The Impossible Girl

by Lydia Kang

  Suzette nodded.

  Cora drank the alcoholic, bitter tincture down to the last brown drop, then set the cup delicately in the saucer, and handed the two brown bottles back to Suzette, who hid them in a fold of her dress. Suzette plucked a small bell from the edge of the table and rang it.

  The maid came in momentarily.

  “Jane, I’m afraid Miss Lee is not feeling well. She has a fever. Please run a cold bath for her, and bring the ice upstairs. All of it.”

  “Do you wish to call for the doctor?” Jane asked, her eyes wide at seeing Cora resting her forehead against her hand, slightly slumped over in her chair.

  “In time. We’ll try the bath first.”

  Jane curtsied and quickly exited the room. Suzette looked anxiously at Cora. “Cora, dear. How are you feeling?”

  Cora looked up at her, eyelids already drooping.

  “Horrible.”

  CHAPTER 27

  Cora ought to have been shocked at how quickly the medicines were taking effect, but she was too drowsy to be shocked about anything.

  A treaclelike heaviness had spread over her limbs, and her head swam with dizziness. She checked her pulse and found she had trouble locating it on her wrist. It was becoming too slow and weak. She was nauseated but fought the urge to vomit. She needed to keep the medicine in her stomach. Dimly, she was aware that the light outside the window was waning. Twilight had come. Or was it her vision that was dimming? Her mouth was dry, as if she’d drunk sawdust shavings instead of tea, and she blinked sleepily at Suzette. Her cousin’s voice seemed to be coming from a tunnel.

  “Cora? Cora?” Suzette said, but her lips didn’t match the words. Cora thought maybe she was saying, “More, more,” as if Cora needed to take more medicine. Cora reached for her cup, but it was empty. She knew that. How odd that she would reach for it. She did anyway, and hooked the teacup with a feeble finger, but it slipped off and shattered on the floor.

  “Jane!” Suzette cried. “We need to get her upstairs. To the bath. Quickly.”

  The opium had worked so quickly. But of course, she had not eaten a thing all day except a few stale crumbs at her home. Which was not her home any longer. Leah was gone, Leah who had raised her to sell her. Like a pig. Worth more if she was a pregnant sow, which she was.

  “Sow!” Cora exclaimed suddenly, and Suzette looked at her with a troubled expression. Why didn’t Suzette understand the joke?

  “All right, Cora. We’ll go upstairs.” She raised her voice for the sake of anyone who could hear her. “You’re burning up with a fever. Come now.” She came over to Cora and offered her a hand. Cora was too tired to lift her hand, so Suzette slipped an arm around her waist, hoisting her up off the chair.

  “We are going, goooooinnng,” Cora slurred.

  “Yes, we are. Upstairs to the bath. Remember?” Suzette whispered. Her face was all concern with a hint of panic, but her voice was quiet and steady. “The ice bath.”

  Suzette was gesturing to the maids, who were bringing fresh linens up the grand staircase outside the salon. Cora saw the polished mahogany railing, the rich Persian carpets on the floor, and the gilt medallions decorating the walls. Maids were carrying buckets of water upstairs for the bath. Another brought a sheet gathered up in the corners, containing something wet and dripping, with chunky edges. The ice.

  In the washroom upstairs—everything was white and shining and scrubbed and polished—a large porcelain bath lay next to a pedestal holding a ewer and basin, along with an ebony shelf full of bath salts and soaps. One of the maids approached Cora with an eye to undressing her, and Cora stretched out her arms, Christlike.

  “No,” Suzette said, shooing the maid away. “I’ll undress her myself. Leave the towels. I’ll be out in a bit.”

  Cora could barely stand. Her head swam with wooziness, and darkness bled into the edges of her vision. She put her hand on her chest and found that her gown was already gone, and she stood only in her petticoats and one of Suzette’s old corsets that didn’t quite fit. Soon Cora stood shivering in only a loose chemise and long pantaloons, Suzette drew her to the bath.

  “It’s ice cold,” Suzette said. “As you said it should be.”

  Cora nodded, and while holding on to Suzette’s steady arm, she slipped into the bath. The water knifed up her calves and thighs, and when she sat down, she couldn’t suppress a cry. Immediately, her skin erupted everywhere in gooseflesh, and she shivered violently. The cold seemed to awaken her from her opium stupor. She shook her head and put her hands on the edge of the bath, as if trying to pull herself out again.

  “You have to go lower,” Suzette told her. “You need to cover your shoulders too.”

  Cora’s teeth already chattered, a clanging that echoed in her skull. “I can’t. Suzette, I can’t.”

  “You must,” she said soothingly, almost too persuasively. “This is the plan. Your plan, remember?”

  “What if . . . ,” Cora said through chattering teeth, “What if-f-f this k-k-kills me?”

  “It won’t. You won’t die.”

  But Suzette’s words seemed hollow. A dull voice of alarm swirled in the recesses of Cora’s mind. Alexander’s voice: Does it occur to you that you’re another Cutter heir? That you’re competition?

  Panic widened Cora’s eyes. She looked up at her cousin who was pushing, pushing, pushing her back into the water. Soon, the iciness enveloped her to her neck.

  “I think you need more opium,” Suzette said, almost to herself. “Yes. She’s too awake.”

  “I s-s-suppose I should d-d-die with my eyes c-c-closed,” Cora chattered.

  “You should, yes. I’ll be right back.”

  Cora watched as Suzette whisked out of the room and closed the door. She heard the doorknob make a slinking sound. Suzette had locked the door so the maids wouldn’t interfere.

  As she waited in the bath, her shivering began to slowly subside. Maybe, she thought, I should get out for a while. But when she attempted to clench the sides of the slippery porcelain bath, her fingers were too numb to comply. She put her finger in her mouth and found her tongue felt hot against her fingertip.

  I must lower my temperature more, she thought, and closed her eyes to sink deeper into the tub. The floating chunks of ice clanked around the bath’s edges and her knees as she sank down to allow the water to cover her mouth. The iciness in the center of her body squeezed, tight and painful, until it transformed to a quizzical, dull warmth. Almost pleasant.

  Cora didn’t realize that she had fallen asleep until Suzette unlocked the door. Cora opened her eyes in tiny crescents to see Suzette carrying the bottles of medicine in her hand, and another great enamel basin of ice chunks balanced on her hip. One by one, so as not to make noise or a splash, she put the great pieces of ice in the water to replace what had melted; they floated like grand uncut diamonds. She looked at Cora just as Cora’s eyes slid closed again.

  “Cora!” Suzette said.

  Cora could not answer her.

  “Cora!” Her voice sounded more forceful, but not frightened. Cora felt a hot hand on her forehead, and the same hand slipped under the surface of the water to shake her shoulder.

  Cora’s own hand rested lightly against her chest, just over her left heart. Stubbornly, it thumped against her palm. Faint, but there.

  Thump.

  Thump, thump.

  Thump.

  Thump.

  Thump.

  The beats were erratic, with very slow pauses between them. The herbs were doing their work. Cora forced open her eyes and saw Suzette working on the medicine droppers. She realized she had fallen unconscious for several moments.

  “I sent the letters out,” Suzette said. “You’ve been in the bath for almost an hour now. Your lips are positively blue. It’s time for the belladonna,” she said. “I’m sure it will sting. I’m sorry, Cousin.” For a lady of the gilded uppertens, she possessed a startling comfort with the medicines, the ice, the plan.

  Suzette leaned over a
nd pulled Cora’s right eyelid up. Cora saw the brown glass dropper loom closer, closer, like a stick ready to pierce her very skull. Something blazing hot and painful hit her eye. She winced and wanted to cry out, but her mouth was still beneath the surface of the water. Suzette lifted the other eyelid, and an explosion of searing pain hit the other eye.

  “I don’t know how long the drops will last. I may have to put them in again, before the doctors arrive. But, Cora,” she said, putting the medicines back on the shelf, “you mustn’t react to me, or to Dr. Blackwell, or the other physicians, when they come to see you. You can’t move. You can’t breathe. You can’t snore. If they pinch you, you can’t react. Do you understand?”

  “More . . . ,” Cora rasped, her throat so dry. “More . . . opium.”

  “All right.” After several moments, she felt Suzette lower her bottom lip. A dreadful bitterness spread over her tongue. “And now, we should get you out of this bath and into the bedroom. You are cold as death, so we’ve done that well enough. I brought two extra slabs of ice and put them in the bed, and extinguished the fire. I kept only one small lamp lit, so it’s quite dim.”

  Suzette did her best to try to get Cora out of the bath, but eventually she had to call the maids for help. Cora was now truly ill enough that there was no lying necessary to show how incapacitated she had become. She didn’t have to be considered officially dead until the “guests” arrived.

  With the maids’ help, Suzette put her into a long nightgown, dried her hair, and lifted her onto Suzette’s bed. The nausea in her belly was overwhelming. She wanted terribly to vomit, but again, she swallowed down the bile in her throat and willed her stomach to be still.

  A maid whispered, “Is she dead?”

  “She looks it. She was well just a few hours ago!” said another.

  “I don’t know. She had a swoon, but perhaps it was a fit. She’s had them before, but this is the worst one yet. I think it was brought on by an ague of some sort.” It was as if Suzette were feeding the lines directly from Dr. Blackwell herself, who had prepared her for questions they might encounter.

  One of the maids sniffed. “What kind of life she had been living, I can’t imagine. Those clothes she was wearing!”

  “Yes, and she wasn’t in good health to begin with,” Suzette said. “Fevers can take people so quickly sometimes. We must call for her family.” She dabbed her eyes with a handkerchief, despite the lack of tears.

  Inside the room, viewed from Cora’s barely opened eye, there was a canopy bed, festooned with thick gold damask and silk fringe. Everything seemed to appear now in duplicate, and oddly washed in a glaze of jaundiced yellow. Cora was laid atop hard, cloth-covered slabs of ice. But she was already too cold to care about any discomfort.

  “It’s the fashion now,” one of the maids whispered, while arranging the bedcovers. “There’s a man who can make the corpse look so real. He keeps them on ice until the interment.”

  “She’s not dead yet!” another maid whispered.

  “If she isn’t, it shan’t be long,” the first maid replied.

  Suzette shooed away the maids again and went to a table with a large mirror before it. She took a box of face powder and brought it over to Cora. She carefully added the whitish makeup to her entire face, her hands, and her upper chest, whisking away the extra powder so the finish was more natural.

  “You are as dead as I can make you, Cousin,” Suzette declared quietly. “There is nothing more to do but wait.”

  CHAPTER 28

  Before she slipped into unconsciousness, Cora recognized that she was numbingly cold, and her back was damp from the melting ice. A few times, Suzette came in to make sure the bed had towels nearby to keep the ice from soaking the linens and conspicuously dripping to the floor. But when she touched Cora’s stiffened hand, or face, she nodded with satisfaction. Cora must be cold enough that anyone who felt her would assume she had been dead for hours.

  Her mind was a whirling, confusing storm of images, interchanging with voids where time and distance tangled with the present. She’d note that Suzette was touching her cheek, or changing a pad of bed linens nearby; and then she would be at home in her old, decrepit cottage on Gowanus Bay, twelve years go. Cora would be dressed in a little boy’s clothes, chasing dragonflies that alighted on the mud chinking of the cottage walls. Leah would be scolding little Jacob for being outside too long, while Charlotte wrote another letter, asking for more funds. And somewhere in the background, there was Alexander, with a precious pair of dead fowl, doing his best to supplement the meager supplies of the house.

  Vaguely, she noted that Charlotte stood up to greet someone. It was Dr. Tilton, whom she had seen only a few weeks ago. But she couldn’t see him. She just knew it was he, from his voice at her side.

  “I cannot believe it. She was the one with the two hearts? And all this time, she concealed it from everyone. It’s unbelievable.”

  “I didn’t know whom to tell,” Suzette said. “Miss Lee had mentioned your name—I thought you were a family friend.”

  There was silence as she felt his warm fingers on her cold hand, but it left just as quickly. There was a creak of a door, and new voices murmuring quietly. She could hear footsteps on the soft carpet beneath the bed.

  “Mr. Flint,” Suzette said. There was a pause. “Dr. Blackwell. And Mr. Duncan. I apologize for the shocking news. She was well earlier today, but there had been a fever. She seemed terribly overtaxed—her constitution must have been weakened.”

  “A fit, did you say?” Theo said. His voice was hoarse.

  More silence. Suzette must be nodding. There was sniffling, and a rustle of handkerchiefs.

  “Where will she be buried?” Theo asked. Something in Cora’s hearts seemed to knock, then go silent, like the wind dislodging a chestnut from its branch and falling, falling.

  Calm, Cora tried to tell herself. Be calm.

  “Evergreens Cemetery,” Suzette said. “I’ve spoken to Mother. She’ll be laid in the new family plot we’ve purchased. It’s only right.”

  “Who else knows?” Theo asked again. His voice was strangely unemotional.

  “You, and the doctors she once worked with. I believe that gentleman she called her uncle is still in the hospital?” she said.

  “Alexander is in the hospital? Why?”

  “He was attacked on Murray Street. We sent a message to him, but he hasn’t replied.”

  Cora’s eyes smarted. She remembered how Alexander had fallen in and out of consciousness. What if his wounds were worse than she realized? What if he had died?

  There were more murmurs. The maids came in and out, and then Mrs. Cutter came in to briefly greet and say goodbye to the visitors. Whispers were quickly doused by the matriarch of the house.

  Cora fell back into brackish, frozen slumber again and again, her body made so inert by the medicines and ice that she felt tied with ship ropes to the very core of the earth.

  And every time the specks and slivers of wakefulness arrived, her thoughts were too disjointed for her to even wonder whether she’d survive this. She recalled several words being said around her.

  Shocked

  It’s true

  Heart

  Hearts

  Heart

  Hearts

  How

  She wanted to string the words together like beads on a silk cord and finger them like a rosary, as if each one had the power to erase all her past sins, every misstep.

  At some point, she seemed to awaken long enough to hear two voices just outside the door.

  “Let the servants take care of it, Suzette. My God, you’ve spent almost every moment in there since it happened. You’ve done what you can.”

  “I won’t leave her,” Suzette was saying.

  “There is nothing left to do. The burial will be in hours. Your mother doesn’t want her in this house for longer than necessary. Anyone of importance who knew her has already seen her.”

  “I won’t leave her,” Suzet
te repeated, the stubbornness in her voice rising.

  “Drink this.”

  “What is it?” Suzette paused. It sounded like she was sniffing something.

  “Wine. You need to calm yourself. This is a shock to you, I understand. But remember—this is a blessing. It’s better she is out of our life. It was a disgrace, what her mother and aunt—your aunt—brought into this family. It will all be laid to rest now.”

  Suzette sputtered and coughed. “This isn’t just wine. What did you put in here?”

  “Something to calm you.”

  “What was it?” Suzette said, her voice rising. “A soporific?”

  “Laudanum. Quite a bit too. I’d like to see you rest. This amount of excitement must be addressed.” There were low murmurs, and Suzette’s voice began to crack. She was crying now.

  “I have to be in the room with her,” she insisted.

  “I forbid it. The plans are already in motion for your cousin’s burial. You need not attend to the details.” He paused, and his voice lowered. “Your fixation is unhealthy, Suzette, and unbecoming. Too much time with those terrible novels, I’m sure, and that will have to change. I understand you grew fond of your cousin, but enough. It’s up to God now to hear your prayers.”

  The door was shut vehemently, and there was a click of the lock.

  Cora tried to open her eyes, but her face somehow didn’t obey her. With a herculean effort, she raised her arms but found that only one arm moved. Her right. And only a tiny twitch of her finger. Her left side was completely numb, immobile. And she was still cold, so cold. The back of her body was soaked from the melted ice, and her head swam with dizziness. Since the room was empty, she tried to speak.

  Nothing issued from her throat.

  She tried to open her eyes again, but she could not. Another wave of dizziness came, the now familiar treaclelike tentacles of unconsciousness pulling her down. She should not have asked Suzette to give her the extra dose of the opium. She might have died. Perhaps she was dying. She would laugh at the irony if she were not too drugged to do so.