Daphne fingered her heart-shaped charm and opened her mouth to say something else, but she stopped herself and went into the other room to sort through her luggage for the tenth time. A part of Helen wanted to run after her mother and say she had always hoped her necklace was a tie between them, too. But another part of her wanted to rip the thing off her neck and throw it in her mother’s borrowed face.
Helen wasn’t certain how far Daphne’s power of persuasion went just yet. It came from the cestus, so it might be that Daphne was irresistible only in a sexual way, but Helen was painfully aware of how quickly she had agreed to leave her home and the people she loved. She was following a woman she couldn’t remember to a place she had never seen, and she had made the decision to do so in less than an hour. Helen thought through everything she had learned, looking for some clue that she was being controlled, but as she added up all the evidence, she knew that she didn’t need to be brainwashed to want to run away.
After what Daphne had told her, Helen was so disgusted with herself she would have run away, regardless.
“Are you hungry?” Daphne asked. Helen jumped away from the window at the sound and dropped the curtain guiltily. Without even realizing it, she had been looking for Lucas again.
“No,” she replied, unable to look up from the rug.
“Well, you’re still going to have to eat, and we should try out your new face before we get on the ferry,” Daphne said with a grimace. “We’re going out for breakfast before we have to travel over that blasted ocean.”
Helen tried to argue—to point out how silly it would be to test her ability to hold her new shape with so little practice—but Daphne only shrugged and said that it would be easier to test it on land before they ventured out on the water. It seemed that Helen’s fear of the ocean was inherited. Daphne loathed it, and remembering what Hector had told her about how her own dislike of the ocean came from not being able to control it, Helen assumed that her mother must be a huge control freak to hate the ocean so passionately. After a quick check to make sure that neither of them was wearing clothes that might get them recognized, Daphne dragged Helen out onto the street with a promise that it would be “fun.”
The storm had mashed the fallen autumn leaves into a kind of red-brown paste that coated the cobblestone streets and clogged the overwhelmed gutters. The rain was petering out and the wind was dying down, but the bottoms of the clouds were still a smudged-mascara color, and water ran in impromptu rivers down the sidewalks on their way out to sea. Fallen branches lay here and there, the bushy ends denuded of leaves, and the trunk ends, newly ripped from the trees, ended in fresh white splinters that stuck out in all directions like dropped boxes of toothpicks. Helen could smell the tree sap in the air as the few trees that the island had to offer bled out after losing their battle with the wind. With the disturbing image of dead wooden soldiers and giant wooden horses in her mind, the last thing that she wanted to do was eat.
“Nothing’s going to be open,” Helen protested, but she knew she it wasn’t true.
“I used to live here, too, you know. And if there’s one thing I learned...” Daphne stomped confidently past the boarded-up windows of the nervous art dealers and down the block, where a line was forming outside the Overeasy Café. “It’s that Whalers love nothing more than a reallygoodstorm,” she finished with relish.
It was true. Helen’s fellow Nantucketers were proud of their ability to live through whatever Mother Nature threw at them. It was a macho thing, but also a chance to bond. They shared a good laugh over the howling wind, ice, snow, or rain while they all looked for their hysterical cats and retrieved their lawn decorations from each other’s living rooms.
The block didn’t have electricity, and folks were still sweeping up glass from the broken windows. In spite of all this, Helen wasn’t at all surprised that the café was seating people. In fact, she knew that at that moment her father and Kate were six blocks away at the News Store, checking out the damage. She also knew that if people started hanging around out front looking hungry, Jerry and Kate would open the doors and feed them. With the refrigerators out, the perishables would have to be eaten or thrown out, anyway, and Kate would much rather give food to her neighbors than watch it spoil.
Helen thought for a moment of how she should be there with them, but then she caught a glimpse of her new reflection in the one window outside the Overeasy Café that wasn’t broken. She wasn’t Helen. She was a cute brunette from the mainland, and she and her tacky, horse-faced mother were on vacation in Nantucket. These two tourists owed nothing to anyone.
Helen sat, put her napkin in her lap, and ordered whatever the café could make on a gas stove—eggs, bacon, and French-pressed coffee. As she pushed her food around, Matt walked into the diner. Helen’s eyes widened when Matt looked right at her and, out of habit, she pulled in a breath to call out to him, but his eyes skipped right past her.
It was obvious that Matt had come into the café looking for her. Helen groaned to herself and rubbed her tired eyes—Claire must have told him that Helen was missing. Helen wondered how much else he knew about her. Knowing Matt and how clever he was, Helen was sure he had figured out some of her secret on his own, like Claire had.
For a moment she wanted him to find her, but he was scanning the room for Helen’s bright blonde hair. When his eyes didn’t immediately spot her, he gave up. She wanted to throw her napkin at Matt and yell that she was sitting ten feet away from him, but she realized that it was silly of her to blame him for not recognizing her. Still, it hurt not to be recognized by a guy she’d known since she was in diapers. As she watched Matt walk out of the café, she couldn’t help but feel like she was faceless, alone, and about as substantial as a ghost.
“It’s better for him,” Daphne said consolingly as she reached across the table to take Helen’s hand. “The humans who love us never last long. Scions are tragedy magnets. It’s safer for them if we leave before the trouble starts. That’s why I didn’t give Jerry more time...”
“You never loved my father, I mean Jerry,” Helen interrupted bitterly. She snatched her hand out from underneath her mother’s.
“No, I didn’t. I’m not going to lie to you to make myself more sympathetic,” Daphne replied, moving her rejected hand to reach for the check. “But I would never wish harm on that man. Remember, he’s the only person I trusted with my daughter. You hate me for not loving Jerry? Fine. But the least you can do is respect me for understanding how special he was and giving you the gift of thinking he was your father.”
“Jerryismy father in every way that counts,” Helen said, wrenching herself out from the sinking seat of the booth.
She waited with her back turned while Daphne threw down some bills. On their way to the hotel to get their things, Helen spotted Hector. He looked right at her and then right past her, just as Matt had done. The twins were with him, wandering around by the ferry. Helen heard Ariadne call out to Matt, sounding surprised to see him, but Daphne pulled her into the hotel before she could find out what they said to each other. Helen heard Claire’s name mentioned right before the door shut behind her making it impossible even to tell what they were saying about her, even with Scion hearing.
Lucas was in the lobby. Helen didn’t see his face, but then she didn’t need to. If she had only caught a glimpse of him as he disappeared around a corner half a mile away she would still have been able to recognize him. She turned her face away, knowing she couldn’t look at him or she would lose concentration and allow her mask to slip away. As she hurried up the stairs behind her mother, she both hoped and feared that he would yell her name, but of course, he didn’t.
Back in their room, Helen grabbed what few things she had and brought them to the entryway by the door, hiding her streaming eyes and her red nose from her mother as best she could. She tried to let the stranger’s dark hair fall across her face, but unfortunately this girl had bangs. As her mother checked over the room one last time before they left for the dock, Helen let out an incongruous laugh, suddenly remembering the last time she had taken the ferry. It was when Claire first told her about the new family that had moved into the big compound out in ’Sconset. Claire had been sure that there would be a dream boy to fall in love with each of them, and Helen had been sure that Claire was being ridiculous. So sure that she’d changed the subject, and wondered aloud whether she should cut her hair.
“Well, Claire was absolutely right,” Helen said to herself, laughing through her tears. “Idohate having bangs.”
Her breath still catching on the half-crazy laugh, Helen yanked open the door of the hotel room to leave, and ran right into Lucas. In a split second he registered Helen’s tears and the shocked face of the strange woman next to her. Lucas grabbed Helen’s arm and pulled her away from the woman, putting himself between them.
“What did you do to her?” he said, threatening Daphne.
“And just who are you?” Daphne said with a southern drawl. Lucas gave the woman a confused look and then looked back at Helen.
“Helen, who is this woman?” he asked.
“Come inside,” Daphne said, dropping the fake accent. “Come on, Helen. We’ve been discovered. He can see your true face.”
“How?” Helen asked, looking down at the hands that weren’t hers, at a body that wasn’t hers, as she followed Lucas back into the room.
