by Tess Little
“Elspeth, I was just calling to get hold of your number,” he said, smooth. “I wanted to check in and see how you were doing—”
“I was doing fine before you called.”
“—and I’m sorry for not calling sooner; my lawyers thought it wasn’t the best idea. But who’s gonna know, it’s just a phone call, right? And I was sitting here with a bourbon, thinking of you, because this friend of mine, Brian, was telling me about this neat little rom-com project he’s picked up. And he mentioned this role for the mother of the lead and, you know, immediately I thought of you. Immediately.”
“What do you want, Miguel?”
“Elspeth, please.” I could see him, leaning back on his chair, drink in hand. “I’m calling as a friend. We’re friends, aren’t we? We were getting friendly that night, remember? I was telling you it might be time for you to get back to work, so maybe my assistant could set up a meeting and—”
“I don’t think that would be appropriate.”
“Okay, okay, I understand, another time. But that’s not the only reason I’m calling—you know, I get concerned, Elspeth, when I think of you girls all alone in that little house on Cahuenga.”
Panic seized me. My eyes flitted to the door.
“Are you threatening me?” I was gripping the phone.
“Threatening you?” He sounded genuinely taken aback. “God no, Elspeth, please, I—”
“Good. Because I’m an inch away from hanging up and calling the cops.”
“Elspeth, let’s, let’s calm down.” Miguel laughed uneasily. “Come on, it’s me, I just wanted to see how you were doing.”
“Like I said, I was doing fine.”
“Well, okay. Okay then, but you know you can call me anytime.” His sweetness was nauseating. I imagined him leaning closer, closer. “If you’re worried about anything, if you wanted to talk over the investigation or, or, you know, anything you remember from that night, you give me a call, okay? I’m always here for you.”
“If I did want to discuss anything,” I said, “I would do so with my lawyer or my therapist, not another suspect. I suggest you do the same.”
“But, Elspeth, there are things I could tell you,” he said too quickly, dropping his faux concern. “There are things you should know. Some people can’t be trusted and if you—”
I hung up the phone.
* * *
—
“I think we should remove our clothes—it’s rude to be fully dressed in the presence of the moon.”
“Sabine, babe, we’d all take off our clothes if we looked as good as you,” said Kei. “Trust me, I’d be prancing through the fucking Getty in my birthday suit if I had your body. It’s a goddamn work of art.”
“Keiko,” giggled Sabine.
“It’s not quite an Icelandic hot spring, is it?” said Tommo as he slipped in. “I thought it would be warmer. Champagne, anyone?”
“Me first, me first.” Charlie took the bottle and slugged it down.
“What is this ‘birthday suit’ anyway?” asked Sabine. “It is this?” She gestured at Richard’s stomach. “Is this the birthday suit?”
“Now, that would never make it into a gallery,” said Miguel, cackling hoarsely to himself.
Charlie belched.
“Hey, don’t be so rude,” said Jerry. “It’s the quintessential Lucian Freud.”
He choked as Richard splashed his face.
“You bastard,” he shouted, kicking back.
“Fils de pute.” Sabine, collateral damage, swept a wave toward him. And then we were all kicking and splashing as hard as we could.
“Mind the bottle, mind the bottle,” Tommo cried over the commotion.
“Don’t think you’ll escape so easily,” said Richard, throwing water in his school friend’s face.
The splashes calmed to giggles, and we were resting our heads on the inflated walls, catching our breath.
“You got a little something on your face,” said Jerry, blowing a handful of bubbles as I looked down at my nose.
I laughed. Wiped the suds from my eyes. “You better not have ruined my mascara.”
“Wow,” said Jerry. “It can laugh. It can actually enjoy itself.”
“Oh, I do enjoy myself,” I answered. “But maybe this is the first time I’ve ever laughed at one of your jokes.”
“Touché.”
“Hear, hear,” said Tommo, holding the bottle to my mouth. “To Jerry’s shitty humor.”
Our legs were piled in the center of the pool; we passed the bottle around until our fingers grew wrinkly. I turned to find Richard gazing at me.
Wresting the bottle from Charlie, he took a deep swig, never shifting his eyes from mine. “To two orphans on the run, Ellie darling. And our perfectly imperfect fit.”
What could I say to that? He put the bottle to my lips. I drank deeply.
Honey watched us, silent, from the other side of the pool.
I reentered the shadow of the concrete mausoleum with Lillie at my side. My black skirt soaked up the sun as we walked from car to door—it was a bright day, as it had been on my first visit. But against this afternoon sky the structure seemed less harsh, more forgiving than before. We rang the doorbell. Waited in silence. This time I did not adjust my clothes.
Honey answered the door, and Lillie fell into his embrace.
I stood behind, cheeks burning, awkwardly enduring the moment. He nodded at me over her shoulder. I smiled a paltry smile.
Then Honey held Lillie at arm’s length and said, “You’ll make him proud, I know it.”
She took a deep breath. We entered.
And Sedgwick: just as I remembered. The confusion of the slotting levels, the dazzling light and spacious glass. Black-clad ankles peeked from the gaps between adjacent and higher floors. Strappy Jimmy Choos and polished British brogues: Guests were exploring Sedgwick, as I had the night of the party. These signs of life only underlined the clinical precision of the architecture—movement exaggerating the still.
Lillie and Honey linked at the elbow, fell into step. I walked behind, silent.
Over the past few weeks, Lillie and I had ground to a silent impasse over Honey. There was no way I could prove, even to myself, whether he was or wasn’t guilty. And so I didn’t, couldn’t, prevent her from organizing the memorial with him. Partly, that memory of him lying unconscious reassured me: How could he have done it? But there was another, overwhelming consideration: Lillie would never forgive me if I stopped her from playing a role in Richard’s memorial, especially if Honey’s innocence was later proven.
Give me one good reason, she had said that day. Did I have a reason to suspect Honey?
All I could say was, “I have a feeling.”
Lillie had looked disappointed. Not because she’d hoped that I did have a reason but because she’d hoped I was better than that. Better than feelings and accusations and baseless suspicions.
As I watched them walk ahead of me, I wasn’t sure what that feeling was. It was fear, yes, but was it rooted in jealousy? Was it fear of a murderer or fear of my daughter finding someone else?
The truth was unavoidable: Honey brought something out in her that I could not. I watched them pause ahead of me. He reached down to collect an eyelash from her cheek, and Lillie shut her eyes to make a wish. Blew it from his fingertips as naturally as if they had grown up together. Observing them like this, I knew that even Lillie’s admission of their friendship had been understated to spare my feelings.
Before Dad and Honey broke up, we were pretty close, she had said. Pretty close, very close, closer than she and I. Honey said something I couldn’t quite hear, and she laughed—she laughed with him, even on a day like today.
It raised the hairs on my arms—because he was a murderer, or because he was, simply, someone else?
<
br /> Event planning had taken up so much of Lillie’s time over the past few weeks, I had barely seen her. There were endless phone calls, meetings with Honey. When she emerged from her room, she was always speaking into her phone screen, white wires leaking from her ears. I knew she had a lot to arrange, and it was good for her—to have something that she could focus on, throw herself into wholeheartedly, something to drown out everything else. But I also wondered if she was avoiding me. Every time I saw her, I remembered that disappointed look.
I let Lillie and Honey pace ahead, lingering behind to ready myself for the next act in the interior’s three-part drama. They vanished around the corner. And then I was alone with the aquarium.
My stomach tumbled as I approached it, though I knew Persephone would not be visible. She would be crawling across the rocks, one floor beneath me. But even the notion of the water, lapping against the glass of the tank, was enough to churn my insides.
I had been dreading the memorial, almost physically, violently. Not just because Richard’s notes for the event seemed almost engineered to give him a hold over our daughter, one final attempt to tug her from me—but because the thought of the birthday guests reconvening at Sedgwick was unbearable. I relived the party each night, feverish, as I drifted off on Lillie’s couch in the blue light of the laptop. The red-ringed eyes: knowing, watching. The faces of the other guests, one by one. There I was, in the dreams, a distant spectator, but also there, lying on the floor, there at Richard’s feet—sleeping oblivious to the silent slaughter.
The police had made no arrests; I had heard nothing since my last questioning. A few times, catching Lillie in her hallway, I’d asked whether the detectives had been in touch, whether there was any progress. She told me nothing had happened, and each time she’d looked so increasingly despairing, I finally stopped asking. It wasn’t fair to remind her.
Both of us were all too aware of what this meant: that the murderer would be at Sedgwick today too. Lillie couldn’t have disinvited anyone from his last night, not when they featured at the top of Richard’s In the Unlikely Event guest list. I worried about how she would handle this amid the pressure of hosting. But when I’d raised it on the drive over, she brushed off my concern.
“I can’t talk about that now,” she said. “I need to run over the speech again.”
Then she put her earbuds back in—she’d always learned lines like this. Recorded herself reading them aloud, played them back, paused after each sentence, repeated each word. At home, in the run-up to school productions, I’d catch her in the kitchen having conversations with her own voice.
And so I let her mutter the speech, undisturbed. Concentrated on the road. I was nervous about seeing the other guests myself. All the unknowns. Would we even talk to one another?
Miguel had not called Lillie’s landline again. After hanging up on him, I’d listened to our conversation, recorded on the answering machine, before deleting it. My voice sounded cold and defensive. Too cold, I thought, upon hearing it again. There had been no threat in Miguel’s voice—just a bourbon slur. He’d probably mentioned Lillie’s address without thinking. He’d probably called because he was lonely, or scared—or wanted to compare thoughts on the investigation. And maybe I would have been more curious had he not caught me as my mind ran wild with images of Richard’s death, the octopus hunting, the crunch of shell.
Regardless, whatever Miguel had been trying to do, whatever he’d tried to tell me, I didn’t regret warning him away. It was best to keep my distance. I didn’t know him; I couldn’t trust him.
I hadn’t heard from any other guests. Not even Jerry, Tommo. I was certain now that we’d all received the same legal advice: Stay far from the others. But maybe we would have to talk to one another at this event—maybe avoidance would be more unnatural, raise more suspicion. I told myself it would be an opportunity. I could look each of them in the eye. I could ask them directly about the things I had discovered during the interrogation.
I told myself this—but I was having a difficult time holding on to it. I was sick with the thought that the murderer would be there. That I might have to talk with them.
That they might be waiting beneath the water.
I slowed my steps, placed one foot in front of the other. Would I perceive the creature’s guilt once it was floating right before me? Would it recognize me? As I greeted old acquaintances, would I be able to scrape the fevered scenes from my mind?
(The dark, grainy form in infrared: slipping from the filter, slipping across the floor, slipping between the lips.)
But the hallway was curiously light…
(The fingers, the eyes, the sharp stench of vomit.)
…and as I neared, I saw: The aqueous glow on the mezzanine was gone. Persephone’s tank was empty, glass walls encasing air.
I stared into the depths of nothing. The light caught the slow-waltzing dust. I tucked my hair behind my ears, then I was ready to enter the atrium.
* * *
—
Girls huddled over my glass table with credit cards and plastic baggies. The bass pounded—waves of nausea. Too many people, not enough space, and I knew none of the guests in my own home.
How long did I have to stay before heading upstairs to sleep? Would Richard mind if I left before midnight? What time was the sitter returning Lillie tomorrow? Everywhere I turned, glimmering bodies bounced to the beat. I slipped off my heels and kicked them beneath a table.
Two emaciated girls were slumped against the wall beside me—one draped her arms around her friend’s neck, the other was spitting out words as fast as she could, her pupils black-mooned.
“…andthenhetoldmethatitwasn’twhathewantedbutIwaslike—”
“Mrs. Bryant?”
The caterer was wringing a dish towel between her hands. Wisps of hair poked out of her hat, stuck to her face. She looked as wretched as I felt—I’d been drinking in the sun since late afternoon and my mind was sluggish, my skin burned pink.
“Mrs. Bryant?” She raised her voice over the music. “I know you wanted the cake at midnight, but none of us have seen Mr. Bryant for a while, so we’re wondering whether we should bring it out.”
I brushed the back of my hand across my forehead: sweat.
“Because we don’t want to light the candles—if he’s not around, I mean. Forty candles, well, that’s a fire hazard if we let them burn. We want to make sure he’ll be there to blow them out. And the cake’s pretty heavy. It’s a four-man job. Big cake, just like you asked. With the meringue and the cream and berries.”
I struggled to hold on to her words.
“Unless you’ve seen him recently?” The caterer flipped the towel over her shoulder and crossed her arms.
Had I seen Richard recently? The crowds were doubling in my vision after four martinis. The birthday boy had vanished into their masses.
“Your husband, Mrs. Bryant,” shouted the caterer slowly, “do you know where he is?”
“No,” my tongue stumbled. “I don’t…I haven’t seen him.”
A woman had climbed onto my table in Lucite platforms, thighs juddering as she danced. She needed to get down from there: The glass would not hold.
“…and it’s getting late. We only covered staff till midnight in the budget, but I don’t want to ask the waiters to work overtime, because they’re getting tired and, well, it was all in the contract, Mrs. Bryant. Until midnight, it said. We’ve got everything else packed up.”
A middle-aged man in tight white underwear joined the dancer, pumped his fists into the air. My table…Where was Richard?
“That’s what I’m asking you, Mrs. Bryant.”
I tried to recall our conversation. “The cake?”
“We’ll just put it out for you with some plates and then get out of your hair. People can help themselves. No candles, but we’ll leave them to the side
in case your husband turns up and you want to put them in his slice or something.”
I smiled—this was an easy solution—and tried to thank the caterer, but she was already gone.
Something knocked into my elbow. My vision clouded with white feathers. A golden Adonis with great stretching wings was backing into me. I was hypnotized, mesmerized by this angelic sight—until he stood on my toes.
“Hey, you better watch yourself,” he called, bashing his feathers into my face when he turned. “Can’t see a fucking thing over these fucking things.”
His cigarette hung out of his mouth, burned up a long snake of ashes. I wanted to ask where he had materialized from—what he was doing in my house—but I was silenced by three events in quick succession:
First, the ashes dropped from his cigarette to the floor.
Second, there was an almighty crash of glass.
And then the girl beside me vomited down the wall. It splashed onto my white minidress in a deep, disgusting purple.
* * *
—
Jazz Rolling Stones covers floated over conversation; titters and clips of English accents cut through the noise. They were there in the hundreds: all those aunts and uncles and school friends—second-rate copies of Tommo—who had attended our wedding, then faded back to their rainy isle. From the mezzanine, I tried to identify them. Their pallor and static were conspicuous amid bronze limbs and blowouts. I noticed expressions of disgust cross their faces as the musicians picked up tempo and other guests began to dance. This was unlike any memorial service I had attended before, but it would be entirely alien for Richard’s compatriots.
I imagined he had anticipated this reaction when including them on the guest list. It was so like Richard to curate an experience that would make people uncomfortable, thrust them into a new world, force intimacy upon strangers. All the bodies were packed in tight, spilling out to the lawn, the hallways, the crevices of the house.
