I arrive at the motel Mr. O’Brien has specified on a gray morning, the air laced with rain so fine it’s invisible. I was hoping for an expensive place: a room with a sweeping view of the city, a concierge with averted eyes. But instead I recognize the name as a cheap roadside motel poised to attract tired families. I find a quiet parking lot; the fenced-off swimming pool collects water in its tarpaulin.
When Mr. O’Brien called this morning, I let myself hope that the recent coverage had scared him away. But he told me the room number and had me repeat it twice, instructing me to meet him here at noon sharp. The exaggerated hush of his voice left me feeling grimy. I imagined his sweet-faced wife somewhere else in the house: washing his dishes, folding his clothes.
Room 2B is tucked into the corner of the motel’s layout, rooms pressed tight on either side. I try the doorknob. It’s unlocked; I step into the room.
As bare-bones as it is, the space is cramped. A bed with its quilted bedspread, a framed watercolor of a meadow. Something isn’t right. I reach for the doorknob, fumbling. The woman rises from the chair.
“Please,” she says, softly urgent. “Don’t leave. I need to talk to you.”
She’s shorter than me, her stomach pressing against the front of her blouse. I take her in. I feel like I already know her, although this means nothing. Everyone seems familiar these days.
“My husband couldn’t make it,” she says.
Of course. “Mrs. O’Brien,” I say, although my mind fills with her first name. Lindsey.
Lindsey stays standing, awkward and shifting. “Can we just talk? That’s all I need to do, ma’am. I’ll leave you alone after that.”
I sit on the edge of the bed. She positions herself back in the chair with an uneasy stiffness. I cross my legs. Lindsey glances at my bare knees once, her eyes wide and prim like a child sneaking a glimpse at a pornographic magazine.
“Did your husband send you here?” I ask.
“No.” Quick, as if defending his honor. “It was my idea. I figured out where he was going, all this time,” Lindsey says. She twists her fingers together on her lap. I spot the busy sparkle of a wedding ring, too ornate for her blocky hands. “He said he was getting grief counseling. I wanted to believe him, but I knew it was wrong. He was so angry after Margie died. He only seemed to be getting worse. I can’t remember the last time he’s even touched me. Even a hug or a peck on the cheek.”
I clench my hands against my thighs.
“When I saw that place on the news one night, I just—I just knew. They were saying it’s a place where people can communicate with the dead? Stay in touch with their loved ones? And that’s when I knew what was happening.”
The walls seem to be closing in.
“At least Ken didn’t fight me on it. He confessed right away. And he said—” Lindsey squints at me. “He said this was the first time you two were meeting like this. Is that true? You have to be honest with me. I’m not going to do anything. I just need to know.”
Red patches are leaking up her skin from beneath her neckline. I look directly into Lindsey O’Brien’s eyes. “He’s being honest,” I say. “This was the first time we’ve met here. Every other time, your husband has been with me at my place of work.”
“Oh God,” she whispers. I can’t tell whether she’s relieved, or whether the ridiculousness and humiliation of her relief is hitting her. “Oh God.”
“Everything that’s happened between your husband and me has been innocent. He just wants to talk to your friend again.”
She stares into her lap.
“I’m sorry, Mrs. O’Brien.”
“You don’t have anything to be sorry for, ma’am,” she says. “It’s your job, isn’t it? You have to do your job.”
I focus on the watercolor painting above the bed: meadows that appear bubbled, like burning plastic, a segment of sea as black as rotting fruit. It’s a landscape cobbled together from other pieces, a crude representation of a place that’s never existed.
“Margaret didn’t love him,” Lindsey says. “It probably doesn’t matter to you. But I wanted to tell you.”
This startles me.
“Ken loved her,” Lindsey says. “I knew that within a month of dating him. It was obvious to everyone.”
“You know she didn’t return the feelings?”
“She told me she didn’t,” Lindsey says, with a painstaking gentleness, as if I’m the one who needs protecting. “Margie and I got along better than Ken knew. There were plenty of times we’d confide. We drank way too much one night and it all came out. She didn’t want to embarrass me or Ken. She had a kind heart. But she told me how she felt.”
“You never shared that with your husband,” I say.
“No.” Lindsey’s eyes widen. “No, why hurt him?” She looks at my body openly then, her gaze traveling from my ankles to my neck in a slow once-over that could have been sexual, except for the rueful appraisal in her eyes. “It’s a good thing you’re so thin,” she says.
“Why is that, Mrs. O’Brien?”
“Well, not for his sake,” she says. “For Margie’s.”
I shift against the bedspread, stray threads pricking against the flesh of my inner thigh. In the photos, Margaret was all angles and hollows.
“Margie worked so hard to be thin like that,” Lindsey says. “I have my mother’s genes. I could starve myself forever and never get that thin, so I thought, well, why not enjoy myself? But I know Ken wishes I applied myself.”
I inhale the thick, stale smell of the motel room. Cigarettes layered over cleansing agent layered over cigarettes, gumming up the air.
“I wonder if it bothers her,” Lindsey says, “that he’s bringing her back. She thought she’d escaped her body, and here she is again, right back where she started. That’s why I’m glad you’re thin, ma’am. Just so it feels familiar to her.”
“Mrs. O’Brien,” I say, standing from the bed. “We’d both be better off leaving this place behind for good and getting on with our lives. Agreed?”
She shakes herself as if she’s just waking up. “Oh, yes,” she says. “Yes, agreed.”
Mr. O’Brien entrusted a lifetime of hope to this room, his chance to be with Margaret. I’m closing the door on it all, the bedspread taut over the mattress, the plastic seals pulled meticulously over the mouths of the glasses. Despite everything, I feel a quick throb of regret as I walk away from all this, knowing that I’ve pulled Margaret out of his grasp just as his fingers started to close around her.
At Lindsey’s car, a boxy SUV with a plastic flower on the antenna, she opens the door and then looks at me, hesitating. “I should thank you,” she says, half a question.
“For what?”
“For making this whole thing not as terrible as it could be,” Lindsey says. She rubs at the back of her neck, looking up at me through blond hair muddied with highlights. “You must think I’m pretty pathetic. My husband wants a dead woman more than he wants me.”
I resist the impulse to reach out and touch her hand, push her hair behind her ear. Some gesture that would remind her of her own specificity, her tenacious, beautiful existence.
“Well.” Lindsey’s sigh is channeled from a place deeper than I can access. “I don’t blame you if you do.” When she opens the car door wider, I spot a scatter of plastic toys across the passenger’s seat, a bottle with milky white inside. My heart stutters. I hadn’t realized that the O’Briens were parents. “You’ll never be seeing my husband again,” she says.
“Never,” I agree.
Are you free tomorrow night? Come over. I want to have a real date, a nice dinner.”
His easy warmth thaws the resentment that’s been growing inside me since the other night. But I hold back. I almost didn’t answer the phone when I saw his name trapped inside the screen. The accusations push at my lips: I saw you with her. She was there, in our home.
Who was she?
Who is she?
“If you can’t make it, though,” Patrick says, “I understand.”
“No, Wednesday night sounds perfect,” I say. “I’ll bring the ingredients. Let me cook.”
“I didn’t realize you cooked,” he says.
“Maybe I haven’t mentioned it yet.”
“There’s a lot I still don’t know about you,” Patrick says. He sounds genuinely surprised at this.
On Wednesday morning, Dora comes to find me. I’ve just ended an encounter with Ms. Milroy, a wistful, diluted woman who lost her mother as a child. I’m dazed from the lotus, a floating sensation just behind my eyelids. When Dora taps on the door frame and then comes into Room 12 uninvited, I focus on her as if she’s a figure in a dream, conjured inexplicably into the wrong scenario.
Dora sits in the client chair. She hovers on the edge, knees loosely together, one leg jumping. She gives a tentative smile. “Mrs. Renard wanted to see you,” she says. “I volunteered to get you.”
As the lotus wears off by degrees, I look at her more closely. She’s different, her cheekbones more pronounced, her curls limper and flatter. She’s growing less specific. A face in a crowd. “Thanks for letting me know, Dora.”
“There’s something else I wanted to talk to you about.” She whispers now, words rushed. “How long did it take you to move out of the apartment?”
“The apartment,” I repeat. I piece together what she means. “On Sycamore? Maybe a year. Not long.”
Dora’s eyes flick toward the ceiling as if she’s calculating.
“Is there a problem?” I ask.
“No,” she says, too fast. Then, after a pause: “It’s just— I keep finding stuff left behind by the girls who lived there before me. It’s spooky. Like there’s no room for me.”
A spark of impatience awakens inside me. I want to tell her that she might never have a chance to free herself from other people’s lingering influences, that some of us are destined to crawl inside the shells of lives others have left behind, never deserving a place of our own. But I bite this back. I remember how lonely the Sycamore apartment was, like a child’s clumsy drawing of a home: bed and table, chair and lamp.
“I understand that you’d like your independence,” I say, making myself speak gently. “Keep in mind that Mrs. Renard is looking out for you. It’s not the most glamorous place to live, but it’s cheap, and it’s safe.”
Dora bites at her lower lip, eyes unconvinced.
“Just be patient,” I say. “Keep focusing on your work here.”
“Yeah. Well. Beggars can’t be choosers, right?” She slips off the chair and moves toward the door. “Anyway. You better go see what she wants.”
Mrs. Renard glances up as I enter her office. I instantly register another presence. Jane stands to the side of the desk, hands clasped in front of her body. I almost turn back, an instinctive desire for escape.
“You wanted to see me?” I ask. A throb of anxiety runs through me.
“Come in,” Mrs. Renard says. “Lock the door behind you.”
I slide the lock into place with a solid click, a punctuation mark in the silence. Jane won’t look at me. Every time I try to make eye contact, her eyes slide away from mine.
“Sit,” Mrs. Renard commands.
The chair is overstuffed, overwhelmingly soft. I could sink into the upholstery and never emerge, a crumpled white dress and strands of blond hair spat out in my wake.
“I’m sure you have some idea why I’ve called you here today, Eurydice. I placed a significant amount of trust in you,” Mrs. Renard says. “Imagine how much it disappoints me to hear it was misplaced.”
Her voice is only mildly reproving. It’s as if we’re discussing someone we barely know.
“I’ve always been generous with you,” she continues. “But when I learned that you purchased lotuses behind my back, for your own purposes, I knew it was time to start treating you like any other employee. Like someone I can’t trust.”
I look at Jane again; she’s gazing at the floor as if she has no part in this conversation.
Mrs. Renard examines me without speaking for a long, tense moment. “Do you have anything to say for yourself?”
“I bought those lotuses for a different client,” I say. “You have every right to be disappointed in me, Mrs. Renard, but—”
“Are you meeting with Patrick Braddock?”
I shut my eyes, barely even surprised.
“That’s what Leander has suggested to me,” Mrs. Renard says.
Resignation moves sluggish through my veins. Lee: of course. Lee, saving me from myself. Backing me into a corner for my own good.
“You’ve removed a paying client from inside these walls and started meeting with him on your own terms,” Mrs. Renard says. “You think you know better than I do what our clients truly need, what they want from you, but you’re wrong. These things never end well. You’re hardly the first body to betray me.”
“Are you going to fire me?” I ask.
For a moment, leaving the Elysian Society holds an appeal so strong it surprises me. But then Patrick moves back to the forefront of my mind. I don’t know what our relationship would look like without the Elysian Society between us. Taking it out of the equation feels too soon and delicate, like moving an injured person when the wound is fresh.
“Try to see things from my perspective,” Mrs. Renard says. “You’ve been soliciting lotuses behind my back. If you’d betray the Elysian Society on one level, who’s to say you wouldn’t go further?”
“Fowler’s not even working with the authorities anymore,” I say.
“But the damage is already done,” Mrs. Renard says.
The words come out of my throat, shoved along by my own desperate momentum. “I know who worked with Mrs. Fowler,” I say.
“Is that so?”
I’m silent. My pulse pounds in my ears.
“Give me a name,” she says, low.
“It was Ananke. Ana. She admitted it to me.” And I’m prepared to justify this. To point out that Ana knew about Mrs. Fowler, that she needs money, that she has a history of working with clients outside these walls.
But instead: “I suspected as much.” Mrs. Renard leans back in her chair. “I only wish she had told me herself.”
Jane reaches up to scratch at the back of her neck, still not meeting my gaze.
“Mrs. Renard, Ana was only trying to help,” I say.
“Possibly,” she says. “But Ananke’s shown an unforgivable disregard of what we do here. She’s endangered this institution, and for what? Nothing.” She smiles with a thin triumph.
“You said she needed protection,” I say. “Isn’t that why you wanted to find out who worked with Mrs. Fowler? Not to punish her, but to help her.”
“She’ll be helped.” Mrs. Renard is distracted; she reaches for the phone on her desk. “Thank you, Eurydice. I’m glad to see your loyalty hasn’t changed as much as I feared.”
I watch as she brings the phone to her ear, her fleshy cheek pouched against the receiver. And I understand that Mrs. Renard isn’t going to press me about Patrick Braddock. This is my reward for being faithful to the Elysian Society: being allowed my small vices. Being allowed him.
All of Ana’s hints, her pointed focus on the sundress and the earring, clutter my head. I study Mrs. Renard behind her desk. She runs the entire operation from this hidden perch, pulling the strings, soothing the clients, dispatching the bodies. I can’t believe I ever thought she was unaware of Ana in hotel rooms, of Jane selling lotuses. Of me and Patrick.
“Jane,” Mrs. Renard says, “will you please show Eurydice out?”
In the hallway, Jane won’t speak. She starts down the corridor to her own office until, desperate, I step in front of her. I think she might walk right into me. But she finally looks at me, examining me with chilly blankness. As if I’m a mere obstacle in her trajectory.
“We need to talk,” I say.
“I told you that I couldn’t protect you if it meant risking my own position here. Surely you can understand that.” There’s a nasty undercurrent in her voice.
Ignoring this, I say, “I need more lotuses.”
“You’re out of luck,” she says. “Renard’s tightening the reins around here, didn’t you notice?”
The implication of this hits me hard, full as a fist. “How will I get more?”
“That’s not my problem,” Jane says.
“Please,” I say. “It’s not what you think, Jane. It’s not about the money. I’m in love with him.”
The words between us are clear, bright, as if I could take them into my hands and watch them light up the shells of my closed fingers.
I’m in love with him. I’m in love with him.
“Love?” Jane repeats, almost reverent. I think she feels it too: in the middle of this space, the air stifled with strangers’ grief and the muted ache of loss, there’s something exquisite with life and promise.
“Jesus,” Jane says. The mood snaps, neat as a twig under a heel. “If you knew how many times I’ve heard that, you’d understand why I don’t care.”