I tossed my empty Starbucks cup in the trash, splashed water on my face, and poured a slug of the leftover champagne into my recently washed mug. I headed down the dimly lit hall, stopping at the open door of my mother’s study.
It was immaculate, like the rest of the house, done entirely in ivory. She’d lined up every book she’d ever loved on shelves that wrapped around the room. Rare first editions, books her famous friends had written, even paperbacks she’d dropped in the bathtub. One entire wall, the one facing the windows that looked out over Fifth Avenue, was reserved for her own work and awards. Along the uppermost shelf were crystal polygons, silver platters, gold plaques. A dented sterling mint-julep cup (some Southern book award, maybe?) and a carved ivory spoon thing (I couldn’t begin to guess). Each engraved, each proclaiming Frances Ashley a genius.
I made a lap around the room, swirling my champagne in the mug and trailing my fingers over the spines of my mother’s book collection. The skin along my own spine went to gooseflesh. I couldn’t help it—the room always made me feel edgy. A little spooked.
At the end of my circuit, I reached the pièce de résistance—the Kitten wall. Copies of the original hardbacks, first editions and other limited editions, lined one entire shelf. Below that, every incarnation of trade and mass-market paperback in every language imaginable stood like a row of obedient children. Frances had cleared out the shelf below the awards for the new fortieth-anniversary edition, the one I’d seen on the side of the bus.
I took a step back, the way you might look at a painting that is too big to take in at close range.
All those copies of Kitten—they were like an army, their sheer numbers and precision making me feel slightly off balance. Christ. When you looked at it all together like that, it really was impressive. The wall loomed, there was no other way to put it. I shivered, hating the books and feeling oddly grateful for them all at the same time. My mother’s books had made me what I was: a spoiled socialite, a useless dilettante. A failure. I was the girl Kitten built.
I touched one of the hardbacks. My finger traveled up. Hooked over the edge. A triangle of the familiar cover emerged—the black-and-pink image of a demonic little girl in a pinafore dress and that lurid ’70s typeface. In my head, the bus roared past me, and I saw my mother’s face, those curled scarlet lips like she had a secret.
Maybe she did. Maybe there was something of my mother buried somewhere in the pages of this book that, if I had ever bothered to read it, would’ve given me a key to understanding her. Something that would’ve made my life bearable.
I pushed the book back in line with the rest of its comrades and went to sit behind Frances’s desk. I drained the rest of my champagne. Spun in her spectacularly expensive, ergonomically designed chair. There were no framed pictures on the sleek glass surface of the desk, no plants or kitschy keepsakes. Just an ivory leather cup holding a bouquet of ivory pens and the jagged stone paperweight. She’d told me, since I was a little girl, never to touch her awards. Never to touch her desk or the paperweight.
But I wasn’t a little girl anymore, was I?
I plucked one of the pens out of the leather cup. Stared at it as I balanced it on the tips of my fingers. I took hold of either end and pulled the cap loose. Then unscrewed the body of the pen and drew out the cartridge. It was full of black ink. The ink she used to write her first drafts, on creamy white legal pads in an even, looping hand.
I bent the cartridge a few times and it finally split, dripping a few drops of ink onto the pad of my finger. I studied the black blob as it quivered on the surface of my skin, slowly settling into the whorls of my fingerprint, then I lowered and pressed my finger onto the paperweight. The ink left a perfect print.
I stood and walked to the Kitten shelf. Ran my inky finger along the row of pristine paperbacks, leaving a series of black smudgy dots and dashes along the spines. Fifth Avenue Morse code.
Help me. Help me.
I stopped at the end of the row, at the last paperback. Its spine was broken, creased so deeply the title was almost completely illegible. I pulled it out.
It was a 2007 edition, surprisingly beat up for such a relatively new book. Inside the cover, there was a name written in pencil. Susan Evelyn Doucette, age 12. From Aunt Jo. Ah, yes. I’d almost forgotten. Frances’s most rabid fans liked to gift her back their treasured books every time new editions were released. At some point, back in the early 2000s, I think, she’d mentioned in an interview that she loved seeing readers’ annotations, and ever since she’d been deluged with old copies of the book. It was a religious rite, almost, for a Kitty Cultist, to return a copy of Kitten to the mother ship.
Which I’d thought my mother had always promptly handed over to her assistant to dump in the garbage, unless it came from somebody like Bill Clinton or George Clooney or Ruth Bader Ginsburg. Susan Doucette wasn’t a name I recognized. Maybe a Make-A-Wish kid or something. Someone special enough for her to actually hang on to it. This book definitely had the too-loved look of somebody’s Velveteen Rabbit.
I lifted the book to my nose and inhaled. It smelled the way old books do, a combination of printing-press chemicals and rot. Some people liked the smell. Not me.
“Planning on doing some reading?”
I spun. It was Asa Bloch, standing in the open door. He wore a rumpled blazer with the sleeves rolled up and was swathed in a pale-blue scarf, which wasn’t doing him any favors. In the light from the window, he looked even more ashen than he had last night.
“What are you doing here?” I snapped and dropped the book on the desk. “Did Frances give you a key?”
He held it up.
“I told you not to come here. When my mother is away, this place is mine.”
“Okay, fair enough. But before I go, I wondered if we might talk.”
“Now’s not a good time.”
He scanned the room, probably taking note of the inky smudges on the paperweight and across the row of books. His face didn’t change.
“Did you like the food I left you?” he asked me.
“I thought that was the housekeeper.”
“You thought the housekeeper bought your favorite cinnamon bagels, tuna rolls, and lemon-flavored Pellegrino?”
“Jesus. Stalk much?”
“I was trying to put my best foot forward.”
“Right.” I looked into my empty champagne mug. “What the little people do.”
He laughed. “You’re really hard to impress. I like that about you.”
“Then you must love my mother. But really, you shouldn’t have gone to so much trouble. Probably nobody told you this, but you don’t have to impress me. I don’t give a shit. Not about you or anything you have to say.”