I’d already explained that I wanted my mother’s room, Room 10, and after that I couldn’t seem to stop talking. “Do you remember my mother?” I asked Ms. Ballantine. “She was going by Dawn Tremper then? It was before she got married?” I hated that my mother had changed her name, matching herself to the man she was with—it meant she no longer matched with me. “Were you here then, when she was?”
The details didn’t help. Many girls had stayed here over the decades. Many wanted to act in movies or have their eager selves circled in a bright-hot spotlight on a red-curtained stage. More than a few went back to bad boyfriends and former abusers, or came to rent a room with welts on their arms, flinching when touched, saying they needed someplace to stay. A hundred girls might fit that description. If Ms. Ballantine remembered, wouldn’t she tell me?
Instead she leaned forward and said, “Are we going to stop this charade now?”
“Stop what?”
“I was hoping you would call sooner, but I told her we had to be patient, that the day would come. And here you are.”
A ripple of surprise ran through me.
“My mother called?” She must have known for a while that she’d send me away—since the Toyota in the tree, or longer? Since I turned fifteen, the first worst year of my life, followed by the next two? I thought she’d wanted me to stay with those friends from his church, but all along she’d known I’d end up here, as she had. My heart warmed for a second.
But if that was true, how did she know I’d take the card and make the phone call myself ?
“Oh no,” Ms. Ballantine said, correcting me. “No, no. Your mother hasn’t contacted us in years. We do like our former tenants to keep in touch. If they’re able.”
“So she didn’t call.”
“No,” she said, “you did.”
Something inside me sank. I didn’t admit that my mother had no idea I was here, that I’d swiped the number, along with some money from unguarded wallets. My mother surely hated me right now and was maybe investigating the legalities of getting a daughter disowned, and changing the locks, and pressing charges for grand larceny (how much did it have to be to turn “grand”?). I’d been talking about her as if we were close, two pinkies entwined and cycles synced, even today.
Still, Ms. Ballantine hadn’t said she remembered. Decades of girls coming and going, room keys traded from hand to hand, a pile of names. I wanted my mother to be the most memorable, a shining face in the crowd, but nothing indicated she was.
I could even be mistaken about the name. My mother started going by Dawn the day she moved into this house. That was her middle name and her stage name, and now it was her ordinary name out in the world. I could see her in this room, her hair that rotated through a half dozen colors in a single summer, her unwieldy dreams, her overstuffed suitcase bursting with shoes. Now I’d get to see this place for myself, and I’d know her. I’d know her in a way I never did before.
Her last name then and mine all my life, Tremper, wasn’t technically my mother’s, either. She liked it better than our family name, which sounded too “ethnic” for her future in Hollywood, she said, where so many people recast themselves with smooth, bland new selves and pretended not to be what they were. Her invented name was borrowed from the place where she was from, Mount Tremper in Ulster County. She put it on her glossies. She answered to it at every cattle call. She changed it legally, at the courthouse. When I was born, she passed it along to me.
I was about to ask Ms. Ballantine again when we were interrupted. The door was partly open, and a girl’s head peeked in. Dark hair in a halo of static. Wide, searching eyes that landed on me.
“Yes, we have a new tenant,” Ms. Ballantine said. “You’ll meet her later.”
The girl stared. I felt naked in the chair, peeled open.
Ms. Ballantine waved her hand, a shooing gesture, and the head vanished.
“I apologize,” she said. “But I have bad news.” She explained I couldn’t have Room 10; it was occupied. But this was such good news that all the rooms were occupied, didn’t I think so? Even if I had to have Room 14?
I pictured the mysterious Lacey, all her belongings carted out and piled on the curb. Was I getting her room? What happened to her here? No matter. I said I’d take the room. It wasn’t my mother’s, but it was close enough.
Out of the corner of my eye, I saw another girl drift past the open doorway, slowing. Blond head this time, smoothed hair that flipped upward at the ends. Small pursed lips and not a word, either.
After her was a girl in purple, and another, a splash of red hair and red lipstick.
“Don’t mind them,” Ms. Ballantine said, so studiously unbothered it made me wonder if I should be concerned. My back was to the door, and anyone could have walked by.
I turned again. Across the way I had a view of the grand parlor, gold velvet on any object that could be encased in gold velvet, crowded with artifacts from places unknown, swimming with dust, and crowned with the portrait of the serious young woman in the gilt frame. The tenants weren’t watching me anymore—they’d scattered. The photograph on the wall—it was watching.
“Is there a problem?” Ms. Ballantine said.
The portrait. Were its lips moving, creating a faint blur beneath glass? Was the frame crooked on the wall now, as if it had skittered to the left? Did the glass in front of her face contain a strange, swirling mist?
“Could we, um—” I didn’t want to put words to what I was seeing. “Could we close the door?”
Ms. Ballantine stood from behind her giant desk. She stalked across the room—it wasn’t a large room and was crammed with filing cabinets, but I heard every clack and smack of her jewelry, and she wore a tremendous amount—and pulled the door shut. It wasn’t until she was back behind the desk again, bulbous rings glistening, that she spoke the name.
“You’re curious about our Catherine.” When I didn’t respond, she clarified. “Catherine de Barra. Our namesake and the owner of this townhome, before her tragic end. As I’m sure your mother told you. That portrait was taken when Catherine was a mere eighteen years old. The year she lost her father. He was her last living relative. After his death, she was all alone. Imagine.”
Ms. Ballantine had called me curious, but curious was not the word I’d use. I’d say unsettled. Something caged inside that frame bothered me.
I found some empty words and said them. “It’s a beautiful photograph.”
Ms. Ballantine let silence sit between us, as if to call my bluff. The photograph was substandard, in fact—once you got close enough, the soft blur became clear. It seemed an optical illusion, with only the eyes and the mouth sharp. Everything else was clouded. I’d noticed that in the parlor.
“I mean, the girl in the picture—Catherine—she was beautiful.”
Ms. Ballantine’s eyes narrowed. Did I see the picture? Did I even look?
I did. I thought anger was very beautiful on a girl, so long as it wasn’t directed at me.
“Catherine was not known for her beauty,” Ms. Ballantine said. As she spoke, she went to a filing cabinet. “There are other ways for a woman to be remembered. I tell all our girls that—for their sakes.”
She drew a stack of papers from one of the file drawers. “In Catherine’s case, what beckoned all the suitors was her inheritance. Charles de Barra, her father, was quite protective before he died. Some say too protective. Some say . . . unhealthily attached.” She shrugged, as if she wasn’t one of those who would say that. “But after his death, word got out, as it does, and suitors crowded the rooms out front. They came bearing gifts. They came for weeks on end, but no one was chosen before the incident that took her life. It turned out she left the house to all of us. Somehow she knew we would need it.”
The incident. I held on that word.
Us. As if I were already one of them.
Ms. Ballantine gazed with reverence at the dingy curtains and the low ceiling, cobwebs clinging to the corners. Then she turned and looked me straight in the face. Did she see an angry, unsteady mess of a girl? Did she recognize the true person I was?
No. She was only assessing my face. Only concerned with my outside parts and my surface. The bruises, the swollen spots, the banged-up lip, did make me appear desperate. That was what she seemed to be searching for—it was all she saw, all she needed to know.
“Catherine said you would come,” she said. She’d raised her voice, as if she hoped someone just outside the room might hear.
I sat up very straight in my chair.
“Caring for this house all these years”—how many years? I wondered; something about the milky film over Ms. Ballantine’s eyes made me suspect a great many—“being here for each and every young woman who finds her way to these doors, I often think of the tragedy of it all. I’m grateful to your mother for sending you, Miss Tremper. It’s been almost twenty years since all our rooms were filled in the precise way we were hoping. When Catherine told me you’d called, I felt this little flicker. I couldn’t think of the word to call it until this moment. Hope. She felt it as well, when you spoke.”
She touched a ringed finger to a fat black phone on the desk. It had a wire plugged into the wall. One by one, in quick succession, these thoughts struck me:
She thinks my mother sent me here on purpose.
She thinks I talked to a dead woman on the phone.
Get up. Get out of the chair.
Walk to the door. Get your suitcase. Go.
But my body didn’t move. Only my mouth did.
“I’m sorry?” I said. “Aren’t you who I spoke to on the phone?”
She shook her head. She was saying what I thought she was saying. Behind the film covering her eyes—as if just on the other side of a thin white curtain—a light was shining. A bright, bobbing light.
There was a knock on the door, and another girl popped her head in. I tried to meet her eyes—but she avoided my gaze. “Excuse me . . .” She hesitated. “May I ask about the ice?”
“Yes?” Ms. Ballantine said.
“We wondered . . . might we need some?” She spoke so formally, her freckles darkening on her cheeks as she spoke, as if this were a bold question.
Ms. Ballantine leaned forward. “Yes, Miss Tedesco, thank you for checking first. We do. We absolutely do.”
The girl’s tense face relaxed.
“It looks like we’ll be having the party,” Ms. Ballantine said. She nodded. The girl nodded. The door closed. I’d not gotten out of my chair or made a run for it. I’d not moved a muscle. It was funny that they were talking about ice, because my fingers felt so cold as I gripped the arms of the chair. The mist I’d caught sight of in the portrait wasn’t behind a layer of glass in the next room anymore. It was at my feet, creeping upward in a faint shroud over my legs. It felt like the lower half of my body was crouched in a tight freezer, but the upper half was still free.
Then gone. Any thought of mist or cold or the foreboding sense I should walk to the door and leave was over. All of it gone but the ordinary drifting dust inside the dim, cramped room. I could see my legs again. Ms. Ballantine was seated behind her desk as before.
I touched the tender spots on my face, my head.
That felt more real than any of this. But maybe I wasn’t quite myself yet.
“Are you ready?” Ms. Ballantine said, a crinkle of concern on her brow.
“What do you mean? Ready for what?”
She touched the back of her head, base of the skull, left side, exactly where my own hand was. “You said your head was hurting and you needed a minute. Did the episode pass?”
My head was oddly clear. I nodded. The episode—whatever it had been—must have ended, and so swiftly I didn’t remember it.
“Let’s continue with the paperwork,” Ms. Ballantine said.
Paperwork. That was what we were doing. I had a page in front of me on the desk.
There was the short-term rental agreement for me to review—I could afford only the month of July, but I knew I had a whole month to come up with a way to pay for August—then items for me to initial and sign. Ms. Ballantine offered a ballpoint pen, encrusted in dust. She’d have to abbreviate the orientation tour, she explained, because she had to supervise setup for tonight.
“The party is tonight?” I prompted.
“Yes, that’s what Miss Tedesco was asking about. She’s tasked with running to the corner market for ice. With this heat, we’ll certainly want it for the drinks.”
I nodded again. I remembered some talk of ice, and my feet and legs and hands were warming again, feeling the summer humidity clogging the room.
“Did you bring anything you might wear?” she asked. “Cocktail attire is preferred.”
“I’m invited?” I said.
She almost laughed. “Of course. Do you think you might have a suitable dress?”
That would depend on what was inside my suitcase. Before I’d even snuck out for the night, when I was in the shower, my mother had let herself into my room. She was the one who’d packed the suitcase and left it for me on the end of my bed, zipped and tagged with my name over hers, crossed out. She’d tried to fix the broken wheel with duct tape, but it didn’t work. She probably thought she was being helpful to me, loving. She didn’t realize she was being cruel.
My face was still stinging from the last party, not a day ago, which featured me drunk in the dirt, wishing I could dig down into the tree roots and bury myself in the warm black earth.
“Eight o’clock,” Ms. Ballantine said. “Perhaps ask one of the other girls to lend you something.”
We moved on once more. I turned over the cash for a single month’s rent, more than I could afford. I tried not to think about how I had $94.59 after train ticket and subway fare, and no job and no prospects.
“One more thing before I retrieve the keys,” Ms. Ballantine said, pushing a sheet toward me. “The vow.”
She was serious. This sheet of paper began with a place for the date and the words “I do agree that I”—a wide gap where I was to write my name—“as a resident of Catherine House, a refuge for young women that has opened its doors to me as I promise to open myself to it, vow today the following . . .” It went on with a series of rules. Quiet hours were from ten to five. Breakfast was served between seven and eight thirty. A house refrigerator for our other food items could be found in the back hallway, but we were not allowed to use the oven or the stove. Curfew was ten o’clock on weeknights, midnight on weekends. Other rules included no smoking, no illicit substances of any kind, no high heels on the hardwood floors (this was because heels made scuffs; I made no comment about Ms. Ballantine’s own heels), no pets, no hot plates in the rooms, no candles of any kind, no incense, nothing that burned or could start a fire.
Ms. Ballantine paused at a rule toward the end. It said that no males were allowed above the first floor, and she wanted to make sure I didn’t miss it. No men or boys, none. No boyfriends, or boys who were just friends. No brothers or other relations, real or so-called. No dads or uncles. That staircase and everything above was a no-male zone at all times. She paused, even after I’d initialed the no-boy box, waiting to see what I’d say.
The rule was so completely ancient. It was binary and boring and lifted from another time. Then again, I didn’t want anyone in my room, no matter their gender. And if I asked someone in at this point, who would come?
“Okay,” I said.
“Usually, here is where I get some back talk.”
My mother must have felt safe in knowing that the person she’d escaped from was not allowed upstairs. Yet I was escaping something else. I saw a ring of girls’ faces hovering over me, forest-fire flicker, the coming kick. Then I lost the image. It didn’t matter—they couldn’t have known I was here.
“No argument from me,” I said.
The last item on the vow was bolded and underlined, so I couldn’t miss it. Before she read it aloud, Ms. Ballantine took a moment to reveal what had caught my curiosity before. This boardinghouse was founded after Catherine lost her life tragically due to the incident that took her from the world too soon, not long after her father’s death. That was how she’d described it, incident, a word with a skin of mystery around it. Catherine had gifted her home to other young women in her will, young women in trouble, young women who needed a safe place to shelter from the cruel, coarse world beyond the gate. So long as she was alive—Ms. Ballantine thumped her bony chest—she would make sure Catherine’s wishes were followed. Catherine would have wanted her house to be a refuge in this dangerous, dirty city. And a refuge is a fortress. And a fortress is kept secured by secrets.
The last item of the vow was this:
29. I will not speak to reporters, authors, historians, or anyone else, excluding female blood relations in the first and second degree (mothers and daughters, grandmothers and granddaughters), about the goings-on inside the house, nor of the founder, though deceased, while in residence or afterward, effective up to 99 years.
The specificity of the ninety-nine years was off-putting, as by the time all those years passed, anyone who signed this vow would be dead.
But it was something else that caught in my throat. Excluding female blood relations, such as mothers and daughters. So a daughter could be told? Meaning my mother had signed this vow—she couldn’t have rented Room 10 without signing—and must have known she was allowed to talk about the house’s founder.
Yet she’d never told me about Catherine de Barra. Not once.
“Another problem?” Ms. Ballantine said. My pen was poised above the paper, but I hadn’t moved. She may have thought I was having another episode.
“No problem,” I said. I checked the last box.
Ms. Ballantine had me sign at the bottom of the sheet. “Thank you,” she said, pressing my vow to her chest as if relieved. It seemed to carry more weight than all the cash I’d paid her. Though it was odd she was so worried about filling the last room—couldn’t she have advertised it online and gotten a tenant in a snap?
“We were so happy when you called,” Ms. Ballantine added. “It’s rare when we have a legacy—and Dawn Tremper’s daughter? I can’t express what a surprise this was.”
So she did remember my mother. A pain pulsed in my center.
“What’s so surprising?” I asked. “I’ve known about this place my whole life.”
“Of course you have. We didn’t expect that Miss Tremper would”—she took a long moment to search for the word—“want her daughter here, after the way she left us.”
I could almost see my father at the gate, ruining everything. If not for him (and me), my mother might have stayed a whole year, or longer.
Ms. Ballantine went to the wall and retrieved a ring of keys from the highest hook. “Shall we?” she said.
We returned to the foyer, which she pronounced foy-yay. Halfway up the first flight of stairs was a girl scrambling to the next floor, but Ms. Ballantine’s shrill call made her stop.
“Miss Chaudhary, you have a moment, yes?”
The girl turned, and though it seemed as if she’d been in a rush, trying to sneak to the next landing before being spotted, she was all polite smiles when face-to-face. “Sure, Ms. B, what’s up? Oh, hi.” This part was directed down at me.
“This is Miss Tremper,” Ms. Ballantine answered for me. I was to be called the same thing my mother had been called, almost two decades ago. “Room Fourteen. Why don’t you show her up?”
“So it’s true,” the girl said. “We did get a new tenant.” She was looking right at me. Had we met before? She was taller than me and noticeably thinner, a detail I reacted to subconsciously by sucking in my stomach. She was also exceptionally pretty, all cheekbones and light in her eyes, a puff of dark hair to her shoulders, brown skin, a warm smile.
“Room Fourteen,” Ms. Ballantine repeated. The keys were still in her jeweled hand. She wouldn’t let me have them. “There won’t be an empty bed in the house tonight.”
A shadow passed over the girl’s face. “Sure, no problem.” Then, to me, “I’m Anjali. I’m on the fifth floor, same as you.” She bounded down the stairs for the keys (Ms. Ballantine gave them up).
“Nice to meet you,” I said. I told her she could call me Bina.
“Miss Chaudhary, a moment first?”
Anjali leaned in.
“Did you happen to see Miss Mathis today?”
There were some low words I didn’t catch, though I strained to, and then Anjali said, “I haven’t seen Monet anywhere, all day.” She was a bit colder as she said this, as if Monet weren’t someone she particularly liked.
Ms. Ballantine glanced anxiously at the front door. “We need everyone here.”
“I’m sure she’ll be back tonight,” Anjali said.
Ms. Ballantine said yes, surely she was right, and then she headed off, leaving me alone with Anjali at the bottom of the stairs.
Anjali’s face was gray for a long moment. Then it cleared. “Want me to help with that?” she asked.
I gathered my suitcase and lifted it onto the step above me. “I’m good.”
“Okay, if you’re sure. There’s no elevator, you know.” She started up and then stopped, because I wasn’t following. She’d caught me with my eyes on the photograph over the fireplace, trying to figure out why it had bothered me so much before. It was ordinary now. Subdued and barely even angry.
I didn’t go any closer.
“Hey,” she said. “I wouldn’t stand there so long if I were you.” She started bounding up the stairs, moving so fast I had to tear my eyes away to catch up.
━━━━━
We tromped up the multitude of steep stairs that twisted in a hard turn and had more twists the higher they climbed. I trailed Anjali, dragging the suitcase behind me.
Over her shoulder she asked, “So what brought you here? I ran away and couldn’t ever go back—New Jersey, not so far, but it’s not like I ever see anybody from home, so I’m safe here. You?” She said this so openly, stating it so plain, it stunned me.
“Upstate,” I said. “And I’m just visiting. I’m here for the month.”
She looked at me strangely, as if she didn’t believe I would possibly want to leave so soon. I kept climbing the steps behind her and didn’t offer more.
“So is that a black eye or what?” She slapped her hands over her mouth. “I can’t believe I asked that, I’m so sorry. It’s, like, sometimes I don’t think before I say stuff . . .”
“It’s fine.” A lie came to me on a wing, so simple. All the traveling must have tired me out. I was having trouble with the details. “I was attacked. They jumped out of nowhere and . . . you know.” Hold on. That lie was too close to the truth.
It was only the night before, but the whole way it had happened felt hazy and soft, the way things get when I’m drinking. Every so often, a precise image popped up. I could see a green sneaker with white laces in the air before my eyes, and then the sneaker blurred into an incoming missile, green and white, muddy and fast, connecting square with my face. That was only the beginning. I was cold again, like before. I saw tree branches, too many, cracking in a cascade as I slammed through. A part of the woods that was too dark, too thick, too remote from the road. Something going on with my ear, or inside it, this weird hum. My ankle giving out. Dry sandpaper covering my tongue. Pain in my ankle, and I sat down.
That was happening in real life. I was sitting on the stairs, and Anjali had stopped to survey me from a few steps above. Dust swirled in the air around the both of us.
“Are the stairs too much?” she asked.
“I need a second, that’s all,” I said.
“So you were mugged? That’s what happened?”
Yes, that sounded better. “They took all my money and this piece of jewelry of my mother’s. It was a black opal, very rare. I tried to fight, but . . .” Why had I mentioned the opal? Couldn’t I have lied about at least that? I stood up, alarmed. My ankle still hurt, faintly, and there was this strange whistling sound way back in my ears, a small windstorm caught in my head. I should have told her a roaring burn-down-the-forest lie instead of anything even connected to the truth.
“That sucks. Wait, what did they take again? An opal, you said?” She mentioned this pointedly, as if wanting me to say it again from my own mouth.
The black opal was no invention. It was the soft, dark, shining stone that my mother used to wear on her finger with the door closed, the one that barely even fit my thumb. She said she got it in the city, years and years ago, but she never said how she could afford such a thing, or from where. She wore it every once in a while, when we were alone, and kept it in the back of her top dresser drawer, wrapped in a plain blue cotton scarf that she once used to hold back her hair when she was cleaning the house. She’d joke around and call it her “schmatte,” which, in Yiddish, means rag. It was so ordinary, so unappealing, that no one would expect it was guarding something so priceless. So grand.
Then one day she said she couldn’t wear the opal anymore, it was too dangerous. Keeping it in the back of the dresser wrapped in the old rag wasn’t enough. She had to move it. I last saw it the night we buried it, and I caught it only through the shield of the clear plastic baggie, which fogged up its shine. My mother placed it in the hole she had dug. She dropped the earth back in the hole between the rows of tomatoes and smoothed the surface, and we arranged some ragged weeds and leaves overtop to disguise it. He didn’t help with the gardening. He’d never find it. My mother said we’d come back for it when we needed it, and this way we would always know where it was. The earth was warm and moist down in the depths of the hole. I felt it with my own hands.
“It was just something of my mom’s,” I told Anjali.
No robbers stole the opal from me. It was two and a half hours north of the city, where we left it. Buried deep in the ground.
A flicker crossed her face. “Never mind. So did they catch them?”
“Who?”
“The losers who mugged you and beat you up.”
“It was dark. I mean, it could have been anybody.”
“Too bad,” she said politely, as if she’d lost interest.
I’d lost the ability to make anything I was telling sound good.
We continued climbing the stairs in silence, and as we did the pictures that lined the walls stole my attention. Tarnished frames showcased posed black-and-white portraits of young women, girls all grouped together in tight-packed rows (kneeling on the floor, seated in chairs, standing), as if these were class photos. I recognized the room they were in by the furniture, which was shrouded in thick, mottled skin. Downstairs in the parlor, the velvet had been warm gold, but in the photographs it was dismal gray. In every image, from one to the next, she sat stiffly in her frame, on the wall above the girls. The gathering had the appearance of a solemn sorority, with Catherine de Barra herself as patron saint and reluctant queen.
The first photographs were labeled with months and years from the 1920s, and the decades inched forward as we climbed.
Then there it was, the one particular photograph I was holding my breath to find. The dates matched.
I spotted my mother at once, top row, perfect center, closest to the fireplace mantel and the frame. My mother was dark-lipped, hair bobbed and curling toward her chin. The image was in black and white, so I didn’t know what color her hair was that day. Catherine, hovering in the frame above her, was almost smiling. Almost. The picture was too small to make it out for sure.
I tried to look not at her and only at my mother, the one who mattered. There she was, immortalized with a knowing gaze, a sense of consciousness, as if I could lean my ear in close and she might speak. She was so unconditionally herself back then, and I wondered what that felt like. She was only nineteen there, two years older than I was now.
“Hey, c’mon already,” Anjali called. She was far above me—I hadn’t heard her climb.
I came around the bend to the topmost landing, where the stairs stopped.
“Okay, so this is it.” She showed off a wide, windowless space filled with towering piles of shoes. “This mess!” she said, kicking at a stray fuzzy slipper. “I keep telling them and telling them. It’s even worse on the fourth floor. Anyway, this is our common room, so you’ll have to learn to live with it.”
I walked the cleared pathway, trying to get my bearings. It was dark. It was hot. Floating flecks of dust gravitated to my mouth, and I had to spit some out.
The common room contained a few armchairs, an ironing board, a standing rack for drying clothes that was completely taken over by a war zone of underwire bras, and an open doorway leading to a shared bathroom. The bathroom was the only thing giving off much light, and when Anjali switched on an antique lamp, I had to blink at the sudden brightness. I sneezed.
“I know,” she said. “If you have a dust allergy, you’re cooked. At least in our rooms, we can open the windows.” There were four numbered doors on the walls of this center room, 11 to 14. The room my mother had, Room 10, was on the floor below this one.
Anjali was gazing at the door to Room 14.
She paused, without putting the key in the lock. She hovered outside the door, didn’t even touch it. “I guess this is your room now,” she said.
She didn’t have to say it: This was Lacey’s room. Or had been and wasn’t anymore.
Anjali slipped the key into the lock. But before she had the chance to turn it, the door opened by itself from the inside.
Anjali shrieked and grabbed me. I grabbed her back. The key ring flung itself onto the ground, clattering at our feet. Someone was in the open doorway.
I retreated and knocked over the bra tree until there was Anjali laughing and saying, “Oh, you scared us, Lacey. I didn’t know you’d still be in there. Didn’t you have to switch rooms?”
“Yeah, I’m on the second floor now. I forgot my plant,” the girl said. She was holding a sagging little fern in a plastic pot.
The girl was . . . Lacey? In the flesh?
Flashbangs of random thoughts went through me. She was a ghost. She was a figment of my imagination. She was a hallucination. But it really was Lacey—looking a lot like her mother, and perfectly alive even though her family had been mourning her downstairs. Her hair was braided and pulled back off her neck. She had intense eyes that skirted away from meeting mine. There was a sadness on her face that caught hold of me and reminded me of her father’s grip on my arm, so urgent.
“What”—I could barely find the words—“happened to you?”
Anjali patted my shoulder as if trying to comfort me. “Nothing happened. Her parents tried to get her to come home before it was time,” she said. “That’s all.”
“I guess I wasn’t ready,” Lacey said softly. She said it as if it had been out of her hands, some unspoken destiny she couldn’t fight and wouldn’t have dared to try.
Anjali said it differently. “Sometimes Ms. B helps us figure it out, and if she has to deal with our families or whatever, she deals with them.” There was a serene expression on her face, as if her own family had been dealt with.
“I saw your mom,” I told Lacey, “and your dad, and your sisters.”
She nodded and pruned off a shriveled brown leaf from the plant she carried.
“Did they tell you she died or something?” Anjali asked.
“Missing,” I said.
“I guess they didn’t check too closely,” Lacey said. “That was just old junk.”
“Stuff some girls didn’t want,” Anjali echoed.
“Random sweaters and things girls from before left behind . . .”
“That got stained or shrunk in the wash.”
“I think there was an old set of curtains in there.”
Anjali nodded to confirm.
“They saw what they needed to see,” Lacey said.
Anjali laughed. “You look like you saw a tarantula or something.” She pinched Lacey and let me witness the pinch. “See? She’s fine. She’s right here.”
“Who are you, anyway?” Lacey said to me. “Are you new?”
“You didn’t hear?” Anjali answered for me. “This is Bina. She like literally just got here.” She motioned to my crooked suitcase. “I guess she has your room now.”
Lacey didn’t acknowledge this or welcome me. She turned to Anjali. “That means there’s someone in every room.”
They met eyes for a long moment.
“Are there not enough seats at the dining room table or something?” I said, breaking the silence.
Anjali laughed, an uncomfortable too-loud snort. Lacey said only, “Or something.”
Anjali leaned closer to Lacey and lowered her voice. “Ms. B was asking about Monet. Was she out again last night?”
Lacey confirmed this. “Pretty sure.” Her plant quivered in her arms, even though her face was perfectly still.
“Where is she going?” Anjali whispered, a note of judgment in her voice. “I don’t get it, she’s such a—” She stopped talking because Lacey was eyeing me, as if to keep her in check. I was thinking of all the ways people had talked about me, at home, must have still been talking, lighting up phones, eviscerating me, setting me to ruins, saying this, saying that, and all the more after last night. It made me not want to ask, made me not want to know. A girl should be allowed a fresh take when you meet her for the first time, shouldn’t she? She shouldn’t have to step into a room with her shoulders already burdened by old mistakes and the names she was called before. If that was the case, no one would want me here.
Anjali leaned back and set her voice to a normal volume. “Anyway, see you later. What are you wearing, that white dress?”
Lacey said she was. She’d made sure it wasn’t with the stuff her family took. She headed off down the stairs.
I would have asked more questions maybe, but I was so struck by the room. My room. My very own. I peered into the doorway at a plain, tightly bound bed that took up most of the space. Anjali and I both squeezed into the room, so small I could spread my arms and press a hand on each wall. Three walls were white. The fourth was red brick, coarse against my fingers. Everything in the room was clean, as if no one had lived here before, though Lacey had, as recently as that morning.
I wanted to close the door right then, I wanted to be alone between the tight four walls, unbearably hot because there wasn’t an air conditioner or a fan, but Anjali lifted the window for some air and then perched on the end of the small bed.
“You’ll need those,” she said, pointing at the dropped keys on the floor.
I retrieved them and took a closer look. There was a room key and a second, smaller key, together on one ring, and that was all. Anjali explained that there was no key for the front door. Past curfew it would be secured, and no banging or begging on the intercom would allow us in. We never needed a key for it in daytime.
“What’s this one for then?” I asked. It wasn’t big enough for a full-size door, and it was murky gold and grimy, as if a hundred sets of hands had gotten their grease all over it.
“The little baby key gets you into the private garden. It’s for our house only. No one else is allowed in.”
This was my own set of keys, proof I lived somewhere, on my own—and it was a whole house, gated and tall, with its own garden. I closed my fist, and the keys were warm, and weightier than expected.
“Yeah, so if you need anything, let me know,” Anjali said. “I’m across the way, the door that doesn’t have all the shoes piled up in front of it.”
“Not the shoe monster,” I said. “Got it.”
“The party’s at eight. You’re going, right? Of course you’re going. You have to go. We can’t have it without you.”
“What am I supposed to do, just meet everyone?”
“Yeah,” she said. Her eyes flickered. “Everyone. Be sure to dress up. She likes it that way.”
Ms. Ballantine did seem overly formal. I was standing, and Anjali was still sitting, and she wouldn’t leave. Maybe she was trying to be my friend. I’d forgotten what that was like.
I cleared my throat, trying to make it obvious that I wanted the room to myself, when I noticed it, on the wall behind her: a random extra door carved into the wall, blocked by my bed, painted the same white as the wall.
“What’s that?” I said.
“Huh?” she said, and turned.
The door was short—it came up to my neck, and I was only five feet tall. Even the knob was painted white, as if to blend in with the wall. In order to open the door, we would have had to move the entire bed, an impossible task with two people crowding the space on the floor.
“Hey! My room doesn’t have one of those!” Anjali said. Before I knew it, she’d reached out to take the knob.
Something came over me. I lunged, grabbing her hands, grabbing them hard, holding her back by the wrists.
I had a frantic, furious need to do it. On the other side of that door was nothing I could let her or anyone see—I felt that in my bones. It was mine and mine only. This was my room and not hers, and that was my door.
I couldn’t say why I kept her there, trapped, all so she wouldn’t touch a doorknob, but there was nothing else I could have done. Her wrists were so thin, the veins and arteries and bloodwork palpable under her skin, and I was holding so tight. My nails dug in. I could have snapped her wrists like twigs, and it was something I thought about: how strong and capable you can feel one moment, how small and powerless the next.
I didn’t know how long I held on, but when I finally came to, Anjali was backed up against the dresser, shielding her wrists. Red marks peeked out from where she tried to cover them.
“What’s wrong with you?” she said.
“I don’t know. I’m so sorry.” And I was, but there was a tiny fizz of energy in the depths of my chest, and it bristled. Burned. If this was an episode like the one I’d had downstairs in Ms. Ballantine’s office, I wasn’t sure what to make of myself. But I couldn’t let her know that. “Are you okay? I’m really, seriously so sorry.”
“The door can’t even open,” she said. “The bed’s like right in front of it.”
“I know.”
She inched away from the dresser, careful to avoid touching me. The last thing she said to me before she left the room was, “I hope you like it here.”
Faintly, in the back of my ears, I heard a hum.
Now I was alone. I told myself it didn’t matter if my neighbors hated me—that was nothing new. I told myself it didn’t matter if they all talked about me before the party even started. This room was mine, and I needed to unpack and stake my claim. All that mattered was the fact that I was here, in this house, having this chance to be someone far away from who I was at heart. I might grow a new heart here. I might change into an entirely new person.
I zipped open the suitcase to see what my mother had packed inside. There were tightly rolled coils of shirts and jeans and socks and pajamas, her signature style of arranging her dresser drawers. There were toiletries in zipped pouches. My prescriptions. My vitamins. My toothbrush. My phone adapter.
She’d thought of everything . . . except something formal that I could pull off as a cocktail dress, because why would she think I’d need that?
I was about to close the suitcase when the note slipped out. She’d carefully folded it around my hairbrush and written it small, in her rounded block letters that were so much like mine I should make a conscious effort to change my handwriting.
Bean: This is temporary. Give the girls some time to cool down. It’s their house and you know I always try to respect that. I’m not choosing them over you. I’m giving you
I didn’t read the rest.
At the head of the bed was the window. I shoved it open as wide as it would go. Immediately off the window ledge was the fire escape, a black iron cage that gave me a miniature balcony, if I wanted to use it. Down below were the streets of the city, filled with millions of strangers who I hadn’t disappointed yet. I craned my head out the window, and I breathed in the air.
I reached out my arm—I didn’t like heights and didn’t want to risk the rest of me—and I opened my hand, and I let the note from my mother go.
The moment passed, and in the quiet of a summer city afternoon, reality set in. My mother didn’t know where I was. This was a first in our relationship, unknown territory. If anyone could understand wanting to be in this city, wanting to claw through the sidewalk to set roots here, anyone on this Earth, it would have been her.
Yet she was no longer the same girl who’d dangled her legs off that fire escape, and she wasn’t the same woman who’d grabbed everything she owned and flagged down strangers in their cars to rescue herself and her daughter. She wasn’t brave, and she wasn’t trying to be somebody, not anymore. This was worse than when she converted and bent in the pew to pretend to pray. I barely recognized her lately, and we had almost the same face.
Didn’t she remember running? Didn’t she remember all the things she said to me pre–Blue Mountain Road, pre-sisters, pre-grace, pre-Christmas, pre-settling, pre–giving in? Back then, the window we’d had to escape was so small, and it had closed tight. But not for me. I made it. I made it out, to New York City.
Here was a vow, and this one was for myself:
Like Lacey, I would find a way to stay.