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My hand reaches up to drift against the spines of the beautifully bound hardcover books in Greyson’s library, a room that’s bigger than my entire apartment.
Touching them takes the edge off the nerves rattling through me as I wait for him to come back. After I locked the kitchen door, I headed all the way through his manor to his living room at the front of the house, peering through the window as he and Stanley walked towards the gate which is hidden by the trees and the winding path.
I don’t know what the hell’s going on but every sense in my body including the sixth tells me it’s not good.
It doesn’t help that I made the stupid mistake of checking my messages and seeing another one from my mother. Or my birth mother, rather, the one who was subjected to my presence so unwillingly until I reached the age of seventeen, as she reminded me every day of my existence.
As I peruse the hardbacks, I try to block out her words, her accusations that she sacrificed her life for me, her promises that I’m going to be a failure in life, her wrath about me not appreciating everything she’s done for me. I fought the urge to list the various ways she abused and let her piece of shit second husband abuse me and ask if that’s what I’m supposed to appreciate.
Trying to shake out the malaise coiling itself in tight rings around my body and the energy of a woman who still believes I owe her for the privilege of being born and being allowed to live in that house of hers, I walk quickly, past the classic literature section and into the poetry section, reveling in the beautiful covers of the books I pull out.
I never read hardcovers. I don’t even have the space for paperbacks apart from a few on yoga. I only read ebooks so my fingers wander around the beautiful images printed inside a book I pull out, an anthology of twentieth-century American poets, spotting a few notes in some of the margins, wondering if Grey wrote them himself or someone else.
I put the book back, spotting two books by Marilla’s favorite poet, Robert Frost, way up on a high shelf. I decide not to use the rolling ladder and instead grab a small wooden stool, standing on it and reaching up for the book which I bring to my nose, inhaling the woody scent.
Frost is the only poet by whom I think I've read every published poem, and that’s because I usually spend four months of the year in Scotland with Marilla, Orpha and Harry, the latter loving to get drunk on Guinness and read us poetry in the most charmingly animated way.
I flick to the first page, a quote about poetry by Frost.
“A poem begins as a lump in the throat, a sense of wrong, a homesickness, a lovesickness.”
As I devour the fragrant words, I hear the muted bang of a door somewhere and the scuffle of feet.
I listen out, feeling the vibration of footsteps, maybe on the wooden stairs…
“Grey?”
Silence weighs thickly on the room as I peer through the door of the library, realizing my body is shuddering despite the warmth in his elegant library. Its shelves are floor-to-ceiling and made from solid dark wood. A few intricately woven rugs cover a hardwood floor and there are small wooden tables dotted around, flanked by brown armchairs. The walls are a deep forest green and the accents copper which gleam like flames in the muted light from large floor lamps.
I distract myself by slowly flicking through the poems, stopping at one Marilla once read to me.
Wind and Window Flower.
I know it already, the words speaking of love unfulfilled.
My eyes dance over the first stanza.
LOVERS, forget your love,
And list to the love of these,
She a window flower,
And he a winter breeze.
Marilla read me this poem the first time I visited her in Scotland. We were sitting by the fire, just the two of us, completely comfortable in each other’s company, whether we talked or not, and I remember stupidly bursting into tears to the point that I began to sob once she finished the poem, not fully understanding why.
My tears became a river as I realized that what Marilla and I were doing together was so meaningful, the words falling from us not about what clothes I’m wearing and whether they embarrass her, what facial expression I was pulling that drove her insane, or whether I accidentally dropped a crumb onto the carpet or ate a yogurt in the bedroom, or all the other trite bullshit my biological mother was obsessed with.
What was more astounding to me after years of my birth mother sneering at my every emotion that didn’t feature on the limited list of acceptable ones she would tolerate me expressing—sadness not being one of them—was that Marilla comforted me. As a child, my daring to express tears for any reason would either send my birth mother into a rage or lead to her mocking me for my ability to feel.
Instead, Marilla came and sat next to me, putting her arm around me and wiping the tears from my face, something that made me cry as I came to feel safe for the first time in an older person’s house.
Not only safe, but wanted, a feeling that was new to me.
Not once in the seventeen years that I’d lived with my birth mother had she ever engaged with me as if she wanted me there, as if I wasn’t some tumor that had attached to her and that she had to live with while loathing every minute of it.
With Marilla and Orpha, I felt wanted. It was so palpable. I was their girl, even if neither had given birth to me. I didn’t realize that feeling, one I’d ached for my whole life, was even possible.
