Alex hasn’t left. Even knowing that so much of her presence was Ellis’s machination does very little to erase her from my mind. I still see her in the shadows. I still watch her flit between the forest trees. Her voice wakes me in the night. Her memory stains my soul.
Maybe I’m being unfair to Ellis. Maybe some nightmares are real.
My mother appears at Dalloway on Friday night, an apparition trailing expensive perfume. For a moment I almost don’t recognize her, standing in my doorway with her hair spun in careful curls and her pink Isabel Marant dress. She got thin in Nice.
“What are you doing here?” I demand.
“Miss MacDonald called. She said your friend had gone missing.” My mother looks as if she doesn’t know what to do with herself in this place, her gaze darting from the books on my shelves to the candles on my desk to, at last, the tarot cards scattered across my floor. “Felicity, what’s all this?”
“Nothing. You shouldn’t have come.”
Surely Cecelia Morrow had better things to concern herself with—better vintages—than her mad daughter and the dead bodies that seem to fall in her wake like cut flowers.
My mother drifts forward and kneels to stare at my spread. It was a bad spread, full of dark omens; I’d drawn the Hanged One and thought of Tamsyn Penhaligon swinging from that tree, strangled to death. I’d burned anise and clove over the cards to ward off her curse.
Now my mother trails a finger through the ground spices and then rubs it against her thumb, a faint grimace passing over her lipsticked mouth. “I thought you were past this,” she says.
“It’s for my thesis.”
“Felicity…”
I know what she’s going to say. She’s been talking to Dr. Ortega, who has filled her ears with stories about my paranoia, my obsession with the Dalloway Five. It was no use explaining how all academic passions veer toward obsession. She wouldn’t understand that magic can be a metaphor, like Ellis said. That magic doesn’t have to be magic for it to mean something. That sometimes magic is a salve over a burn, and it’s the only way you can heal.
“I’m fine,” I tell her. “You can go home. Go back to Aspen, or Paris, or wherever. Don’t worry about me.” I laugh. “You never do.”
“I do worry about you. Felicity…darling…are you still taking your medication?”
“Yes.”
“Can you show me the bottle?”
My next breath is too sharp, hissing through my teeth on the inhale. “Why is it any of your business? Why are you here, pretending I’m the one who’s crazy—I’m not the one who’s crazy! I’m not the one who spends every hour of every goddamn day with her head in a wine bottle. I’m not devouring Xanax and ripping up priceless artwork and then telling everyone I’m perfectly happy.”
I can’t tell if I’ve hit my mark. My mother’s face is as expressionless as the surface of an icy lake. Perhaps even now her emotions are drowned in six glasses of C?tes du Rh?ne red.
“I think,” she says eventually, rising to her feet and dusting the spices from her hand, “you should take another leave of absence. Dr. Ortega said they can have a bed ready for you as early as next Friday.”
“Fuck you.”
This, at last, garners a reaction, my mother’s mouth forming a tiny moue of shock and her hand immediately rising to cover it. “Felicity Elisabeth, that language is not appropriate—”
“Fuck,” I say again. “Fuck, fuck, shit, goddamn, fuck, shit!”
The flush that darkens her cheeks is lovelier than anything she could buy at Chanel. “You aren’t well,” she says. “It’s clear that Housemistress MacDonald was right about that. It’s perfectly understandable that losing your friend would have this effect on you, after what happened last year.”
Perfectly understandable. My mother has never understood a thing about me, not since the day I was born and she handed me off to the first in a string of nannies. “I’m not leaving,” I say.
“You are. I had to talk to the police for you. Did you know that? The dean told me that you were being interviewed. I had to call the police and tell them you were nothing but a sick girl, grieving her friend. I had to tell them you were fragile, that you—”
What she means is that she had to call one of her powerful East Coast friends and make them talk to the police.
Or that she had to pay.
“I’m eighteen,” I inform her. I grin, wild and sharp. “I’m eighteen. I’m an adult. You can’t make me do anything.”