Tuesday Mooney Wore Black

by Kate Racculia

  Dorry peered at the photo. “That’s not her,” she said.

  “What do you mean?”

  “I—” Dorry blinked at her.

  Tuesday turned the paper around to look at the photo. She counted thirteen heads. She matched the names in the caption with the faces. Dex. Ned and Dorry. Cass and Lisa Pinto. Warren Wilson, née Archie. The old woman, Verena. Colin and Marcus, the Mario-Shaughnessy Brothers. Trudy in the yellow tracksuit. Alex, the ripped Hulk. And Kat, the girl in the bloody green dress, missing number thirteen. Not pictured: Tuesday Mooney.

  “These are the thirteen players Lyle cast in the final act,” said Tuesday. “Nat hit Kat over the head so he could take her place.”

  “That’s not.” Dorry was shaking her head now. “Then who did I see?”

  “Who did—” Tuesday set the paper down on her lap. “Who did you see? Where?”

  “She had.” Dorry licked her lips. “She had curly hair. Lots of it. I couldn’t really tell what color it was because—”

  “Because why?”

  “Everything was green,” Dorry said. “I was looking through the goggles.”

  A moment hung silent between them.

  Dorry stuttered. “I – it was – at the top. Of the stairs. I ran up, after you fell down. I ran up to help you. That’s when I saw her. She was wearing—”

  Dorry closed her eyes.

  “She was wearing a dark satiny dress with a big cape and long satin gloves. She walked right up to that guy. And.”

  “And what?” Tuesday asked.

  It was impossible.

  “She pushed him,” said Dorry.

  It couldn’t have happened.

  “I think he would have hit you again. And again,” Dorry said. “I think she saved your life.”

  Dorry could not have seen her.

  “I didn’t tell anyone what I saw.” Dorry’s lower lip trembled. “I couldn’t. At first I thought I – I had to protect her. Because she protected you. And later, when all the craziness was over, I started to wonder if I saw her at all. If she was in my imagination.”

  “But …” prompted Tuesday.

  Dorry sat up straight.

  “I know what I saw,” she said. “I can’t explain it. But I know I saw a curly-haired girl in black satin save your life.”

  “I believe you,” said Tuesday.

  “Should we tell someone?” said Dorry.

  “Who would we tell?” asked Tuesday. “What would we tell them?”

  Dorry sat with that.

  “If she wasn’t this Kat person” – Dorry’s voice rose – “who was she?”

  I’m going to miss you. So much.

  It was impossible. It couldn’t have happened. Dorry could not have seen her. And yet.

  “A friend,” Tuesday said.

  Abby was gone.

  Again.

  It took Tuesday a few days to notice. At first she blamed it on the drugs and her lack of consciousness. But when her head finally cleared, it was – clear. Empty as the open blue sky. Abby, she thought. Abby, where are you? But no response came. Tuesday’s head had reset, purged itself of its delusions. She was cured.

  She felt strangely hollow. Her skull echoed, too spacious, like a longtime tenant had pulled up stakes and left behind no forwarding address. When Dorry told her about the curly-haired girl in black satin, for one moment Tuesday almost believed that’s exactly what had happened: that the ghost who’d been haunting her for sixteen years had made herself corporeal to save Tuesday’s life. It was the kind of thing, living or dead, that Abigail Hobbes would have done. Strange and unprecedented. Wildly improbable. A noble act at the climax of the film.

  A dead girl saving her best friend’s life.

  It was a great story, and though she couldn’t quite believe it, Tuesday liked telling it to herself. It had dramatic heft and resolution, more satisfaction than the logical, loose-ended alternative, for, if Dorry saw what she saw – and Tuesday believed that she had – there was simply a fourteenth player. A girl who snuck into the house just as Nathaniel had, who took action when she saw Nathaniel attacking Tuesday. It could have been Emerson in a costume and curly wig. But for all practical purposes, it had been a stranger: a stranger saved her from anything worse than a pulverized leg, and Tuesday would never get a chance to thank her.

  That’s not why she did it, Dex texted. For the kudos

  Though if I ever push an asshole over a balcony to save your other leg

  You better BELIEVE I want credit

  Abby might have been gone, but Dex was there. Every day.

  The doc says my legs are going to be two different heights, Tuesday texted.

  I’ll never walk in heels again

  You’re going to be the leaning tower of Tuesday, replied Dex. C’MON EILEEN

  He came to her room after work on Friday.

  “Hospital happy hour!” he said, and handed her his flask. He didn’t sit. He was too busy examining the furniture, rubbing his thumb over the velvet nap of the curtains, opening and closing the drawers of the desk. “Though on this fancy floor,” he said, “wouldn’t be surprised if there’s an actual wet bar around the corner.”

  He’d visited before, when Tuesday was still foggy and her parents had been around. It was the first time her parents had met Dex, and Dex had met her parents. Later, after Dex left, her mother leaned close to Tuesday and said, with the straightest of faces, “He has a very old, powerful spirit. I think he might be a witch, only he doesn’t know it yet.”

  Today Tuesday and Dex were alone.

  “Dex,” Tuesday said. “Dex, stop fluttering.”

  “Tuesday,” said Dex. “I can’t help it. Hospitals make me flutter.”

  “My mom thinks you’re a witch,” she said.

  That had the desired effect. Dex froze, flattered.

  “A what? A witch? Your mother?” He smiled. “Well, she would know.”

  “She said you have a very old and powerful spirit.” Tuesday moved to one side of the bed as best she could, given her leg, and patted the empty space. “But you don’t realize it.”

  Dex sat. She slipped her hand into his. She hadn’t known she was going to do it until she did. At first he pulled away – out of surprise, Tuesday thought, not discomfort. He relaxed.

  “Are we going to talk about feelings now?” he said, low.

  “I’m sorry,” she said, “I was so nasty. To you and to Rabbit. I felt like shit that day, but that didn’t give me the right to take it out on you.”

  “It wasn’t untrue,” said Dex. “What you said.”

  “It doesn’t matter,” said Tuesday, “if it was true or not. I was a dick.”

  Dex laughed then. “You sure were,” he said.

  “I am truly sorry,” Tuesday repeated.

  “I forgive you,” said Dex, and Tuesday’s throat caught.

  “Wow,” she said, a little choked. “That’s a powerful feeling.”

  “I’m not – I’m not exactly going to thank you, for being a dick.” Dex drew his shoulders back. “I don’t want to reward objectively bad behavior. But I thought a lot about what you said. That I need attention, that I need the world to love me. You’re right.”

  “We all need to be seen.”

  “Some,” he said, “more than others. Anyway, I thought about it and I realized, as I was belting away in Vincent Pryce’s karaoke demolition machine” – Tuesday snickered – “who I was searching for, dating all those creative boys, those ballerinas and singers, even Rabbit’s a musician. It was me. I was looking for who I used to be. For the ghost of myself. What I used to love, what I spent my life doing. So.” He squeezed her hand. “Why don’t I become the person I’m looking for?”

  Tuesday passed her free hand in an arc, a shooting star swiping through the air.

  “The more you knooow,” she sang.

  “You’re hysterical,” said Dex. He dragged his own free hand across the outside of his wet eyes.

  “Does this mean you’r
e going to quit your job?” she asked.

  “Not today,” he said. “Not tomorrow. But maybe soon.” He tipped his head back, like he could see the blue-black autumn sky through the ceiling panels. “And for the rest of my life.”

  They sort of glowed, quietly, at each other.

  “Dex,” said Tuesday.

  “Yes?”

  “I—”

  She thought of Abby. She thought about what Abby would do. It wasn’t the same as having Abby’s voice in her head, but it would suffice.

  “The last time I had a friend like you,” she said. She looked down at their hands and then up, up at his face. “A best friend.”

  Dex’s lips sprang back in a grin.

  “I lost her,” said Tuesday. “And then I lost my mind.”

  “That sounds serious,” said Dex.

  “I’m a serious person,” said Tuesday, deadpan.

  Then she cackled. Because she was with Dex, and Dex was with her, and because she remembered – after all these years, she remembered – this was how it felt to be safe with another person. A person who laughed with you, and sang with you, and held your hand, and handed you an umbrella when you needed to defend yourself. A person who deserved to know you, all of you, as you knew them. She wanted to tell him everything. Everything about Abby Hobbes, about how Abby vanished and about what happened after. But also everything that had happened before. How it felt to be a girl growing up in Salem, a strange girl on the outside, who didn’t know it was possible to find other people in the world to love, and to trust, until she did. She wanted Dex to know who she’d been, where she’d come from. She wanted Dex to meet her first best friend.

  “Her name was Abby Hobbes,” said Tuesday. “She was a witch too.”

  19

  HEART ON A STRING

  Tuesday stood outside the Tillerman house, juggling her crutches under her arms. Behind her, she heard the Green Cab she’d taken from Somerville splatter away through the river of slush on the road.

  It looked smaller in the daytime. The house had metastasized in her mind these past three months – or – had she even seen the outside of it, the night of the funeral? She hadn’t. Tuesday shook her head. Hello, Tillerman house, she thought. Nice to see you for the first time. It was an imposing box of warm sandy stone, brownish in places with dead moss and creeping vines, surrounded by naked winter shrubs and trees that had been cut back from the circular drive. And while it may have looked smaller than expected, it was still an enormous house, built to grand proportions, built to last lifetimes, wearing its wealth in its bones, in the gleam of its windows, in the marble of its portico.

  The high whine of a power saw, muffled, sliced the air.

  Tuesday sniffed. She pulled her phone out of her coat pocket. She was fifteen minutes early. She knew Lyle would appreciate promptness, but there was such a thing as being too prompt. Too eager. Though that’s what she was – eager. Desperately curious. Lyle had invited her to the house for lunch, to discuss “some things,” whenever Tuesday felt ready.

  She was more than ready. This was, officially, the farthest Tuesday had ventured on her own since being discharged from the hospital two and a half months ago. She’d had regular appointments at physical therapy, dinner with her parents and her brother on Sundays, plus get-out-of-your-apartment trivia and karaoke nights with Dex twice a week. Recently, she and Dorry, when it wasn’t too snowy or icy, had been walking around the block on Thursdays instead of eating takeout in her apartment. But this, today – answering Lyle’s cryptic invitation – was Tuesday’s first step back into the real world on her newly uneven legs.

  She was having trouble. Not with walking, necessarily – at least, nothing worse than the kind of trouble you’d expect when you have to relearn how to walk on a shattered leg – but with accepting. Accepting that her right leg, the only one she was ever going to get, had changed. It had been altered forever by a careless, violent man, who, not coincidentally, looked a lot like the man who’d been squatting in her apartment when she’d first returned to it. Archie, to his credit, had done an excellent job taking care of Gunnar in her absence; her cat even seemed to like him. The first afternoon she was home, Gunnar sat on the back of the love seat behind Archie’s head, chewing on his hair. And it wasn’t just Gunnar Archie had cared for. He’d filled her freezer with individual servings of homemade soup and vacuumed and kept everything tidier than Tuesday likely would have kept it herself.

  He felt terrible. He was trying. She wanted to give him credit for that too. She didn’t want to wake up at two in the morning from nightmares she couldn’t remember, feeling very fragile and very mortal, but she did, and if she texted Archie, he came over. He came over and wrapped himself around her and it helped. It also helped that he’d gotten his own place. “You’re rich as hell,” Tuesday told him. “And you’re no longer a lost son. Stop stealing and sign a lease.”

  So he signed a lease on a loft in Cambridge. He had nothing to furnish it with. They went to the antiques shops along Charles Street and bought a bed and a table and chairs and a couch. They went to Target to buy essentials, shower curtains, a bathmat. Archie embraced cleaning supplies with such unbridled joy – she had never seen a human being so thrilled about a self-wringing mop – that Tuesday could almost pretend they’d met like ordinary people, and that whatever they were to each other, now or in the future, could be easy. Then another part of her said, You never wanted ordinary or easy, and you know it.

  Nathaniel did not reappear. There was an article in the Globe about his absence, but the story, probably through Constance and Emerson’s influence, was buried near the obituaries. His second-in-command at N. A. Arches was promoted. The world continued to spin. And Archie was officially reinstated as an Arches, at least privately; he was seeing Emerson fairly frequently, and his mother every week for Sunday dinner. When Tuesday asked how those dinners went, Archie went flat. That was when she knew, for sure, that he knew. Everything. He’d known the whole time what had happened to his father, and now he knew what had happened to his brother, and he knew what his sister and his mother and Vincent Pryce had done. He wore it like a brick tied around his neck. She could imagine one day being strong enough to share the fullness of that weight—

  But that day was not today.

  She looked at her phone again. Now she was twelve minutes early. The power saw paused and started up again.

  She swung forward on her crutches. She could finally walk around her apartment without them, but they helped when she was unsure of the terrain or how far she would have to walk. She wasn’t very good on them. They didn’t feel natural, and not just because they were a constant reminder that her body was different now.

  She maneuvered up the short steps of the portico. There was a giant door knocker: a brass lion’s head, mane luxurious, with a metal ring clenched in his teeth. She clanged it against the door.

  Lyle opened it almost immediately.

  “Tuesday,” she said. “You finally decided to come in?”

  “Were you watching me?” Tuesday said.

  Lyle nodded.

  “I was – I was processing.”

  “There’s a lot to process,” said Lyle. “Come on in.” She pulled the door back and stepped aside. She was wearing jeans and yellow work boots, dusted with plaster, and her ever-present hooded sweatshirt. Clear plastic safety goggles were pushed up into her hair. They were in a small, dark vestibule, with a short flight of stairs leading to a room that Tuesday recognized from the wedge visible through the doorway: the great hall. The power saw was much louder in here, and she heard voices, rustling, activity. “You okay with the stairs?” Lyle asked, extending her arm. Tuesday hesitated.

  “I’m not great on these,” she said. “Not sure I ever will be, honestly. I can’t seem to adjust to them. My arms are too long, or my legs are too – something.”

  Lyle tapped the side of her chin. “Wait here,” she said. She scurried up the stairs and disappeared into the hall. Tuesday re
sted on her crutches. A man passed by the doorway, hefting a two-by-four over his shoulder.

  She squinted.

  It was Marcus Shaughnessy.

  Even without the Mario costume, she knew him.

  “How about this?” said Lyle.

  She was holding the black umbrella. Someone had cleaned Nathaniel Arches’s blood off the sharp silver tip.

  Lyle descended the steps and held the umbrella out to Tuesday. “It’s sturdy,” she said. “And tall. Try it.”

  Tuesday remembered how good it had felt in her hands. How solid and true. She handed Lyle her crutches and wrapped her right hand slowly around the black fabric. She squeezed her palm around the wooden handle. She pressed the tip firmly against the floor.

  She took a step.

  “Perfect,” said Lyle.

  It was.

  She followed Lyle carefully up the steps. The great hall was even more of a mess than the last time she’d seen it. There were drop-cloths everywhere. Some of the columns were braced, being replaced with new wood or stone. The fresco on the wall opposite the grand staircase was almost entirely revealed, but protected by a giant plastic sheet. She couldn’t see the details clearly, but even so: it was a monumental work, a mural of life-size figures spanning two, three stories. Tuesday pressed her hand to her chest. It was a party, or some kind of gathering. The figures were dressed formally, holding drinks or platters, in old clothing, full skirts and high collars, laughing and talking. Some were dancing. Some were fighting. Kissing. The wall writhed. It washed over her like a tide; everywhere she looked, she saw something new, something alive.