The Possessions Read online

  DEDICATION

  To Ryan, who sees me

  EPIGRAPH

  Certainly they are my lips that are being kissed . . . Yet how can it be? It is a horrible feeling, thus losing hold of one’s identity. I long to put out one of these hands that are lying so helplessly, and touch someone just to know if I am myself or only a dream.

  —Elizabeth d’Espérance, Shadow Land

  CONTENTS

  Cover

  Title Page

  Dedication

  Epigraph

  One

  Two

  Three

  Four

  Five

  Six

  Seven

  Eight

  Nine

  Ten

  Eleven

  Twelve

  Thirteen

  Fourteen

  Fifteen

  Sixteen

  Seventeen

  Eighteen

  Nineteen

  Twenty

  Twenty-One

  Twenty-Two

  Twenty-Three

  Twenty-Four

  Twenty-Five

  Twenty-Six

  Twenty-Seven

  Twenty-Eight

  Twenty-Nine

  Thirty

  Thirty-One

  Thirty-Two

  Thirty-Three

  Thirty-Four

  Thirty-Five

  Thirty-Six

  Thirty-Seven

  Thirty-Eight

  Thirty-Nine

  Forty

  Forty-One

  Forty-Two

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  Credits

  Copyright

  About the Publisher

  ONE

  The first time I meet Patrick Braddock, I’m wearing his wife’s lipstick. The color is exactly wrong for me. Deep, ripe plum, nearly purple, the type of harsh shade that beautiful women wear to prove they can get away with anything. Against my ordinary features, the lipstick is as severe as a bloodstain. I feel like a misbehaving child trying on her mother’s makeup.

  In the photo of Sylvia Braddock that lies on my bedroom floor, the lipstick looks perfect.

  Most of my clients send only a handful of images: yearbook head shots, studio portraits against amorphous fabric backdrops. I prefer the candids slipped in as afterthoughts. Ordinary, tender images with tilted frames, red pupils, murky lighting. Unstaged photos offer less space to hide. I make note of the strata of clutter on a living room floor, the prickling distance between a husband and a wife when they don’t realize anyone is watching, and I know everything I need to know about these strangers’ lives.

  Mr. Braddock has sent dozens of photos, enough to retrace the full six years of his marriage to Sylvia. Their wedding day, sun-washed beaches, landmarks scattered across the continents; work events with careful smiles, parties with blurred laughs. Nobody is more present in the chronology of Sylvia’s life than her husband. At my job, I order the world into patterns with the incurious efficiency of a machine, and the Braddocks’ pattern is a simple one. They’re in love. A showy love, drawing attention to itself without necessarily meaning to.

  Sylvia only wears this exact shade of lipstick in a single image. I’ve checked and checked again, struck by its absence. In the photo, she’s naked. She lies on a bed, unsmiling, propping herself on her elbows. Against the deep plum of the bedspread, her body is so pale it seems lit from within. Details stand out with startling clarity. Her areolas, precisely delineated as the cheeks painted on a doll. The winged origami of her hip bones. The lipstick.

  I arrive early at work before our encounter, the tube clutched warm in my palm. Mr. Braddock is my first client of the day. He’s scheduled his encounter on a Thursday. It’s the middle of March, a time when the Elysian Society traditionally experiences a slow period. No sentimental holidays, no blooming flowers or first snows to breed guilt and nostalgia. Just the unbroken lull of late winter.

  Opening the door, I assess Room 12 with a practiced gaze. The suites at the Elysian Society hint at familiarity without fully resembling anyone’s home. Dark hardwood floors; a framed painting of water lilies floating on gem-bright water. Two low-slung, armless chairs face each other in the center of the room.

  Anything that could disturb this impression lies hidden in plain view. For instance: the small white pill in its crimped paper cup and the larger paper cup of room-temperature water, both arranged on the end table. These designate the chair I’ll take.

  Outside, the latest snow of the season clings to the curbs in an exhaust-glittered crust. The air inside the Elysian Society hovers at sixty-five degrees. I’m barefoot. My work uniform is a white dress, so fine my flesh scarcely registers its touch. I hold myself steady, suppressing the urge to shiver.

  The door swings open before I can respond. I turn, thinking that Mr. Braddock is already arriving. After memorizing his face in the photographs, I’m curious to see him in person.

  Jane stops in the doorway. “Everything’s all right, Eurydice?”

  “Of course,” I say. “Come in.”

  As an attendant, Jane has the luxury of dressing more warmly than the bodies. She’s jarringly mundane in her lint-speckled cardigan, like somebody intruding on a dream. “The lipstick,” she says, sketching a quick line around her own mouth. “It’s a little uneven.”

  “I didn’t realize.” I hesitate, then hold out the tube. “Do you mind?”

  The lipstick on my mouth is a soft, intimate pressure. Its tip is blunted from use. There’s a subtle taste lingering beneath the medicinal sweetness. Sour and human. I think of the saliva and skin particles that must linger on the lipstick’s surface.

  Nausea clenches at my jaw.

  “You’ve worked with this client before?” Jane asks.

  “First time,” I manage. The nausea dissipates as quickly as it came. “He sent the lipstick ahead of time.”

  Jane is silent. We both know this goes against routine. Most clients bring their loved ones’ possessions in person, lending me the effects for the duration of our time together. The fact that Mr. Braddock has given his wife’s lipstick to a perfect stranger creates an impression of either unusual trust or unusual carelessness.

  “It’s really some color.” Jane caps the lipstick. “Girlfriend? Mistress?”

  “Wife,” I say.

  “Second or third?”

  “First,” I say. “They were married six years.”

  “There you have it, then,” Jane says, mildly disapproving, as if she suspects that I’m lying. “I never would have guessed first wife. That’s midlife crisis lipstick if I ever saw it.”

  I don’t answer.

  “That looks much better, at any rate,” Jane says. “I’ll send him in.”

  The moment she shuts the door, I’m blank. Since I joined the Elysian Society, my emotions have evolved. They’ve gone from unwieldy to finely attuned. Ready to snap into nothingness. What used to be a struggle is now a simple reflex.

  The knock is timid at first, nearly too low to catch. By the time I cross the room, the second knock is steady and assured. I open the door.

  Most of my clients are different in photographs than in person, a disappointment in one direction or the other. In the back of my mind, I suspected that Mr. Braddock would change in the flesh. In photos, his good looks have the quality of a movie star or a young politician. A charisma too polished to exist outside a static image.

  But he’s exactly the same. I’d know him anywhere. The only difference is that Mr. Braddock appears strangely smaller as he stands in front of me. Maybe because of the tiredness that shows beneath his eyes in lavender shadows, or the poor job he’s done of shaving. A red nick blooms like a kiss mark on his j
aw. Or maybe it’s the absence of Sylvia by his side that shrinks him, cutting him neatly in half.

  “Do I have the right place?” he asks. “Room 12. She said you’d be waiting.”

  “You’re at the right place, Mr. Braddock,” I say.

  After I close the door behind him, I turn to see that he’s moved to the center of the room. He stands in front of the painting with his hands clasped behind his back, his posture holding the studied attentiveness of a man visiting a museum.

  I hang back, allowing my client this last ordinary moment before his world changes. The first encounter is always delicate, a tricky dance that must conceal its very trickiness. It’s my job to feel out the clients’ moods without them realizing I’m doing so. Some pretend it’s all a joke; some are suspicious, hostile, waiting for the figure to emerge from behind the curtain; some are painfully earnest, willing it all to go smoothly. But at first, all of them, all of them, are terrified.

  Mr. Braddock points at the painting. “Monet?”

  “An anonymous artist, I believe.” I gesture toward the chair. “Please.”

  When we’ve arranged ourselves, Mr. Braddock’s eyes go to my mouth, darkened with his wife’s lipstick.

  “Can you tell me whom you’re hoping to contact today, Mr. Braddock?”

  The clock is already ticking. He’s booked the standard time. Half an hour, doled out precisely and sparingly as medication.

  “My wife,” he says, and leans back. “My wife,” he repeats, half wonderingly. He stares straight ahead, as if the words hang suspended between us.

  “Do you have a special message for your wife?”

  “I’m not sure.” He shifts closer to the edge of the chair. “Should I?”

  “Some clients find they have a better experience if they’re prepared with a message,” I say. “But it’s entirely at your discretion, Mr. Braddock.”

  “I want to talk to her again,” he says. “The way we’d talk before she—”

  I let the silent part of his sentence unspool before I continue. “I’m going to ask you to share a memory with me. A memory of Sylvia.” He winces instinctively at her name, as if I’ve cursed. “It’s best if you share a memory that’s as recent as possible. I know it might be painful,” I add, because Mr. Braddock has dipped his face into his hands.

  But when he looks up, his eyes are dry and clear as shards of glass.

  “We were at the lake,” he says. “Lake Madeleine, outside the city. It was our first time visiting. Sylvia suggested the place. The cabins had these huge windows in the living room. It made me feel like a fish in a bowl, looking out at everything. Or maybe everyone was looking in at me. At us.” He pauses. “Is this too much?”

  “Not at all, Mr. Braddock,” I say. “Details are helpful.”

  I listen without interrupting as he talks. Most of my clients are rushed and halting, recounting memories with the clumsy bluntness of children recalling dreams. But Mr. Braddock shares the last weekend he spent with his wife as if it’s playing on a screen in front of him.

  When he stops speaking, the silence dissolves like a fog. I tip the pill into my palm. Among ourselves, we bodies refer to the pills as lotuses, a nickname established before I arrived. There’s no official name for the capsules, no imprint or marking on their powdery surfaces, so lotus works as well as anything else.

  With my free hand, I reach for the cup of water. “Shall we begin, Mr. Braddock?”

  “Wait.”

  I don’t move. I’m aware of the waxy coolness of the paper cup against my lips.

  “What we’re about to do—it won’t hurt you, will it?”

  None of my clients has ever asked this question before.

  “The process is entirely safe, Mr. Braddock.”

  “All right.” He holds out a palm toward me. “I wanted to check. Please. Go ahead.”

  I slip the lotus between my lips and swallow. The sensation is as unsurprising now as drawing a breath or falling asleep. A numbness spreads across the body, the blood growing sluggish. The eyelids turn weighted. The body is rearranging itself to make room, my consciousness rising and scattering like wary birds sensing an unknown presence.

  Mr. Braddock moves closer, his knee pressed hard against my own. He must realize his mistake; he moves away almost as soon as I register the touch. But when his clothed knee meets my bare one, I feel the hard bubble of his kneecap through the fabric, and a brief, thrilling warmth. I’m pulled back into my body, all the work I’ve done to become somebody else unraveling.

  He recedes from my vision, moving backward so fast I can’t reach him. I open my mouth to warn him, but it’s too late.

  I’m already gone.

  I open my eyes. For an unsteady moment, my limbs aren’t in the right place. Then I settle back around my body like dust resettling on a surface after being disturbed. My palms and soles sting. I stare around Room 12 as if I’ve never seen it before: the shimmering water in the painting, the empty shells of the paper cups.

  Gripped with urgency, I look at the chair across from me. Patrick leans forward as if I’ve caught him on the cusp of rising. He clasps his hands between his knees, his jaw tight, his whole frame strung with tension. When our eyes snag, his face lights up with a hopefulness that begins to fade again immediately.

  “Mr. Braddock,” I say.

  Patrick exhales abruptly and leans back in his chair, his posture loosening. He nods once. As if we’ve settled something. When he stands, I tilt my head to take him in: his height, the glitter of his downturned eyes visible beneath his lashes.

  “Thank you,” Patrick says. He’s cool. Courteous.

  There are questions I should be asking him. I have a script to follow this first time, easing the transition between one identity and the other, reassuring him that I’m once again a stranger. But something stops me. I stand without speaking and go to open the door, stepping aside to let Patrick pass. His gaze brushes against mine as he moves into the corridor. His eyes are unreadable, purposefully closed off to me. I ignore the instinct to follow him.

  TWO

  Sylvia Braddock has been dead for nearly eighteen months.

  She drew her last breath sometime between the last day of August and the first day of September. The Braddocks’ trip to the lake was her idea, a small retreat before the summer came to an end. Lake Madeleine lies an hour from the city: a body of water spilling across nine hundred acres, fringed by frothy, overgrown forest. Along the lake’s winding perimeter, enterprising spirits have carved out pockets of civilization over the decades. The resort is self-consciously rustic, conjuring up images of nostalgic summer camps, creaky family cabins passed down from generation to generation, but filtered through a lens of luxury.

  The end result is too stuffy to attract much upscale clientele, too expensive for sunscreen-blotted tourists. Sylvia had heard that the cabins offered city dwellers a chance to escape without going too far. To breathe in a dutiful dose of fresh air, examine the sensation of wilderness and solitude, and then return to normal life.

  Soon after the Braddocks arrived at Lake Madeleine that August, they recognized the couple staying in the next cabin. Patrick’s colleague, married to a friend of the Braddocks. One of Sylvia’s many small matchmaking successes among her circle of acquaintances. She immediately suggested the four of them spend time together, folding the other couple into the Braddocks’ plans as easily as if she’d expected to find them there. Patrick couldn’t find a polite way to protest this, even as he knew that Sylvia would slip into her role as hostess. Expansive, dazzling, unable to reenter the more intimate world of being his wife.

  By Saturday evening, Patrick was depleted: exhausted by the small talk, the bright beat of the sun, the previous night spent drinking, surrounded by the acidic veil of citronella lanterns. He made his excuses as Sylvia escaped into the nearest town with their friends.

  She arrived home from dinner later than Patrick expected, the tint of wine on her breath. He tried to convince her to com
e to bed; Sylvia was edgy from drinking. The last time Patrick saw his wife, she was sitting at the edge of the bed to remove her shoes. Head bent. Dark hair falling over her face to reveal the graceful slope of her neck.

  She was gone the next morning. Patrick waited. Her shoes stood outside the bedroom door. Sandals with needle-thin heels, perfectly lined up, as if she was just about to step into them. A towel lay in a moist, crumpled blossom from last evening’s shower, fragrant with shampoo. When Patrick called his wife’s phone, it vibrated violently on the windowsill.

  It was past noon before the thin threads of Patrick’s worry and impatience solidified into fear. Sylvia had woken before sunrise the previous morning to take a quick swim in the shallow water nearest the beach. She’d been back in time for breakfast.

  That afternoon, Patrick walked the perimeter of the lake. When he returned three hours later, exposed skin blooming with mosquito bites and long, raw scratches, his friends were waiting. They seemed reluctant to meet Patrick’s eyes as they discussed what to do next. Stranded in the absence of their gazes, Patrick began to understand all of this as pointless. A temporary buffer between not-knowing and knowing.

  Half a day passed before they retrieved Sylvia’s body. Within this time, Patrick turned into someone to be protected and distracted, shuffled off with the local sheriff’s deputy. The deputy and his wife kept up with a soap opera, and so the deputy patiently explained to Patrick a labyrinthine plotline in the latest episode. A woman who coerced her identical twin into taking on the life she didn’t want, only to envy her sister’s unexpected happiness.

  “Grass is always greener,” the deputy said. Patrick nodded and nodded in agreement, imagining his wife pulled from the depths of the lake like a flag of surrender.

  Later, he’d learn that Sylvia’s body was caught in the weeds near the middle of the lake. It was ruled an accidental drowning, an unskilled swimmer going out too far. Most likely, they told Patrick, she’d been lost in her thoughts, unsure of her own abilities, until it was too late.

  I’m yanked awake like a fish with a hook lodged in its mouth. Immediately, I recognize the signs of a long and dreamless sleep. My throat aches; my hair is tacky with sweat.