The Tenth Girl

by Sara Faring

  But I still can’t let him do this.

  It’s tricky push-pull work, edging inside while pressing him away from the edge. Like slipping around icy, shifting scaffolding thousands of feet above the ground. And what’s worse, I’m meeting too much resistance, too much more pressure than usual.

  I’m still pushing when I feel a wobble inside Dom. I’m straining like a sumo wrestler locked in a rival’s grip; manipulating all my crystal sinews in a way that takes overwhelming self-awareness. That’s when I catch on a series of internal levers, one by one—and pressure releases.

  A glimmer in the shape of a man exits him like a breeze.

  Oh.

  I understand all of a sudden: Someone else had usurped my place, but it wasn’t Dom. It was an Other.

  Relief blows through me: It wasn’t him. It wasn’t him seeking oblivion. It was a stranger, an impostor, a parasite.

  How many Others have sat alone, overlooking the edge of the world, and dove onto the ice in a borrowed body? Is that what one of them did to Mrs. Hawk? To Luciana?

  How selfish, I think to myself, shaking hard. How irresponsible.

  But I have no right to call it selfish. I have no right to call it irresponsible, not with my past.

  I look hard for the interplay of strange shadows and light around us. A constellation of silver speckles dances a dozen feet away—maybe. Or maybe not.

  I enter Dom and corral his every muscle, leaning him back, nudging him onto the balcony like a toddler at the edge of a stair. I straighten my spine. I trudge inside, up the stairs, down the hall. I lay Dom down to rest in his own bed. He needs to sleep before tomorrow. He needs to sleep, to wipe the slate clean, to clear that look of total existential exhaustion still on his face.

  I recognize it. I recognize that look from Mama’s cadmium-yellow face in the hospital. Cadmium-yellow. Mama’s skin was so yellowed and blotchy that day that Rob thought she had been painted up, that her thin and wan face was a mask painted to scare or, confusingly, amuse us, and I couldn’t keep him from asking why her face was painted, and Mama asked, half joking, What colors did the makeup artists choose today, Angel? I consulted my phone and said 255, 246, 0, and she cackled for the first time in ages. Rob asked what the numbers meant, and she explained that it was a type of yellow. He asked Mama what that yellow was made of in the real world (if it was made of the captured sun, of daffodils, of peepee, of what), and since she knew the painterly names and RGB codes for the entire rainbow, she said cadmium, with a look in her eyes that told me she couldn’t keep this up much longer, as much as she loved us. Cadmium is carcinogenic, which I found out later. Mama always did have a poet’s sense of humor.

  She died less than a week later, just after nine in the morning. Rob and I weren’t there at the time, because Liese wanted us to keep up with school. No matter that first period was always useless, and I cut it anyway.

  All I wanted in my old life was to accordion-open my time with those I loved, spreading the days so that every pastel hour felt like a single century, and then to accordion-close the time after those so painful I did everything I could to compress them into nothing.

  This place has changed everything.

  “Why did I let myself get in so deep?” I ask Dom as he drops off into an insensate sleep.

  21

  MAVI: ARGENTINA, JUNE 1978

  “Enter,” Carmela calls to me and Yesi.

  In her office, a monumental wooden desk sits void of paperwork and personal effects—I see a calendar, a blank notepad, a modern and characterless lamp, and a glass of identical pens. She sits in her leather chair, arms folded, her face fully painted up and her platinum hair sculpted into its typical gleaming bob despite the early hour. She squares the notepad and takes hold of a silver pen. “Yesi was in a state earlier, so I requested that you and she both visit me when she was more composed, Miss Quercia. Are you prepared to explain exactly what happened now, Yesi?”

  Yesi swallows, hands moving in and out of her pockets. “We were watching the girls last night, Madame De Vaccaro—”

  “Which girls, Yesi?” she says, making not a single note. “Be precise, now.”

  “Michelle and Gisella.”

  “Was that sanctioned by Ms. Morency?”

  Yesi bites her lip. “It was not.”

  “And it was not sanctioned by me. Why were you there, Yesi?” she asks, taunting us with her impassive expression.

  “They’re ill, possibly with a flu, and—”

  “Yes, I know. Do answer my question.”

  “The girls shared concerns about nighttime disturbances, so I decided to witness the phenomena for myself, after Morency left them to sleep.”

  “Unsanctioned. As did Miss Quercia, it seems. Despite being told to remain in her room.” I glance up to find her giving me a flat, chilly smile. “So the both of you were wandering the halls at night alone. Do go on.”

  “We were watching the girls, and around three in the morning, a man came into the room and leaned over Gisella. We rushed to fight him off, and he ran out. But I recognized the man.” Hand faltering, Yesi pulls out the hair from her pocket and places the scraps on the table.

  Carmela regards the bundle with the faintest hint of detached disgust and clears her throat. “And you can confirm you saw Mr. Lamm of our staff? The same Mr. Lamm who suffered a heart attack so recently?”

  Yesi nods, chastened by the unlikeliness of it all.

  “I will speak with Mr. Lamm this morning,” Carmela continues. “I will also speak to the girls. But know that I cannot take such accusations lightly. I have no reason to mistrust you, Yesi, but if you have misrepresented the situation in any way, the consequences will be serious.”

  Even though I disagree with Yesi and am pleased by Carmela’s reluctance to punish Lamb, the condescension in her tone grates on me. She’s done nothing at all to help the situation. Luciana, as far as I know, remains unfound, yet Carmela sits here, imperious as ever. “In the meantime, your classes will be canceled while we evaluate the situation, and your future pay will be docked accordingly. Remain in your rooms, and speak of this situation to no one else.” She picks up her silver pen. “You caused enough damage by informing Dr. Molina of your own accord.”

  “Dr. Molina is treating them,” Yesi says.

  “The situation has evolved,” says Carmela crisply, setting down the pen. “This is outside of Dr. Molina’s purview.”

  “You should send the girls home,” I say, speaking up at last and accepting in that instant what the consequences are of wielding this opinion. “And the rest of us should look for Luciana.”

  “If the girls are sent home, then the school will be shut down. Is it in your best interest for the school to be shut down, Miss Quercia?” Carmela asks coolly. “What with your background?”

  Yesi looks at me, confused, and the back of my throat aches. But I think of my mother and her cousins: I would sacrifice myself to spare the girls. I truly would. “It is best for them to be sent home. We all think so.”

  “And who exactly are ‘we,’ Miss Quercia? The two girls I see before me?”

  “Some of us on the staff,” I say. “Your son, too.”

  Immediately, I wish I had bitten my tongue. She scoffs—half incredulous laughter, half nonchalance. “I was warned by Ms. Morency that you were inclined to develop fantasies, Miss Quercia. Especially pertaining to my son.”

  My stomach drops, and I feel Yesi look at me with homicide in her eyes.

  Carmela rises. “Ladies, I thank you for your input,” she says in a tone that confirms our utter valuelessness, “and I assure you that I will—”

  “Whatever you think about Mr. Lamm, or us, you have to acknowledge that the girls are suffering. And with Luciana gone,” I interrupt, feeling the heat of tears coming to my eyes, “you must—”

  Carmela stops me with a hand. “Do pull yourself together, Miss Quercia. Don’t make me regret hiring a leftist troublemaker more than I already do.” She turns her attent
ion to the empty pad of paper before her. She hasn’t taken a single note. “Is that all?”

  I curl my hands into fists behind my back.

  “Yes, Madame De Vaccaro,” Yesi says for the both of us as my nails tear into my flesh.

  Outside, Yesi marches away from me without a word. And I: Well, I could flay Carmela De Vaccaro myself with the frustration I feel toward her bureaucratic attachment to her pointless rules. I, for one, refuse to follow them any longer.

  * * *

  After I’ve eked out an hour or so of sleep in bed, Dom, of all people, knocks on my door. I’m surprised to see him, if glad, as always, even though my eyelids are still practically glued shut. I pull him inside, too exhausted and fed up to care a fig about decorum. Thigh to thigh on the bed, I tell him what I know about last night, about the man leaning over Gisella, about Yesi being sure of Lamb’s guilt, about Carmela’s brush-off, and I share everything that I don’t know—why have the Others decided to take over our peers now? What comes next?

  My words are a jumble. But as I speak, as I describe my confusion, a sentimentality mellows Dom’s features, an open sentimentality tinged with sadness that I’ve never before witnessed.

  It gives me pause.

  I wouldn’t call it a cousin of pity or concern—it reminded me of my mother’s face the last time I saw her, the pained and adoring face of a person who loved me deeply despite keeping great secrets from me, the nature of which I could never fathom.

  I look away shyly; it fills me with doom to face that expression a second time in a short life.

  Before I can form the words to protest, he pulls me out of my room, down the stairs like broken teeth, through the chilly hall, into the breakfast room, and out to the empty patio, where the ice punctures the sky. The blustery weather wakes me like a cold-water bath. I extend a naked finger out into the wind; I know rain, proper rain, will pour from the steel-gray sky in mere moments, and we should be burrowing back inside the warm depths of the house. In consolation, I suppose, Dom fetches a woolly yellowed blanket and drapes the length over my shoulders with unsteady hands as I sit. He shakes as I’ve never seen him do, and cold doesn’t seem to be the reason—his hands burn hot as ever as they brush my neck.

  My stomach chooses that moment to groan like a dog in pain—when I ask to dart into the kitchen to scavenge a leftover piece of toast, a bruised apple, anything, he promises to cook me lunch himself after he says whatever he’s trying to say. To try to say the words implies they’re difficult to express. But Dom does and says everything with ease. The girlish part of me wonders for a split second if he’s going to make some sort of romantic confession after our botched first kiss, but I don’t think Lamb’s story is one to put anyone in that mind-set, so I quietly worry, thumbing the blanket’s edges as I wait for this secret to emerge.

  “What’s going on?” I ask with a gentle smile, trying not to shiver. “Couldn’t resist the lovely weather?” I know I need to laugh off his zealousness. I need to put him at ease, because as I learned with Yesi, when those I care for become unwound, I risk becoming unwound myself.

  No, a part of me—the weak part—wants to tell him. Not now. Please save your confession for another time. I can’t bear it now. I can’t, not after the evening and morning I’ve had.

  His face freezes in an unfinished expression of fear, as if some crucial bit of machinery has failed inside. He watches the empty deck, hair windswept. Rain clouds the size and shape of tipped-over mountains race across the sky above us in double time, blown forward by severe winds.

  “Listen, Mav, I owe it to you to explain myself,” he says as if he’s soothing a frantic animal. I fold my arms across my chest, feeling the first tickle of rain on my skin. “I know you’ve noticed a change in me since those first days in the house.”

  I contemplate him. Of course I’ve noticed a change. He cares about me. He’s not embittered, not depressive, not cold, not jeering. But those days were so few that I can tell myself they were imagined. I curl my knees up onto the chair, wrap my arms around them. “What are you saying?”

  “You deserve to know who you are. I mean … who I am,” he says, rubbing his brow.

  “Who I am?” A spatter of rain hits me on the cheek, and I wipe it aside reflexively. “Who you are?”

  “This is getting all confused,” he says, flustered. “Let me simplify this. You’re Mavi. And I’m—I’m Angel.”

  “Angel.” Two unfamiliar syllables my brain cannot process. An-gel. Fat drops of rain fall onto my face, my arms, exploding into wet starbursts. I can’t bring myself to laugh yet. I don’t understand the joke. My cheeks flush. Angel. Is it a noun or a name? It must be a name. “What? But you’re Domenico. Carmela’s son. A De Vaccaro.” I’m humiliated speaking the words—feeling less purely rational than wholly unintelligent. I check his face for signs of madness: A jagged smirk, a winking sneer, but his face remains as smooth as an undisturbed lake. The effect is even more frightening: I’m sure he’s expending great energy to keep it that way; either that, or the brain, overwhelmed, struggles to keep facial operations in play. My eyes flick to the patio edge, too few meters from us. How close the ice is now. A hulking mass.

  “You’ve never once been wrong to think that presences gather here,” he says, placing his hands flat on the table, sending another shudder through me. I can’t keep my own arms still, and his hands, those hands, they’re large and freckled and delicately veined and so real. “Presences do gather here. Spirits roam the halls invisibly, alongside the rest of us. They can even, at times, make themselves visible.”

  I swallow. “What? What are you saying?” My own hands are so fragile-looking and blue with cold; I tuck them into my armpits so they won’t shake, but they don’t stop, won’t stop. And he won’t look me in the eye; he’s suppressing his own emotion. I wait for him to laugh or to cry; I wait for rage to swell inside me. I wait for a prescribed turn of events. I wait for a betrayal—the insecure part of me expects him to inform me I’ve been an idiot to believe in ghosts, that our friendship is as insubstantial and imaginary as they are. I wait for him—still—to reveal that hidden madness, an insanity he has learned to camouflage. A hundred conclusions flicker through my head as I watch him get speckled by the rain; for believing Domenico might have fallen for me as I did him, especially after those first days, the universe may now be giving me a colossal karmic middle finger. Whatever has gotten into Dom’s head is either a grand joke or symptom of mental illness or evidence that I’m even more ignorant and minuscule in this universe than I thought possible, that all of us are, that …

  Tears pool over in his wide blue eyes, and he scrabbles for my hands. To warm them, perhaps. I don’t respond in kind. I can’t.

  But I’m taken back to the morning I met Domenico—when he teased me at breakfast and recoiled at my touch, as if everything about me disgusted him.

  It would be irrational to think them the same person.

  He’s not Dom.

  “You’re one of them.” Bile swells up my raw throat. “One of these presences.”

  “I arrived here like you did,” he says, tears falling. It isn’t an answer. He’s not Dom, goddamnit. I want to kick him and punch him, but I’m so terrified that I feel as if I’m going to sob and vomit all at once.

  “You’re not a Zapuche. And you’re not an old victim of their curse.”

  He shakes his head, wipes at his eyes. “Others come from all times, all places. It’s this place—we’re drawn to it. I told you. I tried to explain. I—I never wanted to cause any harm.”

  “I don’t understand,” I say, enunciating as clearly as I can. I think I’m crying, too; my cheeks feel hot and ice-cold all at once. He bites his lip. Domenico’s lip. His face drips with tears and rain. “Have you caused any harm?” I think of Luciana, gone. Mrs. Hawk. The girls. I hear a sharp intake of breath, a gasp, a groan. From me.

  “Of course not,” he says. “You know me.”

  But I don’t know him. This Angel,
whoever this Angel is, whatever this Angel is, has watched us all from his stolen perch, played me for a fool, if what he says is truth. My Dom does not exist. “I don’t know you. You lied to me.” I rub at the moisture on my cheeks, unsure if these silly droplets betraying me are tears or rain.

  “I’m the same person you’ve gotten to know,” he says, voice catching. “Sort of.” His meltwater-blue eyes droop so tenderly at me—it should wound my heart more deeply than the sharpest of his icy glances.

  But he isn’t Dom.

  “Sort of,” I echo.

  “Please let me explain,” he tells me, fumbling for my bare wrist again.

  Its touch sends a crackling shudder through me, electrical and violent. It’s not his hand—it’s nothing but a tool used to manipulate me, hot as flame despite the frigid cold of the patio. Worst of all, despite my immediate fear and revulsion, some old part of my brain desperately wishes for the hand to remain there, because it brings a comfort to me that I cannot overstate. But craving an expired intimacy is worse than anything—a reminder of the permanent disconnect between mind and body. Where is Domenico, if Angel has taken his place? And is it inexcusable not to immediately wish him back?

  It only started with the tremors, but I’m weeping, too, now; I hear it, and I taste it, salty thick, and I pull away, soaked to the bone, wondering how easily extinguished this flicker of consciousness inside me truly is, and how it has survived this long, a single wick alight in a gusty world. I push my chair back to stand, trip over a rain-soaked tile, and burst back through the patio’s double doors.

  “Please don’t cry,” he calls as I run. “Please! I don’t—Please come back, Mav! Let me explain.” And I hear him sob, too.

  22

  ANGEL: 2020–2200

  I needed to take her where she could see the sky and the ice. Where we spent that first night together, under a blanket of stars. Where she could understand that the unknown isn’t to be feared—it’s to be carefully explored with awe, if she is willing.