The Possessions

by Sara Flannery Murphy

  It was too painful for me to touch my husband. Together with mine, his body was part of that unfixable equation.

  Even as the oxygen leaked from my blood and water trickled into my lungs, during that one shining, brutal moment when I accepted what was happening, I still didn’t know how to miss my body. I missed the world: warm pavement under bare feet, music fluttering from a passing car, the strange wildness in the air whenever seasons changed. I missed Patrick, the way we were before and the way we should have been. But I didn’t miss my body in the moment that I left it.

  It’s taken all this.

  I’ve come back into different flesh, shocking in its newness. At first, I was only in her for brief stretches of time, confused and sickened. Too much sensation: too much queasy closeness. The wrongness of being so intertwined with a stranger. Words formed with an effort on a huge, wet tongue, thrust out between the heavy stones of her teeth. The frantic pounding of blood in her ears. The maddening awareness of so much skin, itching and throbbing and hurting without relief. I pushed through it. I made myself stay and speak.

  Settling into her skin took time. It was a primal instinct. Blunt, chaotic flashes of being inside her, interspersed with nothingness. Over time, though, I blinked awake more and more fully. I stretched.

  For a long time, she was merely functional. I found myself with a body again and I wanted the simplest second chance. The impulse overrode everything else: to go back to my final moment. To make them see me, this time, when they’d been looking past me for so long. But over time, the vengefulness faded and thinned.

  I wanted more. I wanted to walk through life again. If I miss the people I loved the first time, it’s a forgivable ache. I can’t see them again. But this new body, with all its limitations, has the strange, wild freedom of a second chance.

  I’ve had to learn her. Patient and painstaking, I’ve felt out her boundaries. This time, I can’t ignore the specificity of having a body. It’s always a wonder. An astonishment.

  With her, I view the world from a different vantage point. Everything lower than I remember. I’ve learned to grip objects with hands both finer-boned and longer than my previous ones. Our tongue responds to salty tastes more vividly, dampens sweet flavors: the opposite of my first body. At night, our dreams are bursting with color instead of black and white.

  When we embraced Patrick, our mouth lined up with his. Before, I had to stand on my toes like a child. It was a revelation to be evenly matched with him. Everything in him aligned with everything in me. He turned smaller, easier to understand, and I could forgive him.

  Now.

  Now: he’s gone again. He walked away from her, just like I knew he would. He’s never learned how to look without flinching.

  But I’m here. I’m here, I’m here. I’m in love with the tastes and smells and sensations that cut through the ordinariness of occupying a body, bright shocks. I want to soak everything in. Whenever I feel that darkness edging against her, dulling her brain, muffling her vision, and I know that she wants to escape, I share this wonder with her. This gluttony.

  Want it, I tell her.

  Want everything.

  And she listens.

  FORTY-TWO

  Without anything to interrupt the cold, clean February sunlight, it comes through the bare windows to land in evenly paced squares across the length of the room. I stop just past the entrance. The place is dingy, holding all the stubborn dignity of a home long neglected. But the pure clarity of this room—the white walls, the slanted symmetry of the sunlight along the wooden floorboards—opens up something huge in my chest. I’m alive with the knowledge that I’m making the right choice. Moving into the right future.

  “It’s a quiet street,” the real estate agent says. She’s been hanging back, a vaguely polite presence, asserting herself at just the right moments.

  I turn and smile. “Yes, I noticed that right away.”

  “There’s not much traffic noise. The park we passed gives you some privacy, but you’re only a block or two from the closest neighbors.” She walks deeper into the room, heels clattering. Her shadow makes a swift blot across the sunlit squares. It’s a small disappointment, like the first messy footstep in fresh snow. “It’s a balance between residential amenities and that nice secluded feel,” she says. “My impression is that you want something like that?”

  “That’s exactly what I want,” I say.

  “This home has been on the market for a while,” the agent says. She’s neutral: black dress; short, neat hair; makeup in subdued colors. I can see her getting dressed every day, making sure she’s nonspecific enough to complement whatever space she enters. “It’s one of those unique places that needs just the right person. I have a good feeling about you.”

  The house is old, two stories tall. White paint weathered grayish, like pencil shadings and idle scribbling on the margins of paper. The screened-in porch slightly lopsided, as if it’s sinking gradually into the ground. Trees grow thick and close on one side, so that every east-facing window is cloaked with a lacework of branches.

  I reach out to brush my fingertips along the walls. The layout inside is airy but close at the same time, rooms connected like a half-completed puzzle. Large rooms with unexpected angles and sunken nooks. I flesh out all the details. It wouldn’t need much. Sweep away the ellipses of mouse droppings, repaint the walls, and wash the windows until the glass is cleanly invisible. The house is old enough to feel like a memory, something half remembered from anybody’s childhood. It has a generous quiet: Come in.

  Welcome home.

  “You’re new here, am I remembering correctly?” the agent asks.

  “I moved last week,” I say, gazing out the closest window. Through the layered grime, the view is perfect. A winding street, a tiny public park composed of overgrown shrubbery and a few concrete benches. The closest residence is just a roof’s peak, edging over the treetops. In the warmer weather, with the branches thick with leaves, even this much will be hidden.

  “Ah.” The agent sparkles a smile at me. “New job?”

  “In a way,” I say. “I’m hoping to start my own business.”

  “Oh, an entrepreneur,” she says. “You have family and friends in the area?”

  “Not really,” I say. “But I’m hoping to make connections.” I smile. “As a matter of fact, that’s why I’ll be leaving earlier than we discussed. I’m meeting someone this afternoon.”

  She waits a second for me to elaborate, but I’m silent. “Well, I hope you’re enjoying our town so far,” the agent says, a brisk tamp of a conversation ending. “Now, since we’re pinched for time, I’d like to show you the bedrooms. You’ll be amazed at how much space you’re getting for the asking price. More space than you know what to do with, I imagine.”

  I follow her up the steep, broad staircase, the dark-stained wood dully gleaming in the sunlight. I’m barely listening to her lively stream of details and selling points. She doesn’t need to say anything else; in my head, this house is already mine. Ours. I reach into my coat pocket, my fingers automatically finding the lotus tucked inside.

  I’ve kept the photo from that light-dazzled evening at the park. I used to take Sylvia away and leave only the two of us. Patrick and me. Meeting a decade ago, or more, when we were both scrubbed bare of the future. I’d try to calculate what we might have brought out in each other. What we could have had, while there was still time to become different versions of ourselves.

  But the fantasy was never right. Over time, I came to understand what really would have happened. We would have been vacant and too young, crossing paths without noticing each other. There would be nothing there to latch onto, smooth surfaces slipping past. We met when we were both roughened and torn, our hearts tattered enough to snag on each other’s.

  Even if Patrick thought he loved me for my infinite blankness, there must have been a part of him, hidden even from himself, that responded to our similarities. To the matching trails of destruction we
’d left in our wake. What happened stayed with us, a force that guided my steps to this point.

  To this house. To these movements, like a dreamer’s, under my skin. To Sylvia.

  Sylvia.

  She’s stayed with me. I’ve stayed with her. It’s pointless to untangle us. I’ve stopped questioning which impulses come from me and which come from her.

  There was a while, right after he left, when I thought she’d abandoned me too. I spent my days in an interrogation room, my shell-shocked reflection a blur in the corner of my eye. I talked in rote detail about the Elysian Society. About Mrs. Renard; about Thisbe. The lotuses.

  The words fell like leaves from my mouth, dry and brittle. I was shockingly alone in my skin. Nothing but space. The people who filtered in and out of the interrogation room must have known why I was there. Their casual curiosity wasn’t unkind, but it glanced sharply at my skin. My role at the Elysian Society had been protection for so long. It was disorienting to have it turned against me, my blank mask pulled inside out to reveal a freakish face.

  I tried to apply Sylvia’s lipstick one morning, hoping it would bring a comforting reminder of when the Braddocks were entirely new to me. When my world was lit up and crackling with that strange possibility. But the lipstick had soured, leaking out a smell both soapy and rotten. Eventually, I threw it away.

  She came back the first time I felt movement. It was only a month or so after Patrick had left; the fluttering was a small shock, happening just as I fell into sleep. A brief stirring, outside my control, deep beneath my navel. Half dreaming, I pictured a goldfish swimming. Its fins brushing the sides of the glass. Then I remembered what it really was. It was happening much earlier than last time. My body’s muscle memory waking up, reminding me. And for a second, I panicked.

  I couldn’t do it again. I couldn’t face it. With Patrick, I was so sure I’d changed, but I hadn’t. Not enough. The same impulses would pull me under, leaving no way back.

  In the numb tilting of that moment, I felt her again. Another presence soothing my muscles. My dread dissolving into a sense of quiet as everything opened ahead of me.

  Ahead of us.

  I think about Laura sometimes, transformed into Thisbe, transformed into Hopeful Doe, floating further and further from her own identity. I don’t know how we avoided her fate. It’s easy to imagine Sylvia eating me alive. Fighting me until we merged into emptiness, canceling each other out. My dreams, the first few months, were heavy with these images. My body with Sylvia’s face, discarded in an empty house. I’d wake up cold-skinned and screaming, the room pulsing around me.

  But I’m here. She’s here. There’s a comforting weight to Sylvia’s presence inside me, the empty places in me that she’s filled. The cracks that I used to slip down into, where my body became something depthless and hollow, have turned into sources of warmth. All I have to do is reach for her; when I’m exhausted, Sylvia takes our body and lets me rest.

  By now I wonder how I ever could have lived alone in my skin. It seems like an impossible loneliness.

  We walk out onto the porch. This town has a milder climate than the city I left behind. Though it’s still the middle of winter, the layer of snow on the ground is as thin as a fallen handkerchief, already melting in patches. A flock of birds takes off from a nearby tree, a sudden ink spray swooping across the sky. As the agent fumbles with her overloaded keychain, I look up at the still and quiet rows of windows. Everything just waiting to begin.

  “Will anybody else need to see the house before you make a final decision?” she asks, turning from the door.

  She’s too discreet to lower her gaze, but I bring my hands to my stomach, acknowledging the unspoken for her. “No,” I say. “It’s only us.”

  The movement comes, responding to my touch. A swift kick near my rib cage, followed by a flutter like a trapped moth.

  “Of course,” she says. “I understand.” Then she smiles, coaxing. “It would be the perfect home for a little one,” she says. “So much room to run and grow.”

  “I think so too.”

  “We’ll be in touch, then?” she asks.

  “Definitely,” I say.

  The real estate agent beams. She reaches out to touch my shoulder, her fingers light and familiar. People have been this way since the pregnancy started to show: an easiness with my body. “Well, I admit, I have a soft spot for this house.” Her voice softens to a ruefully confiding tone. “A few prospective buyers have passed it up. You should know how happy it makes me that you’ll be breathing new life into those rooms.”

  I look back once as I drive away, trying to see the house through a stranger’s gaze. The rising white walls, the bare branches etched against one side. The windows that already brim with something close enough to life.

  When the idea came to me, I only wanted to talk to one person. I worked up the nerve to call him the evening before I left the city. I’d been living in a motel room, unable to return to my apartment. Afraid that if I walked back into those rooms as if I still belonged, even for just a day, I’d never leave again. The motel room was small, with upholstery-thick beige drapes that blocked out all light. I could curl in bed and imagine it was any time of the day. That anything was happening outside.

  Six murky, impossible weeks had passed, going too fast and then too slow. Six weeks since Patrick walked away from me. It was very late at night or very early in the morning, and I was groggy, furious, about to tip the bottle of lotuses into the mouth of the toilet. The idea came into my head. It was so simple and complete that I almost laughed.

  I pulled the bottle close to my belly, pressing it tight. Carefully, I looked at the idea again, circling it to gauge its size, its layout. Why not? I thought, and then again, Why not? And each time I knew more surely that I’d do it.

  Lee answered on the second ring. “Edie?” His voice tinged with caution.

  “It’s good to talk to you again,” I’d said.

  “I didn’t think—” He stopped, and in the small stretch of silence I heard him sitting down. “When I gave you this number, I didn’t think I’d hear from you,” Lee said. “You’re doing well?”

  “Yes,” I said. “I’m doing fine.”

  “You’re with him.” A statement.

  I was about to say that I was living alone, but the untruth of this struck me. “No,” I said simply. “I’m not with Patrick anymore. We parted ways.”

  “I see,” Lee said. He hesitated. “Well, I’ve been thinking about you,” he said. “I’ve been hoping you’re all right. I should have come forward, but I was—”

  “It wasn’t so bad,” I said. “The authorities did what they could. There wasn’t any reason to get more innocent people involved.”

  “They treated you all right?”

  “They were kind enough,” I said.

  “It was brave of you, to try and help Thisbe,” Lee said. “It’s still hard to believe what happened, but I should have suspected something. We all should have.” He paused. “You don’t know what happened to Renard?”

  Mrs. Renard vanished not long after my call to Detective Rogalski. She slipped away quietly. The Elysian Society building locked up tight one morning. It was as if she’d always had one foot outside her own life, merely waiting for the signal to run into the next one.

  A few weeks after the police told me I couldn’t be any more use to them, I let my curiosity overtake me. I drove past the Elysian Society building. It had already started to fade into the same gentle disrepair as the other buildings in the neighborhood; it felt as if Mrs. Renard had provided all the building’s weight and vitality, and without her at its core, the whole structure deflated inward. I thought of my clients. Tried to imagine where they were, scattered across the city, their grief once again hot and fresh.

  “She didn’t say a word to me before she left,” I said to Lee. “She’s out there somewhere.”

  We were quiet, considering this.

  “Do you miss it?” I asked.

&
nbsp; “In a way,” he said. “Within a week of leaving—less—it didn’t seem real. There are those things you do that always make sense. But something like that, the moment you leave, you look back and it doesn’t seem possible.”

  I sat on the edge of the motel bed. “Lee,” I said, and I told him. Clutching the bottle of lotuses to my heart, I told him. Of everyone I knew, even Ana, he was the only one who’d understand what it could mean. What was at stake: both the promise and the dangers.

  Lee listened, his silence an attentive presence on the other end. “I’m not sure, Edie,” he’d said after I finished. “You think it’s wise? Maybe it’s time for the Elysian Society to end. You have other talents, you could—”

  “I’ll be different,” I said, cutting him off. The calm was so deep and clean and cool that I never wanted to leave it. “It won’t be the same place. I’ll make it more personal. Fewer rules. Better rules. Mrs. Renard lost sight of what the Elysian Society meant at its simplest level.”

  “Which is?”

  “Connection,” I said.

  He didn’t answer, but Lee’s silence had turned yielding. I’d cracked the motel’s heavy drapes, and the headlights of a car in the parking lot slid along the wall. They landed in two glowing spots on the wall, shining like an animal’s pupils, before snapping off.

  “I’ve saved money for years,” I said. “There was never anything I wanted to spend it on. And I have nothing in the world but time.” Across from the bed, in the broad mirror that spanned all sides of the motel sink, my reflection was faceted like a diamond.

  “You’d continue to work as a body yourself?” he asked.

  “No, I’m done with that,” I said. “If I’m honest, it’s time to move on from that side of things. I’ll run the place. I can offer the bodies and the clients something Mrs. Renard couldn’t. I know exactly what it is to be a body.”