The House Girl Page 8

  Tomorrow Lina would make some calls, arrange some meetings, and by early next week she would have a few candidates for Dan and Dresser to review. This would not be a tough assignment, Lina thought, and she felt a flash of pity for Garrison.

  Lina’s bed was king-size, a giant white raft positioned in the center of the room, facing three large sash windows that looked out over Sixth Street and the linden’s sturdy gray trunk. Only the gooseneck lamp on her bedside table was lit, but the circle of light was wide and bright at the center where Lina sat. The rest of the room—the painted white dresser bought by Oscar when she was seven, the potted ficus grown nearly to the ceiling, the forgotten guitar in its dusty case, the overflowing bookshelves—remained in shadow.

  Duke wandered into Lina’s room, eyed the bed appraisingly, and jumped. At the foot, he circled out a nest in the blankets and began to clean himself with long sweeps of his precise pink tongue. He finished with his left foreleg and moved to the phantom right, his tongue licking air, his empty shoulder moving in circles.

  On the open page of her notebook Lina wrote, “Nature of the harm—slavery.” She turned to the transcripts, beginning with the index of slave interviews. The listed names were musical and endless: Larkin Payne, Millie Barber, Sarah Odom, Sidney Bonner, John Payne, Lina Anne Pendergrass, Cella Perkins, Marguerite Perkins, Andrew Boone, Amanda Oliver, Robert Bryant, Rachel Perkins, George Washington Buckner, John Coggin, Neil Coker, Amy Perry, Lizzie Davis, Louisa Davis, John B. Elliott, John Ellis, Helen Odom, John Ogee, Lewis Ogletree, Daniel Phillips, Nathan Gant, Clayborn Gantling, Jenny Greer, Henderson Perkins, Andrew Gregory, Benjamin Henderson, Molly Hudgens, Carrie Hudson, Jesse Meeks, Nathan Neighten, Sam Kilgore, Lucy Key, Ella Johnson, Edward Lycurgas, Ballam Lyles, Jane Oliver, Annie Osborne, Victoria Adams, Dolly Whiteside, Belle Robinson, Ellen Polk, Dina Beard, Nathan Beauchamp, Irene Poole, Harrison Beckett, Annie Beck, J. H. Beckwith, John C. Bectorn, Prince Bee, Mary Poe, Enoch Beel, Welcome Bees, Matilda Poe, Anne Bell, Oliver Bell, Cyrus Bellus, Sam Polite, Carrie Pollard, Edgar Bendy, Minerva Bendy, Allen Price, Willis Bennefield, Carrie Bradley, Logan Bennett, Fannie Berry, Kato Benton, Henry Probasco, Ellis Betts, Jack Bess, James Bertrand, Alice Biggs, Jane Birch, Jenny Proctor, Carrie Binns, Ransom Simmons, Rosa Simmons, Andrew Simms, Millie Simpkins, Ben Simpson, Fannie Sims, Senya Singfield, James Singleton, Billy Slaughter, Alfred Sligh, Peggy Sloan, Samuel Smalls, Arzella Smallwood, Sarah Smiley, Anna Smith, Clay Smith, Francis Black, Ank Bishop, Nelson Birdsong, Josephine Stewart, Elvira Boles, John Price, Marshal Butler, Titus Bynes, Annie Stanton, Tanner Spikes, Solbert Butler, Laura Sorrell, Nathan Byrd, Granny Cain, Rosa Starke, Maggie Stenhouse, Charlotte E. Stephens, Laura Caldwell, Jeff Calhoun, Mariah Calloway, George Scruggs, Abram Sells, Sarah Sexton, Alice Sewell, Roberta Shaver, Mary Shaw, Nelson Cameron, Chaney Spell, Jessie Sparrow, Easter Campbell, Patience Campbell, Patsy Southwell, Elizabeth Sparks, Fanny Cannady, Sylvia Cannon, James Cape, Tille Caretaker, Susan Snow, Albert Carolina, Cato Carter, Frank Reed, Esther King Case, Charlie Rigger, Julia Casey, Susan Castle, Zenie Cauley, Ellen Cave, Dora Richard, Lula Chambers, Amy Chapman, Charity Riddick, Cecelia Chappel, Harriet Cheatam, Alice Rivers, James Childress, Mary Anne Patterson, Solomon Pattille, Carry Allen Patton, Martha Patton, Amy Penny, Sallie Newsom, Pate Newton, Lila Nichols, Margaret Nickens, Margrett Nillin, Fanny Nix, Cora Torian, Neal Upson, Dolly Whiteside, Sam T. Stewart, Mark Trotter, Ellis Strickland, Jim Taylor, Luke Towns, Addie Vinson, Charlie Van Dyke, John Wesley, Ophelia Whitley, Alice Rivers, Susie Riser. The names went on and on and on.

  As with every one of her cases—breach of contract, restitution, fraud—Lina began with a chart. Within neat rows and tidy columns, the facts became more than just a list of names, a catalogue of tragedies and mistakes; they became usable, valuable, revelatory. Was there a pattern? An anomaly? How did events unfold? Who were the key players?

  Lina titled her chart “Nature of the Harm” and labeled the columns with general types of harm as she found them in her reading.

  As she located a specific example of a type of harm, Lina wrote the initials of the individual involved and the relevant page number. She skimmed as she read, not dwelling on the facts she found. Law is the bastion of reason, Lina’s criminal law professor had always liked to say. There is no place for feeling. As lawyers, we reason, we observe, we analyze.

  At three thirty A.M., Lina examined her work.

  The once neatly organized transcripts had become a sprawling white paper landscape across the bedspread and over the floor. The chart alone remained ordered and clean. Lina studied the names, the frequency and types of harms; she cross-referenced gender and location, age and origin. But no pattern appeared. The harm was everyone and everywhere.

  Lina’s eyes hurt, her fingers hurt, her laptop lay heavy and hot against the top of her thighs. A waking dream of all that she had read flashed in colorless cutout silhouettes across her vision. Lina wrote on her yellow legal pad: The harm is immeasurable.

  Outside a car passed; the arc of its headlight roamed the ceiling and disappeared. From above came the dull thumps of Oscar’s footsteps as he wandered the fourth-floor studio. Lina had not seen or spoken to him since the night before; she had tried not to think about the pictures of Grace. The dinner-plate eyes with the empty centers.

  Enough.

  On Lina’s wall hung a series of pictures Grace had made before Lina was born. Four small pencil sketches, portraits no larger than an apple, but the detail extraordinary, each wrinkle and eyelash precisely drawn. An old woman pursing her lips, annoyed, her hair a helmet of tightly wound curls. A teenager with a Mohawk and a row of earrings, a placid, satisfied smile curling his lips. Each was labeled with an obscure family reference scripted in elaborate scrolling letters: Sister’s Nephew’s Son, Fourth Cousin Once Removed, Grandmother’s Uncle. Lina had no idea if these people were actually Grace’s relations, and thus also her own, or Grace’s friends, neighbors on their block, or people Grace had passed once on the sidewalk. Lina grew up envying these strangers, for they had been the subjects of Grace’s attention in a way that Lina had not: Lina had never seen any pictures of herself made by Grace, a fact that still managed to cause a mystified little jolt of hurt whenever she considered it.

  Upstairs, the studio door opened and closed, followed by the sound of Oscar’s feet on the stairs and then moving down the hall to Lina’s door.

  “Come in,” Lina called before Oscar had a chance to knock on the half-cracked door.

  Oscar pushed the door fully open with a creak of old hinge and leaned against the frame, hands in pockets. He looked disheveled and tired. “Just wanted to say good night. Working hard?” and he pointed his chin toward the papers and books that covered the bed.

  “New case,” said Lina. “I’m trying to get up to speed.”

  “Hey, I’ve been meaning to ask you—whatever happened to Stavros?” Oscar said with careful indifference. “I haven’t heard you talk about him in a while.”

  “We broke up.” Lina turned back to the papers. Stavros, with his wire rims, the unprotected nape of his neck, how Lina had thrilled at the sight of him in the beginning. Neither of them had changed, not exactly, it was just circumstances—this is what they had told each other—and timing. That one long phone conversation (four hours? five?) and neither of them had cried or yelled, the decision was made mutually, amicably, responsibly. She knew she should have told Oscar about the breakup months ago. He had always liked Stavros, despite their vast differences in political beliefs and chosen professions.

  “I thought you guys were pretty serious,” Oscar said.

  “We were, I guess. I mean, four years is a long time. But it just didn’t make much sense. He’s in San Francisco. We’re both working so much.”

  “Love doesn’t always make sense, Carolina.”

  “Dad. Please. You sound like a greeting card.” Annoyed, she looked up at him and was surprised to see his face so drawn. His eyes roamed over the papers on Lina’s bed, t
he piles of books, the open notebook with all her scribbling. “I’m fine, you know,” she said quickly. “Maybe I’m just waiting. Waiting for something like you and Mom had.” Lina wanted her father to know that this wasn’t all she expected out of life, work and late nights and a burning laptop, but somehow these words landed wrong. Oscar’s face registered a hurt shock and then closed up, and Lina immediately regretted having mentioned her mother.

  Oscar shifted away from the doorframe, and his eyes went to the floor. “Well, I will take my greeting-card self downstairs to bed then. Good night, Carolina.” He did not blow her a kiss, as Lina was expecting. He shut the door behind him.

  “Good night,” she called after him, feeling as if she should apologize to him, though for what she wasn’t sure. The breakup with Stavros? The greeting-card remark? The choices she had made, was making every day, to build a life so different from his own?

  Turning to her bedside table, Lina picked up the photograph of Oscar and Grace, the original of the reprint that Lina kept in her office. In the photo, her parents sat at a restaurant, the curving mouths of two wineglasses just visible at the bottom of the frame. Oscar’s left arm circled Grace’s shoulders; Grace’s hands were hidden but Lina had always imagined that they must be holding Oscar’s right hand under the table—look at how closely they were sitting, look at the intimacy. Oscar seemed so young—no beard, his hair shaggy and falling into his eyes, his smile exuberant. Grace was turned toward him, a smile there too, one visible eye shining, looking up at him with love and pride. The photo was taken after Oscar’s first important show, a group show, but the gallery was trendy, and he had sold a painting. One painting! It had seemed impossible, amazing, like they were on their way, Oscar had said. Nine months later, Grace was dead.

  A wintry sweep of road, going where? The car—what kind? A tree, a telephone pole, a concrete divide. Grace alone. Had she been alone? Blood on the front seat, a splintered windshield, a body thrown, dark hair fanned across red-spotted snow. It had been years since Lina had thought about her mother’s death, really wondered about the specifics that once had seemed so essential to know. But Lina’s imagination now unfurled these images in vivid color and excruciating detail.

  For years, from late childhood and into her early teens, Lina had followed dark-haired women she passed on the street or saw on the subway. She looked for those who seemed about the age her mother would have been—mid- to late thirties—and she stalked them quietly, harmlessly, down Manhattan sidewalks, into the post office or the bank, as they shopped for groceries or sat in a café with friends. It was something she did with a complicated thrill of fear and excitement and guilt. She never bothered them. She took nothing from them. She spoke to only one, a woman wearing a long dark-green coat whom Lina followed one late afternoon of the winter she turned fifteen, a bitterly cold day, the air heavy and gray and smelling of metal. She had seen the woman first on the subway, exited behind her to the street and followed her east along Seventy-seventh Street in Manhattan. Snow was falling, restless flyaway snow that scattered across the sidewalk and onto the arms of Lina’s coat and her bare head. She followed the woman as the sidewalk disappeared under shifting layers of snow and Lina’s hair crackled with ice. Suddenly the woman stopped and turned to face her. The block was empty, apart from the two of them, and the woman’s eyes were wide and frightened.

  “Why are you following me?” she asked.

  Lina had been so startled by the sound of the woman’s voice—high and nervous—that she almost turned and fled. “I’m—I’m not following you,” she stammered.

  “Yes, you are,” said the woman, seeming less afraid now. “You’ve been behind me for blocks. I saw you on the subway. I saw you looking at me. Why are you doing this?”

  Now that the woman faced her, Lina could see that she was in fact much older than Grace would have been, hair threaded with gray, her face lined around the mouth and purple beneath the eyes. And it was this that made Lina say, “It’s nothing. I have to get home now,” and she turned and walked back, past the silent brooding brownstones of the Upper East Side, to the subway stop where she had first exited, some five paces behind the woman, wanting to see where she would go, wanting to see the life that she—this woman who looked like Grace—was leading.

  The sound of water rushing through creaky pipes filled Lina’s room—Oscar brushing his teeth—followed by muffled thuds from below of drawers closing, floorboards groaning as he prepared for bed. Lina heard the oddly distinct click of his bedside lamp turning off, and then silence. Again she looked at the photo of her parents, at her mother’s shining gaze. She remembered the snow on that day, and the shock at seeing the lined, frightened, tired face of the woman and realizing that no, this woman was not her, this woman could never have been my mother.

  Josephine

  Josephine became aware of Missus’ voice, a faint repetitive calling, almost like a bird, but with a sharp insistence. “Josephine! Josephine!” The sound startled her, and she could not say if this was the first time or the tenth that Missus had said her name.

  Opening the bedroom door, Josephine found Missus sitting on the bed, her back to the door, long hair loose on her shoulders. It was close on midday now and sunlight filtered in through the two south-facing windows directly opposite Missus, the ones Josephine had looked to from the garden earlier that day; two others on the west wall were dark with the curtains drawn. Only the window closest to Missus was open and the room still breathed with the smell of Dr. Vickers and his poultices.

  “Dr. Vickers has gone, Missus,” Josephine said. “It’s coming up for dinnertime. Let’s get you back in your dress.”

  Missus nodded vigorously, the uneven ends of her dark hair rising and falling across her back. “Yes, yes, the doctor. Josephine, I am not right today, not right at all.”

  She turned and Josephine saw blood on her face, a deep cut horizontal along the curve of the left cheek, the gash ugly and open and bleeding. A look of satisfaction or pride flashed across Missus’ eyes, and then it was gone and there was fear and pain.

  “Missus, what’s happened?” Josephine ran to the bed and took Missus’ face into her hands. Bone flashed white underneath the blood and Josephine pushed the edges together. The cut was straight and true and they met neatly like two broadcloth seams for sewing. Josephine pulled a corner of sheet off the bed and ripped a strip of cotton, the tearing sound loud and awful in the room. She held the strip to Missus’ cheek, pushing against the cut, but the bleeding went on and on, drips running down Josephine’s wrist and into the sleeve of her dress. Throughout, Missus Lu remained silent, surrendering herself to Josephine’s ministrations, her eyes blank, her breathing shallow.

  Finally Josephine released Missus Lu’s face and gingerly removed the strip of sheet, now heavy with blood. “Did the doctor do this?” Josephine asked.

  Missus Lu said nothing, just gave a long deep sigh, and then, “Josephine, you are a dear girl. Who do you think did this? Who do you think?” She smiled with a slyness that Josephine had not seen before. “It was me. Who else? I have no need for this face anymore. I heard what the doctor said. I listened by the door, I heard the things he said to you. I am dying.”

  “Missus, don’t—” Josephine began but found she could not continue. She went to the bowl and jug and washed her hands, wrung out her dress sleeve as best she could, wet a cloth for Missus. It was words of comfort that Missus wanted. She wanted Josephine to contradict her, to say, “No, Missus, you heard wrong what the doctor said. He said nothing wrong here, no need for my services here.” Perhaps on a different day, Josephine would have said this. She had done so in the past, at other times when comfort was needed. She had smoothed Missus’ hair and held her hand and rubbed her back, like a sister or a mother or a daughter would.

  But today Josephine’s mouth could not say the words. She felt herself separate from the room, from Missus Lu, from the sun on the floorboards, from the bloody residue still sticky on her fingers, as
though she lived according to a set of principles that applied only to her, the principles having to do purely with escape. Every nerve was tensed and every muscle flexed toward this one goal, flight, and the simple tasks she did every day, the things she touched, the words that came from her mouth—Yes, Missus; Yes, Mister—all bound her to this place, and she wanted to shed them all, shake them from her as a dog shakes water from its coat. Part of Josephine was already gone, through the gate, turning left on the road to town. As the sparrow did, Josephine would point her head like an arrow and fly there.

  Josephine brought the wet cloth to the bed. She sat close beside Missus and took her face in hand to clean the cut. The blood had not yet dried and it came away easily, leaving the skin raw pink and puffy. Missus Lu winced from the scrubbing but did not pull away. “I used to be a great beauty, you know,” Missus said. “My sisters all despised me for it. My mother and daddy, oh, they were so afraid when they saw me in my birthday dress. At thirteen, I was irresistible. Thirteen, can you imagine?”

  Missus pushed Josephine’s hands away and rose from the bed. She walked to the end of the room and threw open the curtains of the far windows, bringing a sudden rush of light. Josephine’s eyes narrowed and she put a hand out to shade them as she looked down and away from the glare. Her gaze went to the windowsill. There, a kitchen carving knife, the blade streaked red. This was what Missus had used, a knife from her own kitchen.