong.

"Am I dead, too?" Emmie doesn't think she believes in heaven or hell or an afterlife, but now she's starting to wonder. Although if this is heaven and there is a God, then he's a pretty boring god, she decides. It was nice of Him to let her meet Chance Silvey, but the least He could have done was put heaven outside in the sky, like in all the clichés. She can't imagine spending eternity in this dank stone-walled room. It's barely better than Pearl's attic.

[chance_silvey]

Chance has started taking Hogwarts for granted. It's been almost a year she's lived here now, hard to believe but the time just slips by so fast. She's so gripped by her own reaction to Emmie, her own surprise, that she almost doesn't think about how strange this place must seem to the girl. Then Emmie's question stops her short.

"Yes. I'm Chance Silvey," she agrees, wondering how yellow-eyed Emmie who is not her dream-child knows this. But of course Deke must have shown her pictures, right? Must have talked about her, if he could bring himself to do it, and Chance wouldn't be half-surprised if he couldn't. "And I don't know whether you're dead. I'm not going to lie to you about that."

[emmie_silvey]

Chance is honest, and Emmie appreciates that. She much prefers honesty to nonsensical application questions.

"Well, I don't remember dying. Unless there was a nuclear bomb or something." Emmie had once read a book about Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and she was pretty sure the people who had died there didn't know what had hit them. But if a bomb had hit Providence, then Deacon would be dead, too, and wouldn't he then be there with Emmie? Along with all the other people who had died in the blast?

She decides the jury's still out on her death, so she'll just have to wait and see. There's nothing else she can do about it, anyway.

"So are you a paleontologist here, too?" Emmie finds it's hard to know what to say to Chance, but she also doesn't want to miss this opportunity to talk to her. She now knows the truth about Chance, about where she, Emmie, came from -- or, more importantly, where she didn't come from -- but that doesn't mean it's simple to cut her emotional ties to Chance, and she doesn't even know if she wants to. Chance is far less creepy than Saben White. And Deacon still loves her, even though he loves Sadie, too.

[chance_silvey]

Chance shoves her hands in her pants pockets. No Hogwarts uniform for her. She's wearing jeans and a big old sweater and clunky boots, and she shifts uncomfortably from one boot to the other. "I'll always be a paleontologist, I think. I just haven't got a real job here. I'm researching a kind of plesiosaur that isn't known in the outside world, and that keeps me busy."

It's like a cocktail party, she thinks suddenly, the kind of cocktail party that is really secretly a job interview. Where almost every word is a step on a tightrope, or a knife's edge, but you can't let on.

"Did Deacon tell you about paleontology?" She wants to know that, not just as small talk but for real. She wants to imagine those talks. She has a mental picture, a sudden vivid one, of this little yellow-eyed girl walking hand in hand with Deacon through the Red Mountain Museum. (Can that be right? What's the Providence Athenaeum? That's not in Birmingham. Maybe he moved them. But the girl mentioned Sadie, and Sadie was in Birmingham...)

[emmie_silvey]

Emmie has seen plesiosaurs at the American Museum of Natural History in New York, with Sadie, and she knows they aren't actually dinosaurs, but rather reptiles that lived during the same time as the dinosaurs.

"Yeah, he told me some things, and the rest I learned from books and museums and TV shows. And Sadie bought me dinosaur toys." Emmie is unaware of the history, the bad blood, between Chance and Sadie, so she doesn't think twice about bringing her up. To Emmie, Sadie is just Sadie, her stepmother, a constant in her life, even though she left them to live in New York because she and Deacon couldn't stop fighting.

"I've got a Triceratops, a Tyrannosaurus rex, an Edmontonia, um....." She tries to remember all her dinosaur figurines. "Apatosauraus, NOT Brontosaurus...." Too many people make that mistake, and while Emmie knows Chance wouldn't, it's become habit for her to make sure people know the difference. "Anyway, I've got a lot of them, and I also have some fossils Deacon gave me. He tells me about a lot of things."

[chance_silvey]

Sadie. Yeah. Chance is pretty sure there isn't an unlimited number of Sadies running around the world who happen to know Deacon Silvey. But that's not something she needs to get into with Emmie. She's not sure she'd even want to get into it with anyone. If it's Sadie Jasper that Emmie is talking about, then Sadie Jasper has been good to Chance's little girl (is this her little girl? really? this girl with the yellow eyes?) and that counts for a hell of a lot.

"You're absolutely right. Apatosaurus, not Brontosaurus." Chance has to be a little pleased by that, and the approval seeps into her voice. It's a serviceable voice, Chance's, not really remarkable: not sweet or lilting or any of the things that lost fairytale mothers seem to have in spades; not hoarse either, Chance doesn't smoke and there isn't anything to roughen it. Just a straightforward matter-of-fact voice that's neither too high or too low, colored by a slight Georgia accent. Her family were educated people.

"What kind of things does he tell you?"

[emmie_silvey]

Emmie picks up on Chance's approval, in a subconscious sort of way, making her feel a bit lighter despite the strangeness of her new surroundings and the uncertainty of her situation. She had never felt deprived of a mother figure, because Sadie had easily filled in that role, but she had always thought of Chance as her real mother, and it feels good in a deep, unexplainable sort of way to get the sense that Chance is acknowledging what Emmie knows. Even if Chance isn't actually her real mother after all.

Emmie considers how to answer Chance's question, since there are so many things she can say. Deacon raised her, after all. "Things that are important to know," she finally says. "Like the meanings of new words and what things are true and what things are crap." Emmie had once told Deacon that he knows everything, and while she doesn't know if she still believes that completely, she thinks it's mostly true, at the very least.

"And he tells me about you." She figures Chance might want to know that. "About how you were a paleontologist in Birmingham, Alabama, and you studied vertebrate fossils and got your Ph.D." There had to be more things Deacon had told Emmie about Chance, but she can't think of them right now, not with the real Chance standing right in front of her.

[chance_silvey]

So they don't live in Birmingham any more. That means he sold the apartment, the one she sold her grandparents' house to buy. Chance understands wanting a new start. Otherwise she'd never have sold the old Matthews place at all. Too many ghosts, and she hopes it isn't her ghost that drove Deacon and their child from the town Chance lived in all her life. Chance nods. "I was. I did."

The meanings of new words, that sounds like Deacon all right. His shelves and shelves of books Chance had never heard of or felt much interest in. Everything from crappy pulp sci-fi to Kierkegaard and Sartre. "Did he go back to school? Your daddy?" Something they'd planned on. At least that was what Chance told people when they asked oh, what does he do? about Deacon. What she told the real estate agent who sold them the loft. And maybe Deke was serious about it or maybe he wasn't, but Chance likes to think he was.

[emmie_silvey]

Emmie shakes her head. "No, Deacon didn't go to school." Not that Emmie knows about, anyway, and Deacon had never said otherwise to her. "He owns a used bookshop on Thayer Street, and you don't need a degree to do that." She thinks about telling Chance that Deacon already knows everything anyway, or at least everything that's important to know, but decides to keep that knowledge to herself. Maybe Chance already knows it. She was married to Deacon, after all.

Emmie's still confused about whether she's dead or not, and what that means for Chance being dead, but that doesn't change the fact that Chance is standing in front of her in this place, talking about the things she does there, and so Emmie asks, "Did you get remarried?" Chance had introduced herself with Emmie's and Deacon's last name, but Emmie knows that doesn't mean anything, because plenty of people don't change their last names when they get married. Sadie didn't.

[chance_silvey]

Deacon ... owns a bookshop? On Thayer Street? Chance has lived in Birmingham her whole life and if there's a Thayer Street there, well, that's possible but she's never been there or heard of it. Definitely not a main thoroughfare. And where the hell would Deacon get the money for a bookshop?

It's then that Chance remembers. Multiple worlds. The Journal of Vertebrate Paleontology without her article in it. (Did you get remarried? Emmie asks innocently while the gears in Chance's head are turning, and that just slams the whole thing home, remembering when she showed Simon that issue of the JoVP without her article in it. Remembering he's from outer space, or was, before he was popcorn.)

Maybe this is alternate-Deacon's daughter, from a world where Chance never was. Where little-kid Chance died along with Henry and Carol Matthews in a fender-bender, never grew up, never got married, never had a baby with Deacon Silvey or anyone else.

"I didn't get remarried," Chance tells Emmie straightforwardly. "Only been married once. Emmie ... are you Sadie's daughter?"

[emmie_silvey]

Now Emmie wonders if maybe Chance has been waiting here in drab-castle-afterlife-or-whatever-it-is all these years for Deacon to die and join her. Not that she's believing in heaven and hell and afterlives, at least not yet, but she knows that's what supposed to happen in myths and religions -- that dead people are supposed to wait for their spouses to die, and then once everyone has passed away, they can be together and happy once again. Except that doesn't really make much sense to Emmie, because what if, like Deacon, you remarry, and then your second wife dies, and now both of them are waiting for you in the Great Beyond or Valhalla or Paradise or whatever?

This is probably why Deacon says religion is for people with simple minds.

But she can't dwell on this issue for long, because Chance has asked her a question, one that she doesn't quite understand the motivation for, but also one that she doesn't have a problem answering, because it's easy and makes sense.

"No, Sadie is my stepmother."

She wonders just how much she should tell Chance about their lives. If Chance has been waiting up here in the great castle in the sky (again, or whatever it is) all this time for Deacon, it will probably be very disappointing for her to find out that Deacon is married to someone else now, even though that doesn't mean he doesn't still love Chance. And Emmie is pretty sure it will be even more disappointing for Chance to find out that Emmie isn't even her real daughter anyway...to find out what actually happened to her real daughter.

For now, remembering something Sadie once told her about how tact is sometimes better than truth, she decides not to wreck Chance's eternity or everafter or whatever this life is too much, so she holds back on all the stuff about the Hounds and Saben White and Soldier and the Bailiff.

But she did already say that Sadie is her stepmother, so she adds, "Deacon got remarried to her. But she doesn't live with us anymore. She lives in New York now, for her writing, and because...." ...she and Deacon couldn't stop fighting. Again, the thing Sadie said about tact and truth comes to Emmie's mind, and so instead, she says, "...because she decided it was best that way."

[chance_silvey]

Right. Emmie can't be from a world where there was no Chance, because Emmie knows Chance. Said so right away, clear as could be, you're Chance Silvey.

"Sadie Jasper, right? From Birmingham. And now she lives in New York, and you live somewhere else."

A little selfish hard part of her is glad that Sadie decided not to live with Deacon any more. Even though that means Deacon's alone and -- oh, shit.

"... Where's your daddy? He's got to be worried sick about you."

[emmie_silvey]

Emmie isn't surprised that Chance knows Sadie. That was never a secret. And Sadie has told her things about Chance before, mostly when Emmie has asked about them -- usually just small things about what Chance was like and the sorts of things she enjoyed.

"Yes," and she nods. "Sadie Jasper from Birmingham. She lives in New York City and Deacon and I live in Providence, Rhode Island." Of course, if Chance were a total stranger, the way Saben White was, there was no way she would have said where she lived, or maybe she would have made something up. But Chance isn't, and she isn't strange either, and so it's all right to tell her these things.

It's funny how Chance keeps calling Deacon Emmie's "daddy," because Emmie has never called him that herself, and so the title just doesn't fit. But Chance wouldn't know that, and the word does seem to go right with the slight lilt in Chance's voice, the accent from a part of the country that Emmie has heard about many times, but never been to herself.

"Deacon's at the bookshop," she replies in response to Chance's question. "I don't know if he knows I'm gone yet. But when he finds out, he'll be really upset."

And now Emmie feels a little bit sick, because she remembers how horrible Deacon looked when she finally came home last February after being gone all those days, how thin and pale and lost his face looked, chin and cheeks overgrown with gray stubble. Worse, she remembers how he smelled, a sour, biting blend of sweat, unwashed hair, and alcohol -- and not just his usual light breathstink of beer, a smell she finds bitter and unpleasant, but strong, reeking alcohol, pungent and sharp. That was when she truly understood that "worried to death" wasn't just words, that someone really could worry themselves to death, and Deacon had been well on his way.

"I could call him if I had a cell phone. Or any phone at all," she says hopefully. "Is there one here I could use?" Of course, if it's that easy, then Chance probably would have called Deacon herself, Hey, honey, I'm dead, but I'm okay, and if you want to find me, just look for a creepy castle and fill out a stupid application, but Emmie decides it doesn't hurt to ask. She really doesn't want Deacon to find her missing.

[chance_silvey]

Chance thinks it is really fucking weird that Deacon has settled down to raise their child in Providence, Rhode Island. More or less where Chance died.

It hasn't escaped her that the little girl calls him Deacon, not any variant of father, childish or otherwise. And that seems to her normal -- she didn't call her grandparents anything but Joe and Esther, their names; no Meemaw or Pawpaw, no child-names -- it's just that she thinks of Deacon this way when she thinks about him in relation to their baby. Deacon reading McElligott's Pool to her swollen stomach. Deacon rubbing her feet and telling the baby to stop kicking her.

This self-possessed (and yellow-eyed!) little girl couldn't be much farther from that unseen unspeaking stomach-burden if she tried, and Chance has a hard time imagining she actually carried this being inside her. She wonders if every mother feels that way, looking at what is a completely separate human being with its own identity. By the time Chance even started thinking about motherhood, Esther Matthews was ten years dead, and Chance's own mother had been dead since before Chance even knew where babies came from.

"You're damn right he'll be upset." Because Chance knows that Deacon would give every last breath and every last drop of blood in his body to protect their baby. Apathetic about everything else in the world, maybe even about Chance sometimes it seemed, but never about that baby. "I wish I could tell you there was a way to reach him from here, but there aren't any phones, only owls that carry letters. I tried to send him an owl and it never came back," she admits. "This place doesn't run on technology like ours. It runs on magic."

[emmie_silvey]

Emmie's disappointed, but not surprised. When she left the house on Angell Street with Pearl last year and went to all those strange places, there was no telephone for her to use either (well, aside from the one that Odd Willie had disconnected so she couldn't use it), and in fact Pearl had said that would be dangerous for Deacon, for him to know where she was, because that would involve him, and then the Hounds would go after him, too.

But Chance did try to get in touch with Deacon at some point, and that's very interesting to Emmie. She supposes an owl could be used the same way carrier pigeons were during World Wars I and II. But...

"There are lots of owls in Providence, and without the proper training, I don't see how it could even -- " And then the end of what Chance said sinks in. "Magic?" Except she thinks of it as "magick," because that's how Sadie spells it when they play Scrabble. "Are you a witch like Sadie?"

[chance_silvey]

Oh lord. Explaining Hogwarts is going to be a job and a half. Compared to her own rude awakening, Emmie's reaction is pretty damn level-headed, Chance thinks. Maybe it won't be so bad. Maybe being a child helps.

(Maybe being whatever has yellow eyes helps. She hushes those misgivings. This is her daughter, somehow. Fuck Narcissa Snow, she's not going to take that away from Chance too, just because the Snow woman had freaky eyes.)

"I'm not a witch like Sadie," she says, remembering Sadie's gothed-out trappings. Hair dyed black, carrying an umbrella in the sun, an ostentatious-spooky girl. "But this place isn't just a castle, it's a school of magic. Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry. And if you're a female who can do magic, then they call you a witch, here. A male who can do magic they call a wizard. Not a warlock, I'm not sure why. So technically, strictly speaking, I am sort of a witch."

She chuckles, not much more than a little rueful snort. "I wouldn't say I self-identify as a witch."