Authors: Michele Jaffe
Althea’s hand gripped my arm like a talon, and she led me inside.
A
s I walked next to Althea, I reviewed the layout of the House in my mind, preparing for the next test.
Althea cleared her throat. “Your room,” she prompted. I felt her gaze burning into me. Aurora’s room was on the third floor in the southwest corner. From the front door there were two ways to go.
I could either turn right…
“Where are you going?” Althea demanded. I turned to look at her. Behind her tinted sunglasses, her eyes were challenging.
“To my room,” I said.
“You’re not going to take the stairs?” she asked.
“The shortest way is to cut across the courtyard and take the middle stairs.” I watched her expression change. “You said to go there directly,” I said, working not to sound smug.
Standing, I was six inches taller than she was, which made it easier to see through her tinted lenses. I caught something between surprise and confusion flicker across her face.
“Indeed. I just didn’t expect you to be so very obedient.”
“As you’ve said, I’ve changed.” I bent to kiss her cheek and said, “Goodnight, Grandmother.”
She pulled away like I’d scorched her. “Don’t call me that. After what you have done, you have no right to be so familiar. If you must call me anything, call me Althea.” Her tone held the keen tang of an icicle in the moonlight. “Go to bed.”
I bowed my head and crossed the courtyard. A wind blew, and the door that opened onto the hallway tugged at my hand as though being pulled from the other side. From somewhere above me came a faint wailing noise. A tingling started at the base of my spine and wove itself up my back, through my ribs.
The House doesn’t want me here
, I thought. It came to me with crisp clarity, as though it were a perfectly natural thing to think.
The House wants me to leave.
But I had no choice. I’d made a deal with Bain and Bridgette. This was my chance at a new life. A new start. And I had to take it.
I climbed the two flights of stairs slowly, feeling with each breath like my chest was constricting.
Go! Get out!
that voice in my mind screamed.
Turn back.
At the top, the corridor was completely still, and the air was cool and heavy and perfumed.
Like a tomb
, I thought.
I stood there, staring at Aurora’s door, third on the right, both fascinated and repelled. Moving like a sleepwalker, I took one heavy step, than another, until I was standing outside it. I inhaled a deep breath and reached for the knob. There was a low keening as the door began to open. With trembling fingers I reached along the inside wall and flipped on the light.
And laughed out loud with relief.
The room was beautiful. A warm glow spilled over the bed from a star-shaped lantern hanging from the top of a tall birch wood
canopy. Everything looked exactly the way it had in the photos Bridgette and Bain had shown me: the modern bed made out of four solid pieces of birch wood brought back by Aurora’s parents from the forest in Bavaria where they’d conceived her; the dozens of pillows piled atop it in shams of white lace or eyelet; the massive white (faux, I hoped) fur rug that stretched over the polished wooden plank floor; the nubby oatmeal floor cushions around a low white lacquer table. It was chic and comfortable and clearly designed by a decorator. There was nothing sinister, nothing scary at all.
Beyond the bedroom I could see a bathroom bigger than I’d seen in many city bus stations, but much cleaner and done in slabs of grey-green marble that would have blown any municipal budget.
I took a step forward and then another. I felt like I was sneaking around, intruding into someone else’s space. Like I could be caught at any moment.
This is your room
, I told myself.
Yours
. All three-and-a-half-hours-to-clean of it.
And just like that the strangeness and apprehension vanished, and joy surged through me. It was gorgeous! It was mine! I flopped back into the white cushions on the bed and hugged myself. This bed, this room, this—
I got up and crossed to the closet. Dresses, pants, shirts, jackets all hung there neatly, more clothes than I’d had in years. I ran my fingers over them, turning up labels with names I’d seen in the closets of homes I’d cleaned, and in cast-off copies of
Elle
. Price tags poked out at me—one of the jackets, four of the shirts, and three of the dresses had never been
worn
. There were skin-tight minidresses and slouchy jumpers and fake leather pants and a long prairie skirt, a jangle of styles.
Everything that Bain and Bridgette had told me about Aurora made her sound brash and confident like a party girl, always in the
middle of a crowd. But the confusion of her closet told a different story. It made me think of loneliness and insecurity. I could picture Aurora standing right where I was standing, flipping through different outfits, trying them on as though if she just found the right look she’d know who she was, or who she wanted to be. Suddenly she wasn’t simply a spoiled girl with too much time and money on her hands, but someone who shopped just to do something, to feel something.
I thought about the coolness of my reception from her “friends” earlier that night at Coralee’s, as though none of them had really known her either.
Who were you hiding from?
I wished I could ask her. If what Bain and Bridgette said was true, I realized that Aurora’s relationship with Liza had been not only her closest, but in some ways her only real one. Running my fingers over the fringes and leather and silk in her closet, I wished I could go back and give that Aurora a hug, and tell her she didn’t have to be alone, that everything would be okay.
Except, of course, that everything hadn’t been, I reminded myself.
Stop it.
I opened the second closet, and my knees went out from under me. It was lined, floor to ceiling, with shelves. I reached for a pair of black ballet flats with a supple rubber bottom that looked like they’d barely been walked in. I bent my foot behind me to slip one on, a do-it-yourself Cinderella. It fit perfectly.
Some of the shoes were boring and some were ugly—the Crocs went directly in the trash—but there was a pair of silver Prada wedges and a pair of platform Gucci sandals with crisscross straps over the ankle and a pair of motorcycle boots with rivets up the front. And all of them, every pair, was exactly my size.
Oh, Aurora,
I thought,
how could you have run away from this?
My mind flashed back in time to a rural bus station, linoleum floors, fluorescent lights that hummed, the sweet, fake pine scent of the industrial cleaner the grey overalled janitor was slopping back and forth as he swayed to the music in his ear buds. The clock said eleven thirty, and my mother and I were the only ones there. We’d been travelling by bus for weeks at that point, moving in sprawling loop de loops across the map as though driven by a crazy Spirograph.
I was using the nail of my pinkie finger with its chipped red polish to pick at the old resin on the wood benches while my mother sat next to me, her head slightly turned away, listening to conversations only she could hear.
“Are we running away from home?” I asked, giving voice to the question that had been on my mind for two days, ever since the lady at the Wok On restaurant asked where we were from and my mother lied.
My mother had laughed. I couldn’t see her face, but her laugh I could always conjure—rich, ringing, like bells calling you to a wedding. “No, silly goose. You can’t run away from home. It’s not
home
if you want to run away from it.” She paused to brush a strand of hair from my face. “You can only run away from a house. Home is something you run toward.”
Home.
Looking around the room now, I realized how sterile everything was. Sterile in a way that went beyond its neatness. It was more like a stage set of a room than a place someone had actually lived in over time. There were no photos in frames, no little notes or stupid toy surprises from crackerjack boxes, no rocks with faces in them you’d picked up on a walk, no once-loved-but-now-relegated-to-a-corner games or dolls, no pieces of sea glass or cards from a friend or pencils gnawed at the ends or half-used raspberry-scented
erasers. No computer. It looked like the room of someone who had tried to erase their real identity. Or perhaps her identity had been erased after she disappeared.
My energy level flagged suddenly, like a sail when the wind dies. There were a dozen things I should do before going to sleep, but I decided that all but hiding the original note from Bain offering me one hundred thousand dollars could wait for the morning. I slid it between the mattress and box spring, figuring that with me on top of it, it should be safe enough until morning.
I pulled open the top two drawers of the dresser and found a frothing pile of underwear in one and socks neatly rolled into balls in the other. Below those was a big drawer with stacks of T-shirts, and below that sweatpants and shorts. I pulled out a pair of boy shorts and a T-shirt and reached for a pair of socks. A strip of photos came out with them.
It was the kind you get from a photo booth at an arcade or fair, four down, different poses. They all showed a guy with floppy dark hair and a girl, sitting close together to fit into the frame. In the first one they were smiling at the camera, the second one they were forehead to forehead, the third he was cradling her cheek with a very large hand, and in the bottom one they were kissing.
The girl was Aurora, but it could have been me. We really did look exactly alike, and the realization pierced me. She looked happy. No, more than that—blissful.
I couldn’t tell what the guy looked like because his face had been scratched out with a black ballpoint pen. I could only tell his hair was dark because she’d missed a place on one of them.
I took the strip of pictures to the bed and sank back into the pillows to study them. My finger rubbed over the texture of the pen that had been used to obliterate his face. The cross hatching
was deep, done with real feeling, back and forth over and over. I could feel the pain that had gone into it, the anger, the shattering of a dream. On the back of the photo strip the machine had printed a date. One week before Aurora disappeared. The same day as the tennis tournament in the photo on the piano at the guest house. The one Aurora had been cut out of.
She had gone from being in love, to being so angry that I could feel it in her pen marks, during the course of that week. What had happened? Did it have something to do with her disappearance?
And why hadn’t Bridgette and Bain ever mentioned that their cousin had a boyfriend? Why didn’t this guy have his own flashcard? Bridgette wouldn’t have made an oversight that big.
Unless it wasn’t an oversight. Unless it was intentional. I couldn’t shake the feeling that they were up to something, something beyond our imposter scheme, something that I was unwittingly part of. As though it wasn’t necessary, maybe even wasn’t desirable, for me to get Aurora completely right. I didn’t like it.
Expendable
, I could still hear Bridgette’s voice saying that first day.
Of course, I hadn’t exactly been fully honest with them about my plans either.
And I’d already put mine in motion. I yawned and realized again how tired I was. Everything else could wait until tomorrow. I set the photo strip down on the night table and snuggled under the covers.
I don’t remember turning off the lights. But the only illumination was coming from the moon when I awoke to a faint scratching sound and saw the knob on the door to my room begin to turn slowly by itself.
I
came instantly awake, mind racing. I’d turned the lock, hadn’t I?
Hadn’t I?
Fear crept up my shoulder blades with prickling fingers. I groped with my unbandaged hand around the surface of the night table next to the bed for anything I could use to defend myself. How had I been so stupid? I knew better than to let down my guard.
I was making a list of all the things I should have done—jammed a chair beneath the knob, got my knife out of my purse before putting it under the mattress, never agreed to have done this in the first place—when the handle stopped moving. The door jiggled, like someone was trying to get in from the other side. My fingers closed on a flashlight on the bottom shelf of the night table. I slid it into my palm.
The handle jiggled again. “Who’s there?” I asked, struggling to keep the quiver out of my voice.
The handle stopped moving for a moment. I was in the middle of taking a breath when fingers began to scratch at the edge of the door once more, as though looking for another way in.
“Who are you?” I demanded, trying to swallow and finding my mouth dry. “What do you want?”
I had to lean forward and strain to hear, but when I did, it was unmistakable. “Aurora,” a voice said. It was part whisper, part wail. The handle began to jiggle again.
I wasn’t going to sit there terrified. I was going to face whoever was out there. In one motion I leaped out of bed, bolted to the door, and flung it open.
And was standing face-to-face with… nothing.
There was no one there. There was no sign that anyone had been there. The wide, dark corridor was silent, still. Empty.
Completely empty.
But the handle on my door had moved, there had been whispering, I’d seen—
The spirits will have their revenge,
I heard the medium’s voice.
This was not spirits,
I told myself.
There are no ghosts.
My fingers trembled, and I could feel my heartbeat through my whole body. This had to be someone. I would find them. Probably this was some prank Bain and Bridgette were pulling. Maybe this was part of their plan, to scare me, drive me nuts, make me think—
What?
That didn’t matter, I wouldn’t let them.
Trailing my hand against the wood paneling, I began walking to the end of the corridor opposite the way I’d come up. I went slowly, the beam of the flashlight chiseling into the empty shadows. I paused after each step, listening, but the only sound I could hear was my breathing. Four steps in, a chill wrapped around me, as though I’d passed through a cooler patch of air, and I sniffed the faint smell of jasmine. I stepped forward, and the air was warm. I stepped back, and the chill settled around me. Embraced me.