“What? Oh. The painting. You know he hasn’t seen it yet.”
“Yeah.”
“You’d be the only person besides me to see it.”
“Yeah.”
“Okay, fine, but my ego is very fragile about it, so maybe don’t tell me anything bad about it. Maybe don’t say anything at all. Just grunt, and then I’ll put it away real quick.”
“Yeah.”
The high-ceilinged studio had a little half balcony; she retrieved a large canvas from it and then, making a face, turned it around at the bottom of the stairs for him to see.
Matthew looked at it a long time.
“Never mind, say something; silence is much worse,” Jordan told him, and Matthew liked this, too, because it made him feel like she cared about what he thought.
“Does Declan know what it looks like, even a little?” he asked. When she shook her head, he looked at it a bit longer and then he said, “Are you going to marry my brother?”
“Crumbs, man, you go hard. I thought you’d say the foreground was too busy or that I’d gotten his nose wrong.”
Matthew asked, “Why does he treat you like you’re real?”
Jordan looked at him for a long time, as long as he’d looked at the painting, and then she took away the portrait of Declan to the second floor again. When she came back down, she crouched in front of him and said, “Because I am real.”
“How do you know?”
“Because I’m talking to you, mate! Because I have thoughts and feelings of my own! It doesn’t matter how you got here. You are here.”
Matthew stared at his hands. “What if Ronan made me this way? What if he made me how I am?”
“So what if he did?” She took his hand and jiggled it. “Why do you think Declan’s got his curls? Why do you think Ronan’s an asshole? We all get handed things from our parents. We all have bodies that obey rules that we deal with. We’re not as different as you think.”
Matthew could feel himself retreating from this last sentence as fast as he’d walked away from Old Man Eyebrows.
“Look, I’m not trying to tell you it’s easy,” Jordan said. “To deal with this, with being a dream. I just mean—I just mean, if you’re thinking, This is the magic thing that explains why everything’s weird and wrong and why it’s so hard to figure where I fit, well, it doesn’t solve things like that. We’re not different in ways that matter. Your boy Declan just pretends it matters so he doesn’t have to think too hard about his mum and how he feels about that, and because he’s afraid that if you’re a real person, you’ll grow up and leave him and then he won’t have a family and he won’t know who he is. There. There’s your two-dollar therapy session, I don’t know if it’s for you or for him but maybe you can split the cost.”
“You’re pretty cool,” Matthew said.
“Aw, yeah I am.” She lightly high-fived him again. “So what do you think of my painting?”
Matthew pointed to a long orange breast on the closest canvas. “I think it’s better than that one.”
Jordan laughed gleefully. “Hey, I see a smile on that face. You happier, then?”
Matthew thought about it. “Yeah.”
It was better than happiness, actually. For the first time since he’d found out he was a dream, he felt like himself again.
Hennessy remembered sitting for Jordan in White.
Jay had spent the morning crying at a mirror on the second floor of their London row house, and Hennessy had spent the morning watching her through the cracked door. She’d drawn the shape of her mother into the shag rug she sat on and wiped it out again and again, trying to perfect the slope of her shoulders, the bend of her neck. It was difficult to tell if Jay had been truly crying or if she were crying for reference. She was taking photos of it with her phone in the mirror and then rapidly typing something into it.
After a few hours of this, Jay emerged without warning, and although Hennessy scrambled away to prevent discovery, her mother found her wrapped in the linen curtain at the end of the hall.
“Little ghost,” she said to Hennessy. “Let’s go to the studio.”
Hennessy was rarely allowed into the studio and certainly never invited, so it was with awe she accepted her mother’s hand and rode the elevator to the third-floor studio.
There was nothing quite like J. H. Hennessy’s studio when she was in the prime of her career. This secret world was accessible only via the coded elevator or via a dark staircase that ended at a door with no knob, just a key in a lock. Inside it was old and new. Elderly window sashes, sleek white walls. Old floorboards, new black and white graphic floor paint. From the ceiling hung immense light fixtures, gifts from a fellow artist, messes of lightbulbs and dried grasses and leaves. From the floor grew metal floor lamps with shades cut sharply so that they threw light in geometric, lacy shapes. Gradient thumbprints dotted every flat surface, including the white grand piano, where Jay had thoughtlessly tested new paints. And of course there were the paintings, in all states of finish. The eyes were alive. The hands were alive.
Once the elevator door had hissed closed behind them, Jay took just one moment to look out one of the studio’s windows for something and then, when she didn’t find it, she returned to make a great fuss over Hennessy. She had her try on several of the dresses she had thrown on the sofa. She posed her in multiple ways in a simple wooden chair. She messed with her hair and played at braids and put lipstick on her and wiped it off. All the while she told Hennessy how pretty she had grown up to be, how wonderful a painting they were going to make together. No! Not a painting. A series of paintings. An exhibition. It had felt like a day that happened to someone else. Hennessy sat very still in the chair, like an animal by a highway, afraid to move lest she dart from safety to something worse. She was cold in the white shift but she didn’t want to even shiver in case her mother remembered Hennessy was not usually treated like this.
But the spell hadn’t broken. They’d worked all day, all evening. The next morning, Jay was still enthused. She ordered in a very grand breakfast of pastries from one of the bakeries and then they went back up for more work, this time up the rickety back staircase that ended in the door with no knob. They spent two weeks like that, with Hennessy sitting still in the chair and not shivering and her mother painting her and takeaway and delivery bags piling up in the stairwell.
At one point, Jay put her brush down and said, shocked, “I made you. One day you’ll grow up and be a woman, and I made you.”
Jay looked at Hennessy, and Hennessy suddenly had the impression that Jay was really seeing her, really thinking about what it meant to be Hennessy, to be Hennessy’s mother.
Jay looked from Hennessy to her painting and back again, and then she said, “How wonderful you’re going to be.”
It was the best moment of Hennessy’s life.
Then there was an audible slam. The front door. Bill Dower, returning from wherever he had gone. Jay leapt up so quickly that her stool clattered on the floor. Her still-wet palette was abandoned on the piano. The elevator door was whirring closed.
Hennessy was alone before she even quite understood what had happened.
She sat in the chilly chair for quite a while, not wanting to move in case her mother returned. After an hour, she pulled up the drop cloth to wrap around herself and wait some more (little ghost!). Finally she let herself shiver and admit Jay wasn’t coming back.
With a little sigh, she padded barefoot across the cold floor to the elevator, but discovered it wouldn’t move without the code, which she didn’t have. She went to the door without a knob instead, but it wouldn’t open. It was locked; the keyhole was empty.
Hennessy was trapped in the studio.
At first she called down very nicely, though she didn’t think either of her parents would hear her over their own raised voices. Then she shouted. She banged.
Finally, she gave up. She waited.
It became night.
Hennessy wiped away her tears
and turned on the floor lights, which threw hard, lacy patterns across the floor and walls. She went to see the canvas her mother had worked on all these weeks.
It was awful.
It was the worst painting Hennessy had ever seen her mother do. It was twee and cutesy, a straightforward and boring portrait of a daft, plucky little girl sitting awkwardly on a chair. The eyes weren’t alive. The hands weren’t alive. Hennessy, who’d been working and learning with her own art all this time, was embarrassed for her mother. It was terrible that she wasn’t coming up here for Hennessy and her growling stomach, but it felt even more terrible that anyone would ever see this piece.
Hennessy looked at the canvas for a long time, and then she counted, telling herself that if one of her parents came for her by the count of six hundred, she wouldn’t do it.
Six hundred seconds went by. Eight hundred. One thousand. Hennessy stopped counting.
She searched the drawers by the wall and collected all the paints she wanted. Then she moistened her mother’s oils again on the palette, picked up the brush and began to paint. After a few minutes, she dragged over the full-length mirror from beside the sofa, and she redid the portrait’s gormless face with her actual wary expression. She overpainted the boring shadows in the white shift with subtle colors instead. She shrugged the shoulders of that chilly girl just a little, not quite shivering, but wanting to. At each step, she got up to compare her brushstrokes to the other paintings in the studio. She made the eyes alive. She made the hands alive.
She painted the portrait that Jay should have painted. It took all night.
It was a J. H. Hennessy by way of Jordan Hennessy. It was another day after that before her mother came to get her, and by then Hennessy was fitful and burning up with a fever that had come on during the second night. Bill Dower had gone again.
“This turned out better than I thought,” Jay said, looking at the canvas, hovering her fingers over her signature in the corner, painted by Hennessy hours before. “Oh, Jordan. Stop complaining. I’ve got some paracetamol downstairs. Come on, what a trial. Next time don’t hide so long and you won’t feel as awful.”
Hennessy’s first forgery was of herself.
Sitting in the basement of Aldana-Leon’s house, crisscross applesauce on the roll-up mattress, Hennessy took out her dreamt phone and held it in her lap. She looked around the dim basement. It was stacked densely with cardboard boxes, a family that had either not yet unpacked from a move or was packing for one. One corner had been reserved for a small desk covered with tubes of poster paints and cheap brushes. There were a few pieces of rippled paper there that had been painted on, and some child had painted the top of the desk instead. Hennessy respected that child.
With a shiver, Hennessy told her dreamt phone to call Jordan.
It rang for nearly a minute, and then:
“Jordan Hennessy,” Jordan said politely, not recognizing the caller ID. “Hello?”
Jordan’s voice hit her like a sack of stones.
Hennessy’s best forgery. Jordan, by way of Hennessy. All those years together. All the other girls, dead. Why hadn’t Hennessy called her before now? How had she forgotten how Jordan was the only thing that ever made this feeling inside Hennessy go away? This awful dread, this feeling of the Lace, even when she was awake.
Hennessy hadn’t spoken yet. She didn’t know what to say.
On the other side of the line, a bland voice sounded in the background. “I’m getting it to go—it’s faster that way, even with the walk. Do you want baba ghanoush or no?”
Declan Lynch.
Declan Lynch.
Why was she surprised to hear his voice? She’d known Jordan had left in his car, weeks and weeks before.
Jordan’s words were slightly muffled as she turned from the phone. “If you’re paying, yes. Get me every side dish they have.” Then, back to the phone, “Sorry, who’s this? I don’t know you’re coming through very well. I can’t hear you.”
This voice, the one she was using on the phone, was a very different voice than the one she’d just used for Declan Lynch. She’d used her outside, professional voice to talk to the phone, her inside, real voice to talk to Declan Lynch. Hennessy and her girls were the only ones who used to get the second one. They’d been the only ones who were important.
Hennessy’s cheeks felt hot.
“Hello?” Jordan said. Then, to Declan, “No, a crank caller, I guess. Or a bad connection. One doesn’t like to assume malice.”
“Safer to assume,” Declan said drily, and Jordan’s laugh faded as she pulled the phone away from her head.
Hennessy hung up.
She sat back on the mattress.
She let herself think it. This is what she’s always wanted.
It wasn’t that Hennessy had wanted Jordan to be unhappy in her absence. After all, Hennessy was the one who’d insisted Jordan go with Declan in the first place—right? Her memories were muddy. She could hear a little voice suggesting Jordan had actually come up with the idea, but carefully worded it so Hennessy would think it was hers. Was that true?
She thought about going upstairs to find Ronan. He would remember. He was there that night.
But finding Ronan meant finding Bryde, too, because they were together in the bunk bedroom, and also because the two of them were inseparable. And Bryde would just try to spin her current misery into a lesson. Hennessy didn’t think she could take any more lessons.
The basement was cold. She pulled up the sheet around her to cover her shoulders and, just like that, was transported to her memory in Jay’s studio. Little ghost.
What if Jordan stopped loving her? What if she’d never loved her, only needed her? What if Hennessy had lost the only real thing in her life by running off to chase dreams with Bryde and Ronan Lynch?
What was she doing here?
They weren’t a company of three dreamers. Bryde and Ronan were one thing. Hennessy was something else.
Hennessy was so tired of being alone.
She was so tired.
She turned the phone over in her hands. Even the phone was a reminder of how little she belonged here. If not for Ronan, it wouldn’t be a phone in her hands, it would be the Lace, just like at Rhiannon Martin’s farm. Angrily, she tapped through the options, looking to see what her subconscious and Ronan’s subconscious had dreamt into it. Contact numbers. Speakerphone. Text messaging.
Timer.
Before Ronan and Bryde, Hennessy had always set a timer before she fell asleep. Twenty minutes. That was the longest she could sleep before starting to dream. Eventually she had to set the timer while she was awake, too, because it turned out that sleeping without dreaming eventually left one prone to drifting off even while painting or driving.
This phone’s timer had only one setting. Twenty minutes.
Was it her subconscious or Ronan’s that had guessed she might come looking for it at some point? Which one of them hadn’t trusted her? She wondered if she could go back to that life. Everything seemed imaginary with that little sleep. Surely it had been worse than this reality.
Surely.
Hennessy tried not to think about the sound of Jordan’s voice.
She tried not to think of the sound of her voice talking to Declan.
Little ghost. Hennessy was haunting Jordan’s life. She knew which of them was the more vital Jordan Hennessy.
The hideous feeling grew and grew in her. She knew if she went to Ronan and Bryde, they’d whisk her off into a dream full of impossible things, thinking this would remind her of the joy of dreaming. They never considered how it only reminded her of the joy of their dreaming. No, she needed to deal with this herself.
She just wanted to put this feeling down for a few minutes. Everyone else in the world could sleep it off.
Not Hennessy.
It was always the Lace. Always going to be the Lace.
Closing her eyes, Hennessy thought back to that last time she’d seen Jordan. She ignored the little mean
voice. She was sure Jordan hadn’t wanted to leave Hennessy. She was sure it had been Hennessy’s idea to send her off with Declan for safekeeping. She was sure Jordan had believed in her.
She was sure.
Shrugging off the sheet, Hennessy climbed off the mattress. She didn’t set the timer. Instead, she asked her phone to show her one of John White Alexander’s paintings. He was one of their favorites. Jordan and Hennessy. Hennessy and Jordan.
She went to the desk covered with art supplies, squeezed some paint out, and picked up one of the brushes.
Then she began to do one thing, at least, that she knew she was good at: forging someone else’s brilliance.
Ronan woke with a start.
He was in the top bunk in the room he was sharing with Bryde. It was still dark.
He rolled over quietly to see if Bryde was sleeping.
The lower bunk was empty, the blankets tossed aside. Ronan grabbed his jeans from where they were tossed at the end of his bunk, his jacket from the plastic unicorn head on the wall, and his boots from beside the door.
He stepped quietly into the dark hallway.
Bryde crouched there over a collapsed form. Matthew. One of Matthew’s hands was palm up, and in it was a little figurine of a hawk. He was obviously dead.
“What did you do?” Ronan snarled.
“Correlation is not causation, Ronan Lynch,” Bryde said. Adam appeared briefly at the end of the hall and, just as quick, was gone.
“What did you do?”
Bryde said, “Wake up.”
Ronan woke with a start.
He was in the top bunk in the room he was sharing with Bryde. It was still dark.
He rolled over quietly to see if Bryde was sleeping.
The lower bunk was empty, the blankets tossed aside. Ronan grabbed his jeans from where they were tossed at the end of his bunk, his jacket from the plastic unicorn head on the wall, and his boots from beside the door.
He stepped quietly into the dark hallway.
Bryde crouched there over a collapsed form. Matthew. One of Matthew’s hands was palm up, and in it was a little figurine of a hawk. He was obviously dead.
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