The Possessions

by Sara Flannery Murphy

  “I never told her how I felt,” Mr. O’Brien says. “There was never a good time. She was with somebody, I was with somebody. I married Lindsey while Margaret was in a relationship that seemed to be going somewhere. Why put my life on hold? And I love Lindsey. She’s a wonderful woman.” He looks at me accusingly.

  “Of course,” I say.

  “She thinks I’m at therapy. Lindsey’s been so understanding since Margaret died.” Mr. O’Brien fidgets, twists his watch around his wrist, and then falls into stillness. “I used to think: What will I do if something happens and I’ve never told her? I tortured myself, imagining if I never got up the nerve to say anything.” Mr. O’Brien clasps his hands together. “But I couldn’t hurt Lindsey like that.”

  Pain slices at the edges of my careful blankness. Shockingly sharp yet small, like a wasp sting or a paper cut.

  “That’s all I could think, when I got the call,” he says. “I thought, I have to tell her. I better tell her, before it’s too late.”

  “Mr. O’Brien,” I say. He looks up at me, eyes blunt and clouded. “The Elysian Society exists so that you’ll always have time to say these things.”

  He considers this. “You think I’m a terrible person, don’t you?”

  “I can promise you that I don’t.” I reach for the lotus. “Shall we begin?”

  SEVEN

  A familiar voice rises from a sea of strangers’ bodies and turbulent music. Calling my name.

  I move through the gloom. Cigarette smoke and colognes create a cloud in the orange lighting. Women in clinging tops, variations on the same style, line up at the bar, slouching backs jutting in waves. A few people turn, their gazes slipping off me.

  “You made it,” Lee says when I arrive at the table.

  For a second, I think I’ve taken a seat among strangers. Everyone looks so different out of the Elysian Society uniforms, bareness replaced with markers of individuality that seem embarrassingly intimate. Ana’s halter top is low-cut, her eyes doubled in size with shaded layers of makeup. Dora, across the table from me, has her hair down in a soft mass of curls.

  Ana has been talking to a body I know only vaguely, a younger man with close-cropped hair, but she cranes around at the scrape of my chair. Her face is feverishly rosy. “Oh my God,” she says. “You have to be fucking kidding me. Are you still wearing your uniform?”

  “I couldn’t. . . .” I start, but I don’t have anything to say, and I’m sinking with panic.

  She laughs. “I would have told you not to wear it, but I thought you’d know. Jesus, Edie. Don’t you own any other clothes?”

  “All right, all right,” Lee says. “It’s an honest mistake.”

  Ana turns away, biting back a smile.

  I clutch uselessly at the front of the white dress.

  “You look fine, you always do,” Lee says. “Look, can I get you anything? A beer?”

  “Thank you,” I say. When he rises to make his way to the bar, his knee presses against mine. I pull back quickly; Lee murmurs an apology.

  Patrick’s knee against mine. I glance around the bar, as if he might be sitting at a corner table, waiting to approach. I hold my breath until I’m satisfied that he isn’t. Of course not. But in my mind Patrick’s everywhere, the whole world suffused with the thrilling prospect of him.

  Dora leans toward me. Without meaning to, I stare at the sweat-shiny hollow between her breasts. “Would you like my shrug?” She doesn’t wait for an answer, already wriggling her arms loose. I take the sweater, touched at the ease of her offer. It’s wrong for me, sheer and crimson, sparkling threads woven throughout.

  “Red looks great on you,” Dora says. She’s using that magnanimous tone that pretty women use with plainer ones. I don’t mind. “You should wear bright colors more often.”

  “Well, I don’t have many chances to dress up,” I demur.

  “Yeah, I didn’t bring much along,” Dora says. “I’m sick of wearing the same stuff every day. Maybe we could go shopping?”

  “Maybe,” I say after a surprised second. I can’t tell whether this suggestion is an overture of friendship or an attempt to draw a favor from me.

  “I don’t know the city yet,” Dora says. “I thought I’d have time to explore, get out and meet people. But this is the first time I’ve done anything outside of work. Pretty sad, huh?”

  Lee returns. The glass he places in front of me brims with a deep, clear yellow. I take several long drinks, the beer settling in my belly.

  “How are you finding the work so far?” I ask Dora.

  She pulls her mouth to one side, glances up at the ceiling. “Oh. Fine. I guess. My roommate left. She’d only been there a week and then I wake up today and all her stuff is gone.” She closes her fingers and then opens them, like a magician revealing a dramatic absence. “She’s just vanished.”

  “That’s typical,” Lee says. “Plenty of people find that the work isn’t for them. It helps to have certain personality traits.”

  Ana’s been shooting glances at us. Now she leans over the table to address Dora. “What you want is to be like her”—and Ana stabs a finger at me—“and have no attachment to anything. Or anyone. Be a recluse. A nun.”

  The beer lodges in my throat like a burble of laughter.

  “That’s what Lee really meant,” Ana continues. “He’s too nice to say it.”

  “I didn’t mean that,” Lee says.

  Ana stands, touching the tabletop with her fingers for support. “I’ll be back. Don’t talk about anything interesting while I’m gone.” In motion, she’s lithe and sparkling. Men’s eyes track her openly.

  “Renard said something,” Dora says. I turn back to her. “At the end of my interview, she said she could tell when people had something special. And she thought I had it.” With her hair down, Dora is achingly young. “But she probably says that to everyone.” She’s trying for a joking tone; I catch a twinge of wistfulness.

  “Not to me,” Lee says, good-natured.

  I hesitate for a long moment. A memory of the first time I stood in Mrs. Renard’s office works its way through my brain. “I can’t remember.”

  “I’d take it as a compliment,” Lee says to her.

  Dora grins at him. Her drink is neon, fading into the surrounding ice. When she lowers her glass, she licks her lips, unselfconscious. “Most of my clients aren’t so bad,” she says. “I thought they might be weirdos. Spooky? But a lot of them are sweet. They just want to talk to their daughters again.”

  “I can see you being a daughter,” Lee says.

  Ana leans against the bar, arranged so that her breasts and hips are pointed at the room. She talks over her shoulder at the bartender, and she and I notice at the same time when a man detaches from his table and comes to stand in front of her.

  “Are you a mother?” Dora asks.

  I realize she’s talking to me. I’m overtaken by a dense chill that rises, separating me from everyone else here. Muting the lights like a finger pinched over a flame, pressing down the voices and music so that they turn meaningless.

  gone, all gone

  Then I force myself to focus; the world pops back into clarity. “Only sometimes,” I say. “I’m a wife. Not always, but usually.” I wonder if I’m blushing. Absurdly, I want to talk about him. “One of my best clients right now is contacting his wife of six years. She drowned at Lake Madeleine.”

  Dora makes a murmur of dutiful sympathy, but it’s Lee who looks at me. “Wait,” he says. “Lake Madeleine? I know who you’re talking about.”

  “I don’t think so,” I say.

  Lee points at me, squints. “She was named, um, Celia? Or no, don’t tell me.” He holds up a palm. “Sylvia? Sylvia sounds right.” My scalp prickles. “I remember when that happened. I followed it for a while.”

  “It was on the news?” Dora asks.

  “Briefly,” Lee says. “As I recall, the question was whether he’d sue the resort where it happened. For negligence. There was some issu
e about whether the wife drowned because of fault on their part. Not marking the dangerous areas of the lake. But then the whole thing vanished. I assume they settled out of court.”

  Patrick never mentioned this. A sense of betrayal plummets through me, stone heavy, as I realize that he’s kept aspects of his wife’s death cloaked from me.

  A noise grabs at my attention. A sharp lift of voices. When I glance over, Ana stands with her arms wound across her chest. The stranger leans over her, his hand gripping the bar. He’s taller than her by a foot. Through his unseasonable winter coat, his frame suggests a restless energy.

  “The husband is an attorney,” Lee is saying. “I wonder how he’s holding up.” His eyes twitch toward me. “Not too well, I’m guessing.”

  I’ve been drinking steadily. Everything is starting to feel tilted, flat, like a picture held up at the wrong angle. “Do you know who that is?” I ask Lee, gesturing at the bar. “One of Ana’s clients?”

  Reluctant, he follows my gaze. “I doubt it,” he says. “We choose this bar because we won’t run into clients.”

  Ana’s moving back to the table now, the stranger following in her wake. He reaches out to touch the small of her back. Her expression is hectic, brilliant and tense as a live wire.

  “Edie.” I turn to Lee. His eyes are serious, his face close to mine. His breath is warm against my neck; the finest curl of steam from a cup. “If I’m right about who your client is, he shouldn’t be coming to the Elysian Society,” he says, low in my ear.

  “Why’s that?” I ask.

  But Lee leans back, his expression growing formal again. Ana has reached the table. Behind her, the stranger doesn’t try to hide his stare. His eyes linger on Dora. He’s middle-aged, roughly handsome. There’s an arrogance in his face: he’s smiling like someone who’s figured out a secret.

  “All of them—?” he asks Ana, nearly too low to catch.

  Ana ignores him. “So, something’s come up,” she says. “I know, I’m a flake. The rest of you should stay. Have fun. God knows we all could use a drink.”

  I’m fixated on the stranger’s hand on her elbow. The easy possessiveness of the gesture.

  “Your friends can come with us,” the man says. “I don’t mind.” His gaze has shifted to me. His eyes are watery, threaded with pinkish veins. “Don’t I know you?” he asks me.

  Ana laughs. “Her? No. Rob, nobody knows her. She never leaves her house.”

  “No,” he says. “I’m serious. You look so goddamn familiar.”

  I don’t panic. Keeping my expression blank, I slide through the faces in my memory. The ones I’ve allowed to grow dust-blurred and indistinct. Even after I erase five years from the stranger’s face, he stays opaque. I don’t know him. My stomach unclenches with relief.

  “Don’t tease her,” Ana says. She tugs at his sleeve. “Let’s get out of here.”

  When they’re gone, the rest of us sit in an uncertain silence. I can tell that Lee is waiting for an opportunity to return to our conversation, his patience like a soft itch. Suddenly, I can’t breathe. The room is overwhelming, the throb of music, the overlapping scents of a dozen bodies. Through the window, I still see Ana’s black smudge of hair.

  “I should be going too.” I ignore Lee’s open disappointment, not letting myself meet his eyes as I say good-bye.

  Tipsy, I see the bar as an obstacle course. Bodies perched on stools, bodies swaying next to tables, bodies peering into their phone screens. All I can think is how strange they are. So solitary, occupied by one heart. One mind, eating itself like a snake devouring its tail. These other people seem so lonely that I can’t bear it, and then a man pushes against my elbow, roughly enough that I’m not sure he sees me, and I’m less than one. A sliver of a person.

  Outside on the sidewalk, the damp night air brings me back. Ana lights a cigarette, her hand curled protectively around the flame. When she turns to me, her expression is both defiant and sheepish. A child expecting a scolding.

  “He’s just pulling the car around,” she says, breathing out a tendril of smoke.

  “You work with him?” I ask.

  “Not exactly.” Ana stares across the street, as if she’s addressing somebody else and I happen to be nearby. “It doesn’t have anything to do with the Elysian Society, OK? It’s my own shit.” She waves the smoke away with a graceful gesture. “I know it must be hard for you to imagine having a life outside of that place, but some of us do.”

  Ana has held other work over the years. I assume that’s why she vanishes periodically, returning like a cat wandering home after accepting food on strange porches. It’s always made me uneasy to know that the Elysian Society is just a job to her, no better or worse than any other. Looking at the exposed curve of her breasts, thinking of the stranger’s hand on her elbow, I wonder what her other work entails.

  It must show on my face. “It’s not what you think, Edie,” Ana says.

  “I know.” I speak too fast.

  Ana taps her cigarette. The tip falls to the sidewalk and fades into the asphalt. “Well, I’m glad you came tonight,” she says. “I’m sorry if it wasn’t as exciting as you thought it would be. Or if it was too exciting.” She smiles, wry. “What were you talking about while I was gone? Anything interesting?”

  “No,” I say, and mirror her smile. “Not really.”

  A car pulls up along the curb. Expensive and silvery, all low angles, windows so shadowed that I can’t see the driver. Without looking at me again, Ana slips inside the car. I catch a flash of her tight smile, the particular mix of blankness and brilliance, like the filament at the heart of a bulb.

  EIGHT

  At home, I can’t relax. I’m oversaturated: the alcohol, the conversations, the other eyes on me. Without the pattern of the Elysian Society, the outside world is unmoored. Anybody could say anything, do anything. It’s a constant undercurrent of chaos, one that everyone else is strangely capable of ignoring.

  Even before I became a body, I could feel it where other people couldn’t. The unpredictability that lapped at the edges of our lives, threatening to suck us under. The Elysian Society has given this fear a structure. Funneled it into a framework of routine, allowing me to step outside myself and become a silent bystander to other people’s grief.

  I was twenty-five years old when I began work as a body. Now I feel as if I haven’t aged, as if the world has continued on without me. I understand what people mean when they talk about spinsters or old maids. Women whose hearts are suspended in time, locked safely behind glass like museum artifacts.

  Five years ago, this is exactly what I wanted.

  I gaze around my apartment with the dismissive eyes of a stranger. All my furniture is cheap and hastily constructed, like displays in a store. It gives off the impression of sturdiness, but looking too closely reveals the peeling veneers. One half of my living room houses boxes and a small filing cabinet. All the files and photos I’ve collected from clients. Their memories crowd out my own.

  This was originally an improvement. It was only after a year of work that I rented my own apartment. All the upgrades I’ve made to my life since then have been in a similar vein. A used car instead of a bus pass, a plain winter coat to replace one coming apart at the seams. My life is neat, self-contained. A serviceable life. A placeholder.

  Tonight, the silence feels like a force that could smother me. A pillow held over my face.

  I sit in my car, twenty minutes from my apartment. I’m parked on a shadowy corner.

  Across the street, a small café is still open. A young woman with dark hair bends attentively over her phone. Next to the café, a bookstore is already closed for the night, silhouettes of the shelves visible beyond the darkness. And there’s the doorway I’m watching, tucked into a row of townhomes. Long staircase, looping wrought iron railing. A plaque gleams on the wall outside the entrance, a glint in the shadows. CASTLE & CLARK LLP.

  The neighborhood sits within an unpredictable system of locked gates
, homes surrounded by elaborate gardens and deep-set porches, like guests at a party who wish to be admired but not approached. I’ve passed through this area occasionally. Maybe that’s why this location came to me so quickly after Lee mentioned it at the bar.

  I shut my eyes. She waits inside my eyelids. Sylvia, nimble and immaculate as she greets her husband after work. Her black hair is pulled back, revealing a ballerina’s neck.

  he doesn’t love me anymore

  I open my eyes. As if conjured by dark magic, Patrick stands across the street, his back to me as he locks the door. His hair is a shade too long at the nape of his neck, a cowlick that’s absurdly vulnerable. A child without a mother to tend to him.

  Somewhere behind me, a shattering of glass breaks the silence. I turn my head. A green-aproned waiter from a restaurant across the street is emptying a cascade of bottles into the trash.

  When I turn back, Patrick has stopped. He’s looking at me. In the diffused light of the street lamps, his face is as indistinct as if I’m viewing him on a grainy screen. I must glow through the darkness. My white dress, my colorless hair. I can’t move. His eyes on me shove me backward, hold me in place like a physical restraint. Hands on my shoulders.

  look at me

  Then Patrick moves on, head ducked, until he turns a corner and is lost.

  When I start toward home, my mind is so razed that I can barely find my way. I can’t stop imagining what would have happened if I’d stepped out of the car, if I’d called out. Part of me thrills at the idea.

  Still. Still. Outside Room 12, a man like Patrick Braddock would never notice a woman like me.

  I was instructed to wear a simple outfit when I interviewed at the Elysian Society. Nothing formal. Nothing flashy, no distracting accessories. In the motel mirror, I scrubbed my face pink and pulled my hair into a damp ponytail.

  My outfit was the best I could do with what I’d salvaged from my life. White T-shirt, tea-colored skirt. Approaching the Elysian Society building for the first time with my naked face, I was embarrassed. Back then, it was rare for me to leave the house without makeup.