Chapter 26

The next morning, Saoirse lingers in bed, staring out the balcony slider at the brilliant swath of leaves in shades from dandelion to cider. Emmit left earlier than she expected, citing the need to head into his office to work on story critiques for several mentees. But Saoirse doubts this. His urgency, she thinks, has more to do with the inspiration he claims visited him the previous evening than with returning papers while he’s out, recovering from his fictitious bout of COVID.

Emmit didn’t say much over dinner regarding the nature of this inspiration, only that—while far from the fully formed idea he received prior to embarking upon Vulture Eyes —it was the beginning of something special. Saoirse didn’t question whether his excitement was misplaced, though she can’t see how anything from that damp, disgusting basement could translate to something of literary merit.

Still, he seemed hopeful to the point where she chose to ignore the two bottles of wine he drank with dinner, invigorated so that his eyes remained bright and alert even after Saoirse grew tired. He was energetic on the walk home, and after they fell into the front door of 88 Benefit, up the stairs, and into her bedroom, his thirst for her was endless, his need for her touch and attention exhausting her, his demand for her reciprocation and synchronicity almost sending her over the edge.

Saoirse remains tired even after the full night’s sleep, drained from the drug and alcohol consumption. She still can’t believe the woman last night sipping from a flask and swallowing unidentified powder-filled capsules was her.

Easy to fall down the rabbit hole of substances, isn’t it? Jonathan asks. Even with a bum heart.

Saoirse ignores him.

Vowing to get back on track with her health, she goes to the kitchen to put the kettle on and search for her computer. Despite these distractions, despite her attempts to focus on the fun she’s had with Emmit, or the seeds of an idea for a new poem, the only thought that continues to present itself is the one she’s trying to dodge most vehemently: I might not be anything like Jonathan. But might Emmit be a little more like my late husband than I first thought?

No. That isn’t it. They’re just in that early stage of relationships, when everything is new and full of potential. It’s normal to let loose a little more than normal, to rely on a bit of liquid courage to let down one’s inhibitions. Emmit is not like Jonathan. He can’t be.

But it’s not just the substance use —abuse?— that reminds you of me, is it? Jonathan asks. That night you were having dinner with your friends ... Emmit didn’t just sound disappointed when you weren’t free, he sounded jealous. I didn’t even get jealous of you spending time with other people.

“No,” Saoirse says aloud. “You were jealous of my insistence on maintaining a life, on maintaining an identity, separate from you. You wanted to strip me of my autonomy, to control—no, obliterate—my very life. I’ll take Emmit’s disappointment over your abuse any day of the week.”

That’s a little dramatic, Jonathan says.

“It isn’t.”

Really? I mean, I still don’t even buy the little meet-cute as it supposedly happened. Emmit, worrying you were stalking him ? It was an act meant to turn you away from your original suspicions. You and I both know Emmit saw you in the Athen?um that day, followed you home, and has orchestrated every subsequent run-in.

Saoirse opens her laptop angrily. “Will you get out of my head! Why won’t you disappear already, shut up and leave me alone?”

Oh, Saoirse, Saoirse. You know why I won’t leave. It’s simple, really. Poetic. My voice is the disembodied heart beneath the floorboards, and I’m going to keep on beating till I drive you mad.

Any lingering motivation to check job postings dissipates. She pushes her laptop across the table, leaves the kitchen, and wanders into the living room. She will not continue arguing with someone who’s not really there, whether that’s the ghost of her dead husband or a fragment of her own splintered brain. She sits on the settee and opens a notebook on the coffee table. She wants the peace that comes with writing but doesn’t want to be alone to achieve it. She’s considering going for a walk to shake some ideas loose when her cell phone rings.

“How’d you like to engage in a little mysticism for mysticism’s sake?” Roberto asks after Saoirse’s accepted the call.

“Huh?”

“Just a little transcendentalist humor. Writing. How would you like to get together to do some writing?”

“You have great timing. That sounds perfect right about now.” She pauses. Something about Roberto’s opening comment was sticking for her, like a spot she couldn’t rub clean. “What was the whole mysticism humor thing again?” she asks.

Roberto chuckles. “Oh, it was nothing. Just a dig at ol’ Poe.”

“Poe?” Saoirse feels a chill, like moth wings, at the back of her neck.

“Poe couldn’t stand transcendentalists. Wrote a whole story that was a thinly veiled critique of those responsible for the movement. Thought their ‘mysticism’ and symbolism turned their poetry into the flattest kind of prose.”

She can practically hear Roberto shrugging, but her mind is churning, contemplating what he’s said. Odd, that Poe despised those individuals with whom his fiancée would have surrounded herself. A strange parallel, since Emmit has been lukewarm, at best, whenever Saoirse’s mentioned her transcendentalist friends.

“Anyway, where do you want to meet?” Roberto asks.

She shakes her head to clear her thoughts. “How about Carr Haus?” Who am I? Just last week, all I wanted was to curl up under a blanket of Paxil.

Paxil. Entresto. She shoots a look toward the kitchen then down at her phone. Ten o’clock. Wherever she and Roberto end up going, she needs to take her medication before leaving the house. She promised herself she was going to start making her health a priority, and here she is, an hour late taking her meds. Not only that, but she needs to find a cardiologist and psychiatrist now that she’s settled in Providence. Her New Jersey providers won’t prescribe to her indefinitely. She’s worked too hard finding the perfect balance of drug interactions to risk having a lapse in her treatment.

“What was that?” she asks, coming back to the present yet again. “Sorry, I zoned out for a second.”

“I saaaid,” he starts, drawing the words out, “let’s skip Carr Haus. That’s not even a you-and-Lucretia place anymore, it’s a you-and-Emmit one.”

“Oh, please,” she says, mock-irritably. “But fine, no Carr Haus. What do you suggest?”

“How about the Ath?”

Saoirse freezes.

“Saoirse? You still there?”

“Yes. Sorry. I’m here.” She can’t be weird about the Ath; Roberto will ask too many questions. “That sounds fine.”

“Meet you there in twenty?”

“See you then.” Saoirse hangs up, takes her medication, and is about to head out when her phone dings again. Thinking it’s Roberto, Saoirse eyes the screen, but the text is from an unknown number. She opens the message:

It’s Aidan. Why’d you block my number? I’m going to find you, Saoirse. I’m GOING to talk to you. Just respond, agree to meet, and make this easier on everyone.

Saoirse throws the phone across the room. She is trembling. Aidan didn’t say agree to meet somewhere in Providence , so it’s possible he still doesn’t know she’s here. But he got another new phone, which means he’s going to start texting her relentlessly again. She wants to call Roberto back and cancel, but she also doesn’t want to be alone, so she forces herself to grab her bag and leave the house. She walks the ten blocks between 88 Benefit Street and the Athen?um looking over her shoulder every few steps.

Ten minutes later, still jumpy, Saoirse stands before the trickling fountain. Her eyes roam over the carved granite leaves and elongated letters. A fly whizzes past her right ear, then doubles back and circles her left one.

“Buzz off ,” Saoirse hisses, and swats the air so hard that she misjudges her proximity to the fountain. The back of her hand smashes into the thick granite, and her brain goes blank from the pain. She doubles over, sucking air through gritted teeth. Something warm snakes over her fingers, and Saoirse looks down to find the skin along her knuckles is raw and broken; the deepest scrape oozes blood.

After several deep breaths, she forces herself to straighten. The stream of fountain water fills her vision like a mirage. Unthinkingly, she jabs her hand forward and lets the cold water run over the bruised tendons and aching bones. It flows into the series of scrapes, washing the blood down the scalloped stonework and into the lower basin. When she pulls her hand away, more pink-tinged water runs off her fingers to disappear into the cracks of the city sidewalk. Once you drink from the fountain, you can never leave, the couple walking down the sidewalk told her just one week ago.

Drinking it would be one thing, Jonathan says, but what does the legend say about filtering the water straight into your bloodstream?

Saoirse whimpers and shakes excess water from her skin. The throbbing has lessened to a dull ache. She looks one way then the other—no Aidan, and no one has witnessed her run-in with the fountain. Saoirse rubs her palm across the leg of her jeans and starts up the stairs.

As she reaches the library entrance, Roberto calls out from behind her. “Hey! You beat me here.”

She waits while he jogs up the stairs, more grateful to see him than she’d expected, and they enter together. Saoirse focuses on Roberto’s easy gait and the casual way he greets the librarians rather than the vivid memories of spending time with Jonathan at the Ath now joining her anxiety over the text from Aidan. That those memories are all pleasant, coupled with the knowledge of what her and Jonathan’s relationship would become, causes a dissonance that nags at her as persistently as her injured hand.

She wonders what Roberto would say if she told him about her husband. She always wonders what people would say if they knew the truth of how Jonathan had changed from a normal, fun-to-be-around guy to the veritable prison guard he’d become. Why didn’t you just leave? she imagines they’d ask. That question simultaneously infuriates and demoralizes her. Imagine the frog in the pot of boiling water, she can see herself saying. Then imagine that, during the first few instances of the water warming by a few degrees, the frog was also systematically belittled, worn down, stripped of its agency, and gaslit out of taking the very remedies that could have motivated it to escape. Do you see now? Do you see why leaving wasn’t only not an option, it was as likely as starting a little frog pond on the dark side of the moon?

“We could see if the Art Room’s available,” Roberto muses.

“No,” Saoirse says quickly. Too quickly. She needs to stop letting her mind wander before Roberto starts to question her sanity. Still, the last thing she wants is Leila Rondin finding her near a table of artifacts for an upcoming exhibit. “One of the alcoves is fine.”

When they reach the second floor, Roberto turns left. He passes the first alcove and veers into the second. Saoirse follows, wishing she’d insisted on meeting at Carr Haus, after all. She takes in the multipaned windows, the bust on the sill, the straight-backed chair pushed neatly against the empty desk.

Saoirse’s been in this alcove before. It’s the alcove with the best light, according to Leila Rondin. The alcove in which, two days before their planned Christmas Day wedding, Edgar and Sarah were sitting when Sarah was handed a note telling her that Poe had broken his promise of sobriety.

She thinks of Emmit and his affinity for Poe, his irresistible lopsided smile, the way he listens to every word she says, encourages every thought she has. The way he treats her poetry like it’s some sort of magic. Then, the lopsided smile turns sinister, and she sees him tipping back the silver flask. Handing her the small capsule stuffed with suspicious brown powder. Beckoning to her after smashing the door of the Shunned House in the yellowy light of a waxing gibbous moon.

You’re having your very own Poe-Whitmanian whirlwind romance, Lucretia had said, and Roberto had agreed, claiming the longing, the passion, the depth of his love for her, practically overnight was on par with Emmit’s feelings for Saoirse. Everything feels too orchestrated, a little too much like Saoirse is acting out a role in a play. The relationship is too exciting, too full of meaning, too significant. Serendipitous. The past couple of days, her every action feels like it could be an echo of Sarah’s. And Emmit? Were his actions an echo of Edgar’s?

“Does this work?” Roberto asks, interrupting the madness swirling around her head.

Saoirse forces a smile and nods. She slides across from him at the desk and pulls out a notebook. The framed drawing of a pen-and-ink raven above their heads reflects the light from the alcove across the open-air space of the second floor. Saoirse wishes she had a bottle of water, feels a little fuzzy-headed.

It’s because you’re letting Emmit inside your head now, like you once did me, Jonathan whispers.

Saoirse and Roberto settle into a comfortable silence, broken only by the flip of Roberto’s pages. Saoirse stares at her own notebook for several minutes but can’t clear the static from her brain. After ten minutes without writing a word, she pushes her chair back and stands.

“I’m going to take a walk.” She’s thinking of something to add, something about needing to look for inspiration, but Roberto is already nodding.

“Sounds good,” he mumbles, pen flying.

Saoirse wanders around the second floor but sees no glass enclosures or well-lit display cases. It’s almost the end of October; the exhibit Leila Rondin had been curating should be up now. When an authoritative woman walks by with a stack of books cradled in her arms, Saoirse taps her on the elbow. “Excuse me,” she says, “can you tell me where the Poe-Whitman exhibit is located?”

The woman leads her downstairs and to the right of the main entrance, kitty-corner to the children’s wing. Saoirse thanks the woman, and she nods and disappears. The exhibit is small—much smaller than she expected—a mere three glass cabinets of artifacts, the most prominent being a parchment featuring Poe’s signature. There are early newspaper printings and contemporary parodies of “The Raven,” a print of “Le Corbeau” by French modernist painter édouard Manet, inscribed to Sarah Whitman by poet and critic Stéphane Mallarmé. Saoirse spots several first editions, some memorabilia of Poe’s, and, finally, a portrait of Sarah.

It’s different from any of the portraits she’s seen, a daguerreotype taken—according to the plaque beside it—by Providence photographer Joseph White and depicting his subject in profile, her dark-brown hair peeking past her accustomed headwear: a black veil and ribbon tied in a bow under her chin. The plaque also states that Sarah, “or Helen, as she was known to her friends,” was fifty-three at the time the photograph was taken.

Saoirse stares at the woman before her—the whispers of Jonathan, Aidan, and Emmit that had swirled through her mind since entering the library falling away.

Too long benighted man has had his way. Indignant woman turns and stands at bay.

The lines materialize in her head as if delivered on the wings of a raven. Though, was it possible this was something she’d read before and was merely recalling? More lines arrive just as swiftly:

Old proverbs tell us when the world was new,

And men and women had not much to do,

Adam was wont to delve and Eve to spin;

His work was out of doors and hers within.

But Adam seized the distaff and the spindle,

And Eve beheld her occupation dwindle.

Saoirse steps back from the exhibit, the lines cutting serpentine patterns through her head. She makes her way back to the staircase as if she’s a sleepwalker—new words, new rhymes, spinning themselves around her like smoke.

At the top of the stairs, she turns left past an empty alcove. She’s two stacks away from Roberto, from her empty, waiting notebook. But after another step, she stops, forced to a standstill by the words in her brain, the poem’s final line presenting itself along with a shiver that runs up her spine and cascades along her neck. It’s not the shiver of scuttling spiders or the unpleasant prickle of fly legs. This is a sensation of delight and exhilaration, and the fingers of her right hand twitch, anxious to transfer the odd, alien words from her head to the page.

She moves forward another step. A noise comes from Roberto’s alcove, like he’s sliding his chair back from the desk. Saoirse looks up at the exact moment a figure steps out from the stack on her right, blocking her path. A hand goes to her neck, brushes her collarbone to grip her shoulder, and Saoirse feels herself pushed backward, past the last two stacks she passed, into the farthest corner of the library, feels her shoulder blades press up against cold metal shelving and smells the chemical compounds of the glue, the ink, the paper of the hundreds of books that surround her. The arm against her chest is firm and unmoving.

Saoirse’s heartbeat skyrockets. She is back in the graveyard with Aidan Vesper, beneath the weeping willows. All the lovely lines of poetry disappear from her head.