There’s something funny in the air lately, don’t you think?”
Hazy, I look up at Ms. Mendoza.
“It’s probably just the way people are after a long winter,” she says. “They don’t know what to do with themselves.”
She’s pulling on her cardigan; the sleeves stretch between her elbows like awkward bird wings. “I hope you had a pleasant encounter today,” I say.
Ms. Mendoza hesitates before she answers. “Eurydice, dear, I may not be coming back soon. But I don’t want you to think it’s anything about you.”
“If you’d like to work with another body—”
“Oh, no. I would never. It’s just—” She looks away, fussing with the pearly buttons on her cardigan. “Personal matters. Financial.”
“I know Veronica will miss you.”
It seemed like a kind thing, but Ms. Mendoza’s eyes brighten with tears. “I’ve tried to cut back in other areas of my life,” she says. “I’ve been making adjustments for years. But I have medical expenses and bills to pay. I’m not getting younger.”
I watch her go, shoulders hunched. I have an unwelcome flash of her life: a dingy apartment stripped bare of luxuries, counting down the pennies. The minutes.
“Ms. Mendoza,” I call. She turns. “Do you find that your encounters with Veronica help you?” When she frowns, a polite confusion, I continue: “Do you feel happier after you see her?”
“Well,” Ms. Mendoza says. “Well, of course I do. Always. That’s why I keep coming back, you know. My sister will always be the best part of my life. But after all, I do have to live.” Ms. Mendoza’s chin lifts with a fragile defiance. “It feels selfish sometimes, but I do have to live.”
Leaving the Elysian Society, I stop short. She’s waiting for me in the parking lot, leaning against the side of my car, smiling too coaxingly.
“Dora.” I move to unlock the car. “You need a ride again?”
“I missed the bus,” she says. “My client couldn’t stop crying after I woke up. I felt bad leaving her there alone. What was I supposed to do?”
Sliding into the car, I stretch across to unlock the passenger-side door.
“Anyway,” Dora says, climbing in. “Remember what you said, about how we could go shopping together? Maybe we could do that now.”
I’m about to refuse, but I know what waits for me at home. Silence, the heaviness of time pressing down in a slow crush.
When we’re a few blocks from the Elysian Society, Dora rolls down the window. Fresh air whistles into the car. I take a deep breath, enjoying the coolness. “Where do you want to go?” I ask. “There’s a consignment shop, not far.”
“Consignment? Like secondhand?” The corners of her mouth twitch downward. “Nah, I’m getting sick of wearing other people’s things.”
We end up at a strip mall. Dora chooses the store on the corner: fake stone facade, headless mannequins staggered in the window. It’s all wrong for us. The dresses are conspicuously formal. Prom gowns with beaded bodices like armored breastplates, puffy skirts that remind me of jellyfish. I can’t imagine either of us having an occasion in our lives that would require one of these gowns, but I follow Dora inside.
The interior is bracingly cold, lit with hospital-bright fluorescence. Compared with the jeweled gowns, the surroundings are incongruously harsh. A girl stands in front of a display, yanking a bridal gown over the unresisting limbs of the mannequin. The mannequin’s stiffly extended arm trembles helplessly. The girl turns as we enter, taking us in for a silent moment and then looking away without offering a greeting.
Dora moves deftly behind a circle of racks, hiding us from the view of the front counter. A red dress hangs in an alcove. The tightly banded panels remind me of blood-soaked bandages. “Do you think we look weird to her?” Dora whispers.
“I doubt she knows what we do,” I say.
“Before you worked here, did you know about bodies?”
“I guess so.” Memories nudge the back of my skull. “I was aware of the possibility.”
“Did you ever think you’d work as one?” she asks.
“No.” We’re passing a wedge of mirror, and I catch our reflections from the corner of my eye. Dora, small and vivid, and me trailing after her like the pale blot reflected by a jewel. “Why?” I ask. “Did you?”
She pulls a lavender gown from the rack. When she holds it against her body, the hemline pools on the floor. “I wanted to do this for a while.”
“Really?” I don’t hide my surprise.
Dora replaces the dress. She’s not meeting my eyes now, slowly circling the rack, reaching out to touch a sleeve here, a skirt there. “My mom used to go see this woman who’d channel for you in the back room of her bookstore. She was in another town. My mom had to drive for hours. She’d be gone all day. I knew not to talk about it with my dad. We pretended it wasn’t happening.”
The music overhead is a keen wail set over discordantly jaunty instruments.
“My older sister died when I was . . . nine? Ten?” Dora’s tone suggests I might know better than her. “They were always really close, she and my mom. There was no room left for me. When my sister died, I even thought—” She runs her fingertips down a rose-pink bodice: all clear beads, silver sequins. “But. Then my mom found that place, and she was gone all the time.”
“Dora . . .” I say.
But she twirls to face me now. Her expression has turned determinedly cheerful, almost flinty. “Hey, you should try something on,” she says. “You never dress up.”
I accept the gown she pulls loose from the clutter. Dora guides me to the dressing rooms, cramped stalls covered by curtains that scarcely reach far as my knees. The full-length mirrors are inescapable. I’m forced to look at myself from multiple angles as I undress, pulling my Elysian Society uniform over my head.
When the white fabric falls free of my face, I stop, shocked. The woman in the mirror is wrong. She’s tall, her hair listless. Small, firm breasts, swollen like teardrops; the exaggerated curve of her hips, disproportionate against long and boyish legs. I take her in, this stranger.
“How does it look?” Dora calls.
“Wait a moment.” I turn from the mirror, reaching for the green dress. Compared to my Elysian Society uniform, the fabric is densely luxurious. I thread my arms through the straps.
“That’s why I wanted the job,” Dora says. In the corridor that houses the dressing rooms, the music is muted. It’s easier to hear her voice. I’m quiet; it’s as if she needed to be separated from me by the curtain before she could continue. “I used to imagine what it was like for my mom. Some woman who maybe looked a little like my sister, sitting in a room, and my mom loved her. I wanted a chance to be on the other side of that.”
I reach for the zipper. “Does your mother know you’re with the Elysian Society?”
“No.” She laughs, a sad, frayed sound. “We don’t talk much these days.”
I’m shocked at how well the dress fits, lightly grazing my hips, fitted across the chest. I run my hands over the slippery softness. I imagine standing in front of Patrick. How his eyes would move over my body: the softness of my breasts, the arch of my hips. I’m furious at the image, even as a spike of excitement moves down the length of my body.
“So you like the dress?” Dora asks. “Are you going to buy it?”
“I don’t think so,” I say. “It’s not for me.”
It’s been nearly two weeks since I saw him.
After work, I lie on my bed with the Braddocks’ photos. There’s a voluptuous humiliation in being reduced to looking at his image like an outsider. I’ve moved through my days in a perfunctory way. Unlocking my mailbox and collecting the stray bills and flyers, cleaning dishes and folding laundry, turning down my sheets to enter my bed. The rote mechanisms of sustaining day-to-day life. I can’t believe this was a life I didn’t know enough to hate. Worse, a life I was grateful for. It’s the sensation of a fog lifting to reveal that I’ve been standing right on the lip of a plummeting cliff.
I keep the book and the box of Sylvia’s belongings right near my bed. Tangible proof that what I had was real. The woman on the cover of Villette, with her veiled, cunning face looks sometimes beautiful, sometimes ugly. I’ve tried picking up the book and following the dense thread of the plot. But each time, my mind slips off the words.
Without his presence in my life, I’m reduced to my old tactics. For five years, my access into other people’s lives has been through the unwitting clues they’ve left behind. Their photographs offering an intricate but obscure code into their habits. Into the rhythms of their lives together, the quiet, tugging undercurrent they never noticed.
Tonight, I stare at Patrick’s hand entwined with Sylvia’s. His skin against hers. I can almost feel the heat of his palm pressed against mine, the small, thoughtless movements of his muscles as he shifts. A tiny flame sparks inside me, but I extinguish it, not wanting the pain of desiring him.
Moving to the second photo in the stack: Patrick’s arm circles around Sylvia’s waist. In another photo, he buries his fingers in her hair; in the next, she perches on his lap, cupped perfectly against him. Her lips pressed to his cheek, his hand on her shoulder. In nearly every photo of the Braddocks together, Patrick touches Sylvia. She touches him. They’re like a couple in some urban legend, kept alive by physical contact with each other. Remove that touch and they wilt.
The space between the chairs in Room 12 must be a constant taunt. To be so close, held apart by that clinical distance. Even from the first day I met with him, Patrick was breaching these boundaries. That sensation of his knee against mine: maybe it wasn’t an act of rebellion, but a deep and unthinking instinct, his body drawn automatically to hers.
I grow calm. The awareness of what I have to do comes over me so easily, so completely, that I know this plan has been waiting inside me all along, biding its time.