The Possessions

by Sara Flannery Murphy

  I straighten. I slip the wedding ring into my pocket. “I’m here,” I call.

  Nothing. In my bones, I feel a sudden absence. It’s as clear as if I’m sinking, the water shutting over my head. Down here, in this landscape beneath reality, everything looks the same. I can’t find my way back to the surface.

  Even though I’m calm as I approach their house, every movement precise and constrained, the Damsons react to my presence with a sudden, stricken tension. Viv, turning from the car door with Ben in her arms, freezes, pupils darting between me and her husband.

  Henry’s jaw clenches. He hesitates a second before he starts toward me, heading me off in the middle of the driveway.

  I understand that there must be something in my expression. That beneath the surface of my silence, I’m blood-streaked, screaming, wild-eyed.

  “What did you say to him?” I ask Henry when he’s close enough.

  “You need to go,” he says.

  “He wouldn’t have left without me,” I say. “He wouldn’t have done that unless you did something, unless you—”

  I stop, realizing that Viv has come up next to us. She’s different from the brightly tidy housewife I’ve been visiting. Today, she’s stripped and unadorned: wrinkles showing at the corners of her eyes and around her mouth, hair pulled back roughly. She looks older, strangely more beautiful. For the first time, I feel intimidated by her.

  “Are you seeing her?” she asks her husband, not even looking at me.

  My brain scrambles the question. Are you seeing her? As if Henry might not be able to register my physical presence. As if I’m invisible to human eyes.

  “Of course not,” Henry says. “This isn’t the time. Take Ben inside. I’ll deal with her.”

  “I’m supposed to trust you?” Viv asks.

  Henry waits, gazing at the cracked cement of the driveway, at the weeds trickling through. The baby murmurs, tugging at a strand of his mother’s hair. Viv finally looks at me. We make eye contact for a long beat. I feel a strange moment of sadness pass between us, disappointment and betrayal, all three of us pulled together by it. Then she turns and walks back to her house, closing the door behind her with a quiet click that’s more startling than if she’d slammed it.

  “She found the photo,” Henry says to me. “She knows.”

  The Polaroid from the lake; I realize what must have happened, the memory shifting back into place. That night that I woke up in the Damsons’ home.

  “I’m sorry,” I say, impulsively. The vengefulness that thumps inside my chest belongs to Sylvia, not me. I would have been content to walk away and leave the Damsons. Let them tend to the tangled undergrowth of secrets on their own terms.

  “It’s what you wanted, right?” he asks.

  “You didn’t have to do this to us,” I say. “You could have let us go.”

  “It wasn’t because of that,” he says. “I was already going to talk to Patrick.”

  I can’t tell whether this is true or not. It would be a relief to dissolve the chain of events that led to Patrick’s absence. To think that I couldn’t have stopped it, couldn’t have changed anything. But already I’m looking for a moment that could have pushed the events in a different direction.

  “What did you do?” I ask.

  “I told him who you are,” Henry says. The evening is deepening purple around us, windows breaking into illumination up and down the street. “You’ve been lying to him.”

  “I wasn’t lying,” I say. “He never asked.”

  Henry shrugs. “Same thing,” he says. “So I told Patrick. What he did with that information isn’t my business.”

  “How did you find out?” I ask.

  “Your boss didn’t want anything to do with me,” Henry says. “She seems to care about you a lot. You should be flattered. But the other woman—Joan? Jane? Anyway, she was happy to talk. If it makes you feel better, it wasn’t cheap to get your real name and your hometown. She didn’t know much else, but that was enough. The firm used to hire a private investigator for background checks. We stayed on good terms. It only took a few days to get your story.”

  Whatever exists out there in medical records, paperwork, newspaper articles, is only the parched surface of the story. The stripped bones. Patrick still doesn’t know the parts that only exist in the deepest, most tender pit of my memory. But I’m not sure if revealing this to him would pull him back into my arms or send him spiraling further from my grasp.

  “I would have told Patrick,” I say. “When he was ready, I would have told him.”

  “You wouldn’t have,” Henry says. “You knew he’d leave you.”

  It must have happened this morning. I was at home, going through my day, stupid with hope and fantasizing about my escape. Ready to step into my new life. And all that time, Patrick and Henry stood together, miles away, and Henry opened me up without my permission. Laid me bare and defenseless.

  Look at her.

  “I couldn’t let him take Sylvia,” Henry says. “He had his chance with her. He had no right to drag her back.” His eyes surprise me, even in this moment: the sudden streak of grief. “Patrick doesn’t get to do that. Nobody gets to do that.”

  “He’s her husband,” I say. “You don’t know what Sylvia wanted.”

  “I saved her from Patrick,” Henry says, as if he didn’t even hear. “From you, trying to crawl into her life because you can’t stand your own. You ruined your life, now you want someone else’s.” We face each other in the gloom. “I feel worse for Patrick than for you,” Henry says. “There’s no love lost between us, but even he doesn’t deserve this.”

  “Where did he go?” I ask, my voice leaden.

  He shrugs. “I wouldn’t tell you if I knew.”

  The Damsons’ house is all warmth, all light. Lit like a diorama, windows uncovered. The spread of framed photographs against the wall, the mantelpiece with its staggered candleholders, a stray shirt slung over the back of a chair. Viv walks through the rooms with the baby; I catch fractured glimpses of them. In the living room, the dining room. Then they’re lost to us. Viv doesn’t glance out the windows. She’s a woman moving calmly through her evening.

  My mind turns to what I learned this morning. What Patrick doesn’t know yet; what Henry doesn’t realize. The piece of the equation they haven’t yet considered, still a secret.

  “That place,” Henry says. “They’re all like you, aren’t they?”

  I look at him as if he’s separated from me by layers of glass.

  “All the workers are like you,” he says. “Rejects. Recycled from lives you hated.”

  Mrs. Renard rummaging through a pile of discarded bodies, stiff mannequin torsos, angled knees, cloudy glass eyes. Taking us home, dusting us off. Propping us in chairs, painting on the right expressions. Making us useful again.

  Mind spinning, I turn to leave.

  “Wait,” Henry calls. He’s not angry now. There’s a resignation to his voice, a grudging truce. That’s what stops me in my tracks.

  He goes to their car, opening the passenger-side door and stooping to retrieve something from beneath the seat. I stay at the end of the driveway. Down the block, children shout and laugh, colorful loops of sound against the evening. A young woman, ponytail whipping, jogs past without looking at us.

  Henry returns. “Here.” He extends something toward me: a thin yellow folder.

  I hesitate before I accept. “What is this?” My hands are shaking. The paper vibrates lightly in my hand, as if something inside is alive and fighting to come out.

  “I’m forcing you to face up to what you did,” he says. “Who you are. Think of it as a favor.”

  I open the folder, already knowing what I’ll find. My past self. Offered to me by a stranger, after all this time; dragged from her hiding place by a distant bystander. For a second, I’m overcome with resentment at Henry for walking into my life and doing this to me. He has no right. I’m homesick for the existence I built so carefully these past fiv
e years. A world tiny and controlled enough to hold inside my palm, where nobody else could ever access it.

  But Henry never came to me, I remind myself. I’m the one who guided him into my life. I invited him in. I opened the door to an enemy and then turned my back as he ransacked my private possessions.

  FORTY

  The knocking at the door works its way into my dream, insistent as a heartbeat. As I rise from the couch, the stove clock marks the time as four in the morning.

  I open the door. He stands in the hallway. Eyes bleary with exhaustion, jaw set. I watch his gaze move along my length. Patrick doesn’t hide the fact that he’s staring. I’m wearing a cheap silk bathrobe, the hem brushing the middle of my thighs. He’s memorized my naked body, but right now, I’m more exposed in front of him than I ever was in his bed.

  This time, he knows what I did. He’s meeting me for the first time.

  Everything in my body rearranges itself around Patrick’s presence. The wildness of desire and relief, but following this, its inevitable shadow: the fear that I’ll lose him, and how foolish I was to have wanted him at all.

  “Come in, Patrick,” I say, and open the door wider.

  The apartment is saturated in darkness. In the shadows, he looks as grainy as a memory.

  “I drove for five hours before I turned around,” he says. “I should have kept going. But here I am.” He keeps distance between us; I can sense the heavy restlessness of his body from across the room. “I wanted to hear it from you. I owe you that much.”

  We sit on opposite ends of the couch, stiff and careful, keeping our posture very straight and our hands tucked on our laps.

  “I know your name,” he says. “Your real one.” A pause. “I always liked that name.”

  “I wish you’d keep calling me Edie,” I say. The thought of hearing my real name in Patrick’s voice is unbearable right now.

  “Would you have told me your name, at some point?”

  “I left it behind,” I say. “It doesn’t belong to me anymore.”

  “And Edie does belong to you?”

  “For now,” I say. “Yes.”

  From the corner of my eye, I sense him turning to face me. I think he’s going to ask another question. But he’s silent for long enough that I realize how hard this is for him. Any single question will come along with a trail of others, tangling together, each question marring the blankness he’s relied on for months. I have to be the one to reach down into the cold and depthless place where I’ve been waiting.

  In the end, I have to be the one to drag myself back to the surface.

  “I can’t really remember the first time it happened,” I begin. “Other people had to tell me what I’d done. I was only thirteen or fourteen. A child. I’d been shy, a late bloomer. Everyone thought I was nice. Quiet. The kind of girl nothing would ever happen to. It just woke up in my brain one day. I was fine, and then there it was. I didn’t know how to handle it. I was completely unequipped against something that huge. The first time, I wasn’t trying to do anything. I wanted to take a break from everything, that’s all. Sleep for a while. I had a vision of sleeping for days and waking up different. I’d go back to how I was before. Happy and calm.

  “When my mother found me, she didn’t believe that it was an accident. I still think sometimes that if she’d believed me, I could have moved on from everything.”

  That other life I could have led unravels, so gentle and ordinary and impossibly far away that I can’t let myself think about it too closely.

  “My mother treated me differently. I just wasn’t her little girl anymore. Other people found out, the way things spread in a small town. They changed too. I went from being a nice girl to being suspicious. People talked to me as if I might explode. I wasn’t part of the sleepovers or the birthday parties anymore. They weren’t trying to shun me. Not really. They just saw me as a different type of person. Someone who wouldn’t be interested in those things. Someone who didn’t want to belong to that world.”

  Patrick’s shape in the darkness is unyielding, impossible to interpret.

  “Things went on that way most of my teenage years,” I say. “Every single morning, I woke up thinking that it would be better. I’d be happy again with no warning. Really, it made sense. There wasn’t a good reason to begin with. Who’s to say it couldn’t vanish the same way?

  “But it became part of me. I couldn’t remember a time when I wasn’t like that. I withdrew from other people. My mother tried to be there for me at first. But after a while, she got impatient. I’m sure I frustrated her. I worried about being a burden. I tried to be as independent as I could, relying only on myself. I made OK grades, got accepted into a decent school. It seemed like a chance to make a clean break.”

  My mother’s face pulls together in my memory. The careful restraint in her expression when we interacted, a chilly politeness that hurt more than anger would have. At the time, I thought it was her choice to withdraw, but now, I wonder if I was at fault too: holding her back by the shoulders and then resenting her for not embracing me.

  “When I was about eighteen,” I say, “after I started school, I tried again. This time, it was more intentional. Nobody found me. My roommate was out of town. I woke up in my bed as if nothing had happened. It had snowed that day, and the light in the room was so bright. I thought I was in a dream until I found the empty pill bottle. My body had pulled itself back. Despite everything, it was still there. I was still there.”

  I keep waiting for Patrick to say something.

  “It was almost a game, from then on,” I say. “Seeing if my body would ever give in. I tried twice more. Each time I came back, everything seemed more distant. Like I was returning to a fuzzier copy of life. I couldn’t find my way back into a clear version. After my roommate found me, she forced me to see a therapist. I took medication. I went through the motions. But even when things became a little easier, I worried that it was only a matter of time. And so I didn’t let myself want things. I was afraid of how it would feel when I couldn’t have a normal life. Trying to keep my expectations small—it was the kindest thing I did for myself.”

  There’s a comfort in listening to the story unfold without tears or rage. I could be telling a story that belongs to a stranger.

  “After school, I moved away,” I say. “Only a few hours. Everything even looked the same. Same architecture, same weather. But nobody there knew who I was. It was like resetting myself. I started to wake up. I still held myself back from wanting too much, but I was learning to be content with a small life. Only big enough for me. Manageable.”

  The other half of the story is approaching. I sense it deep in my body: a kernel of apprehension, as if I’m walking across ice toward the patches that will give under my feet.

  “Daniel worked across the street from me,” I say. “We sometimes had coffee or lunch at the same diner. I liked him for months before I even realized what was happening. For most women my age, it would have been a small crush. Not even worth noticing. But for me, it was . . . enormous. I didn’t know what to call it. It was like everything inside me coming alive. By then, we recognized each other enough to say hello. I could pick and choose which parts of myself to reveal to him. Telling him about my life in these little pieces, I started seeing myself differently.

  “Being interested in Daniel rearranged all my plans. Wanting this one thing, letting myself want it, had turned everything into a possibility. The type of life I’d never let myself want—it wasn’t anything glamorous or exciting. A husband, a house, a baby. But letting myself want it after so long thinking I couldn’t have it? It was intoxicating.”

  I keep waiting for the room to brighten. It stays sketched in the vagueness of early morning. In a way, it’s easier to talk while I’m hidden, a mere silhouette.

  “Daniel and I started spending more time together. I kissed him one night when we’d been drinking.” Slipping backward, I see the girl with optimistic makeup, a dress both too cheap and to
o formal. Prissy office casual at a dive bar. “I wanted to see what it was like to act on something I wanted. He kissed me back. After that, we were together. Just like that. As if it had always been that easy.”

  A long exhale from the other side of the couch. I wonder if Patrick’s hurt by this memory. An entire history that’s been buried under our feet all along, sharing space with Sylvia.

  “People didn’t understand why Daniel would want me,” I say. “He’d lived in that town his whole life. Everyone had predicted who he’d marry since he was a kid. I was a newcomer. Maybe it seemed unfair that I could come in and take him. I didn’t care. I was selfish. I wanted him, he wanted me back. It was perfect. I never told him about my past, of course. I didn’t want Daniel looking at me differently. And it didn’t feel like lying. I really was a new person with him. The two of us didn’t have to worry about what another girl had done during another life.”

  Footsteps in the hallway outside: the bad stage whispers of a tipsy couple playing at discretion. Laughing, a wet kiss, a playful, mumbled scold. I wait for the click of the closed door before I continue.

  “In the summer, I found out I was pregnant.” I say it evenly and firmly, not letting myself linger. A simple truth: I was pregnant. “We’d only been dating for a few months. People said I’d tricked Daniel into it. But it was a decision we made together. I was tired of holding myself back. I wanted to just reach out and take this life, before it slipped through my fingers. And Daniel was so young. I didn’t think of him as young back then, but I see it now. He was in love with me and I was wild. Full of life. How could he have known that that brightness was only one side of me?”

  Patrick starts to speak, a quick and uncertain syllable. Then he stops.

  “The pregnancy was fine at first,” I say. “I was healthy. The baby was healthy. The first few months passed quickly, and I convinced myself that I could do it. When I was four or five months along, I started getting flashes of my old self. It scared me, but I thought once I had the baby, I’d be better. It would change things. People told me it would. I’d look at her and feel the most intense love I’d ever felt, and it would make everything OK again.”