by Emily Beyda
“Babe,” he says, and he stops. There is nothing left for him to say. I look into his eyes. He doesn’t believe me. He probably never will. But he will be too ashamed to say anything about it ever again. He knows now how it sounds. He knows he is a stranger in the world that will never acknowledge what he knows indisputably to be true. He moves across the room and stands silently behind Eleanor, not touching her, not saying anything at all. Together, they look out to where the moon peeks from the clouds, silent, over the sea.
* * *
—
In the car outside, Max is waiting, his eyes scooped hollow by the light of the phone. He has called a car for the blond man, who has disappeared into the darkness of the driveway, waiting. The wind has died down. He will be comfortable until it arrives.
“You were right,” I say. “What a waste of time. And they don’t know a thing about Rosanna that we don’t. Not a thing.”
Beside the empty highway, the moon continues its slow set over the sea. I look away so I won’t have to see the vulnerability of relief breaking on his face. Inside me, still, that powerful thrum, that urge to touch someone the way Rosanna touched Leo. I am so lonesome in my new body. It has been so long since I was touched.
“I do need to tell you something, though,” I say. “She was definitely sleeping with him. Not just once, either. She had been sleeping with him for a long, long time. You should tell her he’s angry, if that’s something you think she’d want to know. You should tell her he probably still loves her. Just in case she’s wondering. Just in case she loves him, too.”
We drive in silence to the hills, to the apartment. I know I should feel panicked. The worst has happened, and worse, perhaps, is to come. Leo could still tell everyone. He could convince Eleanor. The blond man could sell a tell-all, “My Strange Night with the Stars,” earn a little money, boost his notoriety enough to get a part in a daytime soap. But I am strangely calm. I have his number, can buy time by leading him on until the evidence of our time together has faded and no one believes him, either.
I am as tense as a clenched fist, vibrating with desire. When the car pulls up to the curb, I reach out and hold Max’s hand in mine. Soft. Warm. The close tenderness of him. I want to wipe that blank sadness off his face.
“Will you tell her?” I ask, more for the sake of distraction than anything else. “We don’t know how she feels about him. Maybe she’s still waiting for Leo. Maybe, for some reason, she loves him, too.”
Max nods. He nods again, again, not saying a word, and then his whole body is shaking and he is sobbing silently, folded over the wheel in a posture of hopeless defeat. I lean over and pull him into my arms. That same strange feeling. More, I think, more. I don’t understand why he’s crying. But I can still try to fix it, still make him feel better. Like Rosanna would.
“Come upstairs,” I say. “Just for a second. Let me take care of you.”
He nods again, a gesture that could be agreement or just another shuddering sob. I walk to his side of the car and open the door. I help him out, his body a wet bag of sand holding back a flood, heavy and limp, an object in my arms.
In my room, I lay him down on the futon. He remains curled up, and I lie beside him, hold him in my arms. His whole body is shaking. He feels small, smaller than me, impossibly tender and little and young. I love him, I think. I was wrong. I don’t resent him, I love him. I love him so much I can hardly stand it, I love him so much that it lives inside of me like a hurt, an ache, an urgent and parasitic desire. That’s all. I lean in close and bring my lips to his cheek, the skin hot. I lick away one tear, another, the salty, bitter taste, bringing him into me, his body mine, my body ours, and he tilts his face up slightly and his lips are on my lips, his tongue on my tongue, that same burned, bitter taste of cigarettes and must, that same impossible tenderness, that urgency, his hands, calloused thumbs and fleshy palms pawing at the slit of Rosanna’s dress, clumsy with desire. In the faint light from the street his face has a nakedness I’ve never seen before, totally open, utterly strange, his eyes clamped tight against my seeing. I must feel so familiar. I must feel just like her. “Rosanna,” he says, so quiet, as if there were no one here, whispering into the silence of the room, like I am not a person, in that moment, not myself or her entirely, but no one, an emptiness, my body a stranger to us both. In the silence, the darkness, the three of us are one. “Yes,” I say. “Yes, please, yes.”
* * *
—
It’s still dark when I wake up. The streetlight shines in through the window, casting violent shadows across my white sheets. I can see the low-slung belly of the sky, vulnerable and close, pale with the creeping fingers of dawn. The bed beside me is empty. Max is long gone. I hold my arm up into the light. I consider the empty space. My wrist throbs painful where my birthmark should be.
When I was a child, I wanted to be a nun. It wasn’t from any particular abundance of faith; my family rarely went to church when I was young, and later, after my mother died, none of my foster parents were especially convincing in their attempts to save my soul. But I had a feeling that I was responsible for the evils of the world. That I was at fault when things went wrong. My mom would be crying or my dad would be angry or I would see something about a tornado on the news. My fault, I would think. My fault. Maybe if I removed myself from the world I could save it. I liked the idea of life in a convent, of sisterhood. I thought about how I would spend all day working in the garden or copying Bibles or doing whatever it was they did, lost in my duties, thinking only of the women around me, putting their needs first so I could forget my own. I want to be that way for Rosanna now. To devote myself. To disappear entirely. To offer up as proof, stigmata, the dark marks beneath my palm. I am so close to disappearing. I am so close to being saved. I sit in the window turning my wrist over in my lap, looking at it. My emptiness, my blank space, my lack. I had been caught because Leo had noticed the birthmark was missing. This was literally, substantively true. But he had noticed because he was looking. He had been looking because I hadn’t been as good as I needed to be. I hadn’t been flawless. I had been pretending. The cracks had showed. My fault again, my fault. If I have been caught once, I can be caught again. I will be caught again. It isn’t good enough for me to pretend. I have to become. To think her thoughts. To carry her inside me. To let myself slip away until I am safe and I am clean and I am gone, and her freedom is my freedom, and she belongs to me as much as I belong to her. More.
I go through my library, carefully examining every image in the bright light of the kitchenette, looking for a picture where I can see the inside of Rosanna’s arm. There are close-up shots of almost every other part of her body. Her stomach (“Rosanna’s Baby Joy!”), her thighs (“Best and Worst Beach Bodies”), her biceps (“How Rosanna Got Stronger Than Ever”). Someone has even taken a grainy zoomed-in photograph of her shoulder from the night she got matching tattoos with a boyfriend, another after she got it lasered off, alone. And then finally I find something. Rosanna at the Met Gala a few years back, body draped in a low-backed silver dress, hair in a tight, sleek bun. She looks out at the camera, her gaze frank and inviting. And in a close-zoomed inset, there is a picture of the bracelet she’s wearing, a diamond-and-platinum cuff, Art Deco, worth fifty thousand dollars, the caption says, on loan from Cartier. And beneath the bracelet, of course, a wrist. Rosanna’s wrist, bony, birdlike, fine. On one side, a blurred shadow, exposed to the light where the diamonds hang down. The birthmark. Her birthmark. Mine. It’s smaller than I imagined it would be. No bigger than a tiny drop of milk, tension domed and quivering on the rim of a glass, the blot of blood when a needle slides out, gentle against your skin. It’s distinctive, though, an oval with unsteady edges, another, smaller, dot beside it. I understand why Leo remembered it, this tiny secret thing, an imperfection that belonged only to him. It won’t be his anymore.
I rifle through the rack of Rosanna’s purses unti
l I find a ballpoint pen and a beat-up old hotel sewing kit, Villa des Orangers, Marrakesh, embossed in gold on the front. I close my eyes and picture it, those Moorish arches, the fragrant orangerie, the cool black-and-white marble of the high-domed lobby. I remember it well. I remember it all. There is a bottle of rubbing alcohol in the bathroom cabinet, and I pour some onto the cleanest washcloth I can find. I light the stove with a match, and when it sputters to life, take the small gold safety pin from the kit and hold it in the flame until the tip starts to glow. I snap the pen in two, watch the blank ink pool viscous in a chipped saucer, dip the hot tip of the safety pin, and, before I get a chance to reconsider, stab my wrist, just slightly off center, next to the place where I can see the tendon tense, the dark blue fork of vein. The skin puffs red where the needle goes in. I swear I can smell something burning. Again and again I dip the needle, and the mark begins to take shape, dark ink blooming rough-edged, cancerous, beneath the skin. It feels like I’m pulling it up from inside myself, black dark blood. I am aware of the closeness of my own pulse, the way my muscles pull and shift, the choking tangle of veins and guts and tender nerves, all of it held in place by sheer inertia. The enormous tidal monstrosity of me, wrapped in such thin skin. I make a second dot next to the first, this one perfectly round, a moon orbiting some strange dark planet. I hold my arm up to the window to examine my work. The darkness is as much a part of me now as it is a part of her. Whatever happens next, I promise myself one thing. I won’t get caught. I won’t ever get caught again.
* * *
—
I sit silent in the window, looking down on the empty street. Is it morning or afternoon? The same day of my disaster and salvation or the next? How long had I been sleeping? When did I wake? It is impossible to tell. My wrist throbs painful in my lap. I can barely stand to move it, wincing as I turn the pages of the magazine I read, or remember reading, gazing blindly down at the blurry words. Good. The pain tethers me to my body. I hope it keeps hurting. I hope I hurt forever. The pain will keep me strong. It will distract me from the hunger that will come as I wait. And Max will keep me waiting, of that I am certain. This time I am ready. I have been saving scraps in the back of the freezer, sneaking scoops of the powders and seeds and dried fruits he brings over in the mornings and stashing them in the silverware drawer. But I am not waiting for Max. I am waiting for Rosanna. Soon something will happen. Leo will call. She will know, and she will come to me. The two of us alone, together forever. We will be stronger without him, without Max, growing in power, in purity. We will leave these four small walls, the filthy glass panes of my view. Together we will walk hand in hand through the hills, the city spread out begging at our feet.
* * *
—
And then a sound outside. The car. It hasn’t even been a day. I am almost disappointed in Max. Rosanna deserves better. I can see his hunch as he gets out of the car, read the fragility in his body. He has even brought me coffee, late in the afternoon or evening as it is. His arms are full of flowers. I think, Poor Max. Poor, lonely Max. I take Rosanna’s favorite foundation, mother of pearl, and daub it onto my wrist, blowing as it dries. Poor Max. Poor thing. He doesn’t need to know that everything is different now. It’s my job to protect him, just as it’s his job to protect Rosanna. It’s what she wants, I know. I unroll the long sleeves of my cashmere sweater, the fabric soft over my swollen skin. What Max doesn’t know won’t hurt him. Let him think he can tell the difference between us. Let him learn to miss me when I’m gone.
“Oh, hello, Maxie,” I say when the door opens. “Where have you been hiding yourself? You know I get lonesome without you.”
“Hi,” he says.
Just that. But there is a new tenderness in his voice. He hands me the coffee, looking right into my eyes, still smiling as I put it down without even pretending to take a sip. The bouquet he’s holding looks awkward in his arms, the drooping buds of the pink roses uncannily like flesh. These aren’t flowers Rosanna would buy.
“I missed you, too,” he says.
Without warning, he leans forward and kisses me on the mouth, still beaming, so his lips are stretched hard against his teeth and his teeth knock against mine. I don’t know how to react. I thought last night was a slip, a lapse, a strange lapping over into another reality that we would both understand we could never speak about again. And here he is kissing me, like it’s the most ordinary thing in the world.
“Well, thanks for the coffee,” I say.
“Anything for you,” he says. “Anything.”
He sits beside me, stroking my hair. His hand catches on a snarl and he pulls, just slightly too hard. I lean my head toward him with an animal gesture of submission, pain, letting him think it hurts. I’m waiting, biding my time. I want to find out what it is he thinks he knows.
“Your hair’s getting a little long,” he says. “We’ll need to cut it.”
“You’re right,” I say. “Thanks for noticing.”
“I’m always watching out for you,” he says. “You’re my girl.”
And for now, I suppose, he’s right. I am. I smile as warmly as I can.
“Guess we’d better call Holly,” I say.
“Actually,” says Max, “I’ve been thinking. Maybe it’s too risky having people come over here. I don’t want anyone to interrupt our privacy, do you? Maybe I’d better cut your hair myself.”
I picture him cutting my hair, collecting it, saving it. Bags and bags of the cast-off parts of me, his forever.
“Okay,” I say. “That sounds nice.”
I turn another page of the magazine. Any excuse to look away from his impossibly eager gaze. My wrist aches, but I do not flinch. I look down at the image, at my Rosanna wide glossy expanse of lip, my ten tips for a perfect summer, and our smile for a moment seems to waver. But I’m not scared. I’m not alone. I’m with Rosanna, now and always, and together we will conspire against him to save ourselves.
“Look at her,” says Max. “Look how beautiful she looks.”
He stares down, rapt, at the photograph. He thinks it’s Rosanna. He’s sure of it. I pick up another magazine, testing him.
“How do you think she looks here?” I ask.
There I am a few weeks ago in my leaf-print leggings, jogging along that beach. Even though it seems so distant from me now, a memory from another life, I know that Max was beside me, sitting silent in the back seat of the car, watching me run.
“Beautiful,” he says. “She always looks so beautiful.”
He can no longer tell which pictures are me and which are her. Which of us has her face and which my own. But is it possible he’s right? That I am the one making a mistake, writing myself too efficiently onto Rosanna’s memories? For a moment, I am uncertain. Reality seems to wobble and shift, with the brilliance of oil floating on dirty water. I pick up another magazine, flip through the images of me, Rosanna, us. Is that really my beautiful face, my dress? I check my wrist to make sure. In this shot, my arms are held behind my back. Some part of me must have known that something was missing, even if I didn’t know what it was.
“Max,” I say gently, as gently as I can manage, “that isn’t her. It’s me.”
He laughs a gentle little laugh, pushes the hair from in front of my eyes. “Out there, you’re her,” he says. “In here, you belong to me. You’re mine. You’re not Rosanna when we’re alone.”
“Who am I, then?” I ask.
He smiles. “You’re my girl.”
I look over his head at an image of Rosanna on the wall, walking away from the cameras, smiling. Max can tell I’m not focusing. His grip tightens. He pulls me closer. His body is so near to mine that it is almost as though we are embracing. I look right back at him. I look and look. He thinks he can control me. He thinks that he can rob me of the last thing I own, the name he has given to me. He thinks he can call me by my old name. He doesn’t
know that name isn’t mine anymore. That I am Rosanna or nothing at all, something somehow more and less than human, a creature existing beyond the bounds of time and logic, entirely beyond his understanding. He is trying so hard to appear fierce, protective, but there is a faltering at the edges of his eyes. He needs me now, more than I need him.
“I’ve been thinking,” he says, “after last night. Maybe you should stay inside from now on. I don’t like the idea of you, vulnerable, without me. I don’t think you should go out anymore. It’s not safe for you out there. And it’s my job to protect you. I need to keep you close. I can’t make the same mistakes I made last time, let people hurt you.”
“Max,” I say, “I don’t think that’s a very good idea. You need me out there, don’t you? Rosanna needs me. She can’t disappear again. Remember why I’m here—so that she can be safe. You’re right, we need to keep her from the world. We need to protect her. But that’s why I’m here.”
I push past the tenseness of his arms and lean my head into his chest so he can smell me. I smell like her. I feel like her. This similarity protects me, breaks me into a reflecting hall of mirrors. Poor Max doesn’t know where to look. He doesn’t know whether he’s addressing the reflection or the real thing.
“I know that it’s hard for you,” I say. “I know, I know. It’s hard for me, too. And I’m sorry about last night. I’m sorry I told you about Leo. It should have been Rosanna’s secret to tell, I know that now. But it was so nice afterward, wasn’t it? Being together. Isn’t that the way that it should be? Rosanna outside, and in here, me, yours?”
His grip loosens a little. I can breathe. I breathe in deep and reach up, wrap my arms around his neck. I look into his eyes, my whole body aching.
“Let me keep living as Rosanna,” I say. “Let me live. I’ll die if you keep me in here, Max. It’ll ruin everything we’ve worked so hard for.”
