XXVIII

The night before George was due home, Mrs. March grew tipsy on red wine and settled into a fragrant bubble bath. She and Jonathan had dined on their beefsteaks in silence, neither regarding the other, as the Chopin record played to its end. After they finished and Martha had left, Mrs. March took one of the good wineglasses—the ones reserved for formal affairs and stored in the dining room china cabinet—and filled it to the brim with Bordeaux.

Mrs. March sent Jonathan to bed but she could still hear him prancing about and talking to himself in his room. She closed her bedroom door and inspected the bathroom tiles for vermin. Finding none, she poured a thick stream of scented soap into the tub.

She undressed, dodging her reflection in the mirror the way one avoids a neighbor at the supermarket. She left her clothes folded neatly on the toilet seat and stepped delicately into the bathtub, adjusting to the temperature before submerging herself into the plush aromatic froth. The water pressed down on her chest with a weight that was almost crushing.

The events of the past few days nagged at her like flies on a corpse. She had explored George’s study down to the last paper clip, searching for any souvenirs of his crimes, expecting to stumble across Sylvia’s teeth in a porcelain snuffbox (the way she stored Jonathan’s baby teeth). She had rifled through multiple notebooks and velvet-lined fountain pen cases and drawers filled with loose typewriter ribbons, but in the end had found nothing—only a telephone number scribbled on a notepad. She had called the number, and a woman had answered, but Mrs. March had not been able to come up with a convincing ruse to extract information and had hung up in a panic.

Earlier that morning, as she was still fending off the idea of getting out of bed, she was startled out of her lethargy by the devastating realization that she’d forgotten to tip the day doorman for Christmas. She’d raced down to the lobby, her hair undone, dressed sloppily in a loose shirt that bunched over her midriff and George’s much-too-large trench coat, and had pressed a thick, sweaty wad of cash into the unsuspecting doorman’s hands as he backed away from her.

She gulped her wine in the tub in an attempt to stifle the memory of her voice breaking as she pleaded, “Take it, please take it!” Like some kind of madwoman. Her purse had fallen from her shaking wrist, scattering its contents all over the lobby floor. The shriveled chestnuts from her long-forgotten visit to the museum rolled across the marble.

Going forward, she would have to wait until after the doorman’s shift change at three o’clock to leave the apartment.

She bent her left leg, exposing her knee, and watched the steam rise off her skin in smoky wisps. As she squinted at her wrinkled fingertips, a string of blood dripped into the water. It moved across the tub like a water snake, diluting in a light pink near her toes. She sat up, ready to flee the tub, when she realized that she’d spilled some wine into her bath. She relaxed, leaned back into the water, and took another sip. Had Sylvia bled a lot as she was murdered? Could she feel the blood leaking out of her, trickling down her skin, as she was beaten and violated? The medical examiners had advised the public that rape was difficult to determine in this case, as the body had been subject to the elements, but the idea of Sylvia’s rape was firmly instilled in everybody’s minds, including Mrs. March’s. At this point it would be disappointing if she hadn’t been raped, if they had all been wasting their time mourning a simple murder. Certainly the contextual clues pointed to rape. The body had been found half-naked from the waist down, and Sylvia’s panties had been discarded nearby as if in haste. Mrs. March tried to imagine what Sylvia’s naked form had looked like. While she regarded her own body under the translucent water, she pictured Sylvia’s pubic hair, imagining her killer marveling at it before raping her. A forgotten sensation blossomed inside Mrs. March—arousal. She immediately felt guilty, a familiar pattern burned into her psyche from her teenage days, when she had explored her body in the bathtub. The first time she’d done it, she imagined that Kiki had watched her, and that she had judged her for it. She finally put an end to Kiki, once and for all, the winter after that strange summer in Cádiz. When Kiki stepped into the bathtub with her that night, Mrs. March felt a wave of fury wash over her, followed by something altogether more desperate. She implored Kiki to leave, to never return, but a stubborn Kiki had refused. Angrily, Mrs. March reached out her hands toward Kiki’s throat, pressing so hard that her nails dug into her palms and her arms trembled, shaking the air as if Kiki were fighting for her life. As her imaginary friend sank into the water, she pictured her neck hanging limp and her eyes going white. Satisfied, she pulled the stopper and the water circled the drain, taking Kiki with it.

As she grew drunker on her wine, the glass balanced precariously on the edge of the tub, she could sense something just out of her line of vision. She looked to her left without moving her head to see that it was a woman standing, naked, next to the bathtub. She gripped the edge of the tub, bracing herself to turn her head, and she saw that it was herself, looking down at her. Mrs. March held her gaze, trying to will them into cohesion, as her twin raised a leg over the tub and slipped inside, looking squarely at Mrs. March. It was then that she realized it must be a dream. The woman that was herself regarded her somewhat quizzically, then leaned forward, her too-dark, too-big nipples grazing the surface of the water, and extended her hands, her fingers searching, toward Mrs. March. She placed them under the water and Mrs. March could see them advancing between her open legs. “Don’t,” she said.

She woke up in tepid water, a greasy film on its surface, to find Jonathan standing over her. He was wearing his bear costume. “Are you dead, Mommy?” he asked. She tried to smile but her lips cracked painfully, dried out from the wine. “Mommy’s only sleepy,” she said. “Why don’t you go along and play for a bit.”

“It’s after my bedtime.”

She looked to the little window above the bathtub and saw that it was dark, although hadn’t it already been dark when she first drew the bath? “Of course it is,” she said. “Why are you up then?”

“I had a nightmare.”

“Go back to bed.”

“Can I sleep in your bed tonight?”

“You’re too big for that. You know that.”

She waited as Jonathan silently debated with himself. She couldn’t move or the remaining foam would dissolve and he would see her breasts. She couldn’t remember the last time he had seen her naked body. She didn’t think he ever had. She herself had only ever seen her mother naked once, and she remembered it vividly. The black, woolly patch of coarse hair between her legs as she sat on the toilet in front of a young Mrs. March, and doing so inexplicably casually, even though nudity had been considered inappropriate in their household.

“Mommy . . .” began Jonathan, rubbing at his eyes, his dark heavy eyelashes crusted with sleep. “I can’t find the lady inside the other lady.”

“What are you saying?” said Mrs. March, alarmed.

“The lady inside the other lady . . .” repeated Jonathan. “You know, the Russian one!”

“Oh,” said Mrs. March, with relief. He was referring to her mother’s collection of wooden Russian dolls. “Have you been going through my things? You know you’re not allowed in there.”

“I couldn’t find her . . . the last one, the tiniest one.”

As a child, Mrs. March herself had played with these dolls in secret, twisting them open, revealing smaller versions of themselves. She would sometimes replace the innermost doll—the smallest, purest one—with another object. A folded bit of paper with a doodle on it, an ivory chess pawn, or one of her baby teeth. She’d thought it marvelously relatable that her mother even had dolls. It was at last something she could understand about her, something that might bond them. Her mother, upon discovering that she’d been tampering with them, scolded her and relegated the dolls to the highest shelf above her bedroom dresser. The dolls possessed an aura of unattainability, which prompted Mrs. March to take them for herself after her mother had been shipped off to Bethesda and the apartment had been emptied.

When Jonathan finally left the bathroom after much cajoling and, ultimately, the threat of punishment, Mrs. March rose from her awkward position in the tub—the water now cold—and pulled the drain stopper. Water drained from her body, too, dribbling out thinly from between her legs.

SHE’D TAKEN the herbal pills that had worked on other occasions, but this time they failed. Sleep managed to elude her.

She got up from bed and pulled on some socks, grabbing her robe and making her way to the living room. Softly illuminated by streetlamp light, the room was silent, save for the occasional car on the street below.

Years ago, on a trip to Venice, George had gifted Mrs. March with an old mask. It sported a long beak, like the ones worn by plague doctors, except this mask had been painted a brilliant yellow, with white and gold feathers around the eyeholes, making it further resemble a bird. Perturbed by it, Mrs. March had hidden the mask on a high shelf among decades-old travel guides. Now, she stepped onto a chair, feeling for it blindly with her hands. She recognized it immediately upon touching it.

She walked with no real purpose around the apartment, her breath hot and loud inside the mask, her vision adjusting to the small eye cutouts. As a child, when she couldn’t sleep, she hadn’t dared to wander about like this. There had been something forbidding about her parents’ living room in the dead of night, with its stiff sofas and heavy coffee table.

She walked into the dining room, running her hand along the table, tracing a finger on the portraits. She spotted something silver in one of the frames, glinting against the dark Victorian palette. She peered closer, as close as her beak would allow, and saw that it was a silverfish, trapped under the glass, searching blindly for an exit. The insect creeped up toward the Victorian woman’s face, whose entreating eyes seemed to be asking her to do something about it.

The silverfish raised its tiny head, as if to look at Mrs. March. She tapped on the glass gently and the insect skittered off, retreating under the frame and out of sight.