The Possessions

by Sara Flannery Murphy

  Quickly, I pull my hand away. “I need to go.”

  THIRTY-THREE

  I’m glad you came tonight,” Patrick says, shifting against me. “I wasn’t sure you would. After.”

  “I wanted to come.”

  Laughter rises in a fluttering peak from outside. Patrick’s neighbors are hosting a party; I noticed it when I parked. The burn of paper lanterns, the hum and jumble of voices.

  It seems like an event that the Braddocks might have attended as a couple, walking over arm in arm. All charming smiles, light jokes about how long the journey took, stuck in traffic. For a wistful moment, I wanted to join the party. I wanted to slide into my green dress and wrap my throat in jewelry, feel Patrick’s hand at the curve of my waist. All those eyes registering us together, their idle curiosity as they examined Sylvia’s replacement.

  We lie in bed alone now, beneath a canopy of fractured, colorful light from the lanterns outside, splayed at an angle across the ceiling. When a breeze blows outside, the gem-bright blobs shift and wobble.

  “I’d understand if you hated me,” Patrick says. “Knowing what you do.”

  My heart squeezes. “I don’t hate you, Patrick.”

  “It’s weighed on me.” He continues as if he didn’t hear. “This wall between me and other people. I can’t get close without imagining what they’d think if they’d heard me say those things.”

  “You didn’t mean any of it,” I say. “It’s what you said in the moment. A terrible moment. It doesn’t define everything that came before it.”

  Patrick’s silence is restless, tinged with doubtfulness.

  “Can I ask you something?”

  He stirs and smiles, half distracted. “Yeah, yeah, of course.”

  “Have you forgiven Sylvia?”

  He lifts himself up on his elbows, staring down at me. “For what?” he asks. “For Henry? Or for leaving me the way she did?”

  “Either,” I say. “Both.”

  He lies back down with an impatient gesture, flinging his arm across the pillows. “For a long time,” Patrick says, “I was obsessed with her forgiveness. I thought I’d make it up to her and move on. But—I wonder. If I’d said those things, that night, and Sylvia had woken up the next morning, would I have forgiven her for what she did? Maybe I only forgave her to bring her back.”

  I make myself face the thought calmly, the one that’s been strung through my brain since I learned about Henry. It’s possible that I’ve never been in love with Patrick. My heart is so plain and foolish that it only wants what someone else has. I’m attracted to desire itself, not the human that lies beneath. Even someone else’s borrowed lust will do. And now Sylvia’s love for her husband has diminished, leaving me alone.

  But even his smallest detail, the dark knot of a mole near the base of his throat, opens desire in me.

  “What you want—” I stop to collect my thoughts. “What you want is a chance to fall in love again. On your own terms. Without the past hanging over you, without those mistakes.”

  “Isn’t that what everyone wants?” He speaks quietly, ruefully. He has no idea, yet, just how weighted this moment is.

  “Patrick, I can bring Sylvia back for a longer period of time,” I say. “You could spend more time with her. Not just a few minutes at a time, but every day. The way you used to be.”

  Next to me in the bed, I can sense his body grow tense.

  “If that’s what you want,” I add, when he doesn’t speak.

  “I don’t understand.” Patrick’s careful as a man negotiating with a gun to his temple. “Bring her back for good?”

  “Not permanently, but for a while. A month,” I say. “Longer. Enough so that you’ll have her with you again, uninterrupted. You can hold her at night. Wake up to her in the morning. Do the things you thought you’d missed.”

  “But you’d be taking hours off your life,” he says. “Weeks. Months, maybe. I don’t understand why you’d do this.”

  “Because I know what it’s like,” I say. “I know what it’s like to lose somebody you love. You lose all the possibilities that went with that person.”

  From outside, a voice crests suddenly above the mutter and drone of the partygoers. The voice has a desperate joviality, as if the speaker has been trying for too long to make this point and has only one chance: The heart wants what it wants.

  “How would you know that?” Patrick asks.

  “What?”

  “How could you know what it’s like to lose somebody?” He’s mildly confused, as if I’ve made a tiny clerical error. Misspelled my name, recited the wrong digit in my birth date.

  I can’t answer. I’ve been so meticulous. So constantly careful that the carefulness itself has turned invisible, as if I’ve never known anything but caution. As if I was born hiding. And now I’ve spilled the dark core of myself as casually as I might tip over a glass. It’s such a clumsy mistake that it seems to stem from someone else.

  “Because of my clients,” I say. “I’ve been surrounded by death for five years now.”

  To my relief, he nods. I let myself relax again. In his eyes, this indiscretion must scarcely matter, overshadowed by the main point.

  “If I can give that to you and Sylvia, then I will.” I turn to him. “I’ll be happy to.”

  On the ceiling above him, a red light pulses and shivers. A woman’s laugh exhales through the room like a breeze.

  “Will you think about it, at least?” I ask.

  “Yes,” he says. “I’ll think about it.”

  THIRTY-FOUR

  I know just when to go to him. The time of day when he’s left unguarded. Late Friday afternoon, the sky piled with distended, bruise-dark clouds. I park down the block and walk to their home. Approaching, I notice that the stroller is gone from its usual spot next to the door. The driveway is empty. A dog barks nearby, over and over.

  Instead of Lucy Woods’s muted costume or my Elysian Society uniform, I’ve chosen a tight black dress. The backless design is webbed with delicate straps. Sylvia’s lipstick coats my mouth.

  I ring the doorbell. Muffled music throbs from inside the house, the bass line cut through with an angry, slurring voice. I ring again. After a second, the sound drops off abruptly. Footsteps approach; the door swings open.

  He’s been expecting a sales pitch, a nosy neighbor. He’s smiling too politely, hands curled into fists on his hips. Beleaguered as he stands in the doorway. When he recognizes me, he stiffens.

  “Can I come in?” I ask.

  “Viv isn’t here right now,” he says.

  “That’s fine,” I say. “I need to speak to you.”

  Behind him, the spidery coat rack dangles with objects. Ben’s puffy blue coat, a crisp sun hat, an umbrella printed to resemble a frog. A colorful foliage of grocery flyers spread near the mail slot. It’s a sweet, simple backdrop. Inside this space, Henry feels all wrong.

  “I told you to stay away from us,” he says.

  “It’s about Sylvia.”

  He’s quiet for a beat too long, as if purposefully suppressing any reaction to my mention of her. “Frankly, I don’t have anything to say to you about Sylvia Braddock.” I note his formality in using her last name. “And I don’t have time to—”

  “I was at the lake.”

  He looks around quickly, an instinctive check to see if anybody has overheard. We’re alone; the neighboring houses are quiet except for the relentless staccato of the barking.

  “Just come inside,” he says.

  I pass close enough to catch the musk of his deodorant. Henry closes the door behind me. Without speaking, he guides me to the dining room, where he hovers near the doorway, creating the impression that he’s on the brink of leaving. As if this is my house, and he’s a nervous visitor. I sit in one of the dining chairs. A bowl of cereal is on the tabletop, pinkish rings ballooned and crumbling inside a pool of milk.

  “How is your family these days?” I ask.

  He laughs. “Seriously?” Th
en he squares his shoulders back, playing along. “My wife’s fine,” he says, showily polite. “The baby’s fine. Everyone’s doing quite well.”

  “I’m glad to hear it,” I say.

  His exaggerated smile drops away, revealing his tension. “Let’s get to the point,” Henry says. “Get this over with.”

  “I need to know about your relationship with Sylvia Braddock.”

  “She was a friend.” Fast and casual: rehearsed. He was anticipating this. “A family friend. You knew that.”

  “That’s what you’ve told me so far, yes,” I agree.

  Henry shifts his balance on his feet. “You’re not a PI or something, are you? All your questions. You need one of those lights.” He opens his fist toward me, the flung fingers suggesting the probing rays of an interrogation light.

  “Henry, I know,” I say. “You don’t have to hide it anymore.”

  He stares.

  “You can tell me what happened between you and Sylvia,” I say. “It can’t hurt you now.”

  Maybe it’s my years at the Elysian Society that give my voice the right weight, the coaxing pressure of a truth serum. Henry seems almost relieved. It occurs to me that he hasn’t been able to talk about this with anyone else.

  “Start at the beginning,” I say.

  “We met through Patrick,” he says. “We clicked, but we were only friends at first. The Braddocks had been married for years. They treated me like a younger brother. A bachelor. Nothing happened. Flirting, maybe. Innocent stuff. She was being nice to a guy without a date.

  “Things started about three years back. Right after I started dating Viv. I know how that sounds. It wasn’t on purpose, not on my end. Sylvia introduced me to Viv. And Viv’s great, we got along immediately. But it was like seeing me with another woman clarified things for Sylvia. She had to see me with somebody else before she knew she wanted me. Her attention was flattering,” he says. “Flattering as hell. You’ve seen her, right?”

  “I’ve seen her.”

  “Lake Madeleine was her idea. Far enough away that nobody would recognize us. We made excuses. Work trips, weekends with friends. Sylvia almost wanted to be caught,” he says. “She was sloppy. We took photos. Again, her idea. Polaroids. I was always terrified that one of them would find its way into the wrong hands, even though she kept hold of them. She’d destroy most of them right in front of me, on the day we left. Nothing was real for her until she saw a picture of it. The reverse of how it should be.”

  Outside, the dog continues to bark at an even pace, a machine producing an automated noise. The smell in the dining room—sharp basil, sickly tomato—lingers from last night’s dinner. I think of the two remnants of their time at the lake that have survived without Henry’s knowledge.

  “Things with Viv got serious,” Henry says. “We got married after a year or so and made it official. I couldn’t live a double life. I’d seen inside someone else’s marriage and I wanted it for myself. The real thing. Not borrowing theirs.”

  A hard flutter of outrage. I’m not sure on whose behalf.

  “I tried to break things off,” Henry says. “Sylvia kept saying she was already married, why should it stop me? Was my marriage more important than hers?” He runs a hand through his hair. “It all feels like something other people did. Strangers.”

  The contrition in his voice is too pointed. Carefully engineered to sound authentic, but with a prodding note underneath: Henry looking around to be noticed, to be admired.

  “And then the baby,” I say, refusing to rise to this.

  “The baby.” He hesitates; when he speaks again, his voice has cooled. “The baby changed things. I stopped answering her calls, stopped seeing her. And I planned a weekend with Viv at the lake. I wanted to send a message to Sylvia.”

  “She followed you,” I say. “With Patrick.”

  “Only fair.” Henry’s quick smile is uncannily detached as a sawed-off limb. “She was out for blood. She was all over us the whole weekend. It drove me crazy. Patrick was useless. I ended up alone with Sylvia and my wife, pretending everything was normal.”

  I’ve barely eaten today. My stomach and head are scooped out with hunger.

  “Viv announced the pregnancy to Sylvia,” he says. “That wasn’t part of my plan. We’d only known ourselves for a couple of weeks. We came back, Viv went to sleep. She was still adjusting to the pregnancy. She slept like the dead. Thank God. She didn’t have to know when the two of them came pounding on the door, trying to drag me into their fight.”

  “Their fight,” I repeat.

  Henry must catch my subtle emphasis on the first word. His mouth twitches. “I stayed out of it,” he says. “It wasn’t my battle. I couldn’t step in and fix a relationship with that many problems. They seemed fine, but talking to her, I realized how much they’d been hiding. I couldn’t take that on. I had my own life.” A pause. “I have my own life.”

  I glance around. A framed photograph of infant Ben, his body curled tight as a bud. Viv’s discarded sandals, the foot beds darkened, tossed carelessly near the doorway. This is what required Sylvia’s absence: the suffocating enchantment of ordinary life.

  “Why didn’t you follow her?” I ask.

  He knows what I mean at once. He runs both hands over his face. “Following Sylvia would have sent the wrong message. I would have been pulled right back into it.”

  Dark water spreading around my waist, expanding outward in shimmering circlets, ringed by moonlight.

  “Every day, I’ve thought about her out there,” he says. “Alone. Waiting for somebody to follow her. But I had no idea. You have to believe me. I had no idea what she’d do.”

  A warning at the back of my head, too small and swift for me to fully examine its implications. “But it worked out for you, didn’t it?” I ask instead. “If Sylvia had woken up the next day, you would have always worried that she’d expose you. She might have told Viv or mentioned it to a friend. With her gone, you don’t have to worry.”

  Henry watches me, eyes cloaked.

  “A while back, you told me Patrick was unfaithful to Sylvia,” I say abruptly.

  He shrugs.

  “You lied to me.”

  He seems annoyed by this sudden change of topic. “It doesn’t matter anymore.”

  “It’s the lie you’ve been telling yourself, isn’t it?” I’m so calm I sound almost sweet. “Telling anyone who will listen. It’s not enough for you to destroy them and get away with it. You also have to get rid of your guilt. You have to shift it to Patrick.”

  We stare at each other. My gaze is twice as dense as his. It’s the unevenness of a roomful of people staring at one subject. He must sense it too; he breaks eye contact to look at the floor.

  “What do you want me to do about it?” he asks, rough and low. “Sylvia wouldn’t want me to ruin my life. She knew what family meant to me.” The dog falls suddenly silent outside. “Patrick doesn’t have anything to lose,” Henry goes on, voice louder in the emptiness around us. “Nobody knows why he’s still here. No friends. No attachments. He should have left by now. He’s dead weight at the firm, doing work that should go to teenage interns. I’d leave if I were him. I’m the one with a life to protect.”

  I laugh. The sound startles both of us.

  “Are you going to tell me who you are?” Henry asks, hostile now. “You come into my home. You’re stalking my family. For what? To find out I cheated?”

  I lick my lips, catching the slight sharp taste of the lipstick.

  “Now you know,” Henry says. “You know what I did, you know that it’s over. Whatever you’re doing, you can move on.”

  There’s the sound of the car in the driveway. Tires crackling against the pavement, the hum of the engine that cuts to silence. A door swinging open.

  “They’re home,” he says. Then Henry moves toward me roughly, as if he’s chasing away a wild animal. “They can’t see you here.” He grabs my elbow, pulling me to my feet.

  The car
door slams. A second later, a creak as another door opens. I picture Viv leaning over the car seat, murmuring to her son as she unbuckles Ben and lifts him free.

  Henry’s hand is a hard knot at the small of my back, guiding me to the kitchen. A door stands at the end of a small hallway. I shake Henry off, turn to face him. His expression is fist-tight with tension, eyes wet and harsh. Our bodies are so close that I feel the heat rising off him.

  “Maybe they should see me here,” I say pleasantly. “How much have you told her?”

  “Don’t do this,” he says.

  The sound of footsteps up the stairs. Viv’s muffled voice, singing, talking to the baby.

  I study Henry. The close-cropped beard; the startling fullness of his mouth; the clear, shallow brown of his eyes, like weak coffee. Sylvia must have gazed into this face with love.

  The click and jingle of keys in the front door.

  “Go,” he says. “Please.”

  I step so close that we meet, grazing at the hips and the chest. Henry grows still, breath suspended. We listen to the door swinging open, the flat thump of heavy bags dropped on the floor. “Anybody home?” Viv calls.

  I slide my hand down his body. Down his stomach, past his waist. I press my hand against him and feel him stir in response. Henry grabs my waist, pulling me closer with the urgency of a man inside a dream. Her name is caught at the very tip of his tongue.

  Viv’s footsteps come through the living room, bright and clacking against the floors.

  I step back from Viv’s husband, slipping out the door. I’m down the back stairs; I’m walking through the gate, not securing it behind me, so that it clacks and bounces against the side of the house; I’m going down the driveway, past Viv’s sedan. I don’t care, right now, if Viv looks out and sees the rude shock of the past, brushing right up against her future.