“Almost from the beginning,” she said. “My family hates me. If I lived four hundred years ago, I’d be burned already. As it is, my family thinks I’m a liar and a tart.”
She said the words with such calmness that my heart jumped in my throat, and I asked the question that burned inside me, that kept me awake at night. “Doesn’t it bother you?” I asked her. “Seeing the dead? Don’t you ever want to stop?”
Gloria tilted her head. “And do what?”
“Tell fortunes. Read palms,” I said. Both were impossible, and therefore a lie—according to my mother—but sometimes I thought that lying would be better than telling those grieving women the truth. “Anything but endure those visions—the dead.”
Gloria’s gaze had gone curiously still as she looked at me, and I could tell she was calculating something. I’d said too much, perhaps, though in my distress I couldn’t fathom what I’d said wrong. “It bothers you, then?” she said almost softly. “The visions?”
“How can you ask that?” My voice cracked, and I fought to keep control. My emotions were tumbling out of me of their own accord. “This power means I’m a circus freak. A witch—you said it yourself. A girl who will never have a normal life.”
Gloria arched an eyebrow again. She put a hand on one hip and regarded me for a long moment. Then she walked to the door and slipped on her coat with its beautiful fur collar again.
“I’ve never wanted a normal life,” she said to me, “so I can’t help you with that. But it seems to me that your problem is that you have no life at all. Come with me, darling. Let’s get drunk and see what we can do about it.”
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
When I finally arrived home from Ramona’s disastrous séance, my street in St. John’s Wood was as dark and quiet as if the world had ended. My heels clicked shallowly on the front walk and my key seemed to echo as it slid into its lock.
I tossed my handbag aside and dragged myself back to the kitchen, the silence deafening in my ears. It suddenly seemed that I had heard nothing but silence since my mother died; I’d been swaddled in cotton, the world muffled outside the confines of my head. Those last few years of my mother’s life, after I met Gloria, had not been quiet in this house. There had been arguments about hemlines and hairstyles, and tense fights when I came home in the middle of the night, and one particularly shrill confrontation when my mother caught me smoking. Then there was the drama of my mother’s scandalous retirement, and her moans of pain after she’d grown sick. And then all had been silence.
A tray covered with a dome sat on the kitchen table. My daily woman had come and gone as always, dutifully leaving me supper even though I was not in the house. What did she think of me? She never said. She had worked for my mother, and after my mother died we’d had a brief conversation in which she’d stated she’d like to stay on if I’d have her. She had offered no condolences, and I had asked for none.
I pulled the dome from the tray and looked down at the cold supper beneath it. This was how I lived: With the ghost of my mother, whose name I had taken, whose dress I wore every day in atonement. With the ghost of the daily woman, who hadn’t mourned my mother and would never mourn me. With the ghost of Gloria Sutter, who had haunted me long before she died.
I hadn’t gotten drunk that first night, despite Gloria’s proclamation. I’d never been drunk in my life, and I was far too terrified to let even Gloria have her way. She had taken me to supper at a tiny club with plush red chairs, no windows, and a wizened proprietor who spoke nothing but Russian and communicated with his patrons chiefly in mime. Gloria had downed a bottle of wine over the meal, let me pay the bill with my last few coins, and then taken me out into the night.
There had been taxicabs and clubs, and almost-beautiful women in expensive dresses and fur coats, and men who poured drinks and whose comments seemed to insult you and compliment you at the same time. It was bitterly cold, the slush on the streets wet and nearly frozen, our breath pluming in the air as we went from a taxicab to a doorway and back out again. It was hectic and exhilarating and exhausting. Everyone knew Gloria; everyone loved her and referred to her as “darling” or “simply too much,” but even I could see the wariness in their eyes beneath it all, the way none of them touched her.
Now, in my silent kitchen, I took off my high heels and rubbed my feet. My brain hurt and my eyes felt as if sand had been rubbed into them. Still, I made the journey back to the front hall to retrieve my handbag and pull out the little satin bag I’d taken from Gloria’s flat the day before. I’d carried it with me like a talisman, never certain when I would need a bolt of gin. That moment seemed to be now.
I slid the little flask from its pouch and admired it briefly. It was well made, chosen with Gloria’s impeccable taste, slender and feminine. When I touched the empty satin bag again, I heard a telltale crinkle, and when I slid my fingers inside, to my amazement I pulled out a few folded pieces of paper.
I opened the first one and held it under the light.
Dear Mrs. Sutter,
It is with great sadness that we inform you that your son, Harry Sutter, died 19 March 1916, valiantly in defense of his country . . .
There were three of these letters, telegrams, each of them as well-worn as lace. Tommy, the sweet one; Colin, the sour politician; Harry, the handsome one. Gloria hadn’t spoken much about her brothers, but she’d quietly carried these letters with her everywhere she went. I set them aside, careful not to damage them.