After Tad goes, taking his music and his beachy scent with him, the place is quiet. Just me on the floor with Tad’s beer in my hand, watching the sky darken through Mother’s immense windows. Tad offered to stay, but I said, I’m fine, thank you, Tad, and again his name mocked me. I am fine. Really. Just an apartment. Just Mother’s apartment. Filled with her furniture, all of it sharp-edged and winking in the light. Shouldn’t be afraid, it’s silly. If Mother knew I was afraid, she’d laugh and laugh. She’d say, Ridiculous. I stare at the wall of cracked mirrors in their heavy frames. Were there always this many, Mother?
Angelica has disappeared, slithered whitely away. A clock somewhere ticks and ticks. Didn’t know Mother had a clock like that. Tick, tick, telling me I should move along. All I’ve done so far is unpack the box Sylvia gave me from the shop basement. Disappointing. Mostly old dolls—my childhood dolls, I guess. They all looked exactly alike, like Mother, in fact. Pale skin. Blue eyes of glass that stared up at me unblinking. There was an old clock in there too, with a picture of Snow White and the Seven Dwarves on the face. Funny, I don’t remember owning a clock like that. There was a red diary, locked, no key. A picture book of what looked like a Snow White story. The Beautiful Maiden, it was called. Very worn. Spine cracked. I must have loved that story once.
The shoebox was a little curious, I guess. I thought it was just the dolls, the clock, and the books in the box at first, but something told me, Put your hand in deeper. And there was the shoebox at the very bottom. Taped up just like the box itself had been. Taped tighter than the box. Someone had wrapped the tape around and around. I had to take a knife to all sides to get it open. Then what? I held my breath a little. Maybe this would be… something. What was I looking for? But it was nothing, really. Just an old torn poster of Tom Cruise in Top Gun. Some magazine clippings, mostly of Tom Cruise too, it looked like. All of Tom Cruise, it turned out. Each one carefully folded. I stared at page after torn page of his glossy face, the cracked mirrors shining in my eye corners. Dizzy, I felt then. Cold suddenly in the very white room. Who ripped these out? I wondered. But I knew. I knew before I even saw the childish handwriting scrawled across one of the clippings—Tom smiling in his sunglasses in Risky Business. I’m yours, I’d written in tiny red letters. How funny. I’d even drawn a heart, how very funny. Right around Tom’s face in red ink. I looked back at the torn Top Gun poster. Half was missing. Kelly McGillis, his co-star, torn out so it was just Tom alone on his motorcycle. I looked at Tom’s face, the mirrors nearly blinding me now with the light of the dying sun. His eyes were in shadow, so they looked like black holes. I must have had a crush or something at some point.
Now I stare at the open box brimming with dolls, the clippings, that worn little picture book. Just more shit to pack up, really. Are you moving in or moving out? Tad joked again as he was leaving.
Moving out, Tad. Moving out.
So get going, I tell myself. At least now you have a box. Her books, her clothes, dishes, just fucking pick something. Beer in hand, I wander the apartment, my footsteps clicking along the floor. Belle, Mother would snap, shoes!—but I keep them on. As I go from room to room, my heart sinks like a stone. Because her hobgoblin lawyer was right. Her place is in terrible shape. The more closely I look, the more I see. Cracks in the white walls. Water stains on the ceilings like ink blots. Paint peeling everywhere. In the bathroom, where I hid away yesterday watching Marva, I notice chips in the sink now, decaying grout around the rim. When I pull back the flowery shower curtain, I see the tub’s filled with cracks. The shower head yields nothing but a thin stream of rusty water. I try to turn off the tap, but it comes off in my hand. The kitchen is a disaster. Ancient stove, I can’t see the numbers around the dials anymore. Fridge that hums, that’s the humming noise I was hearing during the memorial. I thought it was Sylvia playing some Gregorian chants. I take a long swig of beer. This is bad. Mother, did you really live like this?
And the jars. Red jars and bottles in every room, how did I not notice them all before? Lining the walls of her bedroom. Cluttering her countertops. She really loved her products, didn’t she? Sylvia said. I think of the video, the glowing girl in the bright bathroom, holding a jar up to her face like an apple. Red glass just like this. It feels heavy in my hand. Gold, slanted characters like runes are etched across it. ROUGE, it reads, and nothing else. No ingredients list. No instructions. Oh, I have my secrets, Belle. We all have our beauty secrets, don’t we?
I open the jar. More than empty. Like it’s been licked clean by the cat. There’s a faint scent of ocean and roses that rises up like a ghost.
I look in the cracked mirror. “Mother,” I whisper. “What the fuck is all of this?”
Belle, do you ever look in the mirror and hate? she asked me once on the phone.
Hate? I stared at the silhouette of my reflection in the dark. Yes, I thought. Of course. All the fucking time. But I said, Hate what, Mother?
I could picture her sitting alone in the dark like I was, staring at herself in the mirror.
Ce que tu vois, Mother whispered. A crack in her voice. She sounded lost and sad and afraid. What were you afraid of, Mother?
Now in the mirror I see a shimmer of something. A shape. My heart pounds. Oh god, what—but it’s just the cat sitting by the front door. Staring at me with her eyes pale and sharp as Mother’s. She blinks at me slowly and slinks away.
A pair of red shoes come winking into focus. Shining by the open box behind me.
I turn around and there they are for real. Gleaming between the dolls and the shoebox full of Tom Cruise clippings. Like they were always there. Like they could have come out of the box. Maybe they did and I just didn’t notice them in the sea of dolls. Pretty, I think, walking over to them. So very red. Mother’s, they have to be. Funny, I don’t remember her having a pair like this. And yet there’s something familiar about the worn, thin heel, the sharply pointed toe with the feathers, this red web of straps. The clock, that clock I didn’t know she had, ticks louder somewhere. Quicker? Maybe quicker, too. Try me, try me, the red shoes seem to say. Almost like they’re speaking to me. I shake my head. Mother’s shoes would never fit me. I think of her little white feet with their painted red toes. Nothing at all like my freak shows. What are we going to do with you? she used to say when she took me shoe shopping as a teenager. Shaking her head at my huge, misshapen feet in their scuffed black Doc Martens, the only shoes we could find that fit. I don’t know, Mother, I said. Put me in a sack. Drown me. I’m hopeless. And she’d frown as I smiled.
Holding the shoes, I feel a strange charge in my hands. Light as feathers. Giving off a faint scent of flesh, her flesh. I close my eyes. It’s funny how Mother’s shoes make me feel silly, sort of ashamed. Like a stupid, sad child again. Just then a memory hits like a cold, crashing wave. My childish feet in red shoes. I’m looking in a mirror, but it isn’t myself I see there. Someone else is in the glass. A man. I can’t see his face, but I feel him smiling at me. I’m smiling too. Then all goes black.
* * *