AllFreeNovel
Share Us
Mr. Vanders’s eyebrows rise slowly to his hairline. He watches Kiran, Jane, and Jasper as they pick their way across the gardens to the house.
* * *
Kiran leads Jane to a small door in the house’s back wall, through a dark corridor, then into a space flooded with moving light. Jane’s never seen this room before. It’s the indoor swimming pool, with gold tile floors and massive glass walls, one of which is an enormous fish tank. A lime-green eel stares straight through the glass at Jane with an almost human leer stretched across its face.
“Shark tank,” says Kiran in a bored voice, then heads along the edge of the pool toward a couple of doors at the room’s far end. “One of Charlotte’s design choices.”
“Sharks?” Jane says, then barely suppresses a gasp as a gigantic bull shark swims by. Bull sharks are predators. Jane used to have nightmares of Aunt Magnolia being eaten by one. The shark reaches the end of the tank, turns, and swims back the other way. The eel is still leering at Jane like some sort of terrible, crazed clown, but the shark neither knows nor cares that Jane exists.
Jasper nudges Jane’s leg to get her moving. As she follows Kiran, she’s certain the eel has its eyes on her back. It reminds her of the woman in the photo in the receiving hall; its expression is the same. Charlotte. Jane decides she’s not going to talk, or think, about Charlotte anymore. It makes the air feel charged.
Kiran rounds the pool, chooses a door in the narrow wall at the pool’s end, and leads Jane through a small, teak-paneled changing room that glows with the quality of its varnished wood. Teak is not cheap. Jane has made only one umbrella with a teak rod. Of course, maybe the first Octavian Thrash stole the teak from a monastery in Burma, which would’ve made it quite economical.
Another door brings Jane, without warning, into the library.
* * *
At the library’s west end, Jane sits at a card table facing her partner, the mysterious Phoebe Okada. Jasper’s tucked against Jane’s feet. Kiran and Colin make up the other team and Lucy St. George has curled herself up in a nearby armchair. Jane has lost her daffodil somewhere; it’s not behind her ear.
“I can’t stay long,” she says, because she’s promised herself not to spend time in the library. The problem is that the waves of color soothe her anxieties. When she entered, the blues and greens and golds swept her gently across the room. If the room is like being underwater, surely it can’t be the wrong place for Jane to be?
Phoebe, to her surprise, is an intuitive teacher. She can anticipate Jane’s bridge questions, then answers them so that she understands, and with no particular snobbishness. “It’s an elegant game once you get into the rhythm. Good,” she says as Jane trumps the ace of spades with the three of hearts. “You’re catching on.”
At the other end of the room, a toddler bolts through a doorway suddenly, then disappears through the door to the changing room. Jane can’t see the child’s face or skin, only a mop of dark hair and fast, sturdy little legs. A middle-aged, light-skinned black man bolts after the child, slowing only to look over a shoulder and assess the occupants of the library. He catches eyes, briefly, with Phoebe Okada, exchanging a significant, mysterious expression. He’s wearing a chef’s hat and checkered pants. Then he’s gone.
“Does your cook have a child?” Jane asks Kiran.
“Come on,” Phoebe says to Jane, with some impatience. “Focus on the game.”
“What?” says Kiran. “Cook? My head hurts. Does your head hurt?”
“Your cook,” Jane says. “That’s the guy who wears checkered pants and a chef’s hat, right?”
“Cook dresses like that sometimes,” Kiran says. “Though I always get the feeling he’s doing it to be ironic.”
“Ironic?” Jane says. “What do you mean?”
“How should I know?” Kiran says, then sighs. “What does it matter? It’s like his name. His name is Cook, that’s why we call him Cook. Corcoran, actually, but he’s always gone by Cook, and I think he does, in fact, like to cook, but I don’t think he ever cooks. He’s always busy doing god-knows-what instead. Playing his damn saxophone. Caring for his parents. Cook is Mr. and Mrs. V’s son. Patrick does most of the cooking. Everyone in the world has fulfilling work but me.”
This is such a striking thing for a bored millionairess to say—especially about her own servants—that Jane is momentarily stunned into silence.
“Kiran,” says Colin gently, not taking his eyes from his cards, “you speak half a dozen languages fluently and have as keen a political mind as anyone I’ve ever known. You’ll find a job, when the time is right. Don’t rush yourself.”
There’s a particular quality to Kiran’s silence. Jane is beginning to recognize it: a kind of irritable resentment at the expectation of her gratitude. As if his niceness is oily and self-serving.
Nearby, in her armchair, Lucy St. George sighs over The House of Mirth. “I thought I remembered the plot of this book,” she says, “but I guess I don’t.”
Jane glances at Lucy uneasily. Lucy’s wrapped her hand in a bandage, which seems extreme, for a splinter. There’s a bruised look to the skin around her eyes, a fragility Jane sees in her own mirror after nights when she’s not slept well. “What do you mean?” she asks. “Is the plot different from what you remember?”
“Everyone is playing more bridge than I remember,” says Lucy. “Lily Bart is sitting in an armchair in a library, reading a book and watching her friends play bridge, endlessly, which I don’t remember. Didn’t she usually play bridge herself? Isn’t that what got her into financial trouble? And wasn’t she always having clever conversations with gentlemen?”
“I don’t remember the plot either,” Jane says. “I just remember thinking there wasn’t much mirth. Is your hand okay?”
“She’s getting awfully sleepy as her friends play bridge,” says Lucy. “It’s making me sleepy.”
Jane’s own bridge game is stalled, because Kiran is staring into space. “Charlotte chose something interesting for the ceiling of this room,” Kiran says.
“I don’t want to talk about her,” Jane says, automatically.
“Doesn’t it look like an open book?” Kiran says. “The way Charlotte designed the ceiling?”
“Don’t say her name,” says Jane. “She can hear her own name. It wakes her up.”
“What?” says Kiran. “What are you talking about, Janie? Just look at it!”
Jane cranes her neck. The ceiling has two halves, painted white, that, ever-so-slightly vaulted, meet in the middle. The effect is accentuated by what seem to be small images, like miniature ceiling frescoes, arranged in neat lines across each “page.” Jane finds it difficult to decipher the images. This difficulty contributes to the ease of imagining them as letters, or words. Yet, they’re regularly shaped, aren’t they? Not letters of the alphabet, but rows of rectangles and squares. Little windows or doors, painted on the ceiling? Little book covers?
Lucy, now dozing in her armchair, makes a loud snorting noise through her nose. It sends a shock through Jane’s body, like the sound of a gunshot would, and Jane sucks in air.
“Lucy!” she cries. “We should wake up. We should have a clever conversation.”
“Huh?” Lucy says, half-asleep. “Lily Bart is sleeping.”
“You’re not Lily Bart.” Propelled by a sudden sense of urgency—she doesn’t know where it comes from, and even Jasper is startled
by it—Jane gets up and grabs on to Lucy’s arm, hard, shaking her. “Wake up.”
“I want to know more about Charlotte and the ceiling,” Lucy says blearily.
“No,” Jane says. “We don’t want to talk any more about—”
Jane means to end with the word that. Her mouth forms the shape of the word that, then somehow the word Charlotte, awkward and full of spit, shapes itself around her intentions and pushes itself out of her mouth. “Charlotte,” Jane says. Frightened, she tries again, but again, her mouth won’t take the form she wants it to take. Her lips purse forward and her breath pushes through. “Char—” she says, struggling against it. “Char—!”
“Shark!” cries Phoebe, who holds her cards in tight hands and stares at Jane, eyes wide and frightened. “Shark,” Phoebe says again, with some triumph. “Try it. You can turn it into the word shark.”
Jane thinks of the bull shark in the fish tank. She imagines the creature pulling the word shark out of her mouth as it swims back and forth. “Charlotte,” Jane says, almost weeping with frustration.
“Shark!” says Phoebe. “Try harder!”
Jane reaches for something more powerful: the gentle whale shark Ivy carved into the edge of her worktable. Jane holds her hand up and imagines touching it.
Jane is underwater, touching the underbelly of a benevolent shark. It glides above her and moves on. Everything is quiet and slow. Jane is herself. “Shark,” she says, feeling the compulsion sink away, down into the darkness. “Shark! Oh, I’ve never been more happy to say the word shark.”
“That was strange,” says Phoebe. “Wasn’t it?”
“What’s wrong with you guys?” asks Colin, squinting at each of them in turn. “You’re being really weird. You’re making the strangest faces too. And what’s wrong with the dog?” he adds, for Jasper is tugging on Jane’s bootlaces with his teeth.
“I don’t know,” Jane says. “But I want to leave.”
“You’re all acting funny,” says Colin.
