In Her Skin

by Kim Savage

  “I can?” I say.

  “You can simply tell the police that you made the story up. The truth is, you have amnesia. You have no idea where you’ve been these last seven years.”

  The Lovecrafts are freaking brilliant, smarter than me, smarter than Momma, smarter than you, Temple, thinking you got me into enough trouble that your parents would make me leave when they want me to stay.

  But—Vivi is an innocent. Lying doesn’t fly with Vivi. I screw my face into confusion and say, “You want me to lie?”

  Mrs. Lovecraft shakes her head. “Not lie exactly. Just confess your uncertainty. Make it clear that you don’t remember the details.”

  “You won’t be alone. We’ll be there, of course, and our attorney will be, too. His name is Gene. The goal is to make this one meeting; one and done. Any question you feel like you can’t answer, don’t worry. Gene will handle it.”

  “Gene is an old family friend, and he was a friend of your parents,” Mrs. Lovecraft says, licking her lips. “If you don’t tell the police this, they will be a permanent fixture in your life. Relentless. If they find your abductor, there will be a trial. You will be questioned, ripped to shreds on the stand. Painful memories will be lived over and over. It takes away from the joy of your recovery.”

  I could not agree more.

  “I really don’t remember,” I say softly.

  Mrs. Lovecraft presses her fingers to her smile, and Mr. Lovecraft opens his palms. I am about to get a group hug. Mrs. Lovecraft rises and pulls me out of my seat to hug me and Mr. Lovecraft stands behind her with his hands on her shoulders, squeezing them, and I have yogurt on my shirt and it’s getting on Mrs. Lovecraft’s blouse and she doesn’t see.

  And like that Mr. Lovecraft is off to his fancy-sounding Equinox in the Financial District and you are tucked away at your fancy cello lesson and Mrs. Lovecraft and I are on fancy Newbury Street getting me a fancy haircut. Four fancies is okay here, because wishing is not needed. The hairdresser is respectful and gentle to the point of cringy. He speaks only to Mrs. Lovecraft, and they are close. Jerel has a studded belt and a goatee and is the same dude who came to our house before the symphony. He owns the place and speaks in soothing tones, as though his salon is a museum, and usually I don’t like my head touched, but I wish the girl who washed my hair took even longer because who knew you could have your head massaged, and that it would feel so amazing? We are in a private room, which is the perk of being a Lovecraft. Mrs. Lovecraft perches on a white chair that looks like an alien pod and flips through a magazine.

  I wait for the hairdresser to sweep away, murmuring about tinfoil, before I ask her the question I’ve been wondering.

  “Will I go to school with Temple?” I ask. There are considerations to make, a hide to be grown. If they send me to your all-girls school, there’s going to be a whole other level of questions and challenges. Also, math might not be my strong suit, but three years of no school do not equal seven years of no school, so I’m going to have to downscale my knowledge, do a little research on third-grade curriculum versus high school. I need to know what I don’t know.

  Mrs. Lovecraft repeats the question back to me. Then: “Oh no, that would never work! We’ve hired a tutor to homeschool you.”

  I exhale hard under my black cape. Jerel returns with an assistant pushing a cart carrying a bowl of paste and tinfoil strips. I give the bowl a strange look, and he strokes my hair.

  “We’re going to brighten you up a touch,” he coos. “Give you that sun-kissed look.”

  I’ve done everything to escape being sun-kissed. Florida was my purgatory and gray Boston is my salvation. Now they want me to look like I spend time in the sun, and that one photo I saw of Vivienne Weir is the reason. My hand floats to touch the foil strips that Jerel has painted sections of my hair to. I look like I’m trying to block aliens from reading my thoughts. Once, Wolf and I caught lice, and even though I haven’t itched for months, I wonder if Jerel can tell. Lice look less like bugs and more like white glue, and they will live through the apocalypse. We slopped mayonnaise on each other’s heads and wrapped them in Saran Wrap, and combed each other out like monkeys. The mayo took weeks to get rid of, and it occurs to me, gazing into depths of mirrors, that my looks are not nearly as fine as Vivi’s. When I think I can’t take it anymore, Jerel releases me from my tinfoil cage. Again, I am washed, and this is becoming my favorite part, and is this salon where Temple goes to get polished and rich-looking? Jerel raises his scissors and starts lopping hair off, big lengths of it, and it sails to the floor. No one asks me what style I want but I am silent, because this isn’t about me, though I am in the chair. In fact, I am turned away from the mirror, facing Mrs. Lovecraft, who looks excited.

  When Jerel spins my chair back around, I squeak.

  The girl in the mirror is not just sun-kissed. She is waxed and buffed and downright sparkly. My hair is lighter. My hair is glossy. The baby bangs are blended and the ends turn under and it is shorter in a way that Wolf would hate, but I know this shorter is chic. I feel the back of my neck and it is cool and I do not recognize myself.

  Mrs. Lovecraft leaps from her pod and clasps her hands. “So smart, Jerel! It’s perfection!” She moves behind my chair and Jerel steps aside. In the mirror, her eyes shimmer with tears. “Vivienne Weir, you grew up to be a beautiful young lady.”

  After I unsnap the robe and Mrs. Lovecraft hands over her credit card, it is time to shop. You will not tolerate me wearing your old clothes forever, and Mrs. Lovecraft wisely bought me only underwear, pajamas, and one fancy coat, given the uncertainty of the situation. The jeans I’m wearing bite my waist and drag on the ground, and Mrs. Lovecraft seems to think an overcorrection is in order. We head for J.Crew to buy cropped pants and striped sweaters. Unlike at the salon, here she asks my opinion on what I like, and though I don’t like anything here in this store of little-kid colors, I do like new things, and I like covering my body, and I like adding up the price tags in my head, which is dizzying. And I’m starting to understand why people equate stuff with love, because having your own nice clean things means you blend in without trying, and blending in is relaxing. By the time we’ve hit H&M “for some trendy things,” we are laughing like mother and daughter, like ladies who lunch, and we do lunch, at Stephanie’s on Newbury, where the hostess knows Clarissa Lovecraft and the servers fall over themselves to satisfy her, and by association, me. She gets me to try tuna sashimi, which is served in a cocktail glass with Day-Glo orange sprinkles. When I make a face, she swears I liked it as a child, and I can do this, I can eat this red slime so much like an internal organ, along with its tangerine sprinkles, and I do, and it is surprisingly good.

  Mrs. Lovecraft orders a second cocktail, muttering “Uber,” like I care if she drives drunk, me whose real mother lived high. She wishes out loud that we didn’t have to carry so many bags. I like the bags, I tell her: there is something cool and old-fashioned about two ladies swinging overflowing shopping bags and smiling. She loves this and toasts my iced tea. There’s only one thing that would make this better, she says. Would I mind changing into one of my new outfits? I skip to the ladies’ room, ripping tags off a lime-green button-down sweater with an attached collar and cotton pants sprayed with teeny dots. I fold the clothes I was wearing and place them in the bag, then check myself in the mirror.

  I expect to look dorky. I don’t expect to look young.

  Momma called me an old soul. Maybe the first half of my life, in Immokalee and the other blur-towns, was my time to be old. This is my time to be young.

  I toss my hair around my face and practically skip back to the table, where a waitress is serving Mrs. Lovecraft her third vodka cocktail.

  “Look at you! Camera ready, I’d say,” she says, her words a little slurry.

  I pull my seat in primly. “We’re taking pictures?”

  “You never know when the press are around, darling,” she says.

  * * *

  I lay the clothes out o
n my bed. I’m trying hard to imagine the girl on the bus, how she would have acted if she saw me in one of these outfits. Her admiring looks, how we might have talked about her family in Boston, or she might have shown me what was in her suitcase. Instead, I see not empty clothes, but skinny, sprawled girls with busted limbs.

  You knock and I jump. It is nearly nine p.m., and you’re just getting home from a day that started with cello, moved on to back-to-back tutoring sessions, tennis, and finally, fencing. Yet you glow. You thrive on these overscheduled days, I am learning, and you did not spend the afternoon thinking about what you planted in my pocket.

  You glance drily at the clothes. “Well, at least now you have the preapproved uniform.”

  “Why did you do it?” I ask.

  “And the hair is a lot better.”

  I’m not biting. “The poem, Temple. Why did you steal it?”

  You scan me, looking for anger you can react to, but I cleansed my words of it. I am better at this game than you, and it’s time I proved it.

  “Consider the poem my ‘Welcome home, Vivi’ gift,” she says. “You don’t like it?”

  “We have to give it back.”

  “You can’t give it back. But it doesn’t matter. They can never track you down. We used a fake ID, remember?”

  “You used a fake ID.”

  Your lip curls. “Fine, I used a fake ID.”

  “We can never go back to the library again.”

  “So we don’t.” You flop down on the bed, crushing an eighty-dollar T-shirt that says something in French. “Who cares?”

  I do care. I can’t let myself miss Momma, or Wolf, but I can miss the long table with rows of green lampshades, and my old spot in front of the fireplace among the busts of Lucy Stone, Alice Stone Blackwell, and Thomas Gold Appleton. I can miss the gold seam in the floor that divides the tiles cracked in patterns that I memorized. I can miss the high arched windows or the colorful flags whipping in the wind outside them. I can miss the carved white roses in the corners of the ceiling.

  It’s fine. I am safer here. I am safer here. I am safer.

  (make it so)

  I move to my underwear drawer and take the poem out. The delicate paper is stained and charred at one edge, like Dickinson tried to burn it. I perch on the bed’s edge and read. “‘A death blow is a life blow to some, who till they died did not alive become. Who had they lived, had died but when they died, Vitality begun.’”

  You scoot closer. “You didn’t say if you liked it.”

  Vivi is simple. Vivi admits to not understanding things. “I’m not sure I understand it,” I say.

  You take it gently from my fingers. “It’s here in the first line. A death blow is a life blow to some.”

  I think of Momma and her broken face. I think of Cold John, who, when everyone hauled over to the Father Bill’s shelter one night last winter, stayed in his tent and never woke up. I think of when someone stole Keloid Kurt’s rat and stuck it with a stick and roasted it over the fire. I think of the dead things I’ve seen, mothers and men and rats, and I know what dead is. The only people who talk about dead like it’s something pretty and fanciful are people who haven’t seen it up close.

  “Isn’t dead dead?”

  “Not always. For some people, it’s their first big shot at living. At least that’s what Dickinson is saying.”

  You may be smarter than me at most things, but this is a topic I know way better than you, and I can’t help myself. “Blow. She says ‘death blow.’ That’s death by violence. How do you recover from that?”

  “She also says ‘life blow.’ A life born from violence.”

  I shake my head. “She’s talking about people who become more famous after death. Maybe she was thinking that would be her story.”

  “It was the case for Poe,” you say as you rise. “Anyway, I thought it would speak to you. Because, you know, everyone thought you were dead.”

  Despite myself, I am touched. You are generous, it’s true. You give things that mean things. Even if they can get me in trouble. Maybe this is what Vivi loved about you. Maybe you pushed Vivi into living on the edge.

  Still. I need to pretend stealing is scary, me who has seen and done way worse. Jaded at sixteen, playing the innocent. I can do this.

  “Thank you,” I say. “It was wrong to steal. But it’s the thought behind it that counts, right?”

  You look at the floor, cheeks slack. “Give it to me and I’ll take it back.”

  “You said there’s no way,” I say in a rush. Now I feel bad.

  “There’s always a way.”

  “They know you. I mean, by sight, anyway.” Careful, Jo. Don’t start giving advice from experience. “What if they call you out?”

  “Narrow escapes are kind of my thing,” you say, flashing a wicked smile. “Maybe I’ll even use a disguise.”

  Oh my God. I picture you in a black bob wig and big sunglasses. It’s so cute when a regular girl tries to play the con.

  You study the clothes on my bed for a moment, those girls with their flung body parts. “On the topic of costumes, what are you wearing to the police station tomorrow?”

  “I don’t know.” My voice hitches in surprise. You know I’m going to the police station? “Does it matter what I wear?”

  “It always matters.” You nod at my chest. “Wear that sweater. Preppy and innocent. And Henry and Clarissa’s plan is a good one: say you don’t remember a thing. No one presses the shell-shocked or the traumatized. Take it from me.” I’m mouthing “Henry and Clarissa?” at your back when you turn suddenly at the door. “Another thing.” You rush to hug me, press of hot sternum. “I’m glad you’re back. It makes everything better.”

  I watch the door. Maybe you’ll return, but you don’t. I hear your music crank and disappear (you popped on headphones; I know your ways), and it’s just me and the flat girls, and I know how they feel. Plucking them off the bed, I drape their arms and legs on hangers inside my empty closet. From the middle of my bed with my legs crossed, I admire my open closet and the clothes inside that are mine. Eventually, I flick off the light and climb into my bed, which I’m starting to look forward to, and I drift fast. This house seems to want me to sleep in it, and though it’s hours earlier than I’ve ever slept, I oblige, and the fall is delicious.

  A metallic rattle jolts me awake.

  My window faces a back alley. While the first-floor windows are barred, the third floor is considered too high for breaking and entering, but I wouldn’t mind some bars. Far as I’m concerned, a ladder leading to your window might as well be a stamped invitation. I feel under my pillow for the steak knife I stole from the kitchen—weak blade, but it’ll do—and crawl off the bed, ninja-style, sliding against the wall. The fire-escape creep won’t expect a girl who knows the best place for stabbing is the neck or groin. Jangle, shake-shake, jangle. Louder now. I tested that fire escape when I moved in, one leg out the window. It held good. A shade darker on the floor in front of the window: the city light gives his shadow away. My back prickles.

  He stands on the landing looking directly into my room.

  I have two choices: scream or fight. Vivi would scream. Jo would fight.

  I leap off the wall, knife blazing.

  Wolf throws up his hands and lurches backward, veering wildly toward the rail.

  I drop the knife and reach fast for a handful of his shirt, yanking him inside. He falls into me, and we stagger for a minute like we’re dancing drunk until I shove him off.

  The bedroom is dark but I can see the cut on his lower lip. He has a need in his eyes for something barbed or burning, a need he can fight when he has me.

  “You look like someone else,” he says.

  “You look the same,” I whisper. Over my shoulder, I check through the crack in my door to see if your light has flipped on. Still dark. When I turn, Wolf is circling the room. Even in the purple half-light, I can see that he is stunned by the grand curtains and poster bed and polished plank flo
ors. I smell cold air and other men’s skin, and I shouldn’t care.

  He could blow everything just by being here.

  If we get caught I will accuse him of scaling the fire escape to rape me. He won’t argue, because although he hates me right now, he also loves me.

  Wolf makes a low whistle. “This is some place.”

  “You can’t stay,” I whisper, less sure than I ought to be.

  “Don’t plan to,” he says, lifting a bell-shaped glass cover off a gold tree sitting on the dresser. “Unless they lost a boy here, too. Maybe I could play pretend-rich-kid alongside you.”

  “Wolf…”

  “What is this thing, anyway?” he says, holding the glass cover in the air.

  “It’s a cloche. It holds jewelry. I mean, you hang jewelry on the tree and the glass covers it.”

  He widens his eyes, nodding. “Fancy. Cloche.” He sets the glass bell down carefully.

  “Why are you here?” I say, weighting my words.

  He turns and looks me full in the face. “I could ask you the same question.”

  I move closer and force myself to breathe him in. The smell of the men on Wolf is enough to keep me away. I worked hard to keep Momma’s men off me; it’s a contamination and I am clean here in my new home and backward is not in my vocabulary. I do not want you, Wolf. I do not want you, Wolf. I do not want.

  “I’m safe here. They believe I’m Vivienne Weir.”

  Something shifts inside him; he was waiting for this. “Safe from what?”

  “The last one, for starters. What if he comes after me?”

  “Your momma’s been dead a year. No one’s coming after you.” He leans in and takes my chin. “That isn’t why you left.”

  I step backward. “Maybe life in Tent City isn’t for me.”

  “Because your life in Florida was so fine?” He waves his hands in the air. “Because this is what you’re used to?”

  “You wouldn’t understand.”

  “Because I never had a mother? You aren’t the only one who had a different life before Tent City.”