And Your Girl Can Sing

Chapter 40: The Calm Before The Storm

I gathered my coat around me and lay still. In front of me, a strange shape loomed out of the darkness, a house.

I caught my breath.

My house.

"Probably just some vandals or such," sighed the voice to my left.

"Nonsense, Mara, this is Chiswick, after all," said the other. I took a quick glance above the fence separating our neighbors yard from ours and very faintly made out a silhouette digging something in the back yard.

"Shh, you'll wake the Lanes," the voice shushed. "Come with me, I'm going back inside to get the soil."

The Lanes were my next door neighbors; all my doubts drifted away as I breathed in the air of fifty years later: I was home. I was home at somewhere around 5 AM, but home nonetheless. Then there was a shift in my chest and I remembered the events leading up to my coming home. I touched my lip and the bites on my neck and felt his sharp teeth biting desperately at the soft skin covering the side of my neck. I love you, he had said, and the pieces started falling into place. He couldn't just fuck me. He had to love me first. He had to make sure I knew. And now he was gone.

"John," I said quietly into the darkness, repeating his name. "John, John..." I was home, he wasn't home with me, and I felt like someone had scrubbed me raw from the inside. Here I was, pure at last but feeling like I was missing a vital organ—why had he told me he had loved me?

I brought my hands to my face, emotion rising within me. Two minutes of lust immediately spanned to two minutes of grief, separated by an ocean of time. I drew my knees fo my chest, my coat barely keeping the cold out, staring at the grass I was sitting on, still finding it hard to make out where I was after so many, so many months of the beginning of the sunny sixties. Something inside me had crumbled off and I could feel it dragging my thoughts down into a swirl of memory: screaming my lungs out in the Kaiserkeller, kisses at dawn, his fingers around mine as he taught me new chords, the melodic tune of his voice in my ear, which would sometimes dip to a low hiss and make me jump to take my revenge in the form of a terrible country form of "Heartbreak Hotel."

I wanted to scream, but convinced myself not to, to lock in my emotions based on the time of day and also my reputation as being a sane person. And so I tried to get rid of him in my mind, but it was like trying to get rid of fog. My name on his lips, my name again, said so pleadingly at the last moments in Mimi's house. That was when I knew, when—

"Cora."

How I thought I imagined the voice. Every movement froze; on all fours I was still, ears pricked for the noise.

"Time traveling again, aren't we?"

I knew I could never mistake that voice. "John?" But it couldn't be. It was some form of my imagination, attempting to fill in the gap I had so expertly slotted in for the past few months—

"Cora, my love, please answer me."

The damn darkness, making it so hard to see if he was actually there, or if he was a voice in the inner regions of my head. I didn't dare speak his name again but moved to my right. I heard a rustle that mirrored mine and I choked out, "John, bloody fool, this had better goddamn well be you."

"It is, it is—please let me hold you again."

I stood my ground. "Do you love me?" I whispered, feeling the phrase edge its way out of my tightly guarded lips.

"You have no idea how much," he said from the darkness, but I interrupted him with, "Juliet?"

"She reminded me of you," he said out of the darkness. "I tried to replace you—"