“I never walked along the cliff,” I lie, staring at Anjelica.
She doesn’t say, I could have sworn I saw you. Instead, she keeps petting the dog, whose eyes close and open. “Well, it’s a pretty walk, anyway. Pretty walk, weird house. A mansion, really. Right at the edge of the cliff. I always wondered who the hell lived there. I guess now we’ll never know, will we?”
She’s asking me. I feel her asking me.
“I guess not.”
“I always wondered if it might tip into the water. I was even going to warn them about that. In case they didn’t realize. Sometimes it takes an outside eye to see things.”
“Yeah.”
“But they didn’t seem very approachable. Living behind those tall black gates.”
“Right.” I picture Sylvia knocking primly on the door to tell them, to do her neighborly duty. The look on their pale faces when she explained herself.
“For a while I thought it was abandoned,” she says. “But it had the most beautiful roses in the front yard. Those take cultivation, you know. Care. Roses like that.”
“Yes.”
“And I think they had some sort of spa in there?” Sylvia says. “Something like that, anyway. French. Very exclusive. To do with beauty,” she presses.
“Beauty,” I repeat.
“Skincare,” Sylvia says, frowning a little. The concept is far too suspect and mysterious for her. “I think your mother used to go there.”
“Did she?”
“You know your mother. Always into the treatments and such. The weirder the better for her.” And she laughs. But I know Sylvia’s laugh now. Not cruel. Mostly just embarrassed by the want she observes in the world. Even her own. “You like that stuff too, don’t you?”
“I used to.”
“You know that flooding happened the same morning we found you on the beach. Not very far away.”
“Huh,” I say. And that is all I say. Even though Sylvia sits there for a very long while. After she leaves me at last, I go online and try to find a woman called Lake. I want to do something for her. To let her family know. To find the house with the thirteen windows. To tell whoever lives in that house what happened. No woman called Lake in La Jolla that looks like Lake. Though I remind myself Lake didn’t look like herself. And probably she wasn’t called Lake. Probably she was just like me, like Hud’s brother. With her own dark mirror, her own story of envy and longing that made her the Perfect Candidate and then the perfect feed. What was your mirror like, Lake? What did you see when you looked into its shining face? Did you ever see how beautiful you were? Did you ever see your own face as it truly was? Or was it another face you saw there? The name and shape of some childish dream. Did he dance with you in the bedroom dark? Whisper poison into your young ear, his breath on your neck like a cold, cold breeze? Did yours look like a famous movie star? Someone that as a child you might have recognized, already learned to love, trust, find beautiful. Face like the sun, eyes like the sea. And yet something about the cold sticking of his touch, the endless deep in his eyes, the poison words on his red lips told you he was also something else. Something awful you couldn’t name. Where did it come from? Your soul or the glass or something else between? What did it make you destroy? I was only ever a mirror for your darkness, seedling, Seth said, his eyes going from blue-green to red to blue-green.
I wish I could ask her.
I find a phone number for Hud Hudson, try it. Not available. I call the pink hotel. He’s still checked in there, but they haven’t seen him, they say. They put me through to his room and the phone rings and rings, and then it’s the front desk clerk I’m speaking to again.
“Would you like to leave a message?”
“No message. I’ll try again later.”
* * *
Sylvia never asks me about the house directly again. She never asks why I washed up in a torn white-and-red silk dress on the shore like I did. She never asks why I went insane in her clothing store. She never asks and I never tell her that I did indeed walk the path along the cliff. In a pair of Mother’s red shoes, shoes I seem to have lost in the night of water. Shoes that led me down the very same path she must have walked, that led me right to her in the end. Maybe she is where they were always leading me in the end. I never tell Sylvia about going the Way of Roses, where I very nearly became my Most Magnificent Self. I never tell her about the Treatment Room, where the black box of my mind was opened and I came face-to-face with my deepest secret, almost lost my soul in the shape of a red jellyfish. She doesn’t ask, though I know she’s suspicious, and I don’t tell, though it doesn’t feel like such a secret anymore. Not like Seth was. Seth in the black box that Rouge opened. In some ways, it feels like Sylvia knows anyway.
If she did ask, I would say it was grief. The deepest grief. I know she would accept that as an answer. No one knows what’s inside grief.
Anything at all can be there.
* * *
I call the funeral director and arrange to pick up the ashes. I call Persephone and tell her I won’t be back to Montreal for a while. I call Monsieur Lam and he says Lucifer is doing beautifully, not to worry. Do what you have to do. I lie in Sylvia’s blue guest bedroom and through the wall, I hear her sitting in her beige living room alone watching Wheel of Fortune and then Jeopardy! in the evenings. I remember Grand-Maman rocking alone in the dark. The sound of the rocking and the sound of the television and the sound of her silence. Her fist of gold and stones. How she pressed it to her heart when she taught me about forgetting, though she herself never forgot. Now is the time to bury. The gold bracelet winks on my wrist, thin as thread. I look down at the eye that kept me watchful that terrible final night. Father’s eye, Mother said. Always open. There are some stones that close and some stones that open.
One night, I join Sylvia in the living room.
She looks at me standing in the doorway and smiles. There’s her cup of tea on the coffee table. “Not watching your beauty videos tonight?” she says as I take a seat beside her on the crinkly couch.
“Not tonight,” I say. When I first got my laptop back, I immediately opened YouTube and tried. But just one look at Marva’s pale, expressionless face and all I saw was the Queen of Snow covered in Lake’s blood spray. All I heard was her fake motherly voice. All I saw in the vial of serum Marva was holding up was a white pulsing fish. I snapped the laptop shut.
“You know I could use someone at our little shop,” she says.
“Really?”
She nods, flipping channels. “Someone to buy and manage the stock. Do the displays. That was never my forte, as I know you know. I’m really more of a numbers person. And Esther’s sweet, but she’s hopeless. Your mother was the one with the eye, the style. Always so sharp. We really miss her.” She looks at the TV screen. “Do you know anyone who might be—?”
“Yes.” I say it before I can even think.
Sylvia smiles at the television. “Wonderful.”
We watch Jeopardy! like I used to do with Grand-Maman. Except I don’t lie upside down, and unlike Grand-Maman, Sylvia isn’t silent. She blurts out her guesses. Blurts them out even if she’s wrong. She doesn’t care. “I’ll always say the answers,” she says. Not the answers, dear. The questions, Mother would say if she were here. “I can’t contain myself,” Sylvia says. “Sorry.”
“I like it,” I say.
I feel her looking at me instead of the screen, smiling. “What?”
“Just, you’re looking better these days.”
“Am I?” I haven’t looked in a mirror since I arrived. Can’t bring myself to face a glass. Not yet. Don’t know what face I’ll see there. Mother’s. Seth’s. Some moonbright monster.