Emboldened, I recap the lipstick and drop it into my pocket with the key. But the air stirs with the faint scent of neroli and salt water. It drifts suddenly into the room from the empty fireplace like a cold front. I look up into Aurelia’s piercing gaze, drawing the fragrance deep into my lungs, dust motes stirring from the disturbance.
The whimper is so soft at first, I scarcely hear it. The far-off cry of a baby in need of swaddling or a cat caterwauling in the rain. But it grows louder as I approach the mantel, and I know it is the same cry I heard early one morning after coming here. I remember throwing the covers back and climbing out of bed, following the sound down the hall and the stairs, worried it was my mother. It led me all the way to this room, but the door was locked. My mother wasn’t there, or Nina, or anyone else. The crying, I soonrealized, was coming from inside the empty room. I backed away on uncertain feet; but in the days after, I often heard the crying, softly echoing down the halls, beckoning me closer.
As I kneel at the hearth, it becomes the clear and agonized weeping of a woman. But as I press into my knuckles and lean into the firebox, glancing up the flue for answers, it echoes around me, seeping from the bricks themselves, a wail trapped in the clay and marble ringing across time, echoing into silence.
I rush to pull away, but my fingers catch something papery soft at the back, blackened and wadded together. I pull it out and return to the vanity stool, brushing off the soot. It’s a bouquet of sorts, dried out and browning where it isn’t charred, stems curling against each other, frozen in time. After a second, I realize it’s goldenrod, the flowers that bloom before the house. But they’re tangled through with hair, a net of golden strands like the one on the pin. And something is buried within them, hard and misshapen. To get to it, I must unwind the red ribbon tying it all together. I go slowly to avoid scattering the floor with old blossoms, but eventually I pull the weeds away and expose a half-melted candle, white and smooth, except where something has been scratched into the wax, the remnants of a word. Holding it up, I can just make out the lettersi-n-d, a deep, earthy red substance smeared and dried across them, filling in the grooves.
Blood,I hear the voice whisper. The shriveled husk of a small grass snake drops from the bundle onto the vanity top.
And then a ripple in the drapes catches my eye in the mirror’s reflection, and a sudden thud from the bathroom causes me to spring from the stool. It’s the sound of something falling, hitting the travertine tub. I don’t wait to see what fell or who made the fabric dance. I wrap the flowers loosely around the candle and toss everything into the open vanity drawer, including the dead snake, ducking briskly out of the room and locking its door behind me.
It’s a long walk back to my room, my hands and legs trembling from what I found. I sleep clear on the other side of the house on a higher story, as far from my grandfather and my mother aspossible. In our walk-up in San Francisco, we were close as cats, my mother, father, and I. But here, she put me away like a doll she tired of playing with. My heart aches for the comfort of our old life, shabby but connected.
It’s an even longer wait for the party to begin. I zip up an ivory lace dress over my ribs and tie the black velvet sash at my waist. The dress is a little tight, but it’s the only nice one I own. Next, I slide on my patent leather flats and go to the small mirror hanging on my wall. I pull out the lipstick I stole from my grandmother’s room and slide it over the fullness of my lips, waiting in the cane-back chair by the door, trying to unravel the mystery like I did the bundle—the flowers, the hair, the lettersi-n-d.
When my mother finally comes to get me, to bring me downstairs like an exotic pet they trot out for the entertainment of guests, she takes one look at me and her face twists into a knot of pain and then fire. Before I can comprehend what’s happening she is backing me against the bed where she smears a hot, angry palm across my mouth, wiping with such force I think she must be taking skin off with the makeup.
“Where did you get it?” she screams when she’s at last satisfied that it’s gone.
I can feel my face flame, heat filling me up like blood. Ravaged, I scramble away from her, but there’s nowhere I can go. I’ve watched my mother sour like rotting fruit toward me over our years here. I’ve taken her bitter words and suffered her cruelty when she chose to lock me in my room or keep me tucked out of sight. I’ve accepted the days and weeks alone, the withdrawing of affection, and even the turning away of her eyes. But I have never felt her touch me in anger, until now.
When I don’t respond, she tears through my room, pulling out drawers and dumping their contents on the floor, turning out pockets, ransacking my meager allotment of things like a criminal investigation. Plunder spills across the floor like milk, all my secret finds laid bare. But she ignores it all, even the pearl earring. Until she finds the key and the lipstick, one which I stashed in thepocket of my robe, hoping to return it in the night, and the other which I thought I’d hid well in a pair of wool socks.
Her hand trembles as it clutches the evidence of my disobedience. “What have I told you?” she grates between her teeth.
“Never to go in that room or walk on the cliffs beyond it,” I whisper, terrified.
“Never,” she says, seething. “Never!” She backs away from me like I’m a stain.
“Wait!” I call out as I realize what’s happening. She’s leaving. Without me. “What about the party?”
“There will be no more parties,” she says, her tone brittle and full of hate. “Not for you. Not tonight. Not ever.”
It is a promise she keeps to the bitter end, and the last time I would know her touch before the night the fires claimed her.
IDROP THElipstick I’m holding into the sink and run my trembling hands under the cold water. Where did that come from? I haven’t thought of that day in years. I walk out of the bathroom and sit on the edge of my bed, trying to regulate my heart rate. Since losing the baby, these flashbacks have haunted me. These old, buried memories rising from their graves like zombies, ready to devour me.
But this one, I’m certain, has a very different trigger.
I stare down the black envelope propped up on the dresser across from me. I’d been too scared to open it in the park last night, feeling too vulnerable out in the open. Instead, I ran all the way back to my car, not daring to open it until I was safely inside with the doors locked.
As before, this one simply has my name on the outside. But unlike the last, which was clearly an invitation, this one contains some kind of riddle. The words troubled me the whole way home and late into the night. I’m so exhausted, it’s no wonder I can’t even manage getting dressed for work this morning. I probably only secured a few hours’ sleep at most.
Knowing I’m already late, I text an excuse to my work about apower outage, telling them I’m on my way. Then, I drop my phone onto the bed and lift the envelope from the dresser, sliding the card out to read it one more time.
When dusk is high
and sun is low,
the icon shines,
and stakes will grow.
You’ve just one chance
to shadows bend,
and show us darkness
