“Christ,” Colin says. “You’re a child.”
If only, Jane thinks. If I were still a child, I’d be having dinner with Aunt Magnolia right now, instead of with these people. On special nights, they would eat at the diner in town. Aunt Magnolia had owned a beautiful long coat, a dark, iridescent purple with a lining that shifted from silver to gold depending on the light. She’d often left it unbuttoned, knowing that Jane loved the glimpses of the secret shimmer inside. It had made Aunt Magnolia look like some of her own photographs of squids in the deep. It had made her look like outer space.
“Has anyone spoken to my mother?” Kiran asks, which strikes Jane as a strange question for her to ask this group. Kiran’s mother divorced Octavian Thrash IV a long time ago.
“You mean your mother, or your stepmother?” Colin asks her. “Charlotte,” he explains, looking at Jane.
“My own mother, of course,” Kiran says. “Why? Have you seen Charlotte?”
“Of course not, sweetie. I would’ve told you if I’d seen her,” Colin responds, which makes no sense to Jane. The wedding was recent and Charlotte, Octavian’s new wife, lives in this house. Where is she, anyway? Where is Octavian? Don’t they eat dinner? The air is moving against Jane’s eardrums. Whispering a word? Has someone at the table whispered “Charlotte”? Kiran absently rubs one of her ears and Jane does the same, then notices herself mirroring Kiran. She wonders, Isn’t that kind of peculiar?
Then she forgets.
“My mother is a scientist too, like Janie’s aunt,” Kiran says to Phoebe, “as I think you know. A theoretical physicist. She could tell you things about the universe that would show you how small you are. And my stepmother is an interior designer who always worked for a living before she married my father, and she’s damn good at it. Remember whose house you’re in, if you’re going to be snotty to my friends.”
There is a pause. “Kiran,” Colin says, “would you please pass me the salt?”
It’s the first time Jane has seen Kiran and Colin look into each other’s faces since the dinner began. Colin wears the expression of a man determined not to frighten a trapped creature. Kiran looks as if she might throw the salt at his face. She hands it to him silently.
Jane feels a bump against her leg and spends the rest of the meal passing tidbits down to Jasper.
*
Later that night, a sound wakes Jane, pulls her out of a dream about Baby Leo Panzavecchia. He’s wailing, he’s feverish. His angelic face is covered with angry welts and pustules; he’s dying. “Silly Baby Leo,” Jane mutters. “Everyone gets chicken pox. You’re not going to die.”
Through her bedroom window, the moon gleams low in the sky, a slice of orange. The storm is over. What woke her? The house has made a noise, like an annoyed grumble at being pulled out of its repose. Or did that noise come from Jane herself? It’s hard to tell.
It’s past four, which is unfortunate, because Jane can never fall asleep again once she’s awake. When she was little, Aunt Magnolia would stroke her hair, telling her to pretend that her lungs were a jellyfish, slowly swelling and emptying as they moved through underwater space. “Your body is a microcosm of the ocean,” she’d used to say. Jane would fall asleep with Aunt Magnolia’s hand in her hair, imagining herself the entire ocean, vast and quiet.
Now Jane sleeps with a blue wool hat of Aunt Magnolia’s that she’d unfailingly packed on her polar expeditions but left behind on that last Antarctic trip. This hat has only ever known Aunt Magnolia alive and well. It’s scratchy and springy. Jane reaches around under the covers for it, finds it, balls it up, pulls it close to her face, and breathes. Jellyfish are ancient creatures. Jane can be ancient and silent too.
No. Sleep is impossible. Pushing out of bed, Jane finds a hoodie to wear over her Doctor Who pajamas. What is this house like, she wonders, in the middle of the night?
Her curiosity outweighs her trepidation.
As she steps out of her rooms, she decides that the house is making protesting noises. Rumbles and groans, and something unplaceable, like the underwater echo of the laughter of children. But after all, a large old house would make strange noises, so she dismisses it. And she doesn’t notice herself cringing as the sound hurts the back of her teeth. She doesn’t feel her breath catching.
Motion-sensor spotlights hit each painting, one by one, as Jane progresses down the corridor toward the atrium, then turn off again once she’s passed. Forgetting about Captain Polepants, she trips over his head. Softly swearing, she continues on.
The house’s grumbles give way to actual human voices, distant and angry. Someone is having an argument in the courtyard. Jane begins to notice the scent of a pipe. Cautiously, she moves into one of the balustered archways and peers down.
A young man in black leather gesticulates with a motorcycle helmet at an older man, maybe in his fifties, who wears a silk, paisley bathrobe and bites down on the pipe Jane smelled. Their coloring is different, the elder man is white and the younger is brown, but Jane can see the father-son resemblance in the way their faces flash with anger. She can hear it in their voices. This is Octavian Thrash IV and Kiran’s twin brother, Ravi, who, Jane now realizes, did not ride a bicycle today from Providence to the Hamptons.
“Silly boy,” Octavian is saying. “Of course I didn’t sell your fishy.”
“Why do you do that?” Ravi says in disgust. “Why do you make a point of talking to me like I’m a child?”
“Stop behaving like a pollywog and I’ll stop treating you like one,” Octavian says. “Waking Patrick up in the middle of the morning to fetch you. Waking me up with your indignation when you get here and a sculpture’s not where you’ve left it.”
“Excuse me for being concerned about a missing Brancusi. And I didn’t wake Patrick up,” Ravi says. “He met me for a drink on the mainland and it got late, as it always does with Patrick. I didn’t wake you up either. You’re a creature of the night.”
“Not an excuse for you to stumble in drunk and raving.”
“I’m not drunk,” Ravi says distinctly. “And I merely want to know why the Brancusi fish isn’t in the receiving hall. No, forget that—I want to know why you don’t care it’s not in the receiving hall. You understand the piece I’m talking about? The one Ivy used to build an underwater kingdom for out of Play-Doh? You let her keep it in her bedroom for weeks, surrounded by Loch Ness Monster LEGOs.”
“I know the piece,” says Octavian wearily.
“Jesus, Dad, it’s worth millions. It was your own acquisition! Where the hell is it?”
“I expect Mrs. Vanders thought it would look better somewhere else,” Octavian says. “Or maybe she’s studying it for provenance. Between you and Vanny, it’s a wonder there’s any art left in the house. She made me return a seventeenth-century tapestry to some old geezer in Fort Lauderdale.”
“Right,” says Ravi testily. “Because she figured out it was Nazi plunder, acquired by your esteemed grandfather during the Holocaust. How dare she.”
“It’s damned amusing, you getting all huffy about provenance,” says Octavian. “I know what you’re up to with your mother. How do you explain the provenance of the art she supplies you with?”
Ravi peers at Octavian without expression. Crosses his arms. “There’s no reason to do a provenance study on the Brancusi,” he says coolly. “Vanny and I know everywhere it’s been since Brancusi created it.”
“Well, surely you don’t think someone stole it?”
“I don’t know what to think,” Ravi says, swiping a hand through wet hair and turning away from his father. “It’s not like you not to care. You used to be a normal person, who slept normal hours, and had normal conversations, and loved the art as much as I do, and gave a shit.”
“Watch your language,” says Octavian sharply.