He takes it from me and flips it open, my heart thudding with every turn of the page as if I expect black envelopes to come flying out like confetti. “Hmmm… that’s funny.”
“What?” I ask, wary.
“I don’t remember this one being in there earlier.” He glances up at me, the aqua gleam of his eyes catching mine. “I don’t usually miss a book.”
My mouth opens, a stuttering sound escaping.
“Tell you what, it’s on the house,” he says, passing the novel back to me.
“Oh, no. I couldn’t,” I try to protest, but he waves me off.
“It’s not like it’s a first edition or anything,” he says coolly. “Besides, you look like you’ll appreciate it more than most.”
My eyes trickle down the cropped shadow of his beard and the tan lines of his neck to his chest, where a hint of hair is escaping over the topmost fastened button of his shirt. “Thank you.”
“Just one thing,” he says before I can turn to leave.
I meet his gaze, worried he saw what happened behind the shelf, that he’ll ask to see the envelope and somehow read my secrets in it. “Oh?”
“Come back when you’re done,” he says simply. “Tell me if it’s as good as you remember.”
I’M RUNNING OUTof time. I’ve already wasted two hours sitting in the soft light of my bedroom, staring at the items lined modestly on my bed, trying to decide. A prescription bottle, a dress, and an envelope. Surely the pills are the deadliest of these. So why does the envelope feel like it’s the most dangerous?
My eyes land on the pill bottle, its nude contours and colorful stickers. The pragmatism of the typeface. I have a liter of Svedka in the kitchen. Wretched stuff. It won’t be fun to choke down. But then… then it’s over. This feeling of being a place where the baby was, a holding space for what really mattered, a failure at even being that. I wouldn’t have to remember Roger’s long arms around me in the dark, his dark hair tickling my neck, rocking his body slowly against mine, his breath on my shoulder when he came. The feeling that I took shape when he held me, like liquid poured into a container. That I existed when he was looking. As if I were only defined by their contours—Roger’s and the baby’s—pinned between them, the pressure bringing me to life.
My eyes slide to the dress. It’s one of the few black garments I own. I have a preference for all things gray. Nothing too extreme. Just that middle point where definitions cease to matter. A therapist once told me it’s a reflection of my lack of boundaries. She’s probably right. It has a V-neck and a pleated skirt, little cuffed sleeves that end just past the shoulder. The waist is fitted. The hemline modest. I bought it for a funeral two years ago when oneof our senior executives died from a pulmonary embolism. I keep it around in case of another death, another unexpected funeral. Maybe my own.
My eyes find the envelope, a parcel of questions. Corners that are razor sharp. A plane of black broken by the golden script—Judeth Cole. How did they know my name? I haven’t gone byJudethsince I was eighteen. For all intents and purposes, I have been Jude no-middle-name Clark in this second, empty life I took on. Who are they? This person—people?—that mysteriously know the real me. How did they know I would be in that bookstore tonight? That I would pick up that precise book?
What else do they know?
The Bell Jarwinks at me from the top of my nightstand. Could it have been the man working the register? He did give me the book for free. His sparkling blue-green eyes shine through my memory. They are kind, jovial. Not the sort of eyes I would expect to bait innocent women into a midnight rendezvous under a bridge.
Beside it, another relic from my past, another plain but fraught rectangle of paper. This one a business card.James E. Lampitt, it reads, the once-sharp font dull, the corners rounded with wear. My grandfather’s attorney—myattorney. I’ve never reached out in all these years, despite my struggles. I’ve kept my promise to him and to myself. But I couldn’t bring myself to get rid of his card, like a parachute I won’t pull the cord of but still feel comforted by. I assume he’s been watching, like he said he would, that he’s witnessed the messy spectacle of my life from afar. Could he be behind the invitation in the book? It makes no kind of sense except…
Except Solidago is always at the heart of what haunts me, always somehow to blame for what’s wrong in my life. Inme.
But who left the invitation for me isn’t the question that matters. I’ve spent the last two hours trying to answer the one that does.
Do I go?
I slide the card from the envelope one more time and readit over. It’s matte. Expensive by the texture. And in such an odd color too. Not your usual invitation fare. Who would have this just lying around? The wording is so precise and formal—cordially invited,attend a reception,on your behalf. But the words that really get me, that whip my nerve endings into a froth of adrenaline, are these:Learn what waits in the deep.
As if they know. As if they’veseen. As if they can show me.
My mother’s words sift through the ganglia in my brain, teasing at the fine hairs around my ears like breath:The power comes from the deep, Judeth. From a place that can’t be known. Only a fool would trust it.She told me that on the one and only day she took me into my grandmother’s room at Solidago.
I remember the way her eyes rose to my grandmother’s portrait over the carved mantel—a devastatingly beautiful monstrosity wrought of pale Sicilian marble, writhing with creatures from the sea, an amalgam of fins and tentacles and waves so real it might have been made of bloodless flesh. Her eyes were like twin stars seeking an orbit, a story there that she was never willing to tell.
I pick up the pill bottle and turn it over in my hand. Isn’t that what this is really about? It’s not the miscarriage, feeling the baby I never knew I wanted run out of me like raw eggs. And it’s not Roger leaving, the unceremonious way he grabbed the electric wine bottle opener from the counter on his way out the door, trailing the charger cord behind him. I wanted to love him. I tried. But more than that, I needed him in order to feel human, to feel real.
It’s about that night, when I cracked my skull like a fruit and felt the world go black and started sinking. Into thatotherplace, that otherthingthat wasn’t anything at all but was everything to me. A depth, a darkness, a comfort like no other. The place my power had seeped up from into my mind and hands and mouth as a girl. The place it sunk back into, preserved like a blade in a bog. Hadn’t I seen behind the curtain that night? Hadn’t I slipped into the deep? Don’t I just want to return to that place?
Is that wheretheyare, my mother and grandmother, the women of my line—troubled and beset—stretching back into time?
Can my mysterious host take me there without the pills?
Something inside me is stirring. My soul perhaps, if I ever had one. Something is quickening. A spark of curiosity, of need. It is the most life I’ve felt in three months’ time. And this envelope put it there. It is a beckoning. A call I must answer.
