I shivered in my wet towel in the room where Dorian had left me. I did not know where he had gone or when he would be back; he had pointed to my clothes folded on a corner chair and locked the door behind him.
The room was an ocular circus; patterns of acanthus leaves spread across the quilts and the cushioned backs of sharp-pinnacle chairs; bloodshot blackberry vines covered the walls. I hurried on every light, from wall to wall, brushing away each patch of darkness so that nothing, no one, could hunker in the shadows unseen. I sat down on the bed, in the room’s rotted yellow glow, and blew on my frozen fingers. I rubbed up and down my arms and listened to my teeth clicking together. There was nothing in the room to smash through the locked window. Just useless glass lamps, browned journals, pillbox hats messy with cobweb.
If the lamps had been brass, like our old Baroque ones at home; if the hats had been clocks like Mama liked; if the items of this room had been like my own family’s — brutal heavy metals and blunt objects of dark wood, I could have butchered the window to pieces.
The shutters rocked in the low breeze, the iron latch broken off, allowing a glimpse of the oak tunnel and front yard. I spotted the toppled green beach pail, unreachable on the grass two stories below. My head went fuzzy and my fingertips numbed. I had not been thinking when I ran from home. I should have woken Fritzi, of course I should have woken Fritzi. Only Fritzi knew how to knock me out of my stupid, senseless spells.
My heart dropped into my stomach. Fritzi was probably sitting alone in our bedroom, feeling like the last person on the planet.
I stayed close to the window. It was made of old, distorted glass, as if hammered into uneven thickness, so that the outside wavered, ever so slightly unreal. The walls smelled of sweet, musky wood. With the fence in the yard right below the window, I knew I was in one of the antebellum rooms.
Around me floated the face of Apollina Lasalle. She looked out from dozens of photographs lining the scarlet walls, fashionably staged in a rowboat or posed at a dining table in a limp, ruffled dress. Her young child self hung in a prominent oval frame, shining in the recent finger trail that had swept away the dust.
Someone — Dorian, I imagined — had collected what appeared to be a chronological assortment of Apollina Lasalle’s belongings. There was a glass ballerina, arms arched above her head, standing en pointe on the desk, and a heap of dance slippers underneath, their heels cut up and cracked. A stack of knitted sweaters with old toggle buttons and guilloche brooches was neatly folded on the floor, and beside it sat a doll with a cracked face made of jaundiceyellow wax.
The room was impossibly cold. Its dust was so thick that I fell into a coughing fit as I lifted my clothes from the musty chair and hurried them on. It looked forgotten, long quarantined behind loose shutters and creeping hydrangea vines, but somebody had been here. Apollina’s fine-tip nose was evident where the dust had been brushed away, and there was a rolled-about rumple to the bed, and a bare hole large enough for a mug in the dust that layered thick across the nightstand.
I stood in the middle of the room with my hands gripping my head. I was crying without meaning to, my face utterly still. I had a flush of dizziness, I was sick with it. For once I did not know even one tiny measly piece of what I was supposed to do. My legs pained from trembling. I sat down and heard a plastic crinkle underneath the bedding. My head began to roll. I touched my forehead and the burn had deepened. My fingers came away sweaty despite my shivers, and the ceiling spun down and was directly in front of me, and with every blink I saw black-glass eyes and chalky hands.
I lay in a dreamy, seasick roll of unreality. Was this how Fritzi felt when she and Theodore doped up? Dorian’s face came and went over the hours, or minutes. He put his hand against my forehead. He checked my temperature with the same glass stick Mama used. When I fully woke, there was a taste in my mouth, metallic and syrupy.
Arm limp, I reached out to the bedpost and pulled up my dead weight, until the liquid in my stomach came hurtling up my throat. I licked my thumb and tried to rub away the discoloured spittle I had left on the quilt. I scratched it until the end of my nail caught in a loose thread and tore off. I put my thumb to my mouth and bit at it.
I was her, like Connie had been her, and Parnella had been her. I was the frozen girl, the leech-sucked girl. I slapped about my body in search of leeches but found nothing. No suction bruises, no blood. Was that next? I listened to my breaths, each one a tuft of frost. Surely my temperature had evened by now; it had to be the room, it was the room whose bones had frozen. The photographs on the walls cast long, shape-shifting shadows that crawled across the floor and nipped at my feet. There were family portraits, wedding pictures, the Bellrose girls at the county fair with blue ribbon pies and Emma Lasalle with two marblefurred greyhounds, and everywhere the sweeping web of this whole malignant family, something dead and rotten at its centre like mould eating it from the inside out.