The Possessions

by Sara Flannery Murphy

  At Lindsey’s car, a boxy SUV with a plastic flower on the antenna, she opens the door and then looks at me, hesitating. “I should thank you,” she says, half a question.

  “For what?”

  “For making this whole thing not as terrible as it could be,” Lindsey says. She rubs at the back of her neck, looking up at me through blond hair muddied with highlights. “You must think I’m pretty pathetic. My husband wants a dead woman more than he wants me.”

  I resist the impulse to reach out and touch her hand, push her hair behind her ear. Some gesture that would remind her of her own specificity, her tenacious, beautiful existence.

  “Well.” Lindsey’s sigh is channeled from a place deeper than I can access. “I don’t blame you if you do.” When she opens the car door wider, I spot a scatter of plastic toys across the passenger’s seat, a bottle with milky white inside. My heart stutters. I hadn’t realized that the O’Briens were parents. “You’ll never be seeing my husband again,” she says.

  “Never,” I agree.

  Are you free tomorrow night? Come over. I want to have a real date, a nice dinner.”

  His easy warmth thaws the resentment that’s been growing inside me since the other night. But I hold back. I almost didn’t answer the phone when I saw his name trapped inside the screen. The accusations push at my lips: I saw you with her. She was there, in our home.

  Who was she?

  Who is she?

  “If you can’t make it, though,” Patrick says, “I understand.”

  “No, Wednesday night sounds perfect,” I say. “I’ll bring the ingredients. Let me cook.”

  “I didn’t realize you cooked,” he says.

  “Maybe I haven’t mentioned it yet.”

  “There’s a lot I still don’t know about you,” Patrick says. He sounds genuinely surprised at this.

  On Wednesday morning, Dora comes to find me. I’ve just ended an encounter with Ms. Milroy, a wistful, diluted woman who lost her mother as a child. I’m dazed from the lotus, a floating sensation just behind my eyelids. When Dora taps on the door frame and then comes into Room 12 uninvited, I focus on her as if she’s a figure in a dream, conjured inexplicably into the wrong scenario.

  Dora sits in the client chair. She hovers on the edge, knees loosely together, one leg jumping. She gives a tentative smile. “Mrs. Renard wanted to see you,” she says. “I volunteered to get you.”

  As the lotus wears off by degrees, I look at her more closely. She’s different, her cheekbones more pronounced, her curls limper and flatter. She’s growing less specific. A face in a crowd. “Thanks for letting me know, Dora.”

  “There’s something else I wanted to talk to you about.” She whispers now, words rushed. “How long did it take you to move out of the apartment?”

  “The apartment,” I repeat. I piece together what she means. “On Sycamore? Maybe a year. Not long.”

  Dora’s eyes flick toward the ceiling as if she’s calculating.

  “Is there a problem?” I ask.

  “No,” she says, too fast. Then, after a pause: “It’s just— I keep finding stuff left behind by the girls who lived there before me. It’s spooky. Like there’s no room for me.”

  A spark of impatience awakens inside me. I want to tell her that she might never have a chance to free herself from other people’s lingering influences, that some of us are destined to crawl inside the shells of lives others have left behind, never deserving a place of our own. But I bite this back. I remember how lonely the Sycamore apartment was, like a child’s clumsy drawing of a home: bed and table, chair and lamp.

  “I understand that you’d like your independence,” I say, making myself speak gently. “Keep in mind that Mrs. Renard is looking out for you. It’s not the most glamorous place to live, but it’s cheap, and it’s safe.”

  Dora bites at her lower lip, eyes unconvinced.

  “Just be patient,” I say. “Keep focusing on your work here.”

  “Yeah. Well. Beggars can’t be choosers, right?” She slips off the chair and moves toward the door. “Anyway. You better go see what she wants.”

  Mrs. Renard glances up as I enter her office. I instantly register another presence. Jane stands to the side of the desk, hands clasped in front of her body. I almost turn back, an instinctive desire for escape.

  “You wanted to see me?” I ask. A throb of anxiety runs through me.

  “Come in,” Mrs. Renard says. “Lock the door behind you.”

  I slide the lock into place with a solid click, a punctuation mark in the silence. Jane won’t look at me. Every time I try to make eye contact, her eyes slide away from mine.

  “Sit,” Mrs. Renard commands.

  The chair is overstuffed, overwhelmingly soft. I could sink into the upholstery and never emerge, a crumpled white dress and strands of blond hair spat out in my wake.

  “I’m sure you have some idea why I’ve called you here today, Eurydice. I placed a significant amount of trust in you,” Mrs. Renard says. “Imagine how much it disappoints me to hear it was misplaced.”

  Her voice is only mildly reproving. It’s as if we’re discussing someone we barely know.

  “I’ve always been generous with you,” she continues. “But when I learned that you purchased lotuses behind my back, for your own purposes, I knew it was time to start treating you like any other employee. Like someone I can’t trust.”

  I look at Jane again; she’s gazing at the floor as if she has no part in this conversation.

  Mrs. Renard examines me without speaking for a long, tense moment. “Do you have anything to say for yourself?”

  “I bought those lotuses for a different client,” I say. “You have every right to be disappointed in me, Mrs. Renard, but—”

  “Are you meeting with Patrick Braddock?”

  I shut my eyes, barely even surprised.

  “That’s what Leander has suggested to me,” Mrs. Renard says.

  Resignation moves sluggish through my veins. Lee: of course. Lee, saving me from myself. Backing me into a corner for my own good.

  “You’ve removed a paying client from inside these walls and started meeting with him on your own terms,” Mrs. Renard says. “You think you know better than I do what our clients truly need, what they want from you, but you’re wrong. These things never end well. You’re hardly the first body to betray me.”

  “Are you going to fire me?” I ask.

  For a moment, leaving the Elysian Society holds an appeal so strong it surprises me. But then Patrick moves back to the forefront of my mind. I don’t know what our relationship would look like without the Elysian Society between us. Taking it out of the equation feels too soon and delicate, like moving an injured person when the wound is fresh.

  “Try to see things from my perspective,” Mrs. Renard says. “You’ve been soliciting lotuses behind my back. If you’d betray the Elysian Society on one level, who’s to say you wouldn’t go further?”

  “Fowler’s not even working with the authorities anymore,” I say.

  “But the damage is already done,” Mrs. Renard says.

  The words come out of my throat, shoved along by my own desperate momentum. “I know who worked with Mrs. Fowler,” I say.

  “Is that so?”

  I’m silent. My pulse pounds in my ears.

  “Give me a name,” she says, low.

  “It was Ananke. Ana. She admitted it to me.” And I’m prepared to justify this. To point out that Ana knew about Mrs. Fowler, that she needs money, that she has a history of working with clients outside these walls.

  But instead: “I suspected as much.” Mrs. Renard leans back in her chair. “I only wish she had told me herself.”

  Jane reaches up to scratch at the back of her neck, still not meeting my gaze.

  “Mrs. Renard, Ana was only trying to help,” I say.

  “Possibly,” she says. “But Ananke’s shown an unforgivable disregard of what we do here. She’s endangered this institution
, and for what? Nothing.” She smiles with a thin triumph.

  “You said she needed protection,” I say. “Isn’t that why you wanted to find out who worked with Mrs. Fowler? Not to punish her, but to help her.”

  “She’ll be helped.” Mrs. Renard is distracted; she reaches for the phone on her desk. “Thank you, Eurydice. I’m glad to see your loyalty hasn’t changed as much as I feared.”

  I watch as she brings the phone to her ear, her fleshy cheek pouched against the receiver. And I understand that Mrs. Renard isn’t going to press me about Patrick Braddock. This is my reward for being faithful to the Elysian Society: being allowed my small vices. Being allowed him.

  All of Ana’s hints, her pointed focus on the sundress and the earring, clutter my head. I study Mrs. Renard behind her desk. She runs the entire operation from this hidden perch, pulling the strings, soothing the clients, dispatching the bodies. I can’t believe I ever thought she was unaware of Ana in hotel rooms, of Jane selling lotuses. Of me and Patrick.

  “Jane,” Mrs. Renard says, “will you please show Eurydice out?”

  In the hallway, Jane won’t speak. She starts down the corridor to her own office until, desperate, I step in front of her. I think she might walk right into me. But she finally looks at me, examining me with chilly blankness. As if I’m a mere obstacle in her trajectory.

  “We need to talk,” I say.

  “I told you that I couldn’t protect you if it meant risking my own position here. Surely you can understand that.” There’s a nasty undercurrent in her voice.

  Ignoring this, I say, “I need more lotuses.”

  “You’re out of luck,” she says. “Renard’s tightening the reins around here, didn’t you notice?”

  The implication of this hits me hard, full as a fist. “How will I get more?”

  “That’s not my problem,” Jane says.

  “Please,” I say. “It’s not what you think, Jane. It’s not about the money. I’m in love with him.”

  The words between us are clear, bright, as if I could take them into my hands and watch them light up the shells of my closed fingers.

  I’m in love with him. I’m in love with him.

  “Love?” Jane repeats, almost reverent. I think she feels it too: in the middle of this space, the air stifled with strangers’ grief and the muted ache of loss, there’s something exquisite with life and promise.

  “Jesus,” Jane says. The mood snaps, neat as a twig under a heel. “If you knew how many times I’ve heard that, you’d understand why I don’t care.”

  TWENTY-THREE

  I’ve brought a bottle of wine to Patrick’s house tonight. Glossy pink chicken under plastic, a glass bottle of brined capers, two lemons, olive oil.

  “What are you making?” he asks.

  “It’s a recipe my mother used to make.” I open one of the low cabinet doors beneath the oven range, searching for a pan. All the dishes inside have a furred skein of dust settled in their depths; a spider scuttles away from the sudden press of light.

  When I straighten again, Patrick watches me. “Are you and your mother still close?”

  I realize that I’ve mapped out a portion of my distinct history, diverging sharply from where I first met Patrick in March. I remember myself as a little girl with a long, melancholy face, hair so pale it looked white, like a photographic negative of a dark-haired child.

  When I don’t answer, Patrick speaks up, tentative: “I said the wrong thing.”

  I smile an apology, shaking my head. “She lives far away,” I offer. “We don’t talk often. Not for any reason. Just life getting in the way.”

  Patrick’s eyes turn thoughtful. “I haven’t seen my family in a long time. You look up one day and it’s been a year. More. It’s easy to lose track of people.” A pause. “Easy for them to lose track of you.”

  He speaks lightly, but the very lightness of the words is wrong, as if he’s so accustomed to this isolation that it’s no longer strange. Standing in the kitchen, I think of the photographs, my first introduction to the Braddocks: so many faces spread across those images. A whole rotating cast of bit players, supporting roles. All those people thickened out the Braddocks’ lives, reflected their beauty and happiness back at them. Eyes like mirrors.

  In contrast to those infinitely populated photos, Patrick’s current life is astonishingly empty. His echoing house; his solitary body moving through the rooms. No photographs displayed on the walls other than Sylvia’s. No envelopes bearing return addresses in the intimate handwriting of friends, parents. This must be why the sight of the dark-haired woman hit me so hard. She’s such an anomaly that she’s forced into uneasy significance.

  Patrick picks up one of the lemons, rolling the pebbled neon yellow between his palms.

  “It’s not so bad, losing touch with people who aren’t there for you anyway,” I say. The Damsons flash through my mind. “I find it’s better to focus on the future.” I peel away the plastic veil clinging to the chicken: the pink meat shimmers with crystals of ice.

  “Wise woman,” he says.

  I’m silent, thinking of those faces. Something else occurs to me, a hard punch of a realization. Each smile in those photographs must mean something specific to Sylvia, a trail of beloved memories. Her friends, cousins, college roommates—they’re scattered across the city, across the globe, mourning her. Navigating the flat, unending landscape of grief, running into unexpected reminders of her absence. Sylvia is coming back into a world without these other lives. Her life, this time around, is narrower. Only big enough for the two of them. Him and her.

  Patrick leans over me to reach for a glass. His body tight against my back, his breath in my ear, and I’m penned in. I can’t move. His arm presses tight against my shoulder.

  The bathroom has high ceilings, eggshell-pale walls. A trace of ammonia sours the air, and the bar soap next to the sink is hardened and warped.

  The muffled rush and clink rises through the floorboards as Patrick washes dishes downstairs. He still hasn’t mentioned the stranger. I’ve been looking around, furtive as a suspicious wife, for some remnant that could open up the conversation. Blotched lipstick on the rim of a glass, a black hair curled on the sink drain. But it’s as if she was never here. She walked through these rooms without shedding a trace of her physical presence.

  I open the medicine cabinet, the mirrored doors cutting my reflection in two as they swing open. On the shallow shelves inside the cabinet, I find a razor, an empty prescription bottle. A sleep aid. Crouching, I pull open each drawer beneath the sink: nothing, nothing, nothing. And then, at the bottom, a lone object. The movement of the drawer has sent it rattling wildly from one corner to another. A single earring, a simple gold stud.

  I reach for it. This proof that a woman was here, in this house, intruding on my space. I imagine going downstairs, laying this piece of evidence between us, forcing Patrick to account for her: Who is she? Why is she inside my life?

  But confusion washes through me. Maybe the earring is mine. Maybe I wore it a few weeks ago, forgot it here. Or maybe it belonged to Sylvia, a leftover, neglected for years. I drop the earring back into the drawer.

  When I go downstairs, back into the kitchen, Patrick glances around from the sink. “Get lost up there?”

  “I’m sorry,” I say.

  “You know I’m only teasing,” he says. “My home is your home.”

  I can’t speak. I go to him, wrapping my arms around his waist and feeling him still at my touch. Leaning my head against Patrick’s shoulder, I’m shocked at how neatly we slide into place. As if I’ve worn grooves in him, as if he’s carefully shifted the shape of my body during my sleep.

  I wake up in a stranger’s bed. His face next to mine is gaunt and somber; his eyes shift beneath the tissue-fine membrane of his eyelids. His hand on my hip is heavy enough to pin me down.

  I struggle to my elbows. A hard thud of panic slams over and over into my brain: get out get out get out.

 
I look for the door. Beside me, the stranger mumbles, shifts.

  The sleep dissolves from my brain slowly, then quickly, and I’m back in Patrick’s room. I’m naked, the covers wound around my ankles like weeds. On the bedside table, the envelope of lotuses is half open. Only two left. The depletion of the pills is as steady as an hourglass, ticking down until the moment I have nothing left to offer.

  Out in the hall, I breathe more easily. Pulling Patrick’s discarded shirt around my shoulders, I move past the kitchen, past the living room. I automatically shift my hips to avoid the protruding corner of a side table. My foot knows which creaky step to avoid on the stairs.

  And I know which unassuming door to open and enter on the second story of the house. The room is overcrowded. Boxes stacked haphazardly in one corner, disgorging a clutter of paper. I could open the boxes and find Sylvia’s body parts, labeled and bubble-wrapped, neat as a mannequin’s. Her slim torso, tiny waist, beautifully sculpted face, ready for assembly.

  The first box holds a tumble of clothes, elegant colors and delicate patterns. Silky dresses, sweaters soft as fur, shoes dainty as a doll’s. I’ve never realized how tiny Sylvia was. Photographs gave me an abstracted sense of her body, but holding her clothes is a shock. Placing a lacy shirt against my own body, I see exactly where I diverge from her shape, the bone and flesh I’d have to trim away, stitch to my frame, to match her. The clothes release a light floral scent of detergent. At the edges, there’s the bitter breath of clothes that have sat untouched.

  I look through the other boxes. Expensive jewelry tangled together, jewels choked by chains and earrings snagged like fishhooks. Cases for DVDs. Hardback novels: classics, titles that I vaguely recognize. A defunct phone, screen smeared with fingerprints. Everything looks as if it’s been swept into the boxes unceremoniously. In one box, a glass bottle of nail polish has cracked, leaving a red crust against a white sweater.