The bedroom floor. I come back to myself so quietly and easily that I don’t realize anything is unusual at first. Then the wrongness of the situation descends on me.
Through the open wedge of curtains, the sky is just lightening. I kneel on the floor. A reverential pose, like a praying child. My hands lie clenched against my thighs. I look around at the landmarks of my bedroom, anchoring myself. My bureau, right in front of me. The bed across the room. The end table, holding the Braddocks’ photos. Sylvia’s face shines out of the shadows.
try to remember
try
In my own bed again, waiting for sleep, I scan my memory. I don’t know if I’ve ever sleepwalked before. What I do in my sleep, my unconscious tics and habits, how I appear to other people: these are parts of myself I can’t decode alone. I’d need a partner, an observer.
I turn to face the wall, not letting myself start the calculation: how many years it’s been since I’ve had someone like that in my life.
Unlike many of my clients, with their formal, vaguely funereal outfits, the client I meet on Thursday morning wears black leggings tight as snakeskin and a velour track jacket. A heart-shaped zipper pull dangles beneath the pouchy dip of her throat.
“Welcome to the Elysian Society.” I smooth my skirt over my thighs. “This is your first time working with us, Ms. Fowler?”
“Mrs. Fowler,” she corrects, swinging her ankle. “Candace Fowler.”
I nod a brisk apology. “And whom do you wish to contact today, Mrs. Fowler?”
Her voice drops into a conspiratorial hush. “First, I need to know I can trust you.”
“We have a strict confidentiality policy at the—”
But Mrs. Fowler holds out her hand. “Nuh-uh, nuh-uh, I know all that crap. I’m asking if I can I trust you, personally. Not the whole place, but you.”
I’m briefly transfixed by her eyelashes. Sticky with mascara, wavering insect limbs.
She seems to take my silence as cooperation. “I want to contact Hopeful Doe. I lied,” she adds, proud. “On the forms, I said I wanted to contact my cousin. But I’m here to bring that sweet girl’s killer to justice. Get some answers.”
“I’m afraid you can’t contact the deceased unless you knew her personally during life.”
She’s sucking hard on her lips. “This murder affects me personally, young lady,” she says. “It affects my family. She showed up near my home. It was my daughter who found her. My girl, forced to see something like that.” Mrs. Fowler leans toward me as if she can transmit the horror through physical proximity. “I know how these things work. The police will lose interest. Meanwhile, I’ll be going to bed every night wondering who’s out there.”
“Mrs. Fowler,” I say, “I understand your concern. But if you’d read our policy—”
“Oh, all right.” Her voice grows honeyed; we’re just a couple of girls exchanging gossip over coffee. “I always come prepared.” She winks, a quick snap of her eyelid, like a baby doll tilted back. “I’m not sure how much of a cut they give you, sweetie, but I’m sure it’s not enough. The pay is never enough for this work, is it? I can only imagine what it’s like for you girls.” I stiffen. “Whatever they pay you, I’ll double it. Triple it, I don’t care.”
“You don’t seem to understand,” I say, frustration turning me blunt. “I can guarantee that you won’t find the answers you’re looking for, Mrs. Fowler. Have you brought an object that belonged to Hopeful Doe during her lifetime?” I rush ahead, knowing that she hasn’t. “Besides, victims who died violently aren’t known for being compliant. They’re confused. Their memories can be scrambled, unpredictable.”
Mrs. Fowler cocks her head, pert as a lapdog. “Isn’t there some way around that?”
“I’m afraid not.”
At this, Mrs. Fowler smiles as if she’s caught me in an obvious lie. “It just so happens that I did my research, young lady,” she says. “I know you can just take more of those.” She gestures at the lotus in its paper cup. “Two or three.”
I open my mouth and then shut it, biting off my words on an inhale. There are stray pieces of information floating around. Shared by amateurs, small-time entrepreneurs, former bodies spiteful or cavalier enough to share whatever they knew. Some of the information is accurate. Most of it isn’t. Still, Mrs. Fowler shifts in my eyes, turning from housewife-gone-vigilante to somebody more thorough. A woman accustomed to getting her own way.
“The Elysian Society simply doesn’t work that way,” I say. “If you’re interested in taking that kind of risk, I’m sure you could locate a willing participant elsewhere.”
“Find some quack online, you mean? Show up to an abandoned building and get murdered myself in the process?” Mrs. Fowler sniffs deeply, like she’s trying to find the source of an odor. “Nah. This place might not look like much, but I’ve heard it’s the best you can get.”
“I’m not sure that you fully understand what’s at stake,” I say. “Taking more than one lotus isn’t safe. It could hurt the body.”
She sweeps her eyes up and down my body. “You strike me as a hearty-enough specimen.”
The hairs at the back of my neck rise. “Surely you don’t expect me to endanger myself.”
“You chose this line of work,” Mrs. Fowler says. “You chose to treat your body this way. Why not at least do some good?”
I stand too quickly, helium light. “I’m afraid I’m going to have to ask you to leave.”
For a moment, it seems she won’t budge. Then Mrs. Fowler is a flurry of motion, rising and heading for the door. She keeps talking: “What you do here, people might call it freaky, but you could help people. The fact that you don’t? It’s shameful.” She looks right at me. “That baby’s blood is on your hands now.”
When Jane comes into Room 12 a few minutes later, she stops short, looking between me and the empty chair. “She wanted to contact Hopeful Doe,” I say, weary. “I’ve sent her away.”
Jane’s expression is blank for a moment, then takes on a grim focus. “You did the right thing, sending her away. I’ll be sure that Mrs. Renard hears about this.”
“Thank you,” I say.
“You’ve been following that case?” Jane asks.
“A little,” I say. “It’s so sad.”
“Very sad.” Jane glances at the empty chair, as if some version of Mrs. Fowler lingers there. “You did the right thing,” she repeats.
Coming into the waiting room after Mrs. Fowler, I catch a low murmur of voices. One voice rises up from the tangle of words, followed by muffled laughter.
Curious, I move to the farthest end of the room. They’re clustered on the floor, cross-legged. I realize that they chose this spot because they’re partially hidden by a couch; Jane won’t walk by and spot them. Ana sits against the wall, head tilted to show the long lines of her throat. A trace of a bitter scent surrounds her, overwhelming in the bland air of the waiting room.
“Can we help you?” Ana asks.
The other three bodies have stopped talking. They examine me with a bemused hostility, like kids on a playground approached by a younger child. When I make eye contact with the girl sitting directly in front of me, she smiles. I recognize her: Dora.
“Jesus, sit down already,” Ana says. “It’s making me nervous just looking at you.” She pats the floor with one hand, the way she’d call a dog.
Automatically, I sit at the edge of the group, folding my knees beneath me.
“What were you saying?” an older woman asks Dora.
“Oh, yeah.” Dora scratches at her neck. “The guy who lost his wife. His wife was thirty-something when she died, so I don’t understand why he’d choose me. I just turned twenty. I thought I’d be channeling granddaughters or daughters or high school friends.”
“Twenty, thirties,” the woman says. “What’s the difference? Wait till you’re my age. You only get grannies. Half the men who walk through those doors are my age or older, but you wouldn’t think it to look at my client list.”
“You’re talking about Womack?” Ana asks Dora. When Dora nods, she goes on: “Womack is a rite of passage around here. If you’re halfway pretty, you’re going to get him at some point. He watches for the new bodies. He tries them all.” She winks. “A real connoisseur.”
“You figure his wife was a swinger?” the older woman asks. “Maybe this is what she wanted. Get a cuter body each time. Doesn’t sound so bad to me.”
The others laugh.
“Yeah, or maybe she didn’t want this at all,” Ana says. I can’t tell whether her sternness is mocking or sincere. Ana can be like this, disguising her emotions as exaggerated versions of themselves, like caricatured masks. “Maybe she was a good little wifey, and Womack never cheated. Now he gets to have his cake and eat it too. Feel all virtuous, visiting his dead wife. See a pretty girl in her slip at the same time.”
Dora wraps her arms around her upper body. I remember how hard it was to grow accustomed to the thinness of the dress, a sensation like being naked in a room full of strangers. “He can just do that?” she asks.
“Of course,” the other girl says. Tiny pockmarks dot her nose and the skin above her lips; scars left behind by piercings. “If he pays for it.”
“I thought clients would want to work with just one body,” Dora says.
“Most can’t,” says Ana. “We don’t have a stellar employee retention rate.”
“If you last for a year or two, you’ll have regulars,” the older woman adds. “But until then, you’re stuck with whatever you can get.”
“I’d like to have regulars,” Dora says.
“Careful what you wish for.” Ana lifts her hand to her mouth. She holds a cigarette delicately between her fingers. She makes eye contact with me briefly, daring me to react. “The way I see it,” she says, once she lowers the cigarette, “the clients who don’t care are the true romantics. They can look at any random face and find the person they love. It’s sweet, if you stop and think about it.”
“Regulars must care more,” Dora persists. “You’re not just a body to them.”
“But you are just a body to them,” I say. “You always are. You have to be.”
The others turn to me in a little flurry of movement, as if they’d forgotten I was here.
“I have more regulars than anyone,” I continue, though their attention is a prickly, uncomfortable weight. “Being a body is all about your receptiveness to the clients. To their loved ones.” I hesitate, seeing Sylvia’s imperious beauty superimposed over my ordinary face. “If you start believing that your client needs you, specifically, then you’re failing at your job.”
Dora’s eyes on me are tentative and considering. Her hand moves to her hair, as if she’s disconnecting her curls from her identity.
“Thanks for that cheerful PSA,” Ana says.
The older woman smirks, gazing at the floor. The girl with the scars reaches over to pluck the cigarette from Ana’s hand.
“I’m only trying to help,” I say.
“How long have you been here now?” Ana asks. “Ten years? A hundred?” She laughs. “You’ve memorized every last idiotic rule. So if anyone needs a refresher course on that, we’ll be sure to come to you.”
The girl leans across the space between us to pass the cigarette to Dora. I notice that her fingernails hold a trim of old nail polish, scabbed red at the edges. With one quick guilty glance at me, Dora accepts the cigarette.
“The rules are for our protection,” I say.
“Ooh, my protection,” Ana repeats in an exaggerated voice, words rounded like puffy balloons. “Sounds serious.”
“Look what happened to Thisbe.”
I’m not sure why I say it. Maybe as an experimental nudge, maybe as a way to hurt her. Ana’s eyes blaze wider for a fleeting second; then her expression snaps back into its usual carelessness.
“Who’s Thisbe?” Dora asks, looking between us.
“Forget it,” Ana says. “Edie doesn’t know what she’s talking about.” But her mouth has a sour twist to it.
After a silence, Dora hands the cigarette to Ana. It’s a stub now, glowing hazy orange at the tip. Ana lifts up a flap of carpet near the baseboards, revealing a floor vent screwed firmly into place. She dips the cigarette beneath one of the slats.
“You think you’re so much better than the rest of us,” Ana says abruptly. “Perfect role model. Never a toe out of line.”
The nicotine turns me dizzy.
“Maybe you’re looking at this all wrong,” Ana says. “I used to date a guy who thought he was smart for asking these pseudophilosophical questions.” She deepens her voice, low and dopey. “Can ugly women be faithful? Is it really being faithful if nobody else wants you?” She snaps back to her normal voice. “Real asshole, right? But he had a point. The same principle applies to you, Edie. Are you better than us for avoiding temptation, or is it just that you’ve never been tempted?”
I can feel the others’ eyes on me. “It hasn’t always been easy for me to follow the rules,” I say quietly.
Ana shrugs one shoulder. “If you say so.” Light and mocking.
“Just today,” I say, “there was a client who came to me wanting to contact a murder victim. The body they found in that subdivision. Hopeful Doe.”
They’re all silent for a minute, the words settling into their brains. I notice the piercing-scarred girl looking at each of us in turn, trying to piece together what her reaction should be.
“Seriously?” Ana asks. “One got past Renard. It’s been a few months since the last attempt.”
“Candace Fowler,” I say. “I nearly couldn’t convince her to leave.”
“What did she want?” the older woman asks. “Jane told me about a man who thought the Black Dahlia was his soul mate. Was she one of them? Gets all weird about a murdered kid on the news, comes here hoping to be a surrogate mommy?”
“No, no,” I say. “More straightforward than that. She wanted to solve the case.”
“Ah, detective fantasies,” the woman says sagely. “Should have guessed.”
“It’s too bad,” Dora says. “That poor girl.” When she catches my eyes on her, she goes on: “I know it’s against the rules, but you could have helped her.”
“It would have been much too dangerous,” I say.
“Where’s your sense of adventure, Edie?” Ana asks, a needle glinting in her voice.
“So what would you have done?” I ask her.
“If she came to me?” Ana crushes the cigarette, grinding it against the vent’s metal rim. Then she flicks the butt down into the darkness. I see the tiny contrail of the dying embers for a second. “Who knows. You’re right. It’d probably be too risky to work with her here.”
When she rises, the others follow her lead; the older woman drifts away. I stay seated, my skirt twisted around my thighs. I’d nearly forgotten how Ana can make me into the odd one out. How easily she can tease my awkwardness and stiffness to the surface.
I’ll see him again in five days. The thought is suddenly and deeply comforting.
“One word of warning,” Ana says. I look up to find that her eyes have softened. “Everything in moderation. You pour too much time and energy into a job like this, and you may as well be a ghost yourself.”