Roman smiled and received it all graciously, dressed in starched clothes and polished leather shoes, his black hair combed out of his eyes and his face shaven. Another perfect appearance. If Iris didn’t know better—if she hadn’t sat on a park bench with him and heard him confess how reluctant he was to marry a stranger—she would have thought he was thrilled.
She wondered if she had dreamt that moment with him, when they had almost spoken to one another like old friends. When he had laughed, listened, and apologized. Because it suddenly felt like some feverish imagining.
The fuss was dying down at last. Roman dropped his messenger bag, but then he must have felt her stare. His gaze lifted and found her on the other side of the room, over the sea of desks and paper and conversations.
For a breath, Iris couldn’t move. And whatever mask he had been wearing for everyone else—the smile and the merry eyes and the flushed cheeks—faded until she saw how exhausted and sad he was.
It struck a chord within her, music that she could feel deep in her bones, and she broke their stare first.
* * *
Iris was halfway through drafting an essay inspired by the myth she had received in the wardrobe when Sarah approached her desk with a scrap of paper.
“The constable just called this in,” she said, setting it on Iris’s desk. “Was hoping we could squeeze it into tomorrow’s paper.”
“What is it?” Iris asked, preoccupied with her writing.
“I’m not sure what to call it. But they found a body this morning, and they’re hoping someone will be able to identify her. The description is there, written down. It’s just dreadful, isn’t it? Being killed like that.”
Iris paused, hands in mid-type, to glance at the paper.
“Yes,” she said in a hollow tone. “I’ll take care of it. Thank you, Prindle.”
She waited until Sarah strode away. Then she read it, and the words swam in her eyes, burned through her mind, until she felt as if she were trying to squeeze herself through a tight space. A long, narrow tunnel.
A woman was hit and killed by a tram last night around 10:45 PM. There was no identification on her, but she looks to be in her mid-forties, with light brown hair and fair skin. She was wearing a purple coat and was barefoot. If you think you may know her or be able to identify her, please see Constable Stratford at Station Nine.
Iris rose with the note, her knees shaking. The weight in her chest was overwhelming. She remembered to grab her tapestry bag, but she forgot her trench coat, draped over her chair. She left her desk lamp on and essay page curled in the typewriter and she simply quit the office without a word, hurrying out the glass doors.
She pushed the button for the lift, and then felt her gorge rising.
The elevator was taking too long. She rushed to the stairs, and she half ran, half tripped down them, trembling so violently that she barely made it out the lobby doors before she vomited into a potted plant on the marble steps.
Straightening, Iris wiped her mouth and began to walk to Station Nine, which wasn’t far from her home.
It’s not her, she told herself over and over, with each step that drew her closer. It’s not her.
But Iris hadn’t seen her mother in over twenty-four hours. She hadn’t been sprawled on the sofa that morning, like she had been the dawn before. Iris had assumed she was in her bedroom with the door closed. She should have checked, to make sure. Because now this doubt was piercing her.
When Iris reached the station, she paused, as if not entering would keep the truth from happening. She must have stood on the front stairs for a while, because the shadows were long at her feet and she was shivering when an officer approached her.
“Miss? Miss, you can’t stand on the stairs like this. You need to move.”
“I’m here to identify a body,” she rasped.
“Very well. Follow me, please.”
The station corridors were a blur of cream-colored walls and crooked hardwood floors. The air was astringent and the light harsh when they made it to an examination room.
Iris came to an abrupt halt.
The coroner was standing with a clipboard, dressed in white clothes and a leather apron. Beside him was a metal table, and on the table was a body.
Aster looked like she was sleeping, save for the crooked way she rested beneath a sheet and the gash on her face. Iris stepped forward, as if taking her mother’s hand would make her stir. She would feel her daughter’s touch, and it would pull her back from whatever chasm that wanted her, from whatever nightmare they were trapped within.
“Miss?” the coroner was saying, and his nasal voice reverberated through her. “Can you identify this woman? Miss, can you hear me?”
Iris’s hand froze in the air. Stars began to dance at the edges of her sight as she stared at her mother. Dead and pale and in a place so far away, Iris would never be able to reach her.
“Yes,” she whispered before she collapsed, into the embrace of darkness.
{11}
The Vast Divide
It was dark and cold and long past midnight when Iris walked home from the station, carrying a box of her mother’s belongings. A mist spun in the air, turning lamplight into pools of gold. But Iris could hardly feel the chill. She could hardly feel the cobblestones beneath her feet.
Her hair and clothes were beaded with moisture by the time she stepped into her flat. Of course, it was full of quiet shadows. She should be used to it by now. And yet she still peered into the darkness for a glimpse of her mother—the spark of her cigarette and the slant of her smile. Iris strained against the roar of silence for any sound of life—a clink of a bottle or the hum of a favorite song.
There was nothing. Nothing but Iris’s labored breaths and a box of belongings and the undertaker’s bill to pay, to turn her mother’s body into ashes.
She set down the box and wandered into Aster’s room.
Iris sprawled on the rumpled bed. She could almost fool herself, remembering the time before the alcohol had set its claws into her mother. Before Forest left them. She could almost sink into the bliss of the past, when Aster had been full of laughter and stories, waitressing at the diner down the street. Brushing Iris’s long hair every night and asking her about school. What books she had been reading. What reports she was writing.
You’ll be a famous writer someday, Iris, her mother had said, deft fingers braiding Iris’s long brown hair. Mark my words. You’ll make me so proud, sweetheart.
Iris let herself weep. She cried the memories into her mother’s pillow until she was so exhausted the darkness pulled her under again.
* * *
She woke to the sound of persistent knocking on the front door.
Iris jolted upright in bed, her legs tangled in wine-stained sheets. Sunlight was streaming in through the window, and for a moment she was confused. What time was it? She had never slept this late …
She scrambled for the watch on her mother’s bedside table, which read half past eleven in the morning.
Oh my gods, she thought, and rose from the bed on shaky legs. Why had she overslept? Why was she in her mother’s bed?
It all came back to her in a rush. The message at the Gazette, Station Nine, her mother’s cold, pale body beneath a sheet.