The Possessions

by Sara Flannery Murphy

  I slide my hand beneath the blanket. Sleep pulls at my edges. My rational mind clicks off, replaced with the voluptuousness of long-buried memories.

  As I shift against the mattress, Patrick’s face changes. He’s Ana’s Rob, eyes clear and assessing. I want to stop, but I can’t. Then I don’t want to anymore. Rob’s face wavers, changes. Now the man pressing me open beneath his weight is Mr. Morris, with the freckled lips and shiny forehead; now Mr. Deehan with his perpetual sunburn; now Mr. O’Brien’s vulpine features; and another face and another, men who have lost their lovers, their girlfriends, their wives. Their faces revolve over me in rhythm with the sleep-drugged movement of my hand.

  And then, as I’m almost there, I can’t see his face at all. He could be anybody. His proportions stretch out impossibly, a shadow lengthening against a wall. He’s no longer panting above me but is too far away, looking down from a distance and watching me. I’m sinking fast. He shimmers above me, a silhouette seen through the moving surface of the water.

  I reach for him.

  He steps away.

  She sleeps on the couch in her tight dress. Her hip slopes upward beneath the blanket.

  I lean forward to catch her warm, sour breath. “Wake up,” I say.

  She sighs and shifts.

  “Wake up.”

  Her eyes flutter open. Ana sits abruptly, bracing herself with one hand. Her eyes take on a stricken wariness.

  “You took him from me,” I say.

  Ana shakes her head, again and again.

  “You didn’t have to do that.” The words emerge from my throat as if by a magic trick, an endless scarf pulled from the dark pit of my mouth.

  She reaches for me, fingertips icy on my arm.

  “You thought you won.” I push her hand away. I’m gentle, but she flinches.

  “Edie,” she says. “You’re having a bad dream.”

  “He’s mine,” I say.

  “Of course he is,” Ana says, soothingly. “Of course he is.”

  I’m silent. The living room is sifting into focus in the clean light that comes through the blinds. I’m suddenly exhausted, as if I’ve been awake all night. I can feel more words congealed at the back of my throat, trying to push out.

  “I’m sorry, Ana,” I manage.

  She smiles, but her eyes stay tense. “God, you scared me.”

  “I talk in my sleep,” I say. It’s a lie. But now that I’ve said it, it begins to feel real. I can convince myself that the words were sleep-clouded and indistinct. I can forget the actual sensation of speaking: my mind both outside my control and buzzing with clarity, fully awake.

  “Really, I should have warned you.” I stand, light and shaky.

  Ana swings her legs over the side of the couch, reaching for her shoes. The tapered heels jut like weapons. “Isn’t it early for that?”

  “For what?”

  “I barely recognized you.” Ana slides her foot into the punishingly narrow mouth of the shoe. “You apply that in your sleep? Not bad for a sleepwalker.”

  I move into the kitchen, where a small mirror is one of my few concessions to decorating. My face in the uneven surface is startling: not my disarranged hair or puffy-lidded eyes, but Sylvia’s lipstick. It’s perfectly applied, as if I’ve been wearing this color all my life.

  Ana’s cautious footfalls move up behind me. “It’s grown on me,” she says. “It’s really your color, Edie.”

  TEN

  I’m scared.”

  Ms. Young’s eyes are leveled at mine. After a second, I decide that she’s not one of the unpredictable clients who sometimes slip through the cracks, their calm exteriors hiding onslaughts of tears, accusations, grief-torn wildness. Instead, Ms. Young offers her confession with a thoughtful weight. It’s as if she’s just realized it herself.

  “Someone should have spoken to you about this process, Ms. Young,” I say. “There’s no need to be nervous.”

  “Oh, I know,” she says, voice shaded with apology. “It’s not about . . . you, or this place, or anything. It’s about me and her.”

  Ms. Young has cloudy black hair, a crisply ironed blouse. According to the forms, she’s here to see her daughter. A young woman who died several years ago, at the age of twenty. This surprises me; Ms. Young strikes me as being in her late thirties. Not much older than I am.

  “I was in high school when Tiffany was born,” Ms. Young says. “Everyone said adoption was the best thing to do. It would give her a better shot at life than I could provide. I went back to school, and then to work, trying to make a life for myself. I’d only placed her for adoption because people told me I didn’t have a real life yet. But I started feeling—I don’t know how to describe it. Stuck, I guess.” She considers this. “Stuck.”

  I can’t look at my client as she speaks. Instead, I focus on the corner of the room, the uneven fit of the crown molding, the glossy-fine cobwebs wreathed there.

  “I’d keep thinking—if I made a good life for myself, then I may as well have kept her with me,” Ms. Young says. “It didn’t make sense. But I couldn’t let go of this obsession. I had to keep my life small and plain, because if Tiffany ever came looking for me, and she saw that I was successful, she’d wonder why I didn’t let her stay.”

  With an effort, I bring my eyes back down to Ms. Young. She gazes straight ahead, lips pressed into a stark line. The seconds tick past us.

  “It was an open adoption,” Ms. Young says finally. “But I kept my distance. I didn’t want to create any confusion. She sent me a friendship bracelet when she was nine or ten. The idea of speaking with her was too much. I put it off. I told myself I’d wait until her eighteenth birthday to reach out. Trust me, I’m not proud of this. But you’d be surprised how quickly life can go by when you’re hiding from something.”

  I make a small noise of encouragement.

  “When she was nineteen, I got a call from her parents,” she continues. “Ovarian cancer. It’s rare in someone that young. There are barely any symptoms until it’s advanced. I found out later it had something to do with a mutation of the BRCA gene. From my side of the family.”

  Ms. Young tucks her hair behind both ears, a methodical gesture. I notice her hands trembling slightly.

  “I got to know Tiffany,” she says. “We all pulled together at the end. Her parents and me. It was hard on them to see her so changed from the person they’d known. But it was hard on me too. I’d never known a different version of her. I’d missed Tiffany during her healthy years. So much lost.

  “And I’m scared she’ll be angry,” Ms. Young says. “Angry that it’s me coming to see her and not her parents. They have no idea I’m here. I wanted to have this one thing between her and me.”

  “Don’t be scared,” I say. “This is a place where you don’t have to dwell on the past.”

  My client reaches up and flicks a finger beneath each eye. She hasn’t been crying; it seems like a gesture born of habit. “But what about you?” she asks, and it takes me a second to recognize that she’s addressing me. “You’re all right? You look a little pale, ma’am.”

  “I’m fine,” I say. A braided friendship bracelet coils around my wrist, tight enough to lightly pinch my wrist bones. The pink and purple threads are frayed. When Ms. Young tucks her hair behind her ear, I watch for and catch the flash of matching colors beneath the cuff of her blouse: she wears the bracelet’s twin.

  I reach for the lotus, gripping its edges tightly between the pads of my fingers. “Let’s begin,” I say.

  On Friday, I enter the bookstore right before the clock ticks over to noon. At the door chime, the man behind the counter looks up. “Just yell if you need anything,” he calls.

  Catching a flurry of movement through the bookstore window, I turn. It’s an older woman walking a bouquet of lap dogs. My heart slows. Angling my body so that the window is in my peripheral vision, I slide a book off the shelf, eyes slipping unseeing over the words.

  This morning, I bought a fashion m
agazine at a drugstore, as furtively as if I were buying pornography. After five years of helping people pretend I’m not here, I don’t remember how to draw eyes to my body. The outfit I found at the back of my closet has gone unworn for years. A black blouse with pearly buttons, a gray skirt. Cheap, with sharp threads poking at the seams. But if I don’t look closely, the outfit creates a paper-doll illusion of elegance. I’ve coated my mouth with red lipstick, a tube I bought alongside the magazine.

  When I glance up, the man behind the counter is watching me. I can tell by the duck of his head that it was more than an idle gaze, and I surge with a mix of triumph and shyness. A sensation I’d nearly forgotten.

  He walks past the bookshop window. I know it’s him before I even turn my head. He’s encoded in my memory now: his gait, his gestures. Patrick glances through the window. Our eyes meet. And just like that, he’s gone.

  I hold the words open in my hands, frozen and ridiculous. Then I push the book onto the shelf and hurry outside. The April air is damp and outrageously sweet, intoxicating.

  Immediately, I spot Patrick’s lean back.

  “Mr. Braddock.” My voice barely belongs to me.

  Patrick looks back. He pauses, turns around to face me. We examine each other. As strange as I must look in my darkly gaudy outfit, he’s different too. I’ve never seen him in the sunlight before, or in these clothes, his shirt open at the throat. The daylight carelessly reveals the folded wrinkles at the corners of his eyes, the bruised fatigue beneath his lower lashes. I’ve forgotten how appealing it is: a man whose body looks lived in.

  “It’s you,” Patrick says, and the words sing through my body: It’s you, it’s you. “What are you doing in this neck of the woods?”

  “Oh, I was just—” I gesture at the bookstore window.

  “Did you find what you were looking for?” He glances at my empty hands.

  “Not really,” I say. “I was hoping to find a copy of”—I dredge the name from my memory—“Villette.” A book I read in high school; I remember almost nothing about it. “By one of the Brontës.”

  A funny distance opens behind his eyes. “What happens in that book? Something about a governess?” He doesn’t wait for an answer. Whatever changed in his face is already gone. “Listen, I was just going to lunch, if you want to join me. If you’re free.”

  “Yes,” I say. “I’m free.” As if I might as well. As if it’s one option of many.

  He props the café door open, gesturing cartoonishly to me, like a maître d’: the quick bow at the waist, the extended arm. “After you.”

  As I pass, I catch the gleam of his wedding band.

  Inside, the smell of fresh bread envelops me. Classical music plays overhead. The whole area seems doused in more sunlight than the sidewalk outside.

  When we receive our food, arranged on delicate wicker trays, Patrick leads me to an isolated corner table. Our knees almost touch when we sit. I face the back of the café. Patrick is all I see. The distance between us is smaller than when we sit together in Room 12. I feel every inch in my bones. I measure it with the steady pump of my pulse.

  He shakes open a napkin, drapes it on his lap. “I hope you enjoy,” Patrick says. “I used to come here with my wife.” His voice doesn’t change when he says this. His wife could be a mutual acquaintance. A woman I met at a party once, safely ensconced at her desk job.

  I slide a tongue of red pepper from inside the sandwich. My courage isn’t flagging yet, but a worry worms its way in at the edges.

  “Do you work around here?” I ask.

  Patrick nods, swallowing. “Right down the block. It’s a law office.” He pulls his mouth at the corners, acknowledging an unsaid joke. “I know.”

  “You’re a lawyer.”

  “I am.” The grimace again; a pause. “Really? Nothing?”

  Images from afternoon TV, melodramatic movies, flash through my mind; the hushed courtroom, the beleaguered lawyer pacing in front of the judge’s bench, rearranging the world’s inflexible patterns into something more forgiving. “You’re giving people a second chance,” I say.

  “Nice way of looking at it.” He’s surprised and then pleased, like a teacher whose quietest student made a wise observation. “But I’m not the grand-speeches kind. Corporate attorney. It’s more conference calls and document review than you want to think about.”

  “I see.”

  “It has its good points, its drawbacks. I’d been considering changing paths, but then it happened.” A shrug. “I felt safer staying in a holding pattern.”

  It. It. I work a slice of tomato from inside the crust.

  “So you’re a bookworm,” Patrick says.

  I take a moment to connect this to our earlier conversation. “Well, I read when I can.”

  “Same,” he says. “There’s an unexpected upside to insomnia. Apparently you should avoid screens at night. Something about the circadian rhythm. So I’ve been catching up on books I bought years ago.”

  “Any good ones?” I ask.

  “Nothing as highbrow as the Brontës,” Patrick says. “I tried slow-paced stuff at first. But it works better if I’m reading something I want to be reading. If I’m fighting to reach the next chapter, it knocks me out quicker.” He smiles. “There’s my stubborn streak for you.”

  “That makes sense,” I say.

  “Now let’s see what I know about you,” he says. “I know that you like to read. You go for the classics. I know you keep up with the news. And you prefer the winter to the summer. Does that sound right?”

  It’s a sketched silhouette of who I am. Scarcely anything. But I’m overwhelmed that he’s remembered these details.

  “Yes,” I say. “Just about.”

  “Good,” he says. “I’m glad I remembered.”

  It occurs to me that he’s waiting, inviting me into his life. I search for an innocent question to ask him. Engaging, flirtatious. A question that his wife wouldn’t have had to ask. A black-and-white image of the Eiffel Tower hangs above our table, overwhelmed by an elaborate frame. “Have you been there?” I ask, gesturing at the photograph.

  “To France?”

  The note of surprise in his voice is small and politely suppressed. But I realize how foolish the question is, and how clumsy it must seem to someone like him. Such a broad question; not when or which city or how did you like it. The gap between his life and mine, so yawning that only the strangest circumstances could have closed it for us.

  But if he notices my mistake, Patrick’s kind enough to ignore it.

  “I have,” he says. “Paris. Not the Eiffel Tower, not since I was young. I’ve been back a few times. Enough that I’ve staked out my favorite spots. There are hidden gardens all over the city. Not too touristy, so it’s a good way to experience local life. People on lunch break or out with the kids.” A smile. “My wife always asked, what if everyone in those gardens is secretly a tourist? We’re all from Idaho and Alabama, sitting on park benches with each other, thinking we’re with the real Parisians.”

  This time, the mention of Sylvia doesn’t bite as hard. I manage to laugh.

  “And you?” Patrick asks. “Much of a traveler?”

  I’ve never left the country. This seems like a pitiful flaw, suddenly, proof that I’m small and stunted. I’ve been satisfied with the same grudging slice of the world.

  “No, I haven’t traveled much lately,” I say.

  “Your job keeps you busy,” he says, thoughtful now. He starts to speak, then hesitates. “Can I be frank? I have so many questions about what you do.”

  I could pretend that he’s asking me about my work as a bank teller, as a teacher, but I can’t keep up the fantasy. “It’s a strange job,” I relent. “You get used to it.”

  When he leans across the table, I blush. The heat of my own skin feels as if it’s pouring off his body, like I’ve shifted closer to a fire. “How long have you been working there?” Patrick asks.

  “A few years,” I say.

&nbs
p; “You like the work?”

  “It has its good points,” I say. “And its drawbacks.”

  We exchange smiles, quick and conspiratorial.

  “Every time I drive away from there,” Patrick says, “for the rest of the day, I can’t stop thinking about you.”

  I freeze.

  “About how hard it must be for you,” he continues. “How can you do that all day?”

  I make myself breathe again. “Well, I know how to separate myself.”

  He nods. “There must be a lot of jobs like that.” A hesitation. “My wife was a photographer. Originally, she’d wanted to be more serious. Photojournalism. Before we married, she worked freelance for smaller sites, magazines. She gave a lot of herself to her work. Spending time with her subjects, getting inside their heads. Being close to other people’s lives. She said you need a certain distance. Maybe you can relate.”

  My smile feels tucked into place with pins. “She sounds wonderful.” I could have cut the words from cardboard and propped them in front of my mouth; I make another effort. “But she lost interest in the work?”

  “Well, Sylvia”—the first time he’s said her name, I notice—“she was very giving. When we first married, I was having a stressful time at work, and Sylvia shouldered a lot of that burden for me. It didn’t leave her with much time to devote to her own interests. I know what a sacrifice it was,” he adds. “Maybe I didn’t appreciate it at the time, I was young and stupid. I should have worshipped her. You don’t always meet people that selfless.”

  I glance around the café, making eye contact with an older man. Just long enough to be satisfied that he sees me. That I’m still here, wearing my cheap and obvious red lipstick.

  “I know what you’re thinking,” Patrick says, quietly self-deprecating. “Everyone must talk about their wives this way. Nobody’s going to talk about the bad habits or the arguments over dishes.”