Chapter Text
March, 1932.
There is nothing undeniable, and by extension nothing deniable about Caitlyn’s reality.
Pitiful is the word for how she bends beneath it. There is no handbook, no gentlemen’s guide in the written form to explain what had happened and how she might overcome it. Part of her considers it a figment of her overactive mind, or a delayed response to an accident that should have snuffed her out one year ago. Absolution by a clean death would be too kind.
Since absconding from Blackcliff, each day is a matter of surviving to see the sun crest the horizon. Caitlyn learns that there is no vindication in a sunrise one had hoped not to see. The thought of it is frozen where a moment becomes a memory, grievously vivid. She lays in wait for it to become verity, to take shape in her cluttered thoughtscape.
For two weeks, she sleeps when it finds her and eats when she can, neglecting the growing wound in her side unless it suits her to tend it. The snow in Eastport is constant, keeping the streets barren through the evenings. She ventures from the hotel lobby nearing midnight, trudging to the Coast Guard station with sleet clinging to her boots.
“Evening, miss,” the man at the desk greets, fixing his tired slouch.
“I’ve a message for London.” Caitlyn’s rapport has grown with the evening crew at the station, an intrinsic ease which comes with burying herself in military affairs. It saves her a majority of the red taping, never all of it. “Your line is operable?”
“As it can be, miss, yes.” The clerk rifles through a drawer as Caitlyn dusts snowmelt from the shoulder of her coat, stepping further into the cramped room. “Be short. Storm’s fixing to roll in, if it hasn’t.”
Caitlyn takes the key without further gratitude, sees herself to the radio desk with her jaw set. She winces as she sits, gauze pulling at the raw skin of her hip.
The console is imposing as ever. She draws a breath as she pulls the headset on, watches the clock roll over to 00:10. Early morning in England.
Picturing it embitters her. If she were home, Caitlyn would be sharing tea with her mother, feeding and watering the hounds with her father. If she were home, if she had stayed, she would not be wrangling her superiors through radio static.
“Eastport Coast Guard, this is former Captain Caitlyn Kiramman, on behalf of the Royal Navy. Requesting relay to the Admiralty in London. Over.”
Feedback comes to life in the headset, the hairs at the base of her neck standing at attention. A pause, then acknowledgement. She identifies herself with practiced rigidity.
“You’re clear to proceed,” comes the American operator.
“Admiralty. Signal received.” The diction is harsh on her ears. Caitlyn assumes it belongs to the staff officer she’d spoken to the week prior. “Your report’s been escalated. Requesting clarification with regard to your desertion. State your position.”
“Admiralty, I reiterate: my actions were the result of exceptional circumstances at Blackcliff Light. I take full responsibility for abandoning my post, as I’ve said,” her grip tightens on the microphone, “time and time again.”
“Captain.” The title feels more akin to an insult than an honorific. “You’re obligated to provide a full account. The board insists on elaboration.”
Provide a full account. Doing such would require understanding winter’s downward spiral for herself. A right laugh is what he’s having. Her prominence leaves a buffer from scrutiny, but the only way out is with half-truth. Her jaw aches.
“Operational anomalies included insufficient resupply and conditions unfit for service. My partner and I acted to preserve our safety. Further detail is irrelevant.” Caitlyn forces her tone to level, to not stumble over each word. “I am prepared to face any action deemed appropriate, but I insist that my partner acted under my instruction. Her clemency is non-negotiable.”
“Acknowledged,” is the curt reply. Caitlyn imagines her responder dipping biscuits into his morning coffee, watching the London fog with fondness as she pours herself into the receiver. Ambivalent and blind as anyone else to her situation.
“If there’s nothing else,” she grits, “this concludes my transmission. Over and out.”
Caitlyn sits in the silence following the click. Her exit from the building is rushed, an offhand “be well” over her shoulder to the clerk, skulking off into the biting coastal wind.
***
If Vi, six months ago, had been threatened with life as a fugitive under her country’s amphibious forces, she’d have laughed – “Not again.”
And here she is. Hiding from something that can’t be bothered to chase her. Renegade. Vagabond. A name on a list no one’s checking, and still the Marines are the least of her worries.
The lighthouse is a nebulous memory blurred at the edges. It came and went too fast – stability, soured by someone who couldn’t bury her head in the sand. Images of that place cling to the sweat on her neck when she wakes. The mist over the water, the gleam in Caitlyn’s eye by the fireside. The splinter of a knife edge at an ugly angle. Her confidence in the recollection grows weaker with each day, now that the bruises are fading.
Keeping herself alive is the easy part. Caitlyn’s pocket change gets them through, because nothing in town is especially glamorous. It’s not so different from Grafton, which reminds her she hasn’t sent word to Vander or the kids in months. Just her paychecks.
Everything beyond breathing is too complex, and even that is a challenge in their stuffy lodging. During the second week of March, Vi drags Caitlyn to the harbor quarter. Anything to get fresh air in her, keep her from rotting under a damp quilt.
The dockyard is hushed, lamps reflecting like stars on the black water. Caitlyn huddles into her coat, cigarette dangling from her lips. Watching for something on the horizon.
“I have to go home,” Vi says before she can stop herself, standing at the edge of the pier. Not a declaration but a confession, low and stiff. “To Vermont.”
The cigarette’s ember flares, a downward twitch of Caitlyn’s lips around the filter. “When?” she asks. “Do you need money for a train?”
“I’ll figure it out.” Probably remains unspoken. Vi huffs, purses her lips. “I don’t mean to leave you stranded.”
“I hardly expected you to stay.”
“You have better things to do than bum around with me.”
It’s a spineless retort – Caitlyn had abandoned whatever career awaited her at home to sit around in fuck-all nowhere for a full quarter. Vi can’t imagine much love lost there.
“Not really,” Caitlyn confirms for her, flicking ash into the drift. “The Admiralty has me pinned here. Leaving the States means evading investigation.”
That’s an interesting one. Vi hadn’t stopped to give it thought, but it’s only natural that one of their merry band would be facing consequences. Not her fault Caitlyn was prim enough to go seeking out those consequences.
However. Caitlyn’s words from before are a knell in Vi’s ears – I don’t know you. I would like to. It’s that which turns her to Caitlyn after a pause.
“Then… wait it out with me?” Vi asks, her skin stinging, either with the frost air or the adrenaline response. “Got a spare room back at home, ‘least until my sister comes home this summer.”
“I can’t ask that of your family.”
Nice to know that bunking off Vi’s charity is acceptable, but her dad’s off the table.
“You’d be working, too.” She should stop while she’s ahead. “Think about it. You have time.”
The cordial rejection stung a little, but it won’t change anything. The same life, whether Caitlyn decides to be there for it or not. The stakes are higher than trying to hold this together.
Caitlyn drifts off into her thoughts sooner than Vi had hoped, staring into the ember of her cigarette with deep introspect. The offer is half-hearted – chances are, Caitlyn will snap back to herself when faced with shoveling horse shit or scrubbing her hands raw with dishwater. She’ll catch a train when her case comes to an anticlimax, and she’ll be better off for it.
***
Vi sets course for the cannery at four in the morning a week after the exchange, her entire life up to this point crammed into her canvas pack. It’s hard to keep a scowl off her face, tearing off pieces from a plain bagel and scanning the parking lot for any sign of life.
Her guy had been understanding enough, but she can’t imagine it’ll last. She’s lucky to have connections this far from society greater, someone willing to cart her over state lines for all she’s done. Vander will have words for her, and that’s if she’s lucky. Worry about it later, she tells herself while saddling crates of rattling bottles into the boot of the beat-up Packard.
The snow and rain have let up, and the jaunt to Bangor should last five, maybe six hours. “That’ll be all?” the driver asks through a coffee-stained wiry mustache, a workhorse of a man with local blood. Vi bows her head and shucks her hat off with the rest of her belongings.
Leaving it all behind shouldn’t seem so easy – and it isn’t, with the lingering thought of everything she hasn’t said. The mental picture of Caitlyn’s sleeping face burned into her eyelids, the sorry feeling to leave her like that, knowing this is where it ends.
It’ll be fine. They both will be. Caitlyn has her family, her ties and experience. She’ll patch herself up, she’ll tell her future kids stories by a grand fireplace in Buckingham Palace, or where the fuck ever she hails from.
And Vi will keep running from it all. It’s the one chance she has to try. She swings herself into the passenger seat and hopes more than anything that home will fix her.
***
Caitlyn has not pleaded so desperately with her knees to work, damn it all, in years.
Had she checked out of the hotel? No, of course not. Had she left her bra drying from the wash by the radiator? Yes.
Is she regretting that decision? Possibly.
She stumbles down Eastport’s salt-slick streets with a clamor unbecoming of her pedigree, lungs burning with the briny air. Half of her hadn’t left the saggy hotel mattress, and the upright half is wondering what changed to bring it here.
The cannery looms ahead, skeletal in the weak light. Caitlyn’s stomach lurches with the sound of a car door slamming, the ignition growling to life. She knows that’s her ride. Who else would be idling in a junk heap before the first cockcrow?
Brake lights flicker as Caitlyn rounds the corner into the lot, trunk swinging from her good arm and a pack across the other. The junker rolls forward a length, engine rattling. She tries to yelp above it – a desperate “Wait!” – tripping over herself into the headlights, waving like a woman gone mad.
This really could spell her end, throwing herself in front of a vehicle in the morning dark wearing her uniform blues. But for all her effort, the car lurches to a stop, the passenger door flying open just as soon.
Vi all but falls out of it, boots scraping a patch of ice as she catches herself. “Caitlyn? What the hell?” She finds her footing and stomps over, furrowed brows and visible disbelief cutting a stark relief in the amber. “You’re actually–” she cuts herself off, throws her arms up, “What’s wrong with you?”
“Don’t – hah – don’t start now.” Caitlyn bolsters herself on her knees, dropping her trunk to the gravel to wave a hand at the still-open passenger door. “Be a gentleman, would you? I’ll pay your man for petrol.”
Vi scoffs half a laugh. “A gentleman? You’re insane.” It’s blunt when she says it, yet after a moment she strides over, grabs the crate too easily. “Get in the car before I change my mind.”
They load up in silence, Caitlyn and her belongings piled into the back seat. The driver glances at her in the rearview with an unreadable look, but mercifully does not ask any questions.
As they pull out, Caitlyn stares from the window, watching the dark coastline slip further away. She wishes she could say something. Acknowledge the absurdity of it, apologize, explain why Vi’s offer had stricken her. The words tangle and lodge in her throat, too bare and close to the bone; there’s nowhere else for her to go.
The unpaved road ahead is cold and endless. It can’t possibly be worse than freezing alone, the only patron of a dying inn and a foxing on her status. Caitlyn knows there is no plan, no safety net where they’re headed. It had been impulsive, tying up what loose ends remained with a bargain, leveraging what respect prevailed from her career.
Impulsive, though, is what she’s become. Riding in a smuggler’s car to anywhere, nothing but two strangers and a dim hope. She wishes that impulsive did not suit her so well.
***
They stop after two hours to pump fuel and leave soon after. “Finally gone to see your old man?” the driver asks, breaking the snore Vi is halfway through choking up.
“Yeah, I ‘spose.”
“And you’ll be back for the next season?”
Vi blinks. Another oversight in a series spanning twenty-seven brilliant years. “Right, yeah,” she says, short, peering into the rearview with help me eyes at Caitlyn’s blank face.
It’s enough to slip by. Vander is connected enough, and if a shark can smell blood in the water as far out as Grafton then Vi deserves whatever comes to her. That side hustle will be missed dearly.
The latter four hours pass and the driver leaves them a few blocks from Bangor’s rail hub, where Vi pack-mules the luggage. Caitlyn blends in better here, though she’s a head above most of the huddled up crowd. The line to the ticket booth is squat – Vi’s taken the route before and has never seen the station so empty.
“Your names?” comes the attendant through a tight-lipped mouth full of chew, painted in red gloss beneath her rectangle glasses. Caitlyn passes off a fake surname, and the pleasantry ends with the tickets punched.
Maine’s scenery deserves more appreciation than Vi gives it. The snow melts off twenty minutes south of Bangor. Further down the line the tree cover gives way to stone-walled rolling hills, sleepy towns with hickory barns, the peeled white paint of church steeples. The longer it drags for, far from the coast and the ice-laden hostility of Eastport, the more she feels torn.
Putting it behind her in the non-literal sense is outside the realm of possibility. Hardly worth trying, with the object of that guilt perched across from her, sipping lukewarm tea and staring into the mist.
The train from Boston is much the same. A short layover spent dozing off on a bench in the evening dark, rain pattering on the tin roof of a much grander station. It streaks the cab windows when they board, droplets racing backdropped by the mountains. One more stop, then they’ll rest. One stop closer to home.
***
Brattleboro is a needed change. The bed and breakfast especially, emphasis on the bed. Vi looks back on Eastport’s cold hard floor with a hatred deeper than blood. The breakfast is okay, too.
The weather clears up early enough in the day, and downtown is inviting under this light. The streets are winding and narrow, cozy storefronts piled with bits and bobs, a gruff man shoeing a horse by the early morning grey. It strikes again, reluctance to believe Vi could have so easily left behind her post, a parting in the fog that she had not felt or seen until clearing it.
“Do you see your driver?” Caitlyn asks, half asleep where she stands.
“Not yet.”
Airing that she planned to bum a ride from here would’ve sent Caitlyn kicking off in a brand new way, so Vi bites her tongue. The main street and market square are a veritable ocean of victims, the first man or woman with a truck headed north a prime target. She finds her mark eventually: a rotund man in overalls, hauling feed from the co-op and huffing fog through his reddened nose.
“Morning to you,” Vi puts on her best smile, sidling up to his brandy orange truck. “Use a hand?”
And that is how Vi secures passage home, or somewhere close to it. Caitlyn’s scowled recognition belongs framed above the mantle.
The farmer, as they discover against communal will, is a talker. “You’re not from around here,” he says to Caitlyn, hoisting her sable trunk into the squat cab. “Long way from home.”
“Yes, quite.” Caitlyn, tight-lipped but deferential, extends a hand to him while Vi tightens the ratchet on a pallet of wood shavings.
The hour and a half spent in his company is comparable to a year, Caitlyn pretzeled with her knees up to her nose in the bench seat. He’s invasive in the way Vi’s folk are known to be. Everyone knows everyone, a secret is good as the one dumb enough to have it. One of the few joys of making her great escape six years ago had been freedom from that prying.
Vi can play soldier all she likes, but she’ll never dig up those roots.
***
For Caitlyn, being dropped in Vi’s hometown explained little more than her uncouth way of speaking. Grafton is quiet and eerie, nothing like the woman she trails like a lost puppy, muttering her complaints of the muddy streets. The hitchhiking scheme, of course, is a trespass unforgiven, and Vi’s penance is once again carting the baggage.
Rain has just begun to mist their coats when Vi halts at the front step of a farmhouse. Proud and freshly painted red, with a clipped frosty lawn and bare skeletal trees at the fenceline. Warm light spills through the dirt-crusted windows, the only evident life on the stretch.
“Ready?” Vi asks, as if Caitlyn has not been begging to sit down for the entire jaunt.
“As ever.”
Caitlyn follows close as Vi lets herself in. A wall of pine and tobacco hits her nose, thick in the cramped entryway. Deeper in the house she can hear a record turning, the baritone voice of a man singing along. It cuts off when Vi’s pack thuds on the entryway rug, then returns louder: “That you, Mylo?”
“Try again,” Vi calls back, kicking off her boots.
Heavy footsteps sound down the hall until a broad figure fills the doorway, blotting the light. Robust, with grey-peppered hair and eyes thoughtful as they are sharp – Vi’s father, Caitlyn assumes. His stare lingers, softens just enough to crack his stoic expression.
“Vi.” The name falls between relief and reproach. “Where in hell’d you come from?”
“Great seeing you, too,” Vi answers with a flicker of a smirk. Too quick, too practiced.
“You could’ve written.” He steps forward, pulls Vi into a firm hug, face pressed to her mussed hair. His hand lingers on her shoulder when he pulls away, fixes another look at her before he turns to Caitlyn. “Who’s this, then? Don’t tell me you’ve brought trouble.”
“Not trouble,” Vi is suspiciously quick to answer, casting a frightened glance across the room. “This is Caitlyn. She’s…”
Uncertain of what to lead with, is what Caitlyn is, but no less determined to fill the pause. “A coworker. We served together in the exchange.” She steps forward and extends a hand. “Caitlyn Kiramman,” she adds when his palm engulfs hers, firm as he is gentle.
“Kiramman, huh?” His lips twitch up, appraising. “I’ll be sure to break out the fine china.”
If it’s not the accent, it’s the family name betraying her. Should have taken it that an Englishman would know of their enterprise. Caitlyn offers a tense smile and a dip of her head, and the matter is dropped.
He pivots back to his daughter, “You staying the night, or just passing through?”
“Staying.” The word is precarious for Vi. “Hoping to, at least.”
Vander grunts an acknowledgement. “You’re a chip off the block, collecting strays.”
Caitlyn starts, “I wouldn’t want to impose–” but he waves her off, ambling down the hall.
“You’re already here. You do alright with dogs?” he asks over his shoulder.
“Oh, splendidly. I’ve got two back in England.” Caitlyn’s attempt to elaborate is met with a hum of an answer, disappearing into another doorway. She turns to Vi, lowering her voice, “He’s… welcoming. You didn’t tell him we were coming.”
“Someone has to keep him on his toes.” Vi shucks her coat onto a chairback, starts nudging Caitlyn toward the staircase. “Stick around a few weeks – you’re polite, he’ll like you.”
The floorboards creak as Caitlyn follows her upstairs, sticking to the walls and ducking her head with the low ceilings. A room is left messy through a cracked door; two unmade beds, a pile of mudstained men’s workwear. Their home smells lived in, steeped in memories.
Further down the hall, Vi leads her through to a smaller bedroom. Modest in size and made smaller by the eccentric tapestry adorning the walls, dulled fuschia draping the alcove window. An oversize wool blanket is tossed over the bedcovers, where Vi sets Caitlyn’s suitcase.
“We made it.” Vi gestures to the room with a tight lipped smile. “Best room in the house. Vander had to gut the insulation when we moved out here.”
“I appreciate it.” It sounds hollow, but begs verbalization regardless. She’s polite, after all.
“I’ll let you settle in.” Vi stops with her hand on the doorframe, chewing at her lip before turning back to the hall. “If you need anything, figure it out. Gotta feeling I’m peeling potatoes.”
May, 1932.
From Caitlyn’s first week in Grafton, any onlooker would think she’s gotten along swimmingly. She rode with Vander and his sons to the barn each morning, shared mountain brandy coffees in the frost and mucked stalls with the family dog on her heels. She’d been there for the first lambing late in the season and saw life anew in those little lungs and wobbly knees. The townsfolk had taken to her, she’d like to think, for all the errands Vander sent her on.
The turn to April had come soft, longer days and warmer rain. The wound in her hip sealed to a raised purple scar, hurt the same as before. Routine did not break, but something within Caitlyn did, fragile and paper-thin.
To make herself useful had seemed paramount, both to be more than a couch ornament and to sequester thoughts of Maine from the foreground. For a time it had done, until her body adjusted and the mind within it had almost begun to feel safe. The eventide no longer carried her away with ease, a month taken for granted before the memories compounded.
May’s first sleepless night has Caitlyn dwelling on the picture of an altar. On the living, breathing walls of that hollow place, a floorplan she can no longer slot together. Those hallucinations – they must have been – had stopped as soon as they had boarded that ship, and yet there is still the compulsion to make certain.
In bed she sits upright, counting each muffled tick of the hallway clock. In bed she thinks of her wrongdoings and shortcomings, of her brushes with the end.
She thinks of Vi in bed.
Innocuously, for the most part – swaddled in plushy comfort and above all, distance. Caitlyn had thought little of the scant few moments they spent alone. Vi has been looking for work, and Caitlyn a shoddy pantomime. To be isolated together for long would spell certain death for normalcy. The two of them at sea, crammed into that tiny cabin, should have been no different. They’d been worse for it, ragged-raw and suspicious. Still, there had been security in it, always knowing where the other was. If Caitlyn stood at Vi’s door tonight, would she feel the same certainty?
She rises without hope of stopping herself, crosses the hall with leaden legs and a floaty head. Golden light pours from the cracked door. She does not knock, enters with her head low and her back turned.
“Couldn’t sleep?” Vi asks, slouched at the edge of her bed when Caitlyn turns to her. Unsurprised to be intruded on, uncaring.
“You couldn’t, either.” Caitlyn hesitates to come closer to her, to seek the spaces she might slot herself into. The cold dark cast by Vi’s shoulders, the bright warmth between her ribs. The small of her back where Caitlyn had once dug into the flesh with her fingertips.
It’s quiet when Vi makes room for Caitlyn on her bed, quiet when their shoulders brush, quieter still when Caitlyn trails a hand along Vi’s leg. Shaky and light, as if it were the first time.
Only the first time had not been virginal, nor had it left room for something to break. The touch is both a question and an answer.
Could it be the same as it was then?
No. It cannot be, and they will be better for it.
Yet they come closer, they lie together, and Caitlyn can pretend. She can disappoint and underperform, they both can, and that will have been all. Two bodies as they were before, each a means to an end.
The entire affair, for everything it does not mean, is anticlimactic in every way. Caitlyn is blind to the intricacies in a physicality deeper than the skin, and Vi is tireless, as patient as she is disillusioned.
With one hand clamped over Vi’s mouth and the other between her thighs, Caitlyn can forget.
***
The general store’s entry bell rings on Caitlyn’s way out, a mocking kick in the arse to the day’s crowning achievement. A failed interview, rejected without hope of follow up.
“Not the right fit,” they’d said. Something more local was the implication, after which Caitlyn tuned out.
Caitlyn’s mother had always said to her as a girl, “you’re interviewing them,” and other prattle denoting self-assurance in her labor. It no longer resonates — she’d take the chimney sweep position if they’d have her, black lung included.
For a month and a half, Caitlyn has done nothing but overstay her welcome.
She has nowhere to pin the blame, only what about her is so dastardly? She’s all but touting herself with a sandwich board on every street corner, selling her pre-arthritic hands for next to nothing.
The sorrow finds her drowning herself in a 1917 copy of The Royal Road to Health in the window bench of her bedroom. The desk remained untouched since she had moved in, piled with tchotchkes and gadgets that she had taken a cursory glance at and since avoided like plague. She’d set herself up as something temporary, living out of a suitcase. She was never meant to stay.
She isn’t meant to stay.
For hours, the thought digs deeper and loops around every interaction. She skips dinner and listens to the laughter from below, tosses and turns beneath sheets which bring no warmth. An empty bed in a full house, with or without her bones to chill it.
That night, or morning, Caitlyn sits at the desk for the first time, her pen and a torn page from her journal occupying a small clearing amidst the rubble.
The first note is stilted, crumpled and shoved into a corner of her pack. Then the second, then the third.
It’s the fourth that sticks, lacking in apology or feeling. Grateful and cordial.
What she has fostered here was born to break. Vi had always been too good, however Caitlyn tried to frame it in her memory.
England is all she has left, if even that.
Caitlyn’s pack feels too light on her shoulders. At the door, she hesitates only a moment before stepping into the blue dawn, the sound of the latch clicking shut behind her like a chapter ending.
***
“Mother.”
Caitlyn dips her head, rainwater falling from the ends of her hair to the front step. She looks awful and she’s well aware – several days aboard a ship and longer still navigating the train system back to the coast. There had been no chance to wash, scarcely an attempt to eat or sleep. Her knees threaten to give with the weight of her trunk, with her mother’s stare she cannot meet.
She stands before the Kiramman estate and as much as everything has changed, as she has changed, it is the same as when she walked away from it.
The judgment is immense, or it should be. Word will have reached home, not only of her cowardice but of her disappearance and failure to cooperate. Whatever comes to her, she has earned it. Be it that her parents turn her to the streets of London to board elsewhere, or lecture her as an overgrown child.
As she braces for that lecture, for the door to close as soon as it had opened, it never comes.
Cassandra steps from the doorway, places her hand atop Caitlyn’s shoulder. “After eight months without a word, I’d expect at the very least a curtsy.”
The trunk falls to the ground and Caitlyn against her mother, the wiry tweed coat scratchy against her cheek. An arm loops her waist, willowy as Cassandra has always been.
Home, or all Caitlyn has known it to be.
Despite the hour, Caitlyn is brought into the anteroom and told to wait – formalities, that her father could receive her properly and not in her own chamber. He is the same in all of her memories, though he takes the stairs slower and does not sweep her from her feet as he once would have. Donning a blue and pale gold grenadier smoking jacket, slipper-footed and kind-eyed.
“Mamsell and Lady missed you.” Tobias clasps her frigid hand in both of his, soft from bookkeeping and administration. “Almost as dreadfully as your mother,” he tacks, a cheeky glint in his eye.
“And I’ve missed them.” Caitlyn dips her head to kiss her father’s cheek. “I’ve missed you.”
Later in the evening, she creeps to the kennels and brings Mamsell to her room, curled tail bobbing all the way. Her reunion with Lady will have to wait until morning. The younger of the two gun dogs, to Caitlyn’s recollection, is much less suited to snoring the hours away in peace.
Caitlyn’s dresser smells of mothdust and mildew, which leaves her mostly uniformed in her childhood bed, tired bones sinking into the feathered comforter. Since September she had crossed an inordinate number of state lines and oceans, and it had all brought her back to this.
It should feel like belonging. Should feel as it did before deployment, when she had the will to make something of herself. It should not feel so insipid to be granted another in an endless cycle of second chances. It should not be longing which lodges in her chest, wicks in the back of her throat.
A cold snout snuffles against Caitlyn’s shoulder, then her chest. The doberman huffs a sigh, warm brown eyes drooping with her age.
“I know, old girl.” Caitlyn scratches behind Mamsell’s ear, wills herself to relax on the stack of pillows. “We’ll be alright.”
June, 1932.
“You’ve received word of my standing.” Caitlyn centers herself in the study, dwarfed by the dark mahogany partner’s desk her mother sits at. “I’ve fallen out of favor with the service.”
It’s a stain on a legacy which never had legs to stand on. Leaving for academy and shortly thereafter rising through the ranks – that future was not written in her stars. Perhaps she had been right.
It does not dull the sting of purpose long lost.
“I’m sorry to hear of it.” Cassandra raises her hand to lift a glass of scotch without a glance, eyes set on the tip of her pen.
“It’s a shame, but not an irreversible one.”
“What, exactly, do you plan to reverse?” Cassandra tilts her head, stone-faced. “Your return was anything but expected.”
“None of it was planned.”
“No,” Cassandra agrees. “Yet here you are.”
A throat-tightening silence settles, weight pressing in from all four walls of the office. Caitlyn feels as small here today as she had before.
“They’ve agreed to relinquish my case,” Caitlyn says finally, pacing the Persian rug. The pile of it is long sole-worn by conversations much like today’s. “No tribunal, no hearing. A kindness, of sorts.”
“Kindness.” Her mother repeats the word as to feel the weight of it for herself. “Or convenience. Your time away was unconventional, but I’d assume you had your reasons. If the Admiralty sees fit to close the book, I’d suggest you do the same.”
A thorn lodges in Caitlyn’s side, a lump in her throat. To so much as turn the page has been insurmountable, let alone snapping the ordeal away. The lighthouse, Vi’s shadow in the staircase, her voice calling Caitlyn’s name, the cracked ice of the lightroom— it all resurfaces without difficulty. Her hands fidget with the cuffs of her sleeves, tugging the canvas lower down her wrists.
“I don’t mean to be a laggard.” Caitlyn takes to straightening a shelf of records, fingers frost-numb against the spines. “I’ve been… considering my next steps.”
“Consider expediently,” her mother rebukes, not unkindly, nocking her fountain pen into a brass stand.
Caitlyn would’ve done better to seek guidance as a girl of seventeen, before her incompetence had taken root. Sink or swim had never been embedded in the family values, but a maul of shame wedges itself into her solar plexus nonetheless.
“I only need time—”
“You’re chasing your own tail,” Cassandra cuts her short, and doesn’t look up as she speaks. “But you’re smart enough to crawl home with that very same tail between your legs. Don’t squander the opportunity afforded to you.”
Caitlyn shrinks beneath her tone, taking another lap of the rug. There is so much more than she could possibly make clear, not to mention the simple fact she has nothing to squander. No agency or purpose, however far she ventures.
Too many loose ends.
“I understand,” is all Caitlyn can manage, straightening her shoulders.
“Good.” Cassandra’s attention returns to her ledgers. “See yourself to my clerk’s office, if you’re so terribly inclined to find work. Don’t tell me you’ve forgotten to put on tea and keep pleasantries.”
***
Slinking through the doorway into the practitioner’s London corner office feels akin to brotheling. Brim of her hat pulled low and coat collar popped, Caitlyn makes every last attempt to shelter the world from her snarled face until the lobby door clicks shut.
The doctor is a spindly man, aged such that the white in his hair threaded through the crop of his beard, which spoke to Cassandra’s senses when vetting a psychologist for her troubled adult daughter. His methods, she’d been assured, were strictly scientific and infallible. Congruent with the Kiramman worldview – sensible folk who did not waste nor want in the realm of faith.
It’s her fourth week meeting with the doctor, a groggy evening that places Caitlyn at the back end of his schedule. The leather of a Chesterfield chair squeaks as he crosses his legs, steepling his bony fingers.
He asks how she’s been managing the clerical work, to which the answer is terribly, amongst other pleasantries. All meant to crack the ice, Caitlyn is certain. She takes his questions in stride, until he asks:
“Last we met, you mentioned a partner from your deployment. I would imagine there exists a bond, for all that you… endured together. Have you been in contact with them?”
Caitlyn pauses the fidgeting of her hands, which clam up all at once.
She had dug a pit, hollowed the space and buried it so well. The thought of Vi, of what she stood for, as much as it plagued Caitlyn’s mind seemed so small now. Distant and something to mourn, not to humor.
“No.” Caitlyn measures her tone and her temper, as easy as it would be to walk out the door. “I’ve found no merit in dwelling on her. On any of this.”
“Yet you’ve sought guidance.”
A muscle pinches in Caitlyn’s face.
“I’ve come at the behest of a concerned mother, as a burden on my name. Give it credence as you will.” She tugs at the sheepskin of her driving gloves, jaw working left to right.
He ignores the farce, twirling a pen between forefinger and thumb. “Your intake denoted indefinite medical leave, evident disability. Would you say that the accident has any bearing on how you’ve come to me today?”
Doctors, for all Caitlyn has known, are purebred foxhounds of interrogative justiciars. The foreign captors and local authorities held not a single horse in the race. Caitlyn cannot meet the doctor’s stare as it seems to bore into her very soul, the silence drawing from her an urge to fill it.
“Of course it has,” she snaps. Whether the doctor had meant the catastrophic downfall to HMS Aegis the year prior or her retreat to Maine, it makes no difference. It’s meant to prod and it works, the nape of Caitlyn’s neck flushing with her frustration. “I should have died. I would have, if not for her. It’s the same story each time and you’ll gain nothing dredging it up. A shit by any other name would still smell of shit.”
The doctor taps at the edge of his notepad with the end of his pen, allowing the rant to settle like a dense fog in the room. “It’s not uncommon,” he begins, brushing a hand over his beard. “For a survivor to question the value of their own life, when one has been saved at the expense, or perceived expense of others. Do you ever feel gratitude toward her? Resentment?”
Caitlyn’s head jerks up, single eye narrowing. “Gratitude, assuredly. A horrible insinuation.”
“It isn’t an insinuation.” The chair squeaks again. “An observation, rather. Gratitude and guilt are rarely so divided, such that they breed conflict.”
Caitlyn draws a slow breath, thinks back to the light as it ails her. To the times she had fought with Vi, to begging her for an escape. “I’m indebted to her. That doesn’t mean I’ve an obligation to carry it forward.”
“And what absolves you of that?”
Caitlyn could not tell him straight. What comes instead is a crack of her voice, a dismayed whisper.
“What could she want from me?” She stares at the floor. “What ever could I offer her, after everything?
That pen spins slowly in a weathered hand from the peak of Caitlyn’s vision, taunting, contemplative. “You speak often of your deficit. All that you lack. I’d wonder, if you were to put that aside, what is it that you want? What do you imagine she would say if you were to write her?”
Stiffness, immediate in every joint, is Caitlyn’s initial response. Then curiosity, followed by a chill which makes for a wholly unpleasant bodily reaction. “I’ve no intention of writing to her.”
“But the idea troubles you.”
Caitlyn bristles, but says nothing.
“Sometimes, we avoid what we desire most because to want for anything is frightening.” He aims to meet her eye, then drops back to his notes. “Barring that fear, what would you tell her?”
Caitlyn scoffs. “It’s nonsense.”
“Then let it be nonsense.” He softens his tone and it nauseates Caitlyn. “Indulge it privately. A draft, just for yourself. Start where you are.”
There is no further pressing. The clock strikes with the hour and Caitlyn rushes home, quells the ache in her throat with a cigar in the study. Satin barbs of her dressing gown and the contagious cold floors make her skin crawl, her fingers itch.
She runs circles around the thought, the images, every hypothetical unspent in her mind. She cannot possibly send for Vi, not even as a charade only for herself. She cannot entertain the thought. It was better left in the past, better escaped. For every attempt both to end and preserve Caitlyn’s life, Vi deserved a world without her as a scourge on it.
Yet it follows her, as persistent as the shadows that stretch every empty room, as the hounds at her heels through the corridors.
Her judgement has never been something to trust. For herself repeats in her mind. Only to see.
When the moonglow stretches into the morning, Caitlyn sets her pen to paper.
July, 1932.
The soft rain-shine of the evening leaves the pavement glittery, a damp iron smell in the cramped streets. Vi keeps her hands to her pockets as she walks, shoulders hunched.
She’d finished moving out two weeks prior. The apartment isn’t much, a narrow place above a shuttered game room, but it’s hers. Utility and rent is paid with her job at the farm supply, tedious but simple work, and she’s had far worse roofs over her head.
If it’s ever too quiet, Jinx is back now, filling the space with energy that ricochets off the low ceiling and empty walls. It reminds Vi of how young she still is, feels like a kind of healing she can’t place.
Today, though, it’s Vander she has her sights set on. The diner is a short jaunt from the apartment, and Vi sees him out front when she rounds the corner. He doesn’t wave, doesn’t lift a hand in greeting.
“Lost your manners?” Vi asks, stepping up under the awning for cover from the mist.
“Years ago.” There’s a tilted smile around the mouth of Vander’s pipe, turning down as he roots through his coat pocket. “Here.”
Vi glances to his outstretched hand, a thick paper envelope sealed with care pressed into her palm. “What’s this?”
“Came to the house.” Vander pulls back, puffing off the pipe. “Addressed to you. Figure it must be the end times.”
The wax seal is unfamiliar, a foreign stamp posted at the top right of the backside. On the return address, a signature in trim navy blue: Caitlyn Kiramman.
Vi’s heart thuds in both ears. It’s been months, recovering and singing her gripes, thinking but not understanding. Barely a day has gone by that she hasn’t sat in wait, or maybe dread, for a sign of life.
“You want me to leave you to it?” Vander asks, quiet.
“No.”
She’s not sure why she says it, or why she thinks herself fit to pry the seal up here and now, careful not to tear the envelope. The smell of parchment and ink is laced with something brighter when she unfolds it. Jasmine.
Vi steps aside to scan the letter, eyes racing over careful words. No preamble or small talk, just words that seem rehearsed and rewritten a hundred times over before making it to the post:
Vi,
I owe you more than my words can repay, yet words are all that I stand to offer. Words I’ve delayed, though I’ve thought of them, or rather you, in every ordinary moment.
All that I saw, and all that you did, I didn’t expect to survive, nor think myself deserving.
The page blurs when Vi skims ahead. Mentions of rehabilitation, a narrow brush with convulsive therapy, of sedatives. A slow, halting process, reintegration not so different from Vi’s own.
It’s a miracle all of it fits on the page, double sided as it is. Near the bottom, Vi’s eyesight returns to her.
If this finds you at all, I can only hope that it finds you well. I’ve not the slightest what you’ve made of your life since May. If you’ll forgive my presumption, just the once, I’d like to know.
And if I could, I’d like to see it.
Vi lowers the letter, folding the parchment against her chest before the rain can streak it.
“Well?” Vander asks, arms crossed where he leans near the front door. “They’re sending another officer for you?”
Vi slips the letter into her coat, hand lingering over the pocket where it rests. There are a dozen or more things she could, or should say. Nothing useful.
“Yeah,” she mutters, a weak smile tugging at her every effort to crush it down. “Something like that.”