The Appearance of Annie van Sinderen

“What do you think? Is it all right?” she asks me, eyes wide, hunting for my approval.

I smile at her. “I know it’s not to your taste,” I say. “But I think you’re lovely.”

“Do I look respectable? I have to, or they won’t let me in,” Maddie says. “They’ll, like, call the cops or something.”

“You look a perfect lady,” I say.

“All right!” Tyler interrupts, hopping from one foot to the other. “Let’s get this show on the road! Can we all fit in one cab? Should we Uber it? Where is this place anyway?”

Maddie loops her arm through mine and smiles regally into Tyler’s camera.

“Sorry,” she says. “It’s just Annie and me, going.”

Wes clambers off the bed and moves over to us, hovering between us and the door. “Are you sure? Maybe I should come with,” he says.

“No,” Maddie says.

A flash of panic illuminates Wes’s eyes, but he’s trying mightily not to show it.

“But,” he says to me, his voice tighter than usual, “what if something happens? When you find it?”

Maddie and I exchange a look.

“We won’t put it on until we get back,” Maddie suggests. “How about that?”

“Yes,” I say, and now it’s my turn to waver. “I’ll do it when we’re all together.”

Wes looks carefully at me while Tyler moans, “Oh, man! But I got extra batteries and everything!”

“Where do you want to do it?” Eastlin asks quietly as he puts his various tools away.

I look over my shoulder at him. He hasn’t looked fully at me since I walked in with Wes. I can tell that my very being here sets his teeth on edge. As it should. I don’t belong here.

“I don’t know,” I falter.

“Maybe back at your house?” Wes suggests.

It’s a logical idea, but something about it makes me afraid. I don’t know what’s going to happen. I don’t know where I’m going to go. I think of our front door melting before my eyes, and can’t conceive of seeing that happen again.

“They’re about to open,” Maddie prods us. “We should get going. I don’t know if I have to fill out any paperwork, or whatever.”

Eastlin closes a case full of paints and powders with a decisive snap and says, “You guys go. We’ll text you where to meet us. Okay?”

“Fine,” Maddie says.

“All right,” I agree.

Maddie hauls me to the door and my eyes stay locked on Wes, who reaches a hand out as though to stop me. But then we’re gone.

? ? ?

My head is still spinning from the incredible speed of the horseless landau when Maddie presses an unmarked buzzer outside an imposing marble fa?ade across the Central Park from her building. It looks to me like a mansion, but of a scale I hadn’t heretofore imagined. What wealth there must be in New-York now! Dizzying wealth, like the kings of France in the old regime, with their gilded walls, alabaster peacocks, and bowlsful of jewels. Our town house could fit inside this one seven times over or more. I follow close on her heels as Maddie heads inside, trotting to keep up with her as she strides past an airy art gallery, through an unmarked door secured with another buzzer, down a long hallway filled with false light, and at last through a modest glass vestibule deep in the building’s entrails.

There’s a young woman perched behind a desk, and her demeanor is serious and businesslike. Her beauty staggers me. Everyone has such perfect teeth, such smooth and unblemished skin. Even Mother, for all her vanity and social ambition, has pox scars on her cheeks and a brown front tooth.

“You must be Miss Van Sinderen,” the woman says to Maddie.

I peer unseen over Maddie’s shoulder to watch their exchange. I still prick up my ears and begin to respond when I hear someone say my name.

But I might as well not even be here.