Well, yes, I can blame him. So I guess the question is whether I should blame him.
“Obviously,” he’s telling me now, “I haven’t told them the real reason I’m staying. But I want to be here for you. For as long as it takes to sort this out.”
“What?” I say.
“I’ve told them a business situation has come up. And I think—I hope—my wife knows me well enough to know I’m not having an affair. So I’m going to stay in the city. I don’t have to stay here—I respect that you have every right to privacy at this point. But surely there’s something I can do.”
“It’s okay,” I say. “You can go.”
“No. We’ll beat this thing.”
He says it emphatically, like I have cancer and he’s going to hold my hand for the treatments. We’ll beat this thing. But there’s no treatment that’s been devised to beat this thing. There’s no need for him to hold my hand.
He starts talking some more about the sisters I’ll never meet, the sisters who don’t know I exist.
Dinner arrives. As we eat, he asks me about what movies I like. When I name a few he’s never heard of, he says we should watch them together. I assume he means this hypothetically. But when dinner’s over, he goes straight to the DVD player and puts one in.
He sits in the chair that might have once been his. I sit on the couch. I’ve seen the movie a hundred times, but this time it’s different. We’re laughing at the same things. I can feel us both rooting for the main character. I can feel him enjoying it.
It’s like one of my fake memories, only real.
* * *
Elizabeth, Laurie, and I return to Millie’s inner sanctum at the appointed hour the next day.
This time, the door guardian lets us in without a word, simply pointing to the stairs that lead to the hexatorium.
Millie looks calmer and more collected than she did yesterday. She is putting some of the books back on the shelves when we arrive.
“So good to see you again,” she says, even though she hasn’t looked at us yet.
We sit down in the same places from the day before.
“Now,” she says, “before we begin, I must ask your names.”
Such an elemental test of trust. It hadn’t even occurred to any of us to introduce ourselves last time. I think we assumed she already knew.
We give her our full names. Laurie says he’s Elizabeth’s brother. I say I’m Elizabeth and Laurie’s friend.
“I should have seen the resemblance,” Millie says, looking at Laurie and Elizabeth. “I hope you’ll pardon me. I was rather . . . distracted.”
“Completely understandable,” Elizabeth says.
Then we sit for what feels like a minute in silence, waiting for Millie to continue the conversation.
Finally, she tells us she didn’t sleep last night.
“So you’ll have to pardon me again. There’s a lot on my mind, especially considering what I’m about to do. I don’t want you to think that what I am about to disclose is being said without any deliberation. This is not easy for me, and I need you to appreciate that.”
“We do,” Elizabeth tells her. “We appreciate you seeing us again. We appreciate whatever it is you’re about to say.”
It’s like someone’s put me and Laurie on mute. There is some connection between Elizabeth and Millie, and, once again, the minute we walked into this room, the story we were acting out became about her, not me. Millie isn’t talking to either me or Laurie, even though she clearly doesn’t mind if we hear what she has to say. But really, she’s only talking to Elizabeth.
“When you came here yesterday, I felt so many different emotions. And those emotions are what kept me awake last night. More than anything else, I felt old. Older than I’ve felt in a long, long time. I felt the burden of everything I’ve seen, everything I’ve learned, and how that burden has made me slower, more hesitant. The older you get, the wiser you are—this is true. But you also question what use this wisdom is.
“When I started sensing your presence, Elizabeth, I assumed you were another relic like me. It never occurred to me that there would be someone with your power who was merely a girl. Untrained. Natural. When you arrived here, I didn’t know what to do, how much to tell. I’ve made a living for so long solving people’s two-bit problems, upholding my reputation as the local freak. I’ve drifted from all the things that I was raised to do.”
She pauses for a moment to make sure Elizabeth is following; it’s an unnecessary pause, because we’re all rapt.
“It may seem like a very strange gift to have—to be able to see spells and curses without being able to do anything about them. That is the paradox that spellseekers live with. It’s like being able to hear music but never being able to make it. There are pleasures, but there are also many desires that go unfulfilled. You get used to it, but you’re never entirely happy with it. You want to be able to affect the world you see. We all do.
“I’ve debated how much I should tell you. But I think for you to truly understand, I have to take you back to the beginning, or at least to a long time ago. Don’t worry—I’m not that old. We’re not immortal; we have the same long, short lives as anyone else. But there are histories—many of the last ones are in this very room. So we know what it was like, even a long time ago.
“Nowadays, spellseekers are bystanders. We see things, but there’s not much we can do about them. We are, at best, diagnosticians for the damned. We can tell people the cause, but we seem to have lost the cure. Hundreds of years ago, however, this was not entirely so. We were not so helpless. There were more seekers than there were casters, by a large number. And we used our skills to monitor the casters. Some even suspected that a few of the most powerful seekers had the ability to draw out curses and reverse spells, but that was never more than rumor and speculation. Those seekers who may have had that kind of power knew how quickly they’d become targets of the casters. Or maybe they didn’t want to shoulder the burden of removing curses when most of us can’t. I didn’t blame them for wanting to exist in obscurity. We were, to make a crude analogy, both police and judiciary. If a caster was abusing his or her power, we would step in. As a result, cursecasting was extraordinarily rare, and only justified in extreme circumstances. We were, strangely enough, the protectors of free will. And the casters went along with that.”