Who would I find beneath the thin surface of my skin? Bridal Sylvia or the Sylvia in the lipstick? I’m overwhelmed by the thought of all the women who would pour out of me if I were cracked open: swarming like insects, bubbling up out of my mouth. The women who have collected inside me over the years, filling up my insides until there’s no room left for me.
Laura collapses against me. The body heaves. She hides her face in my lap, hair tumbling against my thighs. I reach down to touch her scalp. Her hair is stiff under my touch, sharp with chill, as if she’s been outside in freezing air.
“I’m so sorry,” I say.
“Why would you bring me here?”
“To help you,” I say.
“There’s no helping somebody who doesn’t want to be helped.” Laura lifts her head toward my touch.
Our gazes lock. It reminds me of making eye contact with a stranger in a reflection, a bus window or a restroom mirror. A silvery, palpable layer of disconnect. Then her eyelids start sinking again, lopsided and heavy, like uneven curtains.
The air in the room is wrapped vacuum-tight around my body. In my peripheral vision, I see Dora against the wall, making herself as small as possible.
“Laura?”
She doesn’t answer. Her shoulders slump.
“Laura.”
The air above us seems to loosen, like a needle puncturing the tension.
I stand, letting her body slide away like a doll’s onto the floor. I watch for her to rise again. She’s still, only the faintest throb of breath moving through her. When I’m satisfied that the body on the floor belongs to Ana again, I go to the kitchen, not looking at Dora as I pass. Leaning over the sink, I vomit. Again and again, my body jackknifing from the pressure.
Patrick and Sylvia. I’ve visualized the two of them together, sometimes: Sylvia conjured in the flesh, as if she stepped out of one of their photographs to join her husband. A stupid image. Idiotically romantic as a teenage crush. Now I’m forced to see them. My own face animated with another woman’s expressions, my body crude and slow and wrong as it tries to accommodate the impulses of someone else’s muscles. And Patrick with her.
I scoop a mouthful of water from the running tap, swish it through my teeth and over my tongue, spit it down the drain. There’s soft pressure on the inside of my skull, like a soothing hand on my forehead during a fever. Slowly, I relax.
When I return to the living room, Dora’s still in her same place, face drawn. Ana’s sitting cross-legged on the floor. She smiles at me as I lean in the door frame. “That bad, huh?” she asks.
“I know it was worse for you,” I say.
“Hey, I’m sturdier than I look.” Ana’s skin is pumped back full of color, her flesh damply golden. Wet stains spread beneath her arms. They strike me as beautiful, like dew on fresh fruit. “So,” she says. “Anything useful?”
I hate the hopefulness etched on her face. Dora looks down at her feet, silent.
“Laura was working at the Elysian Society, as Thisbe,” I say. “I verified that much. Something went wrong. She must have worked with a risky client at some point. The rumors were right, for once. She lost her body and couldn’t get control of it again.”
Ana’s breath is soft and shallow.
“But—I’m sorry—Ana, she couldn’t tell me if there were any violent clients, anyone threatening her. She still doesn’t know who killed her,” I say. “She left the Elysian Society at the end of January, the body wasn’t discovered until March. If she was possessed, then weeks of her final memories are gone. Her body could have been anywhere in that time, with anyone.” I pause. “Doing anything.”
Ana takes this in, running her tongue over her lower lip. “But we’ve proved that she was working at the Elysian Society,” she says. “That counts for something.”
“We could go to the authorities,” Dora cuts in. “If we tell them that Laura worked as Thisbe, they’d follow up, right? They’d have to.”
“The least they could do is look at clients with a history of violence,” Ana says. “Guys who have been too attached to the bodies. Anyone who’s been paying for extra services.”
“They probably wouldn’t help us,” I say. “They’re not on our side. I spoke with a cop at the Elysian Society a while back. They think we’re freaks. Untrustworthy.”
“We have to try,” Ana says. “Jesus, I’m risking everything here. If it’s all for nothing—”
We survey each other without speaking. The air in the apartment is like a burst balloon. Tattered and exhausted.
“What is this really about?” Ana asks. “I know you’re attached to the Elysian Society, but this—” Her eyes on me are flat and hard as coins. “I’m disappointed in you.”
“Fine,” I say. “I’ll do what I can. But I can’t promise anything.”
Ana sighs deeply and then stands, her movements as stiff and clumsy as if she’s waking from a long sleep. In the muted light, her single red fingernail holds a gory luster. She crouches down to reach into her bag; when she withdraws her hand, I see the familiar orange sheen of the bottle. I’d nearly forgotten about the lotuses.
“Here you are,” Ana says, holding out the bottle to me. “I wouldn’t want you to leave without it. It’s the whole reason you did this, right?”
I hate the depth of relief that opens inside me as my fingers close around the bottle. When I glance up, Ana is diminished, replaced by the shadow of the other girl. I have to blink several times before she’s herself again.
“What’s wrong, Edie?” Ana asks, voice quiet.
“Nothing.” I rise, keeping the bottle close to my heart. “Thank you.”
“He’s a lucky guy.” Ana nods at the bottle.
TWENTY-SEVEN
I stand in front of the screen, not moving. I didn’t mean to come into the downstairs office, one of the rooms Patrick and I usually ignore when I’m at his house. But when I saw her face glowing out at me from beyond the half-open door, I moved toward her without thinking, caught in a trancelike curiosity.
I’m just another girl looking for my soul mate.
I read the words over and over again. Instead of softening my reaction, the alcohol amplifies my dizziness, sending me spinning into every corner of the room.
She looks so much like Sylvia. A younger, riper Sylvia; a cheerfully sexy version. Sylvia born into a different life, with a pinkish suntan, a tie-dyed sarong. She grins into the camera without a gleam of doubt about her own charms. The disembodied arm of a friend lies draped on her shoulders like a stole.
“I thought I’d find you here.”
I turn, smarting at the faint hostility in his voice. Patrick comes into the office to stand beside me. He reaches out and clicks the window closed, leaving me staring at the desktop.
“I was married to Sylvia for six years,” Patrick says. “We were together for three years before that. People stop counting that when you’re married. Those years vanish. Marriage resets everything. But we were together for nine years. I can’t remember what it’s like to do any of this.” He gestures at the screen.
What hurts isn’t that he’s been looking at photos of girls with heart-shaped faces and generous mouths, poring over their breasts and hips like toys in a catalog. It’s his lack of apology. I crave the fumbling explanations, the defensiveness. But instead he’s vaguely chagrined, as if I’m someone with no stake in his future.
“She’s pretty,” I say, voice stiff with an attempt to match his casualness.
“Sure,” Patrick says.
“She looked so young, though,” I say, not moving. “Isn’t she too young for you?”
“I don’t know,” Patrick says. “How old are you?”
The slow shame unfurls in me, even though his voice was serious when he asked. Almost kind. I’m aware of being alone in this house with a stranger. It’s a broad shock yawning beneath me, like missing a step.
“We always said, if one of us lost the other, we wouldn’t be martyrs,” Patrick says. “Sylvia
wanted me to find someone new. She wanted me to be happy.”
As he speaks, I can remember. The words, sweet and hot, and the expanse of the bed around us, white sheets binding us together loosely. At the time, saying this to my new husband was a gift I could give freely. There was so little chance of anyone collecting on it. Promising him a blank silhouette, waiting in the wings, seemed like proof of our everlastingness.
“Who was she, Patrick?”
Patrick doesn’t say anything. In the flat radiance cast by the screen, deep hollows stand out beneath his eyes, his eyes sunk back farther into his face. He looks old.
“I saw you, that night. There was a woman,” I say. “I was going to surprise you, but then I saw her. Who is she?”
“You must mean Jenn,” Patrick says at last. He’s careful, picking out each word as if sifting through glass. “She’s the only person who’s visited me in a long time. She was only here for a couple of hours.”
“Jenn,” I repeat.
“You remember. A friend from way back. She dropped by unannounced. Trust me, it wasn’t a welcome visit. It wasn’t anything I planned.” He looks at me sideways, through the denseness of his lashes. “She’s worried about me. Trying to be a good friend.”
Patrick moves from the office. I follow, watching his body pass through the shadows and back out, until we reach the kitchen. He works the cork free from the bottle. “Jenn said I don’t seem like myself anymore.” He pours a glass; the wine splashes over the edge. “She’d read some study that men, widowers, they start dating again within a few years of a loss. I’m coming up on the second anniversary. Two years.” He swallows, eyes searching the room restlessly over the rim of the glass.
“You’re going to start dating?” I ask.
“Maybe,” Patrick says. “One day.”
My heartbeat stumbles in my chest. I wrap my arms around my body as if I can soothe the movement. “What about Sylvia?” I ask.
“Sylvia,” Patrick says. “I’ve been thinking about that.”
That. Not her. A mere complication, a roadblock to his new life.
“Jenn meant well,” Patrick says. “She’s one of the only ones who makes an effort. The only one who sees potential for a normal life. I was trying for her sake. Seeing if I could imagine a normal life with any of those women.”
The grinning girl from the photo transplanted into this kitchen, light and life trailing after her like a bridal train. She’d replace Sylvia perfectly; from the back, faces hidden, they’d be identical. She could use Sylvia’s old photographs as her own, slipping seamlessly into someone else’s history.
“I can’t—” Patrick starts. He presses his palm briefly against his mouth, as if preventing the words from forming. “Whenever I think of going on a date, a candlelit dinner, a movie, whatever you’re supposed to do—it’s impossible. I can’t sit across from women and pretend I’m someone I’m not, pretend I can be a normal husband one day.”
“So instead you sit across from me,” I say.
Patrick makes the gesture of a smile, no emotion behind it. “Sure,” he says. “I guess so.”
“Whatever you do,” I say, “just don’t turn your back on her again.”
“I never turned my back on her,” Patrick says. He’s looking at me as if I’m a stranger he’s discovered in the middle of the night, rifling through his medicine cabinet, running my hands over his silverware. “You don’t know anything about our lives,” he says, half a question.
“You won’t let me in.”
“I’ve let you in,” he says. “God, you’re in my house, you’re in my bed—”
“Then why can’t you be honest?” I ask.
“About what?”
I shake my head.
“About what, Edie?” he asks.
It all rises onto my tongue. The questions I could ask him; the strange discrepancies that have floated to the surface of his life without his knowledge, the debris of his marriage that I’ve been examining. The anger that Viv overheard, the two lines on the pregnancy test, the deep wilderness of isolation that Patrick has built around himself.
“Did you ever do this before?” I ask instead. “With someone else?”
His face is blank. “I don’t know what you mean.”
“Am I the first body you’ve used?” I ask. “To see Sylvia.”
A trace of coldness tautens the air around us, moving swiftly through the room.
“Of course.” A strange laugh, barely recognizable as a laugh at all. “Why would you ask that?”
“You never went to the Elysian Society before?” I ask.
“You’re my first,” he says, with a small, sharp edge of mockery.
I can’t speak.
“Edie, what is this about?” he asks. “You really think I’ve used other bodies?”
Thisbe’s face stitches itself together in my mind, then dissolves.
“Even if I had, what would it matter to you?” When I don’t answer, Patrick goes on: “She’s my wife. Whatever happened before I came to you, it doesn’t involve you.”
“So you did see someone else,” I say.
“No,” he says. “But I didn’t make any promises to you. If something happened between the two of us, there would be nothing to stop me from going to another body.”
The anger is as heavy and tangible as a new organ, squeezing under my ribs. “I know you cheated on your wife, Patrick,” I say.
He shuts his eyes against the words. “I can’t do this,” he says, as if to himself.
“Why would you hide that from me?” I ask.
Patrick shakes his head, eyes still closed. “I never cheated on her.” The quietness of his voice gives me a crawling sense of unease.
“I know about it,” I say. “And if you’d do it to her once, then I shouldn’t be surprised you’d do it to her again.”
I want him to be angry. I want the screaming, the hot, shocking burst of rage, the wildness of a fight. I want him to look at me. But when he does open his eyes, he’s already gazing beyond me. I feel as if I’m not even in the room.
“You have no reason to trust me,” he says. “It’s easy to forget that, doing what we do together. I keep thinking it doesn’t matter when I’m with you, because you’re—”
The beat of silence is a neat summary of my place in his life. Outside the window, a bird calls and then calls again, a piercing string dipping into a melancholy lilt.
“What did you say, that night?” Patrick asks. “That I need to look. That I can’t keep running from the past.”
Across the kitchen, in the mirrored surface of the night-dark window, I see us side by side. Time-lapsed versions of us, older, thinner, tense. The stretch of space between us is disproportionate, as if we’re standing on opposite sides of a vast gulf.
“It’s true,” Patrick says. “I can’t avoid it. It hasn’t worked.”
I already know what he’s going to say next.
“So we’ll go to the lake,” Patrick says. “You and me. We’ll leave tomorrow morning.”
The words come from my mouth, but they don’t belong to me. It’s a ventriloquist’s trick: a woman’s voice coaxed from the opposite corner of a room, from an empty chair, a birdcage, a vase. From thin air. The source of the voice is a formality, a mere vessel for the words. And what I have to say is, “Yes, yes, I’ll go with you.”
TWENTY-EIGHT
Lake Madeleine is farther from civilization than I expected. After the exit from the freeway, we’ve only been driving for a few minutes down the narrow, tree-lined road before I feel a shift in the air, sparking against my skin like an electrical current or the first hint of rain. Patrick’s in the driver’s seat; the tree branches cast a shifting veil of shadows over his skin.
It’s been years since I left the city. The slender trunks cluster close together and, glimpsed just beyond, more trees and then more, rolling out like an ocean.
This morning, I rescheduled my upcoming encounters at the Elysian Society, shifting e
verything aside for the next two days. I’ll lose some of my regulars. My clients love me for my predictability, the way I’m always waiting on the shelf. This is the first time in five years I’ve betrayed them by denying them access to their loved ones.
I should feel guilty over this. But every time I try to imagine my life beyond the next few days, my mind finds blankness. A wall of fog, as if my future has been steadily rubbed away.
“Are you afraid that the people here will remember you?” I ask.
“You think that’s going to be a change?” Patrick asks. “The only people who remember are stuck way out here?” His hands on the steering wheel tighten.
The water shines through the trees in a quick, dark glimmer.
“Anyway, I’ll use a fake name,” he says.
I look at him, but he’s still gazing ahead, expression distracted. After a second, I decide that he didn’t mean anything by it.
Patrick guides the car into the parking lot. Only a few other vehicles share the space with us. I wait in the car as he goes to the front office, taking in the curved strip of grainy beach, the single-file row of triangular cabins glimpsed through the trees. The cabins’ gray siding is weathered too cleanly, like props. On the boat rack, the bottoms of the boats stand out like blanched rib bones.
In the daylight, Lake Madeleine is beautiful. Gemstone blue, sun-gorged and glittering. From its banks, the trees feather upward in a gentle slope, or sink back to shadowy alcoves. There’s a brutal innocence to the water’s beauty, as if it doesn’t understand its own dangers.
A shadow falls across my lap; Patrick taps on the window.
Following him down the path that winds through the trees, I study his body. We’ve been civil with each other since last night. Polite but distant. Two strangers bound by something bigger than either of us. We slept next to each other without touching. When Patrick’s hand brushed against my arm as he reached for a glass this morning, we pulled apart as if we’d received a shock.
Only two cabins display any signs of life. Crumpled sunscreen bottles on the porch railings, next to the damp neon of draped towels. In a window, the blinds lift in a crooked arc. Each time I think we’re going to stop, Patrick keeps moving. Then I see it. The second cabin from the end of the row. It’s identical to the others, with its A-frame design and the outcrop of the porch. The steps are dusted with pebbles. I veer toward the cabin as if I’ve come here a thousand times, my muscles guided by an automatic impulse.
The Possessions Page 21
