by Emily Beyda
“Come in, darling,” I say. “I’m so glad you’re back.”
The door opens. Max comes in. He is carrying another bouquet of flowers, large red roses drooping heavy on their stems. I’ve left the old flowers in a pile on the kitchen counter, and their scent, the light green of new rot, mixes with the freshness of the new flowers. The room smells like that botanical garden we visited together long ago. I notice as I take them from him that they have been stripped of thorns. Is this for Max’s protection or my own?
“I’m sorry it took so long,” he says.
“No no,” I say, “it’s fine. We have so much time for each other now, what’s a few hours? Here, come sit. Have a drink with me.”
My voice is soft, Rosanna sweet. I raise my own glass toward him. I take his hand in mine. I think of that day in the garden, when we were, for once, just two people trying their best. I am sorry it can’t be that way forever. If I had her name, really had it, had her money and her power, maybe he could belong to me as much as he wants me to belong to him. But not like this. Never like this.
Max, trusting, lifts his glass. “What are we drinking to?” he asks.
“The future,” I say. “Everything. Forever.”
He smiles at me. He drinks.
It doesn’t take long for the pills to kick in. Max starts to droop, his head nodding as heavy as the flowers, and I lie down beside him as he drops off into a sleep so deep he barely seems to breathe. I pull the blankets up over him, tuck him in tight. The way he used to when he drugged me. I kiss him on his forehead.
“Sweet dreams,” I say.
I lace Rosanna’s shoes with shaking hands. I walk through the unlocked door. I stand out front for a moment, waiting, the desert air cold against my skin. I can feel the pulse of the house inside me, Rosanna reaching toward me down the hill. I close my eyes. I step into the street. I walk.
* * *
—
The house is where I left it. I know I shouldn’t be surprised by this—it’s a house, just an ordinary house, it can’t get up and move—but I am. There was some part of me that was sure it would be gone, the way the enchanted castle in fairy tales disappears with the dawn. Of course it’s still nighttime; maybe that is the secret to finding my way. It’s still nighttime, and the house is still there. On the gravel in front of me, a dark brown line. Blood, my blood. The sign I left. No one has opened the gate since then. No one has come in or out. Rosanna hasn’t gone anywhere. She is inside, waiting for me.
The metal feels warmer than I remember, pliant. Alive. I hold myself against it, leaning on it with my weight, and then I step into the dip of a wrought-iron curl, lifting my weight up and over the top. A long moment in the air, landing with a soft crunch on the other side. I kick the gravel with my feet to cover up the line of blood. I feel the coiled snake of my necklace burning against my throat. I take it in my hand and pull until the chain breaks. With the tips of my fingers I scratch a deep hollow into the soil, dropping in the broken chain, covering it with blood-spattered gravel. Someone has been taking care of the garden. It looks like it does in the footage, the lawn cut close, the flower beds trimmed, an elegantly tangled swatch of color, snapdragons, daylily, milkweed. Even the gravel driveway is perfectly raked. No signs of tire tracks or feet. Nothing messy. Nothing alive. I try to walk soft across it, leave the stones undisturbed, but it’s impossible. My feet sink deep, the gravel making loud noises, a crack like breaking bones. The night leans close to hear, silent around me.
At the door, I hesitate. The porch light is off, and the shadows, gathering close on the unlit porch, pull my heart into my throat. I try the knob. It turns in my hand, easy. The door is unlocked. I wonder if I should wait to be found, if I am intrusive, rude. No. There should be no barriers between us. I am not a guest here. She has left the door unlocked for me. I am coming home. I hold my breath. I push. I watch the door swing open, away from me into the deeper darkness of the hall.
Inside, everything is coated in a thick layer of dust. I remember the way my apartment was when I found it, how Rosanna had let the filth of passing time slowly gather there, too, how I had to clean, how I will clean here, help her, the two of us, taking care of our house. I take small steps, silent, the click of my hard shoes muffled by the carpet of filth covering the hardwood floors. I feel so loose in my body that this added lack of stimulus, this disappearance into total sensory invisibility, unnerves me. I turn in the darkness. “Hello?” I say, mostly just to make a sound, to shatter the dead perfection of that silent place. But there is only silence in response. If anyone is waiting for me, they will wait a little longer. Tree branches press close against the windows. Bony fingers on bony hands. The house holds its breath. I walk quiet, the sharp light of the full moon painful on my skin.
The rooms are all where I think they will be. Everything is the same but strange somehow, the proportions wrong, spaces arranged in ways I don’t expect, narrow corners, strange turns in the hallways, curves in the walls, unexpected steps leading up and down, all of it silent, empty, dead. A familiar place remembered in a dream. In the kitchen, a fruit bowl is stacked with oranges so old they have collapsed in on themselves. I pick one up and turn it over in my hand, feel the powdery crunch of mold as it turns to dust. In the living room the couches are covered in sheets. A book lying flat on the coffee table, its title erased by dust, the same mix of soot, pollen, dirt, dead skin, Rosanna’s skin, her hair, everywhere. Dead flowers in a vase. Relics in an abandoned shrine.
In the backyard the pristine pool where Rosanna floated, floats, shines murky and green, an emerald, a boulder crusted with moss, the water scummed thick and opaque in the vague light of the moon. Dark shapes swim beneath the still surface. The fruit trees reach their heavy branches toward the ground, aching with citrus, oranges and lemons and limes like swollen boils, rotting on the branches, heavy with alien life. The grass here is overgrown. I kneel down and rustle my hands though it to make sure nothing is hiding there. I want to lie down and be still, still, until it grows up over me and swallows me up and I am absorbed by the roots, the land, a part of Rosanna’s garden. But she is somewhere inside, waiting for me. I know it. The thrum grows stronger and stronger. Now there is nowhere left to go but up.
At the bottom of the stairs I wait, listening. Nothing. Nothing, still. The only movement comes from the neighbors’ houses, bright across the canyon with their automatic backyard lights, looking at me, winking on as I climb, as though they can sense my movements through the narrow yellow windows of the turret. The gutter spouts outside are shouting, there is someone here who does not belong. The moon shines bright like water on water, the empty reflection of the pool. Closing my eyes, I feel my way up the stairs. My palms tingle against the air as if I am parting it with my body, making my way through some invisible amniotic fluid. If Rosanna is waiting, I will drop my hands and show myself to her suddenly, a mirror rising from the darkness. But it is quiet at the top, even more quiet than it was downstairs, because down there all I could hear was nothing and here it is something again, breath, heart, the creak of footsteps and bones, my body reasserting itself. It will all be over soon, I think. Soon Rosanna will know the truth.
I try every door along the hallway.
Every door is locked.
And then I come to the end.
Rosanna’s room.
* * *
—
I wait at the door. I wait at the door for a long time, unwilling to go forward without some indication, some sign. There is a sense of holiness here, transgression. My hand rests softly on the wood. I am feeling for a pulse. I am feeling my way toward her, trying to sense what she is doing there, waiting, as she must be waiting, as I know she is waiting for me, in the darkness on the other side. But everything is still. I take one deep breath. Another. On the other side of the door, I can see Rosanna standing from the full white pillows of her full white bed, risi
ng to embrace me. Her arms are open. There is a smile on her face, full of such profound love, such heartbreaking gentleness. Home. The doorknob warms, pulses as though someone is turning it from the other side, pulling on my hand so that without my making a choice, without any volition of my own, the knob turns and the door swings open and I see what is waiting for me inside.
The lamp on the bedside table is switched on, the light soft and golden. Warm. This is the warmth I was feeling my way toward. Rosanna has stepped out for a moment. She has left the light on for me. I wonder why I couldn’t see it from the street and realize that this is the back of the house, not the front, that I had it all wrong. But it’s okay now. I’ll learn. Rosanna will teach me. There is a hairbrush on the vanity table with a few strands of hair in it, glinting in the light of the lamp. There is a carafe of water on the bedside table, two little yellow pills in a little white dish, one of the clothbound books of poems Max is so fond of buying her, a remote. Rosanna’s nightgown is spread out on the bed—white, silk, soft. Light is spilling from everything in the room, the room itself alive, beating with a living pulse. I can’t bring my old things with me here. I must enter a supplicant, naked, pure. I understand now why Max insisted on taking my old clothes away. I strip off my muddy shoes, the thick skin of my damp jeans. I throw them as far from my body as I can, so they are hidden by the darkness of the hall. I cross into the warm light of Rosanna’s room. I sit at the vanity and brush my hair smooth, my face shimmering into life in the glass, Rosanna’s face looking back at me. I look into my eyes and know that I am perfect. There is no other place in the world for me. It has been a long night. It is good to be home. The nightgown is smooth against my bare skin, cold, like stepping into the icy water of the swimming pool outside. I take my pills. I get into my bed, pull the clammy sheets tight against my skin. On the wall in front of the bed there is a television. A little black box in front of it, lit up. I pick up the remote. I press play.
* * *
—
At first the tape seems ordinary. Like any of the other videos. For a moment I am not sure that I haven’t seen it before, Rosanna getting dressed, the camera in the same place it always is, hidden in the darkness behind the mirror, her image clouded a little, dreamlike with the intervention of two-way glass, Rosanna’s focused expression as she puts on her makeup swimming in and out of view. But on this tape, the room is empty, her station at the vanity abandoned. There is a long shot of the curtain, closed in front of the window, shifting slightly in what must be, judging from the quality of light, a night breeze. There are no sounds from the world outside. Not the wind. Not a car, passing on its way up the hill from the highway. No night bird’s cry. After a long time, Rosanna switches on the light.
She walks to the window. Pulls back the curtain. If darkness can flood, then the room is flooded with darkness. I see the silhouette of her, hair ruffling in the breeze, as though she is fraying, slowly coming apart. I think of the way Max looked earlier, of their two bodies fading at the edges, the separation between them melting away. I feel something almost like hope. On the screen, there is the quiet click of a lighter, flame, lingering as she stands there looking out at nothing. She turns back into the room and begins walking, back and forth, back and forth, measuring the space they have built to hold her. I feel a little pop of recognition. I have walked like that. I have felt that way. At the mirror she grinds the cigarette out on the glass surface of the table. There are people hired to clean up after her. She is not afraid to make a mess. She looks into her own eyes, fierce, searching. She touches her face, pulls at her slack skin as though it is a mask she is unable to take off. She leans forward. She looks closer. She reaches out her two strong arms and wrenches the mirror off its base, dropping it to the cream carpet, where it lands with a muted thump, and suddenly she is holding the camera in her hands. Holding me. She looks at me with blank wonder, as if I am an object from another world. It is so close to the way I imagined it that tears well up and wash hot down my face. She is looking right into my eyes. The image twists and shakes as she turns the camera over, clicking off a switch, the world before me going black.
When it switches on again, some time has passed. Rosanna sits in front of me in her makeup chair, her hair combed, her makeup painted on. She looks younger. More alive.
“So this is interesting,” she says. “This is an interesting discovery. Somebody has been watching me. And I know who it is. I think we should see what he has to say for himself, don’t you?”
Down the narrow stairs again, the round eye of the foyer, out into the kitchen, where a man sits with his back to the camera. I can see the Hollywood Sign through the wall of windows, all lit up with spotlights, pale and blank against the tangle of the hill. The sound of helicopters drifts through the open frame, seeming to bounce against the low-hanging matte painting of the sky, bruised that pale Los Angeles nighttime purple, light from the traffic or a wildfire somewhere bouncing back at us, trapped reverberating beneath the clouds.
“Hello, Max,” Rosanna says.
Max turns slowly. He looks at the camera for a long time. He looks through the camera at me. He looks tired. More tired even than he has looked of late. Circles under his eyes, hollow. Wrinkled, somehow, wilted, as though he has been drained of himself, tapped like the sap of a sweet-sapped tree. His face is a closed door. It is the first time I have seen him on tape. He is always around me, seems to know everything there is to know, and yet Rosanna never refers to him at all. It is as if, for her, he doesn’t exist. Now he comes into being, and I see him as she sees him. Fragile. Helpless. Small. A person she does not take seriously. Someone to be pitied, rather than feared.
“Someone has done a very bad thing,” says Rosanna. “And, Maxie, I’m sorry to say I think it was you.”
Her voice sounds strange. Slurred. My body is beginning to feel loose, bendy rubber at the joints, the images in front of me taking on a haloed blur, as if filmed through a scrim of Vaseline. I wonder if Rosanna, too, has taken her pills. On-screen Max shakes his head.
“I wouldn’t,” he says.
He is pleading. It is almost embarrassing, how vulnerable he is. The raw need in his voice. I am watching something deeply private, something he would never want me to see. But hasn’t he done the same thing to me? Now it’s my turn to watch. My turn to know.
“I wouldn’t do anything wrong,” he says. “You know that. I would never do anything without thinking of you, Rosanna. Your needs. Everything I do is for you.”
I can see the way he is looking at, trying not to look at, the camera, edgy. He stands, and standing up, he is taller than her. She is so small. As small as me. Somehow this is a shock.
“I don’t believe you,” she says. “You can’t fool me anymore into thinking you’re selfless. That you’re good, sweet, nice old Max who thinks only of my happiness because he just loves me so much. You do love me, don’t you? Or you think that you do.”
“I love you,” he says. “I promise.”
He steps forward, reaching for her. She moves back, evading him. Still, she does not seem frightened. I would be frightened, if I were her. But all she knows is her own power over him. She still thinks he can’t hurt her. I envy her this certainty.
“No you don’t,” she says. “You don’t even know me. It’s just that you don’t have anyone else. No friends, as far as I can tell, no family. You’ve spent years silently in front of me, all those holidays sitting in cars outside parties waiting for me to be ready to go home, those days off when you answered the phone on its first ring. You were always there. You practically lived here, on that sad little cot in the guesthouse, and when I kept having all those nightmares, you came inside and slept at the foot of my bed like a dog. You never asked me for a thing. I thought it was because I was so great. That there was some goodness inside me you could see. Something worth protecting. Maybe everyone else was wrong. Maybe there was something in me worth l
oving, after all. But now I realize that I was a hobby. Some strange obsession. Something to take up your time. Because you don’t have anything else.”
“No,” he says, his voice urgent, “I’m sorry I filmed you, but I did it because I care for you so much. I really do. You are the only thing in the world to me. Please, Rosanna, you have to believe me.”
She shakes her head. “You did it because you wanted to solve me. To figure out everything I didn’t want you to know. So congratulations are in order, I suppose. You did it. You cracked the code. You know everything there is to know. Of course you don’t love me. Nobody does. And I don’t blame you. I don’t love you, either. I don’t care about you at all. I don’t care about anyone. I need you. Needed you. That’s it. But I don’t care about you. I’m a monster. We both know that.”