Tina Connolly - Copperhead

In her dreams she sees the house, their old house. Except it is not theirs anymore. Charlie is gone, Jane is gone, Mother is gone. Helen lives on charity, on borrowed time and space in a bit of attic at the neighbors’. Like Helen’s family, the neighbors straddle that uncomfortable line between gentility and poverty, except they are further down the ladder. The wife had money, once. The husband has a bit of land and he tries to make it pay. They had one cow and now they have two, for the Eliots’ former cow is keeping Helen in skirts and schooling.

Helen is not given to moping. She is angry at being alone. She is heartbroken (at least, something feels broken inside) at being here in an attic without Charlie and Jane and Mother, or perhaps what she means is, without people who love her. People who chose to leave her. That is not fair, and yet. She saw Mother waste away for no Charlie, even though Helen was there. She saw Jane run to the city to find someone else to love her, even though Helen was there.

And Charlie is gone because Helen was not there. Because Helen could not pick up a staff and kill.

That is what it comes around to, every time she runs through it, and then something in her head tells her that Jane and Mother were right to leave, because when it came down to it, Helen had proved she couldn’t be there for someone who needed her.

It doesn’t matter that she knows this is nonsense. Every time her heart breaks a little more. Her spine stiffens a little more. Her jokes become louder and shriller, as she covers herself up in a cloud of decorative nonsense.

They like her at the village school, when she lets them. She goes through several cycles in the time she is there, before she goes off to governess in the city. She lets them all like her and then she pushes them all away. The method varies. Once her best friend acts nasty to her. Polly. Calls her a charity case, right in front of Sam, whom Polly likes, too. Helen has no idea why on this day it is suddenly too much, but it is, and she runs away. It is late spring, and she lives on the land and stolen table scraps for a week, and when she comes back it is summer, and she doesn’t see any of them for three months, is gone when they stop in, lets all those relationships heal around her, because she is better at being alone.

When school starts in the fall Polly is best friends with someone else, and Sam has moved away, and Helen comes in and dazzles them, and runs the school with an iron fist for a season. But then that pales and she drops all her friends, again, yet again, for they are not really friends, she knows inside, no matter what they claim, and turns to her studies for a few months.

At graduation she is invited to all the parties, and they give her mementos and write “remember me” in her memory book, but if you asked them, they would none of them say that she had truly been their friend, only perhaps that they would like her to be, or that she had been “a good deal of fun, when she wanted to be.”

It’s one of those dreams where you can know what others said about you, just as if you were dead and they talked around your coffin.

She’s not dead, though. She’s still not dead. They all might have left her, but she’s still here.

If she woke right now she would find the eiderdown wrapped around her legs, clutched in her hands. She would find her lips pressed, her cheeks wet. But she does not.

At last Helen did wake, to a gentle tapping on the door. “Ma’am?” said the voice of Mary. Helen opened bleary eyes, stiff with salt and frustration. Why was Mary knocking? Why didn’t she just leave the tray?

She had locked the door, she remembered now. She pulled on her robe and padded to the door, blinking her eyes to clear them. Her palm was stiff with dried blood. There was another stiff spot on her cheek and ear from touching her face with her palm. She shook her hair forward over her cheek and curled her hand closed as she opened the door.

Mary’s face was apologetic. “I wouldn’t have woken you this early, but a woman brought him by and said you wanted him. Is it so?”

Helen looked down to see the small face of Tam, his hands clutching the inevitable glass jar.

He smiled tentatively when he saw her. “Museum?” he said hopefully.

Helen knelt beside him, mint green robe billowing out around her. “Yes,” she promised. “But I have to get permission. Are those caterpillars?”

He nodded and thrust the jar forward for her inspection.

“Nice,” she said. “I like the one with the red spots.”

“His name is Biter,” said Tam.

Helen reached forward without thinking. Mary sucked in breath at the sight of her hand. “I saw the glass, ma’am,” she murmured, and her worried eyes met Helen’s.

Helen looked away. She stood up and took Tam’s hand with her good one. “Do you want some breakfast? Mary, bring something nice, will you?”

Mary promptly produced a rolling cart. “We’ve had him down in the kitchen for ten minutes,” she said. “I rustled up everything I could find.” She laid buttered toast and cherry jam and sugared oranges on a tray, and tried not to wince when Helen’s hair swung away from the blood on her cheek.

The two women installed Tam on a pink tufted seat and watched him go to town on the buttered toast. Helen stood, watching him, knowing she should just stay at home. Play dominoes with Tam and enjoy the luxury of not having to make any more decisions.

When you have knuckled under once, it is assumed you will knuckle under again.

Her stiff hand clenched into a fist.

“Is Alistair still asleep?” she said.

Mary nodded. Helen hesitated, uncertain how to ask in front of Tam if Alistair was in the sort of post-drunken state that meant he would be passed out for several more hours. But Mary intuited her question and added in a low voice, “Probably till lunch, ma’am.”

The plan, such as it was, solidified. Helen raised eyebrows at Mary. “Cover for us?”

“Always and forever.”

Tam stopped in midchew of his toast, butter and crumbs on his cheeks. He looked from one defiant woman to the other.

“Finish up,” Helen said, “and then museum.”

They had Adam drive them to the Natural History Museum, and they were first in line for the museum’s opening at ten. They did indeed see the unusual reptiles exhibit ( Reptomania! ), spent all morning learning about the way basilisks opto-paralyze their prey, and the nesting habits of the extinct parasitic minidodo. (They nested in the ears of an also-extinct species of crocodile, and therefore were deemed acceptable to sneak into Reptomania! )

But perhaps most interesting of all to Helen was the glass case with a mated pair of copperhead hydras. “That’s your necklace!” Tam said when he saw them, and he was right. Even more than Copperhead’s flat lapel pins, her twisted copper necklace caught the essence of the unusual snake. The hydras were a lovely shimmery copper color, the sort of thing you would go up to and pet, if you didn’t know better.

“‘The beautiful copperhead hydra never attacks unless provoked,’” Tam read slowly, sounding out the words. “‘This much-maleeg—’”

“Maligned,” supplied Helen.

“‘—species is noteworthy for its regenerative powers. Through the process of duogeneration, if one head is damaged, two more grow in its place. However, the resulting heads are weaker than the original, so the process cannot continue indefinitely.’ What’s that mean?”

“It can’t have a hundred heads, say,” Helen explained. “At some point it gets too weak to support all its heads. Like the poor female there.” She read from a different sign about the individual hydras in the glass tank, interpreting it to Tam. “She was in a circus sideshow. They kept cutting off her heads so she’d grow more, and people would pay more money. The museum rescued her.”