And the jars. Red jars and bottles in every room, how did I not notice them all before? Lining the walls of her bedroom. Cluttering her countertops. She really loved her products, didn’t she? Sylvia said. I think of the video, the glowing girl in the bright bathroom, holding a jar up to her face like an apple. Red glass just like this. It feels heavy in my hand. Gold, slanted characters like runes are etched across it. ROUGE, it reads, and nothing else. No ingredients list. No instructions. Oh, I have my secrets, Belle. We all have our beauty secrets, don’t we?
I open the jar. More than empty. Like it’s been licked clean by the cat. There’s a faint scent of ocean and roses that rises up like a ghost.
I look in the cracked mirror. “Mother,” I whisper. “What the fuck is all of this?”
Belle, do you ever look in the mirror and hate? she asked me once on the phone.
Hate? I stared at the silhouette of my reflection in the dark. Yes, I thought. Of course. All the fucking time. But I said, Hate what, Mother?
I could picture her sitting alone in the dark like I was, staring at herself in the mirror.
Ce que tu vois, Mother whispered. A crack in her voice. She sounded lost and sad and afraid. What were you afraid of, Mother?
Now in the mirror I see a shimmer of something. A shape. My heart pounds. Oh god, what—but it’s just the cat sitting by the front door. Staring at me with her eyes pale and sharp as Mother’s. She blinks at me slowly and slinks away.
A pair of red shoes come winking into focus. Shining by the open box behind me.
I turn around and there they are for real. Gleaming between the dolls and the shoebox full of Tom Cruise clippings. Like they were always there. Like they could have come out of the box. Maybe they did and I just didn’t notice them in the sea of dolls. Pretty, I think, walking over to them. So very red. Mother’s, they have to be. Funny, I don’t remember her having a pair like this. And yet there’s something familiar about the worn, thin heel, the sharply pointed toe with the feathers, this red web of straps. The clock, that clock I didn’t know she had, ticks louder somewhere. Quicker? Maybe quicker, too. Try me, try me, the red shoes seem to say. Almost like they’re speaking to me. I shake my head. Mother’s shoes would never fit me. I think of her little white feet with their painted red toes. Nothing at all like my freak shows. What are we going to do with you? she used to say when she took me shoe shopping as a teenager. Shaking her head at my huge, misshapen feet in their scuffed black Doc Martens, the only shoes we could find that fit. I don’t know, Mother, I said. Put me in a sack. Drown me. I’m hopeless. And she’d frown as I smiled.
Holding the shoes, I feel a strange charge in my hands. Light as feathers. Giving off a faint scent of flesh, her flesh. I close my eyes. It’s funny how Mother’s shoes make me feel silly, sort of ashamed. Like a stupid, sad child again. Just then a memory hits like a cold, crashing wave. My childish feet in red shoes. I’m looking in a mirror, but it isn’t myself I see there. Someone else is in the glass. A man. I can’t see his face, but I feel him smiling at me. I’m smiling too. Then all goes black.
* * *
I open my eyes. I’m a grown woman again. Lying on the floor of my dead mother’s living room. Anjelica’s licking my face with her rough little tongue. I thought she hated me. Maybe she still does and just wants food.
It’s dark now. No more blood-colored sun. No more blackening trees. Now a moon shines whitely through the curtains, which lift in the black breeze. How did it become night? Clock’s ticking quick. Fridge humming its Gregorian chant. I’m wearing one of Mother’s dresses, I see. The silk silver one that falls like such luxe water. Pretty, but how did that happen? When did I take off my plain black dress and put this one on? The red shoes are on my feet now too, gleaming in the dark. I was about to try them on when I went down some sort of memory hole. When something unbidden just floated up and sucked me in. What? Can’t remember now. I stare at the red shoes shining on my feet. They fit, look at that. Suddenly I feel like going for a walk, why not? On a night like this, so black and windy and warm, why not? The air is calling to me. There’s a song in it, it sounds like. I feed the cat, then hurry out the door. I’ll pack later.
* * *
Outside, the roses are swaying in the breeze. So alive, they seem to be breathing, like each one has a little gulping mouth. Can’t see the ocean, but I can hear it. The roar, the crash against the sharp black rocks. So long as I can’t see the water, it’s pleasant, the sound. A kind of music. I’m walking the coastline, snaking right along the winding path beside the beach, the same one I used to walk late at night as a teenager. It’s black as pitch but I’m not afraid, just like I wasn’t afraid then. Back then, we lived farther from the beach, but I’d come here all the time. Knew every turn and groove in the path. Still do, it seems. I guess feet never forget.