Tangerine

I felt uneasy, in the quiet of the house, conscious that we were not meant to be there but rather, should be dining with the other girls from our house.

“Don’t, Lucy,” I pleaded, looking around me, as if expecting someone to materialize and tell us off for not following the rules. “We’re not supposed to even be in here.”

She looked up, a smile forming in the corner of her lips. “Relax, Alice. Nothing will happen.” But her hand remained on the lion, and I was struck by the conviction that this strange little demonstration of defiance was for my benefit—to prove that she was a girl who could not be told what to do, that she was not afraid.

A shiver passed through me, and I clutched my cardigan tightly to my body. Without the heat of the sun, the sweat that had slipped down my back only moments earlier had grown cold, and my skin rose in goose pimples as I fought to keep warm.

Lucy stood. “You should have said that you were cold,” she said, pulling me closer, enveloping me in a strange embrace.

My aunt Maude was not one for affection, and during my time with her, my life had turned into something solitary and cold. I had missed it at first, those small displays of intimacy, so that even when a stranger would walk by and accidentally brush against me, it was enough so that I could feel their touch for the remainder of the day, burning me, marking me, where we had collided. But now I struggled to relax, and when Lucy finally moved away, I could feel the space where she had just been, humming, vibrating, there in the air before me.

She looked down at the lions. “It’s odd, but they remind me of a pet I once had as a child. A dog named Tippy.” The smile left her face then. “He was a complete surprise, especially if you knew my mother. She detested animals. She used to cringe at the idea of actually owning one. But then, one day, there he was. I guess a neighbor’s dog had had puppies and he was the final one, the runt they couldn’t manage to sell, let alone give away for free. He was small. White and tan. Not really a puppy any longer, since they had been trying for so long to get rid of him.” She stopped, taking a breath. Her eyes remained fixed on the statue, refusing to meet my own. “I remember taking him in my arms, promising to take care of him. My mother just watched from the corner.” A small laugh. “You should have seen her face.”

“When did he die?” I asked, my voice little more than a whisper.

“Not long after we first got him.”

Something in the distance crashed, and I jumped. I looked back toward Lucy, but if she had heard the noise, she did not betray it. She remained still, implacable, staring at the lion, at the empty fire grate. “What happened?” I asked.

“He was hit by a car,” she replied. “No one knows exactly how he got out, but suddenly he was off, running toward the main street.” She paused. “The impact should have killed him instantly, but it didn’t.”

I shuddered, imagining the injured dog, suspended somewhere between life and death, imagining the pain. “Didn’t you take him somewhere? For help, I mean?” My voice, I knew, was pleading, but in that moment, standing in the cold, drafty mansion, I felt suddenly that I needed nothing so much as for Lucy to tell me that they had, that, yes, the dog had been saved, that it had lived, that it was still living, and that everything was fine.

I knew, of course, that she wouldn’t.

“My mother couldn’t drive,” she said.

“But what about the neighbors? Wasn’t there someone you could call?” I felt frantic then, wanting to shake her, to wreck that stoic attitude, her shield and protection, I had already begun to suspect, from everyone around her. If nothing else, I wanted her to tell me that she had done everything that she could, that she had tried to save the life of this improbable dog that was never meant to be hers—that she had loved him fiercely enough for that.

Finally, she turned her face to mine, her black eyes searching. She smiled, a strange, unnerving expression that sent my heart stammering, anxious to be away from her, from this place. She opened her mouth: “There was no one.”

I exhaled, slowly. “So what did you do?”

“We sat and waited for him to die.” She stopped, seeming to weigh her next words. “And he did, eventually. But it was slow. And he was in terrible pain. And so my mother went out into the garden and found a rock. It would be quicker, she said. And kinder. And because he was mine, it was my responsibility and no one else’s.” She shook her head, turning away. “It was horrible, Alice,” she concluded, her tone steely and hard.

I did not believe her. Raising my hand to my mouth—in shock, in doubt, I didn’t know—I could not help but be struck by the thought that the story, her story, I reminded myself, had seemed strangely distant, as if it had happened to another person entirely. Her words had been slow and measured, she hadn’t paused to catch her breath, to wipe away the tears from her eyes. It was as if the story had been cauterized, so that it no longer belonged to her at all, so that I did not believe her when she said it was horrible, did not believe her about any of it.

I thought of the way that she had spoken of her parents, of that detached expression I had envied. In that moment, it was no longer something that I was as eager to covet.

I stepped backward. “Let’s go, Lucy.”

Her eyes seemed to flash at the sound of her name, as if remembering where she was and who she was with. As if everything that had come before had been spoken in some sort of trance and only then had she awakened from it. “Not yet,” she said, reaching for my hand. “There’s one more thing I want to show you.” Ignoring my protests, she turned us to the grand staircase, moving quickly, so that I had to increase my pace to keep up with her. “Hurry,” she called back, as if reading my thoughts.

We continued to race upward until my breath came in short, ragged gasps, and my lungs began to burn. “Lucy,” I panted, knowing that I would soon be unable to match her in speed.

“Just a little farther,” she promised, not bothering to look back, still firmly holding my hand.

When she stopped—so abruptly that I nearly crashed into her—we stood in front of a window, wide and curved in a half circle. From our new vantage point, I could see that she had led us up to the mansion’s top floor. Lucy moved her face closer to the window, her fingertips splayed out on either side of her, pressed firmly into the glass.

“The other girls say it’s haunted. That a family died here,” she whispered.

I frowned. “What family?”

“The Jenningses, the ones who first owned the house. They say the wife killed herself, that she threw herself out of this window, just here. And then the husband, out of grief, hung himself from one of the trees.”

“That doesn’t sound true,” I replied, though I whispered the words. “I heard that the family donated this building to the college.”

Lucy ignored my remark. “There was a student too, a few years ago. She threw herself from this same window, just like Mrs. Jennings.”

I turned to look out the window, at the imprints of her fingertips, their individual etchings, pressed against the glass. I thought of the stories, of the women who had supposedly ended their lives here, one generation after another. And then all at once I felt it—something watching me, from somewhere within the dark recesses of the house. I turned to the left and then to the right, knowing that I had seen something, just out of reach of my vision. I thought at first that it might have been Lucy, but then I realized that she was gone. I was standing by the window alone, empty hallways stretching on either side of me, a half-dozen or so doorways down each corridor. I thought of the shadows, certain they were there, somewhere, lying in wait, so that I had the urge to fling open each and every door in order to prove there was nothing behind them.

And then I remembered. About what Lucy had told me, only moments before: how her parents died when she was five years old. I frowned. It didn’t make her story impossible. Perhaps she truly did remember that horrible story from so young an age, and yet—what, I asked myself, what was it that had bothered me? I thought again of her detached manner, as if she were reciting a story that she had heard from someone else. I shook my head, feeling another breeze, a draft, I supposed, as it moved through the building. There was no reason for her to lie.