Underneath my window, my devil was waiting, wearing my true love’s face. The moon bleached that face and the street beneath, so Carwyn looked as if he were standing on a ray of moonlight, a shining silver expanse that stretched from the sky to his feet.
His face was so pale, the color of alabaster or pearl, the poetic peaceful color that people turned in stories when they died. But I had seen the dead in their cages, had seen them livid and ashen, and I had learned long ago not to believe in stories.
The dead are defeated, the dead are lost. But this, I thought, with all the whispers about doppelgangers I had ever heard suddenly crowding my mind, was something that had been sent back from the land of the dead. This was a shadow of a person. This was death triumphant, walking among the living.
And I had set him free.
He had not changed position or expression as he looked at the window. All he did was stand beneath the window and stare, but I knew he saw me. His eyes looked dark and empty, in contrast with his salt-white face, like holes burned in a sheet.
I do not know how long I stood at the window.
I do not know how long my pallid companion stood looking up at me before he seemed to dissolve away, slipping from the moonshine to mingle with his fellow shadows.
I did not know if it was a warning or not. I didn’t know if he was telling me that he’d had something to do with the spectacle at the Green-Wood Cemetery, or that I was guilty by association, if he wanted only to frighten me or to ensure my silence with fear.
It was a wasted trip for him. I had seen the blood in the streets and on the wall, and I had told nobody what I had done. I had made my decision. I had hidden the collar. I could not betray him without betraying myself.
All the streets could run with blood, and I would not go to the authorities. They had taken my mother forever, taken my father, and I had only gotten him back through being able to lie and pretend we were somehow different from the other victims. Only a few days ago, they had tried to take my Ethan.
I needed no apparitions in the night to urge me to evil.
I had made the decision long ago: better to be safe than good.
The next morning, I got up early and made everyone breakfast. I tried to cook and clean as regularly as I could. Jarvis, Penelope, and Marie might care about us, might feel sorry for us, but it was smart to make them like me. The last time I ever saw her, my aunt had advised me to make myself useful.
Be clever. Be careful. Remember they are not like family, she’d said. Wait for me to come and get you, she had added, but I’d known she was dreaming, and I was on my own.
I forgot sometimes, with Penelope especially, but I tried to remember. I didn’t want to be stupid or careless.
Now I had been stupid and careless, and I had to make up for it by trying even harder.
“You’re a treasure, Ladybird,” Penelope declared, coming into the kitchen to snatch a piece of bacon and patting Marie’s cornrowed hair. “What we’ll do when you go to college I can’t imagine.”
Nothing would change when I went to college. I was going to college in New York, of course. My father couldn’t manage without me.
My father emerged into the kitchen last of all, glasses askew and hair ruffled, looking like a baby owl confused by the world. He sat down at the kitchen island, and I set his plate in front of him and poured his juice.
“You effortlessly make the morning shine, my dear,” he said, sounding like a gentleman from days long gone by, and I could see he felt better. He started talking with Penelope and Jarvis about the deleterious effect of dust on the minds of the young. He was doing research on the subject, writing a paper: there were days he went to the library and talked to strangers, and they thought he was such a charming, intelligent man. He was going today, and I was sure every stranger he spoke to would be fooled again. They would never have imagined there was a thing wrong with him.
I’d burned the side of my thumb cooking the bacon and eggs, and I took this opportunity to press the burned skin to the metal of the refrigerator sneakily, so nobody would see me do it. Nobody ever guessed how much effort looking effortless took.
“I’ll walk to school,” I said. I always got up in time to do that, because only four people fit in the car without being cramped, and dropping me off meant making an extra stop.
“You don’t have to,” said Jarvis. He always offered me a lift, as if it was his job to look after me, as if I was Marie. He was always so kind, and it made me nervous: I always wondered when his kindness might run out.
“I want to,” I told him.
I wasn’t lying. I usually walked, and Ethan usually met me on the way.