What did you think? What is it you believed, in that dark caverned heart of yours?

She lay abed and squeezed her eyes shut so tight she could press her fingertips into the furrows of her brow and run them back and forth the width of her forehead. And imagine the landscape outside the windows, outside the yards, outside the garden wall that kept her so enclosed. Body but not soul.

What was this place? She could feel a panic rise in her, the way the winds could rise up up up out of the gorge, lifting skirts, lifting hair, lifting her bodily from off the earth. Spinning away from all the things that tried to contain her. This place, the Grange. This man, called husband. This life, so askew. Lift her, arms out wide, could she fly away from all of it. Except for him. His body, his upturned face watching her as she ascended into the blue.

His voice, she could hear him. Cathy. Cathy.

The echo of it, between her ears, at the back of her throat, at the pulse points in her wrists, behind her knees, and inside inside inside.

And then the question in that low timbred sound, the sound that was called his voice, the tremble of it as it issued forth from between his lips. She wanted him beside her so she could press her ear against the insanity of his ribcage, protecting him from all the whippings of the world. She would lay her head on his chest while his voice rumbled out of him, while his mouth formed the syllables of her name. Her name inside that toothed cavern.

Where was he, her mind screamed and she wondered for just a fleeting moment if she could call him to her. He said he could follow her to the ends of the world like a dog. A dog! Her canine, her wolf, her creature, the beast inside the man skin. Named by her, called by his name and yet he did not come.

What if she rose from the wedding bed and ran to the windows, threw them open and let her own voice loose, breaking all her teeth as his name left her mouth.

HEATHCLIFF.

But in the bed, another man’s bed, she writhed. Her body filled with unease. Disease. Her limbs desperate to run wild. Once again. Had they run hand in hand through the gorse. She imagined that they had. Indeed. Long ago, they had, she knew they had.

Now, he wasn’t a wild thing caged, it was her.

She could hear him question her. What did you think?

She berated herself, what was it that you believed when you reached out and cast this spell.

She sniffed all the tears back, swallowing hard. What had she thought? Believed? That he was hers and no matter what or where or who she was, he would be just there, beneath her skirts, inside of her mouth, in the palm of her closed fist. She had believed him when he said he would be her dog, forever at her feet, outside the door lying on the stoop, under her bed, beside the hearth.

Who was Edgar to him? What was her marriage to do with him. She couldn’t make it make sense. What did any of this have to do with any of that. With him and her. Why had he left her. Where had he gone.

A cave, dug by both their hands, deep and safe and as vast as the world. A place of their own in which she could shout and scream, and he could whisper and beg, and their pleas would return. Come back. Come back to me. Listen hard, with all your senses, feel his tongue move on your throat as he forms your name with his voice and calls to you from long ago. And his voice returns.

She tossed her body, curled into herself, knees to chest, and wept and wept and wept herself into sleep, into a terrible storm of dreaming. Of a boy and a girl and a wild world lost. Forever.