“People can certainly be more forgiving after a loss.”
“I went to a support group,” Patrick says. He stretches his arms over his head. Darkness blooms under his arms. “I noticed how we all talked the same way. Competitive: Whose dead wife had the brightest halo? Like we’re fighting with each other over whose partner was least deserving of death.”
“That’s a normal reaction to grief, Mr. Braddock,” I say.
“Call me Patrick. Please.”
He lifts his sandwich to his mouth. When he lowers his hands, a dab of grease stays on his cheek. He flicks his thumb across the spot, then sucks his finger clean. I look at his glistening fingertip and cross my legs beneath the table.
“How did you hear about the Elysian Society, Patrick?” I ask, testing out the name.
“A friend told me. She used to go herself. Jenn’s father passed a while ago.”
A couple enters the café, trailing a jangling string of conversation. Patrick peers at his watch. He’s suddenly all business, crumpling his napkin, asking me if I’m sure I’m finished. My sandwich is barely touched, tattered at the edge from where I’ve been picking at the crust. “I hate to cut this short, but I have a call,” Patrick says.
Outside, we stand in front of the plate glass windows. A breeze pulls my hair over my eyes and I reach to brush it away. When my vision clears again, I see Patrick’s hand move back, as if he’d been reaching for me at the same time.
“You look great,” Patrick says. “I almost didn’t recognize you in this outfit.”
And I’m stupid with pleasure, my heart panting shamelessly at his heels.
“I don’t even know what to call you. Out here. In the real world.” He smiles, sunlight caught deep in his eyes.
My real name hovers on the brink of my tongue before I answer him. “Edie.”
“Pretty. It suits you.” He holds out his hand; I take it. “I’m glad I had this chance to get to know you better.”
“I’m glad too.”
He doesn’t let go of my hand. I feel the easy strength and energy behind his grip. Everything in my body settles in the spot where our flesh touches.
Patrick holds my gaze. His lashes are ridiculously long, this close up. “Can I ask something? Are you supposed to see your customers outside of work?”
I can’t tell if he’s been wondering this the whole time or if it just occurred to him. “Not exactly,” I say.
“I thought not.”
“But I don’t mind, if you don’t.”
“I don’t mind at all,” Patrick says. He lets go of my hand. “I’ll see you again soon, Edie.” And I can almost let myself pretend that it’s really me he wants to see.
ELEVEN
A heaviness. A swell that pushes into every part of me, like exploring fingertips. Far away, impossibly far, moonlight cuts through the surface of the water.
I used to believe that drowning would be peaceful, second only to dying in my sleep: a slipping away, a death that would glide up behind my back. But my death was urgent. Terrifying. My lungs ached with the desire to do something as simple as draw in a breath, exactly what I’d done since the moment I came wailing into the world.
I remember that drowning includes a moment of pure and childlike betrayal, that an act so simple and necessary has been ripped away. There one moment, gone the next.
In the waiting room, someone taps my bare shoulder. I have the idle impulse to move closer to this touch, the way I’d turn my face toward the sun on a cold day.
“Lee.” Stepping back, I let his hand fall lightly from my shoulder.
“I’ve been trying to find a good time to talk,” he says.
I remember our last interaction, the concern that pulled his features tighter as he leaned toward me at the bar. “Is something wrong?” I ask.
Lee hesitates. “I was hoping to talk somewhere more private,” he says. “Maybe tonight. We could go somewhere close by, have dinner or drinks.”
I’m opening my mouth to refuse, to make my excuses, but as if from a distance, I hear myself saying, “All right. Tonight then.”
His expression opens up with an unguarded excitement that turns me almost guilty. “There’s a place not far from here,” he says. “Close enough to walk.”
“I’ll meet you outside,” I say.
After he leaves, I stay rooted, staring at the TV screen. An autumnal scene, red leaves reflected in hot bursts against the surface of a pond. My mind turns back to the familiarity of Lee’s touch. Usually, we don’t so much as shake hands. As small as Lee’s gesture was, there was an automatic intimacy to it. His hand on my shoulder. I wonder if some part of me is changing behind my back. Sending out a receptiveness, an openness. As if a long-locked door has swung open a fraction, enough to allow a thread of light inside.
I don’t expect the book to be new. I steel myself against dog-eared pages, pencil scribbles in the margins. But the cover is unmarked. A woman from some nineteenth-century painting stares out, her eyes lashless and heavy-lidded. In contrast to her prim dress, there’s slyness brewing in the corners of her expression.
“She reminds me of you,” Patrick says. “That girl on the front. I hope you take it as a compliment. It’s meant as one.”
I staunch my surge of pleasure the way I’d hold a cloth over a wound. “I do have to remind you that personal gifts aren’t allowed,” I say.
Patrick clasps his hands together, a sign of contrition. “I know. I explained to the woman, Jane, that the book used to belong to Sylvia. But if you’d rather not, I understand.”
I run my thumb down the cover. I can’t imagine parting with it now. Villette.
“Sylvia was reading this book when it happened,” he says. “I found it on our nightstand when I came back from the lake. Opened on its spine. Such a strange moment, seeing that book and knowing she’d never find out the ending.”
I won’t be able to bear it if he cries.
When Patrick continues, his voice is mercifully steady. “But all those books, they end pretty much the same. She falls in love with a guy, she changes him, they live happily ever after. Something like that.”
“Something like that,” I echo. “Thank you for trusting me with this, Patrick.” I set the book on the end table, next to the pill.
“You should know how much I appreciate everything you’re doing for me.” Patrick reaches across the space between us, and he touches my thigh: he rests his hand on my knee. His fingers rest beneath the hem of my skirt, warm and firm.
He traces a single quick circle with his fingertip. There must be a singed mark left behind on my naked thigh. A symbol of his presence.
Then his hand is gone and we sit and face each other, his face closed off except for a knowing smile. I can breathe, which surprises me; I can breathe, and I do, in and out. I breathe even if I’m going to break apart, a piece of paper consumed by a flame in a second.
The restaurant stands on the northern edge of the Elysian Society’s neighborhood, leaking toward the next stretch of civilization. Lee and I walked here with a buffer of space between us, the evening air still spiked with heat. Lee has changed into his own clothes: a button-up shirt and dark pants that he wears with a slight stiffness. I’ve draped a cardigan over my white dress and pulled my hair loose around my shoulders, but I’m careful not to make an effort.
The restaurant is on a quiet street corner, the windows a patchwork of laminated menus, bright flyers offering expired specials and discounts. Inside, the place is mostly empty: low ceilings, booths coated in red Naugahyde, gold-flecked plastic tabletops. A sleepy-eyed waitress plants pebbled plastic cups in front of us.
“This place is probably a drug front,” Lee says, low. “But they have decent coffee.” When I lay the book on the tabletop, he tilts his head to scan the title. “Villette. I’ve never read that. Any good?”
“I haven’t read it in a long time,” I say.
“A client gave that to you?” Lee asks. I blink, unnerved at how easily h
e can detect the presence of somebody else. “I ask because a client used to bring me gifts,” he continues. “A woman who’d been contacting her son. He died young, a bad car crash that she survived. His mother brought me things that she’d purchased new, just for me. Expensive things. A watch, cologne. Concert tickets. I could never use any of it.”
“What did you do?”
“I had to turn her away,” Lee says. “I tried to convince her that it wasn’t appropriate. I wanted to help her. But of course I couldn’t take the risk.” He shrugs.
The waitress looms over us, her eyes grazing my thin dress. She slides two ceramic mugs onto the table. The insides slosh with black coffee. I take a long drink; after the hollowing effect of the lotuses, the coffee is tart as poison. Shakiness zips through my bones.
“When I started at the Elysian Society, I was curious.” Lee fingers the handle, turning the mug around and around. “I heard they had more trouble keeping male bodies. And I thought, you know, there must be people who can’t connect with their husbands or their sons. Their fathers. I wanted to help. It seemed like a way I could step in.”
I know that male bodies are scarcer inside the Elysian Society walls. Ana’s scornful of them. “Poor boys,” I heard her say once, flirting with a new hire. “Such a disadvantage. They don’t have the training for this work that women do.”
But sitting across from Lee, looking at the patience that plays like light and shadows over his features, I think he must have found some emptiness inside himself. An obliging blankness. Without fully meaning to, I shift Lee’s face aside, slide a new one in its place. My mind pulls together the right mannerisms. The exact expression: the set of the mouth, the coolness in the eyes.
I have to turn my head sharply, staring instead at the froth of dust collecting between floor tiles. When I glance up, Lee is himself again.
“It’s not always easy,” Lee says. “That woman wasn’t coming from a bad place. Turning her away before she took things any further—it might not have felt like helping. But it was.”
“Helping yourself?” I give the words a slim edge.
“Helping her.” Lee’s eyes on mine remain steady. “You know it’s true, Edie. Sometimes helping our clients means stepping away from them. Setting them free before they hurt themselves, or hurt us.”
Through a gap in the neon flyers pasted to the window, the sky shows in a smear of darkening gray.
“Why did you really want to talk tonight, Lee?” I ask.
“It’s been worrying me for a while,” he says. “Ever since that night.”
On the other side of the dining room, the waitress leans against the counter, so still she could be a prop. The empty booths lining the windows, the tables scattered in the center of the room with their listless bundles of utensils, give the impression of a hastily constructed stage set.
“Patrick Braddock might be dangerous,” Lee says.
I’m not even surprised. “How is he dangerous?” I ask, voice pleasant.
“I looked up the details,” he says. “The circumstances surrounding his wife’s death. There’s something strange, Edie. Something off.”
“Off,” I repeat, making the word subtly ridiculous.
“The details don’t add up. The story is that she goes swimming alone in the early morning and drowns. She’s drunk or exhausted. But if you look deeper, you see discrepancies. Did you know she was naked when they found her?”
I can feel my heartbeat held inside my chest, like an insect clutched in a fist.
“And it’s not just that,” Lee says. “I noticed that he apparently dropped the lawsuit against the resort. The whole thing vanished.”
“He didn’t want to go through that, right after his loss,” I say.
“Maybe,” Lee says. “Or maybe he didn’t want a closer investigation. A wrongful death lawsuit could have uncovered details Braddock didn’t want out in the open.”
I take another long sip of the coffee, the bitterness setting my teeth on edge.
“All this could be nothing,” Lee continues, “or it could point to a different side of the story. Foul play.”
The two words roll through my skull, hard as marbles. “These are just pointless rumors,” I say. “Mrs. Renard trusts Mr. Braddock. Why doubt her judgment?”
“You don’t know what kind of life Sylvia led with him, what problems they were having. Letting Braddock continue to see her, to be around you—” He hesitates. “It could end badly.”
When I glance down at the book cover, it’s transformed: the woman’s face has lost whatever wildness I detected and is instead unreadable, dumbly complacent as a dreamer’s. “I’ve been working with Mr. Braddock for weeks now,” I say. “He’s been nothing but professional.”
“Why did you become a body?” Lee asks.
“Same as you. To help people.”
“When I tell you about myself,” Lee says, “you don’t offer anything in return. We’ve been talking for two years. You never say anything about your past. It’s like you fell out of the sky.”
I start to speak.
“It’s not my business,” he interrupts. “I know that. But I thought, how strange that she’s doing this, seeing someone like Patrick Braddock. You never take risks. Then I realized that I don’t know enough about you to make that call. Maybe there’s something I’d need to know.”
As I stand, a rush of light-headedness nearly pushes me backward. “Lee, if you care about me, you’ll drop this,” I say. “Please.”
“Whatever you want.” But his eyes remain unconvinced, as if I’m insisting I’m not hurt while holding my bleeding hand between us.
Without looking back, I hurry out of the restaurant. The evening sky is thick and low-slung, threatening rain.
Halfway down the block, I stop. A little girl waits at the intersection just ahead. In the gloom, her face is soft and diffused, a generic grouping of features. Her hair hanging flossy and straggling, the way she swings her arms: the sight of her passes through me like a bullet. She’s too young to be out alone. She could have materialized here, brought to life by my gaze.
The girl’s head is ducked, but as I stand and stare at her, she looks up. Her pale hair slides away from her cheeks. I won’t be able to stand seeing her face.
Then an older woman walks toward her, appearing from behind the corner of a building. The girl whips her head around, skips over to the woman. The two of them start across the street, and I take a deep breath, following in their wake. From the back, the woman and girl are plain and unremarkable. Faces in the crowd. I don’t know them, I remind myself. I don’t know anybody in this city.
Lake Madeleine. August.
I hesitate a second. Foul play. I delete the words, as if I can scrub the term out of my mind, and instead type: Drowning.
The results are sparse. Articles in local news sites, a handful of stilted blurbs in national sources. Some don’t refer to her by name. The 32-year-old wife. Three pieces show her portrait, the same one each time. A professional shot, a smile as posed and unspecific as a stock photo. A few sources use an image of Sylvia and Patrick together at a formal event, her neck wreathed in pearls, his hand tight at her waist. A copy of the same photo lies on my bedroom floor.
I read and reread the articles, hungry for any detail. Braddock was accompanied to the lake house by her husband and two close friends. The friends’ names are withheld, but I recall the wife’s name after a second. Viv Damson.
Sylvia went swimming without telling anyone, breaking the resort’s policies. Going into the water after consuming alcohol, in the early hours of the morning, nobody else around. Only one article echoes Lee’s assertion that Sylvia was naked.
At this time, it is unknown whether Braddock was clothed when she entered the lake.
I remember Patrick’s face when I reassured him that nothing was strange about his wife’s death. His passing flinch of what could have been doubt, shame. Anger.
The raw and unfiltered information is restri
cted to forums populated by amateur detectives. People with cryptically anonymous names who seem capable of a weird arithmetic. Reverse division: they can take the slightest clues and dissect the details until they’re bloated, page-long theories.
The Braddocks appear briefly, a scattering of mentions. I read with heat growing in my chest and tightening behind my ribs.
What do we think about this one? Couple of strange things, including the husband backing off from a lawsuit. Afraid? What do you think?
Yeah obviously no accident.
Guy is guilty as hell but seems to have deep pockets so I doubt he’ll pay for it.
Reports say the autopsy doesn’t show any signs of foul play??? Seems like the bitch just got wasted and thought she was too good to follow the rules.
Don’t know. Don’t care. They’re smug as hell in their photos. Maybe she drowned to get away from him. Maybe he killed her to get away from her. Not worth discussing.
I stand, withdrawing from the quick, cold authority of those strangers, summing up Sylvia’s death as if they were there. It’s like finding a fragile keepsake smeared with a stranger’s fingerprints.
They’re outsiders. Tourists, gathering around something bigger than themselves, hoping for a cheap moment of connection.
I end up in the bedroom. I riffle through the photographs. Sylvia and Patrick rush past, one broad, gleaming grin and open-mouthed laugh after another. She nuzzles her head into his shoulder. She links her arm through his. There’s no sign of unhappiness, no sign of discord. I know exactly how to decipher other people’s tragedies. I would recognize it.
I reach a photo and stop. The lipstick. Sylvia’s high, round breasts and narrow waist are inviting, luminous. I turn the image over.
My dearest. The writing is a childishly elaborate cursive. Faded blue ink. It’s not always easy, is it: being madly in love? But I’ll be yours today and forever. Nothing can keep us apart. Love, your butterfly.
I read the words again and again and again until the world steadies itself around me.
The Possessions Page 9
