The Possessions

by Sara Flannery Murphy

  “I have more regulars than anyone,” I continue, though their attention is a prickly, uncomfortable weight. “Being a body is all about your receptiveness to the clients. To their loved ones.” I hesitate, seeing Sylvia’s imperious beauty superimposed over my ordinary face. “If you start believing that your client needs you, specifically, then you’re failing at your job.”

  Dora’s eyes on me are tentative and considering. Her hand moves to her hair, as if she’s disconnecting her curls from her identity.

  “Thanks for that cheerful PSA,” Ana says.

  The older woman smirks, gazing at the floor. The girl with the scars reaches over to pluck the cigarette from Ana’s hand.

  “I’m only trying to help,” I say.

  “How long have you been here now?” Ana asks. “Ten years? A hundred?” She laughs. “You’ve memorized every last idiotic rule. So if anyone needs a refresher course on that, we’ll be sure to come to you.”

  The girl leans across the space between us to pass the cigarette to Dora. I notice that her fingernails hold a trim of old nail polish, scabbed red at the edges. With one quick guilty glance at me, Dora accepts the cigarette.

  “The rules are for our protection,” I say.

  “Ooh, my protection,” Ana repeats in an exaggerated voice, words rounded like puffy balloons. “Sounds serious.”

  “Look what happened to Thisbe.”

  I’m not sure why I say it. Maybe as an experimental nudge, maybe as a way to hurt her. Ana’s eyes blaze wider for a fleeting second; then her expression snaps back into its usual carelessness.

  “Who’s Thisbe?” Dora asks, looking between us.

  “Forget it,” Ana says. “Edie doesn’t know what she’s talking about.” But her mouth has a sour twist to it.

  After a silence, Dora hands the cigarette to Ana. It’s a stub now, glowing hazy orange at the tip. Ana lifts up a flap of carpet near the baseboards, revealing a floor vent screwed firmly into place. She dips the cigarette beneath one of the slats.

  “You think you’re so much better than the rest of us,” Ana says abruptly. “Perfect role model. Never a toe out of line.”

  The nicotine turns me dizzy.

  “Maybe you’re looking at this all wrong,” Ana says. “I used to date a guy who thought he was smart for asking these pseudophilosophical questions.” She deepens her voice, low and dopey. “Can ugly women be faithful? Is it really being faithful if nobody else wants you?” She snaps back to her normal voice. “Real asshole, right? But he had a point. The same principle applies to you, Edie. Are you better than us for avoiding temptation, or is it just that you’ve never been tempted?”

  I can feel the others’ eyes on me. “It hasn’t always been easy for me to follow the rules,” I say quietly.

  Ana shrugs one shoulder. “If you say so.” Light and mocking.

  “Just today,” I say, “there was a client who came to me wanting to contact a murder victim. The body they found in that subdivision. Hopeful Doe.”

  They’re all silent for a minute, the words settling into their brains. I notice the piercing-scarred girl looking at each of us in turn, trying to piece together what her reaction should be.

  “Seriously?” Ana asks. “One got past Renard. It’s been a few months since the last attempt.”

  “Candace Fowler,” I say. “I nearly couldn’t convince her to leave.”

  “What did she want?” the older woman asks. “Jane told me about a man who thought the Black Dahlia was his soul mate. Was she one of them? Gets all weird about a murdered kid on the news, comes here hoping to be a surrogate mommy?”

  “No, no,” I say. “More straightforward than that. She wanted to solve the case.”

  “Ah, detective fantasies,” the woman says sagely. “Should have guessed.”

  “It’s too bad,” Dora says. “That poor girl.” When she catches my eyes on her, she goes on: “I know it’s against the rules, but you could have helped her.”

  “It would have been much too dangerous,” I say.

  “Where’s your sense of adventure, Edie?” Ana asks, a needle glinting in her voice.

  “So what would you have done?” I ask her.

  “If she came to me?” Ana crushes the cigarette, grinding it against the vent’s metal rim. Then she flicks the butt down into the darkness. I see the tiny contrail of the dying embers for a second. “Who knows. You’re right. It’d probably be too risky to work with her here.”

  When she rises, the others follow her lead; the older woman drifts away. I stay seated, my skirt twisted around my thighs. I’d nearly forgotten how Ana can make me into the odd one out. How easily she can tease my awkwardness and stiffness to the surface.

  I’ll see him again in five days. The thought is suddenly and deeply comforting.

  “One word of warning,” Ana says. I look up to find that her eyes have softened. “Everything in moderation. You pour too much time and energy into a job like this, and you may as well be a ghost yourself.”

  SIX

  The sensation of Sylvia’s presence is there and gone, like catching a shadowy movement from the corner of my eye. I’m brushing my teeth. I blink, and my reflection is a stranger’s; blink again and I’m myself. I’m washing a dish and my hands suddenly are not my own. They’re too large, chapped and pink. I soothe myself by identifying the freckle near the base of my thumb.

  Small moments. Easy to justify and ignore.

  Still, I think of Thisbe. Ana’s mention of her, that day, has excavated a whole string of details from the depths of my memory, detritus snagged in a trawling net.

  Thisbe wasn’t remarkable. A body with mouse-blond hair. Pretty in an accommodating way, features transforming with a shift of the light. I saw her with Ana sometimes, the two of them in the waiting room, heads bent together. I knew Thisbe wouldn’t last long. There was a neediness to her that marred her otherwise smooth surface. Once I came across her crying in the restroom. She’d looked up without seeing me, her eyes glossy and raw-rimmed.

  At the time, I’d wanted to tell her that she should leave her personal problems at home. Instead, I’d walked out, allowing her the space to collect herself. And when she quit the Elysian Society days later, I remembered that moment and I wasn’t surprised by her departure.

  The rumors started after she’d been gone for several weeks. Gossip at the Elysian Society comes in sudden bursts, every few months. Curiosity and boredom attaching randomly to whichever body had left most recently. Thisbe’s story was fairly tame. Someone had seen her standing in front of the restroom mirror, tugging at her cheeks and her forehead as if they weren’t her own. As if she could remove a mask.

  The rumor lost momentum quickly. Now, though, I think of Thisbe plucking at her skin. This could be how it started for her. Not with a cold finger against her spine or a clawed shadow along the wall, but with something as warm and inviting as what I feel when I think of Patrick.

  We have to stop meeting like this.”

  It’s the third time we’ve sat together in Room 12. Today, I allow myself the luxury of taking time to notice the details. The automatic pose Patrick assumes. Knees open, arms crossed. Guarded at the heart. The clothes he favors: button-ups, scuffed loafers, the expensiveness suggested through simple lines.

  “It’s a joke,” Patrick says when I don’t respond. “It’s OK to laugh.”

  I smile a second too late. “Do you have a message for your wife, Mr. Braddock?”

  “I thought we could talk about you.”

  A spike of dread. “If there’s an issue with my performance, the Elysian Society would be happy to help you find a replacement—”

  “God, no,” he says. My heart swims with gratitude. “It’s unfair, you knowing about me when I don’t know anything about you. So.” Patrick stretches a hand toward me. “Tell me about yourself.”

  I cross my legs and uncross them.

  “It doesn’t have to be about you,” Patrick says, voice gentler now. “That’s again
st protocol here, isn’t it? It can be about anything.”

  Still, my mind slips across a bare expanse. I don’t know how to have a normal conversation anymore. All the small similarities, the details and experiences, that other people use to build connections: these don’t exist in the life I’ve created.

  Then my mind lands on a topic, and I’m so thankful I speak without thinking. “What do you think of Hopeful Doe?”

  “Think of her?”

  I’ve said the wrong thing. Patrick’s brows are drawn together, his lips still holding a smile, as if he can’t tell whether to go along with a joke or take offense.

  “Well,” he says at last, measured. “It’s terrible to lose a life so young.”

  I want to pluck my words out of the air, slide them back between my lips. It must haunt him to see Hopeful Doe’s face splayed across the news. I’ve committed the unforgivable sin at the Elysian Society. Bringing grief into the room when I’m supposed to banish it.

  “When Sylvia passed, it ended up in the news,” Patrick says. “Maybe you noticed.”

  “I don’t really recall,” I say carefully. Now it seems like a betrayal that I ever could have dismissed Sylvia Braddock as a stranger, changed the channel to a more interesting death.

  “I was lucky,” he says. “It was kept pretty quiet. But any death that attracts attention—it’s hell, when you’re on the inside. Dealing with your pain while everyone has their face pressed against the glass.”

  “You must be grateful you had friends with you that weekend,” I say.

  “Friends?” he repeats.

  “The couple at the lake.”

  “The Damsons, you mean?” he asks after a second. “They weren’t much help. They tried, but they were caught in the middle of it. Viv was seeing a grief counselor before I was.”

  I put the name together in my head: Viv Damson. It’s glancingly familiar, like the name of a childhood classmate or a neighbor I scarcely knew.

  “Every time there’s something like this,” Patrick says, “I remember what it was like. It took away my appetite for these things.”

  “But Hopeful Doe’s loss is nothing like your wife’s.”

  Again, I’ve said exactly the wrong thing. His eyes shut off to me. Room 12 seems to expand, growing airier and colder. An impersonal space, edging us further apart.

  “Mr. Braddock, I’m sorry,” I say impulsively. “Can we start over?”

  It takes a moment. Then Patrick’s posture relaxes. He looks up at me again, face cautiously brighter. “Well, you don’t get that chance often,” he says. “You should take it when you can.”

  “I was hoping for one more snow,” I say, “before the warm weather arrives.” It’s a bland observation, insignificant. But the words feel right, warming the room like a flame.

  Patrick smiles. “I’m with you.”

  I take a deep breath, radiant with relief.

  “Winter is a tough sell,” Patrick says. “Nobody wants to see fall end, or spring. Summer gets its share of mourners. But winter, it’s just—” A shrug. “Gone. No backward glances.”

  “I’ve always loved winter,” I say.

  “It’s the most private time of year,” he says. “Everyone stays indoors, focuses on their own pursuits. Maybe that’s why we like it.” He gestures between us. “Winter makes it easier to pass unnoticed as an introvert.”

  The way he says we, that easy bringing together, swells inside me. He’s recognized me, gathered me onto his side. I feel the division split across my understanding of my place in the world: the two of us and then everyone else. A swift, perfect fracture.

  “Shall we begin?” I ask.

  I make a conscious effort to perform well with my other clients. Sylvia’s dark lipstick stands in my own medicine cabinet, a contrast to my utilitarian lineup of painkillers, eye drops. Spurred by guilt over how much space she occupies in my mind, I review the files and photos of my clients’ loved ones.

  Bethany, who died in an accident, drunk behind the wheel. Her older sister, Mary, agreed to buy alcohol for Bethany’s Sweet Sixteen. Bethany stayed in a coma for a year between the accident and her death. Since then, her sister has slowly withdrawn from the family. As far as I can tell, Bethany is the only relative Mary talks to anymore.

  Elinor, whose grown son found any excuse to avoid visiting his mother in her nursing home. He sees Elinor once a month, like clockwork, now that she’s tucked safely in the family plot.

  Tracey, who died pedaling her bike along an overpass on her way to visit her best friend. Her black T-shirt blended with the dusk, so the teenage driver of a 1983 Camaro didn’t see her when Tracey swerved to make a left turn. The driver of the Camaro and Tracey’s best friend eventually married, their shared guilt merging into something close enough to love.

  I’m grateful for the chance to lose myself in the weight of the routine. Downing the lotus over and over, surfacing like a swimmer for a bracing breath of my own body before I submerge again.

  At home, that’s when I’m unguarded. That’s when it happens with increasing frequency. It’s more than physical. Not recognizing my own face in the mirror is a discrepancy I could grow used to, over time. I haven’t belonged to myself for years; working at the Elysian Society, I see my body as an object on permanent loan. A door without a lock.

  But it’s more than that. One evening, I catch sight of a plum on the counter, big as a child’s fist and grayish-red. I want to laugh. It’s an instinctive catch in my brain, the lingering memory of a long-ago inside joke. But I don’t have a punch line. Every time I see the plum, I have to fight back someone else’s laughter. Finally, I throw it away.

  Kneading my hair during a shower one night, I become aware that I’m touching a stranger’s body. As limp and heavy as an animal’s stripped pelt. A corpse’s hair.

  Unlike the other impressions, this one doesn’t fade quickly. I leave the shower and lie, soaking, beneath the covers, keeping my body distinct and separate. No part touching any other. I want to reach for a zipper and pull at the nape of my neck to step out cleanly.

  it’s not yours

  nothing here is yours

  Hours pass before I feel secure inside my flesh again. I’ve left the shower running and the water bites at my hand when I turn off the faucet, cold enough to yank my breath from my lungs.

  Following a long winter, the weather hurries to catch up. It’s April, the heat of each day an exploring touch. Flowers burst frantically in spots where I’d forgotten flowers ever grew. Buds appear along branches one evening and expand into blossoms the next. Everything smells like dark, loamy soil.

  The whole city seems energized. A memorial sprouts at an intersection not far from the Elysian Society. A floral arrangement shaped like a heart, propped next to a plywood cross. Painted across the cross’s center beam: WE PRAY FOR YOU HOPEFULL DOE. “It’s as if nobody ever died in this city before,” Ana says, coming into the waiting room, full of pleased disgust.

  I’ve just returned from meeting with a client. The nickel plating of his wife’s pendant leaves a nagging itch on my skin.

  Ana hesitates before she moves toward me. “What are your plans for this weekend?”

  I’m silent, trying to figure out her angle.

  “I’m sure you’ll be up to something amazing,” she says. “Skydiving. Meeting strangers for weird sex. It’s always the quiet ones who are trouble.”

  “Do you need something, Ana?” I ask.

  She plucks at a stray hangnail. “On the off chance that you’re free this weekend, you could come out with us.” Ana speaks carelessly, but I catch a shift in her expression: a faint rise of color that turns her vulnerable.

  “Why would I do that?” I say it before I can stop myself.

  “It’s my birthday.”

  This takes me aback; I can’t remember the last time I acknowledged my birthday. It’s become a string of numbers. Rote identification, no more meaningful than my thumbprints.

  “Your boyfriend�
�s going to be there,” Ana goes on.

  My heart stutters. “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

  “Oh, sure you do.” Ana lowers her voice. “Leander?”

  “Nothing’s happening between us.”

  “Yeah, yeah, you’d never stoop to a workplace affair. But he never shuts up about you.” She prods the inside of her cheek with her tongue. “You two would be a good match.”

  “Who else will be there?” I ask, not taking the bait.

  “Your little protégée. Dora. I invited her along so you’d have someone to talk to. See what I’m willing to do for you?”

  I’m scarcely listening. A body has just entered the waiting room, carrying an aura of some musky cologne. A pungent, leathery smell. As the scent seeps into my nostrils, I’m tense with lust. I’m engulfed in the warmth of breath against my neck, the sweat on Patrick’s skin.

  “When are you meeting?” I ask Ana.

  “I figured about nine, Friday,” she says. “Nice and early.”

  “Maybe I’ll be there,” I say.

  She grins. “Well, well,” she says. “I’m glad you’ve had a change of heart.”

  I want to tell her that I’m still in love with her.”

  The man across from me, Kenneth O’Brien, is a new client. He’s handsome in a tentative way that could go to seed at any moment.

  “There might be a miscommunication, Mr. O’Brien,” I say. “You’re here to contact Margaret Ross?”

  Pinkish bull’s-eyes stand out on his cheeks, but his eye contact is so fixed, it’s reckless. “That’s correct,” he says.

  “The forms suggest you’re still married. To a Lindsey O’Brien.”

  He’s been married for four years. In half the photos that show him and Margaret together, Mr. O’Brien’s wife is also present, a cheerful, sturdy blonde to Margaret’s sharp-boned frame. Four months ago, Margaret Ross died in her sleep from an undiagnosed heart problem. Though Mr. O’Brien’s report doesn’t corroborate anything, slipping past the question with eyes averted, I study Margaret’s bird-wing elbows and the visible bones in her chest. And I wonder.