She wasfine.Fine.She was better than fine. In twenty-four days she’d have five hundred and fifty dollars from Dowd’s. In twenty-five days, she’d board theEphemera. What a name for a steamship. She’d already begun to think of her current life as something to be discarded after use. A house to be razed. When she arrived in France, she might look back at who she had been across the ocean and realize it was the necessary passage to where her life had been leading her all along.
“I’ll take one,” she said. “With sauerkraut.”
Suddenly she was ravenous. Some days, she felt she could eat and eat and eat and still not be sated. The baby hadn’t kicked yet, but she diddemand food, the hungry girl. “Make that two,” she said. Some days, she’d fill herself with cheese and bread and butter and eggs and salted pork she purchased at the market, and she’d crave more and more still. Insatiable. Opal liked expanding, taking up space. Though she hadn’t felt the baby move, her girth had been its own reward. As she ate her bratwurst, she stood in front of the public posting board. She wiped her fingers on her cloak.
Before she even lifted up the posting from its tack so she could read it, she saw the photograph. The image hewed her in two. She was this Opal and that Opal. Two women. One body. She dropped what remained of her bratwurst, suddenly sick.
She plucked the paper from the post to examine it closer. The photograph had been taken on her wedding day. She was seventeen and dressed in her mother’s light blue gown with a stain at the hem. Her face was so plump, so youthful, she could hardly recognize herself. Her expression held bewilderment and sadness. Even so, she could admit she’d been a beautiful bride.
Wanted, Runaway Wife. Opal Doucet has left my bed and board, stolen from me, and behaved dangerously and unlawfully. I will not pay a cent she may contract on my account, unless she is returned to me, along with my goods. Reward $100.
Her husband’s name was printed beneath.
Jagr.
Her vision tunneled. She could see nothing but the sign, his name, her picture. The papers had said Jagr was not expected to survive, that his funeral was planned, that his wife had poisoned him. Murdered him.
But the papers had been wrong.
The so-called poison was a combination of medicines: the capsules he prescribed for insomnia, the pain powders he gave to patients who’d suffered injuries, and the elixir—that special elixir—Opal took for her unusual episodes.
On the evening of her wedding, Jagr had given her a glass of water mixed with laudanum. “To relax you,” Jagr had said. “Prevent your headaches from…” He didn’t finish his sentence. She stood against the wall of this strange house where she was now to live, the same house where her mother had brought her after Oren’s death when it became clear that the physical symptoms of her bereavement—loss of appetite, exhaustion—were something else.
The doctor had been kind enough then; when she’d cried, he tucked a strand of hair behind her ear. “Pain,” Jagr whispered, “is a sign that it’s working.”
Her mother believed she’d been ruined for marriage—but Jagr said he could cure anyone. Opal had been beautiful then. Compliant in her grief. A year later, they’d been married.
“Drink it,” her new husband said on the night of their wedding, holding out the laudanum, and Opal did as he instructed because her doctor was her husband now. He nodded as Opal tipped the glass back. By now she knew he preferred agreeable patients. The liquid was bitter on her tongue.
It didn’t take long for a feeling of lightness to hit her, as though she could lift right from her toes into the air and hover there. The laudanum. Jagr’s lips were shiny, wet. Warm. She inhaled and calm washed through her, extending out to her fingertips. Jagr may have led her by the hand, or she may have floated. Either way, her dress was soon on the bedroom floor, a discarded skin. He sat on the bed, fully clothed, watching her as she undressed.
She disrobed slowly, a button at a time. She didn’t love him, but something in her wanted to please him. She wanted to be good, believing goodness could cure her. But of what?
Did she think of Oren that night, how it should have been him, there atop her? Did she call him to mind with longing and regret, or think of the time they lay together in the cornfield, the grass scratching at her knees? She did not. She thought only of herself and herpleasure. But who was this indulgent self? The drugs had separated her body from her mind. Her only thought was how cool the air felt on her neck, how the lantern was surrounded by halos of sparkling light. She felt the weight of sinking into a mattress and the warmth of his body and the darkness.
The laudanum had been Jagr’s greatest kindness. And that drink she offered him the night she ran away had been hers, for she could have done it another way. Instead, he took the glass from her, then rattled it. The ice tinked. He tipped back a sip, and his mustache remained wet.Drink it faster, Opal willed him.Drink it all.She hadn’t much time.
“Would you like one more?” she asked when the glass was still half full.
He took another sip. Then another.
The night Opal ran away, she’d made a rump roast, but they would not eat it. Instead, she would gather the money from Jagr’s tinderbox. Instead, she’d board the sunrise train for Baltimore. From there, she’d buy a steerage ticket aboard theEphemera. Then: France.
Madame de Fleur had described her house in a letter—stone with two chimneys, a rounded brown door, a garden with fleurs-de-lis and hydrangeas that reminded her of a pompadour. In the letter, she’d told Opal about spirit photographers and spirit telegraphs and spirit typewriters and self-appearing slates; she’d told her about mesmerists, about ectoplasm exteriorized from the spiritualist’s body, and about ghostly fingerprints that appeared as impressions in putty. Some mediums could pass messages from the dead through automatic writing. Others could play trumpets or guitars through mental clairvoyance alone. In France, the medium Eva C. would manifest light between her palms—like she’s holding the whole world between her two hands.
That night Opal drugged him, medicated him—poisoned him, the newspapers said, but she hadn’t meant for him to die—she prepared the fire, stacked logs on kindling. She made him a second drink,dissolving in the liquid, again, the contents of medicines she’d stolen from his office. The key to the cabinet was on the shelf, beneath the table bell where he kept it. The table bell was used to summon Opal for this chore or that. He considered her weak only when he needed her to be.
When Opal handed Jagr his second glass, his eyelids were already droopy, his voice sounding as though he’d stuffed marbles in his mouth. He’d thrown his hat on the rug, and it landed upside down. She could see a ring of dirt inside. “Are you okay?” Opal said.
“The light. It’s… My eyes are tired,” he said, then closed one eye completely and knocked back another gulp.
“Maybe something’s coming on. Rest.” She helped him down the hallway to their bedroom and removed his boots. She had only meant the drugs to put him to sleep.
Afterward, she crept into his office and opened the cabinet where he kept his tinderbox. She unlatched it and lifted the lid.
There, at the bottom, where she’d expected to find a thick wad of bills, lay just a single dollar and some coins. She dumped the box over to be sure it wasn’t hidden in a recessed compartment or stuck beneath the lid. Nothing.
But what could she do? Her plan had already been set in motion. When he awoke, he’d know what she had done.
