The Possessions

by Sara Flannery Murphy

  Mrs. Renard didn’t ask me to sit down. I stood in the middle of the office, clasping my hands in front of me. Without any distractions, I was strangely conscious of my body. The submerged thump of my heart. My soles pressed to the floor.

  “You’re not from around here?” Mrs. Renard had asked finally.

  “No,” I said.

  “But you have family or friends in this area?”

  “I only moved here a week ago.”

  “You moved alone? Are you married, in a relationship?” She paused. “Children?”

  I hesitated. “I’m single at the moment.”

  “At the moment,” she repeated. “But you’d like to meet someone.” Her tone shifted into a gossipy lightness, with an edge to it. A piece of shiny foil with a sharp tip.

  “I prefer to be on my own,” I said.

  A lift of her eyebrows. “That’s a rare trait in a girl your age. Refreshing.”

  Not sure how to acknowledge this, I’d merely nodded.

  “You might find these questions invasive for a job interview,” Mrs. Renard had said.

  The truth was that I hadn’t noticed. In my raw state, I felt it was only natural for someone to rummage through my past.

  “You’ll forgive me for the question I’m about to ask,” Mrs. Renard said. “Have you experienced much loss?”

  I’d looked at the floor: the frantic pattern on the rug. The embellishments rising like vines, wrapping around my ankles and legs, pulling me down beneath the surface of the floor.

  “Young lady.” When I lifted my gaze, I found that Mrs. Renard’s demeanor had softened. Her eyes on me were forgiving; I could abandon my secrets to her, toss my sins into her like coins into a well. “This room is private,” she’d said. “Nothing leaves these walls.”

  And so I told her everything. I felt each admission rise off my tongue and leave me lighter, cleaner. The melancholy slant of the afternoon light through the window burned on my skin. When I finished, I was scraped hollow.

  “You know what we do here?” Mrs. Renard had asked.

  “Yes,” I said. “I know.”

  “It doesn’t frighten you, the idea of other people speaking through your mouth? The idea of your hands moving when you’re not there?”

  I glanced down at my hands, imagining them jerked into motion without my consent. After the past few months, my skin was parched and blanched, like something tucked away from the sunlight for decades. The bones at my wrist jutted painfully.

  “No,” I’d said. “Not at all.”

  “Perhaps it should frighten you. It frightens most people.” She’d flicked her eyes up and down the length of me. “Why doesn’t it worry you?”

  Pulled along by the momentum of my confession, I told her. I told her that I sometimes forgot my body was even there. That there were other, harder days when I wanted nothing more than to ignore it and yet felt trapped inside it. If my body could become a useful thing to people who needed it, then I wouldn’t refuse.

  “Selfless,” Mrs. Renard had said. Not with admiration or approval, but as if she was applying a label. “I think you’ll do well here.”

  Passing through the parking lot afterward, I saw an older couple, their eyes pink and tight from crying. The man helped the woman into the passenger’s side. They turned their heads at the sound of my footsteps. Their gazes slipped right across me. Already, I felt invincible. My naked face a perfect mask.

  NINE

  I brought this for you.” Patrick smiles like a date with a box of heart-shaped chocolates.

  The box is surprisingly heavy as I settle it on my lap. I can’t remember the last time I opened a gift. Lifting the lid, I stare down at the bright jumble of objects. The hard twinkle of earrings against a lacy and translucent scrap of silk. A box filled to the brim with romantic gifts. More than romantic: intimate.

  “I thought you could wear some of them,” Patrick says. “During our encounters.”

  I’m gazing at a perfume bottle shaped like a faceted heart. The bottle is nearly empty, just a centimeter of liquid resting at the bottom of the frosted glass. All the signs of use spring into focus. Long, dark hairs caught in the teeth of a tortoiseshell comb, the fingerprints milky on the surface of a powder compact mirror.

  My stomach lurches. I shut the lid too fast.

  Patrick reaches out his hand and places it on top of the box. His fingers are next to mine. The space separating our bare flesh is only the length of a discarded eyelash. Heat hangs shimmering between us.

  I move my finger. I have enough time to register the warmth of his skin, the pinch of his wedding band, before I take a firmer grip on the box and shift it over to the table.

  Patrick withdraws, settling in his chair. “Will you still wear the lipstick, though?”

  “If you want me to, Mr. Braddock,” I say.

  “It looks good on you.”

  This close, Patrick’s eyes are green, run through with streaks of a brown pale enough to be gold. I’m flooded with a sense of belonging as deep as a physical embrace.

  It’s the way he’s looking at me. Even my kindest clients have a certain manner of meeting my eyes, before or after encounters. It still stands out to me sometimes. The sensation of being looked at so searchingly, vacillating between familiarity and disappointment. Just waiting for me to become somebody else. And for years, I’ve accepted it. Wanted it.

  Patrick, though. Today, Patrick looks at me as if I’m right here in front of him. As if he sees a person who is already whole and complete.

  Every inch of my body alive with warmth, I reach for the lotus. “Shall we begin, Mr. Braddock?”

  It’s not until late at night that I examine the contents of the box more closely, swirling my fingers through the salvaged remnants of Sylvia’s life.

  Earrings. Princess-cut emeralds dangling from slim posts. The bottom of the box is lined with a sharp clutter of loose bobby pins, dark ones that would stand out in my blond hair like surgical scars.

  The most confusing item is a small piece of clear plastic, curved like a crescent moon. It takes me a moment to realize that it’s an orthodontic retainer. A perfect mold of Sylvia’s top row of teeth. I hold the retainer on my flat palm, studying the whitish crust that collects along the ridge of the inverted molars. A musty smell floats up, like sour milk. Proof that Sylvia once possessed a living, breathing, imperfect body, complete with parts that secreted and leaked.

  I imagine Patrick walking through the silent rooms of his house, collecting Sylvia from the corners of their life. Some clients have a hard time entrusting their loved ones’ belongings to me, even for half an hour. Other clients can’t seem to give away enough. They ply me with mothball-scented sweaters, sneakers with dirt still caught in the cleats. They give me items that I can’t use during encounters. Old toothbrushes and combs, favorite stuffed animals. It’s possible that Patrick has donated Sylvia’s dresses to charity and distributed her favorite books among grieving family members. Maybe I’m another way of clearing space.

  Or maybe I’m his way of returning his wife’s belongings, the fussy things he never quite understood, to their rightful owner. That relentless ghost in the story, grasping for the material ruins of her body.

  Give me my bone.

  I can’t remember how that story ends, I think, falling into sleep. I can’t remember whether it was the woman or the ghost who won in the end.

  On Tuesday evening, I’m drained completely. My last client of the day was Abilene Osgood, a woman who lost her fifteen-year-old daughter. Most of my clients compose themselves by the time I return. After encounters, they’re calmer than when they arrived. With Mrs. Osgood, I wake to find her face still twisted with such raw and private grief that I’m ashamed to witness it. She looks at me as if I’m the invading spirit in her child’s body.

  When I enter my apartment tonight, there’s a buzzing. By the time I locate my phone on the kitchen table, the screen shows that I’ve missed five calls. I don’t recognize the number.


  As if sensing my presence, the phone vibrates to life in my hand.

  I answer immediately. “Hello?”

  “Jesus. I was getting desperate.”

  “Ana?”

  “I need a favor.”

  A hard plummet into disappointment that it’s her voice and not his. But I listen. “You have every right to say no.” Her words are tight and clipped. “Could you come get me? I don’t have money for a cab.”

  I follow the hasty directions Ana gives me, looking for Apple Blossom Inn. The name is discordantly quaint for the part of town I’m driving through. An area near the freeways. The overpass in the distance holds a glittering procession of headlights. I pass squat, windowless buildings with sagging fences.

  The sign for the Apple Blossom Inn is partially lit against the dusk, fluorescent strips visible through the plastic shell. SSOM INN. I pull into the parking lot. The hotel is a row of rooms angled like an L around the lot.

  A door across from me bursts open and Ana comes out. She moves quickly, head down, as if shouldering through a crowd of people.

  Through the door that Ana left hanging open, there’s a visible wedge of rumpled bedspread. A shadow fills the doorway. The stranger from the bar. He follows her at a more leisurely pace. There’s a stark contrast between their bodies, urgency versus calmness. It creates the impression that they’ve been pasted into the wrong frame together, spliced from different scenes.

  I reach across to open the passenger-side door. Ana slides in, muggy with perfume and sweat. I’m so used to her subdued scent at the Elysian Society that I’m startled more by her smell than by the bandage-tight dress that winds around her body.

  “Let’s go,” she says.

  But the stranger has come to the driver-side window. With the glass between us, I’m like a caged animal. His presence seems oddly amplified by the thin layer between us.

  “She your replacement?” he asks Ana. “Not bad.”

  “Ignore him,” Ana says.

  “Hey, it came to me, Blondie,” he says, voice muffled. “I know who you remind me of. That girl. The one on the news all the damn time.”

  My heart drops, but I keep looking at him. He holds my gaze through the shell of the window. Then he laughs and turns away, shaking his head.

  “Just go,” Ana hisses.

  I pull away, glancing in the mirror to look behind. He stands in the parking lot, stock-still and unperturbed.

  “He was at the bar that night,” I say, losing sight of the inn’s sign.

  “Oh, very good,” Ana says. “Gold star for you.”

  She’s so diminished that her sarcasm has lost its bite. “Where do you live?” I ask.

  “Poplar.” She sighs. “This will sound crazy, but . . . can I stay with you?” She worries at a fingernail. “I don’t want to be alone.”

  “You’re welcome to stay,” I say, hiding my surprise.

  “Look, I’m sorry I called,” Ana says after a few moments. We’re passing one of the city’s hulking industrial buildings, its sides embroidered with ivy. “You’re the only person I could think of who’d come. Everyone else has their own shit to deal with.”

  “How did you get my number?” I ask.

  “I have my ways.” She sighs, shifts. She’s starting to look more relaxed; she sinks back in her seat. “God, what a creep, saying that to you. I’m sorry, Edie.”

  When I unlock the door to my apartment, Ana pushes past me. I hang back, as nervous as if I’m the visitor. In the twilight, the apartment is pitiful, but Ana doesn’t seem to care. She sits on the couch. Grabbing the remote, she lands on a local talk show where the host leans forward to address the audience, face contorted with sympathy.

  “I’ll get blankets,” I say.

  I return a few minutes later to find the TV muted. When I pause in the doorway, Ana turns her palm toward me. “Friend of yours?”

  It’s a photo of Sylvia, her arm around Patrick, staring directly, too directly, into the camera. Daring me to speak the truth.

  “No.” I drop the blankets on the end table, reach out my hand. “Just a client’s wife.”

  Ana ignores me. “She was pretty. A little thin for my taste.”

  “Please, Ana,” I say, and she surrenders the photo to me. I clutch it to my chest protectively, as if I can defend Sylvia from Ana’s glib appraisal.

  “You know, I should apologize,” Ana says, watching me. “I was wrong about you.”

  “How so?”

  “You care about your clients.”

  Not sure what to say, I nod tersely.

  “And I care too.” Her voice takes on a cautiousness that reminds me of an adult bargaining with a child. “That’s why you and I are more alike than you realize. I just go a little further.” She brings one knee up to her chest, revealing a comma of underwear. “Rob was a client at the Elysian Society. He stopped coming maybe six months ago. I got in touch with him. We started working together on our own time.”

  On the TV screen, a man with a loopy grin sits between two women with identical teased hairstyles. WOULD YOU GIVE A CHEATER A SECOND CHANCE?

  “God, Edie,” Ana says. “Are you playing dumb to make me spell it out for you? You must know. You’ve been with the Elysian Society forever.” She sighs. “I do what we do at the Elysian Society, except that my clients get something more. They get what they really want when they come to see their wives and girlfriends.”

  “You sleep with them.” I want to say it out loud.

  “Don’t use that tone,” Ana says, though my voice was flat. “It’s not much different than what everyone does. You ever fantasize about somebody else while you’re in bed? Imagine you’re with some hot stranger, your cute neighbor. Turn the body you’re with into a placeholder. Well—” She smiles dryly. “I’m sure you’d never do that. But we mortals do it all the time.”

  I don’t rise to Ana’s swift jab. Her argument has the feeling of a justification she’s repeated in her own head.

  “Really, I wonder why all the bodies don’t do it,” Ana goes on. “You sit across the room from some poor schmuck who just wants to be with his girlfriend again. After a while, you feel like an asshole for standing in his way.” A quick, strange laugh. “I do, anyway.”

  I sit next to Ana, making sure my body doesn’t touch hers. A flash of heaving hips, sweaty skin, glazed eyes. On screen, the talk show host’s lips move and move.

  “This is what Mrs. Renard protects against,” I say. “It’s what she doesn’t want for the Elysian Society, the whole reason she started a place like this—”

  “Please,” Ana says, biting my words off, crisply scornful. “You don’t have to give me the whole spiel. I know the mission statement. But come on. Renard looks around, notices people making money by channeling on their own terms. Calling the shots, working out of their homes. A community thing. And she turns it into a factory. Now we all have to play by Renard’s rules. If she won’t give them what they want, I will.”

  “You don’t have to drag the Elysian Society into it,” I say. “Do it on your own terms.”

  “No way,” Ana says. “You want me to die of an overdose, chugging downers? The lotuses are clean, at least. Safe. I do have some standards. When you add the lotuses, subtract Renard’s rules—” She waves her palms in a game-show-hostess gesture. “Well. That’s when the magic happens.”

  Through murky rumors among the bodies, tossed-off scraps of her own ramblings, I understand that Mrs. Renard has a monopoly on the lotuses, working out an arrangement with the pharmaceutical distributor. It’s a twenty-hour drive to reach the next city with an organization similar to the Elysian Society. Between here and there, the smaller chances for channeling have been driven to the edges, starved out. Anyone who’s interested in being a body, or using a body, comes to the Elysian Society eventually.

  “How do you get the lotuses?” I ask.

  “From Jane.”

  “Be serious,” I say.

  Ana laughs. “Don’t
underestimate her. Jane’s like me, an old-fashioned entrepreneur. Do you think she’d stay at that crummy job if she wasn’t making extra?”

  I’m not sure what I want from Ana. Half of me wants her to break down, but another part thrills at her lack of apology. “You must be afraid,” I say. “Alone with those men.”

  A strange shadow skids over her features. “Don’t judge by what happened tonight.” Ana picks at a fleck of dry skin on her ankle. A bead of blood pops up, tripling in size until it slips down her ankle. “Robert isn’t a bad guy,” she says. “It’s hard for him, being so close to her and still having that distance.”

  I don’t answer.

  “It was a stupid fight,” she says. “He wants things from me I can’t give him.”

  I’m about to ask what more Ana could give, but she’s transforming into her usual self, glossy and impenetrable. “Look, I’ll be out of here first thing. I owe you.” She reaches for the pillows and blankets.

  As I rise, a question presses at my lips. “Are you the only one who does this?”

  “No, Edie,” she says. “I’m not the only one. People have been doing this for years. Funny, right?” A wry twist of her mouth. “Renard zaps all the weeds on the front lawn, sits around admiring her perfect yard. She doesn’t even realize that the weeds have come back, growing right under the floorboards. Right under her nose.”

  “You could get in trouble,” I say, imagining bodies in hotel rooms across the city—a hairline fracture that proves itself, on further inspection, to be a network of spreading cracks. Damage so deep and widespread that there’s no way to contain it.

  “Is that the way you see me? The one who’s spoiling it for everyone else?” She leans over to remove her shoe, fumbling hard. “If anybody is the odd one out at that place, it’s you.”

  On the screen, one of the women is crying. Without sound, the exaggerated rise and fall of her shoulders makes it look as if she’s laughing into her hands where the audience can’t see.

  “Good night, Ana,” I say finally.

  In my own bedroom, I can’t resist anymore. My mind clouds with images: Patrick’s fingers inside me, Patrick’s lips on mine. The desire is painful, like being cracked open slowly. I know what the inside of his mouth tastes like, the exact pressure of his body inside and against mine.