That morning, while the other women slept, I made breakfast in the blue light at the back of the house. I put quiches in the oven and warmed the waffle iron. I hadn’t known about the bomb threats, but even with this new information, and the realization that we could all be blown to smithereens at any moment, I had never felt safer. Calliope House was filled with the scarred and the wounded, like me. Some scars were visible, some not.
Only a few of us actually lived in Calliope House. Each morning around nine a.m., the other women who worked with Verena arrived, filling the house with hivelike noise and energy. With me in the house, the kitchen became a gathering place, my homemade food devoured instead of the usual takeout and deliveries. The morning of the bomb threat was no different. I set out the quiches and piles of waffles, pitchers of orange juice. The smells filled the house like warm, fragrant breath. Soon I had company.
Rubí was the first to fill her plate. I had admitted to her that I’d ruined the poplin shirtdress she’d made for me during Marlowe’s makeover, but she said she still had the pattern and some of the fabric, if I decided I wanted another one. Sana was next in the breakfast line. When we first met, I didn’t know how to look at her, but I no longer saw a scarred face, just a face. This allowed me to notice her beauty, especially her eyes. They’d been spared any damage and were deep brown with a touch of gold, like two polished stones.
As the women took their places around the table, Marlowe arrived with baby Huck. “Ooh, is Plum cooking again?” She rubbed her hands together in delight.
“Plum is always cooking,” I said, sliding a platter of bacon onto the table and catching sight of her tattoo: women don’t want to be me, men don’t want to fuck me. I finally understood what it meant.
“You all look tired,” Marlowe said. “Let me guess—bomb threat?”
The answer was confirmed by groans, and I put on another pot of coffee. We ate and talked about the bomb threat, then moved on to the far more interesting topic: Jennifer. We talked about Jennifer every day. The morning papers were scattered around the kitchen. The television in the corner was switched on. Leeta remained missing, which heightened suspicion that what she’d told her roommate was true: She knew who Jennifer was and had done something wrong. The news of the day was that Leeta had been spotted in Alaska. The day before she’d been sighted in El Salvador, and before that it was Kentucky. Whenever I saw her face, flattened in newsprint or flashing on the television screen, I felt a jolt. It didn’t seem possible—and yet it was true.
“These people seem convinced they’ve spotted her,” Sana said, digging into the quiche. “It’s a mass delusion.”
“She gets into your head and she haunts you,” I said. She had done that to me, and now she was doing it to everybody. The women at Calliope House knew about my history with Leeta, but I had never shown them the red spiral-bound notebook. Only Verena and Julia had seen that.
“I tried to call Julia again last night,” I said, buttering a waffle. Since leaving the underground apartment, I’d been trying to contact her. “She’s incommunicado.”
“Not surprising,” Rubí said. “Look at this.” She held up one of the newspapers, smeared with greasy bacon fingerprints. The headline read: DOES JULIA COLE KNOW LEETA’S SECRETS? Julia’s job working for Austen Media made her an irresistible target for the New York tabloids, which were already obsessed with Stanley Austen and his editors.
“Julia’s feeling the heat,” said Marlowe. “I wouldn’t be surprised if she and her loony sisters do know something.”
Verena drank her coffee, her normal brightness dimmed by lack of sleep. “If she does have more information, I don’t want to know about it. I don’t want to risk a connection to this tawdry business, no matter how tenuous.” Verena motioned in the direction of the television, where footage of some of Jennifer’s greatest hits was playing: the Harbor Freeway interchange, the bodies in the Nevada desert, Stella Cross and her husband. “It’s not Julia’s fault that her former intern got mixed up in this, but I’m not upset that she’s avoiding us. I’d prefer that she keep away. Is that awful?”
Murmurs of agreement spread around the table. Everyone assured Verena that they agreed with her point of view, that they all worked so hard on their various projects at Calliope House and it wouldn’t be fair for Julia’s connection to Leeta to taint their good work. Julia wasn’t part of Calliope House anyway, only an occasional visitor.
“I can see the headlines,” Verena said. “BAPTIST HEIRESS CONNECTED TO JULIA COLE, LEETA ALBRIDGE’S FORMER BOSS. You can imagine the kinds of stories they’d make up about me.”
“And me,” said Marlowe.