by Emily Beyda
“You’re right,” the doctor says. “The resemblance is uncanny. Where did your team manage to find her?”
“Oh,” says Max, “we have our ways.”
The doctor nods. “And a mute,” he says. “Extraordinary. Not the strangest thing I’ve seen in my line of work, though. Not the strangest by far.”
Max finally catches my eye, gives me a conspiratorial little smile.
“Not strange,” he says. “Lucky.”
The doctor has a pen, and he uses it to make little marks all over my body, dotted lines like borders on a map. I’m glad that he uses a pen. It spares me the indignity of his fingers.
“We could taper her jaw,” says the doctor. “Shave a little bit of bone off here and here.”
He marks the lines on my face, making the same shapes I do every morning with my contouring makeup. I can feel the marker catch and snag on my loose skin.
“Nothing drastic,” the doctor says. “Maybe narrow the bridge of her nose a little, shave off this slight bump.”
He makes two lines. Here, and here. I stand as still as I can, look past them.
“The cheekbones are a little flat,” says Max, “and I think her breasts are too large. Uneven.”
“Good eye,” says the doctor. “Both are easy to fix. A little Botox wouldn’t be a bad idea. Best to get these things started when they’re still young. Preventative measures, you know.”
* * *
—
I cannot eat for six hours before the surgery. But it feels like my stomach has shrunk in Max’s absence, growing small and hard, and I find that I do not mind. I drink sweet things, water, tea. Max sits up with me for all six hours. He reads to me as much as I want him to, books that Rosanna has lent me. My favorite is a folktale I make him read three times over. A girl guides herself out of a dark wood by the firelight of a magic skull, burning her enemies to ashes with the bright glare of its gaze. At the end of the story, the girl returns safely to a faraway city. She weaves beautiful cloth with her flame-scarred hands. She tells no one what happened to her, how she got her scars. Max sits close beside the bed and strokes my own hand, gentle. I do not move away or flinch. He is the one to hold the mask over my face as the doctor watches. He holds my hand. He tells me to breathe in and count down from ten. I don’t feel drowsy at all. It’s not working, I think.
* * *
—
I wake up in the dark in a stranger’s body. My face feels puffy and swollen. My breasts are tender, hollow, as though I have been nursing some infernal being who has sucked me dry. My body lists like a sinking ship, woozy with anesthesia and a helpless emptiness, sick with longing and hunger and loss. I ache. I can’t breathe through my nose; the nostrils are stopped up thick with cotton wads. Blood drains down my throat when I tilt my head. My mouth feels impossibly dry, my lips cracked like they cracked in winter, back when I lived through winters, before. Someone (Max?) has propped me up on a stack of pillows, left a carafe of water and a small bowl of something that looks like porridge on the bedside table. The room is dark. I am alone. And then I see them. Sitting on the windowsill, their heavy heads drooping like the heads of sleeping animals, a narrow planter full of white Miltonia orchids. Rosanna’s favorite flower. Rosanna has been here while I slept. Maybe she’s still here now, on her way out the door, making her way silently down the hall.
I have to see her. I drag myself out of bed, my legs shaking like the legs of a baby deer, that precious, that vulnerable, new. I feel I am in a quiet house in the eye of a storm, the air around me heavy and still in the few long moments before the sky breaks open and the wind sucks down the walls. I sway. I stumble. I right myself and walk to the door, turning the knob like I’m in a dream, sleepwalking. As in a dream, it opens. I say it out loud to myself to be sure.
“The door is unlocked.”
In the quiet, my whisper cracks the air like a whip. My jaw aches. I find myself standing in the open mouth of the doorway like a woman on the ledge of a skyscraper, preparing herself to leap. My body is heavy and strange, with new aches all over, pumped full of fluid. I watch the world outside swim into existence through my drug-fuzzed gaze. I step over the threshold, toward the pull of Rosanna, the night.
The street outside is empty but for the dead palm fronds that litter the road, the streetlights extinguished, everything dark. I feel the wind cutting through my tight layer of bandages, the light, painful pressure of air on my new bruised skin. Santa Ana, Max had said before, when the wind blew all night and gave me strange dreams. The air crackles with a fierce electricity that makes the fine hairs on my arm stand on end, the silk of my thin nightgown spark with static. I feel alive with it, dangerous. I am something strange and raw and new, newborn. I am something that has never been before, in this world or any other. I cross the street to an empty lot where the ground drops away to nothing, the city spread out below. There are houses on either side of me, clinging to the cliff like great birds poised before flight, perched, like I am, on the edge of everything. I stand on the curb and look down over the city, the darkness spilling out from the foot of the mountain like the hem of a black dress, darkness for miles, and then light again, sparkling to the vague shapes of the islands in the far darkness of the sea. I look to the bruised purple sky for stars. I feel the bruised tenderness of my stranger’s body. I scream and I scream and I scream into the wind until my new face cracks with strain.
For days, I am in bed, my face so swollen I feel newborn, puffy-cheeked and tender, my chin in a sling, a plastic nose protector taped to my face so my fragile bridge won’t shift as I sleep. I sleep a lot. I spend most of the day dipping in and out of consciousness, floating between two states distinguished from each other only by the relative brightness of their fuzzy light. I sleep. I wake up to take my pills. I sleep again. I feel adrift, unmoored in my new body. The painkillers make me woozy, brain floating loose in my skull. The time between dreaming and waking blurs so that I am no longer sure what is imagined and what is real. The fabric of reality begins to fray, growing matted and fuzzy at the edges.
Max stays near. In the mornings, he sits in a chair close to my bedside, speaking to me with quiet tenderness when I wake, bringing me tiny glasses of sharp ginger ale, liquefied vegetable soups. I sip painfully through a straw as he sits close and reads to me, more folktales, fragments that seem like extensions of a dream, small girls blooming from flowers, a woman becoming a spider, a house with the crouching legs of a bird. He is there in the twilight, holding my hand. At night he sleeps curled up on the carpet beside me, his suit jacket pulled over his body like a blanket. Time keeps slipping by, faster and faster, gaining momentum, days folding over and in on themselves like taffy stretched on a machine, an endless, numbing, sugar-sweet stretch of time. Everything is one long dark afternoon. I sleep and sleep. I stay still. Slowly my face begins to grow back together. With Max beside me, I become whole again.
One morning I wake up and the pills are gone. I reach out my hand to take them, but the table is empty except for a glass of water holding a single rose, its pink petals wadded up grotesquely, like a clump of flesh. Gradually I return to myself. My body feels empty, my legs too weak to stand. Carefully I pull myself up on my pillows. I look around the room, noticing the gray sky outside, the light coming in the color of pearl. I wiggle my fingers against the smooth blanket, stretch my feet into points, looking for familiarities. Yes, I think, this is right, this is all right. This is how it feels to be a person, alive. Coming back to my body, this body, is like visiting the house you grew up in, years later, when your family is long gone and the rooms where you slept are occupied by strangers. Everything is still here. But it no longer belongs to me.
The door clicks soft as Max comes in. He smiles when he sees me sitting up. “Sleeping beauty,” he says.
“Max, where are my pills?”
I am still sensible enough to smooth my voice out, make
my statement a question, not an accusation. I don’t want him to know how badly I need the help. How strange this body still is to me.
“No more pills,” he says.
“It hurts,” I say. “I hurt.”
I am tender and raw, like an animal, dying, like meat. The thought of my face, red and peeling beneath the bandages, the fluid-bloated bruises padding my nose, my cheeks, disgusts me. I look up at all those pictures, at Rosanna’s perfect faces gazing down. I close my eyes and try to picture my mother, the way her face was like Rosanna’s face, loving, distant. I thought she was the most glamorous person in the world. But the edges of her image seem fuzzy now. Eroded. I am no longer certain that I am correctly picturing her heavy eyes, the long elegance of her fingers. Was the scar to the right of her mouth or the left? Slowly she is disappearing from my memories. She has disappeared now from my face. I do not know what will be left for me, now she is gone.
“No more pills,” says Max. He carefully takes my face between his hand, turns my gaze to meet his own. “It’s not good for you to get used to taking so many. You don’t need them anymore. Your body is starting to heal. And I need you to focus. I want to be careful of you. Soon you will be ready for the next step.”
The next step. The next. It’s impossible to imagine that this isn’t the last thing I need to do. How am I not done working yet? Max hands me a cup of coffee. My face is so stiff I can’t drink from the cup directly. Instead, I am forced to take tiny sips through the stirrer, like a hummingbird at a feeder, the liquid plastic cooled and stale.
“Will Rosanna come to see me?” I ask.
Surely this is what he means. Now I am ready. Now I have proved myself irrevocably, my willingness, my devotion to her. Won’t she want to come look into her mirror? It seems impossible that any person, no matter how far she had disappeared into herself, would be so incurious.
For a moment Max looks away, back up at the wall where Rosanna looms. Infinite, perfect, larger than life.
“Soon,” he says. “When you’re ready, you’ll know. But not today, today isn’t the right time.”
I nod, blinking away any sign of the tears I can feel gathering tight behind my cheekbones. Max smiles. Finally he looks away from the wall.
“You know,” he says softly, leaning in close now, whispering, “she did come see you. The night of the surgery. I told her not to, she’s still fragile, and it was the first time she’s left the house in ages, but she was so worried about you, she had to check in. Didn’t you notice? She asked me to pick up her favorite flowers for you. She wanted you to have something alive.”
The orchids. On the windowsill, in the gray light, I can see them ducking their heavy blooming heads, as if ashamed of the ostentation of their own beauty. I knew it. I knew she had come for me.
“Have you been watering them?” I ask. “I hope you haven’t been watering them too much. Ice cubes, Rosanna says.”
Max smiles.
“They’re yours to take care of,” he says. “Not mine. And that’s not all. I have another gift for you from Rosanna.”
He takes a cardboard box from beneath the bed, opening the lid so I can see what’s inside. It’s full of footage. All kinds—DVDs, minidisks, thumb drives, tapes small enough to nestle in the palm of my hand—each of them neatly labeled with Rosanna’s handwriting, careful and pristine, that delicate forward slant. I recognize it from the flash cards. Rosanna Beach, says one; another Shopping, another January. Wedding. Horseback. Haircut. Karaoke.
“Rosanna picked these out for you. We’ve been assembling this archive for months. Waiting for you to arrive. Now you’re here. And you’re ready.”
He takes a tablet from the bottom of the box and places it on my lap. He plugs it into an enormous machine that he takes from underneath the box, connecting them with an intestinal tangle of cables before connecting it all to a second, larger screen. He pulls my hands on top of the screen, takes them in his, the screen sputtering to life beneath our fingers.
“The magazines are one thing. Anyone could read those. But this archive is precious. In this box is everything you’ll ever need to know about Rosanna. Things she doesn’t even know about herself. So you can see why we had to wait, why we had to be sure that you were as committed to Rosanna as I was. That her secrets would be safe with you.”
He leans forward when he speaks, closer and closer until his face hovers inches from mine. His breath presses soft against my skin.
“I know you’ll understand how important all this is,” he says. “Now you have her face.”
He’s right. I can feel Rosanna inside me now, closer than ever, and outside, too, pressed against the surface of my skin. I want to look in the mirror to see what he sees. But I know I can’t. I won’t look until my face has fully healed. I don’t want to know myself as less than perfect. I don’t even want to speak. I want to give myself the gift of silence, this perfect moment of alignment with Rosanna. This moment in which Max looks at me, at the scar-flawed, swollen, bandaged surface of my skin, and finds me beautiful.
“I can’t wait for you to meet her,” he says.
I smile.
Lowering himself to the floor, he fiddles with the wiring, lifting the monitor so it’s perched precariously, vulturelike, on the flimsy coffee table. In the instant before he presses play, the room is so small and quiet that I feel I can hear the blood pumping through his veins, his heartbeat racing to meet mine. The room seems warmer when he’s in it. I run my fingers through his hair. The wooziness from pain pills has given me access to new liberties with him, and I pretend now that I still feel it. That I need him to support me. We sit in the darkness, close together. Together we watch Rosanna.
* * *
—
She is walking the red carpet. Her hair is sculpted into an elaborate updo, the loose ends falling down crimped, glossed stiff with gel. She is wearing a long silvery gown with a gap in the middle, the bodice dipping in on either side to reveal her impossibly flat, tanned stomach. “Rosanna!” they shout, the crowds pressing up against the barriers in an urgent black mass. “Rosanna!” Past the thin screen of bandage, I can feel Max looking at me, his gaze sticky with longing.
Another clip, her hair down, straight, hanging to her waist. She wears a pink lace dress that flows around her as she walks, the fine layers of fabric catching the air like an undersea plant, undulating as the tide comes in. She smiles wide, white teeth glinting in the flashing light.
Another. Here her hair is short, skating the shoulders of her long white dress, tight through the bottom, where it flares out like a mermaid’s tail. She puts one hand on her hip, tilts her head, flirts. I can hear the questions the reporters shout. “Who are you wearing?” they ask. “Are you here with anyone?” “Smile!” says one, and then again: “Rosanna, look over here, give us a smile!” Rosanna smiles, tilts her face toward the sound, a flower unfolding in the light. She does not say a word. I tilt my face like that toward Max, soaking in his warmth.
Rosanna in gold heels and diamonds. Rosanna in leather and lace. Rosanna looking like she had fallen out of a 1940s propaganda film, like she was on her way to a garden party at the embassy, like she had come down from the moon. Rosanna in silk. Rosanna in pearls. The same flowing walk and studied smile. Rosanna, Rosanna, Rosanna. Once you get past the glamour, there is something surprising about the cramped smallness of it all, the way she seems to have spent her life walking down the same narrow red pathway, hemmed in on both sides by her adoring public, the same dense black crowds aching with want, trying to touch her, calling her name.
* * *
—
Max tells me what to notice. “Those earrings,” he says, “were lent to her, and after the show she got drunk and left them in the back of her limo!”
He looks to me quickly, afraid I’ll get the wrong idea. “Of course, that kind of thing isn’t typical of her.
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“See the way she pauses, just for a moment, in front of the Vogue reporter? She doesn’t actually say anything, making them want to talk to her even more. Masterful. She got the cover that year.
“Watch how she stops on the staircase there, with just one leg lifted. She’s posing, but in the photographs it will look like she’s in motion, makes for a more dynamic composition. The more exciting a shot is, the more likely it is to be prominently featured in the magazines. She was a master of manipulation, nothing got past her.
“Notice how she’s always smiling? Just a little. Not a full smile, that would look too affected, just a slight turn at the corners of her lips, like she has a secret. It makes her look appealing, like even when she’s right in front of you, she’s just out of reach. That’s how I want you to look.”
I try to mold my bandaged lips into that same slight shape, but I can feel the fabric catch and pull at my scars, and I wince.
“I’ll work on it,” I say. My voice sounds strange, harsh and unpracticed, like one of the parrots attempting to talk.
Together we watch her walk until sunset, when the clatter of the birds returning jolts Max from his concentration. He stands up and begins gathering disks back into the box.
“Aren’t you going to stay?” I ask.
The idea of a night alone is daunting. I’m used to his presence in the room now, the quiet pressure of his breath in the air.
“I don’t think so,” he says. “It’s going to be hard enough for you to sleep anyway. I’ll just distract you. And I need to check in on Rosanna.”