Chapter Text
Elizabeth Swann stood before a mirror in the girl’s toilets, wiping off bright red lipstick with a crumpled paper towel. She liked the way it looked, and she liked the tickle of excitement that she felt when one of the older girls painted her lips with cosmetics that smelled fondly of crayon. But if she wore it to her next lesson, or— god forbid— wore this red lipstick home, her parents would have a fit. It made her look too grown-up for her eleven (almost twelve!) years.
Her closest school friend, a girl named Samantha, had persuaded her to skip class. Elizabeth hadn’t minded missing out on maths, so long as she attended their literature lesson. They were to discuss Treasure Island, and Elizabeth had enjoyed the book far too much to show up to class looking like a painted whore— as her mother would have put it. It was fun while it lasted, but now it was time to act her age.
The older girls, a gang of students years seven and eight, graciously invited Elizabeth and Samantha to ditch with them, and neither of them wanted to squander such a gift. So as she dipped the paper towel into running water and dabbed her mouth again, Elizabeth smiled privately, feeling so mature and so very cool…
The older girls, only short years apart but many kilometers ahead socially, were humming the latest Spice Girls tune and preening in the mirrors trying to emulate the kind of models found on MTV. One of them, a girl named Louisa, who had been the one to do Elizabeth’s lipstick, joined her in the reflection of the mirror.
“Can I ask a favor, Lizzie?”
“Depends,” replied Elizabeth, though she was prepared to say yes to whatever would make her look grown-up and worthy of future hang-outs.
“So, my mum’s been on my arse lately,” began Louisa, her breath smelling distinctly of the gin that the older girls were drinking from a plastic water bottle.
Elizabeth declined when they offered her a drink earlier. She may have been pretending to be a teenager, but she cared too much about her grades to get such an early head start on underage drinking, particularly on campus of their expensive preparatory school.
“…and I’m sure she’s planning on going through my bookbag when I get home today.”
Elizabeth glanced at the older girl in the mirror, quirking an eyebrow.
“I was wondering if you could hold onto this for me—“ Louisa dangled a ziploc baggie full of pastel pills between them, “Just until Monday, so I don’t get caught?”
“Alright, yeah,” said Elizabeth, as if she did not feel a little sick with worry at the thought. What did it matter, she decided. A little risk was worth the endearments from cool, pretty girls like Louisa. And it wasn’t like her parents would have a reason to inspect her own bookbag in search of drugs.
“Really?” exclaimed Louisa, as if she expected anything else from a very impressionable year six, “Thank you, Elizabeth, you’re a real friend!”
Elizabeth flashed a smile and tucked the baggie beneath her homework in her bookbag and went back to her reflection. She tossed the red-stained paper towel into the rubbish bin and examined her reflection. Satisfied that she looked properly herself again, she smiled as she listened to the subdued chatter of the other misbehaving students, and touched her fingertips to the gold half-heart pendant that rested between the collar of her uniform blouse. Louisa noticed the necklace at the same time that she did.
“Ooooh—-!” she cooed, “What’s that? Has wee Lizzie got a boyfriend?”
That prompted the other girls to turn their heads, hungry for fresh gossip, and eager to hear more about the silly little lives of their underclassmen.
“Yeah, right!” Elizabeth felt herself blush, “I haven’t got a boyfriend! It’s just an old keepsake, that’s all.”
In truth, Elizabeth sometimes thought of the owner of the other half of the heart pendant as her boyfriend. It was a few years ago— longer still to her youth— and the memory was muddled by time. A friend she had met on a playground… a tomboy, not quite a girl but not yet a boy. She still remembered his name. Will. She liked to pretend to herself that he was her boyfriend. Even as he was little more than a memory now, an old playmate, a happy bit of childhood to think of fondly…
“Lizzie’s got a boyfriend!” the others said in sing-song voices, and their reactions reminded Elizabeth that though the other girls were older, they weren’t necessarily wiser.
“Not true!” she protested through a smile, pink in the face. But as they crowded, gin-breathed voices begging for details, Elizabeth felt rather proud of her perceived maturity. Just as she was opening her mouth to provide some fabricated version of her childhood playmate, the room went hush at a sudden sound of movement outside. They were skipping class, after all, and liable to get caught.
Heeled shoes clicked on the tiles. The girls scattered, some trying to dump out what was left of their contraband, others ducking into stalls. Futile efforts, for their panic was noisy enough to make any passersby certain that there were several students in the girl’s toilets.
“Miss Elizabeth Swann? Is there an Elizabeth Swann in here?”
Elizabeth had no time to hide, and found herself looking sheepishly up at one of the school staff members, who she recognized as one of the secretaries from the headmistress’s office. Shit.
“Yes, m’am?” Elizabeth fixed her posture, thankful that at least she’d had the good sense to take off the makeup before getting caught playing hooky. The secretary huffed.
“Follow me, young lady.”
The secretary clipped down the empty corridor at a rather quick pace, and Elizabeth, who had not yet hit her growth spurt, struggled to keep up. She wanted to ask if she was in trouble, but feared the answer. Was it possible that the teachers had somehow already found out about the pills? She considered chucking the baggie into the next bin they passed, but uncertainty, and fear of losing her standing with the pretty upperclassmen kept her from going through with it. Best to remain calm, and begin preparing her alibi. They’re not mine… I’ve never seen those before, how did they get in there?... No, m’am, I wasn’t dodging class, just feeling a bit ill, you see…
Once they reached the office, it was clear that the pills had nothing to do with any of this.
“There you are. We’ve been trying to find you."
The headmistress greeted her with a forced smile, her expression decidedly solemn. She motioned to a chair across from where she sat at her desk, and Elizabeth sat down, shrugging her bookbag off her shoulder and onto her lap.
“Your father called the office nearly an hour ago. Why weren’t you in class, sweetheart?”
“I… I’m feeling a bit ill…” and it was no longer a lie. The headmistress turned the phone on the desk towards herself, flipped open to a bookmarked page in her address book, and punched a phone number into the keypad with the eraser of a pencil. And as the line rang, Elizabeth fought back the urge to vomit.
“Hello, Mr. Swann…? Yes, this is Headmistress Barlow from St. Anne’s... Yes, I have her right here. One moment, please.”
Elizabeth took the phone with trembling hands and cradled it to her ear. “Dad?”
Her father’s voice came through the speaker in shaky, almost static-y tones. He had been crying, she knew that right away. “Elizabeth?”
“Yes, it’s me, Dad. What’s going on?”
“I’ve sent the car for you. Your mother is… she’s in the hospital again. I did not wish to pull you from your studies, but…” He trailed off, as though choking back a sob. He really was crying.
And so Elizabeth found herself in the backseat of one of her father’s cars, listening to the radio and gnawing on her bottom lip as the chauffeur took a route that she was all too familiar with.
Mum had been in and out of hospital for years. Elizabeth long ago became accustomed to the smell of disinfectant and the persistent beeping of machinery. Dad was always so insistent that Mum was so strong! She could take anything that the sickness threw at her, he’d insisted, even as the cancer encroached on their household.
This had happened before. Elizabeth was pulled out of school more than once, sometimes for days on end, to say goodbyes to the mother who had always survived to beat back the cancer with all the endurance of one of the action heroes that Elizabeth liked to read about. But this time sounded different, felt different. As the chauffeur pulled into the drop-off zone, Elizabeth left the car feeling more afraid and more grown-up than she ever wanted to feel at just half-past eleven years old.
It was somehow all worse than it had ever been. Elizabeth knew her way to the ward, but this time, a sterile nurse with a stoic, unreadable face, accompanied her to a room at the end of a long corridor. The room faced outwards, windows overlooking a prim and proper courtyard garden. But the curtains were pulled mostly shut, casting a fitting gloom over a space full of wires and medicine that always seemed to make Mum sicker.
Dad was in one of those uncomfortable chairs in the corner of the room. Usually he would sit right at Mum’s bedside, holding her hand whenever possible. What did it mean, that he had left Mum to lay alone? He held his own hands now, his head hung low. Elizabeth waited for him to greet her, but he did not. If he knew she was in the doorway, he was not acknowledging it.
Elizabeth hovered in the threshold, clutching the strap of her bookbag as though it were a tether to the person she was now. She was too afraid of the person that she was soon to turn into if she took even one step into the room. But it could not be put off forever. And maybe Dad needed her to take this step on her own. So Elizabeth entered the room as quietly as she could. She glanced over at Mum, who seemed to be sleeping, and went to Dad first. What was there to say to him? No one had even told her yet what exactly was going on with Mum, she just got the impression that it was… altogether awful.
“Dad?” Elizabeth heard her own voice outside herself, small and scared. Dad did not look up at her, but he sat up enough to hug her, pressing a teary face into the shoulder of her starched school uniform. And as he shook with a barely contained sob, Elizabeth pressed a kiss to the thinning hair atop his head, and held him while he cried like a child, wondering if she herself would ever feel like a child again.
Mum was gone already. That was the simple explanation. The less simple explanation was that her brain was gone, and all that kept her heart beating was the whirring machines they had her hooked up to. An unexpected complication happened quicker than could be prevented, and now Elizabeth had been summoned to say goodbye to a dead person that was still warm. Elizabeth was inconsolable when the doctors explained that they were going to shut off the machines and give up.
Forty-two minutes. Forty-two minutes that Dad had to wait to hear from her. Forty-two minutes where she was blissfully unaware. Forty-two minutes wasted. Forty-two minutes that she might have spent saying goodbye to a mother who could say it back. She would have gotten here forty-two minutes earlier, if only she had just been in class when Dad called the school.
The hospital did not feel real, the funeral did not feel real, the empty house did not feel real. It was all too quick. Mum had been sick for years, and Elizabeth had learned how to coexist with the biting worry that one day she would be left motherless. Mum had been better lately, or so Dad had assured her. Were they both keeping things from their only daughter? Had they meant to keep her in the dark so her grades wouldn’t suffer from the knowledge that her mother was balanced precariously on the edge of death’s doorstep?
“Elizabeth…” Dad knocked at her bedroom door once, twice, three times. She could hear him exhale a weary sigh. “Please, Elizabeth. We’ll be late.”
The door had been barricaded by a chair pulled away from her desk, and Elizabeth sat on her bed with her hair unbrushed, still in her pajamas, staring at the plastic baggie of Louisa’s pills. She was entrusted to keep these safe several weeks ago. If Elizabeth ever returned to school, Louisa would be downright furious with her, and that would be the end of ditching maths with the year 8s. She shook her head. What a stupid thing to care about now. That had been all that she cared about, before. Before. Before…
“Elizabeth. Open this door, now.”
Dad was growing impatient. Elizabeth was supposed to care about that. She would have cared about that, before. The mousy woman with thick-lensed glasses and an office adorned with framed certificates in child psychology had stressed the importance of remembering that her dad was grieving too. She had lost a mother, but he had also lost his wife. So what? Elizabeth wasn’t stupid enough to forget that, and she did not need to be talked down to by some self-important twat who hadn’t even met Elizabeth’s mother.
“Elizabeth…!” More knocking, another sigh. The doorknob rattled to no avail. Another sigh. She clamped her hands over her ears to try and shut him out, but still she heard Dad’s strained voice. He must have had his face persistently pressed up against the door now. “Elizabeth. I know you do not enjoy these visits. But please. Do this for me.”
She did not register that she was crying a little until her face felt wet. She wondered if Dad was crying again, too, on the other side of the door. He might have given up by now, or he might just be waiting for her to give up too. And she already had. If she made them miss this appointment, then there would only be another put on the schedule in a matter of days. Or worse, Dad would have them start making housecalls. One last glance at the pills, and then they were back in her bookbag, then shoved under her bed.
Her hair brushed, dressed in proper clothes, Elizabeth joined her father in the backseat of the Rolls Royce and leaned against the tinted window as the gravel driveway crunched beneath the tires. Dad forced a smile that she refused to return, and he patted her hand. If she wanted to be mean, she would jerk her hand away. But Dad was all she had left, and it wouldn’t do any good to lash out at him more than she already had.
“Before you speak with Dr. Bettney today, there is something I wanted to discuss with you first.”
Whenever Dad wanted to ‘discuss’ anything it really just meant that he would be doing the telling and she would be doing the listening whether she wanted to or not. She did not take her eyes off the passing buildings.
“I have been advised that the next best step for us may be to make some changes. How would you feel about moving into a different house?”
That turned her head, and she scowled apprehensively. The Swanns owned lots of property, likely in more places than she even knew about.
“A different house where?”
Dad folded his hands in his lap, paused, and said finally, “This morning, my lawyer informed me that an offer I put in on a house in Miami has been accepted. We’re to close on the sale in two weeks.”
“Miami?” Elizabeth sat up suddenly, as much as her seatbelt allowed, “As in… Florida?!”
“You had fun on our holiday to the Florida Keys, didn’t you? It’s quite scenic.”
Of course she had fun on that holiday. That was the last holiday they had taken abroad before Mum got sick again. Dad had been tied up with business during most of the trip, but Elizabeth and her mother had spent quality time at the beach, snorkeling and swimming and laughing together. The memory of Florida did not excite Elizabeth, it grew a lump in her throat.
Dad was still talking, going on about the restaurant chain he had acquired in the American southeast, about how it would benefit the company to have him living more locally. The lawyer had faxed over pictures of the new house for her to look at later. There was a huge swimming pool out back, apparently. She could pick out her bedroom from the myriad of rooms and she could decorate however she wanted, with whatever she wanted. Money was no object to Dad when it came to cheering her up. Elizabeth could care less about all of that.
“But– but what about school?” she spluttered, her eyes welling up with tears at the injustice of it all. Was she really to have no say in the matter? “And what about my friends? I can’t move! I’m supposed to finish up and do my exams soon!”
“Now, Elizabeth, I am not saying that it won’t be a challenging transition,” said Dad. The car was pulling up to the medical center now. To his luck and her dismay, the conversation would have to be put on hold. “But I think this change will be good for the both of us.”
The car came to a halt and Dad promptly stepped outside. Elizabeth, still reeling from this shocking new development, and reluctant to leave the car with tear streaks on her face, waited until Dad opened the door for her. She trudged behind him into the medical center, wiping her eyes on the sleeve of her zip-up hoodie, hoping that no one looked too closely at her. Though, perhaps a weepy person was not an unusual sight in a place such as this.
Elizabeth wriggled away when Dad gave her a quick side-hug before he headed up a set of stairs two at a time. He had his own appointment with the grown-up shrink that she had nearly made him late for. With him out of sight, Elizabeth considered walking out on the appointment altogether. It wouldn’t be difficult. It would be just like she was back at school again, only a bit lonelier. She was surely smart enough to fake her way through some phony story about what she had discussed with Dr. Bettney, just as she faked her way through the easier classes when she was still going to school.
But as she looked down that dreaded corridor, Elizabeth remembered that her doctor and her father’s doctor had consulted with one another in the past. It wouldn’t be an unreasonable assumption that this move (to Florida, of all places!) was one of their ideas. If she left the building, someone would surely tell Dad that she had been absent. And that would make things worse.
And so she found herself yet again sitting at a table with some crayons and coloring sheets, listening to that nutty lady rambling on about how Elizabeth’s feelings were ‘absolutely normal’ in situations like these… Oh yes, of that Elizabeth was sure. She knew herself better than anyone else did, and she did in fact, consider herself quite normal indeed, thank you very much. There were good reasons why she was staying in her room all the time, crying at night and sleeping during the day, going cold and quiet when Dad tried to put words to the void that was consuming their household. Maybe the adults had just forgotten how much a mother could mean to a person who hadn’t even gotten her first period yet.
Elizabeth swapped a blue crayon for a green crayon and continued to color. Once she got past the initial offense at being offered such a kiddie task, she found that she really did not mind the coloring sheets. At least it gave her somewhere else to look at. In recent weeks she’d learned that if she made eye contact whilst any adults said the words ‘passed away’, the tears would spring forth like a leaky faucet and she would make an embarrassing mess of her face. And those words had come up quite often lately. Elizabeth was determined not to cry this session, even as Bettney tried to goad her into sharing her thoughts on the impending move abroad.
Determination could only get her so far. By the time the clock ran out, her face was buried in her elbows on the tabletop, her shoulders shaking. Bettney extended a box of tissues to her, and she begrudgingly took several to try to clean herself up. She hated this woman, and her methodical sympathy. And even more than that, she hated crying in front of her, but today was their fourth session and by now they had established a routine.
For most of the time, Dr. Bettney would corner Elizabeth with presumptive questions, to which Elizabeth would shug, or mumble one word answers. This would continue until nearly the final quarter of the hour, when the minutes on the digital clock would flicker to the number :42, and then Elizabeth would switch so quickly from brooding to hysterics that she would startle even herself.
Surely Dr. Bettney saw this as an opportunity to do the job she was meant to do, and the questions would seem to amp up, then, nevermind the hiccuping and the snot. Elizabeth would try to answer genuinely, so distraught that she was willing to try anything to get herself breathing normally again. But her sobbing would render her mostly incoherent to herself and others, and by the time she would manage a couple sentences, the appointment would run over the allotted time.
Elizabeth stifled more weeping, then allowed Dr. Bettney to lead her out into the waiting room, from whence she walked alone back down the corridor to meet her father at the bottom of the stairs. How did it go today? He was sure to ask. And she would shrug, and sniffle and say something like, It was boring. Do I have to go back? To which the answer would surely be yes, until her behavior changed enough to convince the adults that she was coping just fine.
Her bottom lip quivered and her throat still burned, yet as she passed by more people coming in and out of the clinics, Elizabeth made a point to keep her head up, feigning composure. Other kids went by, some parents, some staff. Then a family approached with a kid her age, a dad… and a mum— and Elizabeth just wanted to scream. Oh how she envied that kid! Did that boy (or, girl… maybe?) even realize how lucky he was to trail reluctantly behind two living parents? Elizabeth would happily take an eternity of miserable visits with Dr. Bettney if it meant that her mum could be the one to escort her.
Elizabeth could not stop herself from frowning at the other kid, who did not seem to notice her at all. But as she watched the family head toward the receptionist, she thought perhaps the kid looked familiar. Did they go to her school? For certain the family looked too working class to afford such steep tuition, so it couldn’t be that they were classmates. And Elizabeth had never had many friends outside of school. Except for…
Elizabeth whirled around, trying to catch another glimpse of the kid. Would the other half of her treasured necklace be hanging round their neck? But the door to the office swung shut, and her father was waiting for her in the lobby.