They wanted me to join them in the garden that night, but something kept me away. It might have been the pressure of expectation, all those eyes on me, but I told myself it was only a desire to see the city, to see what I might find in the growing orbit around the house.
I slipped out the gate in front of Catherine House and started to walk. I got lost in the maze of the West Village and then found my way east, where the city’s grid of streets began to make sense. As the hours passed, I let myself stay out as late as I could stand it. There were no stars to be seen in the sky, but the building lights twinkled. And there was so much to pay attention to in the street I barely thought to look up.
I hovered outside the windows of restaurants, reluctant to spend my remaining money and sit at a table all alone. I tried on near a dozen pairs of shoes on Eighth Street. I was a six and a half, my mother’s size, but I couldn’t afford a single pair. I found a used bookstore and a branch of the public library. Once, down a narrow alley, I thought I saw Monet poised at a splash of graffiti with a can of spray paint aimed high, but when I blinked it was only a blur of movement and a plain brick wall. Another time I thought I saw her ordering from a street cart. The girl who turned around had a different face and was eating only a pretzel.
My head was hurting in that familiar spot, and by the time deep night had fallen I had blisters on my heels, a burning in the balls of my feet. My weak ankle gave out when I stepped on a patch of crooked cobblestone, and as I sat rubbing it on the curb while a stream of black-clad legs swept past, I marveled that it hadn’t crumpled hours earlier. No one bent to see if I was okay.
It was close to midnight. When I looked across the street, where cobblestone met pavement somewhere in what I thought was SoHo, I saw her again. She had brighter hair this time, burgundy in the shadows, bloodred under a streetlamp. She disappeared into a subway tunnel before I could get up and follow her to be sure.
I didn’t know where she was headed, but curfew was coming. There was an urgent beating in my chest to tell me it was near, that I had only minutes to get back to Catherine House and many blocks to cover. A magnet was pulling me, and I couldn’t resist.
If I didn’t make it, would I have to rough it out in the street, like some of the people I saw setting up boxes under construction awnings? (One was a girl my age; she had nowhere to go, dark circles under her eyes, a busted suitcase. I left her a dollar in her paper cup, and she yelled after me that I’d ruined her coffee.)
I was close to a panic when I finally reached the block and the black iron gate containing Catherine House and its tiny concrete yard. Beside it, through a different gate on the street, was the garden, but there was no time to even peek inside. There wasn’t a moment to spare before buzzing in and leaping up the stairs to the top of the stoop and getting myself through the sleek front door.
I had to catch my breath on the other side, safe in the foyer, holding the arm of the coat stand to get steady and make myself right again.
When I looked out at the street below, I saw that the chain was already on the front gate, though I hadn’t seen anyone who worked in the house go out and take care of it. I saw Anjali on the stairs inside, but she acted like she’d never left me a note, and with it traveling the pipes of the septic system, I wondered if I’d invented the words, and her desire to go. What did she expect me to do? Couldn’t she leave if she wanted?
The others tried to knock on my door to tell me about Catherine, but I ignored them. I avoided her photograph. When I put my ear to the floorboards upstairs, the room beneath mine was a tomb of silence. I’d made curfew—as far as I could tell, all the other tenants had but one. Monet had not.
When I next saw her, emerging from the fourth floor at two in the afternoon with wild hair and bleary eyes from sleeping in, she seemed sickly again. There was a point when she had a coughing fit and someone offered her a dusty lozenge found in the cushion of the gold-velvet couch.
“Where were you?” Harper hissed at her in the linoleum-covered winding hallway between parlor and kitchen.
Monet motioned that her lips were zipped, but she was zipping them all for herself. None of us knew where she spent the long, late hours of night, or why.
My first week in the house went by like this, day after day. I didn’t have the money for movies or shopping, and I had to be careful about spending too much on things like a fan to cool my room. I lied on my résumé to say I’d graduated from high school, but none of the retail counters where I left it gave me a call. Riding the subway every day would have cleaned me out. What I could do was walk, and I did, from Tenth Street to 110th Street, from east to west, up the island and down.
In the nights, light-headed after another day of walking, my phone dark after another day of no calls, I let myself listen to the room below mine, my ear suctioned to the floor. I was drawn to do it. I knew I shouldn’t be so nosy, but I had to know how close she was.
I could hear her climbing the fire escape long after curfew and settling in when everyone else was asleep. A few times, I caught sight of her bare, swinging legs as she rattled around out there, passing my window to whatever was above—the roof, I suspected. She didn’t stop in on her way or leave a gift or a note on my windowsill. She’d defended me in the garden my first night, but she didn’t acknowledge it in any way since. It was almost like she was waiting for me to do something to catch her notice again.
In her room, she stayed silent for long stretches and then talked to herself, whispers I couldn’t quite catch. She listened to sad songs, ones that were vaguely familiar to me, like old hurts. She slept through breakfast, so I started to do the same. She must have dreamed, but I never heard her shouting in her sleep as I woke myself up doing. I wondered if anything scared her, even the dark, dusty rooms of this house and the young woman with the black, shifting eyes downstairs, who the other girls said hadn’t shown herself since.
The small door in my wall, I kept blocked and sealed shut.
The garden, I avoided without asking myself why.
When I slept, my dreams were memories, and always the same running nightmare of home.
━━━━━
By the end of that first week, my mother hadn’t called to ask where I was, and curiosity got the better of me. I’d been checking my phone, expecting a series of messages, a string of texts, wanting to make sure I’d made it to the church people’s place okay, then when she didn’t hear from me, turning worried, getting serious, skipping emojis, asking me where I was, what happened, why I didn’t show. My phone had weak service inside my room, the brick walls so thick, but I would have seen her attempts at contact when I was outside. There wasn’t a missed call for days.
First thing Saturday morning, before I could stop myself, I pulled up her name in my favorites and called. I heard a faint hiss of air on the line and then a high-pitched beep as I lost the signal. I tried again, right next to the window, practically leaning half my body outside, though the sight of ground through the slats in the fire escape gave me the spins. The call dropped.
I didn’t get a good signal until I was out on the sidewalk. I stood across the street from the house so none of the girls would hear. It seemed so taboo to miss our mothers.
She answered straightaway. “Bina? Is that you? I’m driving. I can’t hear you. Bina?”
She’d called me Bina, not Sabina—in fact, she kept repeating it as if she were surprised I’d called—a sign I chose to interpret as good. I softened, and it left me off guard, a door open.
“It’s me,” I said, and let those two words hang. Not that I was sure she could hear with the wind in her ears, a static roar into her mouthpiece. She must have been on the highway with the windows down. That was something she liked to do now. I imagined she appreciated the way the wind threatened to peel away all her layers of hair and skin and flesh and muscle until she was down to the bone, and free.
An exhilarating sense of power twisted its way through me. This was what it felt like to make your life your own, something I’d only witnessed my mother start to do. She’d failed. I wouldn’t fail. I wanted to share this with her—wouldn’t she want this for me? Wouldn’t she be proud?
I surveyed the street—my new home. The block was made up of narrow apartment buildings and brownstones, some gated and none taller than five stories. They were in a series of hues from brown to tan to red to brick and back to brown. There were sidewalk trees, a corner store with a warm-green awning at one end of the street, a red-doored pub at the other, a bright-blue mailbox, a few random people out walking well-groomed dogs.
It was picturesque, like a movie set of the city, which happened to be the way my mother had described it to me when I was a child. It could have been plucked from her stories and made real. I wanted to tell her, but she could hardly hear anything I said.
All the while I kept saying, “Mom?” into the phone.
She was kind of screaming over the wind. “I’m in the car. I can’t hear you. Did something happen? What happened? What did you do?” She had her hands-free headset on— she could easily roll up the windows and talk; she didn’t want to.
“I’m not at your friends’ house,” I burst out. “I didn’t go.”
“You’re not what? I can’t hear you . . .”
It spilled. It spread clumsily all over my feet. Where I was, that I wasn’t coming home for a month at least, that maybe she could send money? I was in the city, like we should have been for the past eight years, and I might not come back ever again, at all.
The power filled me now. Mine.
“I’m supposed to be meeting the girls, but I’m pulling over,” she said. Her voice got so much clearer after she stopped the car, without wind shouting her down. “Please tell me you’re not at your father’s.” She didn’t use one of our sloppy monikers for him; she called him the low-down dirtiest thing she could, which was father, emphasis on your.
“You are,” she said. “Aren’t you?”
Her voice had shrunk so small that it squeezed my heart—more than squeezed, it flattened. There was so much I wanted to say, but then came the still-raw memory of the last day I saw her, when she brought me her old suitcase, one wheel so worn it traveled with a limp, and told me she was kicking me out. That was stronger. That was louder. I couldn’t even remember why I’d wanted to talk to her.
“I can’t hear you,” I said, and ended the call.
━━━━━
I headed back across the street, for the stoop. There was a breeze, cooler than the temperature inside the house, and it touched my arms and skimmed through my hair, lifting it from the damp, hot back of my neck. The light wind brushed my face, where the bruises and scratches still felt tender and fresh. Maybe the air and the sun would help them heal so I would stop looking like a victim and wouldn’t keep having people ask what was done to me. I closed my eyes for a second, to gather myself, when I heard it calling to me and I forgot all about my mother.
The loud creaking sound was insistent. Sharp. It skittered through my body, twingeing into my head. I had to make it stop.
The sound was coming from beside the house, from the lot sandwiched between the building and the town house next door. It was the private garden where we’d all gathered on my first night, the one I’d been avoiding all week and hadn’t yet seen in daylight.
At its center was a gate with a shining gold lock, but I didn’t need a key, because the gate was open, and that creaking was its unsteady swaying in the wind.
I grabbed it to make it stop, and then it happened.
Somehow I wasn’t closing the gate, as I’d planned. I was stepping through it. I was going inside.
Once I did, something rippled over me. It rinsed through my body, a soothing calm. The gate swung closed behind me, and the sound ceased. I kept walking. The area had felt so much larger in the dark, but in truth it was only the width of a narrow building. It was cluttered and fragrant with living things growing from the ground, with gnats, with rustles of movement, a forest hush, but it was still small and walled-in.
I let my palm rest on the rough skin of a tree. It seemed a kind of tree too old to be growing here, in the middle of a concrete city, caught between brick buildings. The trunk was tall and gnarled, knots bursting out, and the overhanging branches provided cool patches of shade. When I looked upward, all I saw were tree branches and the ceiling they made over the garden. No peek of sky was visible from this spot.
This place reminded me of home in a way that made me want to sit on the ground and touch the blades of grass. Home, before I’d ruined it.
As I was trying to figure out which way to walk, I almost tripped over a wooden signpost covered in an unruly swirl of ivy. At the top was the sign itself, an arrow pointing at the back of the garden, which was impossible to see from the entrance. The sign said:
gravesite
The arrow led the way.
I felt no surprise. It hadn’t been said outright, but it had been suggested. I should have figured that was why we’d all come outside my first night, to pay our respects.
The path through the green growth was trampled, and I followed it to the end, near a brick wall that must have been the back of another building. There, a short wrought-iron fence marked off a small section of earth. I knew even before I saw with my eyes that Catherine de Barra was the name engraved on the gray monument. All around were wild weeds, green and growing, horned and clawing, but the base of the headstone itself was clean and carefully tended. A circle of worn, cleared ground surrounded the area—enough space for a small throng of mourners, if they packed in tight around the gravesite, tight enough to touch.
On top of the monument was a collection of items, some weathered and rusted, oxidized into green, but some shiny-new and recent. Those had been left only a week ago. The candy necklace had been ravaged by squirrels and maybe (I couldn’t bear to let the word form) rats, but the miniature yellow cab was intact. There was also a tarnished gold bracelet. A silver button. A moonstone. A tiny black ceramic cat. All offerings for Catherine, from the girls who lived in her house.
A stone bench, meant for a single visitor, was set beside the low fencing that surrounded the grave. I sat down and saw that at my feet a small tomato plant was growing. Tomatoes, in a city garden, right near a grave. Someone must have planted them here as another kind of offering.
I felt an odd pull to touch them. These were cherry tomatoes, fully ripe and perfectly red, small and plump and ready to be picked, the same kind my mother once grew. I remembered the exact taste of them. Tangy but also sweet.
I plucked one from the vine and held it in the center of my palm. I was about to lift it to my mouth and pop it open with my teeth when I heard a new sound.
Not a gate creaking this time, and not the wind through the low-hanging leaves. Something else.
I wasn’t alone here.
The sound was tinny and artificial, not from nature. The electronic alert of a cell phone ringing, and not far away, from an overlooking window or the street. Close. It was coming from the other side of the gravestone, where the shadows hid a patch of tall grass.
I must have crushed the tomato when I’d heard it—I felt the pulp and seeds in my hand. I dropped it to the grass and circled the fencing, and there, lying in a patch of unshorn weeds, was something green—too green. It was plastic with a glassy, almost-neon reflection. I leaned in closer and caught the pattern on its skin, reptilian. A fake-crocodile purse.
The purse was stuck on the short fence that surrounded the gravestone, and I pulled until it came loose. Some muck and dirt had gotten on it. I shook it off. The crocodile skin—slick and cold to the touch, turning my stomach—was flapping open, revealing that the contents of the purse hadn’t been pillaged. There was the wallet and a nondriver ID for a Lacey Rhonda Garnett. A depressing DMV portrait and her statistics: She was five foot seven. She was eighteen years old. She was from Connecticut.
My hand was in the purse again. Slithering in, separate from me, an insistent snake. Almost $200 in twenties was in the wallet. My fingers itched to slip the wad into my pocket, but I abstained, at least for the moment. I decided I’d bring it back into the house and leave it in Lacey’s mail cubby. She’d find it there, eventually. The only question was if she needed to find it with all the money intact.
But the phone wouldn’t stop ringing. The cell phone at the bottom of the purse was lit up with an incoming call. A blocked caller ID. It could have been Lacey herself, calling to see if her purse and all its contents had landed in friendly hands.
I hesitated, and then I answered.
“Hello?”
No words on the other end. Only labored breathing.
“Lacey, if that’s you, I found your purse. It’s Bina—you know, from the fifth floor? I found your purse, and I—”
“Stop,” the voice said. I heard the faintest touch of wind, as if it weren’t a road the caller was on but a high rooftop. No one told me that, but I saw it so clearly. A rush of vertigo in my knees.
The voice sounded gravelly and weak. This wasn’t Lacey.
“Who is this?” Something told me I didn’t want to hear the answer.
The person on the other end ignored this question. Maybe she thought I knew already.
“Hello? I said, ‘Who is this?’”
“You look so much like your mother.”
I lifted my eyes. Up and up, following the long brick expanse of the side of the house until the perimeter of the rooftop was in sight. In daylight the colors were orange and yellow. They went white where the sun hit. White until I couldn’t see anything out of either one of my eyes, the good one or the bad. White like what a dead body sees from under the sheet.
I flung the phone away from me.
As I did, I happened to lose my balance, and I happened to glance down and see it. The trail of hair on the ground behind the statue, long and deep brown. Braided.
My hand reached out to touch it. The braid of hair was heavy, because it was attached to something. A neck.
There was a body hidden in the shadow behind the gravestone. A girl with long braids, the same way Lacey wore her hair. This was her. This was her, on the ground, in the dirt, in the flesh. Her eyes were crusted closed. She lay on her back, arms limp at her sides. A prescription bottle was open beside her. Orange, white cap. The label was smeared with dirt, the name of the pills too blurred to make out.
I went for her, stumbling over the grating that surrounded the grave and almost dropping down, half on top of her and half on Catherine de Barra, buried underneath.
As I got ahold of her, Lacey’s eyelids jittered, and her arms jolted, and I heard gurgling coming from her throat. She was alive, and I had to help her.
Everything moved fast after that.
At some point I removed myself from the garden. I must have. I’m not sure if I yelled out for help from some passersby or if I called 911 from the sidewalk because I couldn’t get a working signal again and I couldn’t find Lacey’s phone that I threw. I was outside the garden as the ambulance pulled up, my arms up to flag it down, and she was inside, and I wasn’t sure why I didn’t stay beside her.
Two EMTs burst out. Lights were flashing. Someone pushed me away. Someone else pulled me aside.
“The garden,” I said, pointing wildly. “There’s a girl inside. I think she took some pills, but she’s alive, she’s alive.”
The EMT asked me for her name, and I told her. I tried to offer the purse, which for some unknown reason I had on my arm, but she didn’t want it. She asked where Lacey lived, and I pointed to Catherine House, and then I said I had her room, and then I said she moved rooms, and I didn’t know what I was saying so I stopped talking. The EMT asked me if I was all right and what happened to me, and that part was confounding until I understood her mistake.
“Did someone hurt you?” she asked, indicating the bruises on my face. “Do you want to press charges?”
“No, no,” I said. That? That was old, already taken care of, I already saw a doctor (I lied). It looked worse than it was. This wasn’t about me. This was about the girl in the garden. This was about the girl.
She told me I seemed flushed and I should sit down and wait there.
She went in through the gate after her partner, calling out for Lacey as if she’d been buried in an avalanche and needed to know there was someone searching for her, she was not forgotten, she would not be alone, not ever again.
I was on the sidewalk, sitting on the curb. I felt something on my face and realized I’d started to cry. I couldn’t bear the idea of Lacey’s being out there all alone, under the tree with no one helping her or even trying to find her all that time.
Ms. Ballantine was on the curb above me, her thin shadow swaying. She’d come out of the house and now glared with intent at the garden gate, which was wide open. She wasn’t even bothering to go in. No other staff members came out of the house to join her. I still hadn’t seen anyone else who worked there. No one who cleaned or cooked or assisted Ms. Ballantine with what she did as landlady and manager of the estate.
A police cruiser arrived behind the ambulance, and now two officers were in the garden, one guarding the gate. Now it was clear we weren’t allowed to follow.
“Who called the police?” Ms. Ballantine asked in a flat voice. The sun seemed to be bothering her eyes, and she put up a hand to shield it from her face. Instead it hit mine.
“I called nine-one-one,” I said, taking claim. “She’s still alive. I can’t believe it, but I think she’s still alive.”
She looked down on me. I had to squint, and even then I couldn’t see the expression on her face.
“Why are you sitting in the street like a beggar?” she said. “Get on your feet. Get up.” She pulled me upright.
I was holding Lacey’s purse—the green plastic cold in my fingers—and all I wanted was to get rid of it. When I tried to hand it off to Ms. Ballantine, she pushed it away with a flinch, as if I’d offered her a severed finger. I would leave it in Lacey’s cubby after all. She could get it later—I hoped.
A hush emerged from the open gate, but it wasn’t peaceful; it was jarring. I wanted to see in, but I also didn’t want to watch Lacey die. I imagined the scene instead: her cheeks losing color, her eyes showing only white . . .
“How did this happen?” Ms. Ballantine said to me. “How could you?”
I didn’t understand. I’d found Lacey before it was too late. I’d done a good thing. I could already picture her family—her mother and her father, her two sisters—pulling up to the curb and running out to take her in their arms. She would go home with them after all. She needed them. It was where she belonged.
What did I do to make Ms. Ballantine so angry?
“You shouldn’t have called,” she said in a low voice, uncomfortably close to my ear.
The police cruiser at the curb said all. It was sinking in that there was a reason Ms. Ballantine wanted to keep the authorities away. It could have been about the garden, where everyone gathered in the night. Maybe there was something in there the city was not supposed to find, because if they found it, they might take it away from us forever.
And I was the one who’d sounded the alarm and led the way.
A minute later, both emergency workers came out. Neither was holding a body. No one was escorting a girl.
I stepped up, even though the panic was flooding my chest. “What happened?”
“There’s no one in there,” one of the EMTs said to me.
“What do you mean?” I started for the garden gate, but they blocked my way.
“There’s no girl.” This repeated in my face. People passing slowed on the street—the ambulance called their attention—but they weren’t trying to get a peek into the garden to see what happened; they were looking at me. Everyone was looking at me. I was the thing to look at.
I noticed the old woman across the street with a gray cat in her arms. The yowling animal struggled in her grasp, butting its head against her chin, but the woman held fast, on thick exposed legs with slippers, mouth slightly open, judging me.
There was talk of my wasting the emergency workers’ time and calling in a phony report, and I wasn’t sure if I was going to get into trouble. Then the police turned to Ms. Ballantine. There was something in the garden they needed to discuss with the property owner—could she come this way?
She walked in, head held high. Again, I wasn’t allowed to follow.
“Miss,” the EMT said to me, her face right up in mine so I couldn’t see past her. “Are you hurt? Do you need medical attention?”
I shook my head. It was Lacey who needed help. She was the one who swallowed all the pills. They might have to pump her stomach, which was supposed to hurt horribly, I’d heard, and she’d probably want company at the hospital. Where was Lacey? I put my hand to the back of my head and held it, to calm the thumping.
“Did you fall? A concussion might be what’s causing this confusion. Why don’t you—”
When the EMT reached out her arm, as if she might touch me, I barely escaped. I moved away as quickly as I could, and it felt like they were on my heels again, the whole pack of them. At any moment, they would catch me and take me down. If I skidded and stumbled and hit the pavement with my bare face, would it feel so different from leaves and twigs and pine needles and tree roots and dirt that night in the forest?
━━━━━
I stood on a patch of random sidewalk a few blocks away. I stayed there a long time, loitering, nursing my ankle. When I circled the block again and saw that the ambulance and police car were both gone, that the crowd had dispersed and no one was across the street keeping tabs, I knew it was safe to come back. They’d forgotten all about me.
It was late afternoon by the time I climbed the stoop leading back into the house and felt something wet and warm flick down onto my shoulders, like a rainstorm had found me. A few more drips, this time on the top of my head.
Monet was there, her legs dangling off the fire escape.
She was holding a bottle and had been dribbling water down on my head. Our rooms were in the front of the house, and she’d descended a few flights to sit at the lowest level of the fire escape, a single story suspended over the stoop.
She seemed so unbothered. The word must have not gotten out about Lacey.
I wiped my hair and looked up to her bare legs. Today she was wearing a midnight-blue pageboy wig. I was beginning to suspect she’d visited a Halloween store and bought herself a collection on clearance.
She held up the water bottle again, and I ducked, shielding my head.
“I’m only messing with you,” she said. “Don’t be so serious.”
I wasn’t laughing. “Hey,” I said. “You haven’t seen Lacey today, have you?”
“Funny you should ask . . . I have.”
“Is she okay? I thought I saw—I thought something happened to her. I guess I was confused.”
“You weren’t confused.”
Wasn’t I? I held up the green reptilian thing that had been hanging on my shoulder. In a way, it was evidence. “I have her purse.”
“I see that. Listen, you weren’t confused. Lacey’s upstairs in her room, recovering. She shouldn’t have tried to leave again. Ms. Ballantine’s going to have a talk with her.”
Recovering. Tried to leave. Upstairs in her room. How did she get back inside, avoiding the EMTs and the police and even me, right out on the sidewalk? There was only one way out of the garden, as far as I knew.
Monet put a finger to her lips so I wouldn’t ask. “Don’t you get it?” she said. “You shouldn’t have called nine-one-one. Not about something happening in here, with us. We have to take care of it ourselves.”
“I need to go check on Lacey.” I headed up the stairs.
“You sure?” Monet said. “Maybe the one you need to worry about is yourself.” She seemed to know things about me she wasn’t telling. I’d sensed that from her the very first time we met.
I kept climbing, but before I could open the door she called down once more. “How was your walk today? Did you wander around SoHo again?”
She knew my habits. She knew where I was.
She gazed down on me as if I should know what was coming right at me, as if she were shouting directions from a moving truck.
Then she climbed the ladder to the fourth floor and into her room beneath mine.
I didn’t know which room was Lacey’s now, but I went to the second floor and called her name. Finally one of the doors popped open and Lacey herself stuck out her head. Her face was puffy and pillow-creased from sleep. Her braids were loose, without any leaves or debris from the garden in them. She was alive, but she didn’t seem too thrilled to see me.
“Hi,” I said. I had my hand on the door, which she wouldn’t open all the way.
“Hi, what?” It wasn’t that she was being mean—more that she was being careful.
“I just needed to see if you were . . .” Dead? I couldn’t say it.
“Can’t you see I’m still here?”
I leaned in, hoping no one in any nearby room was listening. “Do you need me to call your parents?”
She leaned back, gaining distance. There wasn’t a speck of trust in her eyes. “It won’t matter.”
It was a perplexing thing to be so content with something no one else seemed to want anymore. How many of these girls hoped to abandon their rooms in this house but felt tethered here, feet in cement and willed to stay?
Couldn’t Lacey have gone home with her parents when they came for her stuff? I had questions, but the insistence in her eyes told me I should stop while I was ahead. All I ended up doing was holding up her purse so she could see. “I have this for you.”
She pushed her hand through the crack and grabbed it. The door closed in my face. I hadn’t taken anything she’d miss from her wallet—no money, nothing worth even a cent, though I could have.
On the stairwell heading back to the top floor, a familiar face came into view. Dark freckles like black ink spots; shifty eyes, gray. She slipped by me without stopping, a blur of motion swallowed by shadow.
“Hey,” I called after her.
She was gone, though her feet didn’t even make an audible patter down the stairs. When I looked at the closest portrait of the tenants—I was smack-dab in the middle of the 1970s, aimed right at 1975—I almost thought I saw the girl who’d avoided me on the stairwell. But hadn’t I also spotted her doppelganger in a photo from the 1920s? Maybe I did have a concussion.
━━━━━
That night, in my own room, while I was hiding Lacey’s library card, the one item I’d slipped out of her hideous purse, I let myself go over my slowly growing collection. Each day I had something new to put in the hollow space behind the radiator. I removed each thing so I could run my eyes over it and remember where it came from—the place and the moment. The comb was the first—how the silver caught the sunlight, how it gleamed. Also from the parlor downstairs, I had a tiny ivory elephant. Little carved ridges in the body made it feel like a crushable thing. A ceramic ashtray, a folded purple silk fan, a rook from a cobwebbed unfinished game of chess. From the open doorway of a room on the third floor, I had a delicate necklace, a string of tiny silver seeds. Other items from the house included a beautifully decorated spoon from the sugar bowl in the dining room and, from my own common area, one of my floormates’ abundant shoes. I took only the left one.
All I collected were items they wouldn’t notice: the beaded necklace among the other beads, the hair clip dropped beside the sink, the red-inked pen nestled among the black.
But at the far back of the hollowed-out area behind the radiator, burrowed in deep, I had something else, something special. I didn’t have my mother’s blue scarf to wrap it in, and I’d returned Anjali’s shirt, so I used a sock.
I’d thought of selling it—I’d scoped out a pawnshop in a basement storefront in the East Village—and I’d stood, wavering, on the top step, not yet ready to go down and see about giving it up.
I wanted to ask my mother how she’d gotten hold of it—how it could have possibly appeared in a photograph from a hundred years ago that hung, framed, behind a pane of glass, over the mantel, and ended up in her possession, but I couldn’t call to ask. If Monet was to be believed, which of course she wasn’t but sometimes I pretended she was, it was from a countess in Prague who escaped to live a new life, and beyond that I didn’t know who else had worn it or where else it had lived.
My mother once told me it was a gift—but from who, and for what occasion?
She also said it saved her life.
I removed the opal from its cave and let it loose from the sock. Within a moment, it was on my finger, and I was closing the lights and crawling into bed. I slept with it tucked under my pillow, my cheek on top. It was a hard knob digging into the mattress, oddly as cold as a cube of ice that never melted, but I was so comforted by the weight. I had to pull it out. To see.
For a moment, the smooth black stone captured the light and shimmered, showing it wasn’t black after all but a swirl of many colors, uncountable colors, changing by the moment and shifting from every angle, the way opals do.
Some girls wanted to leave Catherine House, and I couldn’t fathom why. With it on my hand, it felt like nothing bad could happen within these walls, beneath this roof, to me.