Page 9

Light from a bright sun. Burning my closed eyes. I open them. See myself in the ceiling mirror. I’m lying in a bed the color of blood. There’s a squeaking sound somewhere. Squeak, squeak, what the hell is that? Where am I? I look around. Blood-colored curtains. Black vanity with a three-paneled mirror. I’m in a vast four-poster bed that sags dangerously in the middle. The red silk sheets bearing the ghost of violets and smoke, a scent of flesh and sweat. Achingly familiar. And then I remember. Mother’s bedroom. Must have slept here. Must have found my way home somehow. How did I leave that house? How did I even leave that hall? Didn’t it seem to be stretching infinitely into darkness? And yet I’m back here, smelling ocean and roses, the stink of the seals on the cove. Still wearing the silk silver dress, the train now covered in dirt and ripped at the hem. The red shoes are still shining on my feet. I kick them off. Who were those people last night? Those strange people (proprietors?) who claimed to know Mother. To know me, too, didn’t they say so? We hope you’ll come back, Daughter. And then the man in the fake black beard. His kiss in the dark hall. And those red jellyfish…

The squeaking sound feels closer, why am I hearing this sound? And then I realize it’s coming from inside not outside. In the house. Oh god, Mother’s ghost. Here, now, in the middle of the day? Impossible. Get yourself together. There’s her red silk robe hanging on the back of the bedroom door. Get up and put it on, that’s it. A little light-headed, a little shaky, that’s all. That champagne, I remember. Those red bubbles I sipped and sipped. Cold, bittersweet, bright as forgetting. That’s all I wanted was to forget. Squeaking getting louder. Does a ghost squeak? Of course not, I’m being silly. Only a living intruder. They know Mother’s dead and now they’re breaking in. I make my way into the hall, looking for a weapon, any weapon at all. In the bathroom, a curling iron. Not much, but it’s something to grip, get a grip. Living room just like I left it. Couch. Table. Roses floating in a bowlful of water and black, slick stones. Roses seem redder, how is that possible?

“Hey there,” says a voice.

I scream.

And there he is standing by the windows. Long blond hair. Shirtless, as yesterday. More shirtless somehow. Tad, the merman handyman. Squeegee in his fist. The wet sponge dripping onto Mother’s floor. Her cat, Anjelica, slithering around his golden ankles, licking the drops at his feet like a whore.

“Belle,” Tad says. “Good morning. Whoa, wait.” He looks at his watch. “Afternoon now.” He grins. Looks down at the red robe that I’m pulling tighter around my body (does he recognize it?), the curling iron clutched in my fist. “Uh-oh,” he says. “I scared you again. Did I scare you again?”

“No.” The curling iron slips from my fingers, clattering at my feet. Anjelica runs away, shrieking. “I mean yes, Tad. You did scare me a little. A lot. I thought someone was breaking in.”

“Oh no, I’d never break in. No, no. I have a key, see?” He points to it, one of several attached to his tool belt. I look at my mother’s key just hanging there on his hook.

“I see.” I try to smile. “I just didn’t expect to see you again. So soon.”

Tad nods. Waves a hand at the glass behind him. “Just here to do the windows.”

Though I don’t look directly at them, though I keep my eyes on Tad, I can see that the glass has indeed been cleaned again. So clear, it doesn’t even look like glass. It looks like there’s nothing at all between me and the palm tree–lined shore, the pelicans and cormorants flying through the blue sky. “Hope you don’t mind,” he says. “Tried to be quiet.”

“Didn’t you just do the windows yesterday?”

“Oh, I like to do them every day. Your mother liked it that way too.”

“Why?”

“Because they get dirty, Belle. All that spray. It may look faraway, but it finds its way here, trust me.” I look at Tad. His beautiful face so earnest, so shadowless. He reminds me of a golden retriever. I picture my mother patting his golden head. Tad barking happily.

“I see.”

I walk over to the breakfast table by the window but I don’t look out, won’t look out. I sit with my back to the glass, staring down at the table. I can feel Tad staring at me, and heat floods my cheeks like I’m a child again. As a child, I’d always find men in the kitchen in the morning. Making her coffee. Breakfast in bed. Well, hello there, kiddo, they’d say when they saw me staring up at them from the kitchen doorway. Mirabelle, am I right? I remember I said nothing. Neither confirmed nor denied this. Just stood there in my dumb little nightgown patterned with pink bunnies, clutching my stuffed white rabbit by its foot.

Sometimes the men were wearing just boxers, which embarrassed me. All that visible, sculpted flesh. All that hair on their legs, sometimes chests and backs. Some of them were ugly. Little hedgehog men. Some were old and withered, reminding me of toads. Their liver-spotted skin lifting ghoulishly upward whenever they smiled. Mostly, though, they looked like men from the soap operas Grand-Maman watched in her rocking chair in the dark while eating religieuse. The men had those kinds of chiseled bones, those penetrating eyes. I would watch the soaps on Grand-Maman’s beige bed, lying on my back and hanging off the bed’s edge, looking at the television screen upside down, my head filling with blood. That looks like Jake, I might say, pointing at the screen.

Jake, c’est qui?Grand-Maman would ask. Speaking to me in French like Mother never did.

Un ami de Maman, I’d say, staring at the screen.

And Grand-Maman would snort. Wolf down another pastry. Un ami, she said. Shaking her head of undyed white hair. She’d disapproved of my father, too, of course. But at least my father had manners, Grand-Maman said. Even if he hadn’t been a Catholic. Always so very polite, respectful. Brought her what she called those oriental pastries and gold trinkets whenever he visited. The pastries were far too sweet for her taste and the trinkets were tawdry, of course, but the gesture was something. Whenever Grand-Maman talked about my father, I’d have a dim flash of a tall, dark man with an afro standing in her front doorway, sweating and smiling and bowing his head. A hairy hand engulfing mine, the cave of it hot and dry. How our skins, side by side, looked like different gradients on a single scale, his fingers ringed with the same gold that encircled my wrist in a slim chain. A soft male voice speaking a broken, heavily accented French to an unsmiling woman dressed head to toe in crackling black lace. No, Grand-Maman always conceded, my father, god rest his soul, was nothing like Mother’s gentleman friends.

Sometimes the men I met in Mother’s kitchen were fully dressed in suits or polo shirts and jeans. Wearing whatever they’d worn the night before when they knocked on our front door. One morning I found one of them wearing her red silk robe as he made her espresso, the robe I’m wearing now, in fact.

My father bought her that, I screamed at him from the doorway of the kitchen. You can’t wear that. And I burst into tears.

What’s going on here?Mother said, coming into the kitchen. Clip-clopping into my nightmare like she was walking on air. Looking lazy and oblivious. So beautiful, she hurt my eyes. Everything seemed like it belonged to her. The morning light, the blue sky. Everything okay, Sunshine? Why the long face?

Oh, we’re fine, the man said, winking at me like we were in on something together. We were just getting acquainted, weren’t we, my dear?

And he smiled at me like he hated me. I didn’t know what to do. I nodded yes though I hated him, whoever he was. I was rewarded with a flash of his white teeth. And Mother smiled like how lovely it had all worked itself out in her favor. Oh good. Chin up, then, Sunshine. Patting my cheek. No more long face. What do we always say? And she did an impression of me. Folded her arms tightly in front of her chest. Stuck out her lower lip in a pout. My face will freeze that way, I said. That’s ri-ight, she’d sing, lighting a cigarette and winking at the man. I remember I hated her, too, in that moment. I recall the hate coursing through my little body. And then? Black after that. I’ve reached the edge of this memory. Can’t go any further into its dark wood.

“How about some coffee?” Tad says softly now.

Though I don’t nod, Tad pours some from a French press. Tears threaten to fill my eyes as I sip. At what? The kindness of Tad? The richness of the coffee? The absurdity of being a grown woman tended to by my mother’s lover? Or perhaps just the remnants of the Revitalizing Eye Formula that can cause watering long after applied, and no matter how carefully applied. It happens, Marva says, even with the most sophisticated formulas. It is their nature to run.

I watch Tad pad into the kitchen and start to make what I presume is breakfast. “You really don’t—”

“Happy to,” Tad says. “You’re exhausted, I’m sure. After a long night of packing.”

I look at the opened basement box from the shop sitting in the middle of the living room, which is as far as I got yesterday before I put on those red shoes. Now Anjelica is sitting on top of the mound of dolls, yawning.

“And you’ve got another big day today, I’m sure. Need your protein.”

I watch his back for a while, stupefied. He pulls a frying pan from the cupboard. Spatula from a drawer. Eggs, berries, and greens from the fridge. He tips the fruits and greens into Mother’s Vitamix like he’s done it a thousand times before. It roars to life with the push of a button.

“You really know your way around,” I say to his back, over the roar.

He goes still. Then he turns and grins. “Yup,” he shouts at me. Winks. I drink the coffee. It’s in a bowl that says café au lait on it in five hundred different fonts. I remember Mother’s look of hurt the last time I visited, when I refused the café au lait she’d made for me in this very bowl. Since when did you switch to black coffee?

Since now, I said. And she gaped at me like I’d slapped her.

I don’t understand why you’re freaking out, I said. It’s just coffee. I looked at her over the untouched bowl. She’d given it a mountain of foam, shaved chocolate curls into it just like I’d loved as a teenager.

Just tell me it isn’t some SKIN thing, she muttered at last, clearing the bowl away.

It’s not, I lied.

Never mind, she said, holding a hand up. What else should I expect, right?

Now Tad sets a plate proudly before me. Two sunny-side up eggs that regard me like eyes. A vegan bacon strip for a mouth. Strawberry nose. Beside it, a smoothie so blue-green it looks radioactive.

“That’s the spirulina and blueberries,” Tad says. It’s the exact smoothie I made for myself when I was here, the one Mother mocked and called my skin sludge.

“Where did you learn to make this?” I say, pointing to the smoothie.

“Oh, your mother taught me a while ago. This was her favorite.”

“Her favorite?”

“She had it every morning when she remembered. With two scoops of this stuff too.” And he holds out the blue tub of collagen powder that I left here, that she wrinkled her nose at. You’re drinking BONE gelatin now?

“What’s wrong?” Tad asks me.

“Nothing,” I murmur at the eggs. He pats me on the back gently like he’s my father. This shirtless man who is at least five years younger than I am. I stare at the eggy eyes, the leering bacon mouth. One of the yolks is oozing now like it’s weeping.

“Tad? What would you say my mother’s mental state was?”

“That’s a good question,” Tad says. He thinks for a while, scratches his neck. “Overall, I’d say it was… great.”

“Great. Really?”

“Sure. I mean, she was really upbeat. Sunny-side up,” he says, looking at my weeping eggs. “Always.”

“Upbeat?”

“Oh yeah. She loved looking out of windows. She loved looking at flowers.”

He grins and stares out of the windows. “Sometimes she’d look over there.” I watch him point happily through the glass at a row of carefully clipped shrubs outside.

“And sometimes she’d look that way,” he says, pointing straight ahead at a row of palm trees near the shore. “Sometimes”—he looks at me in wonderment—“a pelican would fly by. Or a dolphin would jump up from the water. Leap right out of the waves. She loved that.” He smiles at me. “So much.”

“Really.”

“Sure.” He moves in closer to me. “But do you know what I think she loved most?” I look at Tad in his cutoff jeans. He’s wearing a necklace made of seashells. There’s a tattoo of a grinning dolphin leaping from green waves on his upper arm. The green waves are the exact same color of the waves outside and the exact same shade as Tad’s eyes.

“What?”

“That she never knew what she might see.”

I catch a whiff of his sunscreen. And Mother’s own perfume, could he be wearing it? Tad’s eyes, Tad’s cheekbones, Tad’s exceedingly white teeth. Framed by his sun-bleached straggly hair. I think of Mother walking along the beach at midnight. Falling onto the rocks. For a moment, I have a dark thought. A very dark thought.

“There were just so many surprises, you know?” Tad says.

“Yeah.”

“Every day. It gave her such joy.”

“Joy every day. Really?”

“I mean, we all have our dark days. Very dark days, sometimes. When our demons come out to play. No one lives entirely in the light, right?”

“Right.”

“But your mother…” He trails off, looking at the window. Then he turns to me, smiling. “So. What’s your day like today, Belle?”

“My day?” I look around Mother’s apartment. So pristine on the surface, but I know I’m standing on a sinking pit. My day is fucked, Tad, I want to say. I have to pack this place up. Hire someone with money I don’t have, to fix all the broken shit. Sell it. Then get the hell out of here and go back to work. All in a few days. It’s impossible. It may as well be a tower full of straw that I’m supposed to spin into gold. I may as well be waiting for a goblin to show up with his dark promise to help me. In the wall of cracked mirrors, I see that my skin is in desperate need of mushroom mist.

“This and that,” I tell him, trying to smile.

“Look,” Tad says. “You can’t do this by yourself, Belle. This place. It’s old. Run-down. Things not working like they used to, you know?”

“I know.”

“So let me help you, please. I’ll help you pack and fix up the place. I can even bring some buddies to help me. I want to. I’d love to.” Now he grips my hands.

“But aren’t you busy? Don’t you have a… job or something?” His business card flashes in my head. The merman wielding the shears and the squeegee.

“I manage,” he says. “I’m well taken care of.” And just then he waves out the window. I look out and see an older woman in shorts and a visor holding a pair of gardening shears. She’s in the midst of clipping her bushes. When she sees Tad, her face visibly brightens. She waves enthusiastically, then turns and looks at me darkly. She keeps her eyes on me as she clips the bushes now. A snip of the shears that I feel at my throat.

“Gloria’s great,” Tad says, looking at me.

“Is she?”

“You know your mother has a ton of antiques. Sometimes old stuff is worth more than you think just looking at it. Not me, I like to look closely. I see its value. Like this right here.” He walks over to a chest of dark wood in the living room. He runs his hands lovingly over the wood.

“We could sell this. I know a guy downtown we could take it to. Get a good price on it, you know? Buy you some time.”

“Time?”

“To fix the place up. Sell it for what it’s worth, Belle. Do it right.” He puts his hands on my shoulders. That warm, large grip. His beachy, benevolent eyes imploring me.

A knock at the door. Sylvia. Wearing dark glasses. Peering into the windows and waving at me. Tad sees her, and for the first time he frowns. His hands drop quickly from my shoulders.

“Mirabelle,” Sylvia says, coming in. She takes one look at me in my red robe, at Tad in his cutoff shorts, and visibly bristles. Oh, she knows him. All too well. But she doesn’t share Gloria’s or Mother’s enthusiasm. “I was just checking in.” She tries to be sunny, pleasant, but her judgment is all over her face. Like mother, like daughter.

“Just packing up,” I say.

“I see.” She glares at Tad, who mumbles that he’ll get started on the bedroom. But that isn’t enough for Sylvia.

“Why don’t we go outside,” she entreats, “and sit in the sun?”

I’m reminded that my face is bereft of mist. Bereft too of the moisturizing cloud jelly that seals in the mist. Not to mention the Glowscreen, physical and chemical, that shields it from all. “Do you mind if we stay in here?” I say. “Not quite ready to face the world yet.”

She frowns at the hall down which Tad disappeared. “Of course, dear. Only if you’re absolutely sure you don’t need some… air.”

“I’m good. Coffee?”

She looks at the French press as though it were something obscene. Shakes her head of crisp little blond spikes. “Let’s just sit,” she whispers. She walks over to the red couch. Perches lightly on the very edge of it. Her manicured hands folded in her little lap. Thin lips pressed together in a smile. Drawn-in eyebrows furrowed. She’s attempting sympathy, I think.

“Mirabelle,” she says softly, staring at the bowl of roses when she speaks. “I’ve been giving it some thought.”

“Yes?”

“Your situation. This whole terrible thing. Your mother dying the way she did. Leaving you with this mess, this debt. Everything you told me yesterday when you came into our little shop. Just devastated.” Yesterday. It seems like a year ago. I picture myself on my knees in the stockroom before the old mannequins.

“I haven’t been able to stop thinking about it. And I’ve decided I want to help you.”

“You do?”

She sighs. “I think you’re in a real bind here. I don’t just think it, I know it. You need to go back to Montreal, don’t you? And this place is really just a burden. I mean, I know you’ll do what you can to get her things in order but…” She looks at the basement box sitting open in the middle of the floor. Anjelica the cat slinks by, batting around one of the red jars. “It’s a big job. Bottom line. I think you need help.” Sylvia turns to look at me meaningfully. “How about I take it off your hands?”

“Off my hands?”

“The apartment. You’d be selling it to a friend. You could come back and visit whenever you like. I’ll help you pack and sort through everything this week. I could get some girls from the shop to help. Between us, we’ll get it done lickety-split. And you could go home when you planned. In—what is it again? Two days?”

Did I tell her my flight plans?

“Go back to work. Go back to your life. Begin to put all of this…” She shakes her head at the roses. “Horribleness,” she spits. And then her lip jerks to one side.

I stare at her.

“Such horribleness,” she insists, tears filling her eyes. “Put it behind you.”

Put it behind me. Isn’t that what Mother used to always say to me about the past?

“That’s very generous of you, Sylvia.”

She smiles greasily through her tears. Yes. It is.

“Well”—she wipes her eyes—“you know your mother and I were friends, of course.”

I think of visits with Mother over the last years. Always awkward whenever it was just the two of us. Always the radio way up in the car, even if it was a song she hated. Always a movie on full volume in the house. Always a restaurant where she knew a waiter and could banter with them instead of me. Usually she’d recruit Sylvia to join us for at least one lunch or early dinner. Mother would silently sip champagne from under the vast brim of a black hat that shadowed her pale face. Sylvia, hatless, melasmic, beaming with toadyism, would have a salad and sparkling water. Fill the silence with light, boring chatter. Inane comments about her book club. What she’d heard on NPR the other day that was so true. What she’d read in O magazine that she was internalizing—that Oprah just gets it, doesn’t she? And this restaurant—such a cute place. Just look at those cocktails going by! Of course she much prefers to eat her calories, hahaha. Mother would just nod absently. As if she’d left her body just as I’d left mine. And our souls were both floating elsewhere, this silly woman’s voice the only thing holding us down.

“I want to help where I can,” Sylvia says softly. “I really do.”

We both watch Anjelica bat at the red jar with her white fluffy paws. Sylvia, was my mother crazy? Did she ever bring you to a spa on the other end of the cove? An opulent glass house, right on thecliff’s edge? Did she ever introduce you to two beautiful twins clad in the most elegant jet? Who could be thirty, who could be teenagers? How about to a lady in red?

I look at Sylvia in her tan capris and Breton top—a marinière, Mother would have called it. She would’ve approved of this outfit, I know—a classic—but to my eye, Sylvia just looks like she’s going sailing on a very dull boat. Diamonds like little pinpricks of rich in either ear.

“You know,” she says, “I was thinking about what you asked me the other day. About your mother getting a little…”

“French?” I offer.

Sylvia nods. “Toward the end of her… toward the end. And there was something else.”

“What?”

“Well”—Sylvia laughs—“it’s a little embarrassing. But she kept coming into our little shop. After she sold it to me. It was like she’d forgotten she’d sold it or something. I’d catch her behind the counter or with the customers. Being her usual self. Maybe more than her usual self.” She laughs again. “I’d catch her staring at herself in the mirror. You know your mother and her mirrors. Forget about her five million boyfriends,” she says loudly, no doubt for the benefit of Tad in the bedroom. “That mirror was the affair of a lifetime.” She smiles at Mother’s wall of cracked glass. “Anyway. We sorted it all out in the end.”

“I don’t understand. How could she forget she’d sold it to you?”

“I’m sure she didn’t actually forget, Mirabelle. Probably just seller’s remorse. Not that she had anything to be remorseful for. Your mother was never much of a saleswoman, as you know, and the shop was in excellent hands. She knew that, of course. She just had to learn to let go.”

She looks at me meaningfully. “So what do you say? Do we have a… deal?” When she says this, she glances over at Mother’s windows. I keep calling them windows, but they aren’t really. They’re a wall. A ceiling-to-floor wall of glass wrapping around the living room and the dining room and the kitchen. I see a hunger in her eyes at the sight of all that ocean, which I know she can’t see from her own apartment facing the street. I hear the scraping sound of some kind of tool in the bedroom. Tad most likely. I look at the red shoes gleaming by the front door. Didn’t I kick them off in the bedroom?

“I don’t know, Sylvia.”

“What?”

“I’ll need to think about it.”

“Well, forgive me for saying this, but you don’t have much time, do you?”

The red shoes wink at me by the door.

“You’re right,” I say. “I don’t.”