Rouge(33)

“Hi,” I say to the big jellyfish. And feel stupid. I even blush.

But it moves in closer still. It has some sort of pattern on its body, can’t quite make it out. And eyes. Do jellyfish have eyes? These ones do. Red and jellylike just like their bodies. Ghostly so it almost looks like a trick of the light. As I’m looking into its eyes, I smile. The eyes are looking back at me. Tense. Could the eyes of a jellyfish be tense? My heart begins to beat very strangely. I feel it fluttering in my chest like a panicked bird. Someone’s here. Watching me from one of the black mouths of the corridors. I hear a clicking sound. A breath drawn in. In the corner of my eye, a figure appears. The woman in red? No. A stranger clad in black silk. Clearing her throat. About to call to me in greeting.

But instead of walking toward her, my shoes walk me away, around the tank. Away? Why away? I think.

We’re circling each other now. She’s walking toward me and I’m walking away. We go around and around the tank slowly. Every time she takes a step forward, click, click go my shoes around the tank. Stop, I tell my shoes. Please.

And then they do. I turn around and look at the young woman standing a few feet away. She’s looking right at me as if she was waiting patiently for me to turn toward her all this time.

“Daughter of Noelle,” she says.

For a moment, my breath catches. I’m struck. A beautiful young girl. Maybe thirteen or fourteen. Translucent skin. Pale glowing eyes. A fountain of golden curls like a living doll. Long black dress, a grown person’s dress, on her child’s body. And yet there’s something about the way she’s looking at me. Cold, knowing. She doesn’t seem at all like a child. Familiar-looking, too. I’ve seen her heart-shaped face before. Felt those eyes on me. Was she Mother’s friend?

“I’m Mother’s friend,” she says. “Exactly. And Daughter of Noelle’s friend too, I hope.”

She smiles at me with her red bow of a mouth. The childhood memory comes flashing back again: me sitting on a princess bed clutching a doll I hated, watching Mother brush her red hair in my three-sided mirror. She’s telling me that fairy tale about the beautiful maiden. So beautiful, Mother said, that all admired her from near and far. I remember I thought ridiculous, even as I ached to be so beautiful. I thought what a lie, even as a picture began to form in my mind of a young girl. This young girl, in fact. Standing before me now. Same golden hair, same face of glass, same cold eyes. Same dress falling from her lithe white body like liquid jet. On her shoulder, a pinned red rose.

“You,” I whisper.

She smiles like she knows my child’s dream, though how could she possibly know it? Just a dream.

“No dream is ever just a dream,” she says.

My skin begins to crawl a little. When she smiles, I’m devastated by the awful symmetry of her face. “Excuse me?”

“Eyes Wide Shut. One of my favorites. So mysterious and full of fucking. Lots of skin. Have you seen it?”

I look at her heart-shaped face that is a child’s and not a child’s. The word fucking so comfortable in her little mouth. “No,” I lie.

“You like skin, don’t you, Daughter of Noelle? Like your mother.”

“You really knew my mother?” Why would this child know my mother?

She looks up at my forehead scar. But unlike the woman in red, she keeps looking at it. Smiling at it, like it’s telling her a joke.

“Oh yes,” she says. “And I know you, too, Daughter of Noelle.”

“Through my mother?”

“Perfect,” she says. “Yes, exactly. Through your mother.”

“You were important to her.” I say it like a question. Desperate to know all the things I don’t. To be out of the dark.

She stares at me, looking sadly amused. “Yes. And she was dear to me, too. To all of us here.” She smiles dreamily. “At Rouge.”

“Rouge?”

She holds up her excited red drink in a toast.

“A way of being. A way of becoming one’s Most Magnificent Self. Your mother was among our most prized members.”

She moves toward me. But as she does so, my shoes walk me backward, away from her. I can’t believe I’m doing this. Surely she’ll be disgusted at this rudeness. But she just smiles and catches up to me easily. Cups my cheek with her gloved hand. She’s tall for such a young girl. Tall as I am.

Now I’m walking backward and she’s walking forward at the same pace. We’re moving like this around the tank, with her hands on my cheeks like we’re a couple in the strangest slow dance.

“Dear Daughter of Noelle,” she sighs into my face. And her breath is cool and crisp as smoke. “This has been a very trying time for you. I imagine it must be.”

I look into her eyes, bright like stars. I first saw them with my child’s mind. They dazzled me then, and they dazzle me still. I nod. A tear falls from my eye. The first I’ve truly shed since I learned about Mother. Not the Formula this time. She looks pleased that she has this effect on me.

“Death,” she says, “is just another door, Daughter, we must remember. Your mother,” she sighs, “was making such progress. A shame to lose her. But she did go the way of roses.” She smiles sadly. “Surely that’s a consolation.”

“I don’t understand,” I say, as the two of us sway slowly around the tank, her hands on my face, my hands on her silk shoulders. Soft music plays from somewhere, a kind of waltz. “My mother fell off a cliff. What does that have to do with roses?”