The Possessions

by Sara Flannery Murphy

TWELVE

  Locating her number doesn’t take much time. A quick consultation with an online directory. Her basic information collected in one spot, splayed out thoughtless and cheerful. A person with nothing to hide.

  I dial and wait for the voice on the other end. Already, I’m calm, becoming the woman I’ll be once she answers.

  “Yeah, hello?”

  “May I speak with Mrs. Damson?” I ask.

  “Speaking.”

  “Wonderful,” I say, brisk and smooth. “I’m glad I have the correct number on file.”

  “Who is this, please?”

  “I notice you were working with a grief counselor about a year ago, and I was wondering if you’d be interested in a follow-up session.” I lift my voice, efficiently tamping down any questions. “It’s part of a study about the long-term process of grieving and healing.”

  “Oh,” Viv says. I hear the tug of uncertainty, her blank surprise. “How did you get my number?” she asks. “I don’t remember—”

  “My records show that you completed an exit survey and indicated that you’d be open to further studies,” I say.

  “Really?” There’s a long silence, then an apologetic laugh. “That was a crazy time. I was signing so much paperwork, it just— I must have forgotten.”

  “Would you still be open to that, Mrs. Damson?” I ask.

  “God, I don’t know. When I was seeing a counselor, it was different. I’m at home with my baby now.”

  “Your baby,” I repeat, softening my voice around the words. “How old?”

  “He’s eleven months,” she says.

  I calculate quickly. When Sylvia died, this pregnancy was new. A tentative secret, a negotiable slip of life unable to make itself known. I wonder if Patrick traced the passage of time after Sylvia’s death by dutifully admiring photos of his colleague’s wife, her belly swelling. “Eleven months is a wonderful age,” I say.

  “Anyway, I’m doing a lot better,” she says. “We’ve been moving on from everything.”

  “Actually, Mrs. Damson, the purpose of this study is to address exactly that,” I say. “The recovery process. When you first lost your friend—Sylvia Braddock, is that correct?”

  A hesitation this time. “Yes.”

  “In the time following your loss, your counselor was impressed with your resilience,” I say. “We’re hoping to work closely with the clients who showed the most promising recovery process and use our research to help others in the same position.”

  “I’d have to talk to my husband,” Viv says. But I can tell I’m getting through to her. Her politeness is shifting into a cautious relief. “How long would this last?”

  “Just a few sessions,” I say. And Sylvia’s inside me, rounding out the words, turning my usual flatness and coolness into a warm invitation. I sound like someone the Damsons have known for years, someone they’d trust with their lives. “Two or three, maybe.”

  “Yeah, OK,” she says. “That doesn’t sound too bad. Henry wouldn’t mind.”

  “I can make house calls, if that would be preferable.” As if I’m offering a modest favor.

  “That would be a big help,” she says. “Can I ask your name?”

  I hesitate, shrinking back into my old skin. “My name,” I say.

  She waits.

  “Lucy Woods,” I say, the name presenting itself easily.

  “All right, Lucy,” Viv says. “Well, thanks for reaching out.”

  This morning, I sifted through Sylvia’s belongings. My hands lingered over the pins, the perfume, before I lifted up the earrings, slipping them into my bag before I could change my mind.

  Sitting across from my regular clients, I welcome the brief respite that each swallowed lotus provides. Every time I vanish and then reemerge, I’m closer to seeing him.

  “Is something funny?”

  “Not at all, Mr. O’Brien,” I say, swallowing my smile.

  “You seem amused all of a sudden.”

  “I apologize,” I say. Mr. O’Brien is one of those clients who watches me closely, obsessively focused on any sign of individuality that pushes through. “It won’t happen again.”

  After Mr. O’Brien, I retrieve Sylvia’s earrings. The dark luster of the emeralds feels dangerous. The posts are needle-thick, and when I slide them into my lobes, my flesh protests.

  When Patrick enters, he instantly fills every corner of the room. We sit across from each other. I turn my head and wait for him to notice, like a shy housewife showing off a new haircut.

  “You’re wearing them.” His eyes move over my face, from my dark red lips to the thick twinkle at my ears, across the plane of my throat, and then back again. I see him retreat from me. It’s as if these pieces of Sylvia have already conjured the rest of her into this room. Moths gathering around a single flame, blocking out my shape.

  I stir, caught between jealousy and pleasure. Two heartbeats colliding.

  “I’ve been meaning to ask you,” Patrick says. “How long do people keep coming here?”

  This takes me aback. “I’m not sure what you mean.”

  “I was talking to my friend,” Patrick says. “She called yesterday, out of the blue. We usually don’t talk about this place. Unspoken rule. But Jenn mentioned—she mentioned that she’s still coming here.” He watches me as if this should mean something.

  “Our clients are loyal,” I say.

  “I thought she was done,” Patrick says. “I’d assumed that she’d been—I don’t know. Cured? Fixed. What is the right word? Learning that she’s been coming here all along—” He shakes his head. “It surprised me.”

  “Everyone has a different timeline,” I say.

  “How long is typical? Weeks, months?” He’s softly intent. “Longer?”

  “Sometimes,” I say. “Sometimes longer.”

  “Years?”

  “Years,” I concede. “Usually.”

  Patrick’s expression is unreachable. Room 12 isn’t my own anymore. The whole space belongs to him, and I’m an intruder, desperate, pleading for something from him. For too much.

  don’t leave me

  “Shall we begin, Mr. Braddock?” I ask, as opaque as the first day I met him.

  I’m the last to leave. Against the dusk, the Elysian Society building rises like a monolith. The unlit windows turn into rows of shallow impressions, like indented fingerprints in wax. All day, I’ve been replaying my last conversation with Patrick. Fitting different words in our mouths.

  It would have been so easy to reassure him that his grief would be eased soon, that his life would return to normal. It’s an unspoken promise that defines every interaction with our clients: that they’re working toward a discrete goal. A moment of closure, peace. And if this moment keeps receding like a hazy mirage, always the same distance away, we don’t acknowledge it.

  I should have lied to Patrick. Given him the hope that he’s paying for.

  When a hand closes around my elbow, I’m less afraid than relieved. It’s him. He’s come back for a second chance. I can explain everything.

  I turn, already smiling.

  “You’re one of those bodies,” he says. “Aren’t you?”

  I’m still smiling, a dumb and helpless impulse. The man is a stranger. Older, with seed-dark pores bristling along his cheeks, a thick vein marking a line across his forehead. He doesn’t let go of my elbow. Though his grip is light and brittle, as if I’m being grasped by an empty glove, I can’t move. His breath is acidic with menthol.

  “I want to know why,” he says. “I deserve that. I tried to get a good answer from those others and they brushed me off like I was nothing. So I’m asking you now. It’s a simple thing to do, miss. Tell me why you people turned me away, without even letting me speak to my boy.”

  Anxiety constricts my chest. I’m not worried about what he might do to me. It’s the awareness of what I’ll have to do for him.

  “I never said good-bye,” the man goes on. “I didn’t know it would happen. He was h
appier than he’d been in years. If I’d known, I would have done things differently. We could have done something fun together. But he was happy, and I was so relieved to get him back that I treated him like my son again. Hounding him about getting a job and settling down. Fighting with him over stupid things. All I want is a way to say good-bye, a real good-bye this time. I’ll pay. I’ll pay anything. It’s not fair to turn me away.”

  “Your son took his own life?” I ask.

  His eyes snap shut as if I’ve directed a shocking light at his pupils. “Yes.”

  “Well, I’m afraid it’s true,” I say. “We can’t work with victims of suicide. I’m sorry.”

  “You hurt us again,” the man says, voice surprisingly strong in comparison to his frail frame. “You look at people who are hurting and say we’re not good enough. We’re not like the other people who are grieving. We deserve to hurt. We deserve to be alone.”

  “It’s not like that,” I say, keeping my voice under control. “It’s a policy.”

  “Then tell me why.”

  My bare forearm is pressed against the chilled window of the car; my hair, after the long day, has come loose in rough, prickling strands against my neck. The man’s hand at my elbow has slackened, now hanging gently, almost politely. We could be a grandfather and granddaughter.

  The usual way to answer these questions is to induce a clinical sense of danger, lay out the risks that the body faces. Deny responsibility. But I can’t do that right now.

  “When someone chooses to take their own life,” I say, “we respect that. We don’t force them to come back into a body they wanted to leave. It would be cruel.”

  The man opens his eyes, staring at a spot just past my shoulder.

  “That’s why,” I say. “I’m sorry I’m not able to do more for you. But now you know.” Gently, I step away, and his fingers slip and then fall from my arm like a dangling man letting go of a cliff’s edge. “I hope that can be some comfort to you.”

  “Don’t they ever change their minds?” the man asks. “Maybe it would be the best thing in the world to come back one last time.”

  “We can’t know that,” I say.

  He nods and nods, mouth working as if he’s preparing to speak.

  “I really need to be going,” I say. “Can I give you a ride somewhere? Can I—”

  “It’s no excuse,” he says. His eyes lock on mine for the first time. The piercing clarity of his gaze makes me squirm. It’s as if he’s prizing open my forehead to look inside, poke an exploring finger into the coils of my brain. “People who died other ways don’t want to come back either,” he says. “You bring one back, you bring them all. It’s only fair, miss.”

  THIRTEEN

  I touch my face. My cheeks are damp. My eyes are tight and swollen, painful around the edges. I sit up in bed, fumbling for the lamp. In my dream-blurred state, I imagine the water everywhere. Soaking through my mattress, pooling on the floor, dripping steadily into my lungs.

  how could you do that to me

  In the bathroom, I examine my reflection. I’ve been crying. My eyelids are a stinging pink, my skin tight and sticky from dried tears. The evidence of crying renders my features unfamiliar. My nose is narrower than I remember; a pale brown freckle above my lip is jarring. I peel back my top lip to examine my teeth. The incisors are crooked. It’s as if someone reached into my mouth and nudged them askew.

  It’s been so long since I cried. I never cried, right after it happened. I never let myself.

  Back in bed, I make myself as small as I can, curling up and clutching my elbows. The tears have stopped; they don’t even feel like my tears, but like something dragged from inside my body by force. What disturbs me is the sensation that filled my brain during those first few moments after waking. The heavy knowledge that nobody would come looking for me.

  Do you know what it’s like to lose somebody before they’re even dead?”

  Beth Olsen’s voice holds a dogged resolve, as if she’s finally releasing words that have grown in the dark for too long.

  “People have been so nice, since Amber died,” Ms. Olsen goes on. “I’ve had all the frozen meals and flowers and everything. I appreciate it. I do. But I almost want people to stop talking about her.” The quick glance at me, gauging my reaction. “Amber was exactly what people expected her to be. Her friends called her inspirational, or a fighter. Amber left the church when she was a teenager, but she’d started praying again. And anything that made her happier was fine by me.” She looks at her hands, pressed together on her lap. “It’s only now that she’s gone that I can admit how miserable it made me sometimes.”

  Ms. Olsen has coarse auburn hair. Her serious face is lightened by freckles. In my favorite photo of her and Amber, they sit at the edge of a balcony during a party, the other guests hazy faces around them. I see the bend of Ms. Olsen’s head, as if she’s muting everyone else to focus on her girlfriend, and Amber’s sweet, secretive smile.

  I shift in my chair. Patrick hasn’t scheduled a new encounter in three days. Since he first stepped across the threshold of Room 12, his presence has become the most consistent thing in my life. He’s the point I wait for. And though my clients can be unpredictable, scheduling encounters based on their own private patterns of pain and optimism, the suddenness of Patrick’s departure opens a deep pit inside my chest.

  “We were outsiders together,” Ms. Olsen is saying. “In high school, we were always on the fringes.” She laughs under her breath. “We had a mean sense of humor, when you put us together. But that’s what was so addictive. Even the worst thought that went through my head, Amber wouldn’t just listen to it, she would understand it.”

  Her eyes take on the fixedness of suppressed tears.

  “I really miss that side of Amber,” she says. “It was her battle to fight. But God, I miss her, the way she used to be. That dark sense of humor. And the worst thing is when they keep telling me she’s in a better place. What was so wrong with being here?”

  Her voice holds a naked plea. I reach for the tissue box, extending it vaguely, as if I’m offering it to someone else and she just happens to be nearby. But Ms. Olsen smiles and shakes her head, holding up one palm.

  “Listen, I’d give anything to spend an hour with her, being assholes again,” she says. “It’s like I lost time with her before she even died. I was cheated. Do you know what I mean?”

  For the first time in years, the distance I’ve maintained between my clients’ lives and my own has snapped shut, leaving us uncomfortably close, breathing the same suffocating air.

  “Let’s begin, Ms. Olsen,” I say.

  Patrick hasn’t returned to the Elysian Society for over a week.

  Everything in my life has become an attempt at distraction. Evenings after work are the hardest. I remove the battery from my clock. I start drinking, burning swallows of whiskey, acrid glassfuls of wine. When I’ve been drinking, my brain is safer, as if someone has padded it with cotton. I can handle my thoughts more directly. Even the volatile ones.

  I chased Patrick Braddock away. I was too greedy, reaching out to him too openly. Our last discussion must have clarified an ugly truth for him.

  And Sylvia. Sylvia.

  If Patrick leaves, I don’t know what will happen to his wife. After it’s clear that he’s not coming back, she still might stay inside me, metastasizing through my organs until nobody can tell us apart, or she might leave. A parasite deserting a starving host; a stowaway swimming from a sinking ship.

  Sylvia’s presence in my life is both intimate and unknowable. Even as I feel her stirring beneath my skin, there’s a disconnection. I don’t know whether she’s drawn to me or whether her presence here is as inextricably attached to her husband as a shadow cast by his body.

  And I’m not sure which fate I prefer, if it comes to it. To let Sylvia devour me or to be entirely alone again, abandoned inside my skin.

  My outfit borrows the anonymity of my Elysian Society dress and merg
es it with bland respectability. Gray linen, boxy jacket. Paired with my colorless complexion, the clothes wash me out. I rub Sylvia’s lipstick on my fingertip and then over my lips, seeing my face come alive.

  The Damsons live in an area I don’t recognize. A domesticated breed of wealth, hiding its privilege in a show of quaintness. Older houses, small flower gardens out front. A few colorful riding toys are posed on lawns, beneath gingerbread trim and ivy trellises. Tied to someone’s front porch railings, a bouquet of Mylar birthday balloons stir and sway, just starting to droop.

  Viv Damson opens her door a few dragging minutes after I ring the bell. She’s wearing a baggy shirt with one button done wrong, leaving a buckling gap. Yellow-blond hair gathered in a topknot, her cheeks shimmering with a dusting of powder. “Lucy, right?” she asks. “Come in, come in, please. Sorry for the mess.”

  She leads me into their dining room, an open floor plan that spreads into the kitchen. Viv has to shift aside a sliding stack of magazines and chunky board books to clear a space on the table; I arrange a blank notebook on the table while she gets me a drink. It’s a cheerfully untidy house, the air saturated with the lingering scents of old milk and hand soap and baby wipes. A doll lies on the floor, one eye cocked shut to show a stiff spray of lashes. A swift jealousy, something like homesickness, moves through me.

  “Thank you for agreeing to be part of this study, Mrs. Damson,” I say, when Viv returns with a diet soda.

  “Oh God, I’m happy to do it,” Viv says, waving her hand: mint-colored nail polish, a delicate shard of diamond in her ring. “This is happening at the perfect time. For some reason, I’ve been thinking about her these days. So it’s super lucky that you”—she gestures at me, as if otherwise I won’t know myself—“popped up when you did, Lucy.” A pause. “It’s fine to call you Lucy, right?”

  “Of course.” I hurry past the ache the name opens inside my chest. “It’s been about a year and a half since your loss?”

  “Well, more than that now. Um, a year and a half?” Viv crosses her arms over her chest, unwinds them and places her hands on her knees. Catching my gaze, she laughs. “It’s hard to know what to do with my hands when the baby’s down for a nap.”