The Possessions

by Sara Flannery Murphy

  He’s moving, clumsy and slow, back to shore. Everything is tilted and trembling, a world sent spinning like a marble across the floor. Pressed awkwardly to his body, I can feel the strain of his muscles, and, miraculously, the weight and stretch of my own body. My consciousness still tethered to my limbs.

  We’re approaching the shore. The moon in the sky rights itself. The water is as high as his shoulders. When he stops, I lean against him, clutch at him. The other name dissolves on my tongue.

  “I’m sorry,” he says, close in my ear. His voice is burning and clear; it’s as if I’m hearing a human voice for the first time. “I’m so sorry, Sylvia.”

  THIRTY-ONE

  The earth under me and the tree trunk behind my back are gloriously real. The pine tree’s reptilian bark, the thick soil. I want to reach out and grasp everything, drinking the world in. I’m intoxicated by my body: my skin and bone and blood, the humidity and shivery pulse of me. I could stay here forever.

  Far away, on the other shore, sparse glimmers of light cut through the trees.

  Patrick leans against the opposite tree trunk, his hands clasped between the peaks of his knees.

  “Things had been going wrong,” he starts, as if in response to a question. “When I married Sylvia, she was the most vital person I’d ever met. She made me a better person. People responded to me differently when I was with her.”

  “She was pregnant,” I say.

  Patrick breathes in sharply, as if bracing against physical pain. “She was. Once.”

  I lay my palm along the ground next to me, relishing the soft give of the earth beneath my hand. I slip my fingernails into the damp loam. For a moment, I’m about to speak—then he continues, and I swallow the words back down.

  “We’d been married for a few years,” Patrick says. “There was no reason not to have kids. One day she came into the bedroom, smiling, crying, showing me the test.”

  After the Elysian Society, my brain has developed a specific quietness. The ability to walk inside a stranger’s story without being touched by it. Tonight, I’m stripped to a primal state. Sylvia’s story is as intimate a landscape as my own memories.

  “She started bleeding,” Patrick says. “On the way to the doctor, I kept telling her, it’s nothing. But she already knew what was happening. She wouldn’t look at me. She didn’t even let me come to the exam room with her. That was our hardest month. I kept saying the wrong things. Once, I told her that at least we knew she could get pregnant. We’d just try again. Sylvia reacted as if I’d . . . struck her. I couldn’t understand.

  “It didn’t happen, and it didn’t happen. We were trying everything. Spending so much time and money and energy, constantly failing. It was like that first pregnancy had been our one chance, and we’d lost it, and now we’d never get it again. I saw a whole new version of my wife. All this sadness I hadn’t even realized she’d had inside her. She was barely leaving her bed. Do you have any idea what that’s like?”

  I curl my fingernails deeper. “No,” I say.

  “We don’t know what happened,” Patrick continues. “The doctors could never give us a straight answer. That’s what I wanted. One thing we could fix. One problem we could focus on. But there was no real explanation. Her body just . . . didn’t want to do it. I’d rest my hand on her stomach at night and imagine reaching right through her skin to fix something. She was so small, and everything was right there under my hand. But I couldn’t do anything for her.

  “We were exhausted. It was hard to have that same warmth around other people. People talked. I hate myself for it now, but then, I resented Sylvia for not being stronger and happier. I looked the other way. I waited for her to change back into who she’d been before.”

  The stars are different out here. Dizzy sprays of light, more star than sky, whorled and textured like the wind-churned surface of an ocean.

  “I got lost in work,” he says. “Sylvia made an effort to focus on other things. She was thinking about returning to photography, taking it seriously again. I’d still catch that sadness in her. But she was trying to hide it, and I let her. I wanted her to hide that side of herself from me.” Patrick opens his eyes. “This went on for a year. When Sylvia asked to come to the lake that weekend, I took it as another sign that things were getting better.”

  The photo. It slips into my head, every detail crisp and alive. I’m grateful for the image: proof that arrived ahead of its explanation. Preparing me for what comes next.

  “The Damsons were here,” he says. “That changed things. We were doing our old song and dance, playing the happy couple. Even when we were alone together, it felt like we were being watched. I couldn’t go to dinner with them that night. Sit there and be the charming husband. When they came back, she’d been drinking too much.

  “She said we hadn’t been honest with each other in a long time, and she wanted to change that. But she needed to be honest. She didn’t want any secrets between us.” Patrick pauses. “Being with Henry, it was a chance to be somebody different. With him, she wasn’t failing at anything, she wasn’t thinking about the future. She could be her old self. Or maybe—maybe she said she could be someone new. I forget which. Both.”

  I rise and go to him, wrapping my arms around Patrick. The chill goes deep: his body drenched down to his center, the coldness seeping outward.

  “All my wife wanted was for me to see her at her most unhappy and broken,” he says. “She wanted me to see her that way and still love her.”

  “You never knew about her and Henry?” I ask.

  Patrick makes what sounds like a muffled laugh, a noise I feel in his chest. “It’s like I’d been waiting for her to tell me. Once she did, I could look at it directly. The Damsons being here wasn’t a coincidence. She’d followed him. When I went to confront Henry, he was waiting for us. Whatever she’d said or done earlier that night, he must have known she’d tell me.”

  I tighten my arms around him.

  “Viv was asleep,” Patrick says. “That’s when Sylvia told me Viv was pregnant. I stood in that place with my wife and with him. I couldn’t say or do anything to make it right. Henry kept saying we should move on. I felt this huge difference between us. Henry and Viv—somewhere behind my back, they’d become so real. And Sylvia and I were broken. When Henry told us to forget the past, he was gloating. He knew that he’d move on, with Viv and their baby. And he knew that we couldn’t. He was chasing us out of our lives.”

  “Sylvia still wanted to be with you,” I say. “She told you that she wanted a new start.”

  “I didn’t believe her,” Patrick says. “If Henry had been willing to walk away with her that night, she wouldn’t have looked back once. I told her I was leaving her. Told her she was nothing. Worthless. I was glad we’d never had a child, because I wouldn’t want my child growing up with a mother like her.”

  The pain is like a knife meticulously slicing open the outline of a scar.

  “It was a blur, after that,” Patrick says. “Sylvia wasn’t crying. She wouldn’t speak above a whisper. All the color just gone from her. Her eyes were— I couldn’t look at her directly. Like she’d already stepped out of our world and into another place. She just turned around and left.”

  “You didn’t follow her?” I ask.

  “No,” Patrick says. “One of us should have gone after her. She was out of her mind with sadness, she’d been drinking. She wasn’t a strong swimmer. I left a few minutes after she did. I saw her, on my way back to our place. She was already waist-deep, pulling off her dress. Seeing her from a distance, doing something like that, she could have been a stranger. This beautiful woman standing in the water. She didn’t even seem real.”

  Looking out across the water, I can see Sylvia coming toward us. Submerged to her waist, torso cutting an elegant line through the darkness, bare breasts streaming with lake water. Her eyes locked on us. On me.

  “Henry and I never made a conscious choice to hide what happened,” Patrick says. “
Viv was with him the next day. The lake was swarming with people. We couldn’t even make eye contact without someone noticing. It was a silent agreement. Henry seemed to think I’d leave. Leave the firm, leave the city. Vanish, like she did. I can tell he hates having me around.”

  “He identified her body?” I ask.

  “I let him,” Patrick says dully. “What did it matter? I remember Viv acting like he was a hero for doing that. Like it was a kindness. I always thought it was his way of showing that she was more his than mine. I didn’t stop him.”

  The way Henry has spoken about Patrick, that quick dismissiveness and impatience; he must see Patrick as a ghost, circling the edges of the life the Damsons have created, carrying the bitter memory of Sylvia with him into every room he enters.

  “And her family wanted to blame this place,” Patrick says. “They wanted something to explain her loss. I was the one who discouraged them from pursuing a lawsuit. I didn’t want people picking over the details. Her family respected my wishes, but that was the beginning of the end. We stopped seeing each other. Everyone who’d been part of our lives together fell away. I didn’t do anything to stop it.”

  The knob of his collarbone presses into my cheek as I lean against him.

  Patrick turns his head toward me, his startlingly warm breath catching at my skin. “Now you finally know everything about me,” he says. “You know me better than anybody else alive. So what about you?” he asks. “Any deep dark secrets?”

  He’s teasing, weary and rueful. Sitting next to him in this moon-glutted place, I realize how easy it would be to tell him everything. To open myself to him: show him the parts of myself so scarred and strange and distant that they barely seem to be me at all.

  “My life has been very quiet,” I say.

  “You’re lucky,” he says. “A quiet, honest life. You don’t know what it means until you don’t have a chance to lead it anymore.”

  I can’t answer.

  “I pretend all the secrecy is for her sake,” Patrick says. “Sylvia wouldn’t want people knowing what really happened. Better to let them think it was a freak accident, one of those senseless tragedies they can obsess over. But people sense my guilt. And I did kill her, just not the way they think.” He shifts restlessly. “It would almost be better that way.”

  “You were heartbroken, Patrick,” I say. “You weren’t thinking clearly.” When he doesn’t answer, I ask, “You’ve apologized to her?”

  “No,” he says. “At first, being with you, with her—it helped. Talking with her felt like the first few years. The years we were falling in love. We’ve never discussed that night. I couldn’t risk ruining what we had. Then you started mentioning the lake, pushing me to come here. I gave in.”

  “We were in the water together,” I say, half a question.

  “Usually there’s enough of you to soften her,” Patrick says. “Tonight, you swallowed the lotus and she was here completely. You were nowhere. I’d thought if we relived that night, I could undo what happened. I’d go to my wife, the way I should have that night. But she was in the water. She was strong. She fought back. There was a point where you went under the surface and I knew you wouldn’t be coming back. Sylvia would hold you there until you were gone too.”

  It returns to me, a confused jumble of soundlessness, fractured darkness, the sensation of his hands against me. His arms wrapped tight around me. And I realize: Patrick doesn’t know what happened while I was tucked deep inside the belly of the lake. When he found me, he couldn’t have known that I was already caught in a relentless trajectory toward the surface, my body bright with the desire for breath. If he’d looked for me before, he couldn’t have found me. I was so far beneath his reach. Too far.

  There was that moment when something changed inside my brain. A stubborn spark that spread to my limbs, propelling me away from the blackness I’d been sinking into.

  I examine Patrick. He followed his wife, this time; he pulled her from the lake. I see all the tired relief, the cautious triumph, collected in his eyes. His past finally erased and rewritten.

  “But you saved me, Patrick,” I say. Strong, as if there’s not a doubt in my mind. I brush his hair behind his ear. “You saved Sylvia.”

  THIRTY-TWO

  In my apartment, I survey the place through new eyes. I’ve neglected my own home these past few months. A discarded blouse droops over the back of the couch, arms splayed like a crime scene outline. The TV plays an upbeat commercial jingle to the empty living room. The dishes in the sink give off a curdled smell.

  In the shower, I shut my eyes. Fear jolts through my muscles: the memory of my time under the water. Then I relax, feeling her retreat like a watchful animal.

  Patrick and I parted this morning without any mention of when we’d next meet. It didn’t occur to me to ask whether we’d see each other again. It feels natural now. A given part of my world. I caught the tenderness, almost reverence, in the way he’d look at me, the gentleness when Patrick kissed me good-bye.

  I have dozens of lotuses. Enough to retrace a portion of a life. Erase the ugly parts and restart, step back into the sweetest moments. In my bedroom, drying my hair, I catch sight of the photograph that lies next to my bedside table. The Braddocks’ wedding portrait, all that hope shimmering behind Sylvia’s smile. It feels like the truest version of her, trapped behind the other women she became. The scared and frustrated and angry incarnations. The grieving mother, the fierce and heartsick woman wrapping her arms around Henry to forget everything else.

  That first woman, all optimism. She’s the one I could bring back. The one I could lead from the darkness. I remember last night, in that distant universe we occupied at the lake. When Sylvia carried my body up to the surface of the water.

  The moment she pushed back against the press of time, refusing to let this second body sink into the same lonely space as the first.

  I press my hand against my cheek, the skin hot and beaded with moisture from the shower. I’m filled with gratitude that she would give me this chance. As much as I’ve been exposed to her secret heart, Sylvia knows mine too. She knows what I’ve done, the parts of myself I’ve hidden from everybody else. And yet she pulled the air back into my lungs. She strummed my pulse back into my veins; she breathed warmth onto my eyelids, coaxing them open like petals.

  After my day at the Elysian Society on Monday, I’m tired. Even being gone for two days has damaged my ability to sink fully into the work. I feel like a new employee again. My clients’ steady stream of hope has sapped the oxygen from my brain. I’m ready to return home and sleep. When I see the silhouette of a man standing next to my car in the evening light, his face turned from me, I stop.

  He looks up. It’s only Lee. He instantly adjusts his demeanor: shoulders back, a smile beneath serious eyes.

  I move closer, fishing for my keys. “Hello, Lee,” I say. “What are you doing out here?”

  “I wanted to talk.” The light is an uncanny sunset mix of dimness and brightness, everything brilliantly obscured. “I looked for you yesterday and I couldn’t find you.”

  I slide my car key into the lock. “You must have just missed me,” I say.

  “Tell me it’s not about Patrick Braddock,” Lee says.

  I freeze.

  “Maybe you aren’t seeing him here anymore,” he continues. “But I’m not naïve. I know that what goes on doesn’t always happen inside this building.”

  I should go, leave Lee with his question unanswered on his tongue. But something holds me back. My heart blossoms with an unexpected affection for him. All these years, he’s been one of the few people to try to understand a version of me that extends beyond this white dress.

  “I have been seeing Patrick,” I relent. “At his home, as his wife. As Sylvia.”

  “And that’s what you truly want?”

  I’m opening my mouth to say, Of course it’s what I want, but the certainty isn’t there. My desires betray me. Once I get what I’ve wanted, all t
hat’s left is more wanting, the next desire slipping seamlessly into place like a demon jumping from host to host. I should have remembered that wanting is like this. Always leading further and further down a path of new complications, endlessly hungry. For a moment, I miss the former version of myself: the woman who’d taught herself how to stop wanting.

  Lee’s face, backlit, is emotionless. “I hate seeing you caught up in this,” he says. “You’re better than what he can offer. You’re cut from a different cloth than the Braddocks.”

  “Maybe you don’t know me that well,” I say.

  “I know you’re in love with Patrick.”

  I can’t open my mouth to deny it.

  “And I know that Patrick might not be able to feel the same way.”

  I consider hurting Lee, squeezing my hands against the dip in his throat. I’m shocked at the vividness of the image, unfolding colorfully inside my head. The streak of unexpected violence leaves me almost queasy.

  “One of my clients worked with me since I first started,” Lee says. “A while back, she told me she was getting married. I wished her well and said my good-byes. The wedding was a few months ago. She’s come back a dozen times since to talk with her husband. Her first husband—I guess that’s what he is now. I don’t ask questions, but I worry. I’m not sure her new husband knows about her visits. Maybe he approves of it. Maybe he just tolerates it.”

  A group of bodies leaves the building, moving close together, silent and bowed. One of them, an older woman, glances pointedly at me and Lee together.

  “So what would you do?” Lee asks, soft. “If Patrick moves on, he remarries. Has children with someone new. If he kept on coming to see Sylvia, you’d be all right with that?”

  “He wouldn’t do that,” I say.

  “You have your own life, Edie,” Lee says. “You don’t need to share somebody else’s.” He touches my hand.

  Lee is an ordinary life. An ordinary lover, unattached and undemanding. I stare at Lee’s hand on my skin: the absence of Patrick’s golden freckles. The absence of Patrick’s wedding ring. Uncertain and small, something comes awake inside me. Not the lust I feel for Patrick, engulfing me in a second flat, but a warm and vulnerable spark. One I’d need to nurture.