Tangerine

by Christine Mangan

  “How old were you?” I asked, tentatively, unsure whether her wounds were still fresh like mine, or even whether she would want to talk about it at all, recent or not.

  “Five years old,” she replied, that same nonchalant tone lacing her words, so that I found myself hoping I would one day be able to answer such questions in a similar tenor, that my voice would not shake and quiver as it fought to pronounce each word, to form sentences that conveyed who my parents had been and just how much I had lost with their deaths. “I don’t really remember my father anymore, he’s more of just a hazy impression—a suggestion, really,” she continued, whispering. “I know he worked at a garage, but beyond that, I don’t remember anything much about him. But my mother—sometimes I think I can remember everything about her, even the little things. Like a tube of lipstick, honey colored. Or the strange little glass bottle of perfume that she used to keep on her vanity—it was brown glass, with a clear top.” She shifted. “Anyway, I try not to think of her anymore.”

  She stopped then, and I could feel the curls of her hair, so close, tickling my face.

  “Does that work?” I asked.

  “Sometimes.” I could feel her shrug. “It’s harder in the morning.”

  I knew what she meant. “Sometimes I forget,” I said. “I wake up in the morning and it’s like my mind has completely reset. And then I remember, and I have to live through it all over again.”

  She nodded, but I could see that something else had pulled at her attention.

  “Look,” she whispered.

  Jennings Hall, the mansion that sat just beyond the main campus, unfolded before us. The college’s very own Gothic story, made real. There were always whispers about mysterious footsteps, ghostly voices, and strange noises that could never be accounted for, stories about various hauntings that had occurred over the years since it had been donated to the college. Perhaps it was only the sherry, but I was struck in that moment with how ridiculous a notion the idea actually was. Its outside was covered almost entirely by ivy, which had turned a blazing autumnal red in the weather, highlighted further still by the setting sun. It was beautiful, I thought, the walk through the forest more frightening than anything the building in front of us seemed to promise.

  And so when Lucy tilted her head toward the entrance, a silent invitation between us, I took a quick, deep breath and followed.

  “Is this what your home is like, in England?” she asked, turning toward me as we made our way into the hallway, a queer expression on her face.

  I frowned, wondering exactly what type of image Lucy had managed to sketch from the letters we had exchanged. Aunt Maude was well-off, that much was true, but she had lived alone prior to my parents’ death—a spinster, they might have called her only a few years before—and had not seen any reason to change things when her niece had unexpectedly arrived. “No,” I said, with a slight shake of my head, “there’s only just the two of us.” I looked around at the vast emptiness of the hallway. There was little in the way of furniture, and our voices echoed as we moved across the marble-tiled floor. “We wouldn’t know what to do with this much space.”

  Lucy, I thought, looked vaguely disappointed at my words. I waited, then, for her to say something about the place she had grown up in, but she remained silent.

  “Look at this,” she exclaimed. She crouched so that she sat half-hunched, balancing on the balls of her feet, only inches from the object of her excitement: two stone lions that sat side by side in the large, and apparently unused, fireplace. Reaching out her hand, she let it rest on the carving’s head.

  I felt uneasy, in the quiet of the house, conscious that we were not meant to be there but rather, should be dining with the other girls from our house.

  “Don’t, Lucy,” I pleaded, looking around me, as if expecting someone to materialize and tell us off for not following the rules. “We’re not supposed to even be in here.”

  She looked up, a smile forming in the corner of her lips. “Relax, Alice. Nothing will happen.” But her hand remained on the lion, and I was struck by the conviction that this strange little demonstration of defiance was for my benefit—to prove that she was a girl who could not be told what to do, that she was not afraid.

  A shiver passed through me, and I clutched my cardigan tightly to my body. Without the heat of the sun, the sweat that had slipped down my back only moments earlier had grown cold, and my skin rose in goose pimples as I fought to keep warm.

  Lucy stood. “You should have said that you were cold,” she said, pulling me closer, enveloping me in a strange embrace.

  My aunt Maude was not one for affection, and during my time with her, my life had turned into something solitary and cold. I had missed it at first, those small displays of intimacy, so that even when a stranger would walk by and accidentally brush against me, it was enough so that I could feel their touch for the remainder of the day, burning me, marking me, where we had collided. But now I struggled to relax, and when Lucy finally moved away, I could feel the space where she had just been, humming, vibrating, there in the air before me.

  She looked down at the lions. “It’s odd, but they remind me of a pet I once had as a child. A dog named Tippy.” The smile left her face then. “He was a complete surprise, especially if you knew my mother. She detested animals. She used to cringe at the idea of actually owning one. But then, one day, there he was. I guess a neighbor’s dog had had puppies and he was the final one, the runt they couldn’t manage to sell, let alone give away for free. He was small. White and tan. Not really a puppy any longer, since they had been trying for so long to get rid of him.” She stopped, taking a breath. Her eyes remained fixed on the statue, refusing to meet my own. “I remember taking him in my arms, promising to take care of him. My mother just watched from the corner.” A small laugh. “You should have seen her face.”

  “When did he die?” I asked, my voice little more than a whisper.

  “Not long after we first got him.”

  Something in the distance crashed, and I jumped. I looked back toward Lucy, but if she had heard the noise, she did not betray it. She remained still, implacable, staring at the lion, at the empty fire grate. “What happened?” I asked.

  “He was hit by a car,” she replied. “No one knows exactly how he got out, but suddenly he was off, running toward the main street.” She paused. “The impact should have killed him instantly, but it didn’t.”

  I shuddered, imagining the injured dog, suspended somewhere between life and death, imagining the pain. “Didn’t you take him somewhere? For help, I mean?” My voice, I knew, was pleading, but in that moment, standing in the cold, drafty mansion, I felt suddenly that I needed nothing so much as for Lucy to tell me that they had, that, yes, the dog had been saved, that it had lived, that it was still living, and that everything was fine.

  I knew, of course, that she wouldn’t.

  “My mother couldn’t drive,” she said.

  “But what about the neighbors? Wasn’t there someone you could call?” I felt frantic then, wanting to shake her, to wreck that stoic attitude, her shield and protection, I had already begun to suspect, from everyone around her. If nothing else, I wanted her to tell me that she had done everything that she could, that she had tried to save the life of this improbable dog that was never meant to be hers—that she had loved him fiercely enough for that.

  Finally, she turned her face to mine, her black eyes searching. She smiled, a strange, unnerving expression that sent my heart stammering, anxious to be away from her, from this place. She opened her mouth: “There was no one.”

  I exhaled, slowly. “So what did you do?”

  “We sat and waited for him to die.” She stopped, seeming to weigh her next words. “And he did, eventually. But it was slow. And he was in terrible pain. And so my mother went out into the garden and found a rock. It would be quicker, she said. And kinder. And because he was mine, it was my responsibility and no one else’s.” She shook her head, turning away.
“It was horrible, Alice,” she concluded, her tone steely and hard.

  I did not believe her. Raising my hand to my mouth—in shock, in doubt, I didn’t know—I could not help but be struck by the thought that the story, her story, I reminded myself, had seemed strangely distant, as if it had happened to another person entirely. Her words had been slow and measured, she hadn’t paused to catch her breath, to wipe away the tears from her eyes. It was as if the story had been cauterized, so that it no longer belonged to her at all, so that I did not believe her when she said it was horrible, did not believe her about any of it.

  I thought of the way that she had spoken of her parents, of that detached expression I had envied. In that moment, it was no longer something that I was as eager to covet.

  I stepped backward. “Let’s go, Lucy.”

  Her eyes seemed to flash at the sound of her name, as if remembering where she was and who she was with. As if everything that had come before had been spoken in some sort of trance and only then had she awakened from it. “Not yet,” she said, reaching for my hand. “There’s one more thing I want to show you.” Ignoring my protests, she turned us to the grand staircase, moving quickly, so that I had to increase my pace to keep up with her. “Hurry,” she called back, as if reading my thoughts.

  We continued to race upward until my breath came in short, ragged gasps, and my lungs began to burn. “Lucy,” I panted, knowing that I would soon be unable to match her in speed.

  “Just a little farther,” she promised, not bothering to look back, still firmly holding my hand.

  When she stopped—so abruptly that I nearly crashed into her—we stood in front of a window, wide and curved in a half circle. From our new vantage point, I could see that she had led us up to the mansion’s top floor. Lucy moved her face closer to the window, her fingertips splayed out on either side of her, pressed firmly into the glass.

  “The other girls say it’s haunted. That a family died here,” she whispered.

  I frowned. “What family?”

  “The Jenningses, the ones who first owned the house. They say the wife killed herself, that she threw herself out of this window, just here. And then the husband, out of grief, hung himself from one of the trees.”

  “That doesn’t sound true,” I replied, though I whispered the words. “I heard that the family donated this building to the college.”

  Lucy ignored my remark. “There was a student too, a few years ago. She threw herself from this same window, just like Mrs. Jennings.”

  I turned to look out the window, at the imprints of her fingertips, their individual etchings, pressed against the glass. I thought of the stories, of the women who had supposedly ended their lives here, one generation after another. And then all at once I felt it—something watching me, from somewhere within the dark recesses of the house. I turned to the left and then to the right, knowing that I had seen something, just out of reach of my vision. I thought at first that it might have been Lucy, but then I realized that she was gone. I was standing by the window alone, empty hallways stretching on either side of me, a half-dozen or so doorways down each corridor. I thought of the shadows, certain they were there, somewhere, lying in wait, so that I had the urge to fling open each and every door in order to prove there was nothing behind them.

  And then I remembered. About what Lucy had told me, only moments before: how her parents died when she was five years old. I frowned. It didn’t make her story impossible. Perhaps she truly did remember that horrible story from so young an age, and yet—what, I asked myself, what was it that had bothered me? I thought again of her detached manner, as if she were reciting a story that she had heard from someone else. I shook my head, feeling another breeze, a draft, I supposed, as it moved through the building. There was no reason for her to lie.

  I heard something in the distance again, and my heart began to race. I could feel the familiarity of it, beginning in my fingertips. A nervous condition, the doctors had said, most likely brought on by the stress of my parents’ death. It was a pressure, a grip, one that felt as though it would strangle me, for surely it possessed enough strength, enough power. Part of me had imagined, naively, I realized, that leaving England behind might mean leaving that all behind as well, that distance was all that was needed to dispel the ghosts of my past. I had been a fool, I thought, angry at myself, at my ignorance. It would follow me, always, no matter where or how far I went.

  But then, standing just a few paces away on the staircase, so that I towered over her, and not the other way around, stood Lucy. She watched me, with those strange, inquisitive eyes, and then she smiled and said, “There’s nothing to be afraid of, Alice.”

  Her voice was so certain, so sure.

  Lucy extended her hand toward me. “Come on, let’s go get supper.”

  All at once I felt the darkness that had threatened me only a second before begin to lift until it no longer felt like I was some Gothic heroine trapped in a haunted castle, a patriarchal labyrinth that was impossible to ever escape. Instead I was simply Alice and she was Lucy, and there was nothing to be afraid of any longer. I felt her hand searching for mine, her fingers interlacing with my own. I grasped it and together we fled the darkened mansion, leaving behind all the ghosts it held within, both real and imagined.

  THERE WAS A COMMOTION OUTSIDE THE BAR, and then something louder: an explosion of sorts, which brought me hurtling back to the present. I thought at first it was gunfire, thought I could feel the hot bite of it against my skin. I thought of the riots, of the violence that had been erupting throughout Morocco, that had touched Tangier only recently, proving that even she was not immune. John had spoken of it only briefly, making it sound as though it had been amusing that day when the locals had decided to take to the streets, hurtling bottles at the foreign-owned stores and later, when the police responded with gunfire, anything they could use to defend themselves. And when news came out that several lives had been claimed in the skirmish, and almost all of them locals, John had only shrugged, had told me it was nothing to worry about, that these minor rebellions would be squashed eventually. His faith had been absolute. It seemed that not even he, with his professed love for Tangier, had been able to foresee the determination of its people to reclaim their independence, to reclaim their Tangier, had refused to acknowledge, to recognize just how important, how absolutely necessary it was to their life, to their survival.

  I turned to look over my shoulder and saw a flash of lights, just beyond the din of the bar. No one was shouting or running away. There was only laughter, and the sounds of celebration. Fireworks, then, I noted. Locals celebrating their approaching independence. The idea caused something to prickle, just there, at the back of my mind. I moved and knocked over the glass in front of me, sending it onto the floor, splintering into sharp, nearly invisible pieces, the gin and tonic soaking my dress.

  Letting out a sharp exclamation, I stood quickly, the suddenness of my movement causing the dog beneath the table to let out a yelp of dismay, scrambling from his safe hold—though not before his teeth found purchase, my unexpected movement causing him to sink his teeth into my leg. I looked down to see a trail of blood slipping down my now-tattered stocking. The sight made me strangely dizzy. “He didn’t mean it,” I whispered to no one, watching as the dog disappeared from the bar. My head still felt light as I moved to help pick up the broken glass—the bartender now heading toward the mess that I had made—and I felt myself blush with embarrassment. I thought, then, of John and his angry scowl that evening. Of Lucy, and her penetrating gaze, always looking, always searching, I worried, for something that was not there. And then I thought I saw him—John—at the bar, though he wasn’t alone, wasn’t with Charlie, as he’d promised. And there was Lucy, just behind him, watching, watching, watching.

  And then I felt the hard sticky floor of the bar beneath me as I fainted, falling slowly at first, and then faster, without anyone at all to catch me.

  Four

  Lucy
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br />   I FOUND THE SOUKS ELECTRIFYING. THE LABYRINTHINE CURVE of them: dark and packed, with vendors that stood behind stalls or sat on the floor, their bags and buckets of wares splayed out before them. At first, I had been nearly swept up in its fast-moving current, but then I had slowed my gait—walking steadily, with purpose. I stopped at one stall, and then another, purchasing a few grams of bright green olives at one, a stack of hot, sweating msemmen at another. I inspected the hanging carcasses of chickens, not recoiling at the smell the way most tourists I observed did, but considering and haggling, as if I intended to purchase one. I paused in front of the brightly dressed Rif women, opting for a handful of broad beans instead, and then a wheel of white cheese, the kind I had seen locals eat, the sides covered with intricately braided green leaves.

  I had given up on my day dresses. Although it appeared that there were a number of expat women who still favored them, I found the fitted bodice too restrictive in the heat, and the skirt prone to catching against the jagged edges of the city. Instead I had liberated several pairs of capris from my suitcase, ones that I had not yet mustered the courage to wear back home, and a couple of monochrome blouses that seemed more prepared to handle the climate.