“Kiran?” Jane says, then stops when Kiran flinches. It occurs to Jane that Kiran doesn’t want another person asking her if she’s okay. “Is there—anything I can do to help with the missing art?”
Kiran coughs a laugh, then stabs a different green bean. “It’s not funny, of course,” she says. “It’s awful. Or anyway, Ravi feels awful, which makes me feel awful. And I feel awful speculating about who might have done it too.” She shakes her head briefly, as if clearing it. “Ravi gave me the yellow umbrella,” she says. “It’s lovely. Thank you. I hope you charged him lots of money.”
“I did, actually,” says Jane, surprised that Kiran remembers that money matters to Jane in a way it doesn’t to her.
“It’s really special,” Kiran says. “I’d like to see the rest of them.”
“I’d be happy to show them to you,” Jane says, “anytime,” realizing she means it, because Kiran feels different from everyone else. Kiran is careful. She’ll be respectful. She understood Aunt Magnolia, and she’ll understand the umbrellas.
“Do you want to go into business with them?” she says. “Ravi could help you.”
“Actually, Colin has taken a few to show to his uncle.”
Kiran eats a green bean, then stares at her fork. “I don’t know why I’m dating him,” she says.
She’s voiced Jane’s own question, but Jane isn’t sure how to respond.
“I mean,” Kiran says, “he seems like a fine person and all. Doesn’t he?”
“Uh-huh,” Jane says, “most of the time.”
“Ravi likes him.”
“But, do you like him?”
“I like having sex with him,” she says.
“Really?” Jane says, then, realizing how she sounds, flushes with embarrassment.
Kiran laughs. “He probably doesn’t seem the type, huh? Let’s just say there are benefits to him feeling like he needs to be an expert on everything.”
Jane once kissed a boy from her high school at a party, and a girl in her dorm who was pretty drunk. And she thinks about sex. But she hasn’t even come close. Not really.
“I feel like I should like him,” Kiran says.
“Aunt Magnolia used to tell me to be careful not to should all over myself,” Jane says, which makes Kiran glance at her in surprise, then chuckle.
“But, really,” Kiran says, with a strange, stubborn kind of earnestness. “I should like him. The funny things he says should make me laugh. The conversations we have should interest me. He’s smart, he’s educated, he never does anything objectively wrong. And yet I can’t relax around him, and I can’t tell whether it’s actually something about him, or if it’s just that I can’t relax anywhere, about anything.” She blinks fast, looking away from Jane.
“Oh, Kiran.”
“It sucks,” she says. “And trying to figure it out makes me really tired.”
“Is Patrick part of it too?” Jane asks.
Kiran makes a hopeless, impatient noise. “No. He doesn’t get to be part of it. At least Colin is an open book.”
“Well,” Jane says, feeling distinctly useless. “I wish I knew how to help. I don’t have much experience. Mainly what I know how to do is drop out of college and make umbrellas.”
A smile touches the corner of Kiran’s mouth. “What would your aunt tell me to do?”
Jane takes a careful breath. “She’d probably tell you to breathe like a jellyfish.”
“Do jellyfish breathe?”
“I mean, imagine your lungs are moving the way a jellyfish moves,” Jane says. “Breathe deliberately, deep and slow, into your belly.”
“Okay,” Kiran says, focusing on her next breath. “And this will solve my problems?”
Now Jane is smiling. “It will, if your problems relate to breathing.”
“Aunt Magnolia was a wise woman.”
Yes, Jane thinks. She was.
*
That night, Jane’s rooms feel cavernous and dark, the ceilings too high, the air too chilly. In her morning room, the darkness presses in. So she works, moving her hands steadily across the skeleton of her umbrella, trying to be patient with all the questions that don’t have answers.
There’s a stage in umbrella-making when the umbrella is little more than a rod and eight ribs. If Jane opens and closes it, it moves like a jellyfish made of wires, like an undersea creature in the world’s creepiest ocean.
Since she’s using ribs of different lengths for this umbrella, the frame makes a particularly strange and unbalanced jellyfish. It’s hard to know if this will have the effect she’s going for. She’ll have to wait and see. But she thinks she might want this umbrella to be like a secret. When other people look at it, they’ll see something broken-looking and weird. Only Jane will know that it’s the blue splotch in Aunt Magnolia’s iris.
*
Once again, the groaning house wakes her before dawn, this time from a dream about Ivy stealing a fish. The dream becomes a voice—a house voice—with moaning walls and rattling windows that tell Jane to look outside, and before she’s entirely awake, she’s stumbled out of bed and pressed herself against the glass in the morning room. The night is clear, the moon is just rising, and the garden is knit like black lace.
Jasper blunders into the room from the bedroom and stands beside her at the window. He presses his nose to the glass.
Beyond the garden, movement. A dark shape. No—two dark shapes. One of the shapes switches on a flashlight. The other person is illuminated briefly, not enough to make out any features, but enough to show that this person is carrying a flat, rectangular package. They cross the lawn and disappear into the trees.
Patrick and Ivy, Jane thinks, struck by a certainty she can’t justify. Her heart begins to beat in her throat. “Jasper?” she says. “Does that package seem the right size for the Vermeer?”
Jasper sneezes.
“Yeah,” Jane says. “So, what do we do?”
Jasper sets his paw on Jane’s foot. It’s a gesture Jane isn’t certain how to interpret. Is he trying to keep her here, or is he expressing team solidarity in the face of adventure?
Or maybe he’s a dog, Jane says to herself, he doesn’t understand language, and he likes how your foot feels.
“Well, Jasper,” says Jane. “I guess we need a flashlight. An ally would be nice too.”
Finding her hoodie and socks and slipping into her big black boots, checking the time—it’s not even 5:15 yet—Jane goes out into the corridor. After considering things for a split second, she knocks on Ravi’s door. Jasper leans on her ankles. When there’s no answer, she knocks harder, and when there’s still no answer, she takes a conscious risk of discovering him having sex with someone and barges right in. It’s not like he hasn’t barged in on her, and there’s no time to waste here.
Ravi’s bed is palatial, and empty.
Interesting. She tries to conjure up the mental image of the two figures entering the forest again, to see if she can turn one of them into Ravi, but it’s really no use; she didn’t see enough.
“I wish I knew which room is Lucy’s,” she says to Jasper as they proceed down the corridor. “I wish—” She trips over Captain Polepants. “Ack! I wish I knew who to trust.” Where is she likely to find a flashlight? The kitchen? The servants’ quarters?
Jane has a sudden vision of the two long, powerful flashlights propped on Ivy’s computer desk.
If Ivy’s in the forest now, there’s nothing to stop Jane from going into her room and “borrowing” a flashlight. And if it turns out that Ivy is in her room . . .
Jane heads toward the servants’ quarters. As she and Jasper round the courtyard, she hears music in the house somewhere. A Beatles recording, which strikes her as odd at this hour.
In the servants’ wing, she starts to lose her nerve. If Ivy’s in her room, then Jane’s appearance at five-something in the morning is going to be pretty unexpected. And Ivy hasn’t been too friendly lately. She stops outside Ivy’s door.
“Jasper?” she whispers. “What do I do?”
Jasper looks back at her with a blank expression appropriate to a dog.