Jane, Unlimited by Kristin Cashore (4)

Jane decides.

What if Charlotte’s disappearance is the puzzle piece that will make sense of everything else?

“Okay,” Jane says to Kiran, starting down the stairs. “I’ll walk with you, and you can tell me about Charlotte.”

But Kiran doesn’t respond right away. She’s cupping her ear and frowning as if she’s trying to hear something. “Did you hear that?”

“I can’t hear anything but the world’s most anxious dog,” says Jane, who’s reached Jasper’s landing. Jasper’s now butting his head against her boots, whimpering. She reaches down and rubs his neck in a spot he can’t reach with his short legs. He tries to climb into her lap, which nearly topples her.

“Come with us, Jasper,” Jane says, disentangling herself. Still whimpering, he follows her down the steps, crowding her feet.

*   *   *

Kiran walks Jane through the Venetian courtyard and the east arcade. “These rooms are all relevant to Charlotte’s story,” she says. “We’ll end up in the winter garden, where we can play chess if we like.”

Next she leads Jane into a green room with floral wallpaper, brocaded settees, and a fussy green carpet. “May I present the green parlor,” Kiran says. “Charlotte redesigned it in the style of Regency England. Like, Jane Austen,” she adds, when Jane crinkles her forehead.

“Ah,” says Jane, understanding. Linked arm-in-arm with Kiran, taking a turn about the room, she feels like they could be Elizabeth Bennet and Caroline Bingley. If Mr. Darcy were composing a letter at the elegant writing desk, he’d be aghast at her striped jeans and sea-dragon top. “My favorite parts of the house are the parts where everything seems to fit together,” says Jane. “Like this room, or like the Venetian courtyard with its matching tile and marble. You can imagine a whole story here. In the hallways where nothing matches, I just get kind of confused.”

“Yeah,” says Kiran, pulling Jane across the room toward a door. “The matching parts, that’s all Charlotte’s doing. She had weird theories that the house is suffering, because it was built from pieces that were torn from other houses.”

“What do you mean, suffering?”

“Oh, you know,” Kiran says. “From its troubled origin.”

“Charlotte thought houses suffer?”

“Charlotte always talked like houses were people,” says Kiran. “As if they have souls, or at least, as if they should have souls.”

“That’s kind of nice,” Jane says. “But, as an idea. Are you saying she actually believed it?”

Kiran shrugs. “She thought that Tu Reviens had been deprived of a soul because of its origin story. ‘Its parts are bleeding,’ she said. ‘Can’t you see them bleeding?’”

“Um,” Jane says, then pauses. “Can you see them bleeding?”

Kiran smiles. “I know how it sounds. But that’s just how she talked. You know, I realize I’m not supposed to like the lady who takes my mother’s place, especially the blond, skinny, too-young, white lady, but I really do like Charlotte, even if maybe she started to get kind of obsessive about the house. She’s from Vegas, but she hated it there. She told me the city had a lost soul. She said she could hear the voices of centuries of suffering.”

“So, cities have souls too.” Kiran has pulled Jane into a sort of rec room, composed of soft blues, with wraparound couches, built-in media shelves and cabinets, and a gigantic fish tank. A huge painting, taking up an entire wall, shows a scene of an old harbor city at night with two moons glowing in the sky. The double moonlight makes trails across the sea. The painting reminds Jane of Aunt Magnolia’s coat, with its purple sky, silver moons, and candles gleaming gold in the windows of towers. Jasper seems to like the painting. He flops onto his stomach, rests his chin on his paws, and sighs up at it with fondness.

“Charlotte is very sensitive,” says Kiran. “She suits Octavian so much more than Mum ever did. He’s the kind of person who needs a devoted companion, and Charlotte really loved—or loves—being with him. Though it did get to the point where Charlotte seemed more wound up in the house than she was in Octavian, but even then, Charlotte shared all her house thoughts with him. He was even trying to help Charlotte find the house’s soul.”

“How?” Jane says, then frees her arm from Kiran’s, absently, because she needs to touch her ears, and pull at her earlobes, and try to alter some sort of air pressure problem she’s having. Her ears feel stuffy, bloated, as if they’ve eaten too much.

“Charlotte kept saying that the house is made of orphaned pieces,” says Kiran.

“Orphaned pieces?” I’m an orphaned piece, aren’t I?

“Yeah. Charlotte said the only thing unifying all the parts is pain. That the house is in constant agony. Charlotte wanted to find another way to unify the house, to bind its pieces. So the house can rest.”

“Rest?” Jane says. “What does that even mean?”

“I have no idea,” Kiran says, taking Jane’s elbow again and pulling her into another, smallish room. This one has showy chairs and tables inlaid with gold filigree and complicated gold-and-garnet fabric on the walls. It’s another cohesive little world, a tearoom in the Beaux-Arts style, but Kiran tows Jane on to the next room before Jane can ask more. She’s beginning to notice her own disorientation. It’s a sort of sleepy distraction. It’s because each room feels like a new world, a new era, she thinks.

“My impression,” says Kiran, “is that Charlotte thought the house needed some kind of glue to unify its parts, something positive and healing, and whatever that thing was could be the house’s soul.”

“That sounds nice, really,” says Jane. “And so she tried to unify each individual room? Or something?”

“That was the start,” Kiran says, “but unifying the design of each room does nothing for the unmatching parts of the house’s basic structure, you know? The foundations, the skeleton. And Octavian was happy for Charlotte to add things and move things around, but he wasn’t okay with Charlotte getting rid of anything. Like, they had an argument about the shelving in the library, because it came from the libraries of lots of different houses around the world. Charlotte wanted to rip out all the shelving and rebuild it with wood sourced from local, sustainable forests. That was too extreme for Octavian. He was trying to convince Charlotte that the house’s disparate origins were part of its charm, and therefore part of its soul. Charlotte kept saying, ‘It can’t be, it can’t be,’ then finally she stopped talking about it. ‘I’ll make a soul,’ Charlotte said.”

“Out of what? Duct tape? Or . . . glass,” she adds, with wonder, because Kiran has pulled her into a room that seems fashioned out of light. Enormous and L-shaped, this is the winter garden. The base of the L is a greenhouse, unruly and magnificent, while the long part is yet another space with armchairs and card tables, bathed with natural light and the shadows of green leaves. This room, Jane realizes, is where the hanging nasturtiums are cultivated, and the lilacs and daffodils too. A woman is cleaning the moldings with a duster.

“I think she tried to make the soul in a lot of different ways,” says Kiran, stopping at a small, square table with a chessboard, its pieces lined up and ready to go.

“Your move,” Jane says.

Kiran leans down and advances a pawn. Walking to the other side of the table, Jane does the same, noticing how expansive this board feels, how smoothly the pieces move, compared to the tiny magnetic travel set Aunt Magnolia had owned. The light through the glass walls is warm on her back.

Kiran advances another pawn. A couple of minutes pass while each of them contemplates the board and shifts things around in turn. Kiran is better at chess than Jane is. Zugzwang, she thinks suddenly, remembering the word for a situation in which one’s obligation to make a move in chess puts one at a serious disadvantage. Ivy will love it; Jane’ll have to remember to tell her.

“I guess we should sit,” Kiran says, “if we’re going to play.”

There’s something about the feeling of the air against Jane’s ears that stops her from wanting to sit. It’s an inchoate instinct, to keep moving and find a more comfortable place. “We could,” she says doubtfully, advancing one of her knights. “How did Charlotte try to make a soul for the house?”

“Mostly she just got more intense,” Kiran says. “She would talk about listening to each room and letting the room tell her what it wanted to be. She was working so hard, day and night; she was letting it run her ragged. And then she disappeared.”

“Yes, I heard she disappeared.”

Wind pushes at the glass and the house makes a rumbling sound around them, stone pressing back at the wind. Then another noise, a sort of laughter, unstable and faint, like a faraway train whistle. As Lucy St. George and Phoebe Okada walk into the room, Jane’s skin is prickling. She’s starting to wonder if she’s getting an ear infection. The pressure in her head seems to be growing.

“There,” Lucy says, pursing her lips at the walls. “Did you guys hear that?”

“Hear what?” says Phoebe. “I didn’t hear anything.”

“The house made a noise,” says Lucy. “It sounded like a word. ‘Disappointed.’”

“I heard ‘disappeared,’” Jane responds.

“The two of you are being weird,” says Kiran, walloping one of Jane’s bishops with her queen. “I said ‘disappeared,’ and then you said it back to me, Janie. Charlotte disappeared one night, about a month ago. She just . . . left. Octavian was the last to see her. She was sleeping on the divan in the library. As far as he could judge, she didn’t take anything with her, no change of clothes, not even her diary. She left a note behind that said, ‘Darling, there’s something I need to try. Please don’t worry. If it works, I’ll come back for you.’”

“What does that mean?” says Jane. “What did she need to try?”

“No clue.”

“‘If it works, I’ll come back for you,’” Jane repeats. “How did she leave? Seeing as it’s an island?”

“Someone must’ve come and picked her up,” Kiran says, “because no boats were missing. She must’ve arranged it beforehand, which I think really hurt Octavian—that she trusted someone else with her plan, but not him.”

“People were talking about it at breakfast,” says Jane. “Colin told me Octavian hired investigators and everything.”

“Yeah,” says Kiran. “They were real muckrakers; they dug some stuff up about Charlotte’s family, like that her mom had a criminal record, but Octavian said he already knew about that and it was irrelevant. I think he really believes she’s coming back for him. I think he’s put his life on hold until she does.”

Jane thinks of how her aunt died, all alone. Luckily, the people at the research station had known where she’d gone. Because people do disappear sometimes, and if there’s no one around to witness it, how can the people left behind, waiting, ever know?

“At the time she went away, she’d remodeled this entire wing,” Kiran says, sweeping a hand out. “Green parlor, blue sitting room, tearoom, this room, the bowling alley, the swimming pool, the gun room, and she was almost done with the library. Octavian was definitely worried, but he had no idea she was planning to take off. She wouldn’t talk about anything but the cataloging system.”

“The cataloging system?”

“Charlotte decided to catalog the library books by color,” Kiran says. “Completely impractical. Impossible to find anything.”

“What do you mean, by color?”

“Color of the spine,” Kiran says. “The library is at the back of the house and it’s two stories high. Charlotte started talking about how it was the house’s spine, the nerve center, the place of greatest power. Then she started assigning body parts to all the other rooms, like the Venetian courtyard was the heart of the house, and the kitchen was the stomach, and the receiving hall was the mouth, and the east spire where Mum lives was the brain, and the bowling alley was, like, the vagina. It got a little creepy. And it would’ve looked like the worst kind of Picasso if you’d painted it.”

“Well, the library sounds pretty amazing,” Jane says. “Organized by the colors of the spines. I’ve never heard of that before.”

“I don’t really go in there anymore,” Kiran says. “It’s Octavian’s haunt. It’s depressing.”

“Don’t you want to see it?” Jane says. “I kind of want to see it.”

“I’ve seen it,” Lucy says, raising the copy of The House of Mirth she holds in one hand. “I got my book from it. It’s really pretty in there, like waves of color. It’s almost like being underwater. It’s an ocean, and we’re the fish.”

A bead of sadness bursts open inside Jane.

“Let’s go to the library,” she says.

*   *   *

Someone has scrawled the word PRIVATE on a ratty piece of paper and hung it on a fat velvet rope that blocks the entrance to the library.

“That’s Octavian’s handwriting,” says Kiran. “Not to mention his level of craftsmanship. He must be trying to protect his precious haunt from the gala cleaners.”

“Does it mean we can’t go in?” asks Lucy St. George.

“Of course not,” says Kiran. “Only that he doesn’t want us to go in.”

“Hmm. But it is his house,” says Phoebe Okada.

Briefly this strikes Jane as funny, that Phoebe is advocating respect for Octavian’s pathetic rope barrier when last night Phoebe was skulking through the servants’ quarters with her husband and a gun. But then she loses track of that thought, because it’s irrelevant, because she needs to go in and see the ocean of color. If she doesn’t go in with Kiran, Lucy, Phoebe, and Jasper now, she intends to sneak in later.

“Someday Octavian will croak. Then it’ll be my house,” says Kiran. “And it’s the freaking library. He can’t hold the books ransom. If you want to go in, go in.” This last part is directed at Jane, who’s craning her neck and gazing with moon eyes.

Jane unhooks one end of the velvet rope and steps into the room.

The color is singing.

The books of any library are colorful. But these books undulate and pulse with color. It’s not a straightforward matter of all the blues turning to all the purples turning to all the reds. There’s an earthy section, with oranges and greens turning to reds and browns. There’s a serene section with cool yellows turning to cool greens to cool blues, and an energetic section with bold, bright tones of every hue. The sections also blend into each other, bright books fading to more muted books, gradually infiltrated by glimmering metallics, and so on. The room feels alive; it’s like being inside a living thing. And each book, each colorful spine, is the container of a story. It reminds Jane of Aunt Magnolia’s underwater dream worlds, and of her own work too, or of what she wants her umbrellas to be. Yes, Jane thinks. If this house has a soul, its soul is here in this room.

She finds herself looking around for Octavian, expecting to find him in some corner, but he’s nowhere to be seen. Jane remembers Ravi calling him a creature of the night.

French doors look out onto a terrace and Jasper asks to be let out. When Jane opens the doors for him, she can hear the roar of the sea. He shoots outside and turns back to Jane, hopping eagerly, looking longingly into her face, but she’s only just arrived in the library. Nothing about the terrace excites her. “Have fun, Jasper-bear,” she says, closing the doors in his face and turning back to the room. Aunt Magnolia? Is this how you felt in your underwater universe? I wish you could see this.

“What if you don’t know the color of the book you’re looking for?” she asks.

“Card catalog,” Kiran says, pointing to the dark wooden cabinet with little drawers near the entrance. “Like in the days of yore.”

Jane goes to the catalog, pulls out the W drawer, and looks for the first book that comes to mind, Winnie-the-Pooh. “Milne, A.A.,” the card reads. “Glimmering Section. Crimson-ginger. Lettering: gold.”

“Glimmering Section,” Jane says, turning curiously to the room. Across from her is a crimson section that doesn’t seem quite mild enough. It’s bright and loud, not glimmering. Jane walks to the middle of the room again, turning in circles. A small section of books glows softly crimson, silver, and gold on the second level, above the French doors, on the north wall.

Jane climbs a spiral staircase to the library’s upper level. By the time she gets to that glowing patch of books, she’s imagining an umbrella that feels like this library. The pressure on her ears is still present, but she’s barely noticing it anymore.

It astonishes her how quickly she’s able to find the Milne. “Well done, Charlotte,” she says, reaching out to it. The book settles into her hand with a pleasurable shiver, like a satisfied cat arching its back against her palm. Once in her hands, it falls open to the story “In Which Pooh Goes Visiting and Gets into a Tight Place.” Pooh visits Rabbit, then eats so much honey that he can’t fit through the round doorway. He gets stuck, like a plug, and can’t leave. On the outdoor side, Christopher Robin sits with Pooh’s head and reads him stories. On the indoor side, Rabbit makes the best of it, hanging his washing on Pooh’s stubby legs.

Something is strange, though, about this copy of the book. Jane knows, or she thought she knew, how this story is supposed to end. It’s one of her favorites, one she read repeatedly, wedged into the armchair with Aunt Magnolia: Pooh stops eating, Pooh grows thinner, and after a week has gone by, Christopher Robin, Rabbit, and Rabbit’s friends and relations take hold of him and pop him from the hole.

In this version, something different seems to be happening. As the week goes on, Pooh’s body starts to meld with the edge of the dirt hole. It hurts. Pooh is crying.

Jane slams the book shut, alarmed, then angry, actually, at whatever writer thought it would be funny to rewrite it that way. And she’s left with the most surreal sensation of being stuck in a hole in a wall, with Mrs. Vanders hanging washing on her legs, oblivious to anything strange about her new drying rack. “Tut-tut,” Mrs. Vanders sings. “It looks like rain.”

Jane shakes herself. She is not a part of the wall. She’s a person, standing on the library’s mezzanine. Her ears feel unlike anything she’s ever felt before, and she’s beginning to realize how wrong this is.

“Charlotte reached a whole new level of obsession with the library,” Kiran says, from below. “Octavian practically had to move in here in order to spend any time with her. Seems like he still hasn’t moved out.”

Looking over the banister, Jane finds Kiran in a darkish corner across the room, behind one of the metal spiral staircases. The books in that section are blacks, browns, and deepest purples. In a room of moving color it’s easy to miss the divan there, which is piled with blankets, books, ashtrays containing the detritus of the pipe tobacco Jane now realizes she’s been smelling since she came into the room. An ancient-looking record player sits on a low table at the head of the divan.

Jane doesn’t care. She wants to leave.

“This must be his nighttime haunt,” Kiran says, wrinkling her nose in distaste, then moving an overflowing ashtray from its perch on a rumpled blanket to the edge of the table. “What a way to spend all your waking hours. Ugh. Do you ever feel like there’s an inevitability to every version of your life?”

“What does that mean?” asks Phoebe.

“In this version of his life,” Kiran says, “was Octavian always going to be depressed? Does it matter what any of us do?”

“I’m not following,” says Phoebe. “Of course it matters.”

“I don’t want to talk about Charlotte anymore,” says Jane.

“I’m not talking about Charlotte,” says Kiran. “I’m talking about Octavian. Do your ears hurt?”

Jane’s head feels like a balloon. “But Octavian haunts this room because he’s depressed about Charlotte,” she says stubbornly, “right? It’s all about Charlotte.”

Lucy St. George, still carrying The House of Mirth, has crossed to the other side of the room and is gently stroking the burnished wood of the bookcases. Jane finds herself synchronously rubbing the railing of the mezzanine banister. It’s an odd compulsion. Snatching her hand away, she says, “Yes, my ears hurt. I have work to do. I’m going back to my rooms.”

“What work do you do?” Lucy asks.

“I make umbrellas.”

“Really?” Lucy says. “Do you repair them? I’ve got one that doesn’t open right.”

“Bring it to me,” Jane says impatiently, heading for the spiral staircase, “east wing, third floor, at the end. Come right in. I’ll see what I can do.”

“Thanks,” Lucy says, then cries out and yanks her hand away from the bookcases.

“What’s wrong?” asks Phoebe.

“Nothing,” says Lucy, inspecting her palm. “Just a splinter, or some kind of—electrical short, or something.”

“How could a bookcase have an electrical short?” asks Phoebe.

All the hairs of Jane’s body are standing on end. Get out, she’s telling herself as she moves down the stairs; Get out. Jasper presses his nose to the glass of the terrace door, anxiously whining. Jane lets him in, then crosses the room with him as quickly as possible. She’s rude. As she passes through the doorway into the Venetian courtyard, she doesn’t say good-bye to the others.

“Jasper,” Jane says, stopping in the courtyard to take a breath of the sunlit air. “It was weird in there.”

Jasper leans his head against the back of her ankles and pushes, whining softly.

“You didn’t like it either?” she says. “Let’s go.”

She’s almost to her rooms before she realizes she’s still holding tight to Winnie-the-Pooh.

*   *   *

Back in her rooms, the light is bright and warm and Jane thinks maybe work will help clear her mind.

Last time she worked, it was on the self-defense umbrella in brown and gold. She still likes this idea. In fact, she has the nebulous sense of something she’d like to defend herself against, some feeling in the air that’s trying to fuzz her brain. Silly, she chides herself. I probably just need some coffee. I’ll get some, right after I lie on the floor so I can think about my umbrella. She uses Winnie-the-Pooh as a pillow. The morning sun pours in; the shag rug is soft; Jasper tucks himself lengthwise beside her.

When Lucy St. George pushes through the doorway with a navy umbrella, Jane has just dozed off.

“Wow,” Lucy says, surveying the roomful of colorful umbrellas.

“Mrph,” Jane says, sitting up, trying to focus. She’s lost in a peculiar dream she can’t grasp; she’s already forgetting it. Jasper is snorting beside her. “Sorry. Patch of sun.”

“I’m embarrassed to show you my umbrella now that I’ve seen yours,” Lucy says. “It’s positively dull.”

Jane has forgotten all about repairing Lucy’s umbrella.

“Ow,” Lucy says, shaking out her free hand as if it hurts.

“You okay?”

“Yeah, my hand still stings from that splinter or whatever. Here.” She passes her umbrella to Jane. “See, it opens funny.”

Lucy’s umbrella does indeed open funny, but Jane can see that it’s just because a metal rib is bent and needs reshaping and reinforcing. “It’s a simple fix,” she says. “Listen, I don’t have the right paints just now, but you can do cute things on this type of nylon with the right kind of glue and the right kind of glitter.”

Lucy St. George is pinching her lips together to stop a grin. “Are you saying you want to make my dull umbrella sparkly? Go ahead.”

“Really?” Jane says. “It might not be subtle.”

“Do your worst,” Lucy says. “I’m curious.”

“Hey,” Jane says, surprised and smiling. “Thanks.”

“Do you think this house has moods?” Lucy says.

“Huh?”

“Moods,” Lucy says. “You know. Does it have emotions, and intentions, and objectives?”

“The house?”

“Yes.”

“Um,” Jane says. “Isn’t that a little bit fantastical?”

“So, that’s a no?” Lucy says with a weak smile.

“Yes. It’s a no,” Jane says, surprised by her own passion. “I mean, I think that’s what Charlotte thought, but it sounds like she was kind of . . . an oddball. Have you been talking to Kiran about Charlotte?”

“No, it’s just a feeling I get,” says Lucy. “Tell me if you change your mind. It’s a lonely point of view.”

As Lucy leaves, Jane sees the self-defense umbrella, suddenly, that she needs to make. When it’s closed, it’ll feel like a blade in her hand, good for slicing through bloated air. Then it’ll open with a loud crack, good for shoving bad things away. Yes, she thinks. I’ll just stay here on the rug and contemplate it, but when she lies back, her mind keeps picturing Octavian’s sad little crumpled corner in the library. What kind of umbrella would that make?

She gets up once to let Jasper out, then lies down again. Air and water push distantly through pipes in an uneven concert of noises like melancholy sighing. Jane finds herself stroking the rug, as if to soothe herself, or someone else.

*   *   *

The house’s soft sounds fit themselves as harmonies around Jane’s lathe, her drill, her rotary saw, her sewing machine, her own absentminded humming. The glass wall captures heat and light and channels it into Jane as fuel for her focus. The energy of the room strips everything else away; the umbrella she’s building is the entire world.

In fact, it has ribs like Jane. It has one long leg on which its other parts balance; it has moving and bending joints, like Jane, and it has a skin that stretches across its bones. Jane will paint on that skin, just as the tattoo artist marked Jane’s skin. How nice, to have a weather-resistant skin and a body that can vibrate with tension or be at rest. How satisfying to have working parts, lovingly crafted. Rain is a musical patter against Jane’s imagination. Every umbrella is born knowing that sound, its soul straining for that sound, waiting patiently through rainless day after rainless day for the day when raindrops will thrum against its skin.

Jane shakes herself, confused. She wonders, are those really her thoughts? Why does it feel like she’s thinking someone else’s thoughts? She’s too warm, and, when she tries to remember, she’s not certain what she’s been doing for the past however-long. She vaguely recalls . . . an intense connection with the umbrella she’s making. Her ears still hurt and she becomes aware of her own repetitive humming. It’s a Beatles tune, “Eleanor Rigby,” about loneliness.

Jane grips the edge of her worktable, takes a jellyfish breath. Then, under her fingers, she discovers a carving of a gentle whale shark swimming with its babies. It runs along the edge in intricate detail. Ivy must’ve made this table. Ivy, Jane thinks, her mind clearing. Aunt Magnolia. Me.

Why does Jane smell paint?

Turning suddenly to the work she’s been doing, Jane finds a half-painted scene on her umbrella canopy. It looks like the dark brown and black books of the library, and a smudge that’s the beginnings of Octavian’s divan. This wasn’t the plan; this was supposed to be her self-defense umbrella. When did she get so off track?

Jane slaps her paints closed. She needs air, she needs to open a window.

At the wall, she discovers that one of the low panes of glass is designed to crank open. The joint is stiff, but, determined now, she uses her own tools to oil it. Applying all her strength, she manages to budge it slightly. A feeble current of cool air drifts in through the crack.

Jane puts the self-defense umbrella-in-progress aside. It’s pulling too hard. It’s unnerving. She’ll repair and improve Lucy’s navy umbrella instead.

The repair to the bent rib is a few minutes’ work. As for the embellishments—Lucy, Jane expects, will prefer something on the more quiet and tasteful end of the spectrum. Tiny, glimmering stars in a night sky, maybe—the most obvious approach when one’s tools are a navy canopy, glue, and glitter—or maybe something even plainer.

Choosing a gore, Jane spreads an even stripe of glue across it. Simple lines, few in number. She’ll start with that, exercise restraint, and see where it leads.

Some unknown length of time later, a noise in the house, like a yell, touches Jane. She misses a high note in the song she’s singing and the dissonance jars her out of a haze. It’s another Beatles tune, “She’s Leaving Home,” about a girl who runs away from home, abandoning her well-intentioned but repressive parents, leaving them to dwell in their own heartbreak and confusion. Jane wasn’t even aware of knowing the lyrics to that song. She’s changed the lyrics too. She’s replaced all the names and pronouns with “Charlotte,” as if all the people in the song—girl, mother, and father—are named Charlotte. “Charlotte’s leaving home, bye-bye.”

Jane discovers that she’s moved away from Ivy’s table, though she doesn’t remember picking her supplies up and carrying them across the room. She seems to be working on the tarp on the floor, her legs crossed, her back bent and aching. She straightens herself, stretching her neck. Then she takes a look at what she’s done to Lucy’s umbrella and is horrified.

The stripes she started with have become the bars of a prison cell. Behind the bars, a woman sits on a cot, one leg propped up, her head thrown back against the wall, eyes staring out, face grim. The whole scene is rich with shadows and depth, composed of various colors and thicknesses of glue and glitter, an impressive artistic feat considering the awkwardness of her media. The woman even wears an orange glitter jumpsuit. A book rests on her thigh.

The smooth curve of her hair makes her look an awful lot like Lucy.

Oh, hell, Jane thinks. How did that happen?

Someone somewhere in the house is shouting, the sharp fury of a male voice somewhere near. Another male voice responds with a roar and Jane recognizes the tone of this argument; she’s heard these voices raised against each other before: Ravi and Octavian are at it again. Still holding Lucy’s jailbird umbrella open, Jane stumbles into her bedroom, becoming aware that Jasper is whimpering on the other side of the door, scratching to get in. How long has he been out there? Everyone in this house is unhappy. When Jane opens the door, Jasper surges in and runs circles around her, barking too loudly.

Ignoring Jasper as best she can and still carrying the open umbrella, Jane moves down the corridor toward the shouting voices, which seem to be coming from somewhere between her rooms and the Venetian courtyard. “Aye, aye,” she says vaguely, almost tripping over Captain Polepants.

The noisy room is Octavian’s bedroom. Octavian sits upright in an enormous, tall bed, tangled silk covers pulled to his waist, wearing a T-shirt that says “All You Need Is Love.” He’s rubbing his pale face wearily, squinting at the light from open curtains.

Ivy stands at the foot of the bed next to Ravi, who is shouting and waving his arms around.

“You don’t even care, Dad!” says Ravi. “You’re like a shell with nothing inside. You’re turning into a ghost. Soon you’ll be able to walk through the walls!”

“That may be,” says Octavian through steeled teeth, “but I forbid you, positively forbid you, to rifle through the possessions of the staff members or the guests of this house in pursuit of the answers to your self-righteous questions.”

Ivy’s got a small yellow daffodil behind one ear. Lucy St. George is just inside the door, her eyes wide and shocked and focused on Ravi. And Kiran leans against a wall with her arms crossed and an insolent expression on her face, like a mutinying twelve-year-old.

Jane remains in the doorway, holding Lucy’s redecorated umbrella out into the corridor behind her, where the wet glue and glitter are less in danger of bashing into a doorframe and making a sparkly mess. Jasper is butting her calves, repeatedly, which is annoying.

Ivy has noticed Jane’s arrival. She comes to her, pulling the daffodil from her hair and grinning. Ravi is still yelling at his father.

“Hi Janie,” she says, taking in the loony dog, then the open umbrella. Next she glances at Jane’s other hand, which is when Jane realizes she’s carrying Winnie-the-Pooh, which she doesn’t remember picking up.

“Look,” says Ivy, holding out the slightly crushed daffodil. “They’ve decorated the suits of armor with jonquils for the gala. Eight letters, with a j and a q.”

“What?” says Jane, confused.

“Jonquils?” says Ivy. “It’s a kind of yellow daffodil.”

“Okay,” says Jane. “Thanks, but my hands are full. Why are Ravi and Octavian yelling?”

Ivy looks a little deflated. “There’s a marble sculpture of a fish,” she says, “mounted on a wooden pedestal. It’s by a famous sculptor named Brancusi and it sits on a table in the receiving hall. Ravi just found the empty pedestal. The fish is gone. Someone broke the fish off the pedestal and took it away and Ravi doesn’t think his father’s upset enough about it.”

“Oh,” Jane says, still not understanding.

Now Ivy’s trying to get a closer look at the umbrella behind Jane. She squeezes past Jane into the corridor and Jane holds it out to her. She needs to know what Ivy sees when she looks at it.

“Wait,” Ivy says. “Is that Lucy St. George on that umbrella?”

“You think it looks like her?”

“In jail?” Ivy says. “Did you draw a picture of Lucy in jail, using glitter?”

“My fingers slipped.”

“It’s an amazing glitter drawing,” Ivy says, wonder in her voice. “I mean, it’s extraordinary. But why did you draw her in jail?”

“I don’t know,” Jane says. “I didn’t mean to.”

Ivy’s peering into her face. “Janie, are you okay?” she says. “You seem kind of . . . disoriented.”

Because Ivy has asked it, Jane realizes it’s true. “You know,” she says, “I’ve felt disoriented all day. Sort of like gnats are flitting around in front of my eyes.”

Ivy reaches out and wraps a hand around Jane’s upper arm, on the jellyfish tentacles there. At Ivy’s touch, the corridor comes into sharp focus and the endless pressure in Jane’s ears drops away. Ivy smells like chlorine. Her hand is warm, her smile soft. “Oh,” Jane says, wondering how strange it would be to give Ivy a full-on hug. “Thank you. Jonquils. I get it. I’m sorry. This has been a really weird day.”

Not letting go of her arm, Ivy tucks the daffodil behind Jane’s ear. It tickles. Jane flushes.

“Do you think maybe you’re working too hard?” Ivy says.

“I don’t know,” Jane says. “There’s something in the air today.”

“Well, be careful. Lucy’s in there,” Ivy says. “You don’t want her to see that umbrella.”

“No,” Jane says, certain. “I didn’t mean it to turn out this way. I’m going to have to erase it somehow.”

“Oh, man, do you have to?” Ivy says. “Because it’s an amazing umbrella. It’s just kind of . . . maybe not so nice to Lucy. I mean, do you think of her as a criminal?”

“Of course not!”

“Isn’t she even a private art investigator? Like, she puts people in jail herself?”

“I feel awful about it,” Jane says.

“Don’t. But maybe you should go put it back in your rooms before she sees it. Here, give it to me,” Ivy says, reaching for the handle of the umbrella.

The moment Ivy lets go of Jane’s arm, confusion washes over her again.

“Lucy’s coming,” Ivy says quietly. She tugs at the umbrella. “Here, give it to me. I’ll put it in your morning room.” She has to pry the umbrella from Jane’s fingers. With one more puzzled glance, she carries the umbrella away, down the corridor toward Jane’s rooms.

Lucy St. George speaks behind Jane. “Excuse me.”

“Sorry,” Jane says, moving out of the way.

Lucy bumps against Jane as she passes into the corridor, her face blank and panicked.

“What’s wrong?” asks Jane.

“Nothing,” Lucy responds, rushing away.

“Do you feel weird today?” Jane calls to her back. “I feel weird today.”

Lucy halts her mad rush. She turns back to Jane with an expression of great and pale strain. Like Jane, she’s clutching her book in one hand.

“Did you ever love someone,” Lucy says, “and know they love you, and you’re attracted to them, and you know they’re attracted to you, and so many things are exactly right, but it doesn’t matter, because the few things that are wrong are completely, totally fucked?”

“Are you talking about Ravi?” Jane says.

“I’ve made some unfortunate decisions,” Lucy says, then clutches her temples. “My head feels like it’s splitting open. Does yours?”

“What do you mean, unfortunate decisions? Like Ravi?”

“Oh,” Lucy says, “like a hundred things. Ravi is impossible. I can’t believe I’m talking to you about it. Never mind.”

“Have you made criminal decisions?” Jane says, thinking about the umbrella.

Lucy’s eyes widen. “Why on earth would you ask me that?”

“Sorry,” Jane says, confused. “I don’t know where that came from. I just feel really weird today.”

At that moment, Ravi pushes out of Octavian’s bedroom, putting a hot hand on either side of Jane’s waist and shifting her out of his way, not gently. He strides on down the hall toward his rooms at the corridor’s end, his face wet with tears. He doesn’t even glance at Lucy, who watches him go, folding the hard angles of herself up inside a disappointment she can’t hide.

Lucy’s phone starts ringing, but she doesn’t react. She’s still staring after Ravi.

“Your phone is ringing,” Jane says.

“What? Oh,” Lucy says, patting her front pockets, her back pockets, then producing a phone. She walks away, toward the house’s center, saying, “Yeah, what is it, Dad?”

Jane is left alone in Octavian’s doorway with the world’s most agitated dog. He’s gone back to head-butting Jane, as if he’s trying to knock himself unconscious against her shin.

Inside the bedroom, Octavian and Kiran are having a stare-down.

“Is this what it takes for you to visit your old dad?” says Octavian, passing a weary hand across his eyes. “Someone steals a sculpture?”

“You haven’t exactly come looking for me, either, Dad,” says Kiran. “You know I’ve been home.”

“Why would I push myself on you when I’m unwanted?”

“If Charlotte came home after all this time away,” Kiran says, “you wouldn’t sit back waiting for her to come to you.”

“That’s different,” says Octavian. “Charlotte left without any warning. I have no idea where she went, or why.”

“If I left without any warning,” says Kiran, “you’d accuse me of being selfish and immature. When Charlotte does it, you mope, and smoke too much, and stop taking showers, and oversleep. You knew I was coming yesterday and you didn’t even stay awake.”

“Kiran,” says Octavian. “Are you suggesting that I love my wife more than I love my daughter? That I wouldn’t be distraught with worry if you disappeared? Do you really believe that?”

“I’m saying you need to snap out of it,” says Kiran, suddenly angry. “Since when do you sleep all day, or not care if a major piece of art is missing?”

“So,” says Octavian, his voice rising too, “you’re mad at me because I’m depressed? Should I be mad at you because you’re depressed?”

“Yes!” Kiran cries. “You should! You should be subjecting me to long, boring talks about how I need a job, and how you think I’ve chosen the wrong man and I’m ruining my life!”

“You have chosen the wrong man!” says Octavian, almost shouting now. “You are ruining your life!”

“Then tell me so!” Kiran cries. “Don’t just shuffle around in your slippers mooning after Charlotte and acting indifferent to everything else!”

“I’m not indifferent!” says Octavian. “I’m just . . .” He stops, passing another hand over his eyes. “I’m tired.”

“So go for a walk!” says Kiran. “Go for a swim! Go to New York and buy a painting! Of course you’re tired! You never do anything!”

“I haven’t been able to think clearly,” Octavian says. “Not since Charlotte left.”

“I understand you’re hurt, Dad!”

“No,” says Octavian. “No! It’s not just that. It’s like she took some part of my brain with her when she left. I get confused, and I only want to be in the library. I get sleepy, and I lose track of time.”

“That’s not normal, Dad,” says Kiran. “You should go to the city and see your doctor.”

“I can’t leave.”

“What are you talking about? Of course you can leave.”

“Charlotte needs me, she wants me,” says Octavian.

“Charlotte isn’t here.”

“She’s close,” says Octavian. “If I stay here, and keep reaching, I can bring her back.”

“Dad,” says Kiran. “You’re not making sense. Bring her back from where? The underworld? Like Orpheus and Eurydice? Charlotte left! She went away!”

“She talks to me,” says Octavian. “She sings. She wants me to join her.”

“Okay,” says Kiran sharply, “that’s it. You’re delusional. After the gala, Ravi and I are putting you on a boat and taking you to the doctor and you don’t get to have an opinion about it.”

Jane is noticing something about the room, about the way the air seems buzzy and strange, as if there’s an extra energy to it. The buzziness is focused on Octavian. If the thing I’m sensing were visible, Jane thinks, Octavian would be blurry. As if he were existing partly in some other dimension.

“I bet you almost disappear when you’re in the library,” Jane says out loud to Octavian.

Kiran and Octavian both turn to stare at Jane, startled by her interruption. Below, Jasper nips Jane. Then he opens his mouth, clamps it around her calf, and bites, hard.

“Ow!” cries Jane. The room comes sharply into focus again and the buzzing drops away. “Jasper! You sadist!” He’s punctured a hole in her black-and-white-striped jeans. She wants suddenly to go outside and get some air. She needs some air. It’s a desperate, pressing need.

“I’m going for a walk,” Jane says to Kiran and Octavian. “Bye.”

Jasper turns and sprints into the corridor, hopping in anxious excitement. Jane follows him.

*   *   *

Jasper leads Jane down the stairs. For once, he doesn’t try to trip her. In the receiving hall, he herds her around a woman who’s picking pieces of lilac and glass from the floor. Jane doesn’t even notice the woman at first, which upsets her, that she’s so out of it, she almost steps on another human being. Aunt Magnolia, she finds herself repeating. Aunt Magnolia, Aunt Magnolia.

A framed photo on a side table catches her eye. It’s a portrait of a youngish blond woman with some other people and when Jane tries to go to it, Jasper herds her away with enthusiasm. The woman has a maniacal smile on her face. Jane knows it’s Charlotte. She cranes her neck to keep looking at it while Jasper shuffles her out the front door.

The moment she passes into the outside world, she begins to come awake again. She feels the straining sunlight on her skin and hears the pounding sea, the pushing wind. The sounds are normal, natural; there’s no strange pressure on her ears. Standing in the front yard, buffeted by wind and light, she takes a deep, jellyfish breath. Aunt Magnolia.

Jane thinks, suddenly, of the way her aunt died. Aunt Magnolia froze to death, in a blizzard. Hypothermia. Jane has learned, since then, from her doctor, some of the details of what it would have been like. Aunt Magnolia would have struggled with a mental fog like the one Jane has been experiencing today. An inability to remember things, to feel coherent and whole. She would have fought for clarity, but found it impossible, and finally given in to the fog. She would have had no choice.

Aunt Magnolia? Why did you send me to this strange, strange house? Did you know it would make me feel this way? She looks up. Tu Reviens stretches before her, huge and cold, pockmarked with windows and unmatching stones. It makes her think of an old dragon with missing scales and multiple beady glass eyes, protecting its treasure. It feels . . . lonely, she thinks. And hungry.

An instinct tells her that in future it might be wise to stay out of the library.

Jasper’s forging a path across the front yard through grass up to his neck, aiming for the east side of the house, where Jane can just make out the edges of the garden. Jane follows, pushing herself through the soggy grass, taking slow breaths.

Rounding the house’s corner to the garden, she’s bombarded by the smell of fresh, cold dirt and the sight of tulips and daffodils—jonquils, she thinks, touching the one at her ear—and a magnolia tree that looks like it’s ready to explode into flower.

Near the edge of the east lawn, Mr. Vanders sits on a funny, crooked bench that looks more like it’s made for meditation than for gardening. Or maybe it’s just the slow, contemplative manner in which he’s digging. The garden and yard are covered with uneven, random holes and piles of dirt.

“Hello there,” Jane says, not wanting to interrupt, but wanting him to know he’s not alone.

He attempts to speak but instead begins sneezing.

“Bless you,” says Jane.

“Thank you,” he says, pulling a handkerchief from his pocket. “Forgive me. I’m allergic to spring. Going for a walk, are you?”

“I needed to clear my mind,” Jane says, gesturing with her book hand. “I’ve been feeling muddleheaded. So I came outside for some air. Should you be gardening if you have allergies?”

“We mustn’t neglect the gardening,” says Mr. Vanders. He sneezes again, explosively, then sighs, stretching his back.

The damp chill is doing wonders for Jane’s mental clarity. Jasper sniffs happily at the holes Mr. Vanders has made, then starts digging one of his own. Jane feels an urge to go for a jog across the yard and toss her book like a javelin.

Mr. Vanders closes his watering eyes and turns his dark face to the sun. Jane can see every fine line crisscrossing his skin and wonders if the day will come when sudden little details will stop being about Aunt Magnolia, when the lines in the face of an old person won’t make her think, Aunt Magnolia will never be that old.

She remembers, with a start, that Mr. Vanders knew Aunt Magnolia. Before she started feeling so foggy, she meant to investigate. “I haven’t managed to talk to Mrs. Vanders yet,” she says, “about my aunt.”

“Mm-hmph,” says Mr. Vanders, not opening his eyes. “Maybe after the gala. She’ll find you once it’s all over with.”

The gala, Jane remembers. The gala is tomorrow. The details of this day are trickling back. She takes one great, big breath and decides that never again will she go into the library. “Apparently something happened with a Brancusi sculpture?” she says. “Of a fish?”

Mr. Vanders opens his eyes, blows his nose. “Apparently.”

“We’re lucky Lucy St. George is visiting, since she’s an art investigator,” Jane says, with a sudden flash of the jailbird umbrella. “It’s scary, actually, isn’t it?” she says. “If someone in the house stole a piece of art?”

“Yep,” Mr. Vanders says, not sounding scared, or even particularly interested. Jane considers his messy garden. It’s unclear what he’s doing besides creating craters.

“Do you like gardening, then?”

“I wouldn’t say so,” he says, grasping his back. “My lumbar region is in agonies and I couldn’t tell a flower from a weed if my life depended on it. But I’m trying to approach it as an exercise in mindfulness.”

“Is it working?”

“Not particularly,” he says wearily.

Jane watches Jasper root happily around in his hole. Then she anchors her eyes on Tu Reviens again.

“Have you always lived here?”

“Aside from college and grad school and some travel,” says Mr. Vanders, “yes. My parents worked for the Thrashes. I grew up here, and have watched Octavian, then my own son, then Kiran and Ravi and Patrick and Ivy, grow up in this odd, wonderful house.”

Jane considers the winter garden. “Even the glass of that wall is a patchwork,” she says, indicating the panels.

“Just part of the house’s lopsided charm,” says Mr. Vanders.

“Is it? Kiran says that Charlotte thought the house was suffering from its origins.”

“Well,” says Mr. Vanders. “We all suffer from our origins in one way or another, don’t you think?”

Jane thinks of her own story. Her father had been a high school science teacher. Her mother had been near the end of her dissertation on a new meteorological explanation for why it rains frogs. She’d been invited to speak at a weekend conference on Frog-Inspired Architecture in Barcelona and Jane’s parents, in love with their eighteen-month-old baby but exhausted, had decided to make a thing of it. They’d left Jane with her mother’s younger sister, Magnolia. This had been difficult for them, and for Jane’s mother in particular, who’d just weaned Jane. She’d almost canceled the trip at the last moment; she’d almost contrived to take Jane along. But Magnolia had told them, No, go, see the churches, eat paella, get some sun, spend some time alone. The plane, hit by lightning, had lost an engine, then crashed during landing. Jane didn’t remember them; she only remembered Aunt Magnolia, who had used to cry, sometimes, when it rained frogs.

It’s hard for Jane to miss something she can’t remember. Or does some part of her miss it? Might it be buried and unseen, but something on which the whole of her life rests, like the foundations of a building?

“What about a house?” Jane says to Mr. Vanders. “Can a house suffer from its origins?”

Mr. Vanders purses his lips at the house. “I guess if this house were a person, it’d be a reasonable candidate for an identity crisis. Poor house!” Mr. Vanders cries, holding his arms out suddenly, as if he’d like to embrace the house. He intones in a hearty voice, “You are our Tu Reviens!”

“Do you think that helped the house?” Jane asks, amused.

“Well,” says Mr. Vanders, “the more we accept our lack of cohesion, the better off we are.”

“Oh?”

“Let go of the illusion of containment and control!” he says, flinging out his arms.

“Good lord,” says Jane, trying to imagine Mr. and Mrs. Vanders having conversations like this at night while sitting in bed.

“If the house is distressed by its lack of cohesion,” says Mr. Vanders, “it’s because of society’s unreasonable expectations for integration.”

“I see,” says Jane, not seeing.

“The house could also be suffering from a diagnosable psychological disorder,” he says. “Why shouldn’t a house have dissociative disorder or even a severe narcissistic disorder? In a different universe, we would call in a house psychologist and get it the help it needs. Though presumably the house, being a house, isn’t suffering at all, except from clogged gutters.”

“What did you study at school, anyway?” asks Jane.

“Oh, this and that,” says Mr. Vanders.

The French doors of the back terrace distantly open and Kiran comes out. She wades toward Jane through tallish grass, then skirts the dirt piles at the north edge of the gardens. She seems distracted, her face closed and trapped someplace far away. Jasper, meanwhile, is bounding around in his now very deep hole, licking something and making frenzied yipping noises at Jane. He seems to be trying to get her attention. Jane crouches down, tucks her book into her lap, and attempts to wipe mud from his fur with her hands.

“Hey, Mr. V,” says Kiran vaguely. “How are you?”

“Decimated by pollen,” says Mr. Vanders, appraising her with a quick glance. “How are you feeling, Kiran, sweetheart?”

“Marvelous,” Kiran says, an obvious lie. “Come play bridge,” she says to Jane.

“I don’t know how to play bridge,” Jane tells Kiran, still making dubious attempts at wiping mud from Jasper. “And my hands are dirty.”

“I’ll teach you,” Kiran says. “Come on. Phoebe needs a partner.”

Phoebe. Jane saw Phoebe in the servants’ wing last night, with Patrick and Philip and a gun. She keeps forgetting about that. Should she tell someone? What if Phoebe stole the fish sculpture?

Jasper shoots out of his hole and rolls around in the grass, barking. He pops up again, shaking himself out, surprisingly clean. “All right,” Jane says, wiping her hands on the damp grass. “I’ll try bridge.”

She grasps Winnie-the-Pooh carefully between her wet thumb and forefinger and pushes herself to her feet. Maybe spending some time with Phoebe will clarify things.

Glancing into Jasper’s hole as she passes it, Jane notices something long, pale, and opalescent inside. “Nice talking to you, Mr. Vanders,” she says. “By the way, Jasper seems to have unearthed an interesting long, white rock.”

Mr. Vanders’s eyebrows rise slowly to his hairline. He watches Kiran, Jane, and Jasper as they pick their way across the gardens to the house.

*   *   *

Kiran leads Jane to a small door in the house’s back wall, through a dark corridor, then into a space flooded with moving light. Jane’s never seen this room before. It’s the indoor swimming pool, with gold tile floors and massive glass walls, one of which is an enormous fish tank. A lime-green eel stares straight through the glass at Jane with an almost human leer stretched across its face.

“Shark tank,” says Kiran in a bored voice, then heads along the edge of the pool toward a couple of doors at the room’s far end. “One of Charlotte’s design choices.”

“Sharks?” Jane says, then barely suppresses a gasp as a gigantic bull shark swims by. Bull sharks are predators. Jane used to have nightmares of Aunt Magnolia being eaten by one. The shark reaches the end of the tank, turns, and swims back the other way. The eel is still leering at Jane like some sort of terrible, crazed clown, but the shark neither knows nor cares that Jane exists.

Jasper nudges Jane’s leg to get her moving. As she follows Kiran, she’s certain the eel has its eyes on her back. It reminds her of the woman in the photo in the receiving hall; its expression is the same. Charlotte. Jane decides she’s not going to talk, or think, about Charlotte anymore. It makes the air feel charged.

Kiran rounds the pool, chooses a door in the narrow wall at the pool’s end, and leads Jane through a small, teak-paneled changing room that glows with the quality of its varnished wood. Teak is not cheap. Jane has made only one umbrella with a teak rod. Of course, maybe the first Octavian Thrash stole the teak from a monastery in Burma, which would’ve made it quite economical.

Another door brings Jane, without warning, into the library.

*   *   *

At the library’s west end, Jane sits at a card table facing her partner, the mysterious Phoebe Okada. Jasper’s tucked against Jane’s feet. Kiran and Colin make up the other team and Lucy St. George has curled herself up in a nearby armchair. Jane has lost her daffodil somewhere; it’s not behind her ear.

“I can’t stay long,” she says, because she’s promised herself not to spend time in the library. The problem is that the waves of color soothe her anxieties. When she entered, the blues and greens and golds swept her gently across the room. If the room is like being underwater, surely it can’t be the wrong place for Jane to be?

Phoebe, to her surprise, is an intuitive teacher. She can anticipate Jane’s bridge questions, then answers them so that she understands, and with no particular snobbishness. “It’s an elegant game once you get into the rhythm. Good,” she says as Jane trumps the ace of spades with the three of hearts. “You’re catching on.”

At the other end of the room, a toddler bolts through a doorway suddenly, then disappears through the door to the changing room. Jane can’t see the child’s face or skin, only a mop of dark hair and fast, sturdy little legs. A middle-aged, light-skinned black man bolts after the child, slowing only to look over a shoulder and assess the occupants of the library. He catches eyes, briefly, with Phoebe Okada, exchanging a significant, mysterious expression. He’s wearing a chef’s hat and checkered pants. Then he’s gone.

“Does your cook have a child?” Jane asks Kiran.

“Come on,” Phoebe says to Jane, with some impatience. “Focus on the game.”

“What?” says Kiran. “Cook? My head hurts. Does your head hurt?”

“Your cook,” Jane says. “That’s the guy who wears checkered pants and a chef’s hat, right?”

“Cook dresses like that sometimes,” Kiran says. “Though I always get the feeling he’s doing it to be ironic.”

“Ironic?” Jane says. “What do you mean?”

“How should I know?” Kiran says, then sighs. “What does it matter? It’s like his name. His name is Cook, that’s why we call him Cook. Corcoran, actually, but he’s always gone by Cook, and I think he does, in fact, like to cook, but I don’t think he ever cooks. He’s always busy doing god-knows-what instead. Playing his damn saxophone. Caring for his parents. Cook is Mr. and Mrs. V’s son. Patrick does most of the cooking. Everyone in the world has fulfilling work but me.”

This is such a striking thing for a bored millionairess to say—especially about her own servants—that Jane is momentarily stunned into silence.

“Kiran,” says Colin gently, not taking his eyes from his cards, “you speak half a dozen languages fluently and have as keen a political mind as anyone I’ve ever known. You’ll find a job, when the time is right. Don’t rush yourself.”

There’s a particular quality to Kiran’s silence. Jane is beginning to recognize it: a kind of irritable resentment at the expectation of her gratitude. As if his niceness is oily and self-serving.

Nearby, in her armchair, Lucy St. George sighs over The House of Mirth. “I thought I remembered the plot of this book,” she says, “but I guess I don’t.”

Jane glances at Lucy uneasily. Lucy’s wrapped her hand in a bandage, which seems extreme, for a splinter. There’s a bruised look to the skin around her eyes, a fragility Jane sees in her own mirror after nights when she’s not slept well. “What do you mean?” she asks. “Is the plot different from what you remember?”

“Everyone is playing more bridge than I remember,” says Lucy. “Lily Bart is sitting in an armchair in a library, reading a book and watching her friends play bridge, endlessly, which I don’t remember. Didn’t she usually play bridge herself? Isn’t that what got her into financial trouble? And wasn’t she always having clever conversations with gentlemen?”

“I don’t remember the plot either,” Jane says. “I just remember thinking there wasn’t much mirth. Is your hand okay?”

“She’s getting awfully sleepy as her friends play bridge,” says Lucy. “It’s making me sleepy.”

Jane’s own bridge game is stalled, because Kiran is staring into space. “Charlotte chose something interesting for the ceiling of this room,” Kiran says.

“I don’t want to talk about her,” Jane says, automatically.

“Doesn’t it look like an open book?” Kiran says. “The way Charlotte designed the ceiling?”

“Don’t say her name,” says Jane. “She can hear her own name. It wakes her up.”

“What?” says Kiran. “What are you talking about, Janie? Just look at it!”

Jane cranes her neck. The ceiling has two halves, painted white, that, ever-so-slightly vaulted, meet in the middle. The effect is accentuated by what seem to be small images, like miniature ceiling frescoes, arranged in neat lines across each “page.” Jane finds it difficult to decipher the images. This difficulty contributes to the ease of imagining them as letters, or words. Yet, they’re regularly shaped, aren’t they? Not letters of the alphabet, but rows of rectangles and squares. Little windows or doors, painted on the ceiling? Little book covers?

Lucy, now dozing in her armchair, makes a loud snorting noise through her nose. It sends a shock through Jane’s body, like the sound of a gunshot would, and Jane sucks in air.

“Lucy!” she cries. “We should wake up. We should have a clever conversation.”

“Huh?” Lucy says, half-asleep. “Lily Bart is sleeping.”

“You’re not Lily Bart.” Propelled by a sudden sense of urgency—she doesn’t know where it comes from, and even Jasper is startled by it—Jane gets up and grabs on to Lucy’s arm, hard, shaking her. “Wake up.”

“I want to know more about Charlotte and the ceiling,” Lucy says blearily.

“No,” Jane says. “We don’t want to talk any more about—”

Jane means to end with the word that. Her mouth forms the shape of the word that, then somehow the word Charlotte, awkward and full of spit, shapes itself around her intentions and pushes itself out of her mouth. “Charlotte,” Jane says. Frightened, she tries again, but again, her mouth won’t take the form she wants it to take. Her lips purse forward and her breath pushes through. “Char—” she says, struggling against it. “Char—!”

“Shark!” cries Phoebe, who holds her cards in tight hands and stares at Jane, eyes wide and frightened. “Shark,” Phoebe says again, with some triumph. “Try it. You can turn it into the word shark.”

Jane thinks of the bull shark in the fish tank. She imagines the creature pulling the word shark out of her mouth as it swims back and forth. “Charlotte,” Jane says, almost weeping with frustration.

“Shark!” says Phoebe. “Try harder!”

Jane reaches for something more powerful: the gentle whale shark Ivy carved into the edge of her worktable. Jane holds her hand up and imagines touching it.

Jane is underwater, touching the underbelly of a benevolent shark. It glides above her and moves on. Everything is quiet and slow. Jane is herself. “Shark,” she says, feeling the compulsion sink away, down into the darkness. “Shark! Oh, I’ve never been more happy to say the word shark.”

“That was strange,” says Phoebe. “Wasn’t it?”

“What’s wrong with you guys?” asks Colin, squinting at each of them in turn. “You’re being really weird. You’re making the strangest faces too. And what’s wrong with the dog?” he adds, for Jasper is tugging on Jane’s bootlaces with his teeth.

“I don’t know,” Jane says. “But I want to leave.”

“You’re all acting funny,” says Colin.

A phone bursts into song, Lucy’s phone. “My phone!” Lucy cries, then begins patting her body until she finds it. “Hello!” she cries. “Dad!” she cries. “No. Not yet. Don’t worry! It’s safe! It’s behind—”

“Lucy!” says Colin, interrupting hastily. “No one wants to hear you yelling at Uncle Buckley.”

“Never mind!” Lucy cries into the phone. “I’m not telling you where I’m keeping it! I’m not telling Colin, either!”

“All right,” says Colin, shooting to his feet. He shuffles Lucy toward the doorway urgently, shushing her like she’s a child, or a dog.

“Well,” says Phoebe. “We can’t play without Colin and I have things I could be doing.” She stands slowly, as if she’s not entirely sure her limbs are going to behave as usual. But then she crosses the room and strides out.

Jane is left alone with Kiran. Kiran’s not staring at the library ceiling anymore, which is a vast relief, because Jane has no intention of looking at the ceiling again. She wants to pretend there is no ceiling, which is difficult, because she can feel it above her, pressing down. It’s humming some note that makes her own nerves jangle discordantly and she feels that if she looks up, it will sound infinitely worse. Aunt Magnolia? Aunt . . . what?

“Kiran,” she says. “Let’s get out of here.”

“Okay,” says Kiran, still holding her cards, but not really looking at them.

Lucy has left The House of Mirth behind; it’s sitting, facedown, on the seat of her armchair.

With a sudden, certain compulsion, Jane grabs The House of Mirth, carries it to the French doors overlooking the terrace, opens the doors, and flings it as far as she can into the yard. When she returns to Kiran, Kiran raises quizzical eyebrows at her.

“That was weird,” Kiran says. “What do you have against Lucy?”

“I don’t have anything against Lucy,” Jane says firmly. “Quite the opposite. I’m trying to help Lucy. That book felt bad to me.”

“You’re an oddball,” Kiran says, “did you know that?”

The dog is whimpering softly at Jane’s feet. “Yeah,” Jane says. “I know. Let’s go, okay?”

“Okay.”

She’s thrown Lucy’s book into the great outdoors, but without a second thought, she picks up her own book and carries it back to her rooms.

*   *   *

Ivy has kindly returned the jailbird umbrella to Jane’s worktable. When Jane walks into her morning room, Glitter Lucy catches the hot light in a pleasant, humming sort of way.

The umbrella wants Jane to go to it. It’s singing to her. She feels this, and she wants this too. She goes and presses her palm flat over Glitter Lucy’s image. Song shoots up her arm to the top of her spine. The glue is dry, but when Jane looks into her palm, small particles of glitter stick to her skin like jewels.

She lifts the umbrella by its handle and carries it to the sofa where Ravi slept only this morning. Propping the umbrella up, Jane sits under it and opens her book. Jasper whines, so she lifts him onto the sofa, where he nestles against her leg, still whining.

This time, Jane opens to the story “In Which Eeyore Loses a Tail and Pooh Finds One.” Eeyore, the gray donkey, misplaces his tail in the forest. Pooh goes to Owl for help brainstorming what to do. As usual, Owl turns out to have little to contribute besides bluster, but he does have a new bellpull, which captures Pooh’s attention. Oh, that? I came across it in the Forest, Owl says. In a moment of cleverness, Pooh realizes that Owl’s new bellpull is Eeyore’s missing tail.

In the story Jane remembers reading with Aunt Magnolia, Pooh brings Eeyore’s tail victoriously back to Eeyore. Christopher Robin, with great gentleness, fixes it back in place on Eeyore’s rump. End of story.

In the story Jane is reading, Owl pops Pooh’s nose off his face and hangs it up as a doorbell. Then he takes Rabbit’s ears and makes sashes for the curtains. Then he takes Piglet’s head and hangs it on his wall and instructs it to call out the time regularly like a cuckoo clock, though mostly Piglet just cries, because he’s frightened and wants his body back. This story fascinates Jane. But Jasper keeps trying to climb into her lap and knock the book out of her hands or knock the umbrella out from behind her. He’s flailing around like a basset hound who’s drowning, actually, and when he starts trying to close his teeth around Jane’s arm, she shouts his name. “Jasper! If you make any more holes in me, I’m going to lock you in the closet!”

Jasper keeps his mouth wrapped around Jane’s arm, but doesn’t bite. He stares up at her with reproachful eyes. Then, with an expression of tremulous hurt, he plunks down, goes into the bedroom, and finds some corner in which to whimper in solitude.

Something about this pricks Jane. She’s just spoken cruelly to the dog. Shame, she thinks. Pushing to her feet, she sways, unbalanced. She can hear the dog crying. My goodness, how sleepy she is.

She manages to make it to her bed, still clutching her book. Patches of the pale red paint on the wall behind the headboard are peeling, the wall beneath it, purple and wounded-looking. “Gross,” says Jane. Jasper comes out of his corner and dances around her feet, wanting to be picked up. She reaches down, scoops the dog up, and deposits him on the blankets.

“I’m sorry I said that thing about the closet, fuzzball,” she says.

Then her head touches the pillows and she’s asleep.

*   *   *

She’s dreaming of a house with an internal gash, like a circus performer who’s swallowed a sword and punctured his own stomach. The gash is an opening to another world. Whenever anyone passes through, stretching the opening, tearing its edges, the house screams in agony.

The screams of the house wake her. There are words to the screams, but she’s sweating and shaking and too trapped in the space between sleeping and waking to make them out. She kicks Jasper by accident—he’s under the covers at her feet. He grumbles and crawls up to where she can hold him.

“Jasper,” she whispers, having a moment of pure clarity. “I don’t like this house.”

Well. She’s awake now. The clock reads 5:08 a.m., but there’s no point trying to fall back to sleep. Lying in bed shivering until the sun rises doesn’t strike her as an appealing alternative, because the house is laughing all around her. Someone, somewhere, is laughing in the walls, and something needs to be done.

“I hate this house,” Jane tells Jasper, steel in her voice. Damn Aunt Magnolia and the promise she’d exacted from Jane to come to this house. Why would she do that? Jane wonders. Damn Aunt Magnolia for her easy courage, for the things that had never scared her. Not bull sharks, not poisonous squids, not giant clams. Not the weight of the ocean’s water pressing down on her, not the numbing cold. Damn Aunt Magnolia for going out into the cold, for not knowing, for not being more scared. Who in their right mind ever goes to Antarctica? Jane scrabbles around in the bed for Aunt Magnolia’s scratchy wool hat and holds it to her face, willing herself not to cry. Her knee touches the awful book. She pushes it over the edge so it thuds to the floor.

After a number of deep, jellyfish breaths, Jane pulls Aunt Magnolia’s hat onto her own head. “Jasper?” she says. “Come for a walk?”

Jane steps into the cold corridor, wearing a hoodie over her Doctor Who pajamas, happy for her slippers and Aunt Magnolia’s hat. She clutches its long tassels for security. The tiny lights on the walls that illuminate each painting flash on and off again as she walks, throwing Jasper and her into grotesque, shifting shadow. Of course she forgets Captain Polepants and almost breaks her neck.

She wishes the house would stop making breathy noises. Then she questions her logic and wishes it were easier to tell where the breathy noises are coming from. She expects they’re coming from herself.

Jasper gives Jane anxious, exhausted looks, but she doesn’t notice. Her feet take her down to the second story, then around the atrium and through an entrance that leads straight onto the library’s second-story level.

Jane is startled to hear the quiet voices of Octavian and Ravi just below. She can’t see them, because they’re under the balcony she’s on, but she can tell from their easy tone that they’ve stopped arguing. She breathes the smell of Octavian’s pipe. A strange, scratchy noise is hard to place, until Jane realizes it’s the record player, which has finished its record and been left to turn, endlessly playing nothing.

“I think the books change color while I’m not looking,” Octavian is saying.

“I think you need to get out of this house once a day and take a walk in the sun while breathing fresh air,” Ravi says, trying to sound amused, but only sounding tired, Jane thinks. “Remember when you used to travel, Dad? You loved to travel.”

“I’ll ask Ivy-bean to take pictures of the books from hour to hour,” says Octavian. “I’ll show you. You’ll see. The shapes on the ceiling change too.”

“Yeah, okay,” says Ravi. “I never thought I’d hear myself saying this, but right now I feel like Mum is the only member of the family with a grip on reality.”

“Shall we listen to it again?”

“Are you trying to kill me?”

“I’m trying to bring Charlotte back,” says Octavian.

“Explain to me how playing her favorite music will bring her back.”

“I can’t explain it,” says Octavian. “Haven’t you ever felt something in your gut?”

“Kiran’s friend Janie makes me feel something in my gut.”

“That’s not your gut,” Octavian says sharply. “And don’t be crude, boy.”

“Jesus, Dad,” says Ravi, sighing. “You always were a sanctimonious asshole.”

“Language!”

“Mm-hm. Sanctimonious.”

The scratchy noise stops. A moment later, Jane hears the guitar intro to the Beatles song “You’ve Got to Hide Your Love Away.”

Soundlessly, Phoebe Okada appears at Jane’s side. Jane’s body flies into a panic. She spends thirty seconds gripping the banister and trying to catch her breath.

“Did I scare you?” Phoebe whispers. “Sorry.”

Her face, free of makeup, is tired, unguarded, pretty. She’s wearing a silk robe tied tightly at the middle and is barefoot. Her toenails are turquoise and cute.

“Why are you here?” Jane whispers back.

“I heard the music,” Phoebe whispers.

“Charlotte’s music?” Jane whispers. “You heard Charlotte’s music all the way from your room?”

“Charlotte’s music,” Phoebe says. “I was walking and I heard Charlotte’s music. I sleep badly when my husband’s away. I worry about him.”

Jane remembers that one night, a long time ago—no! It was only last night, which seems amazing—Jane saw Phoebe and her husband, Philip, who’s a doctor, sneaking around with Patrick and a gun. Then Philip left the house. “Why do you worry?” says Jane. “Is your husband’s medical practice dangerous?”

“I program ciphers normally,” Phoebe says. “For Britain. Ciphers are my specialty. I’m a bit of a genius. God save the queen.”

Jane is pretty sure she hasn’t asked Phoebe anything about her profession, her level of intelligence, or the queen, but she can’t really remember. After “You’ve Got to Hide Your Love Away,” Octavian switches records and plays “I’m Looking Through You,” then “Norwegian Wood.” Then he mutters something about Charlotte and Abbey Road and Jane hears the opening strains of “Come Together.”

Jane pulls on the tassels of her hat. “I think I was meaning to go back to bed, but I can’t remember,” she whispers to Phoebe.

Phoebe also seems to be thinking hard. “My husband and I are British, but we’re helping keep the missing children safe. Remember? The little kid with Cook?” she says, then looks confused. “I mean, no. Never mind.”

“What are you talking about?”

Before Phoebe can go on, Octavian speaks again. His voice comes rough and raspy through the music.

“Charlotte was reading Frankenstein when she left,” says Octavian. “I’m keeping it here, still marking her place.”

“I know,” says Ravi.

“I’ve read Charlotte’s journals back to front,” Octavian says. “I can’t find any explanation for where she went.”

“I know, Dad,” says Ravi gently. “You’ve told me.”

“Charlotte wrote here that the house, with the unmatching origins of its parts, is a microcosm of the world. Do you think living on an island, in this big old house, made Charlotte pine for the world?”

“I don’t know, Dad. Could we talk about Kiran? She’s here. We can do something about her. She seems depressed. I’m worried.”

“I’d never have held Charlotte here if she wanted to travel,” Octavian says. “We could’ve traveled anywhere.”

Their voices go silent again. A good many songs go by. Jane thinks about the house being a microcosm of the world. She turns it over and over in her mind, she flips it back and forth, because it reminds her of something. It takes her a long time to place the memory.

“My aunt used to say,” she whispers to Phoebe, “that my body was a microcosm of the sea.”

“My massage therapist always says,” Phoebe whispers back, “that my body is a microcosm of the universe.”

“Or the multiverse,” whispers Lucy St. George, appearing beside them and causing Jane to jump a foot in the air. “Sorry,” she whispers. “Did I scare you? I was out walking. When I came in, I heard the music.”

“Charlotte’s music,” Jane whispers. “Charlotte. Oh, fuck,” she whispers, rubbing her ears hard, because now she notices that it’s happening again, that weird compulsion to say Charlotte’s name. Lucy St. George is dressed all in black, from her black knit hat down to her black sneakers, and smells like the cold. She’s tight and pale and ready as a bullet in the chamber of a gun; Jane can feel it. Jane studies Lucy, trying to focus on Lucy instead of on the choking colors of the library, instead of on Charlotte. Trying to process what Lucy said. Jane realizes Lucy has just come in from outside. Lucy is less muddled and bumbling than she, because Lucy’s been outside the house, breathing fresh air.

“What’s a multiverse?” Jane asks her.

“Oh,” Lucy whispers, pulling off her hat. Her smooth hair tumbles down around her shoulders. “It’s this theory Ravi likes to talk about. His mom is a theoretical physicist, you know. His real mom, not Charlotte.”

“Charlotte,” whispers Phoebe.

“Yes,” Lucy whispers, “Charlotte.”

“Multiverse?” Jane whispers, stubbornly not saying “Charlotte.” It makes her head ache, sharply.

“The concept of the multiverse,” Lucy whispers, “comes from the idea that every time something happens, everything else that could have happened in that moment also happens, causing new universes to break off from the old universe and come into being. So there are multiple versions of us, living different lives than the ones we live, across multiple universes, making every decision we could possibly make. There are versions of us we wouldn’t even like, and some we’d barely recognize.”

This stirs at something in Jane’s memory, but she can’t place it. Conversations about various realities and versions of lives. Things Kiran has said, and Ravi. It didn’t make sense then and it’s very confusing now. Jane feels like her own muddled and overstretched brain could be a microcosm of the multiverse. The ceiling is pressing down.

“God, I feel all over the place,” whispers Phoebe. “Like all my parts are spinning away.”

“Yes,” Jane says passionately.

“I’m dying to talk to Mr. Vanders,” says Phoebe. “He could help.”

“I talked to him today,” Jane says, remembering. “He says that the more we embrace our lack of cohesion, the better off we are.”

“That sounds like Mr. Vanders,” says Phoebe wistfully.

“But this is different, isn’t it?” Jane says. “This weird feeling? Don’t you feel like it’s coming from outside us? Like, from the walls and the ceiling?”

Lucy St. George is winding and unwinding the bandage around her hand. “You know,” she whispers, “I get the feeling this house doesn’t like me.”

“Hm,” says Phoebe. “Do you get the feeling it can see everything we do?”

Lucy pauses. “If that’s true,” she says quietly, “I’m in trouble.”

“Why?” says Phoebe. “Did you do something the house wouldn’t like?”

Making no answer, Lucy continues to wind and unwind her bandage. Perhaps Octavian has reached the end of his playlist, because the next song Jane hears is the first song she heard, “You’ve Got to Hide Your Love Away.”

“Listen, Dad,” says Ravi, in a voice that’s patient, but pleading. “I know you love her, and it’s awful she left. I get it, and I’m sorry. But I’m done talking about it. I want to talk about finding some way to get through to Kiran. Some work she might like that we could hook her up with, maybe?”

“What about your own problems, son?” says Octavian. “Why aren’t you in the bed of your supposed girlfriend right now?”

Ravi releases a short sigh. “Lucy broke it off with me again,” he says, “and anyway, how’ll I ever see my father if I sleep at night? I’m worried about you too, you know. I wish you’d get dressed, go outside, go for a walk. Will you come for one now?”

“You’re a good boy, Ravi,” says Octavian. “You’re always trying to hide it. I’m sorry about Lucy.”

“Well,” says Ravi glumly. “I’m sure I’m too young to be in a serious relationship anyway.”

“Have you learned anything about the missing Brancusi?”

“No, and Vanny’s being so aggravating,” says Ravi. “It’s all ‘the gala’ this, ‘the gala’ that. I’m not even sure she’s notified the police.”

“Then notify them yourself,” Octavian says, “in the morning. It’s your house, and Kiran’s.”

“It’s your house, Dad.”

“It’ll be yours,” says Octavian, “after I disappear.”

Ravi groans. “You depressed people are so melodramatic. It’s tedious. Come for a walk.”

Lucy is staring at her bare hand. What Jane sees when she follows Lucy’s gaze makes the back of her throat thrum. The splinter, or whatever injury she sustained earlier, is bruised and festering, green, yellow, gray, and it’s taken on a vague shape. In the dim light, at Jane’s indirect angle, it’s a shape that evokes a familiar scene: an abstract sort of person, sitting on what looks like a cot. Thin veins stand out blackly across the person, like the bars of a prison cell. The person has strange, bruise-colored hair, oversized shoes, and a fresh drop of blood for a nose.

Lucy turns her face to Jane. Her expression is a mask of sadness. She sings along to the song playing below: “Gather round, all you clowns.”

*   *   *

Jane returns to her rooms in search of the Lucy umbrella.

Dawn has broken. She walks past her bed, hearing the hum of Winnie-the-Pooh lying on the floor. The peeling paint on her bedroom wall has spread, continuing to uncover patches of something red and moist underneath. She pushes on to the morning room and stops in the room’s hot center, contemplating the Lucy umbrella, still propped on the sofa.

The canopy is angled away from Jane, so she can’t see sparkly Lucy sitting behind bars. The umbrella is asking Jane to come to it. She can feel the pull. The umbrella wants her to pick it up and appreciate its artistry, which is interesting, because it’s her artistry, really, isn’t it? Jane made the umbrella what it is. It came from some part of her. Jane wonders: If she’s admiring it, isn’t she really admiring herself? She wonders: Might it even be a kind of mirror? If she looks at it, will she see a version of herself?

When Jane begins to move toward the umbrella, Jasper pushes against her legs, whining. “Jasper,” she says, “remember what I said about the closet.” Jasper sits down and stops pushing.

Jane lifts the umbrella gently by the canopy and gazes at her own work. It’s beautiful. It’s exquisite. Lucy must have done something very bad, she thinks.

Then a flicker of doubt touches Jane. The thought seems wrong somehow, it seems uncharitable. She likes Lucy. She threw Lucy’s book into the yard to protect her from her weird book that was making her sleepy, like Lily Bart. Jane likes the dog too, she loves Jasper, and now, when she looks at the poor little guy, he’s shivering and miserable and pleading at Jane with his eyes.

“Jasper,” she says cheerfully, “want to come with me while I bring this umbrella to Lucy?”

*   *   *

By some instinct she doesn’t examine, Jane knows which rooms in the west corridor of the second story are Lucy’s. To her astonishment, directly on the wall outside Lucy’s rooms hangs a blown-up and framed photo, taken by Aunt Magnolia.

Immediately, the photo raises Jane to a higher state of wakefulness. It isn’t just the surprise. It’s Jane’s pride, that Aunt Magnolia’s art hangs with the other masterpieces on the walls of this house.

A small yellow fish peeks out from inside the open mouth of a huge gray fish. Aunt Magnolia took this photo in Japan. It’s exactly the impossible-seeming sort of photograph Aunt Magnolia was known for taking, because she had an extraordinary patience and a kind of natural serendipity when she was underwater with her camera. She would, very simply, wait for the amazing thing to happen. And it would.

Jane backs away to the opposite wall to get a better view, breathing slow and deep, the way a jellyfish moves. Someone has framed this photograph badly, or else there’s some other, smaller piece of art in the frame too, behind Aunt Magnolia’s print. Jane can see its rectangular outline. She’ll have to say something to Mrs. Vanders. It’s liable to create creases in Aunt Magnolia’s print.

Jane’s head rests against the wall behind her and she clasps Lucy’s open umbrella at her side. Gradually she notices that on the other side of that wall, a conversation is taking place. She rests her ear against the wall like a stethoscope. It’s a muffled conversation between two voices she recognizes. Two cousins: Lucy St. George and Colin Mack. The yellow fish and the big gray fish stare at Jane as she spies.

“It’s exactly the sort of thing you would do,” says Lucy.

“It’s not,” says Colin.

“Then why was the first word out of Dad’s mouth when I told him about it, Colin?”

“Because you’re both assholes,” Colin says.

“Oh, trust me,” says Lucy. “Dad can be an epic asshole, but I, as an asshole, am legendary. I’m sick to death of how hard you make my job. It’s over now.”

“Over?” says Colin. “What exactly do you imagine you’re going to do?”

“You’ll see.”

“Oh, give it up, Luce.”

“You’ll see!”

“And when you realize I’m not the one who took the damn sculpture? Will your little rebellion have been worth it?”

“Oh,” Lucy says with her familiar laughter. “Dear Colin. This rebellion will be worth more than you can possibly imagine.”

“That can only mean the Vermeer,” Colin says. “What’ve you done with the Vermeer?”

“Nothing you need to know about.”

“Mm-hm,” says Colin. “You’re bluffing. You wouldn’t turn against the family.”

“You’re leaving my rooms right now. Go be fake and insincere to your girlfriend. Not to me.”

“Ha,” says Colin. “What I’m doing with that stupid bitch is no different from what you’re doing with Ravi. We’re exactly the same.”

“Fuck off, Colin,” says Lucy with sudden passion. “Stay away from me.”

“I love you too, fair cuz,” says Colin.

A door opens and shuts. Colin comes into the corridor and sees Jane, standing there, staring dazedly at the photograph, accompanied by the world’s most haggard dog.

“Oh. Hello,” he says, trying to find a natural tone for his voice, but looking distinctly alarmed. “Why are you lurking in the hallway?”

“I fixed Lucy’s umbrella,” says Jane.

“Oh, right,” Colin says, barely glancing at it. “I’m sure she’ll be thrilled.” He marches away.

A moment later, Lucy St. George steps into the corridor, then starts in surprise at the sight of Jane. She looks terrible. She holds her bandaged hand to her side. Her eyes shoot anxiously to Aunt Magnolia’s photograph, then back to Jane.

“It’s just me,” Jane says, “and Jasper. Sorry to startle you. I brought your umbrella.” She holds the umbrella out to Lucy, like a gentle offering.

The glitter drawing faces Lucy so that she can see it. Lucy’s lips part in wonder, then in a sort of revulsion. “You made that just now?” she says.

“I made it yesterday.”

“You can’t have.”

“That’s true,” Jane says, “but I did. It’s for you. You’re meant to take it.”

“Yes,” Lucy says. “I know.”

Such a strange, resigned voice Lucy speaks with. She holds out both hands, reaches for the umbrella’s handle, and takes it gently from Jane. Then she carries the umbrella away, down the corridor, holding it firmly, but far removed from her body.

She will fall in. Somewhere, out of Jane’s sight, Lucy will fall into the scene in the umbrella, enter that story, and become that umbrella’s soul. And Charlotte will have had her revenge on Lucy. Part of Jane knows this somehow, and wonders, with a morbid curiosity, what it will look like, because really, it doesn’t make sense. How can a person fall into a story?

Feeding someone to Charlotte, personally delivering someone the way Jane has, bonds Jane to Charlotte in a whole new way. Jane feels it. It’s probably why, when she gets back to her rooms, she loses patience with the whining dog and closes him in the closet.

*   *   *

All day long, currents and waves of people move through the house, preparing it for the gala. Cleaners, decorators, caterers, musicians. Occasionally Jane sees Ivy, or Patrick, or one or another Vanders, from a distance, doing what she supposes are any number of Important Gala Things.

She glides down to the receiving hall at one point, weeds among the people, and picks up the photo of Charlotte. Charlotte seems bigger than she did before; the other people in the photo are cast into shadow. Her face gleams with triumph, which Jane knows is about Lucy. It aches with hunger, which Jane knows is about anybody, everybody.

A wave of warmth rushes through Jane suddenly and she knows, without looking, that Ivy is touching her. She also knows Charlotte doesn’t like it, Charlotte wants her to lie to Ivy and get away from her.

“Janie? Are you okay?” says Ivy. “You’ve got the weirdest expression on your face.”

“I’m fine,” Jane lies, turning to face Ivy, who’s holding her tattooed arm. She’s all light and color, dark hair and blue eyes, jasmine and chlorine, and some part of Jane shakes into clarity. She hugs Ivy unhesitatingly, body to body, startling Ivy, who hugs her back with awkward surprise.

“Are you sure you’re okay?” Ivy says in her ear.

“Yes,” Jane says, meaning it, for she is okay in Ivy’s arms.

But then, before too long, Ivy disentangles herself apologetically, explaining that Mrs. Vanders is calling her name, but that she’s worried about Janie, she’s going to come check on her later, as soon as she can, okay?

“Okay.”

As Jane watches Ivy disappear into the throngs of gala workers, she’s touched by a sense of having lost her chance at something. She lost it when Ivy left. Ivy is a sorceress, a good witch, a priest, Jane thinks. But Ivy is gone.

Jane seeks out the room with the indoor pool and sits in a deck chair across from the shark tank, inhaling the smell of chlorine.

Eventually, Kiran joins her, then, shortly thereafter, Phoebe. Jane, Kiran, and Phoebe sit together, for hours. It’s warm and moist. There’s little to say. They all understand, on some level, that they’re having a different experience of gala day than the others in the house, but part of that experience is a lack of curiosity. The bull shark swims steadily back and forth, back and forth. It’s mesmerizing. Bull sharks will eat anything they see, so Jane wonders at the other, colorful fish darting about. Is that their purpose? To be eaten? The eel, lime-green and horrible, leers at Jane, stretched along the tank’s bottom, barely moving. Jane understands that Charlotte can embody any part of her house, she can look through that eel’s eyes. The eel grins, slightly flicking its tail.

Jane’s book rests on her knee, unopened, but humming to her pleasantly.

“I’m worried about Octavian,” says Kiran.

“Why?” asks Jane.

“He’s being so weird and mopey,” Kiran says. “I told him he needs to go see his doctor. Maybe he should also see a psychologist.”

“He could talk to Mr. Vanders,” says Phoebe. “Mr. Vanders could give him therapy.”

“Mr. Vanders?” Kiran says.

Phoebe sits up straight in her deck chair, a confused sort of expression on her face. “Wait,” she says. “Holy crap. I have to go.” She slides her legs onto the gold tiles and pushes herself to her feet, then runs out of the pool room.

Jane and Kiran remain together, silent and sitting.

Sometime later, Ravi sticks his head into the room.

“There you are!” he says. “Sweetheart, are you paying any attention to the time?”

Kiran turns her face numbly to him. “Huh?”

“The gala’s started,” Ravi says. “You need to get ready! Twin,” he says, standing before Kiran’s deck chair and peering at her, then crouching, scrunching his eyes in concern. He’s dressed all in black. As usual, he sweeps and moves like a storm of light. The streaks in his hair shine. Interested, Jane stirs.

“Are you okay?” Ravi says. “People are asking after you.”

“I’m worried about Octavian,” says Kiran.

“Yeah,” says Ravi. “Tell me about it. Come on, I’ll walk with you up to your rooms. Do you know what you’re going to wear? Wait till you meet the hot FBI agents.”

“FBI agents?” says Kiran vaguely as her brother practically lifts her to her feet.

“FBI special agents,” says Ravi. “Special means they’re armed, apparently. I invited all kinds of cops to the party, to investigate the Brancusi theft. Vanny is furious with me and you have to help me keep everyone else entertained so it doesn’t feel like a party full of cops.”

“Okay,” says Kiran doubtfully.

Ravi chatters as he pulls Kiran out of the room. “You’re being weird,” he says. “Like you’re half-asleep. Come on, let’s go outside and look at the water first.”

“Outside?” says Kiran in puzzlement.

“It’s cold, and spitting rain,” Ravi says. “The waves are high. You won’t like it, but it’ll wake you up.” He’s always trying to get his depressed people outside, isn’t he? Jane senses that Ravi doesn’t have the first idea about Charlotte; he merely has the instincts of a person who’s more alive than everyone else. Maybe Jane just missed another chance there, with Ravi. Unfortunately, Ravi has chosen his twin.

Jane is left alone, staring into the eyes of the lime-green eel. She wants her underwater world, where she feels close to Aunt Magnolia. Eventually, she gets up, walks to the west end of the room, and enters the changing room that leads to the library.

*   *   *

Someone, presumably Octavian, has set more rope barriers and private signs up at every library entrance. Sounds filter from the other parts of the house, musical, tinkling, joy-and-laughter sounds, party sounds. The library is empty, dimly lit, glowing softly with color. Humming with energy. Jane steps over a rope.

The library has a few plush armchairs, a few hard-backed chairs around the card table, but the most comfortable-looking seat, and the one from which Jane can best observe the ceiling, is Octavian’s divan. The blankets are rumpled and smell like pipe smoke. Jane smoothes them out and lies down. The ceiling feels closer than it did before and she can better make out the designs running across its “pages.” They are—bird cages? Some of them look like bird cages. Jane can see Hansel, trapped in a cage while the witch fattens him up. Nana, the dog from Peter Pan, in her kennel. A rat in a cage that’s attached to a man’s face: 1984, by Orwell. Juliet, waking on a stone bed, behind the bars of a tomb. A man walling up another man alive: That’s an Edgar Allan Poe story. A wild woman behind a barred window, in an attic: Jane Eyre.

There are also scenes of freedom. In fact, there’s Christopher Robin, Winnie-the-Pooh, Piglet, Eeyore, Kanga, Roo, and all the others walking together alongside a stream.

Jane opens her book.

It’s the story “In Which Christopher Robin Leads an Expotition to the North Pole.” Jane remembers reading this one with Aunt Magnolia. It was one of Aunt Magnolia’s personal favorites, fond as she was of expotitions of her own. In it, the group sets out to discover the North Pole, but then little Roo falls into the stream. Pooh finds a long pole, drapes it across the stream, and rescues Roo. Afterward, Christopher Robin considers Pooh’s pole thoughtfully. “The Expedition is over,” he tells Pooh solemnly. “You have found the North Pole!”

By now Jane knows to expect, of course, that Charlotte is telling the story.

The group sets out, walking in a line. First comes Christopher Robin and Rabbit, then Piglet and Pooh; then Kanga, with Roo in her pocket, and Owl; then Eeyore; and, at the end, in a long line, Rabbit’s friends-and-relations. Behind them, someone else.

“I didn’t want to come on this Expotition,” says Eeyore. “I only came to oblige. My tail’s getting cold. I don’t want to complain but there it is. My tail’s cold.”

Rabbit’s ears are cold. Pooh’s belly is cold. Piglet begins to squeak because the cold is burning his feet and his nose.

“Cold can burn,” says the person at the end of the line. “But don’t worry.”

“Why shouldn’t we worry?” asks Piglet.

“After you burn,” says the person at the end of the line, “you’ll shake. After you shake, you’ll stop shaking, and then you’ll start to feel warm and sleepy and wonderful.”

“How do you know that?” chatters Piglet, who is beginning to shake.

“It happened to my aunt Magnolia,” says the person at the end of the line.

“Did Aunt Magnolia come back and tell you about it?” chatters Piglet, who’s shaking harder now.

“Not exactly,” says Jane.

“How did you learn about it, then?” asks Piglet, who yawns.

“It’s called hypothermia,” says Jane. “It happens to people who set out for the North Pole without the appropriate supplies.”

“Did Aunt Magnolia do that?” asks Piglet.

“No,” says Jane. “She set out for the South Pole, with the appropriate supplies. Isn’t it nice to be doing the parallel and opposite thing? Just like Aunt Magnolia, but different.”

“But, why did she get hypothermia if she had the appropriate supplies?” asks Piglet.

“She got caught in a blizzard.”

It begins to snow, steadily. The wind picks up and the snow blows harder. The snow looks an awful lot like cherry blossoms, soft and delicate and sweet-smelling, but when it hits Jane’s skin, it’s like being poked with pins.

“Ow!” cries Piglet. “Ow! Ow! It stings!”

“Hold on, Piglet,” says Jane as the stinging snow piles around Jane’s feet, her ankles, her shins. Her jellyfish tattoo begins to burn, a jellyfish-shaped fire stinging her arm. “This is how it’s supposed to happen,” says Jane, beginning to be alarmed. “Soon you’ll feel warm and sleepy and wonderful.”

The cherry-blossom snow has a way of finding the crevices in Jane’s clothing, and sticking to her skin. There, it’s like acid; it eats her top layer away. It lays her bare. It happens very fast. Christopher Robin is screaming. How strange, Jane thinks, watching him as he screams. He’s skinless. The cherry-blossom snow has eaten the skin of his face and arms and of the legs above his expedition boots. He’s red and oozing, his outside is visceral, he is the scene in the movie we turn away from because it’s horrible. But it’s how our bodies look, under our skin. Pooh is screaming. Piglet is screaming. Rabbit is screaming.

Jane is also screaming, but she makes no noise. Lying on the divan in the library, Winnie-the-Pooh open on her lap, her back is arched and her mouth forms a perfect silent scream. Jane is struggling with Octavian, who’s puttered in wearing his robe and found Jane there, flailing around like a person being skinned. Jane doesn’t look like a person being skinned, but she feels it, and Octavian understands.

“She’s taking you,” Octavian says. “Why is she taking you instead of me?”

Jane knows why, because Charlotte knows why, and there’s no boundary between them anymore.

Charlotte is taking Jane because Jane got here first, to this room, on this night when Charlotte is more powerful than she has been before. Charlotte’s more powerful because not just Octavian, but Jane, Lucy, Phoebe, and Kiran have been giving her power, by talking about her, saying her name, dwelling in her library. Jane got here first because Octavian was still asleep. She got here first because she closed Jasper in the closet. She got here first because Phoebe is elsewhere, trying to hold it together in her job, Kiran is elsewhere, trying to hold it together at the party, and Jane is the one who fed Lucy to Charlotte.

The moment Jane first entered the library, she gave Charlotte so many openings. An orphaned part, looking for where she belonged. Jane’s wounds were openings.

Jane entered the library because Kiran and Lucy described it in a way that made it sound like Aunt Magnolia’s underwater world. Kiran and Lucy described the library because they were talking about Charlotte, because, at the moment when Jane could have followed Mrs. Vanders, or the child, or Ravi, or Jasper the dog, Jane chose to go with Kiran.

None of this, incidentally, has helped Kiran. As it happens, Kiran is about to have the worst night of her life. Not because of what’s happening to Jane—though this would hurt her too—but because of a scene playing out elsewhere on the island. Kiran doesn’t know about it yet, but Jane does. At the moment, Kiran is shuffling around the ballroom, trying to keep the guests amused, while Ravi takes the two FBI special agents outside for a walk. A walk to a hidden bay, where they’ve stumbled upon a strange scene with Ivy, Patrick, Cook, and the missing Panzavecchia children. Remember the famous missing Panzavecchia children? FBI special agents are, by definition, armed, and so are Patrick, Ivy, and Cook. And it’s dark outside, and bad things happen when armed people get confused. And Patrick is the type to jump in the line of fire in order to protect children, when shots are being fired.

If things had gone differently, Jane, or Kiran, or both, might have been there to prevent it. Instead, Kiran will get some terrible news, and Ivy is on her knees, shaking over her brother, who’s bleeding into the sand of the island’s secret bay. It’s the worst night of Ivy’s life too.

*   *   *

But, back in the library.

Earlier, Jane wondered what it would look like when Lucy fell into the umbrella.

She knows now. Not just what it looks like, but what it feels like.

Yes?

It looks like—almost nothing, really. It looks like Jane: bright, living, fighting, fabulous Jane, writhing, in solitary, silent pain that no one but Charlotte has the power to ease, on a divan, while Octavian tries to hold on to her. And then, instantly, she’s not there. She’s gone. Octavian is left with empty hands and a lingering chord, a note that vibrates his throat and his teeth and makes him look up at the ceiling, where he knows to seek out the image of Christopher Robin, Pooh, and the other creatures of the forest, walking together alongside a stream. He sees that a tall figure has joined the end of the line.

*   *   *

What does it feel like?

The acid snow is skinning Jane alive. The snow isn’t just warm, it’s burning; freezing to death feels like burning. Where’s the numbness Jane was promised? Where’s the sleepiness, and the lack of pain? Jane understands now how scared Aunt Magnolia must have been.

Aunt Magnolia?

Aunt Magnolia can’t hear Jane. And Jane isn’t going where Aunt Magnolia went.

Jane’s final scream is the discordant strum that Octavian hears in some part of his being, causing him to look up at the ceiling.

Jane is stuck in the ceiling, at the end of a procession, in a cherry-blossom blizzard of acid snow. Jane’s physical vision is limited. With part of one eye, she can see some distant edges of the library. But she knows everything Charlotte knows. It’s dark, but she’s not numb. It’s silent, but she still feels pain. Jane is on fire. She understands that she is the house now. Except, not really: Charlotte is the house, and Jane is a smothered part of her structure. Charlotte is the jail and Jane is her prisoner.

Charlotte is trying to use Jane like glue.

It will not be painless, and it will not work. It won’t satiate Charlotte’s bottomless need to feel whole. What will happen then? It will depend on whether Kiran and Octavian and Phoebe and so on keep talking about her, keep saying her name, sitting in her library, giving her power. If they do, Charlotte will pick them off, one by one.

*   *   *

How much time has gone by? Days? Weeks?

The gala is still happening.

Jane thinks, Octavian will tell people what he saw, and someone will rescue me. Or will Octavian keep his mouth shut, and wait his turn?

Or Ivy will find my book open on the divan. But will Ivy know to look up? If she does, could she ever understand what she saw, and is her magic, her power, strong enough? Would she even care, now that her brother is dead? Deceased, departed, perished, quenched. Eight letters, with a q.

Charlotte worries sometimes about Ivy. Ivy might get in the way. She worries about Jasper too, and Ravi, and Ravi’s mother, and Mr. Vanders. These are Charlotte’s least favorite people. She’s less worried about Jasper now, though, because he’s giving himself a massive brain injury trying to break out of the closet.

Charlotte worries, but not too much. She knows she’s doing well so far. She’s only just begun.