The House Girl (11 page)

Oscar pushed the door fully open with a creak of old hinge and leaned against the frame, hands in pockets. He looked disheveled and tired. “Just wanted to say good night. Working hard?” and he pointed his chin toward the papers and books that covered the bed.

“New case,” said Lina. “I’m trying to get up to speed.”

“Hey, I’ve been meaning to ask you—whatever happened to Stavros?” Oscar said with careful indifference. “I haven’t heard you talk about him in a while.”

“We broke up.” Lina turned back to the papers. Stavros, with his wire rims, the unprotected nape of his neck, how Lina had thrilled at the sight of him in the beginning. Neither of them had changed, not exactly, it was just circumstances—this is what they had told each other—and timing. That one long phone conversation (four hours? five?) and neither of them had cried or yelled, the decision was made mutually, amicably, responsibly. She knew she should have told Oscar about the breakup months ago. He had always liked Stavros, despite their vast differences in political beliefs and chosen professions.

“I thought you guys were pretty serious,” Oscar said.

“We were, I guess. I mean, four years is a long time. But it just didn’t make much sense. He’s in San Francisco. We’re both working so much.”

“Love doesn’t always make sense, Carolina.”

“Dad. Please. You sound like a greeting card.” Annoyed, she looked up at him and was surprised to see his face so drawn. His eyes roamed over the papers on Lina’s bed, the piles of books, the open notebook with all her scribbling. “I’m fine, you know,” she said quickly. “Maybe I’m just waiting. Waiting for something like you and Mom had.” Lina wanted her father to know that this wasn’t all she expected out of life, work and late nights and a burning laptop, but somehow these words landed wrong. Oscar’s face registered a hurt shock and then closed up, and Lina immediately regretted having mentioned her mother.

Oscar shifted away from the doorframe, and his eyes went to the floor. “Well, I will take my greeting-card self downstairs to bed then. Good night, Carolina.” He did not blow her a kiss, as Lina was expecting. He shut the door behind him.

“Good night,” she called after him, feeling as if she should apologize to him, though for what she wasn’t sure. The breakup with Stavros? The greeting-card remark? The choices she had made, was making every day, to build a life so different from his own?

Turning to her bedside table, Lina picked up the photograph of Oscar and Grace, the original of the reprint that Lina kept in her office. In the photo, her parents sat at a restaurant, the curving mouths of two wineglasses just visible at the bottom of the frame. Oscar’s left arm circled Grace’s shoulders; Grace’s hands were hidden but Lina had always imagined that they must be holding Oscar’s right hand under the table—look at how closely they were sitting, look at the intimacy. Oscar seemed so young—no beard, his hair shaggy and falling into his eyes, his smile exuberant. Grace was turned toward him, a smile there too, one visible eye shining, looking up at him with love and pride. The photo was taken after Oscar’s first important show, a group show, but the gallery was trendy, and he had sold a painting. One painting! It had seemed impossible, amazing, like they were on their way, Oscar had said. Nine months later, Grace was dead.

A wintry sweep of road, going where? The car—what kind? A tree, a telephone pole, a concrete divide. Grace alone. Had she been alone? Blood on the front seat, a splintered windshield, a body thrown, dark hair fanned across red-spotted snow. It had been years since Lina had thought about her mother’s death, really wondered about the specifics that once had seemed so essential to know. But Lina’s imagination now unfurled these images in vivid color and excruciating detail.

For years, from late childhood and into her early teens, Lina had followed dark-haired women she passed on the street or saw on the subway. She looked for those who seemed about the age her mother would have been—mid- to late thirties—and she stalked them quietly, harmlessly, down Manhattan sidewalks, into the post office or the bank, as they shopped for groceries or sat in a café with friends. It was something she did with a complicated thrill of fear and excitement and guilt. She never bothered them. She took nothing from them. She spoke to only one, a woman wearing a long dark-green coat whom Lina followed one late afternoon of the winter she turned fifteen, a bitterly cold day, the air heavy and gray and smelling of metal. She had seen the woman first on the subway, exited behind her to the street and followed her east along Seventy-seventh Street in Manhattan. Snow was falling, restless flyaway snow that scattered across the sidewalk and onto the arms of Lina’s coat and her bare head. She followed the woman as the sidewalk disappeared under shifting layers of snow and Lina’s hair crackled with ice. Suddenly the woman stopped and turned to face her. The block was empty, apart from the two of them, and the woman’s eyes were wide and frightened.

“Why are you following me?” she asked.

Lina had been so startled by the sound of the woman’s voice—high and nervous—that she almost turned and fled. “I’m—I’m not following you,” she stammered.

“Yes, you are,” said the woman, seeming less afraid now. “You’ve been behind me for blocks. I saw you on the subway. I saw you looking at me. Why are you doing this?”

Now that the woman faced her, Lina could see that she was in fact much older than Grace would have been, hair threaded with gray, her face lined around the mouth and purple beneath the eyes. And it was this that made Lina say, “It’s nothing. I have to get home now,” and she turned and walked back, past the silent brooding brownstones of the Upper East Side, to the subway stop where she had first exited, some five paces behind the woman, wanting to see where she would go, wanting to see the life that she—this woman who looked like Grace—was leading.

The sound of water rushing through creaky pipes filled Lina’s room—Oscar brushing his teeth—followed by muffled thuds from below of drawers closing, floorboards groaning as he prepared for bed. Lina heard the oddly distinct click of his bedside lamp turning off, and then silence. Again she looked at the photo of her parents, at her mother’s shining gaze. She remembered the snow on that day, and the shock at seeing the lined, frightened, tired face of the woman and realizing that no, this woman was not her, this woman could never have been my mother.

J
osephine became aware of Missus’ voice, a faint repetitive calling, almost like a bird, but with a sharp insistence. “Josephine! Josephine!” The sound startled her, and she could not say if this was the first time or the tenth that Missus had said her name.

Opening the bedroom door, Josephine found Missus sitting on the bed, her back to the door, long hair loose on her shoulders. It was close on midday now and sunlight filtered in through the two south-facing windows directly opposite Missus, the ones Josephine had looked to from the garden earlier that day; two others on the west wall were dark with the curtains drawn. Only the window closest to Missus was open and the room still breathed with the smell of Dr. Vickers and his poultices.

“Dr. Vickers has gone, Missus,” Josephine said. “It’s coming up for dinnertime. Let’s get you back in your dress.”

Missus nodded vigorously, the uneven ends of her dark hair rising and falling across her back. “Yes, yes, the doctor. Josephine, I am not right today, not right at all.”

She turned and Josephine saw blood on her face, a deep cut horizontal along the curve of the left cheek, the gash ugly and open and bleeding. A look of satisfaction or pride flashed across Missus’ eyes, and then it was gone and there was fear and pain.

“Missus, what’s happened?” Josephine ran to the bed and took Missus’ face into her hands. Bone flashed white underneath the blood and Josephine pushed the edges together. The cut was straight and true and they met neatly like two broadcloth seams for sewing. Josephine pulled a corner of sheet off the bed and ripped a strip of cotton, the tearing sound loud and awful in the room. She held the strip to Missus’ cheek, pushing against the cut, but the bleeding went on and on, drips running down Josephine’s wrist and into the sleeve of her dress. Throughout, Missus Lu remained silent, surrendering herself to Josephine’s ministrations, her eyes blank, her breathing shallow.

Finally Josephine released Missus Lu’s face and gingerly removed the strip of sheet, now heavy with blood. “Did the doctor do this?” Josephine asked.

Missus Lu said nothing, just gave a long deep sigh, and then, “Josephine, you are a dear girl. Who do you think did this? Who do you think?” She smiled with a slyness that Josephine had not seen before. “It was me. Who else? I have no need for this face anymore. I heard what the doctor said. I listened by the door, I heard the things he said to you. I am dying.”

“Missus, don’t—” Josephine began but found she could not continue. She went to the bowl and jug and washed her hands, wrung out her dress sleeve as best she could, wet a cloth for Missus. It was words of comfort that Missus wanted. She wanted Josephine to contradict her, to say, “No, Missus, you heard wrong what the doctor said. He said nothing wrong here, no need for my services here.” Perhaps on a different day, Josephine would have said this. She had done so in the past, at other times when comfort was needed. She had smoothed Missus’ hair and held her hand and rubbed her back, like a sister or a mother or a daughter would.

But today Josephine’s mouth could not say the words. She felt herself separate from the room, from Missus Lu, from the sun on the floorboards, from the bloody residue still sticky on her fingers, as though she lived according to a set of principles that applied only to her, the principles having to do purely with escape. Every nerve was tensed and every muscle flexed toward this one goal, flight, and the simple tasks she did every day, the things she touched, the words that came from her mouth—
Yes, Missus; Yes, Mister
—all bound her to this place, and she wanted to shed them all, shake them from her as a dog shakes water from its coat. Part of Josephine was already gone, through the gate, turning left on the road to town. As the sparrow did, Josephine would point her head like an arrow and fly there.

Josephine brought the wet cloth to the bed. She sat close beside Missus and took her face in hand to clean the cut. The blood had not yet dried and it came away easily, leaving the skin raw pink and puffy. Missus Lu winced from the scrubbing but did not pull away. “I used to be a great beauty, you know,” Missus said. “My sisters all despised me for it. My mother and daddy, oh, they were so afraid when they saw me in my birthday dress. At thirteen, I was irresistible. Thirteen, can you imagine?”

Missus pushed Josephine’s hands away and rose from the bed. She walked to the end of the room and threw open the curtains of the far windows, bringing a sudden rush of light. Josephine’s eyes narrowed and she put a hand out to shade them as she looked down and away from the glare. Her gaze went to the windowsill. There, a kitchen carving knife, the blade streaked red. This was what Missus had used, a knife from her own kitchen.

From across the room, Missus Lu’s voice was measured: “I have lived more years here than at my daddy’s farm. Did you know that? My, how it smarts.” Missus shook her head. “I have wasted so much. Almost everything, I know that’s true. I have a little beauty left and this I will pass along to you. Pass it to you, Josephine. There is no one else.” As she spoke, she walked slowly back toward Josephine, her fingers trailing against the wall and then against the glass of the windows as she passed each one. “My face was a beauty, wasn’t it? I was a great beauty.”

Missus Lu neared the last window and then lunged toward the knife on the sill, fingers grasping for the handle. Josephine was ready. She jumped from the bed and grabbed Missus’ shoulders, pushing her away from the window, back against the wall, and she held Missus there as she struggled. Josephine’s breath came fast with the strain but she knew she could keep her. Missus surely weighed no more than a child. Nothing more than sinew and bone.

Missus Lu stopped struggling and let her head hang down, but her breath still raced, and Josephine did not release her. They stood like that until Missus Lu crumpled to the floor, crying softly. “You don’t understand,” she said. “That’s all I have to give you, Josephine. There’s nothing more.”

Leaving Missus Lu against the wall, Josephine walked to the open window. She picked the knife off the sill and threw it long and hard through the window, onto the front lawn. It landed blade down, the carved bone handle poking from the long grass, nearly obscured. She watched it for a moment, until a breeze stirred, the landscape shifted, and the handle disappeared into the green. Josephine turned back to Missus.

“Come now, let’s get you cleaned up for dinner.”

“Leave me, just leave me here. I am so very tired.” Missus’ legs were bent beneath her. The neck of her chemise gaped wide and exposed the thin jut of her collarbone.

Again a shadow of pity passed across Josephine’s vision and she blinked her eyes fast to clear it. She went to Missus Lu on the floor, helped her to stand and led her to the bed.

“Lay back,” Josephine said, and sat beside her. Josephine re-wet the cloth and wiped away the remaining blood from the cut. Carefully she held Missus’ face in her hand, turning it to clean the skin thoroughly, until it shone wet and new. Missus closed her eyes.

“No more of this, Missus.”

“Yes, Josephine.”

Missus lay back against the pillows, her breath evened out, her features softened. Missus Lu now was so altered from the Missus who had walked down the path to fetch Josephine those years ago. The cheeks more hollow, the hair more sparse, her whole person washed and wrung out in the muddy shallows of the river. Josephine did believe what Missus had said; she could still see the beauty that had been there. The bones of the face, the ripeness of the lips. Those things would be with her until she died.

What Josephine felt for Missus now was sour and sweet, hot and cold, a flash of tenderness so sharp that Josephine longed to slap her across the face, or dig her nails into the softness of Missus’ arm, the skin pink beneath a screen of fine dark hairs. Missus was not Josephine’s protector, not her confidante, not her friend. But Missus had taught her to read, she had washed the sweat from Josephine’s face when she was eleven years old and so feverish she had collapsed in the kitchen, her cheek pressed against the coolness of the stones. A dress that Missus had grown tired of, she gave it to Josephine. Cotton with small blue flowers and stems of green printed in rows. Josephine had worn that dress every Sunday until the buttons would not close along the back, no matter how deeply she inhaled and pressed her breasts and stomach down to flatten them. She had wept when the buttons would not close, for the dress was the prettiest thing she had ever held in her hands.