One night, I join Sylvia in the living room.
She looks at me standing in the doorway and smiles. There’s her cup of tea on the coffee table. “Not watching your beauty videos tonight?” she says as I take a seat beside her on the crinkly couch.
“Not tonight,” I say. When I first got my laptop back, I immediately opened YouTube and tried. But just one look at Marva’s pale, expressionless face and all I saw was the Queen of Snow covered in Lake’s blood spray. All I heard was her fake motherly voice. All I saw in the vial of serum Marva was holding up was a white pulsing fish. I snapped the laptop shut.
“You know I could use someone at our little shop,” she says.
“Really?”
She nods, flipping channels. “Someone to buy and manage the stock. Do the displays. That was never my forte, as I know you know. I’m really more of a numbers person. And Esther’s sweet, but she’s hopeless. Your mother was the one with the eye, the style. Always so sharp. We really miss her.” She looks at the TV screen. “Do you know anyone who might be—？”
“Yes.” I say it before I can even think.
Sylvia smiles at the television. “Wonderful.”
We watch Jeopardy! like I used to do with Grand-Maman. Except I don’t lie upside down, and unlike Grand-Maman, Sylvia isn’t silent. She blurts out her guesses. Blurts them out even if she’s wrong. She doesn’t care. “I’ll always say the answers,” she says. Not the answers, dear. The questions, Mother would say if she were here. “I can’t contain myself,” Sylvia says. “Sorry.”
“I like it,” I say.
I feel her looking at me instead of the screen, smiling. “What?”
“Just, you’re looking better these days.”
“Am I?” I haven’t looked in a mirror since I arrived. Can’t bring myself to face a glass. Not yet. Don’t know what face I’ll see there. Mother’s. Seth’s. Some moonbright monster.
“How?” I ask Sylvia, and I remember Lake and me in the After Place, the room of white faces. Lake asking me how she looked, If it’s beautiful. Me telling her it was, though I was afraid for her, though the word dead was swimming in me like a small gray fish. I said, Beautiful. Her giving me the same word back.
Sylvia doesn’t look at me like she’s afraid for me. She’s smiling. Like there is someone there she recognizes, in my eyes. A friend.
“Like you,” she says.
34
When I go back to Mother’s apartment—my apartment now, Chaz says—the roses are still blooming redly under her windows. Her door is still flanked with spiky, pretty plants. Wipe Your Paws it says on the welcome mat, the lettering faded. Anjelica is wriggling in my arms as we approach. Home, I can feel her thinking.
I’ll admit I’m afraid to go in. What will I find? Evidence of my insanity? Evidence of hers? Evidence of all the thorns between us?
When I open the door, it looks both the same and different. Cleaner and brighter, more open somehow. Filled with air and light. There are two mannequins sitting at the dining room table by the window like they’re having tea by the sea. I flash to the moment when I took them from the shop, believing they were my sisters. Didn’t I have three?
And then I hear a voice from the kitchen. “Hey.”
He’s standing by the table. Wearing an actual shirt. His hair is tucked neatly behind his ears. No squeegee in sight.
“Tad.” I can’t believe how happy I am to see him. “You’re still here.”
He smiles a little. “I just stayed so I could say goodbye,” he says.
“You’re leaving?”
“I should get out of your hair. Let you get your bearings. Anyway, it’s all done.”
“Done?”
“Everything’s fixed. Patched it all up, too. Pipes, walls. Even cleaned the windows again.”
I look around the place. Now the difference, the openness, the new quality of light and air, makes sense. “I don’t know what to say. Thank you.”
He shrugs like it was nothing. “It’s in the best shape it can be now. Whatever you decide to do with it.” He doesn’t ask what I’ll decide to do with it.
“What do I owe you?”
“Just take care of yourself, okay?”
“Surely I owe you—”
He shakes his head. “I did it for your mom. She was good to me. Probably too good. This is the least I could do.” He turns away from me to face the kitchen cupboards. Silent for a while. “I did some grocery shopping for you too,” he says at last to the cupboards. “Just so you wouldn’t have to think about it for a while.”