The Spires

by Moretti, Kate

  He gave her a look. “Do you want to be Atropos?”

  “I don’t care. I’m just saying. It’s not a perfect metaphor.” Penelope pretended to look uninterested, examining her fingernails.

  “So then, what am I?” Grace asked guilelessly, her cheeks pinked as she licked her lips.

  There was a pause before Flynn said, “There’s only three Fates.”

  “You’re Aphrodite. The goddess of beauty and sexual pleasure.” Jack leaned forward and kissed Grace, cupping her into him and swooning. Penelope turned her head, pretending to study the calendar that Flynn had hung on the wall behind the sofa. There was nothing written on it.

  “The Fates aren’t technically goddesses, you imp,” Willa corrected, tipping back the last of her drink. She watched Jack kiss Grace again and rolled her eyes, this time more obviously. “They’re like incarnations of destiny.”

  Later, she whispered to Penelope in the kitchen when they were alone, “Do you think she’s actually dumb?” and when they turned around, Grace stood in the doorway, blinking like a doe.

  It could have been the days that Bree came breezing in with a tray of five coffees, only to look blankly at Grace and say, “Oh my gosh, I didn’t know you were here, I’m so sorry!” Or maybe the fact that Willa kept buying vodka, even though Jack had told her, irritated, that Grace didn’t drink vodka. She’d make vodka cranberries for everyone, putting a spoonful of pomegranate seeds in everyone’s drink—for fun, and pretty!—and then Grace would sit on the end of the couch, sipping her rum and coke, which looked significantly less festive. Or maybe it was the weekends she’d missed when she had to drive to Maryland to stay with her sister, who was in college and having issues. She’d come back brittle and ill at ease and frustrated with their incessant clowning around.

  “You all just don’t get what the real world is like,” she’d say, and even Jack would sometimes take a deep breath. Either they started excluding her because she’d turned a bit sour, or she turned sour because they excluded her—they could never tell. She wasn’t wrong—they were avoiding the real world, on purpose. They’d started to resent her bringing it to them.

  “Well, it’s never on purpose !” insisted Bree when Jack would question them after Grace left. “We’re just used to five!”

  “Well, get used to six!” Jack said and stomped up the stairs. They dissolved into giggles then, until a pillow was launched over the rail of the loft, landing neatly on the Risk game, the colored pieces flying.

  Flynn shrugged. “I was losing anyway.”

  And they all fell apart again.

  Even Penelope had started to feel better. She could see the end coming. Jack was annoyed at them, but he laughed, too, sometimes. They weren’t ever mean to Grace, but she knew he’d never stay tied to someone who didn’t like his friends.

  Willa came home with a Polaroid camera and a box of costumes. She bought them at the thrift store in town. “Look at this! Groucho Marx, complete with hat!” She passed it to Flynn. Bree took a set of feather boas, a sequined tiara, and a pair of false teeth (“Ewwwwww, wash those first, oh my God!” Willa screeched). Penelope took a flapper costume; she was, after all, the go-go dancer, and in an uncharacteristic move, shimmied out of her jeans and socks and just wore the dress itself to dinner. It was gold and green, sequined, with a deep V-neck, and looked less like a costume than a stunning dress. Her body had changed shape, just a bit. Hardly noticeable to anyone but Penelope, but everything felt a little plumper, riper. Her cleavage deeper, a soft, subtle roundness to her belly. She smoothed the dress down over her new curvy hips, enjoying having an actual figure for the first time in her life.

  Willa kept the pièce de résistance for herself: a lounge-singer costume, plunging red neckline, long cigarette holder that she insisted on smoking a real cigarette out of, making them all cough and ask her repeatedly, “Where did you get cigarettes?” She stuck a brown beauty mark on her cheek, lips painted bright red, and slid into a pair of black stilettos. On her head, she wore a black lace fascinator.

  In the doorway, she struck a pose, and they all whistled. Flynn found a 1930s jazz CD, and when Jack came home, she tossed him a newsboy hat, a pair of suspenders, and a vest. “Saved the best for you, buddy!” She was at least three drinks in, and dinner hadn’t even been served yet. Penelope poured him two fingers of whiskey, neat, and handed him the glass.

  Bree was at the stove, giggling as she kept losing her teeth, trying to keep them from falling into the sauce.

  Willa sang around the kitchen, “Put ’em in a box, tie ’em with a ribbon,” while Jack in his Gatsby get-up twirled her around.

  “Hi,” said Grace, who had made it all the way into the kitchen without anyone noticing she’d arrived. Jack stopped twirling Willa, pausing for one still second before crossing the room and kissing her thoroughly, his whiskey sloshing in his glass. She pushed at him gently. “Didn’t you just get home?” She tilted her head in the direction of his hand and his costume, and he laughed.

  “Sure, but Penelope knows what I like,” he said, winking at Penelope, and Grace did not reply.

  Bree served dinner, by then a sloppy affair as they were all half in the bag. Someone had trailed sauce from the stove to the table, and Willa kept sliding in it in her stilettos. They all ate like wolves, ravenous and ridiculous, laughing at nothing, while Willa continued to sing Doris Day and Flynn tried to only speak in Groucho Marx lines. (“I don’t want to be part of any club that would have me for a member!” To which Jack said, “Too late, you’re stuck in it now!”)

  Flynn waggled his eyebrows at Grace, whose mood had turned more dour as the dinner wore on, and said, “Look, I’m not crazy about reality, but it’s still the only place to get a decent meal.”

  “Bree, what is this? It’s amazing!” Jack exclaimed.

  “It’s beef stroganoff!” Bree clapped her hands delightedly. They all stared at her, dumbfounded, and she giggled. “Made with tofu! Gotcha!”

  Grace had barely eaten, only pushed her food around her plate, and was looking thoroughly miserable.

  “Gracie-poo, what’s wrong?” Willa teased her, poking at her shoulder.

  “No, really. Something is definitely wrong,” Penelope said, suddenly alarmed. Grace’s face had expanded, her lips and cheeks were a bright shade of red, almost purple, and three times normal size.

  “Were there mushrooms in here?” she asked thickly, through bloated lips.

  “Yeah, it’s stroganoff,” Bree said.

  “Grace is allergic to mushrooms,” Jack snapped.

  “Oh my God!” Penelope cried. “Do we have to go to the hospital?” She wondered immediately who around them was fit to drive. Maybe Flynn, if he stopped twirling his moustache. Only Penelope, who had been nursing the same drink for hours, periodically refreshing the ice to look new. Staying under the radar was becoming more difficult by the day.

  “No,” Grace said through her teeth. “It’s just swelling and redness. It’ll go away on its own. I didn’t eat much.”

  “I told you all this!” Jack said, exasperated at them all, but not fully anymore, now that they knew it wouldn’t be serious. “I swear, honey, I told them.”

  Penelope felt a little stab in her heart when he said honey.

  They all watched her face seem to swell right under their eyes, a reverse metamorphosis from beautiful to hideous. In the background, Ella Fitzgerald crooned about “Taking a Chance on Love,” and Willa couldn’t help herself—she started singing in the awkward silence. Bree retrieved an ice pack from the freezer and brought it over to Grace, who took it gratefully. Penelope ran to get Benadryl and ibuprofen and presented both to Grace with a glass of water. She took it and drank it down and finally, blessedly, excusing herself, made her way to the stairs and up to Jack’s room. Jack followed her.

  After a moment, Flynn said, “Look, darling, if you’re not having fun, you’re doing something wrong.”

  And they all fell apart.

  Later, Jack ca
me back downstairs. Willa was passed out on the couch, her mouth open. Flynn had taken off the nose and moustache but said he rather liked the glasses and was playing a round of backgammon with Bree. Penelope was in the kitchen, cleaning up, barefoot.

  “How’s Grace?” Penelope asked. She was tired and anxious for her bed.

  “She’s fine. A bit embarrassed, I think.” He shrugged sheepishly. “She’s having a hard time. We’re a hard club to break into.”

  Penelope grinned. “We’re ridiculous.” She was picking up the bits and pieces of costumes and putting them back in the boxes. Polaroids of all of them lay around the table. It looked like a wild party had happened, yet it was only a run-of-the mill Wednesday.

  “We are,” Jack said softly. He held two glasses of water and paused near the steps to the loft. He turned back to her, gave her a soft smile, almost unreadable, and leaned forward, kissed her cheek. He smelled like pine and citrus, something heady that made her head spin, and she felt herself grow weak kneed.

  “You look amazing in that dress, Pip,” he whispered.

  And then he was gone.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-SIX

  Willa, present

  Pip found the pictures. She met Gen. Things were moving along, although albeit a bit more dramatic than she planned. She didn’t expect Pip to fly off the handle like that—she never used to have that kind of fire in her. Ha! Fire.

  The comb was a stroke of luck. She hadn’t planned that. So many things were just falling into place. Almost effortlessly.

  She thought maybe it was time to start the final part.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-SEVEN

  February 26, 2020

  Penelope’s life had been a straight line for nearly eighteen years. She would not go back to the chaos of her life before. She’d made sure to live in a certain way, within the rigid confines of acceptance, to keep herself from falling back.

  She’d met Brett leaving a ShopRite at the lowest point in her life. She’d never been lonelier, more bereft, and lost than she was in the time right before they started dating. She hadn’t spoken to any of them from the Church House in months, not after the fire. All of them scattered, wrapped up in their own culpabilities, but none of them knew what she did.

  That Penelope was the guiltiest of them all.

  Brett didn’t save her, exactly, because he never knew she needed saving. She’d kept that part of herself locked up in a box, shoved to a corner of her heart. She’d reinvented herself the only way she knew how: from the ground up. She went back to Penelope instead of Pip. She cut her hair and styled it straight, rather than simply brushed in waves. She began wearing dresses and sweaters—boho chic, instead of khaki pants. If she dressed the part, maybe eventually she’d feel the part too. While other couples talked of their lives before they’d met, Penelope spoke vaguely of college and only generally about the year before. She pretended with Brett, more than she’d ever pretended with anyone in her life.

  She was funny. She spoke her mind, for the first time in her life. She was still practical, but she took pieces of them: Willa’s sarcasm, Jack’s charm, Bree’s airiness, Flynn’s quiet observance. She made them all part of her, used them all to make herself whole again. But it never worked. She’d never felt whole. She’d felt empty for a long, long time.

  But with Brett, she could pretend. She could love him, just enough, to fill the void. To find purpose. He’d never question if she was whole. That’s why he had been so safe. She saw that now. Had she loved him? As much as she was capable, maybe, at the time.

  Instead, he pushed her to find a job she loved, take as long as she needed to do it. She took only three short months. It was easy to patch yourself up when you were only pretending. It was easy to pretend to be happy, and after a while, the act looked just like the real thing.

  They married a year after that, had Tara a few years after that. Check, check, check. All the boxes ticked, and her life was back on track, like the Church House had never happened. Like the fire had never happened. Like no one had died.

  Willa had been right about one thing—the gap year had galvanized them all, one way or the other.

  But now, in the gray early morning of her small, surprisingly pleasant room at Wexford Health and Behavioral Science Center, she wondered maybe if it hadn’t been a straight line, after all, but a circle.

  How did she end up here?

  Twenty-four-hour hold.

  Just for observation, the nurse had told her. She had been kind, young, and pretty. Penelope’s face was puffy; she could feel the plump of her cheeks, her under-eyes fat with fluid and a thudding in her forehead that didn’t seem to stop.

  The police had given her a choice: twenty-four hours in observation or they’d book her for assault. The EMS driver was dabbing a fingernail gouge on Brett’s cheek with peroxide and gauze at the time. She inspected her hands for blood and saw nothing.

  “Assault? For a scratch?” Penelope had been furious, still. It seemed never abating, her fury. “I just found out my husband was having an affair with—” She looked around wildly, but Genevieve had slipped out. Penelope pinched the bridge of her nose and said to no one, “I am not actually crazy. She was just here.”

  Willa, hugging herself on the couch, said nothing.

  “I understand, ma’am. It would be misdemeanor assault.” The officer seemed apologetic, even kind, and the clarification meant nothing to Penelope, for she had no idea what degrees of assault existed, nor did she have prior knowledge of the punishment for them.

  Everyone was being so kind. The room was positively heavy with kindness, and the weight of it was exhausting.

  When they brought her here, in the back of the police car (no lights or sirens, no handcuffs), she’d been walked through the intake room by the same quiet police officer and brought to this little “hold” room, as it was called. The nurse had given her a Xanax and told her to sleep. That she’d be evaluated in a bit, but sometimes people under stress just needed a good night’s sleep.

  Now, she sat here, in this little room, at six a.m., with a bed and a nightstand and a small wooden desk with rounded edges (all the edges of everything were round, as if she was going to impale herself on a veneer corner) and used a toilet with no seat and felt, for the first time, completely and wildly out of her element. She’d spent her whole life, one foot in front of the other, walking firmly and resolutely away from the night of the fire, never once closely examining the past, just to end up here, twenty years later and nowhere to look but back.

  Well, for starters, she did look back. Every morning, right before she opened her eyes. The name right on her lips, her heart beating in time to another.

  At night, waking up sweating, the fire hot on her back. The dream fading away but the feeling of the heat and the sweat and the smell of burning wood and the cracking of the beams and the final click of the door, the one that sealed her fate.

  She did look back, in one way or another, almost every single day. But one thing Practical Penelope had gotten very good at was flicking a switch inside herself. It was a talent to be able to turn your feelings off and on. And like she’d always told Tara, success takes talent and hard work in equal measure. Maybe she was born with the ability, or maybe she’d honed it during a childhood reared by The Wonder Years, and Night Court, and Saturday Night Live, and The Price Is Right.

  But, she realized, she worked especially hard every day to keep the skill sharp. Brett, so lost, desperately looking for something to fill his void, and his wife staunchly unwilling to admit she had one.

  Tara and Linc. They filled something in her, seemingly without her admission, almost violating in their need. This is what children did, she knew now. They violated any boundary you thought you’d set.

  Where were they right now? Did they wonder what happened to their mother? Hopefully Brett had the sense to tell them to stay at their friends’ houses. He didn’t hate her enough to turn them against her, did he? God, she had really lost the plot there, back at the
house. She felt not just a little foolish.

  But also. She knew she had been right about a lot of it. The knife, the pictures, Grey, Violet, the burner phone, the necklace—missing, then present, then returned. Like a joke, somehow. Like Willa was trying to make her crazy. Ha, she thought. Look where she ended up.

  Other things tugged at her memory. The wrong song—she sang the wrong song. It wasn’t “Both Sides Now”; it was “The River.” Always “The River.” She tried to catalog all the missteps, all the violations since Willa had come. Which ones were purposeful, and what was blind bad luck? And if they were purposeful, the bigger question was why. It was a lot of effort to insinuate yourself into someone’s life, and to what end? To taunt them or play with them like a cat with a bird?

  Upon intake, they had taken Penelope’s cell phone and her clothes. She wore scrubs, green to the nurses’ blues, and thought to herself, If I wasn’t crazy before, I would be by now. The boredom was excruciating. She had nothing but her thoughts, pinging around, bouncing off each other, no rhyme or reason for any of it.

  If she was being held for observation, she saw exactly zero evidence that she was being observed by anyone. No ceiling camera lens that she could see (and she looked between four and five o’clock, out of sheer boredom).

  The far wall was painted with a bright swirling rainbow, the words Be the sunshine in someone else’s cloudy day! painted in swirling white script underneath it, the whole mural shot through with yellow and orange sunbeams. She crossed the room, a little woozy still from the Xanax, and ran her fingertips along the wall. Her nail dragged on something in the dark-indigo stripe of the rainbow: a hole the size of a pencil eraser.

  Ah, camera, there you are, she thought.

  Penelope lay back on the bed and willed herself, finally, to sleep. She had no dreams.

  “Good morning!”

  A new nurse this time—plump and older. Penelope sighed with relief. She didn’t trust her mental health to someone who looked like they might still get carded for cigarettes. What did someone that young know about life? Cheating husbands and friend betrayals and raising teenagers? She needed life advice, not a pedicure.