We didn’t speak of what happened in the French restaurant. Not that night, and not in the days that followed. I was almost embarrassed about all I’d told Monet, how bare I’d stripped myself, all the clumsy, honest bits I’d revealed. It made me wish I had a dark garage to hide in until the shame passed.
I’d taken to sleeping near the window so I could leave a part of myself dangling out on the fire escape. A forearm. A hunk of hair. My bad ankle, attached to my foot. It was slightly cooler there, where the breeze began, and I was getting used to the height. I could imagine myself as someone else, until I happened to pass a mirror and see who I was. Purple eye and lip, the pair of them apparently a part of me now. Sweat-frizzed hair. Eyes gray today, or green, or maybe blue, depending on the shirt I had on. Partly my mother’s face, but mostly mine.
My life in the city wasn’t turning into what I’d hoped. The bookstore on the corner denied me a job stocking shelves and ringing up customers, and my cell phone stopped connecting, the account suspended into dead air. In my mind, where I could keep avoiding truth, I denied the inevitable end to my stay in Catherine House. Money was running out. The thirty-first was coming swift and soon.
When I closed my eyes at night, I could feel myself sinking. The bed turned softer, too yielding, and I drifted lower, until I hit hard ground. Sometimes I woke to the smell of smoke, the crackle of kindling, and I bolted upward, thinking we needed to evacuate, but it was only the faint scent of my memories. That campfire was from another life, almost a different body. Once, I woke with a leaf in my hair, small and summer green, as if from a dream. It must have blown in from off the street somewhere, that’s all.
If I could, I would have told my mother about Monet. “Have you ever met a girl like that?” I would have asked. Practically a new color of hair every day. Sewn up with secrets, but whole other worlds flashing in her eyes. And then there were her stories. Sometimes she said she was from a one- stoplight town out West where the sky was so enormous you might believe nothing was left on the planet but it. Other times she said she grew up breathing coal mines, or at the craggy edge of the ocean, or that she learned to drive in a city where the streets were carved from cow paths and confused all manner of cars. Some days she was one person, and other days, from a different angle, she was someone else. My mother, an actress, a chameleon, might have been able to figure her out. She would have told me if I could trust her, if she was or had ever been a true friend.
Toward the end of the month, we gathered for the photograph. Ms. Ballantine told us to meet in the parlor, gold-bottomed and decorated in more sneeze-inducing gold, the mythic Catherine lording over us all. In the minutes before, there was a flurry of commotion at the bathroom mirrors, freshening lipstick and checking nose shine. I felt a part of things in a way that made my heart fizz up, my cheeks go pink against the usual purple. Harper helped with my concealer. Ana Sofía attempted to help with my hair.
Downstairs, everyone crowded before the fireplace to find a spot. This was where the pictures of the Catherine House girls were always taken. Sit in the middle, they said to me. Let Bina have a chair, they said. Someone told Monet to move to the back because she was tall, and she took the spot behind me, directly beneath the portrait of Catherine, having to stand on her own two legs. Her hair that day was maroon. The others, my housemates, pressed in around me in rows below and above, crammed in close, eyes forward to lock with the lens.
Ms. Ballantine stood before us with an old camera so heavy she kept it supported with a strap around her thin neck. “Five, four, three . . .” she began.
I couldn’t keep still. Something was gnawing at me, shadowy-soft.
“Smile, Bina,” someone hissed beside me—Linda, the tenant with the dark spatter of freckles. She’d been staying here forever, she’d told me, so long she’d forgotten what for. Muriel had been here for quite a while, too—she acted like she didn’t know what year it was beyond the gate. This was a boardinghouse, meant to be temporary, but something about appearing in the photograph with these girls was permanent in a way that made me uneasy, as if once snapped it would feel like living inside that cage of cats on the street.
Time to smile. I let my mouth open, though my head was pounding and my ears had that hum. Maybe thirty-one days here was enough, though I’d hoped to stay the whole summer. I’d done it. I’d proven I could leave home and be on my own. Wasn’t that enough?
I couldn’t know what Monet’s face was showing in the picture, because she was behind me, but I know what my face did when the shutter opened and we were captured.
I showed my teeth and played pretend.
━━━━━
I was coming down the stairs the next day when I spotted them there at the door.
Two police officers, both men, suited up and small-eyed, pistols bragging from their holsters. They were speaking with Ms. Ballantine. It was an opportunity, a twist of fate I could keep twisting. I considered letting them see me, letting them know I was underage and probably flagged in a database of runaways, so they could sound the alarm and call home. But something wouldn’t let me. I backed up and kept to the top of the landing, concealed by the shadows. I edged an ear and an eye out, attempting to listen and see.
Ms. Ballantine’s narrow body blocked their way. Her arm stretched across the doorway, her yellow hair catching the light and throwing it in their faces. She may have been slight, but she wasn’t budging an inch. Even if I’d wanted them to find me, she wouldn’t have let them.
I couldn’t hear what they said—if they asked for me by name, what they knew—but I could imagine. A couple of girls were near the decorative vase, eavesdropping in better range. One of them—June (long, lonely face; never spoke of home)—turned toward the staircase. She pointed up at me and gave a slight nod. Yes. You.
Message received.
From where I stood, from what I could decipher, the officers wanted to enter, but Ms. Ballantine kept them outside, in the punishing heat. I may have been the careless girl who called the city’s attention to the garden, which called their attention to me, but I was one of hers and still had her loyalty, even if I wasn’t sure I wanted it. Besides, the officers were men, and Ms. Ballantine had a healthy distrust of men, uniformed or otherwise. They’d never be allowed up to my room to spy the stolen art I now had hanging, openly, frameless, on the otherwise blank wall, thanks to Monet.
Still, I strained to hear. I realized my father must have sent them after me. He wanted me apprehended, cuffed and charged, jailed and spending my nights on a cold metal bunk. I’d have to tell my mother all about this during my one phone call. Assuming she’d answer.
In my mind, I’d already spent a decade behind bars and was able to bench 140 pounds when I heard Ms. Ballantine answering them extra-loudly, as if to carry the words up through the foyer and along the staircase to where I lurked.
There was no tenant here by the name of Sabina Tremper, Ms. Ballantine said. She’d never heard of such a girl. And if they could not provide a search warrant, they should see themselves down the stairs.
The two cops left soon after, in defeat. The chandelier glass high over the room tinkled, as if with antiauthoritarian glee.
Once the door was closed, I came safely down and watched them through the windows. I saw them exit the iron gate from my perch behind the heavy velvet curtains, deep-breathing in the mildew, wondering if they’d turn around.
If they did and happened to see me, would I stay put so they could have an unobstructed view of my face? Would I tell them my name? What would I do?
Ms. Ballantine was suddenly behind me, an ice-cold hand on my shoulder. Her jewelry had such deliberate weight. “There’s nothing to worry about,” she said. “Getting the proper search warrant for this house—if they do—will take days. And when they come back, I’ll tell them the same thing I told them today.” She smirked.
I believed it. To any parent or friend or the NYPD, she would lie and deflect to keep us here, safe. Maybe my father did bang on the front gate and yell for my mother to come out eighteen years ago. Maybe Ms. Ballantine told him there was no tenant here by the name of Dawn Tremper, even if she was there, hiding behind these same curtains that probably hadn’t been washed since that day.
June eyed me, as did the girl with her, as did another girl from the chaise.
I watched Ms. Ballantine take the stairs up, finished with our discarded visitors, to her room on the second floor. I followed and soon was in a hallway separate from the tenants’ quarters, where the walls turned more decorative, wallpapered and not so dingy, with colorful glass wall sconces instead of overhead fixtures, nice moldings, smooth and clean. If other staff members were housed here, I never saw any. Ms. Ballantine’s room was at the end of the hallway, and the door was open. A cavernous space stretched toward a bank of windows. She had four, all to herself. Brocade curtains, deep mauve, hung to the floor, and a four-poster bed, high up on oiled oak legs, marked the center of the room. Bright, abundant light cast in from the garden. But most noticeable was the way the temperature dropped as I drifted in the open doorway. She had air-conditioning.
“Miss Tremper,” she said.
Not a question, and not a command to leave. The cool air was so refreshing that I stood in its reach, letting it touch me.
“Didn’t you hear me tell you all is well, and it’s very likely they won’t return?”
Part of me wanted to apologize. For the police visit, for the desecration of the grave, even though it wasn’t a grave, for being trouble, as I so often was. But something was bothering me. Something was clicking inside my head.
“I usually don’t allow the tenants in here,” she said. “We’ve had issues with thievery.”
Someone who liked a small, significant object to hold in her hand, to worry it smooth in her palm, to hold it fisted under her pillow, to stow it away in the hollow behind her radiator, would know from a quick casing of the room where the best collectibles would be found. In this particular room, the vanity. A gold satin jewelry box on top.
“Yes,” Ms. Ballantine said. “That was our Catherine’s.” She self-consciously stroked the bracelets on her bony wrists, her rings. She saw my eyes drift to a rocking chair by the window, to its blue satin cushion. The only blue in the room. “And, yes, that as well. In fact, all of this was. The furniture, the tapestries, some of the items in the chest and in the closet . . . I’ve kept it intact, as she would have wanted. She appreciates it, I know. It helps make all of this easier.”
She was living in a dead person’s room. How old was Ms. Ballantine? How long had she been caretaker of this house? A chill crept up my arms and swirled around me.
“What did you come here to ask?” she said.
I swallowed. “I was thinking about my lease . . .”
Her face went oddly blank.
“I only paid through the thirty-first,” I reminded her, though if she didn’t remember when my lease was up, maybe I shouldn’t have mentioned it. “That’s Sunday,” I added. I wanted to punch myself, but it was done.
“Yes,” she echoed. “Sunday.”
“The thing is, I don’t have enough for next month.” Truth: I had a handful of dollars above zero, plus some change. I had no extra beyond that, nothing saved. Besides, if someone had called to hire me for a job, they couldn’t have reached me once my cell phone got shut off. “And so I think it’s time . . . I guess . . . for me to go home.”
How difficult it was for me to say that, but once it was in the air, spoken aloud in this grand room, I turned clearer and more conscious. Ready.
Only, Ms. Ballantine wasn’t responding. She was watching me intently, taking her time.
I started to add something, but she stopped me.
“Miss Tremper, I need to tell you: This conversation is completely unnecessary. And a little troublesome.” She turned to a corner of her room, there where the rocking chair stood. She gave a quick nod to the chair, as if someone in it had offered a suggestion. “Miss Tremper, the dates on the rental agreements are a formality. You weren’t clear on this?”
I shook my head.
“This keeps happening,” she said. “I’m not sure why the confusion.”
None of it made sense. How did she expect me to get the money for another month? Was she saying I could stay for free? She had to be. Days ago, I might have been relieved. I wasn’t anymore.
“Now, if that’s all . . .” she said, waving me toward the door.
I could have left then. I almost did, was turning for the door and everything, when the chill cycloned around me. The question came right out from nowhere.
“Do you remember my mom’s accident?”
Her neck cracked. It made a brittle sound. “I was waiting for you to ask. I thought it would be long before today.”
“Oh. I guess I didn’t know if you’d tell me.”
Her face darkened. “If you’re here to confront me about why we didn’t go to the hospital, why we left her out there . . . if that’s why you’re here, I want you to know we felt bad about it, but there was nothing we could do. Not for her. Not anymore.”
“Nothing you could do?”
“It was after curfew,” she said. “And it was a far fall.” She paused. “Such a tragedy she broke her leg.”
So that was it? How my mother’s story in the city ended? I wanted to sit down with this news. The daring, delicious magic of her time in the city was fizzling.
“She didn’t come back after,” Ms. Ballantine said. “What we heard, and I believe it’s genuine, is that when she was at the hospital she discovered she was having you.”
The math added up—if she’d left my father and spent two exhilarating months here in this house, they could have been the months she was pregnant. Which meant I was here, once before, when she was.
“I expected you to ask,” Ms. Ballantine said. “In fact, I brought it up from storage for you.” She went to the closet and returned with a cardboard box, taped on top. Marked on the outside was the name Dawn Tremper, the dates she was here, the year.
I must have made a sound as I took it in my arms. I was trying so hard not to.
“Your mother’s things. Her papers, her souvenirs. She had a collection of photos of herself, glossies, the same picture, dozens of them.”
“Her headshots. For when she went on auditions.”
She sniffed. “Your mother paid on time. She met curfew. There were so few infractions, until that night. Our problem was the screaming.”
“The what?”
“For her audition. That was the one role she did get, as I remember. Dozens of auditions, and one role.”
The movie was a slasher film, a black-and-white short. In it, my mother said she screamed so much she lost her voice. This box contained that experience and more. The sound of her. Her plans. Her budding dreams. Yet the box wasn’t heavy at all. So much hope, sitting in storage all those years, and it hardly weighed a thing.
There was a creak of floorboards in the hallway, and we both turned at the same time to see who’d come, but it was no one and nothing. Empty doorway, empty hall.
When I swiveled back, Ms. Ballantine’s face had changed. There was a different light in her eyes. “Is she here?” she breathed. “Is she in the room with us right now?” Her voice was high and hopeful, like a little girl’s.
I turned again, but no one was there.
Ms. Ballantine stepped nearer to me. There was plush carpet under her black heels, nothing threadbare, not in this room.
“I’ve never seen her outside of that picture,” she confessed. “Not in all these years. But I sense her. I feel her near me. Sometimes I think I hear her voice”—she tapped her temple—“in here.”
She was ramrod straight, alerted to any movement at the doorway, but all it showed was the hallway floor and the hallway wall. Both were brightly lit, not a shadow.
“Is she angry?” Her eyes blinking fast. A hitch of fear in her voice.
“I . . .”
“She reached out to you,” Ms. Ballantine said. “She woke when you arrived. It’s you. As it was your mother before you. Please, what do you see?” She’d believe anything I told her.
As I contemplated the endless cruelties I might inflict with the power she’d granted me, I happened to glance to the other wall.
Shadows aren’t solid or built of hard lines, but in this one a texture of skin could be made out. Ridged with fur, as if she’d been growing mold for more than a hundred years.
A sick, cold feeling pulled from inside my own body, telling me we had a connection—that thing in the rocking chair and me.
I started backing away, careful to keep her in my sight.
We shared something. I didn’t want to know what, couldn’t let myself see what. Except she smelled like my last night in the woods had smelled, like fresh, sour-wet dirt when my face was mashed into it and I didn’t think I had the strength to get up. She fell a long way, and they say she never landed, but I can imagine what she might have found at the bottom if she had. I knew what it tasted like. The grit on my tongue.
Ms. Ballantine had been right about us not being alone in the room, but her sense of direction was off. She was standing in the doorway, far across the room, to be close to what she thought was Catherine. All the while, the rocking chair by the window rocked back and forth, back and forth, silently moving. The shadow in it swallowed the garden light.
There was a thing people used to say to me, at home: You look so much like your mother. Catherine didn’t say it out loud—she couldn’t without a mouth, could she? But she was thinking it again. She did whenever she saw me. Her thought wormed its way into my ear.
“I have to go,” I told Ms. Ballantine, rushing for the door. “I have to get this box upstairs.” I took off, pushing past the cold spot in the room. It was only an ordinary vent in the wall, blasting out cooled air for the living, and I was still able to feel it.
━━━━━
I was on the stairs. I had my mother’s box, still sealed, at my feet and the group portrait containing my mother close up to my nose. I’d wiped the dusty glass as clean as I could with the hem of my shirt, but it still wasn’t clear enough or close enough to see her true expression in the frame.
I registered Monet behind me but didn’t turn to greet her.
“Where have you been?” she said, at my back.
“Right here,” I said. “Around.”
She hovered. I was so aware of her proximity, her bare arms, her long legs, the way she slipped off her shoe and crunched her naked purple-painted toes to the floorboards, the way her lungs took in air as she breathed. Somehow, knowing she was there calmed and centered me after what I’d witnessed in the rocking chair. Even my mother behind glass hadn’t done that.
Finally I tore my eyes away and turned. She was a redhead today.
“You okay?” she said. I said I was. “You sure?” She grabbed my hand, but I didn’t know what she was really doing until she shook it, as if we were two gentlemen meeting during a stroll on an old-time cobblestone street. Her smile was so smooth. But there was nothing on my hand for her to take.
“If you’re still looking for it, it’s not on me,” I said.
“Whatever do you mean? Looking for what?”
She knew what I meant, and I knew she knew, and yet we kept the words off our lips.
“You’re keeping secrets,” she said. No judgment, simply an observation.
“You told me to on the day we met,” I shot back.
She nodded. “That I did.”
It made me think how she’d been completely unapologetic about leaving me with the bill at the restaurant—in fact, she never brought it up. After our lunch alone together in the dark quiet of the low-ceilinged space, tucked away under the street, a dot of chocolate from a croissant melting at the corner of her mouth, after all the secrets I’d given her and not one in return, after all that, she wouldn’t be real with me.
“I know you’ve been in my room,” I said. “Don’t deny it.”
“When? How? I’m just coming upstairs now.”
“The fire escape. You crawled in my window, you were looking for my hiding spot, but you didn’t find it . . .”
Once I said this out loud—the slip of mentioning the hiding spot, acknowledging that in fact I did have one, and it was inside my room, still to be discovered—I shut myself up.
Her eyes had come alive, and that should have concerned me, but something else caught my attention. As it did, a chill started creeping up from my ankles.
A crease of concern in Monet’s forehead. Her voice so loud. “Are you really all right, Bina? Are you having one of those episodes again? You know you don’t look so hot, right? I think you need to sit down.”
An episode. The last person who’d said that to me was Ms. Ballantine herself, my first afternoon in the dusty coffin of her office. And my head did hurt, but it was an ache I was getting used to, an uncomfortable hum in the background, always with me, more so when I slept.
This wasn’t anything to do with that.
It was my mother. My young mother captured in the frame of the group portrait. She’d changed, the same way the portrait downstairs liked to change. Now, from out of nowhere, she wore a fierce, urgent stare aimed out at the viewer—me. She stood in the topmost row, directly under the frame containing Catherine de Barra, packed in tight among the other girls, with her mouth gaping as if to say something important, her arms caught in a frantic wave.
She was shouting something at the camera. Waving at me. Warning me.
I swore she hadn’t been doing that before.
I went up close to it. “Mom?” The image became blurrier the closer I got. I tore it off the wall, but her figure clouded, a textured series of dots up close, unidentifiable as anything other than a field of black and white and gray.
Monet was peering around wildly. The stairwell twisted above and below us, with shadows leaking from the walls, but no one else was there to witness this. I dropped the frame on the floor—maybe it shattered, I don’t know—picked up the box instead, and tore off upstairs. I heard her calling after me and her footfalls on the stairs behind me, but I was inside my room with the dead bolt turned, sitting on the floor with my back against the door, before she could get through. I was always the one curious about her, wanting to follow and eavesdrop, to soak in, to understand.
Now she was the one chasing after me.
━━━━━
She went away after a while. She left me in peace. So I got up off the floor and told myself it was time.
What my mother must have wanted was for me to open the box. I had the weight of everything she had to say in my arms, all the answers.
Except at first I didn’t understand. Inside the ordinary brown box was another: a shoebox large enough for a pair of knee-high boots, though it contained no boots. There were no headshots, either. Instead, I found the very things I’d been admiring all my life, the items pinned on the bulletin board over my mother’s dresser at home. Somehow they were here.
I spread them out all over the floor of my room. The photographs weren’t the kind she would have used for auditions. They were candid, soft-focus, a carnival of color. Her hair in different shades and lengths, her face forming different smiles, some sweet and small, some midlaugh, with a view of her tonsils. I’d seen these pictures already—but now I circled them in a new light, trying to understand. Her arms slung around the shoulders of girls who were so familiar, mugging with them on a fire escape, posing with a wriggling gray-striped cat in her arms.
I held up the last photo, trying to get a closer view of the cat. White belly. White mittens. The cat was identical to the one on the old lady’s flyer.
There was also her collection of ticket stubs from clubs, movies, plays. I knew every story. At the bottom of the box, a four-leaf clover preserved in a tiny plastic baggie. I remembered how she told me she found this lucky four-leaf clover in Central Park. She’d been so mystified at having come across one in her lifetime, spotted as if by magic in the giant expanse of green grass. Now it was magic, or something much worse, that transported it here.
Every time I tried to invent a solid explanation in my head, that same creeping chill came over my body, a high-pitched notion from toes to fingers to ears to the top of the head telling me no.
No.
There was a rustling sound on the fire escape—not a mourning dove that had made a nest, not wind, but something more shadowy, and deliberate. But I couldn’t care about it. My emotions got the best of me, and I couldn’t stand to have all these impossible things in front of me anymore and to be forced to connect the dots. I shoved my dresser aside and went for the hole, squeezing as much of my body in the slim space behind the radiator to shove the old Dawn inside, where I couldn’t see what I’d been avoiding. She’d been trying to follow Catherine’s footsteps in escaping, and she had, she’d made it. She’d been brave all along, and for some reason she never wanted me here.
When I tunneled my hand in, it felt like there might be another hand reaching from way back in her top dresser drawer off Blue Mountain Road, all the way down here, for me.
━━━━━
It was dark, night already, when I made it out to the street. Ms. Ballantine’s office was locked, so I couldn’t use the landline in there, and I didn’t want to ask one of the others if I could borrow her phone.
I didn’t expect it would be easy to find a pay phone. But a few turns away, there was one on a corner, an ancient, stickered, sticky contraption shielded from weather in a silver booth. I lifted the receiver and miraculously heard a dial tone. There was a slot to put actual coins in, and it said local calls were twenty-five cents, a quarter each, which was how much they were when my mother lived here.
But my call wasn’t local. To be safe, I shoved all four of the quarters I had into the machine, punched in the digits, then let it ring.
My mother never answered a call from an unfamiliar number on her cell phone, but I thought someone in the house might answer the line hooked up in the yellow kitchen. I was right. Daniella—the one least likely to hang up—was the one who said hello. I’d gotten lucky.
“Let me talk to my mom,” I told her. “Give her the phone.”
There was some scrambling on the other end as she realized—that I was calling from this fuzzy, unknown number, that it was me, really me. So much static.
When she came back on the line, her voice was so serious, and it was still her, not my mother. “How are you calling?” she said. “I don’t understand.”
“I’m on a pay phone.”
“Oh my god,” she said. “Char, come here. She says she’s Bina. Calling from . . . I don’t even know where. She wants to talk to Mom.”
“Don’t give Mom the phone, you freak.”
“Hello?” I said.
I heard Charlotte in the background. “If it’s really her, tell her to go away.”
“I can’t just tell her that.”
“Tell her to go away and stay away forever.”
Daniella returned. She hesitated and said it in a mouse voice, but she said it. “Stay away,” she said, through a haze of static. “Forever.”
She hung up. I had no more quarters, but the static kept hissing.
I’d lost track of time. It was a weeknight, which meant an early curfew, and I should have been inside, in my room, not out here, aching, on the street. I should have—
“Miss,” someone said. “Do you need help?”
No one had ever taken much notice of me on the street before, not enough to offer to help me. This wasn’t what the city was supposed to be like. It wasn’t what my mother told me.
I pushed past them—a woman in black, another two women in black; everyone wore black here like they hoped the night would make them disappear. Then it did for a moment. Then I was alone. I wasn’t myself. Dizzy by a lamppost. Needing to catch my balance. Sitting with my feet in a sewer grate on the curb. I couldn’t remember which way Catherine House was, which turns I’d taken, which corners, which crosswalks, how many stop signs, what I was doing, where I put my keys.
“Hey, girl, can I call someone for you?” A manicured hand was holding a bejeweled phone right in my face. I wanted to grab the phone and run, outright snatch it like a thief and go flying, but I also needed to lie down on the sidewalk, because my ankle was aching, wouldn’t work anymore, my legs wouldn’t either, and all I could see was through a pinhole in my one good eye.
A curtain of darkness drew itself closed around me, and then, with the sound of a train coming, it all went white like a blank wall in a bare room.
━━━━━
I burst through, falling backward. Someone had me by the arms, holding my weight, and then let me go so I was crumpled on the small patch of concrete on the other side of the gate. This was the familiar front space of Catherine House, a city yard without any grass, and I was inside it somehow, the hulking iron gate shielding me from the street.
Some of the others had gathered around me. Gretchen. Lacey. Anjali. More.
Their voices filtered down.
“She tried to stay out.”
“She learned her lesson.”
“Leave her alone.” It was Anjali, bending over me, eyes fierce. “You shouldn’t have done that,” she said to me.
“Where am I?” I asked.
“Home,” she said quietly. “Where you belong.”
Now that I was safe inside the locked gate and whatever commotion I’d caused was over, the other girls lost interest and started up the stoop. There wasn’t really anywhere for me to go—up against the iron fence to hold the bars and feel the wind coursing through, or up the stairs with them, behind the sleek black door and behind the curtains, inside. I would, but not yet.
In time I noticed I was alone out there but for one set of feet.
Purple-painted toes.
One foot nudged me, gently, not to hurt, and then the long legs bent and the face leaned in so close. Her hair was fire tonight, every shade of flame.
“I’m leaving Sunday night,” she said. She paused. The city screamed all around us, and I wasn’t allowed back into it; I’d have to wait for morning. “Maybe you could come with me.”
I tried to read her face. My eyesight was coming clear again, both eyes working now that I was behind the gate. “How?” I asked.
She scratched her nose. As she did, I saw it. The opal set on the simple silver band. She wore it facing out so it made a dancing pattern all over her hand. It fit her so perfectly, but appearances didn’t matter. Intentions did. Purpose.
The rustling on the fire escape had been her. I hadn’t been careful enough when I went for the hiding spot. I hadn’t been thinking, and as soon as I’d left the house she found it and made it hers. There was some small part of me, still kicking, still thinking the link to my mother mattered, that ached to grab her arm before she knew what was coming and wrestle it out of her hand. But I didn’t have the strength to confront her, and besides . . . it looked so right where it was. A person like me shouldn’t be allowed to have something like that. I’d ruin it.
“Your mom knew the secret,” she said. “I don’t know how she found out. But I’m going to try. My lease is up Sunday. Isn’t yours?” Monday was the first of August, a month I never thought I’d be allowed to have in this house. Now I saw I couldn’t escape. My mother was trying to tell me that. The other girls had tried to tell me that. And Monet knew it all along.
I reached up for her hand, but only so I could get on my feet and make it up the front stoop.
Maybe it was the opal twinkling on her finger. Maybe it was actually believing something she’d told me for the first time.
“Meet me on the roof right before midnight,” she said. “Sunday.”
She started climbing the stoop before I could answer, yes or no, or did it have to be the roof, and why and how, and are you sure I can come with you? I didn’t ask her, but it wouldn’t have mattered. In the month I’d known her, Monet Mathis had shown me how much she loved avoiding the truth. If I wanted to trust her, I’d have to connect the dots and bridge the pieces myself.
I followed her inside and closed the door.