The Tenth Girl

by Sara Faring

  Lamb toasts us a third time in his excitement. “And none of this would be possible without Domenico,” he adds.

  “Sorry?” I say, choking on my tea. “You can’t be serious.” We haven’t spoken since that unsettling moment in the family-quarters hall.

  “Why of course I’m serious, my dear. Who do you think carried down the picnic baskets? These old bones? I thought he was fishing for an invitation.”

  Yesi looks at me. “It’s a good thing you refused him one, Lamb.”

  Lamb nods, a far-off look in his eyes. “Oh well. I didn’t think it would be appropriate with the girls around. He still smells of…” He stops himself, eyes widening at the girls, whose ears prick up. “He still carries on a friendship with Mary, err, Jane.”

  Mariella sneers. “You can say he was smoking dope. We’re not idiots.”

  “We’re old souls,” adds Gisella.

  * * *

  The first time Domenico speaks to me alone, I flinch, expecting a cutting insult to come from his marble-sculpted lips. He finds me in a musty sitting room, alone, warming myself by the fire—the weather has already taken an even brisker turn—and reading while Yesi works, undisturbed, on her manuscript in our library. I call this sitting room the deer room because a large stag head stares down on those seated inside. Its only other defining feature is a hideous wooden armoire as tall as Morency, covered in colonial imitations of tribal carvings.

  “Can I come in?” he asks, giving me a passing glance before scanning the bookshelves for God knows what. “I need to check the room for something.”

  He never struck me as the kind of person who cared whether he was intruding.

  “You’re looking for something,” I say automatically, unable to shut my mouth for a single moment.

  “Yes.” He steps forward, and there’s a jerkiness to his movements, like he’s a dog shaking off invisible fleas. I attribute it to withdrawal from the unknown substance, and I wonder if he’s concealed an old stash of smoking supplies here. I wait, watching him as he moves through the room, muscles rippling beneath his fine white linen shirt. My heartbeat could break my ribs, and I only pray it isn’t audible to him.

  Unsatisfied with his search, he turns and catches me staring. “Mind if I sit?”

  It feels like a ruse. An abstruse one. But who am I to deny a master of the house? “Be my guest.”

  He sits—lowers himself—into the tufted chair beside me, and I notice with surprise that his eyes look clear and full. “What do you think of Vaccaro School?”

  I choke on air. Small talk? Well, he’s certainly warmed to me since the first days of commenting on my diet. Since he did—or didn’t—warn me against pursuing him in that hallway. I didn’t know he was genetically capable of polite small talk.

  “Are you serious?” Not that I am capable of it, either.

  He chuckles, sapphire-blue eyes shining. Their warmth and vibrancy concern me. “I’m serious. Be honest.”

  Because now is such a prime opportunity for candor.

  “Come on.” He folds his arms across his chest and leans back. “The grittier the better.”

  “I like the girls,” I say tentatively. “The students.”

  “Okay.” His eyes drift, and it’s a terrible drifting that some stupid adolescent piece of me wants to stop at all costs.

  “But sometimes I struggle to comprehend the bigger picture.”

  And he blinks to attention. I tell myself it is harmless to address the history of the house. To address why it is back in existence. That it’s not a dangerous excuse to keep him here, because just thinking those words keep him here makes me feel queasy and pathetic.

  He leans into me, shoulders straining beneath his shirt. “The bigger picture?”

  “Yes. Why your mother—why Madame De Vaccaro—is trying to bring this school back now.”

  He looks into the crackling fireplace, silent. I rub the chair’s upholstered buttons beneath my fingers, dreading his reply. How brilliant of me to criticize his mother’s actions. And to ask why now. When now is a time so soon after his own sister has died. When now is a time fraught with danger, even if we don’t feel it on this isolated rock.

  “Have you felt something dark here?” he asks. “Something sinister?”

  A shiver chases wicked thoughts down my spine. I remember my many nightmares, my sinking dread every time I must tuck myself into bed for another night’s unrest. Could someone like Domenico De Vaccaro have felt that same inexplicable fear? I think of what he said that night by his doorway, and I’m suddenly overcome by a powerful urge to stop him from falling back down into that melancholy pit. I’m afraid of what he might say—I’m afraid he might become the man he was before this strange and new conversation of ours.

  “That’s not what I meant,” I say carefully. “It’s just that it’s so isolated, and the group of girls is so small. It can’t make much economic sense. It’s not to say I’m not impressed that your mother wants to preserve your family heritage.”

  He sighs, sits back in his chair. “Well, there’s also sort of this Walden Pond component to it all. You know, isolating these special kids from the world at large, which is oversaturated, overwhelming, and bringing them somewhere quiet and peaceful to learn, plain and simple. There’s something nice about that. Especially since these kids aren’t really their parents’ top priority. I don’t know—it’s a wholesome learning experience I wish I’d had. It wasn’t this way where I grew up.”

  I widen my eyes at his sudden loquaciousness. “Paris?”

  He looks away. “I guess what I mean is, when you have a fractured family as a kid, it’s nice to pretend you could develop a second family at a school like this.”

  His sudden vulnerability sends a shiver of a different kind down my arms; it blooms into something hot in the pit of my stomach. “I’m sorry about your family,” I say, unsure of how else to reply. I think of his lost sister, his lost father. “I lost my own mother recently.”

  “Yeah. Well. Losing a parent when you’re young sort of feels like losing a leg and then learning to live with the limp,” he says, shrugging. “You’re never quite like the others, and they know it. You can definitely be happy. But in a sense it’s always there. The space where a leg should’ve been.” A wry smile. “You get it.”

  I do. “I didn’t take you to be such a philosopher king.”

  He chuckles. “I’m definitely not. I guess you brought it out of me.” He glances at me quickly, then looks away again. “Everyone craves an experience at a place like this, removed from the world, where it almost seems as if no bad can happen, at least once in their lives,” he adds. “No opportunity for loss. No distractions. I don’t know. Maybe I’m wrong.”

  “Plenty of distractions,” I say before he catches my eye and my mouth slides shut.

  “What?”

  Argh. I look at the stuffed deer head with untoward interest.

  “It’s nice to talk to someone,” he says.

  “I thought it wasn’t allowed.”

  His brow furrows.

  “Um, your mother? Madame De Vaccaro. She said it wasn’t allowed. Fraternizing.” I sound like an idiot. “Not that I care one way or the other,” I add, tugging on my hair.

  “Fraternizing sounds awful anyway,” he says nonchalantly, coming to his feet and winking at me. “I’m sure we can come up with better things to do.”

  I bite back a smile.

  I return to the deer room the next day, wondering if he’ll be lured there by the same curiosity I feel. Sneaking through the corridors, I burst into the room. I find it empty. My shoulders sag as the deer head stares down at me judgmentally. I settle into the leather armchair Dom occupied last night, and that’s when I notice freshly chopped wood piled beside the fireplace. Someone’s been in since we were here.

  The doorknob rattles, and the door creaks open. I see a foot encased in a pebbled leather navy loafer first.

  Dom follows, fighting a grin when he sees me.

/>   “I was about to lay a fire,” he says as I blush rose red. “Join me?”

  Like clockwork, he meets me in the deer room every day to talk about an unpredictable range of topics, with a genuine curiosity and teasing humor I warm to immediately, as well as an accent I can’t quite place but decide is an upper-class quirk. This newly sober Domenico loves listening to songs I’ve never heard (he teaches me one called “Space Oddity”), eating exotic dishes I’ve never tasted (he promises to try to cook a chicken dish from India for me), and using technology I can’t begin to comprehend (what is an “eye pod”? I dare not ask again). We move our chairs closer and closer as the days pass. One day, I lock the door behind us with a delicate click. Another, I kneel alongside him to light the fire, the sides of our bodies mere centimeters apart. He smells like soap and fresh-cut grass, I think, just as he says: “You smell like facturas.”

  My mouth twitches as I wonder whether it’s a bizarre compliment or a veiled insult: It serves me right for smelling him. I should glimpse into his eyes to check, but I know looking into them will lead me to liking him a bit too much, so I refocus on the firewood. “I don’t smell it. But I suppose thanks are in order,” I say drily. “Fresh facturas are the number one Argentine comfort smell, aren’t they?”

  I can feel his cheeks rise in a smile—that’s how close we are. “Is there a ranking for comfort smells?”

  My heart flutters, a butterfly I wish I could forcibly pin down. “Why shouldn’t there be? You’re not a real person if you’ve never had one. My comfort smell is wet pavement.”

  He lights the match. “Hmm. I thought most people pick gasoline or ink if they go the inedible industrial-supplies route. Why wet pavement?”

  I settle back onto my heels. “During the summer, my mother used to wake me up at six in the morning so we could walk the streets to get the first steaming batch of—well—facturas from the bakery. We used to pass all the porteros washing down the sidewalks, and there would be this smell wafting up from the wet pavement. I can’t explain it. It’s chemical and dirtlike and sweet with this secret layer of old garbage. That was my comfort smell.” I grin as the fire catches. “Everything delicious has to be slightly corrupted to qualify as delicious.”

  We watch as the fire crackles to life, the edges of our fingers almost touching.

  He turns toward me, fixing his blue eyes on me. “What do I smell like?”

  “Fresh grass,” I whisper before I can stop myself.

  We meet eyes, and lightning strikes the top of my head, trickling warm down my shoulders, arms, hands, fingers.

  But then he bursts out in a laugh, the heartfelt kind of laugh you’d want to hear every day of your whole life if you could, and he stands. “Because of the weed? Thanks.”

  “No!” My face pales, but I quickly recover and start laughing, too. Relief rushes over me like I’ve plunged into a refreshing lake during a hot summer: The tension is broken.

  I settle back into my chair, tingling, and it’s in that moment of silence that I hear footsteps outside. Dom and I lock eyes, mine wide. Have we been too loud? How could I expect this to continue with me unnoticed?

  The doorknob rattles, and a dreaded voice calls, “Who has locked this door?”

  The relief turns to icy panic: Morency. Dom silently points at the large armoire in the corner of the room, and we both rise to our feet.

  “It’s just me. Domenico,” he shouts back.

  “Open this door immediately.”

  He opens the armoire door with the slightest creak and helps me climb inside its cramped quarters. Sorry, he mouths, before shutting me in. He turns the key in the lock.

  I huddle there, in the pitch-darkness, my heart slamming against my ribs, as he unlocks the door and Morency rushes inside. I could shrivel up and die as I silently inhale the ancient wood smell—coffin-like.

  “Why have you locked this door? What kinds of iniquitous dealings have you brought into this house?”

  Despite the terror coursing through my body hot as bubbling oil, I bite my lip to stop from grinning at the absurdity of her accusation.

  “Iniquitous dealings?” he repeats. “I’m reading alone, Ms. Morency.” I hear fingers tapping a book. “I just didn’t want any meddling kids barging in here.”

  “I don’t believe you.” She stalks around the room, and I hold my breath, rivulets of sweat snaking down my neck. She sniffs the air, so close to the armoire. I pray to God I don’t smell like facturas right now.

  “Have you been … smoking cannabis in here?” she spits.

  “No, Ms. Morency.” I hear the soft crinkling of leather. “I swear.”

  “If you are lying to me,” she says, “I will ensure your weekly shipments on the supply boat stop at once.”

  I take a slow breath in.

  “I’m not lying, Ms. Morency,” he says.

  Silence. I fear my chest will burst, my blood pumps so hard.

  “Master Domenico,” she says, her voice closer to me than ever. “Your armoire is breathing.”

  I press myself farther back and shut my eyes, as if that will help me disappear, when I know that I will be discovered if she opens the armoire door.

  “That’s ridiculous—” Dom says as the doors of the armoire shake, locked, and my entire body clenches.

  The shaking intensifies.

  “You really shouldn’t break that, you know,” Dom says. “That’s the only piece of furniture my ancestors brought from the old country. It’s real Corinthian oak. My mother doesn’t want it opened, and she’ll be very upset if you damage the paneling.”

  The shaking stops.

  I hear nothing, but I imagine Morency’s lips setting in an angry line. Then a girl’s voice shouts in another part of the house, audible even inside the confines of the armoire.

  “I have my eye on you,” Morency hisses before I hear the rustling of her skirts as she leaves to chastise another member of the house.

  I exhale, rubbing at my eyes. A minute later, I hear the room door closing and Domenico fiddling with the key to the armoire. At first, the door won’t budge, so I press my weight onto it to help push it open. At last, it bursts open, and I fall into him, collapsing against his warm chest. He holds me up, and I can feel his heart beating, almost as fast as mine. I don’t want to move, until I remember myself.

  “Real Corinthian oak?” I croak.

  And he stifles a laugh, which I also instinctively muffle with my hands, until that same pleasurable shock rolls through me as my hands touch his lips. I flinch away, my blush penetrating even my toes, now, I’m sure of it.

  “What?” he whispers, smiling.

  Who are you, Domenico? Why are you good now? I want to ask. Why do you act like an entirely new person? But it is a mystery I shall have to investigate in secret.

  By the next afternoon, we switch to a new sitting room, hidden in a remote corner of the house and untouched in years by anyone but us two.

  * * *

  As for the girls and myself: Their advanced intermediate English level means that they can almost appreciate Holden Caulfield—or suffice it to say that his exploits hardly even scandalize them. They are brilliant—unnervingly so. I understand Yesi’s early description of special. In that monstrous cliché of young teachers, I’m ashamed to admit that I learn almost as much from them as they do me.

  But it is not easy to feel a rapport with them. I cannot stop myself from thinking, class after class, that they are entitled brats—lucky little girls receiving a (purportedly) world-class education over the ice, with no idea of the expense nor the amount we all must cater to them. And to make matters worse, they lie—yes, lie—like their lives depend on it, weaving together the most inane stories to derail any and every lesson.

  One morning, Silvina drapes her charm-bedecked wrists atop the table and tells the class she cannot focus because she went to sleep with her hair loose and woke up with a fishtail braid.

  “I felt tiny hands on me,” she says as the attention of t
he class falls on her blushing roommate. You’d think the gorgeous fishtail braid was the black plague from her tone. Is your braid disrupting the flow of blood to your brain? I want to ask.

  Another day, a sullen Luciana, who has remained mute for days despite my gentle encouragement, informs the class that God is punishing her by leaving red finger marks on her forehead as she sleeps. I examine her forehead for any sign of irritation. “Could they not be pimples?” I ask her, at which point she grimaces and replies, with utter disdain, that “an impoverished backcountry orphan like you, Miss Quercia, cannot understand someone of different stock like me, but that is not your fault—God made us all different for a reason.”

  Well. I had to stop myself from laughing aloud. Whatever gave her the impression I was a poor orphan, I can’t know (good on her, though), but that was enough to goad me into replying, “And God and skin-care products help those who help themselves, Luciana,” in a tone that might have been altogether too cutting for the average weekday morning.

  On another day, Morency bulrushes me outside and hands me an envelope. Just as I believe she’s serving me with the terms of my resignation for God-knows-what-offense, she tells me, “To include in your evening reading.” But, of course, I don’t wait until the evening, and I tear the envelope open before lunch, neck prickling.

  Ten files—nine full and one blank. The girls’ files, describing their backgrounds, their family situations—packed full of salacious details. Why would Morency give these to me now? If it is because I asked about the tenth student at our first dinner, why would she furnish me with an empty tenth file?

  I piece together their stories as best as I can. They are special, these girls, albeit not in the ways I believed. Some of the details are unreadable, appalling, disgusting, and I nearly allow my eyes to race past the worst. I’m not easily disturbed, but even so, I feel my heart slamming around my chest like a trapped and frantic bird as I slow down to absorb the lurid details.