It was a physical sensation I couldn’t pinpoint in my body: knowing we were close to curfew and needing to be back inside—all of us there, safest together—before the clock turned.
We only just made it. A few minutes more, and the front gate would have been chained, and no one, certainly none of the tenants and not even Ms. Ballantine herself, who could not be bribed with cash or with favors, would come down to open it. The garden gate was locked, police tape cordoning it from entry, so we would have had to spend the night sleeping in a doorway down in the street. Anything could have happened.
Once we made it inside to the foyer, Monet stopped. “You’re limping again. Is it your leg?”
I’d felt invincible in the gallery—still had, until she mentioned that. As soon as she put it to words, there was the dull throbbing in my ankle, the same ankle as the night in the woods, a thudding reminder. It wasn’t sharp like a new injury—it was faint, a low pull.
But I kept walking. There was so much I didn’t want to think about. When I was in this house, I wanted to close the curtains on all of that.
“Do you need to sit down?” Monet asked. “Here, let me take that.”
She had her arms out to collect the portrait of my mother, but something in me—coarse, instinctual—would not let her have it. I clutched it to my chest, almost curling myself around it, and she backed off, arms up as if to defend herself.
“All right, all right,” she said. “Keep it.”
As we passed the front parlor, dim with only one gold-toned lamp left on, I had a sudden awareness that we had a witness. I’d been avoiding this room. For more than a week, I wouldn’t dare look toward the parlor when I passed. But tonight was different. I was different. I lingered in view of the archway and let myself peer in.
I pretended at first, for protection. “Who’s there?” I called, as if I might find Gretchen curled up on an armchair, fallen asleep with that book she was always lugging around. Or Anjali and Lacey, maybe, having a quiet conversation near the low-wattage lamp on the giant boat of a couch.
But I knew the room would be empty of tenants. Dust sifted and settled, charged and unable to take a seat. The long drapes hiding the street from view swayed ever so slightly along the gold carpet. The ceiling fan swept in circles. The grandfather clock ticked.
I approached, concealing my mother’s face against my chest. Something told me I should. I walked closer, and Monet was right—I was favoring one leg.
As I came near, the portrait above the mantel shifted. Catherine was easing nearer to the front of the frame, where glass met open air. The mist crept in all around her, an erasure of white fog forming around her mouth. It wasn’t mist at all—it was her warm breath contained in that cold tomb of glass.
“You come down here and talk to her, too?” Monet asked.
I started at her voice behind me.
I hadn’t. Not once. After that first night—candlelight cupped in my hands, shimmer of blue light on the rooftop over our heads—I couldn’t face it.
“Can you even imagine?” Monet said. She was beside me then. Catherine’s black eyes were trained on her as much as they’d been trained on me.
“Imagine what?”
“What it must be like to be her, to watch us every day and every night from behind that glass and not be able to do anything.”
Monet tucked a bright-blond lock behind her ear, and I found myself staring at the black hole there, tiny and deep, that burrowed its way into her head. The opal on my finger was growing warmer.
“Do you think she sees us?” I knew an answer to that question, if I let myself think it. Did Monet?
“You know she does. This was her house, and she’s still in it, and now we’re everywhere. Putting our dirty feet all over her furniture . . . getting our grubby paws on her stuff . . . talking about her like she’s not here. That’s what I think sometimes. But other times I wonder if maybe she doesn’t want to be alone. Ever. So she makes sure.”
We met eyes before the portrait, Monet and me. My hand was hot, and behind the painting pressed to my chest, my heart was thumping.
“We should talk,” Monet said. “But not here.” She gestured at the mantel. Not in front of her.
The portrait darkened, a tremor coming from behind the glass. It rippled through my body like a distant quake. We were upsetting her.
There was the distinct sense that she knew what Monet was about to tell me, and wanted me kept in the dark. It felt like someone was shoving me backward, into the dust and the dim, into the dark gold, down on the ground, and though I was softening and growing dizzy with a drugged sense of numbness and part of me almost wanted to let it have me, another part of me tore away and headed for the stairs.
I didn’t feel like myself again until I had my hand on the banister.
We didn’t pass any other tenants on the way up—everyone else in the house seemed to be tucked in behind closed doors, lights out for the night. But we weren’t alone. Even after leaving the view of the front parlor, I still felt eyes at my back. Eyes on me from below, eyes from above. The portraits of the girls of Catherine House were awake as the tenants slept. The girls behind glass were gray-faced and murky-eyed. They were gazing at me in a way they hadn’t before—now there was an awareness. Whatever I’d done tonight—whatever Monet had encouraged and nudged—and whatever we’d touched on while talking downstairs, it had caught their notice. They were wary of me.
I quickened my steps, though my ankle twinged.
On the landing below mine, Monet left for her room without a word. We’d shared something electric, a live wire exposed. But that had changed once curfew came and we’d reentered the house. “I thought you wanted to talk?” I called after her. She didn’t answer.
As I turned the corner heading up to my floor, Gretchen came down, her shadow so towering and ceiling-bound, I almost didn’t know who or what was coming.
What was she doing up there? Her room wasn’t on the fifth floor.
As soon as she saw me, she grabbed my arm, pulled me close.
“Monet told me not to talk to you,” she said, “but you’re going to do it, right? You’re going to help Catherine?”
I pulled my arm away. The one she’d grabbed was still hurting from the night in the woods, but she also had jagged fingernails and a forceful grip. “Help with what?”
“We need to wake her again. She’s trying to tell us something, and we don’t know what. Her book doesn’t say.”
Something wasn’t right about Gretchen, something in the eyes, urgent and blooming. It unnerved me.
“Were you upstairs in my room?” I asked.
“How could I be in your room? Your door was locked. Nobody locks their doors around here, I don’t know why you do. What are you hiding? Why are you here?”
“What do you mean? I needed a room,” I said simply. “I called, and they had a room for me.”
“No one ever calls for a room.”
But I had. It was almost as if I’d arrived here in the snap of two fingers. In the blink of an eye. A vacancy when I’d most needed it. And yet it was real—I could touch the walls on either side of me, I could feel the stairs under my feet.
“What’s that?” Gretchen asked.
I was cradling the canvas in my arms, and I wasn’t about to let her see it. When she pulled at it to turn it around, I kept it bound to me as if belted in place.
“It’s like someone knocked you in the head and you don’t know anything,” Gretchen said.
“Excuse me?”
She was around the bend and thumping down the rest of the stairs before I could get an explanation.
━━━━━
I closed my door, locked it, and set my mother’s portrait faceup on the bed. How was it that it could be a terrible rendition of her, the skill and detail not much better than a finger painting, and yet I felt her with me more than before? I felt her inside the canvas, and now I felt her inside this house. I was sure she was thinking of me, at that very moment, while I stared into the smudges meant to be her eyes. The smudges were grayish-greenish blue, a mash-up of colors that didn’t claim one more than the other, which seemed right.
I found the largest item of clothing I owned—a hooded sweatshirt my mother had packed for me; it might have been hers once—and wrapped the portrait inside it. Then I slipped it between the box spring and the mattress, sandwiched it deeply in there, down where I’d put my feet.
It was when I let go that my phone started ringing.
The phone was in my bag somewhere, and I had to dig in there, searching, until I came up with its bright screen beaming with my mother’s face.
Had she heard my thoughts, all the way across bridges and up the Thruway and along mountain roads, to know to call me this instant? We were that connected, rope frayed but holding even still?
Phone service was spotty. I had only one bar, but I still hoped to hear her voice when I answered. I didn’t expect to get dead silence—static, faint and far-off, as if she were holding the phone up into the air to let me hear the wind blowing.
“Mom?” I shouted into the phone, but it was useless. The signal cut off. When I tried to return her call, voice mail again and again, no answer again and again, her phone unreachable as if she’d entered a tunnel.
She didn’t call back.
I sat on the end of the bed, not thinking at first that I was sitting on her, and then I leaped up, feeling it all at once. She’d known to call me. Mother’s intuition. She was aware I’d betrayed her by going to the gallery. That was all it was—she’d called simply to let me know she knew.
We’d had an understanding between us when it came to my father, and I’d broken it only once before, four years ago. After we’d visited the gallery, my mother made the promise that I’d never have to see him again, the promise she kept. Then she asked me to make a promise to her.
I was not to tell that man whose bed she slept in, or his girls, where we’d gone and who we saw there. I was to swallow this information and keep it where no one could ever get it out of me. I was her girl, hers more than anyone else could be, hers more than Charlotte was, hers more than Daniella was. She knew she could trust me. Couldn’t she?
I nodded. I’d always been her secret-keeper. I was born into it.
After the gallery, the secret had kept its place while we rode the subway uptown and entered the museum, to meet them at the planned spot. She had to check the map to find it—Water Lilies, made in pieces and stretching like a giant muted smudge over a long wall. The secret kept as we waited, as I stared at the thing, squinted, saw only smears of color, ridged and textured and begging for a finger to mess with it. The secret was not coming out when he emerged around the bend with his daughters. The secret stayed intact throughout the interweaving halls of the museum, up and down escalators, in and out of grand and airy rooms with masterpieces on display.
I thought I had a solid hold of it as I slept on the train headed to Poughkeepsie, the closest stop near home. That I had it stowed good and tight when we were back upstate and in the cheery yellow kitchen a dead woman had decorated.
Dinner was veggie burgers and tater tots, and I was cleaning my plate. The hunger overtook me, and I couldn’t stop eating. I needed to stuff myself full of food, so nothing else would come out.
My mother’s husband teased about how I could be so hungry if we’d had that big lunch downtown, my mother and I. Between mouthfuls, I said, “But we didn’t get anything to eat.” And there it went, the secret. It launched off my tongue and skidded across the table and dropped into his hands. Just like that, I had let the secret go.
“What do you mean you didn’t have lunch?” he asked. Weren’t we meeting her old friend from scene-study class? What was her name, Marina? Didn’t we meet Marina downtown for lunch?
When the truth spilled out, it tasted like a lie. My stomach turned sour with it, and there was a burn in the back of my throat. The sisters’ eyes batted back and forth, catching all of it. Worse was my mother’s face across the table. Gray stone.
“Dawn?” he said. “What’s she saying? You didn’t meet Marina? You went to see him?”
I flattened a tot in my fingers.
“You know Bina and her wild imagination.” These words of my mother’s fell past me, littering the air in microscopic shards of hail. “Do you really think I’d make up a whole story about seeing Marina after all these years and go see him instead? What for?”
He was quiet. The girls were quiet. The energy between my mother and me was so loud.
“Sabina, why would you lie about something like that?” she said in a strange, stilted voice. She enunciated every word.
My own strange voice answered her. “I don’t know. I’m sorry.” We were performing now—like a scene to be studied in her old class. Was that what she wanted from me? To make it better? To fix it with pretend?
“Why are you trying to drive a wedge between us? This is our family now. You know this. I would never lie like that. Explain yourself.”
I wasn’t as good at calling up the dialogue, and I wasn’t sure how I was supposed to explain. I’d said out loud that we went to see my father at his gallery. I wasn’t sure what would erase those words now. My mind went a panicked white. I did the only thing I could think to do, my face burning, my stomach coiling, my mother playacting across from me, proving her worth as an actress. I put my head down on the table and closed my eyes. The darkness behind my closed lids was absolute at first, like a soft, thick blackout curtain.
I heard my mother through the darkness.
“Sabina, stand up.”
I heard her but didn’t respond.
“I said get up.”
When I opened my eyes, I saw that the girls were delighted. Charlotte clapped her hands and kicked Daniella under the table so she’d clap hers. I saw my mother blazing with light.
“Dawn,” I heard him say, his voice low. “That’s enough. She’s upset. She knows she was wrong. Let her be.” He was so forgiving. He wasn’t a bad man, and maybe I should have met his eyes when I spoke to him or called him by his name sometime.
“Get up, Sabina. You’re done with dinner now. Now go.”
I didn’t make it to my bedroom. There was a spot in the garage where my mother stored an old crate of our unneeded things from our last house, and sometimes I went there, simply to perch on it and feel it under me. I would touch the objects inside, but I never took them out where the girls might see them. The small covered garage smelled damp, like mildew and like the oil that puddled under the minivan. It was dark, without any windows to the outside. The corner with the crate was a cocoon, and I folded myself up there, confused and trying to cry without sound.
It might have been hours later when she came to me and apologized. She was so ashamed. I was so ashamed. We’d both done awful things, and to each other, and we wouldn’t accept being forgiven so soon. She wrapped her arms around me in the dark corner, and I stopped shaking so much and calmed. She sounded like herself again.
“Why do you spend so much time in here?” she said. “It smells.”
“Why did we go see him anyway?” I said back. “Was it really for money?”
“He owes it to us. And I was ready . . . to ask.”
I pressed my face into her shoulder, soaking her shirt. “Where would we have gone with it?” That money wouldn’t have been used to buy a car or a new pair of boots. It wouldn’t have landed in a savings account to earn interest. It wasn’t my future college fund or a vacation to Niagara Falls. She didn’t say it, but I knew.
The secret my mother wanted to hide wasn’t that we visited the gallery and asked her ex-husband for money. It was what she would have done with that money. Depending on how much he gave, we could have gone anywhere, or stayed in-state and chosen a borough. The city—the sidewalks all around us, heading in every direction, river to river, bridge to bridge—had been in our reach. Now it was lost again.
She held me, and I held her. She begged me to forgive her, and I said I would. The smell of oil tinged with gasoline filled the garage.
━━━━━
A rattling at my window startled me.
A head appeared. Monet again, now on the fire escape, leaning on the black-barred cage between air and brick to stretch her legs. Only her face and one bare elbow entered my window. The rest of her body seemed suspended over the city, ethereal.
“Hey,” she said, acting casual, like she hadn’t left for her room before without a goodbye and wasn’t showing up now without an invitation.
“Why can’t you use the stairs?”
“Here,” she said. In her extended hand was a twenty- dollar bill. “I think you won the bet about Fred, or I did. Either way, here. Yours.”
I didn’t want to take money from her, but when she placed it inside, on the windowsill, I didn’t push it away. For a second, the air smelled like gasoline and I thought of my mother. She had another secret, one she hadn’t told me, about an accident that had happened in this house. If she knew I was here, she might come running and show up at the door, and then what would I do? Go home with her? Pretend to be gone and have everyone cover for me, forcing her to lug crates of old towels and unwanted sweaters to the street to complete the charade?
Monet was eyeing the closet. Maybe she thought I’d stowed the portrait of my mother in there, for safekeeping, since it wasn’t hanging plainly on the wall. I couldn’t understand why she wanted to see it, why she couldn’t let it be only mine.
The night had tied us up together. She knew something about me now, something I’d thought was unknowable. At the same time, I didn’t know a single thing about her, or at least nothing I could say for sure was true.
“I heard you with Gretchen on the stairs,” she said.
I rolled my eyes. “She’s intense.”
But Monet wasn’t smiling or making fun. The seriousness in her face skewed me. “Your mom really never told you about her accident, did she?”
“You know about that?”
She nodded as if she knew every last thing.
“I’m going up,” she said. “C’mon.”
She lifted her chin at what was above us. I knew she meant the rooftop, even though it was forbidden. I paused, and she leaned in. “Don’t you want to see the view?”
I did. I wanted to see the skyline from up there. I wanted to know for certain if it was how my mother had described it, the way it made a pulsing electric beat in her toes, the way her eyes were marked by it, as if burned through, until she could see the city dancing on the backs of her eyelids for hours afterward, a drawing pinned up while she slept. I’d always believed that had I not come into the picture, she would have embraced these lights forever and committed to becoming one of them. She would have stayed.
I didn’t move.
Something was telling me that Monet meant another kind of view. She meant the thing I’d awakened, unwittingly, by coming here, by finding that opal, by being my mother’s daughter. It was all anyone seemed to care about, but how could I explain I didn’t want or need to know so much, unless it involved my mother?
“It’s sturdy,” she said. “Watch.” She jumped up and down to show it would catch her weight.
I shook my head. The fire escape had only open air beneath it. It seemed to defy gravity and was so fragile, tacked on to the front of the house, and I didn’t understand how it stayed wedged into the brick. I imagined taking a step out onto it, and then the fall.
“No?” she said.
“No,” I said.
Monet didn’t fight me or force me or taunt me for my fear. She didn’t even ask if I was sure, because I wasn’t, as it seemed she was about to tell me something important and I’d miss it. She didn’t give me the chance—she was up the ladder beyond my reach in no time, seeing the buildings from here to the end of the island, whatever that looked like.
I got ready for bed, washing all the makeup off my face to reveal the still-livid bruises. Shouldn’t they have faded by now? Shouldn’t I have recovered? The mirror showed only the worst of me, as if I’d never be over it.
Back in my room, I curled up close to the window, where I could at least feel a touch of air in the stifling heat. I thought about my mother, about whatever sent her to the hospital when she lived in this house and about whether Monet was only pretending to know so she could lure me up the fire escape.
There was no other way up to the roof—the stairs in the center of the house didn’t go any higher than my floor, and I didn’t know of another staircase except for the one behind my wall, bricked off.
The small door was painted white, even the knob whited out. Everything in the gallery had been painted this same white. It was the color of trying to hide something. Of putting one over on you. Of lies.
Lacey had said this door led to a closet, but that was a lie. This time I took my phone for a flashlight—even without a signal, it worked for that at least—and I was up the stairs and around the bend in no time. As before, the corridor was narrow and tight, and there was no door, only the hastily built wall of bricks. I could see more clearly this time the towering stack that filled the doorframe, rough-edged and red.
I put a hand to the bricks. So cold.
And quiet. I found the crack in the bricks where I remembered, a crevice through which to see. This had to be the way to the roof, and maybe I’d be able to spy Monet on the other side, but when I pressed my eye in, straining with all my might, all that reflected back was darkness. It was a darkness that held nothing and no one, apart from memories that had been stowed away where almost nobody could find them, walled in brick by brick by brick.
━━━━━
My eyes open.
“I’m right here.” That’s me. That’s my voice. I’m yelling into the woods. “Where’d you go? I’m right here.” I’m shouting it, but to no one, because they’re all gone now, they’ve given up on me and didn’t bother chasing me all the way out of the woods, to the road. My throat is ragged, my body filling with hot rushes of pain. There’s something wrong with one of my legs, and there’s something wrong with one of my eyes, so I’m crooked as I walk, like a suitcase with a broken wheel.
I hear wind in the trees, and that’s all.
Then I sense the vehicle approaching. Two headlights, brighter than exploding stars, and I’m waving my arms. Stop, I’m trying to tell them. Help me. Stop.
It doesn’t stop.
A van roars past, giant and bright blue, with a smoking tailpipe and screeching tires. There are stickers all over the bumper—unreadable as they blur past—and something blocking the windows so there’s no way to see who’s inside. I’m okay. I’ve lurched out of the way just in time.
But I’m confused, turned around. I must have jumped too far into the trees, because when I stand again, I’m not clear on which way to go. My flashlight isn’t in my hand anymore, and I can’t remember the last time I held it. I start walking, or trying to. I’m pushing branches out of the way, stepping wrong on a path that isn’t a path at all. I keep going, and what I mean is to head home, but in the dark I can’t see which way is out and which way is deeper in, where trails stop and no parties are held. Back there are wild acres of wooded forest, hilltops and climbing cliffsides and thick tangles of trees. And the ravine.
I stretch my arms out in front of me, aiming for stray branches, slapping them away, as if that might help me navigate the darkness. The road is right here. I’ll be home in no time—or I would be, if only my ankle weren’t screaming every time I took a step. If only I could see better, through the swollen pinhole of one of my eyes. If only my head wasn’t sending thunder strikes all through my skull, trying to crack me open.
I might be walking in circles. At some point, I stop, but when I look ahead, there’s only darkness. It’s like the ground falls off and the whole rest of the world is down there, where I can’t see but could be a part of it, if only I take the first step in.
━━━━━
I came awake at the bottom of the closet stairs, a hammer pounding inside my head. It was so hot, too hot, so I pushed back into my room. The small space was in disarray, the bed tipped over so the extra door could open, the dresser drawers knocked onto the floor and bursting with spills, a picture of my mother splayed out on the floor. I set the mattress back and got in the bed, but, now, here was the window. The fire escape I couldn’t climb. The view I never did see for myself. All the things I’d never done and wanted to do.
I took hold of the windowsill, bracing myself, gulping air, and slithered out. I did it before I could change my mind. If anyone had been watching from down below on the sidewalk, or from one of the town houses across the way, if anyone had seen me slide out on my stomach, trying to keep a foot heel-locked onto the window frame, trying not to look down, accidentally looking down, then the vertigo, then my head spinning, then having to close my eyes and lie there with my arms slack and prickling, if anyone had seen this, they would have laughed. Monet would have collided into a wall with laughter. She would have shaken with it, but not as I was shaking out on the fire escape from having the ground so far away and, up above, all that endless night sky.
Then again it was as my mother said it would be, to feel the city out there above and around me, in all pulsing frequencies and on all sides. It was everything.
The warm breeze in my hair, the sweat on my skin cooling. Monet was still up there, and I was down here, and I told myself I’d stay out for a touch longer. At some point I forgot to be afraid, because I closed my eyes to sleep.
I must have remained on the fire escape, only the upper half of my body, until dawn. If she ever climbed back down the ladder to spend the night inside, in her bed the way ordinary people did, I didn’t feel her pass by.
When I jolted awake, it was light out, and the view made me catch myself for a fall that wasn’t happening. I was protected, held in place by the sturdy black cage. The hand gripping it was still wearing the opal—I’d been sloppy, and I went out of the house with it, slept in it, and wore it in open air, where it could have slipped off and dropped five stories and gotten picked up by some lucky stranger in the street.
But was it lucky?
With my eyes closed and my ears plugged, I could play pretend. I could tell myself everyone was happy, as I was. I could ignore Gretchen’s confusing desperation and Lacey’s attempt to leave. I could forget Anjali’s note. And I made every effort to, for days. Even Monet on the roof, acting like she wanted to tell me something, I never made it up there to hear her out, to see. It was cold of me to ignore them all, so maybe the person I was lying to the most was myself.
And yet, I did feel lucky. To be in this city. In this house. In this room, away from everything that had fallen to pieces at home. It was a fantasy come true, a wishful thought dug up from piles of brick and concrete and set to lights. If that wasn’t luck, what should I call it?