We kiss for a long time, hungry for each other, Wes’s hand on my thigh, firm and sure of itself, his other arm around my waist, and at times I gasp for breath, throwing my head back so that his lips can find my throat, my neck, the hollow of my collarbone. The moon rises higher, and the sound of the city recedes behind the sheltering branches that hide the summerhouse where we coil ourselves together.
I am here. I am here, right now.
CHAPTER 13
When I open my eyes, the light is thin and gray, and tiny sparrows are bickering in the branches overhead. My cheek rests on my arm along the back of the bench, my feet drawn up underneath me. Wes’s head lies in my lap, heavy with sleep, one arm still encircling my waist while the other hangs to the ground. He lets out a soft snore, and burrows his nose into a fold of my dress.
It’s today.
Today is my last day.
I don’t want to wake Wes just yet. His face is smooth in sleep. I rub my eyes with a yawn and stretch my arms overhead until my spine cracks. My stays will be leaving red marks on my rib cage.
The park around us rolls gradually out of sleep, birds and squirrels beginning their morning ablutions, and on the far side of the lake, girls not much older than me go prancing past like racehorses, wearing nothing but stockings and tight shirts and shaded spectacles, their pigtails swinging. The city hums to life while I watch, the sky brightening through the treetops, sounds of carriage horns and crying babies and conversations, the honk of ducks paddling by on the pond at our feet.
“Wes,” I say, cupping his cheek in my hand. His beard is coming in, and his cheek is rough.
“Mmmmrrrfff,” Wes says, pulling my skirt hem over his eyes and rolling onto his side on the bench.
I smile down at him, and gently poke his shoulder. “Wes,” I say. “It’s morning.”
“So what,” he says from under my skirt.
“So,” I say, “we’re supposed to meet back at Maddie’s soon.”
“What time is it?” he moans. He rummages in the pocket of his short pants and pulls out his little glass slab. He pokes one eye out from my petticoat hem and peers at the object.
“Argh,” he says.
“What, argh?” I ask.
“Battery’s dead. Do you know what time it is?” He looks up at me with a bright, warm smile.
“Nigh on morning. There’s people about.”
Wes disentangles himself from me and plants a sweet kiss on the corner of my mouth. His beard is scratchy, but I drink in the kiss all the same.
“I love your mole,” he says out of nowhere. “Your mole tastes perfect.”
I laugh, as it’s doubtless the oddest compliment I’ve ever gotten. I never thought much about my mole, though Beattie used to sometimes wake me up by poking it with her finger, as though I were a doll whose eyes could be opened by pressing a button.
Wes takes one of my curls and rubs it thoughtfully between finger and thumb. I reach up and trace a fingertip along one of his eyebrows. It feels silky to the touch. We stare at each other, unwilling to shatter the fragile silence that holds us together, protected from the rest of the world.
“Mommy, there’s a man here!” a tiny voice cries, and we break apart, startled.
A small child in a sailor suit is pointing at Wes, and its mother appears behind it, pushing a wheeled baby carriage with a resigned expression on her face.
“Keep going, Aiden.” She sighs without a word in our direction, heaving the carriage around a corner in the path. The child in the sailor suit scampers after her.
Wes looks at me.
“I guess we should be getting back,” he says.
I nod. I wrap my right thumb around my bare left ring finger.
Today. I’ll find my cameo today.
Hand in hand Wes and I emerge from the park, passing carts selling pastries and coffee on the street corners. He stops to buy a cruller and some coffee in a paper cup that says, “We are happy to serve you” on it in faux-Greek font. The cruller looks good, warm and shining with sugar. I wish I could taste it. With a twinge of sadness I think of the roasted-pear seller I used to frequent on First Street, the fruits syrupy with sugar.
Wes is wiping sugar from his lips with his wrist when we arrive back at Maddie’s building. A different man stands guard at the door today, and before he’ll let us up he has to talk into some sort of oddly shaped speaking tube to obtain our approval.
“Eighth floor,” he informs us once approval is granted.
He has an accent I’ve never heard before—not French, German, or Portuguese, not Carolina, Chinese, or Dutch. A stranger among strangers. I smile at him, but he doesn’t see me.
When the lifting machine deposits us back in Maddie’s foyer, we are met with boisterous noise from deep within the apartment. A pair of large men’s shoes sits under the table in the center of the foyer, together with a satchel.
“There is no WAY I’m wearing this!” Maddie hollers.
Wes and I exchange a look. We’re late. Maddie’s already getting dressed.
“Hello?” Wes calls.
“In here!” a young male voice answers, and Wes and I grope our way down an infinite hallway, looking in at doors—a linen closet first, then a room seemingly designated only for bathing, then a room with nothing but books and a large wooden desk, like Papa’s study—before we finally choose the right one. We open it to an explosion of finery, and Maddie standing poised with a boot held high over her head, a boy cowering at her feet. The room is all done up in florals and pastels, and looks nothing like Maddie at all. With some surprise I see that the bed is the exact same one that I used to share with Beatrice. But it’s been painted white and is piled high with so many pillows it’s hard to imagine there’s any room for sleep.
“Eastlin?” Wes says, and the boy kneeling on the floor glances over at us with a smile.
“Will you tell her how gorgeous she looks?” cries the cowering boy. “She won’t listen to me.”
He’s the same boy who was asleep in Wes’s room, the one I scared by accident. He’s beautiful, which isn’t a word I often use to describe boys, but it’s the only word for him. His skin is peach smooth and perfect, and though I find his manner of dress alien, the worthiness of his form is undeniable. Wes dresses like a boy, to hide his male shape. But this one—Eastlin?—has no such compunction. He’s like the Bowery bloods, lounging on street corners with nipped-in trousers and perfectly cut coats.
“You look—” Wes starts to say to Maddie, but he stops himself when he catches me looking at him.
Maddie whirls on us and chucks the boot in our direction, but we both duck and it whomps ineffectually against the doorjamb.
“I look ridiculous!” she shouts.
She’s wearing a dress that at first glance looks something like mine. It’s a rich brick-red, of a color to make her skin look dipped in buttermilk. It falls in sumptuous layers to just below her knees.
“Not at all!” I say, rushing up to mollify her.
Maddie turns away, wrinkling her nose. But I see her looking at me from underneath her eyelashes in the same hopeful, expectant way Beattie and I use on each other when we feel anxious and want to be complimented.
“You look lovely,” I say, resting a hand on her arm. In a whisper, I add, “Truly.”
The tiniest of smiles pulls at Maddie’s cheek, and she whispers back, “Really?”
“You do,” Wes manages to say.
I don’t look at him when he says it.
“What I’ve been saying,” Eastlin grumbles. “Now sit down over there.”
He steers Maddie over to a cushioned stool at a dressing table, and brushes a finger along the side of her neck, over the lattice of her tattoos.
“How long have you been here?” Wes asks Eastlin. He goes over to Maddie’s—my—Maddie’s bed and flops onto it.
“Not long. Maybe half an hour,” Eastlin says, casting an appraising look at the laurel leaves staining Maddie’s neck. “Why in God’s name would you get a neck tattoo, huh? What are you, a Hell’s Angel?”
“I’m an anarchist,” Maddie says, lifting her nose in an imperious way. “My body is mine, and I’ll do what I want. I don’t have to bow to your capitalist definitions of beauty.”
I stifle a laugh, gazing on Maddie in the mirror.
“The man begs me to come over here and make you look respectable, and that’s what I’m going to do. Now be quiet,” Eastlin says, reaching for a tub of some dun-colored cream. He dips in a finger and starts dabbing it on Maddie’s neck. “Too dark,” he mutters to himself, wiping it off with a cotton ball. He puts the tub down and rummages for a different one.
“Yo! I’m here!” a boy hollers from the front vestibule. “Did I miss anything?”
It’s Tyler, who bursts through the bedroom door with a grin on his face, carrying a giant bag bulging with what I imagine to be recording equipment.
“God!” Maddie says. “What is this, Extreme Makeover, Maddie Edition?”
Tyler has fixed a recording box to his face and creeps up to where Maddie’s sitting. “Annie, you look awesome,” he says.
“Maddie,” Maddie corrects him. “Annie’s over there. And I look like a bourgeois sellout.”
“No,” Eastlin says with exaggerated patience. “You look like a lady. Now hold still.”
Maddie rolls her eyes and looks pleadingly at me. “You see what I have to go through?”
I rub the sore spot on my side where my stays are digging in, and say nothing.
“Where’d you get all that stuff, anyway?” Tyler asks, aiming the camera at Eastlin’s potions and boxes of clothes.
“Abraham Mas did their first show for Fashion Week this year,” he says through his nose as he draws a careful line along Maddie’s eyelid. “Kind of on a shoestring, though. I helped dress the models. This stuff is leftover from that.”
“Oh my God,” Tyler moans. “You got to touch real models, and you don’t even appreciate it.”
Eastlin smirks without moving his hands, drawing a delicate line on Maddie’s other eyelid. “I appreciated it more than you would,” he says.
“Maddie,” Wes asks from his vantage point in the bed. “This is a pretty sweet apartment.”
She grumbles, but doesn’t say anything, as Tyler adds, “Seriously.”
“Why would you want to stay in some squat, if you could stay here?” He drops his voice to a conspiratorial whisper. “Did they throw you out or something?”
Maddie huffs in annoyance and bats Eastlin away from her face, turning her back on the boys in her plush little girl’s bedroom, her hands on her cheeks. She stares at herself in the mirror, and in her reflection she meets my gaze. She looks older, dressed up in this way. I can see the outlines of the woman they’re planning for her to be. It’s a trap they’ve laid. They cosset you, and pet you, and tighten the screws so slowly you don’t even feel them sink into your skin.
I know exactly how that feels.
Who’s going to offer to drive her away on a stolen cart until the wheels falls off? Whose secret cameo will invite her into a world of her own making?
I rest a hand on her shoulder. I’m looking at her hard so that I don’t have to look at myself. I don’t trust mirrors.
“Because . . . ,” Maddie starts. She swallows the tears that are welling up in the lower lids of her painted eyes.
“Because they’re slavemongers, aren’t they,” I whisper in her ear.
Maddie closes her mouth and nods. She looks down into her lap as Eastlin steps away and studies his handiwork.
“Not bad,” he says. “If I do say so myself.” To Maddie, he adds, “While you’re gone I’m just going to burn these fishnets, okay? You don’t mind, do you?”
Maddie wipes a tear out from under her eye and makes a face at him, but the glower subsides into a smile. She gets to her feet, smoothing the front of the dress down with her hands.
The transformation is remarkable. Her tattoos are hidden under flesh-colored paint, like actresses use, and her eyes have less soot around them. He’s urged her dyed hair into a low chignon, and the dress skims her form most becomingly. It must be so much more comfortable, wearing dresses like that, with no lacing.
“What do you think? Is it all right?” she asks me, eyes wide, hunting for my approval.
I smile at her. “I know it’s not to your taste,” I say. “But I think you’re lovely.”
“Do I look respectable? I have to, or they won’t let me in,” Maddie says. “They’ll, like, call the cops or something.”
“You look a perfect lady,” I say.
“All right!” Tyler interrupts, hopping from one foot to the other. “Let’s get this show on the road! Can we all fit in one cab? Should we Uber it? Where is this place anyway?”
Maddie loops her arm through mine and smiles regally into Tyler’s camera.
“Sorry,” she says. “It’s just Annie and me, going.”
Wes clambers off the bed and moves over to us, hovering between us and the door. “Are you sure? Maybe I should come with,” he says.
“No,” Maddie says.
A flash of panic illuminates Wes’s eyes, but he’s trying mightily not to show it.
“But,” he says to me, his voice tighter than usual, “what if something happens? When you find it?”
Maddie and I exchange a look.
“We won’t put it on until we get back,” Maddie suggests. “How about that?”
“Yes,” I say, and now it’s my turn to waver. “I’ll do it when we’re all together.”
Wes looks carefully at me while Tyler moans, “Oh, man! But I got extra batteries and everything!”
“Where do you want to do it?” Eastlin asks quietly as he puts his various tools away.
I look over my shoulder at him. He hasn’t looked fully at me since I walked in with Wes. I can tell that my very being here sets his teeth on edge. As it should. I don’t belong here.
“I don’t know,” I falter.
“Maybe back at your house?” Wes suggests.
It’s a logical idea, but something about it makes me afraid. I don’t know what’s going to happen. I don’t know where I’m going to go. I think of our front door melting before my eyes, and can’t conceive of seeing that happen again.
“They’re about to open,” Maddie prods us. “We should get going. I don’t know if I have to fill out any paperwork, or whatever.”
Eastlin closes a case full of paints and powders with a decisive snap and says, “You guys go. We’ll text you where to meet us. Okay?”
“Fine,” Maddie says.
“All right,” I agree.
Maddie hauls me to the door and my eyes stay locked on Wes, who reaches a hand out as though to stop me. But then we’re gone.
• • •
My head is still spinning from the incredible speed of the horseless landau when Maddie presses an unmarked buzzer outside an imposing marble façade across the Central Park from her building. It looks to me like a mansion, but of a scale I hadn’t heretofore imagined. What wealth there must be in New-York now! Dizzying wealth, like the kings of France in the old regime, with their gilded walls, alabaster peacocks, and bowlsful of jewels. Our town house could fit inside this one seven times over or more. I follow close on her heels as Maddie heads inside, trotting to keep up with her as she strides past an airy art gallery, through an unmarked door secured with another buzzer, down a long hallway filled with false light, and at last through a modest glass vestibule deep in the building’s entrails.
There’s a young woman perched behind a desk, and her demeanor is serious and businesslike. Her beauty staggers me. Everyone has such perfect teeth, such smooth and unbl
emished skin. Even Mother, for all her vanity and social ambition, has pox scars on her cheeks and a brown front tooth.
“You must be Miss Van Sinderen,” the woman says to Maddie.
I peer unseen over Maddie’s shoulder to watch their exchange. I still prick up my ears and begin to respond when I hear someone say my name.
But I might as well not even be here.
“Yes,” Maddie says with an imperiousness that reminds me of Mother. “I’ve come to pick up an item my father placed on deposit here a few months ago. This piece wasn’t meant to be put on loan.”
“I’m so sorry,” the young woman says with an evenness that belies her sorriness. “What a blunder. Here, come this way.”
She leads us into a narrow room lined with filing cabinets, with a felt-covered table in the center. Maddie seats herself at the head of the table and folds her hands, tapping her thumbs together.
“Are you sure they’ll just give it to you?” I whisper in her ear.
“Shh,” Maddie shushes me out of the side of her mouth. “Just act normal.”
I gather she’s saying that mainly for her own benefit, as I can act however I like with impunity. But I’m too nervous to try playing pranks on the young woman from the historical society. I’m afraid that she’ll somehow snatch away my last chance without even knowing what she’s done.
This woman has the power to damn me for eternity, and doesn’t even know it.
“Now then,” the young woman says, reappearing from a vestibule carrying a large book under her arm. She sets it on the table in front of us and opens it to the first page. “This is our finding aid for the collection. You don’t know the acquisition number, do you?”
“No,” Maddie says tightly. “It’s a piece of jewelry. A cameo.”
The Appearance of Annie Van Sinderen Page 31