Rouge(80)

I turn back to Hud Hudson. Eyes still sorrowful. Gaze holding mine like a glass. “How do you know all this?”

He lets go of my hand. Lights a cigarette. “Didn’t I tell you there were two of me once?” In the mirrors, he’s in shadow now. The smoke hangs over his face like a veil.

“Your brother.”

“Edward. He was a member, like your mother. An actor like her too. Who knows, maybe they even saw each other at the house. Shared a glass of the bubbly drug by the Depths.” He smiles darkly, takes a long sip of his drink.

“What happened to him?”

“He disappeared about six months ago.” Another drag from his cigarette. I watch his scar gleam as he smokes.

“I’m sorry.”

“Me too.” His voice is cracked with pain. So familiar to us. “We weren’t very close, not since we were kids. Sort of estranged, actually. Especially after our mother died.”

A sigh from my sister by the flowers.

“About a year ago, I’d started to notice that on the phone, he’d have these word slips. Blanks. Little things, then bigger things. Mix past and present. I worried it was drugs at first—Edward was never all that… stable. Or early-onset dementia. Our mother had it. The last time I saw him, he was playing Iago at the Playhouse. He kept messing up his lines. It was painful to watch, he was always so flawless. I stayed after the show to see how he was holding up, though I worried he’d see that as some sort of insult—Edward took any dent in his armor so terribly. But when he opened the door to his dressing room, I couldn’t believe…”

And now Hud’s just staring at himself in the mirror as if struck.

“What?”

“His face,” he says. His eyes look afraid. And there’s that other shade of feeling creeping in again, what is its name again, Sisters?

“He’d looked different onstage,” Hud continues, still lost in his reflection. “I’d thought it was just lighting, makeup maybe. Maybe another one of his procedures—Edward had always been into those, always a little vain. But this was something else. This transformation was unreal. Not any of his newfangled treatments, not even surgery could account for…” He turns to me. Reaches out as if to touch my face. Instead he runs his hand through his own dark hair, takes another drag of his cigarette.

“I didn’t say anything to him, of course. Edward didn’t like to talk about his looks, but he was obsessed. Sort of like it was a… secret for him. Or something. You know?”

We do, mumbles my sister by the flowers in her sleep.

“So I just congratulated him on his performance. And the way he looked at me…”

“How?”

“Like I wasn’t his brother. Like he didn’t know me at all. Sound familiar?”

Not at all, murmurs my sister on the couch from behind her hands. But her voice is full of pain like Hud Hudson’s. I see Mother’s face in my mind. Looking at me like I was a stranger. Like she was empty. Emptied. And me looking at the emptiness, feeling sick, afraid. Responsible—why responsible?

“People disappear, the police told me, if you can believe it. I started looking into it and that’s when I stumbled upon our house on the cliff. On Rouge.”

My sisters sigh at the sound of this word. The way Hud Hudson says it. How it lights up his eyes, darkens his voice.

“Try looking into Rouge, I told the cop. He said, That fancy French spa by the water? My wife’s a member. Loves it. Barking up the wrong tree there, Hudson.” Another angry drag of his cigarette. He shakes his head at Mother’s mirrors. I know he sees nothing there in the glass. Just himself on the other side, broken and looking in.

“That cop didn’t know it, but he confirmed something for me. Some people, like his wife, seem to be enjoying the services of Rouge, paying for them, without losing their minds or dying. Others, like your mother, like Edward, aren’t so lucky.”

I look at my sister by the window, frozen but still gazing out at the water, a tear midway down her cheek.

“That’s the thing I don’t fully understand yet,” he says. “Why do some members pay, why do others get free treatments? Why do some lose their minds from the treatments and disappear? Why do some disappear quickly and others not so quickly? There seems to be no standard timeline, no—”

“Well, everyone’s Journey is different, isn’t it, Detective?” I say. Didn’t someone tell me that in a waiting room once? “Very peril—personal.”

“Like our demons. Maybe some are more appealing to Rouge than others.” He’s still staring at my face, his eyes tracing its particular configuration of contour and shadow. Why is he looking at me like this, Sisters? But they all still seem to be dreaming.

“You know Edward tried to kill me once?” he says, eyes on my eyes.

A sharp shiver runs through me. “He did?”

“When we were nine. For some reason, he had it in his head that I was the prettier one, if you can believe it. Even though we looked so alike, most people couldn’t tell us apart. But Edward was convinced. So one day he broke one of our mother’s perfume bottles and he did this.” He points to his scar, shining in the light. A burning on my forehead suddenly. Cold rushing through me like wind.

“After that, Edward went to live in Santa Cruz with our father for a while. It was the strangest thing…” He breaks off, shaking his head as if to shake it all away. I reach out my hand to his face. My fingers trace the raised, pale slash on his cheek.