The Sullied Pane

“If you’re really worried about your parents suspecting us, you might want to wipe that ridiculous grin off your face before we go down to dinner,” Maxine said, giving him a coquettish wink. She looped the straps of her bra back onto her shoulders, then turned her back to Xavier in a wordless request for his fingers to re-clasp what they’d so nimbly unfastened a few moments earlier.

Gently, he pressed his face into the soft nest of her hair, which smelled of sea air and spices. “Give me a moment to come down,” Xavier joked in whisper. “I’ll have my poker face on before the salad’s served, trust me.”

“Oh? Is this the sort of thing you’ve done often?”

While still technically a newlywed, Xavier knew his bride well enough to spy that telltale hitch of the corner of her perfect mouth; the seed of a smile that she was struggling to hide from him. It was a reassuring sign that her question was not an earnest one.

“Hardly,” he replied. “I just know my family. The law of survival is simple: show no emotion, expect none in return. Do that and we’re fine.”

Maxine’s brow furrowed in consternation. “We’re in the home of the grand Whitlocks; it’s a palace. Stop making it sound like we’re entering a war room.”

“There may be war if we don’t get this bed remade exactly as Mother had it when we arrived!”

Together they moved about the mattress, which was still warm and tousled from the frantic, hushed coupling they’d snuck in just after their arrival at the grand house.

Once the bed had been reasonably restored, Maxine dabbed the sheen of sweat from her brow. “How does your mother keep this place so pristine without a housekeeper? Honestly!” she huffed.

“My brothers and I have been asking that question all our lives. My father has hired a dozen cleaners over the years to try and ease the burden, but Mother always lets them go.” Xavier shrugged. “Maybe it’s her way of contributing, who knows?”

“What do you mean?”

“My family’s money all came from my father’s side. He took over the business interests from my grandfather before my parents were even married, and he’s handled everything ever since. Once my brothers and I were all grown, I think my mother got lost…maybe even a bit resentful.”

“Resentful of what, the conniving harlots of the outside who bewitched and stole her boys from her?”

Xavier lifted his hands. “Easy,” he said. “This isn’t some Freudian family drama. There’s no Oedipal anything here. My mother didn’t get jealous or angry after we moved out. She just kind of…drifted. She kept house, walked the grounds, sort of disappeared inside herself for a long time.”

“And that’s why her invitation to spend New Years’ here surprised you so much?”

“Yes,” he said, coiling his arms around her. “I wasn’t shut out because you and I eloped. All my brothers and I had nothing but radio silence from the home front.”

“Until now?”

“Until now.”

 

*

 

Their walk to the dining room was, to Maxine’s mind, more akin to a museum tour than the surveying of a homestead. Every inch of the abundant walnut wood gleamed as though it was encased in glass. The carpet that lined the grand staircase bore the swirl patterns of vigorous vacuuming. The walls all looked to be freshly painted, and the air was fragrant with lemon oil. But these details quickly paled in Maxine’s awareness, which was growing evermore focused on her internal anxieties. She could feel the familiar invisible vise clamping over her lungs, and was relieved when Xavier, perhaps able to sense her inner workings, slipped his hand into hers and lovingly whispered an instruction for her to breathe. He stopped her at the bottom of the stairs and kissed her lips before escorting her into the dining hall.

The room was like a film set, so grand was its elegance, so meticulous its maintenance and design. At first Maxine was so taken with the scope of the French windows that composed three walls of the hall, that she scarcely registered the carved table that seemed to stretch from one horizon to the other, or the highbacked plush dining chairs, or the fire that roared inside a maw-like hearth of green marble. Opera music strained from speakers that must have been hidden amidst the bookcases. The panelled wall bore family portraits in oil. There was a large standing globe and an antique bronze telescope by the spacious windows.

Maxine’s arm found its way around her husband’s waist. She pressed her hip firmly against his; a silent plea for him to not stray from her, not here, not tonight.

The party appeared, much to Maxine’s horror, to have divided itself according to fusty traditional roles. In one corner, Xavier’s two elder brothers nursed scotches with their father, who looked every inch the elder statesman with his slender face and tamed white hair and eyes like those of a Siberian Husky. Across the room, meanwhile, the wives were helping Mother set out the last of the serving dishes.

Maxine had every intention of following Xavier and inserting herself in the men’s corner, but Xavier’s mother just at that instant announced that dinner was served.

Noting that the place-cards stationed the spouses next to one another brought Maxine a small measure of relief. Xavier pulled out her chair, as did his brothers for their respective wives. Mrs. Whitlock, however, had to seat herself. Maxine found it strange that the father’s outdated views on gender she’d suspected upon entering the room apparently stopped short of chivalry. Both parents assumed the throne-like seats at either end of the table.

Maxine’s movements as she passed the serving china around were as stiff and unnatural as her smile, but as the evening wore on, she found, to her immense relief, that Xavier’s family was cheerier and looser than she’d assumed. His father asked interestedly about her job in human resources, about her background in drama. Several times the entire group erupted with laughter. Later, the discussion grew sombre and empathetic as the topic shifted to the violent unrest that was intensifying south of the border.

“Well,” Xavier’s father said, “let us hope the new year we’re ringing in tomorrow night brings better things to all.”

The party raised their wine glasses to this wish, and then Xavier’s mother began to automatically clear the dishes from the table and onto the wooden serving cart.

“Let me help,” implored Maxine. There came polite refusals, then polite insistences. Finally, Xavier’s mother half-suggested, half-commanded that Xavier take Maxine for a walk of the grounds.

 

*

 

Without, the night was cold and clear, which Maxine found refreshing after the house’s warmth and the bounty of food that had been served. Their journey had involved a turbulent flight, an overly complicated car rental at the airport, followed by a white-knuckle drive across the unploughed country roads that wound toward their terminus at the family estate. These factors, along with their unexpected early evening tryst, meant that Maxine hadn’t yet had an opportunity to fully drink in her surroundings.

The snowfall, which had caused great stress to her and Xavier earlier in the day, was now a source of magic; it padded the grounds like a pristine quilt, it muted what few night sounds there were out here, it even cast off the occasional glitter when the moon shone upon it at just the right angle.

As she walked arm-in-arm with her husband, Maxine came to appreciate that the care and attention that Xavier’s mother lavished upon the inside of the house extended to the property as well. The perennial hedges were trimmed to symmetrical perfection. The seasonal plants were tidily mummified in burlap, guarding them for the spring to come. The grid of stone walkways that ran through the gardens had already been salted and thus stood out like a maze of black marble laid within the snow.

This obvious meticulousness caused Maxine to doubt herself once her eyes fell upon the ugly little structure that slumped at the far end of the grounds. It was the size and design of a large wooden shed. Its roof was noticeably stooped, and its lone uncovered window was so clouded with accumulated grime it was as if pollen had been baked into the pane. The abode sat nestled among ugly brambles. Its wooden frame was colourless. It was almost as if it was a great toadstool that had sprouted up from the earth; the kind of magic hovel Maxine had read about in fairy tales when she was a child.

“Where are you going?”

Xavier’s voice came from behind, rather than beside her. This alerted Maxine to the fact that she had somehow unconsciously slipped free of her man’s arm and had begun to stray on her own down the sloping lawn toward the strange little dwelling.

“I wanted to get a better look,” she explained awkwardly, covertly straining her eyes to spy whatever she could through the murky glass. (She saw nothing.) “I’m sorry.”

He stepped off the walkway and added a second set of footprints alongside hers.

“No need to apologize,” he said.

“What is it, a storage shed?”

“I think it was a gatehouse once upon a time. Not sure why my parents haven’t torn it down, to be honest with you.”

A wind pushed over the grounds, rattling the settled snow from the tree boughs and the shrubberies. It also rattled Maxine’s bones.

“Come on,” Xavier said, wrapping his arm across her shoulders. “Let’s get you in front of the fireplace and get a warm brandy in your hand.”

The offer was music to Maxine’s ears, but her snifter was still half-full when she felt the weight of the day’s travels pressing down upon her limbs and eyelids. She tried to politely hide her persistent yawns with her hand, but Xavier noticed right away and announced that they were turning in for the night.

Upstairs, the spacious bed felt gloriously supple beneath her tired limbs. She fell asleep before Xavier had switched off his bedside reading lamp.

Perhaps it was the unfamiliarity of her surroundings, but sleep refused to hold her for anything more than a few short bursts. She reposed, her limbs aching and eyes burning. She listened to the furnace pressing warm air through the floor vents, watched the black kaleidoscope of tree limb shadows as they splayed across the high white ceiling.

Suddenly there was sunlight.

Maxine was confused by the impossibility of the golden light that had begun to glimmer upon the ceiling and the far wall. Dawn was still many hours away; a fact that flirted with Maxine’s curious nature. She rose from the bed and moved to the window, shivering at the arctic draft that oozed through the window’s edges.

The vantage from the mansion’s third storey only deepened Maxine’s already great appreciation of the property, both its scope and its pristineness. Up here, she was able to see the source of the golden light quite plainly: it was pouring from the misshapen shack in the greenery. Seeing now the sheer symmetry of the gardens emphasized how ugly and incongruous the little structure was. It did not belong here.

‘Maybe it’s you who doesn’t belong,’ Maxine said to herself, then immediately hushed her doubting mind.

The golden light suddenly became a backdrop for flickering movements. Black shapes began to flitter in the micro-cabin’s tiny window; shapes that became elongated into a mass of lean, ropy things that pulsed and flexed like characters in a shadow-play, with the pearly snow acting as a screen. Maxine stared hard at the guttering light from the window, wanting deeply, though inexplicably, to see, to know what was occurring beyond it.

A few moments later she received her answer, or a portion of at it least.

The amber light shrank and was extinguished, and shortly thereafter a figure emerged from the micro-cabin. It turned and secured the stout wooden door, then made haste along one of the stone paths that led from the gardens to the great house.

Identification was impossible at first, given Maxine’s distance, as well as the flowing, shapeless garment that the figure wore. But once the figure reached the pooled light from the house’s security lamps Maxine could see beyond any doubt that it was Mrs. Whitlock. The colourless overcoat she wore flapped like a cloak in the frigid night wind.

 

*

 

“Good morning, my dear,” Mrs. Whitlock said as Maxine entered the sitting room. The warmth in her voice was a quality Maxine had not detected on the afternoon of her and Xavier’s arrival.

“Good morning,” she returned with reticence.

“Slept well, I hope.”

“Very,” Maxine lied. “How did you sleep?”

“A few hours, but enough. At my age one doesn’t need much sleep.”

Maxine’s next attempt to further probe Mrs. Whitlock for answers slipped away when the entire entourage began spilling into the room in procession. Morning greetings were exchanged, and, by the hand of the matriarch, breakfast was served by the fire.

Only after the meal was done and the other guests were sitting lazily did Maxine manage to attain a fresh clue to the mystery that, for reasons she could not comprehend, was becoming an obsession with her. Her discovery came when she pushed through the swinging door of the kitchen to ask Mrs. Whitlock if she could help in any way.

At that instant, Mrs. Whitlock was exiting the door that led from the large kitchen to the back gardens. She hadn’t noticed Maxine entering the kitchen, but Maxine had noticed Mrs. Whitlock reaching behind the large china hutch, where she retrieved a key.

Exhilarated by the extent of what she might learn this morning, Maxine scuttled across the kitchen’s marble floor and crouched at the base of one of the sparkling windows.

Mrs. Whitlock marched briskly along the stone walkway. When she crossed onto the snow, she revealed that she was carting the kitchen’s dustbin with her, lugging the cumbersome thing by its rim. Maxine watched this elegant woman plunk the dustbin down onto the snowbank. The matriarch began to struggle with the cabin’s door. Perhaps the old lock had shrunken from the cold and thus was refusing Mrs. Whitlock’s secret key, but eventually it gave. The old woman took up the dustbin and disappeared inside the shack.

Maxine sped to the sitting room, shoehorned her slight frame onto the sofa next to Xavier, and then shoehorned her way into the conversation. When Mrs. Whitlock re-entered the room some time later, she did not appear to suspect that anything was amiss. But the old woman’s face was flushed. Now and again she reached one of her tapered hands to adjust the bun in her hair, which was visibly looser than it had been at breakfast. Mr. Whitlock took no notice of his wife’s rather haggard state, nor did any of his sons, or their spouses. This fact pained Maxine. It saddened her to think of the endless, exhausting chores Mrs. Whitlock must have faced daily in order to keep the great house in such gleaming condition.

Greater than her empathy, however, was Maxine’s thirst to uncover why the old woman went to such lengths to keep the tiny cabin a secret.

Her opportunity to discover this secret did not come until much later in the day. The guests and Mr. Whitlock had frittered away the afternoon on board games (‘Bored games,’ Maxine had joked to herself) while Mrs. Whitlock laboured over a pork loin dinner in the kitchen. It was a little after four when she came bursting into the sitting room. She was nearly frantic over the fact that she had forgotten to buy both the heavy cream and the chicken stock required to make the loin’s herb sauce.

“Well, we’d run out and get them for you,” Mr. Whitlock began, “but I’m afraid we’ve all had a few.” He held up his whiskey glass as evidence.

“Never you mind, I’ll go,” replied Mrs. Whitlock. “But I’d better leave now. The stores are all closing early for New Year’s.”

“I’ll keep an eye on the loin if you like, Mrs. Whitlock,” volunteered Maxine. She stood and stepped away from the gaming table.

Mrs. Whitlock puckered her face. Was this tiny gesture (which Maxine had given for wholly selfish reasons) truly enough to drive the woman to tears? She reached out and clutched Maxine’s left wrist and thanked her profusely.

Maxine entered the kitchen and pretended to hear Mrs. Whitlock’s whirl of instructions, when Maxine was simply waiting for her opportunity.

It came the instant she saw Mrs. Whitlock’s sleek car verging off the winding driveway and onto the road toward town. Maxine abandoned her charade of stirring and fussing in favor of searching behind the china hutch. She caught sight of the dustbin, which now stood empty by the corn whisk broom in the corner.

Turning her attention back to the task at hand, Maxine found the key dangling from a small brass hook that had been screwed into the back of the hutch. She snatched it, then paused to listen to the boisterous laughter from the players in the sitting room. Assured that they were too engrossed in their game to check on her, Maxine slipped out the back door.

The sunbeams must have been melting the snow for some time, for the gardens had lost their smooth carpet of white. They were now a shoddy, patchwork place. Lumpy mounds of mud and matted grass jutted up in between pockets of dirty slush. The stone walkways hosted puddles where twigs and old leaves floated, resembling pools of loose-leaf tea.

Before she crossed the muddy slope to reach the cabin, Maxine checked over both shoulders. She was petrified of discovery.

The planks of the narrow porch were twisted and caused Maxine’s ankles to wobble as she strained to find her footing. The little square window was at her shoulder now, inviting her to partake of its view at last. She cupped her hands on either side of her face and squinted to gain a preview of the space she planned to invade.

Through the foggy glass Maxine was able to discern a single stout room. A small pallet mattress lay on the floor, framed by brittle leaves. A canvas tarp had been draped over whatever else was stored inside. Maxine could just make out a tall sheeted form, like a ghost in a children’s storybook. The sight of it unnerved her, and she wondered if this was why the image of the shrouded figure endured throughout the ages. Perhaps there is some profound quality in the shape seen-and-yet-unseen, a quality that touches us at our core.

The milder day allowed the key to fit into the lock much easier for Maxine than it had for Mrs. Whitlock that morning. Maxine knew that her time was limited. For all she knew, Xavier was calling for her from the games table, or perhaps he was standing in the empty kitchen at that very instant, worried or furious over her absence. But she would not allow her fears to dissuade her. Instead Maxine stepped into the cramped cabin and shut its door.

The first thing Maxine experienced inside the cabin was heat. It was the kind of arid, leeching warmth given off by cheap electric heaters. She could feel the static electricity building on her clothing, feel the sweat developing under her arms and at the back of her neck. Being in here put Maxine in mind of a hothouse, but instead of offering her the fragrance of orchids, this space assaulted her olfactory sense with an appalling stench.

The air within was not simply stale, it was thick with the stink of accumulated filth. Dust had not merely gathered here, it seemed to have been cultivated. Great grey mounds of it stood in the corners and along the baseboards. Spiders had been left to weave their silk freely; their creations hung in sweeping cascades from the low ceiling like fishnets. Particles of dust rode in on Maxine’s breath. She felt them lining her nostrils. She sneezed loudly several times.

Was this Mrs. Whitlock’s grand secret, the fact that she used this cabin as a receptacle? Maxine felt disappointed, but also faintly empowered. It was strangely reassuring to realize that all the matriarch’s obsessive cleaning meant that she simply shooed every speck of her family’s filth from the great house to here. This shack was the proverbial rug under which Mrs. Whitlock swept everything she did not want others to see. But if dirt was the worst thing the old woman was hiding, Maxine felt ashamed for suspecting something worse. What was dirt anyway but tiny specks of the past? The hair and skin and other substances of the living, ones that time flenses from us with metaphysical patience, pecking away at us until we ultimately become…nothing.

The morbidity of this line of thought weighed heavily on Maxine until she heard someone sigh inside the cabin. At that instant, her melancholia slipped into icy fear.

It was a low, protracted sound; less an expression of despair, more a moan of great release.

‘I am alone in here. I am.’

The tall shrouded object now haunted Maxine’s peripheral vision. She felt herself shudder. She had to will her head to turn and face the thing head-on.

It was a lumpy, shapeless mass whose height equalled her own. She looked to the filthy floor and discovered a pair of wooden claw-foot carvings poking out from beneath the tarp’s hem.

Entranced, titillated, she reached out and peeled back the tarp, revealing a pair of slender wooden posts. Lifting the covering further still, Maxine found herself facing a blurry reflection of herself.

What was hidden beneath the tarp was a floor-length standing mirror. The glass was tapered too sharply at one end and was too swollen at its base to be a true oval. Its shape was nearer to a teardrop. The frame and legs were of cherrywood and had been carved in a highly baroque style, with undulating C-scrolls and voluted forms. The frame seemed to seethe with energy, to pulse and throb. This illusion was aided by the wavy looking-glass, which appeared like a heaving sea that was frozen mid-wave.

But the illusion quickly became palpable. Maxine could see movement. Something was shifting in the room behind her. In the mirror she saw a great shape rising from the dust. It distended and stretched. Its bulk quickly darkened the sullied pane of the cabin’s only window. Again, there came a deep moan of release.

Enflamed with panic, Maxine flung the tarp back across the standing mirror and flung the cabin door open. She’d accidently left the key in the lock; a mistake for which she was now grateful, for it meant less time fumbling to fill the slit. Snapping the lock, she held the key in her fist and ran wildly for the great house.

Once back inside the kitchen, Maxine’s terror was slightly abated when she found the dinner just as she’d left it and heard the gamers laughing in the sitting room. She returned the key to its hook and joined her husband. A few moments later she spotted Mrs. Whitlock’s car creeping up the driveway.

 

*

 

The New Year’s Eve dinner Mrs. Whitlock had prepared was sumptuous, but Maxine’s troubled mind forbade her from enjoying it. She had to choke down her serving just to save face. When Xavier muttered to her, asking what was troubling her, Maxine drew upon her dramatic training. She mimicked the authentic revelry of her fellow diners, even joined them in a raucous countdown to midnight. Mr. Whitlock uncorked the magnum of champagne and poured the foaming liquid into the waiting flutes.

The festivities extended into the wee hours of the morning. Everyone, including Mrs. Whitlock, consumed a shocking quantity of spirits. By three a.m. some of the couples had slipped off to their rooms. Mr. Whitlock was dozing in his overstuffed chair. Others danced mellowly to the strains of waltz music.

Maxine was unfazed by these sights. Her attentions were focused on two tasks; the first was struggling to fight off the effects of too much drink (she wanted very much to keep her wits about her), and the second was to find out where Mrs. Whitlock had disappeared to.

It had been well over an hour since she had eased her husband into his favourite chair and collected the champagne flutes. She’d escaped into the kitchen but had yet to return. Maxine almost managed to trick herself into believing the foolish theory that the old woman must have retired for the night. She recalled the shape in the cabin, the dirt, the heat, the misshapen mirror…

“Why don’t we turn in,” Xavier whispered to her, pulling her attention from the kitchen door that she’d been waiting to see swing open for the entirety of their waltz. “Let’s go have our own party upstairs.”

Maxine looked at her husband, nodded, kissed his mouth. “I’ll be right up,” she growled.

Xavier gave her his usual telltale grin. He began loosening his tie before he’d even exited the sitting room. He bade none of his family goodnight.

When she was reasonably confident that everyone remaining was either too tired, too distracted or too drunk to notice her, she pushed against the swinging door and moved through the darkened kitchen.

Again, there was light guttering from the little cabin in the hedge; again, there was a manic fluttering of shadows, like a murder of crows in flight.

Maxine exited the great house and snuck up on the cabin.

Peering in through the dirty window exposed her to a sight so startling, so raw, that Maxine’s brain could only process it in fragments. The flame of the lone candle jittered from the motions occurring in the room it illuminated. Mrs. Whitlock stood bent at the hips, naked as she’d been at birth, gripping the sides of the floor length mirror, which had also lost its covering. The old woman appeared to be watching herself in the glass. Her silver mane now hung loose and flowing. Sweat glistened on the soft padding of her back. Her pendulous breasts swung in rhythm with her rutting.

As to the other, impossible aspects of the scene—the numberless bodies of shadow that positioned and repositioned themselves around Mrs. Whitlock to hungrily knead and caress her body, the tongues of cobweb that licked her or pressed against her own jutting pink tongue, the dissolving faces of grit that leered at the action like a gaggle of phantom voyeurs—all of these details Maxine would later tell herself were simply born of her own imagination. Her brain, so shocked by the matriarch’s act of indulgence (or was it one of release?), created a tableau of Id-soaked images to punish her…and perhaps to protect from the even harsher truth about this scene.

Sheepishly, Maxine backed away from the cabin, plugging her ears against the curses and the cries that filled the otherwise silent night in the virgin new year.

 

*

 

New Year’s Day slipped past like a dream. It was plain to Maxine that her mother-in-law was either unaware of her spying or was unfazed by it, for the old woman was every bit as congenial, conscientious and clean as she’d been all weekend. As she had no doubt been all her adult life.

Maxine was unspeakably grateful that Xavier had booked them an afternoon flight back home. Their departure in the great marble foyer was filled with hugs and wishes for safe travels. Maxine hugged Mrs. Whitlock especially close. She thanked her for such a wonderful time.

“I hope this year brings you every happiness,” Maxine told her. Her sincerity was absolute. She looked her mother-in-law directly in the eye when she spoke these words, and then she hugged her again.

Their car hadn’t yet reached the four-lane highway when Maxine frantically urged Xavier to pull over.

“Do you feel sick?” he said.

“Just pull the car over, please.”

Xavier carefully edged the vehicle onto the side of the road, fearful that he might sink them in a ditch. He shifted the gear into Park.

He was half-confused, half-elated when he saw Maxine wriggling her underwear down her legs and over her shoes. She undid his seatbelt, his trousers. She mounted him.

Their coupling was surreal, exotic, intoxicating. For Xavier, terror of discovery mingled with the ecstasy of taboo. He looked at his wife, radiant in the bright winter afternoon. He caught glimpses of the vast open fields and the nearby houses, the birds that perched in the leafless trees.

“Promise me something,” Maxine said once the deed was done.

“After that? Anything!” Xavier breathlessly replied.

“Promise me you’ll never keep anything from me. Anything. Promise me you’ll always tell me everything, no matter what it is.”

Xavier was visibly confused but he nonetheless nodded his head. “Okay,” he said. “But only if you promise to do the same.”

“I will.”

 

*

 

In March of that year, a hurricane that had begun stirring in the Caribbean made its way up the Eastern Seaboard and reached Ontario. The storm felled many structures, including the tiny cabin on the Whitlock grounds. The great house escaped unscathed.

Shortly thereafter, Mrs. Whitlock began to lose weight at a rate that alarmed her husband. Eventually, she was hospitalized, but by this time the cancer in her uterus had metastasized. She succumbed on the 21st of June.

As per her Last Will & Testament, Mrs. Whitlock was cremated, and her ashes were divided into separate urns and sent to each of her sons. For the better part of a year Xavier kept his portion of his mother on a table in the living room. But the sight of it, the very idea of it, disturbed Maxine. Eventually Xavier acquiesced and allowed Maxine to move the ashes to a spare room closet, where they sat for a long time in neglect.

Until one wintry day when Maxine was left alone while her husband was away on business. An ice storm had been ravaging the area for nearly thirty-six hours. Many houses had lost power; Maxine’s included. It was while she sat shivering in the unlit, vacant house, that she decided to liberate Mrs. Whitlock from her perch.

A single candle lighted Maxine’s way as she ventured into the neglected room and freed the urn from its cobweb-laden nook.

The dust it held seemed ever-so-faintly to sigh as Maxine turned it gently in her hands. She sat within the candlelit chamber long into the night, holding the urn, listening. She allowed her mind to drift into buried fantasies, ones that heated her insides with shame, with delight. Maxine waited until these sensations became almost unbearable, then she extinguished the candle.