Fragrance of a Rose, Part 3

This is a series. Read Part 1 and Part 2 first.

When she is fired from her job for not being able to do her work, Rebecca finds that she has no reason any more to keep fighting them: the ghosts, and their insistence that she join them in their madness and pain. 

She’s tried for as long as she could to block out the things they showed her, but now that she has no more reason to try, she realizes that blocking things out was never an option. It’s not the world that changes when you learn something new. It’s you. All the change is on the inside, and you can’t block out what’s inside of you, even if it drives you mad.

“Rebecca, talk to me,” pleads Brad, but she is beyond talking. Dimly, she’s aware that even Brad has his limits. 

“At least tell me what’s going on,” he says.

Instead she stays quiescent whenever he’s around. When she’s alone, she breaks out into hysterical laughter or breaks down into inconsolable tears. She neither eats, nor sleeps, and she keeps watch through the night hours by walking the halls, the meadow, the road on the other side of the hedge. 

She burns bright and hot, and if she could burn herself down to a black and twisted cinder, that would be alright with her. 

But she doesn’t. She burns until she’s a cold blue flame that gives neither heat nor light. She’s a single, dark flame in a lightless universe. She can’t find her way back to her small place in creation, that tiny little grain of sand that should be her life. She has lost that grain, and now she wanders a desert of sand, wondering which grain is hers. 

***

Rebecca sees a shrink so Brad will leave her alone. He feels better with an official stamp of approval: acute depression, panic disorder, agoraphobic type. It doesn’t change anything. But she’s so weary of trying to explain. 

The shrink gives her a prescription for Zoloft, which she takes with her and dutifully refills at the pharmacy every two months, each time opening the vial outside by the curb and dumping its contents into a sewer grate. 

Brad doesn’t have a clue.

Everybody is happy.

***

Rebecca wanders the woods on her own now. She’s not really looking for anything — she just feels better being on the move. She doesn’t have a purpose, since all purposes end up in the same darkness, anyway. But she does have a direction. It’s the one she faces when she walks. 

She feels sometimes that she’s a doorway, and the winds of the worlds blow through her, like drafts flowing from emptiness to emptiness. She’s an open doorway, and the door can’t be closed again. 

Perhaps, she thinks, it’s been blown off its hinges, shattered to kindling. I’m an empty space, a hole in the fabric of everything. 

“I thought she was looking for something,” says Rebecca, some months later. “The Wandering Woman. I thought she was searching, trying to find something, not knowing where to look. Wandering the hallway, wandering the woods. What else would she be doing, so aimless and drifting?”

“Rebecca,” says Brad. “You’ve got to stop this. Baby, you’ve got to let go of this thing.”

“I was wrong,” she says. She knows he isn’t listening. But that’s no reason not to tell him. Who else is she going to tell? “She’s not looking for something, because there’s nothing left for her to look for. She sees it all, she’s been there, to that place where it all comes together, where it’s all one moment and one place — one thought. One thought that holds the whole universe.”

“Are you still taking your meds, Beck?” says Brad. “You haven’t stopped taking them, have you?”

After that, Rebecca stops pouring the pills down the sewer grate. She takes them home instead, flushing them down the toilet one day at a time. 

***

She has long since stopped doing anything with her hair. It’s not worth the effort, so she just lets it grow out, allowing it to fall about her shoulders and down her back. She’s taken to wearing fanciful dresses of the type she saw the Sobbing Woman wearing that first day she came to this strange, haunted place. 

Rebecca need not concern herself with how she looks anymore, so she doesn’t. She has grown older, grayer, and more tired. Her isolation from the world and her exile from the universe has hardened around her like a thick, heavy shell.

Yet the ancient oak in the front yard seems not to have aged at all. Rebecca ponders the first time she saw it, years ago, when she tramped through brittle snow to look around at the property. Her life in this great tree’s shadow has been but an extended breath as far as the world is concerned. 

The branches above her head weave themselves in their familiar patterns, shifting and mutating in a kaleidoscopic array. Today is a cloudy day, and the green-gray light fills the air around her like ocean water.

Rebecca leans against the oak, pressing her face into its rough bark. Oaks know how to live, how to make it through this life. Their hearts beat slow and sure.

She feels that heartbeat now — feels it enter into her: the oak’s wondrous, massive breath, moving into her and through her like a river. The part of her that watches all the time, the part that watched as madness slowly overtook the rest of her, is grateful that part of this madness is her ability to be a doorway to all that life flowing around her. 

It nearly makes existing worthwhile after all. She presses herself to the great tree, and loses herself in the river.

Rebecca stays this way for some time. Brad no longer asks her what she does during the day. He wonders, she knows — wonders when this will pass, when she will lift up out of whatever abyss she’s fallen into. She wishes that she could explain it to him. 

The rose bushes still grow on the old, neglected trellis, though the garden is an overgrown riot now. Brad mows a ring around the house once a week and leaves the meadow to itself. 

It’s all the same to her. She wades through the tall golden grasses when the music draws her that way, just as she walks in the woods when the melodies there pull her into its depth. She tends to lose herself wherever it is that she goes. 

Some of the roses on the trellis have climbed up over her head, thick around the peeling, rotted latticework. They’re yellow — yellow with the faintest blush of peach on the insides of their petals. The tight buds open themselves up with such yearning, as though unable to embrace enough of the world for their liking. 

They stretch open until they fall apart, dropping like soft scales raining from the skin of a brilliant dying dragon. 

From the gray carpet overhead a mist begins to fall. 

On days like this the skin of the world feels so much thinner, as delicate and trembling as the glistening membrane of a soap bubble: Like the skin of her former life, which got caught in a hot wind and burst on her, exploding into rainbow droplets that blew away like stardust in space. 

Rebecca reaches up to an open blossom and gently breaks the stem so the flower comes free in her hand. A petal dislodges and tumbles in slow motion to the ground, leaving its spirit behind it like a trail of colored smoke. The quiet static of mist-drops float down around her and place gentle kisses on her lips and eyes. 

The invisible river flows through her. She feels the steady power of it, and her heart wishes it could burst like the bubble of her life so she might be washed away in it. 

Instead, she feels a cold wind at her back. This is a new presence she feels, new and yet all too familiar. Rebecca turns and looks up at the window of the room that had once been the old widow’s, with the worn Bible and the rosaries left behind. 

There she is, in the window: the doomed, damned woman. Big puffy down coat and short stylish hair, gazing down through the warped, rippling glass. Rebecca looks up at the indistinct face and feels the powerline connection of eyes meeting eyes. Tentatively, the woman raises her hand, as if in greeting. 

Go away — you’re dead, Rebecca wants to shout. You’re dead, and you don’t even know it. You won’t find what you’re looking for. Go away, before it’s too late.

“Oh, you fool,” Rebecca whispers. “You still have hope. You think you have a future. Oh, you poor, poor fool. There is no future. There never was. That’s what you don’t know. There is no future. It’s all just now.”

She’s so far away, Rebecca thinks. If I could take her into my arms and hold her forever, I would. But she’s so far away. 

The open yellow rose drops from her hands, falling forever into a white and boundless world of swirling snow. Rebecca covers her face with her hands, and lets go of all the lonely pain of living between the veils, the horrible distance that True Sight lays down upon her. 

Truth flows through her bones and fires the nerves in her muscle and skin, and she sobs for the reality that there is no escape. Each of her ghosts must perform their hauntings: The mystery of life lies in its inescapability.

And so she cries, because she has no choice. This is the way the river flows, here, and now. 

***

Brad is home for three hours before he finds her, hunched into the tiny alcove at the top of the back stairs. He’s walked by her twice without even noticing her — Rebecca has become invisible to mortal eyes. But the effort of staying invisible is too much. It takes too much awareness of self, so she lets that go, too.

Brad is clutching at the last frayed threads of the cord before it snaps, desperately trying to hold the line between them — Rebecca and the world — together. He’s the Mothership, while Rebecca floats outside in the sparkling miracle of starry infinity. Floating away into forever.

“I’m getting help for you, Beck,” he says, thinking she can’t hear him, because her eyes gaze at something well beyond himself and the walls of the house. “Don’t worry. Somebody’s coming. You’re going to be alright. Try to hold on, Becca, please. Come back to me.”

He stays with her until the ambulance pulls into the driveway. He’s afraid to try to move her himself. But he goes down to the front door to let them in, and when they all reach the alcove at the top of the back stairs, Rebecca is gone. 

Perhaps the back door has opened and then shut again, but she is gone. A search of the woods doesn’t find her, and neither do missing-person posters. Nothing finds her. Rebecca has drifted away. She is gone forever, it seems.

***

Fifteen years later, Brad still finds himself thinking about her at odd and unusual moments: At night sometimes, when his wife sleeps beside him in the darkness, and the children rest in bed within rooms that are solid and safe; or on a nondescript morning while gazing into the bathroom mirror. 

Noting that his hair has receded a little more, his chin become a little looser, the creases on his brow a little deeper, he will find himself wondering what changes Rebecca has gone through, if she is, indeed, still alive somewhere. He wonders how the gray streaks in her hair may have taken over by now or how her smooth skin may have dried and begun to fold.

Brad kept the house and lived in it until he began to see the woman who became his second wife. Now some other family lives there. Brad wonders if they are aware of the ghosts, too. Rebecca had been right about that, at any rate. The house is haunted. 

Brad became aware of the ghosts about six months after Rebecca disappeared. He could feel them — feel their melancholy presence. He understands now why they used to upset Rebecca the way they did. No one wants to bask in such a lonely light for long. Perhaps he should have paid more attention to what she’d said about them, before it was too late.

***

Rebecca says she wants to walk around the house one more time. Terry Ann and Brad can’t conceal their impatience. They want to leave before all the daylight is gone and they’re left to make it through the snowstorm in the dark. 

But Brad is too tired to argue, and Terry Ann is too full of self-satisfaction. She carries a signed binder check in her briefcase, the offer she’ll present to the seller first thing Monday morning. Rebecca stomps through the snow again, leaving them to wait.

The snow around the trellis is clean and unbroken, except for the places where the stones rise up like tiny, dark mountains. She didn’t expect to find any footprints, but she had to come out here to be sure. 

Or maybe it’s just to stand in the spot where something from somewhere else has so recently stood. Rebecca has always wondered about what might be on the Other Side. For a brief instant, thinking of the Sobbing Woman, she wonders if it might, after all, be something a little too dangerous to know.

At her feet, nearly covered by the falling snow, she notices a spot of color. Rebecca pulls off her glove, kneels down, and retrieves it. It’s the petal of a flower — yellow, with a whisper of peach on the inside. It feels soft, like satin or silk. Like the skin of something too tender for a place as rough as this world. 

She rubs the petal between her fingers until the friction causes it to disintegrate — until all that’s left is a faint touch of oil and the fragrance of a rose long gone.

---

Now that you’ve enjoyed this ghostly treat, here’s a few others to read!

• A Dream – Eerie Fiction
• The Golmyrie – Poetry
• A Saturday in Paris – Ghostly Fiction
• Nothing More Than a Lesson – Poetry Reading