That evening I tried to forget what came before and only think about what might come now, tonight. I dropped the black-and-blue dress over my head and let it fall down my body. It was cool to the touch, its outside slick with shine, the inside velvet-soft. The zipper rippled against my hip, a faint scritch-scratch on skin.
There was a mirror on the wall of my room, perched high enough for a face. If I were taller, it would have shown my neck and shoulders, but at my height, it sliced off my chin. The reflection showed a sweaty nest of frizzed-out hair, a purple eye, a scabbed lip, two tomato-flushed cheeks. When I stood on the desk chair to get a view of the dress, the mirror lost my head and stopped at my knees. I became a body only. I could have been anyone, even Monet, my mysterious downstairs neighbor the others were whispering about, the one so generous with the contents of her closet.
The dress slithered around my legs, pooling over my feet. I stepped off the chair. The dress may have been too long, made for a tall person, but if I kept track of the hem when I was walking and didn’t trip, maybe I’d blend in downstairs.
In minutes my hair was up, my face cleaned and re- covered with makeup, and I headed down. As I descended, I could hear the chatter coming from below. It lifted through the stairwell, a scatter of conversation and laughter. Every girl in the house must have been there.
I paused on the second-floor landing, hidden by the angle of the wall. The last time I’d crashed a party was a nightmare, a mistake. I pictured all the tenants of Catherine House turning on me, their frenzied faces forming a circle around me. When I ran, their arms waving sticks through the corridors, chasing me down all the stairs and out the front door, shoving me through the gate onto the street, howling like they were no longer human. Even the air smelled like it was happening again, sour with beer and sweat, warm and earthy, like a mouthful of dirt.
I couldn’t escape. I’d brought it here with me. If I closed my eyes, I would see it, as if it had never stopped and the night didn’t end.
I turned to go back. All I wanted was to close myself behind the door of my little room.
I took a step up, but something caught my attention.
The Catherine House girls in the closest posed portrait, center in a series from the 1920s, seemed familiar for a moment. Only, I hadn’t studied the portraits from this decade. I’d started paying more attention only as I climbed and as they became more recent and might be a group containing my mother.
Now, certain faces stood out. A couple of them were ones I swore I’d seen before. One of them had dark, distinct freckles, as if someone had taken ink to her face. I leaned in for a better look.
At the same time, a girl rushed up the stairs around the corner and almost slammed into me. Dark-clothed, dark-haired, pale-faced beneath the swift slash of her bangs. I knew who she was. Gretchen, the very first girl I’d met here.
She cast an indignant snarl at me. Her chest was heaving, and clasped to it, again, was the gold-bound book. “You’re late,” she snapped. “You almost made me climb all the way up there to get you.”
“Why were you coming to get me?”
“Anjali didn’t want to. Ms. B made me volunteer. What’s taking you so long, anyway? It’s almost nine.” Then she noticed the dress I had on, its shoulder strap slipping fast, and her expression sharpened.
“I was getting dressed,” I said. In truth, I’d slept away most of the afternoon and into the evening. I hadn’t eaten—I couldn’t remember the last time I’d had solid food. Then there was the door in the wall. The stairs. The bricked-up passage—to where, and what? Sliding on the dress had distracted me from everything, and Gretchen had distracted me from the portraits on the stairwell wall.
“C’mon already,” Gretchen said. She had my arm and was pulling me down the stairs. “This party wouldn’t be happening if it wasn’t for you. You’re the guest of honor.”
“I am?” I said, uneasy. She’d muttered those last words out of the corner of her mouth, as if she didn’t want to say them.
“Don’t pretend you don’t like it.”
“Why are you bringing a book to a party?” I asked. She was even more antisocial than me if she planned to sit in a corner and read.
“I’ve read it eleven times already. I practically know every word.” She said this defensively, as if well aware I wouldn’t get it, and as soon as we hit the bottom of the stairs, she let go of my arm and headed for the chaise lounge. To anyone who would listen she announced, “I found her. She didn’t jump out a window or anything. She just takes forever to get dressed.”
No one really responded.
There was a chatter of voices, faint music coming from somewhere I didn’t see. I entered the parlor and felt a sinking sensation under my toes as I stepped onto the carpet. The gathering was quieter than I expected, but still intimidating, with a room full of a dozen or so young women. They all showed an awareness that I’d entered, and a few girls smiled at me, though they went back to their conversations. No one approached. Ms. Ballantine didn’t swoop in. I stood in a pool of my awkwardness, soaking in it. Minutes passed. I didn’t understand how I was the guest of honor for anything.
Scanning the room, I found Anjali. She was smiling and talking with her hands, deep in conversation with a few other girls, so graceful in a pale-yellow dress that dipped down her back. There was a faint discoloration visible on her wrists—the red marks I’d made had darkened—and I only hoped no one noticed. I found Lacey, wearing off-white with a high neck and no sleeves, the toned muscles in her arms showing, but she didn’t meet my eyes. Even she was smiling, but I was too far away to see any expression beyond that on her face.
I would have gone over to compliment their dresses, I would have joined the conversation, I would have, but I stayed put.
The entire front parlor was furnished in that collection of gold-velvet claw-footed pieces from another century, same as in the photos on the stairwell and matching the chair I’d sat in when I arrived. A faint scent rose from the furniture, from its golden, lumpy skin. Fabric freshener, cloying with gardenias, and beneath that, mildew. The gold-velvet couch, low and deep like a boat, fit four girls, and four girls exactly. They nodded at me but did not get up. I found a space by the wall and fiddled with the dress straps that kept falling from my shoulders. The shadow there was cooler, out of the way. There was no central air in the room, and a trickle of sweat ran down my back. A ceiling fan whipped in vicious circles, raining down gusts of warm wind.
Ms. Ballantine saw me and offered a tight smile, but she didn’t make a move to cross the room. If this party was meant to welcome me into the house, wouldn’t Ms. Ballantine have clinked a glass and called out my name? Or something? She only kept an eye on me. A number of the girls did, subtly, sideways. I adjusted my shoulder strap again.
Around a grand piano, lid up and keys quiet, a few more girls gathered, whispering, their backs to where I stood. Then the knot of girls opened—whispers ceasing—and a head lifted from the rest.
I knew that girl.
How she’d fooled me.
She had known I was trying to find this house, and she could have easily pointed me in its direction from the start, but instead she played games. She lived here, at Catherine House, all along. Now the girl from Waverly and Waverly was dressed for the party, with lips dark and eyes black-lashed, daggered at the edges. The shirt she wore was black, the neckline low, with pants instead of a skirt. All of that made sense. But her hair . . .
It had been short when we spoke on the sidewalk, I was sure of it. Now it was lavender-tinged, shoulder-coasting, noticeably transformed. Was it her?
She didn’t acknowledge me at first. What she did was play with a piece of hair by her ear, pulling it back so the shiny lavender locks revealed underneath, tucked away, that her hair was shorter and dark as before. She tugged it free, let me notice, then tucked it back in. Something inside me swiveled and swerved. Something shook loose.
It was the same girl. Only now she was wearing a wig, and for some reason she wanted me to know it. No one had to tell me her name was Monet.
She made a show of looking me up and down, taking in my dress, so I had to acknowledge, had to let her know I knew.
Thank you, I mouthed. For the dress. I didn’t have a way to ask how she could have possibly known I’d needed one. Did Ms. Ballantine tell her? Did she guess?
She shrugged, as if to say it was nothing.
All this happened from across the large room, amid chatter, glasses clinking. Girls and furniture and the body of the piano stood between us, but it felt like she was huddled up next to me at the wall, my mouth to her ear.
I tore my eyes away and edged, from my spot against the wall, closer to one of the short display tables. Each dark, oiled wood table was hip-high. Displayed on lace doilies were so many random objects. Souvenirs. Artifacts. I let my fingers dance over a vanity set made of silver, showing a silver-plated brush, mirror, and two fan-shaped barrettes, and a small silver comb. The comb had the tiniest teeth, sharper than expected. I was poking one into my index finger when I was interrupted.
A blond girl pushed her face into my view. The first thing I noticed after her overwhitened smile was her bright hair, which seemed to be everywhere. She was holding a small glass plate of sweating grapes and cubed cheese, and pushing it in my face. Apparently the food was meant for me.
“Take it before I drop it,” she said. “Monet said I should give this to you as an apology for this afternoon, but for what? What did she do?”
I balanced the plate in my hand but didn’t try anything. The grapes were dripping with condensation; a puddle pooled under them. I couldn’t bear to put one in my mouth.
I remembered what Monet had said to me on the street, only hours before: that I held my cards close, and that I should keep doing it.
“I can’t say,” I said. “It’s something between her and me.” I liked the way that sounded, coming out of my mouth, about her. A blooming secret I’d created this moment.
The blond girl blinked a few times. I’d rattled her.
“I’m Bina, by the way,” I said. “I moved in today.”
“Yeah, like we don’t know. I’m Harper, third floor.”
“Fifth,” I said, wondering if it meant something in the house, the floor your pocket-size room was on, if that would determine a thing out of my control.
“Yeah, we know,” Harper said.
So they knew my name and my room, but they didn’t know anything else about me. My makeup was fresh, though the heat made me worry I’d sweat it off. I could say anything at all happened to me: accident by car or skateboard, mugging like I’d told Anjali, even a simple clumsiness, like I’d walked into a door.
But Harper didn’t mention it. Maybe she was being polite.
“How long have you been staying here?” I asked her.
“A while,” she said vaguely. She averted her eyes to a gold tasseled cushion on the couch.
I wanted to ask what brought her here—had she gotten in trouble, and what kind? Was she hiding from something, and if so what, or who? But she didn’t seem particularly bothered and told me without prompting.
“It was my stepdad,” she said, gazing almost blankly back at me. “He tried to murder me, so I tried to murder him. It was a whole thing.”
“What?” I said, startled.
She popped a grape into her mouth, chewed, swallowed, popped another. “You were wondering why I came to Catherine House, right? Sob story, blah-blah-blah, he-said-she-said and all that. Who knows what happened anymore? It was such a long time ago.”
She seemed about my age, but she was acting like this was something that had happened years ago.
“But I’m safe here. We all are.” She paused, and a flare of awareness shot through her eyes. “Even you.”
Now I was the one to wonder what she knew about me. This room must have been clogged with secrets, but I could focus only on my own.
Ms. Ballantine drifted by, and Harper’s face went studiously blank again, flat as an unmarked board. “Love the dress,” Harper said loudly. “So shiny. Where’d you get it?”
My body did the betraying. Before a conscious thought entered my mind, my head was turned toward the piano, to seek her out. She was talking to one of the other girls, her back to us, the line of her long neck making me so curious. The wig seemed like another game she was playing, maybe even for my benefit. What were her secrets? What was her story?
“Hello,” Harper said. “Your dress? Where’d you get it?”
“I bought it,” I said. “At a store?”
“Right,” Harper said. “I’ve heard of those things. Stores.” It was plain who the dress belonged to, I realized, it was recognized and known, and she had been testing me. I’d failed without even trying.
I’d noticed Lacey crossing the room near us. “Hey,” I called to her. “Wait.”
She kept going on her way to the finger foods, but I reached out to touch her arm. It was so cool.
“I’m in Room Fourteen,” I said, once she stopped moving.
“I know,” she said. “I saw you upstairs, remember?”
“Did you ever,” I started. Harper was listening intently, watching my mouth. I leaned closer to Lacey for a crumb of privacy. “What’s up with that door?” I finally asked, unsure how to put it all to words, what I’d felt when I reached the top of those stairs, my hands against brick, my eye to the dark and impassable crevice. Had it even happened at all?
“What door?” She spoke far louder than my liking.
“The door in the wall. The one behind the bed?”
Not that many hours had passed, but the sadness in Lacey’s eyes had faded—though a shadow was still there, something unspeakable. Harper had a similar shifting shadow in her eyes. Gretchen had one. Even Anjali did. Did all the girls carry an unspoken heavy thing they wouldn’t let out, even when they were smiling?
“Oh that,” Lacey said. “That’s just a storage closet. I found an old vacuum cleaner in there and a bunch of hangers.” She said this with a straight face. She didn’t seem like a liar. And yet.
“You know what, Bina?” Harper said, cutting in. “We were all wondering how you found out about Catherine House anyways. Like, it’s not advertised. You have to really go poking around, or know someone who knows. But you showed up out of nowhere. What’s that about?”
“I do. Know someone who knows. My mom. She stayed here a long time ago, like eighteen years ago. She had Room Ten. I wanted that room, same as hers, but Ms. Ballantine said—”
Nerves got me talking, but I cut myself off, because they both seemed so surprised. I’d been warned to hold things close, and here I was talking about my mother.
“Eighteen years?” Harper said. “That’s so . . . specific.”
I shrugged. That was how long it had been.
Harper shot a look at Lacey. “Eighteen years,” she repeated, with emphasis.
“Interesting,” Lacey said. That small admission made her pay true attention to me for the first time. She noticed my black eye blotted down to lavender, my broken lip painted over in an attempt to hide the cut, the cuticles I bit to shreds on my fingers, the chipped nail polish from weeks ago, the sandals that didn’t match my dress with the hem too long that I’d stepped on again. She noticed.
Did it bother them that my mother had been a tenant? Other girls were peeking over. The girl with the dotting of freckles all across her face—Ms. Ballantine had called her Miss Tedesco—was watching me openly. For a moment, I thought she was the same girl from the 1920s photograph on the stairwell. But she wasn’t. She was the girl who asked about ice. That’s who she was.
Monet was the only one in the room not in the least concerned with what I was doing. She was standing before the fireplace, gazing up at the framed photograph of Catherine de Barra, the house’s grim namesake.
All those eyes on me created a desperate need to scratch at my hip bone. The fancy silver antique comb I’d swiped from the display table and slipped in through the side zipper of my dress was tickling my skin, its teeth nipping where it was tucked into my underwear, right at the waistband. One of the teeth was especially digging in. And now it was all I could feel, it was all I could think about, and I had to do it. It couldn’t wait. I had to.
With slow movements, trying to be casual, I gave in and scratched. Harper and Lacey didn’t seem to notice, and the girl with the freckles didn’t seem to notice, but across the room someone had turned, someone had stopped studying the portrait on the wall, someone saw me scratch, and this someone smirked.
To cause a distraction, I reached out to the closest item on the closest display table as if to admire it. I didn’t care what my hand found. It happened to be a paper fan, purple- flowered, delicately painted, the surface oily and slick.
As soon as my hand was on it, Gretchen was beside me. She snatched the fan from my fingers and set it back on its bed, made from a yellowing lace doily. “I know it’s a hundred degrees in here, but I told you not to play with them,” she said. “All of these were Catherine’s. These were gifts from her boyfriends, and souvenirs from her dad, when he traveled the globe. They were here when she died, they’re here still, and we’re not supposed to mess with them.” She stood guard between me and the table.
“Sorry,” I said. “I forgot.” The itch had stopped. The comb in my waistband was tingly against my skin now, a delicious sensation.
Gretchen smoothed the doily and was about to step away when I asked her: “How do you know all that? Who told you?”
“Catherine,” she said. I immediately thought of Ms. Ballantine and the phone call.
But Gretchen didn’t mean anything weird. She lifted the book—she had it even now, concealed behind her back. Its gold cover was satiny, sewn together. Many corners of its pages had been turned down.
“Catherine wrote down every gift anyone ever gave her,” she said.
“Really?” I said. “In that book?”
She nodded, fever spots spreading on her cheeks.
“Catherine de Barra did,” I repeated, sensing the photograph looming behind me. “That was hers? Where’d you get it? Can I see?”
“Not on your life,” Gretchen said. “This is her private diary. But if you’re wondering where that fan came from, imperial Japan. Her dad brought it back after he was away for four months. He came home with it in December of 1917.” She closed her eyes as if rummaging around her memory for the exact date, as if I cared to hear it. “The thirteenth. A Thursday. She thought he’d left her to die in this house all alone. She would wait at that window, watching the gate, to see if he showed.” She pointed into the foyer, at the stained-glass sliver of a window beside the front door, just narrow enough for a girl to stand, her eyes peeking through a shard of blue glass, or a shard of green, of gold, of warm red, depending on how tall she was.
“What do you know about how she died?” The question was out before I knew I was about to ask it.
“Catherine?” Harper said, butting in, her mouth twitching.
“Ms. Ballantine said something about an ‘incident.’”
Gretchen shook her head. She knew, and she wasn’t telling.
“We can talk about that, can’t we?” I asked. “Do you know what happened?”
Harper’s eyes went wide. A girl on the couch bolted upright.
“Don’t you know?” Harper said. She paused. “You know about the roof, right? Your mom . . . I mean, she must have told you.”
Lacey nodded. “If her mom was really here eighteen years ago, she would know.”
A crawling feeling. My head nodding. She told me. I did know. I was only checking, asking like that. Of course I knew.
I looked to the portrait, I couldn’t help it. Monet had gotten much closer. She was tall, much taller than me, so when she reached the lip of the fireplace mantel, she was a whole head and shoulders above it and level with Catherine’s posed feet.
Monet was close enough now to touch the glass with her finger. I wanted to ask her if the picture of Catherine had changed at all since she’d started watching it. If right then, before her very eyes, the mouth had shifted into a sinister smile. Just to see if I was alone in what I saw before, all alone.
Monet didn’t appear to be the least bit surprised or frightened. I knew it then. She couldn’t see the picture moving at all. That was only for me.
All along I’d been trying to avoid it, but now I had to see.
Catherine had a stern set to her mouth, her lips tight and flat like a ruler. There was no smile. Maybe there never had been a smile. Her hands were still clasped on her lap, in a knot above her knees. I knew I should leave her be.
Yet I found myself moving. My feet barely had to do the walking—I was pulled by a string. I was wheeled on a dolly. I was there before I knew it, at the mantel, pushing past Monet to take the space front and center, my neck lifting, my eyes gazing up. Catherine wasn’t scowling anymore. Her eyes were deep black pools, perfectly serene. Her mouth was loose and coming open, a hint of teeth showing. There was no mist or fog—it was all so clear. On her faint gray face was a new and undeniable grin, a hard beam of light that landed straight on me.
My ears stopped taking in sound.
I saw Catherine de Barra herself, there inside her frame facing the foyer, I saw a ripple come over the image, a faint blur as she shifted in her chair. She was closer to the front of the frame, closer to the glass. She’d adjusted the way she was sitting so I could see it better. See what was on her hand.
There, protruding from her finger, was a dark object, glimmering so brilliantly that I almost thought I could reach through glass and time and remove it.
In the photograph, she was wearing the black opal, the very one. That was how my mother had found it, eighteen years ago—it hadn’t come from the city outside; it had come from this house.
Black opals are beautiful, but some myths say they can also be terrible, even cursed. They are as shiny and lovely as they are said to be angry and foul of mood. I’d read all about them, and I didn’t believe a thing about their bad hearts. People were ignorant, afraid. I’d touched one, held it, tried it on the once, and I knew it to be good. I’ve read that they are also as distinct as a handprint, no two the same. Before we buried it, my mother would remove it from the back of her dresser drawer, where it was camouflaged by her ugliest underwear. She would unwind it from the plain blue schmatte and let me watch as she slipped it on her ring finger, where a wedding band would go, and she would say she was alive today because of it, and let’s never forget that.
I never did. I committed it to memory. I dreamed of it, sometimes, even after we moved away.
And so, I would have known it anywhere. I lifted my finger to the glass, and Catherine de Barra’s finger, on the other side of the glass, reached out to touch mine. Her eyes sparked and seemed to contain a thousand different colors at once. The black of her irises was only a trick—inside was everything.
A hand landed on my shoulder. I broke my stare at the portrait and turned, an insistent ringing in my ears.
Ms. Ballantine had come up behind me. Her face had changed, softening, the apples of her cheeks glowing.
Everyone was looking—more at Catherine than at me. I’d awoken something inside the picture, and now everyone in the room noticed. Maybe they saw the colors swirling in the blacks of her eyes and felt their hearts beating in a way that was urgent and right.
“We were hoping, weren’t we, girls? We were all hoping,” Ms. Ballantine said. She squeezed my shoulder and would not let go. “Welcome.” A true smile broke open on her face, as if she’d been holding it in for such an excruciatingly long time, yellow teeth exposed and not even caring I could see them.
I’d proven myself. I’d shown I was meant to be in this house, as my mother had been almost two decades ago. Ms. Ballantine saw me in a new light. Everyone did.
“We have everyone we need now,” Ms. Ballantine announced to the others as they gathered closer, wrapping around me in a tight ring. “She’s the one we were waiting for. She’s here.”
━━━━━
Time turned sticky. Time spilled slowly forward. Molasses. There was champagne, and there was wine, though most of us were underage. Ms. Ballantine looked the other way. There was loud laughter, dancing, spilling champagne and wine and crushed cubes from an endless supply of ice. I met the other girls, each one, even if there were too many names to remember and I couldn’t recall who I’d met already, and heard the reasons that brought them here to rent rooms. Some had run away, and others had been kicked out. Some were hiding from mistakes that felt too heavy to confront. No one could tell me exactly how many weeks they’d been here, how many months, only that it had been a long time. The faces and hair colors and moving mouths blended together after a while. Some of the girls seemed dressed for another time, as if this were a costume party and we didn’t all get the memo. Others wore tattered dresses, as if they owned only a single one. I noticed these things, but none of it mattered, really. They all wanted me here. No one was running me out of the house for crashing their celebration—no one.
There was a moment when it seemed like more than fourteen of us had come to claim the remaining empty chairs and openings on the furniture, that when there was nowhere left to sit, young women pressed in around the piano, they lined the standing shelf where the cold drinks were served, they occupied any gap they could. I even thought I spotted a young version of my mother, at the back of the crowd, so short she was squeezed between two shoulders, but it was only the gold-framed mirror mounted on the wall, a quick flash of my own reflection. I appeared so giddy when I saw myself, so alive.
Maybe I should have understood what was wanted of me—why everyone would welcome me in so enthusiastically, what kind of circle I was closing by being the last girl. It was assumed I knew, because my mother must have told me.
I acted like I did know. I figured it would become clear to me sooner or later.
When the candles were brought out, and the party moved out to the garden, I followed at the tail end of the crowd, not sure what was happening but swept away and willing to swallow my questions. Ms. Ballantine led the procession out the front door and down the stoop, through the tall iron gate and onto the sidewalk, and then through another gate beside the house, where it was dark and smelled, strangely, a lot like home. This was the private garden space, locked to our neighbors and tourists alike. Here, she said, we would pay our respects under open air.
It seemed more choreographed than an impromptu visit could be, and when we had walked in a line through the gated space to form a circle in the darkness, I began to have an inkling.
I was the only one who hadn’t known we’d end up here. My candle flickered. The faces of the girls shown in that flicker were solemn, full of concentration, but never confused, never uncertain.
I got distracted keeping the flame out of my hair, which had come loose, so the flyaways were everywhere. It was too dark to see our city garden, how big it was, what was planted, if it had trees and how tall. I could smell the plants and sensed myself surrounded by their not-unpleasant muggy heat. There was soft, yielding dirt under my sandals instead of flat concrete. There were small spots of light from our candles, wobbling and fluttering in the night air like fireflies.
Ms. Ballantine clapped her hands, and we quieted. The glow of her candle made the jewelry on her fingers shriek with light. “Now we are all here,” she said—and I sensed her nodding in my direction, though I could barely see the shadowed movement—“and now that she’s awake and listening, we will try to reach Catherine, to see what she wants of us, to see how we can help her, and if she’ll let those of us leave who want to go.”
This set off some faint murmurs near me, a flurry of attention, girl to girl.
Ms. Ballantine clapped again, and the girls stopped whispering, chastised. “First, the offerings.”
I kept myself back as one by one the girls approached a dark space at the center of our ring. They seemed to be leaving items on a raised ledge of some kind, a tall stone, and, as they did, whispering a message, saying a thank-you. I couldn’t follow the words exactly. In the glow of the candles, I thought I caught a shiny coin, a souvenir yellow taxicab, a candy necklace, a bottle-opener keychain.
Soon it was my turn, but no one had warned me or prepared me to take part.
“What am I supposed to do?” I whispered to the girl next to me. It was Gretchen, who only shoved me forward, and then after her, Harper, who gave me a gentler nudge. Ms. Ballantine waved an arm to usher me to the center, and so I stood there, the others all around me. I found the monument and put my hand on it, touching the offerings.
Leaning in close, I found what appeared to be a dark hole in the ground right beside the monument. I couldn’t sense or see a bottom. The light of my candle didn’t reach that far.
I had no pockets, no bag or purse. All I had was the comb I’d stolen from the parlor—and maybe it was sloppy of me to pull it out, maybe I would regret it in daylight, but it was all I had to give.
“I’m sorry I took it,” I whispered to the dark, unknowable space at my feet, as if Catherine were listening and might understand.
There was a hush, and then a few mutters I couldn’t make out, but no one called me on it. I stepped back into the ring of candlelight, where I’d been before, the comb no longer tickling my waistline. I felt empty.
“Now let’s listen,” Ms. Ballantine said. She closed her eyes, and the fire danced on her eyelids. It danced over everyone’s eyelids but my own, because the whole time my eyes were open. Then across the way, I noticed another pair of eyes that did not close—Monet’s.
The others listened. The tenants and Ms. Ballantine listened, and Monet and I fake-listened, but there was nothing to decipher, nothing to translate, nothing whatsoever to hear. Quiet blanketed the garden, as if a whole city weren’t on the other side of that gate.
After a time, Ms. Ballantine sighed, which indicated the listening time was over. Her shadow in the night seemed deflated, thinner and more bent than before. Had she expected her ghost to talk out loud, in front of everybody? Perform for us?
“I do apologize,” she said. Disappointment tinged her voice. Now her candle flame stayed away from me—as if avoiding even touching where I stood.
Murmurs. Rumblings. A few hushed complaints. Then a hand—I wasn’t sure whose—squeezing my own as if I needed comfort.
“Thank you,” Ms. Ballantine said to us all. “Thank you for trying. It’s been eighteen years exactly, to the month, and with Miss Tremper now here, I must have thought . . . But I was mistaken.” She stopped, fumbled, and was quieter when she next spoke. “She’ll show herself to us another time.”
She blew out her candle. The girl with the freckles—at my elbow, I hadn’t noticed her before—did, too, with a hard hiss of breath.
Eighteen years, Ms. Ballantine had said. That was the summer my mother lived here and may have stood in this very circle holding her candle flame and listening for the dead. Another thing she’d never thought to share with me.
The circle disbanded. Whatever magic had electrified the parlor and set us off drinking and dancing had fallen flat outside. I wasn’t so special anymore, was I? I glimpsed Ms. Ballantine heading for the gate. Girls followed, until only a handful of us remained. What was supposed to have happened? Why did I feel like I’d let everyone down?
“Should we head in?” one of the girls asked. “It’s almost midnight.”
“That’s it? It’s over?” someone else said. “Ms. B?”
“She left,” I said, speaking up for the first time.
The garden was set between buildings, and directly above it was the night sky. For a moment, the rooflines overhead turned jagged, like mountains, and that was familiar to me, that was something I knew. I could have closed my eyes and transported my mind back to where I started, but I didn’t want that. I refused.
“What’s the point of you, anyway?” a girl shot out from the darkness. “I thought you’d come for a reason. I thought, with you here, something would change. But nothing changed.”
She was a vaguely familiar face, but I couldn’t recall her name. “What do you mean?” I asked. “If you don’t like it here, why don’t you go live somewhere else?”
“What did you just say to me?” She got up in my face. She seemed furious, buoyed by it as if whatever had happened with the candles had been her last straw.
Monet intervened with her body. All of a sudden, she was there in front of me, as if shadowing me all along. “She doesn’t have what we need, obviously. She can’t help us. Leave her alone.”
The other girl put up her hands in surrender, and then both of them—Monet and whoever among the tenants had been so upset at me—were gone.
A couple more girls filtered away until I had a small pocket of space of my own deep in the garden. I was near the offerings, near the black spot at my feet that felt like it went down and down until nothing could be made out below. Monet didn’t come back. I could hear the last few girls whispering, but no one stepped over. The drinks I’d had (how many? my mind scrubbed details) made me want to catch my balance, and I reached out a hand. It landed on the hard-edged stone of the monument.
My hand began to close. A growing warmth inside my fist. I’d left the comb—everyone had seen me leave it, even if they hadn’t recognized where it had come from—but that wasn’t what found itself captured in my grasp. I didn’t even know what it was at first, only that there was weight in my palm now. I’d taken something else, and it was the taking that calmed me.
It felt like a small oblong stone. Ordinary and cold at first. The band cut a groove into my flesh as I kept my fist shut. The longer I held it, the more the stone warmed. It sparked and hissed. Something inside it rumbled and spun. When I parted my fingers and peeked in, I understood immediately and at the same time didn’t think it possible. I kept my fist closed to conceal it. I was trying to make sense of it. The black opal ring had been buried in the ground upstate—deep in dirt; I’d seen it myself eight years ago. I’d witnessed my mother do the digging. Then how that patch among the rows of tomato plants had been paved over and covered in bricks to make a patio. How it was gone. Gone forever. We’d never rescued it.
Yet here it was. In my hand.
As soon as I squeezed it in recognition, there was a shout.
Harper was crying out, and she was pointing up into the sky.
“Look up,” I heard Gretchen say. “I can’t believe it, look up.”
I emerged from the dense section of the garden and went for where I could see beyond the tree covering. I craned my neck to the sky above, shifting grays on gray. Light caught my eye, and I followed it to the place everyone else was pointing. And there it was. There she was.
Five stories over the garden was a thing none of us would name. I saw it, and I couldn’t blame it on the champagne, or the wine, or the still-pounding spot in the back of my head making me dizzy, needing to lean on the closest girl.
I’m not sure how I imagined a spirit would manifest itself. This wasn’t the photograph reanimated, not a replica of the young woman who’d posed for the camera in the tall-backed chair. It wasn’t so much a girl as a light. The glow was almost blue. The shape of her—the sense she had a shape—was three-dimensional, but the backdrop of city lights could be made out through her.
She was at the edge of the rooftop. She wavered there for a long, heart-stopping moment. We all saw her up there—the few of us who stayed.
Then she disappeared entirely, blotted from the city sky as if a light had been switched off.
I felt a part of something, then. The small group of us together, barely allowing ourselves to move. Simply waiting. The stretch of rooftop—ours and all the other buildings around it—was empty, but we held still until we were sure it was over, and then we allowed ourselves to move again, to blink our eyes, to breathe.
“Did you see?” Harper asked. Her hand was in Gretchen’s. The others who remained were huddled close together, chins lifted.
I nodded. I had seen.
“That’s where she jumped from,” someone said. “It’s exactly like in the stories.”
“She didn’t jump.” Lacey spoke from out of nowhere. “She fell. It was an accident.”
“She knows we’re here,” Gretchen said. “She woke up. Something we did . . . something that happened tonight . . . it woke her.” She was staring with intensity and longing up at the roof. But I knew it was over.
I was afraid to slip the ring on my finger, so I kept my fist closed. Still, I felt it. The opal in my hand had gone calm, and cold.
Lacey was near me now, her breath on my bare shoulder and her off-white dress practically aglow. “You did it, didn’t you?” she said, finding my eyes in the dark as best she could.
I didn’t even open my mouth.
I found myself staring up at the empty edge. Only my first night, and this would be a thing I would not tell a living soul. No one outside this space would believe me; we would all keep this secret through our lifetimes plus ninety-nine years, unless we shared it with our daughters, or—maybe, not that they deserved it—our mothers.
I caught sight of Monet at the fringe of the remaining group. She’d removed the wig, and her ordinary hair stuck out, the silhouette of the cowlick giving her away.
“It’s almost midnight!” someone called, and a sense of urgency leaked from the others. Quickly, they blew out the last few candles. In a rush they headed out of the garden for the house’s gate and, beyond it, the towering stoop. “C’mon,” someone said to me, and I followed. “Somebody lock the garden,” I heard someone else say. I didn’t see who stayed behind to lock it up, but I lingered at the gate for a moment, gazing out. I almost wanted to follow the sidewalk and see where it took me, head to the west side or the east side, downtown or uptown, let myself be led by shifting signs parsed from the moving crowd or the slack summer wind. My mother used to do that in her stories.
But I couldn’t. It was near midnight. I had to go in.
It was when I was back in the house that it came over me, sudden and strong. Dizziness rushing in like a wave. Through it, faintly, I heard the grandfather clock toll twelve times. I felt funny, slippery, and it wasn’t the slinky dress. My stomach was a roller coaster riding up into my head. I needed a glass of water.
Should I have stayed upstate, where I was safe in the trees, safer than I realized, because it was what I knew?
I wasn’t sure how I ended up in my room. I must have been helped up all those stairs, as I had a faint memory of leaning my weight on someone else, being dragged up the last flight, almost carried. At one point, I was puking into a cold porcelain toilet and someone—it might have been Anjali—was carefully holding back my hair, giving me a sip of warm water from a plastic cup and wiping it when it dribbled down my chin. I didn’t even remember getting that drunk, but I must have. I was cold. Then warm, and covered by something soft. I think I asked for my mother, but she was so far away. The pattern on the backs of my eyelids bloomed like a black stone full of uncountable, incomprehensible stars.
The opal had been in my hand, I swore it, deeply burrowed into my fist. It was only when I was in bed, at some point during the night, that I realized I didn’t have it anymore.