Page 63 of The Scarlet Ball

There you are, I wanted to say. I missed you, did you miss me? What are we doing here? What are we doing anywhere? Let me come in, or come out with me, I have missed you so much—

“Hey, what the fuck’s the matter with you?”

She popped up indignantly from her mirror, one hand on her angular hip, the other still holding a dirty handkerchief with a dab of cream on it. Half of her painted face was gone, leaving just flesh underneath it, and I stared because it wasn’t my face at all, or at least it wasn’t the face that I was born with.

“Hey, I asked you a fucking question,” the white girl said, “are you deaf or fucking what?”

It’s a good trick. I should have known, given that I was pulling the same one in the opposite direction. It’s just a trick, it’s just a trick.

It was a good trick, and I didn’t think I could stand it. I knew that if I stayed there a moment longer, I would do something terrible—rip her face off starting from her pale patchy eyebrows or maybe burst into tears. I wondered what she might look like with her face torn off, and when she approached me holding a length of steel pipe in her hand, I turned and fled.

I was in the narrow hallway, but this time it wasn’t a straight line back to Herons. Instead, it branched again and again. It was a labyrinth, how had I not noticed before? There was only one way out, or there were dozens of ways out, or perhaps there was no way out at all. I tore open one door and found behind it an enormous speckled horse, lolling its long tongue out at me. When I gasped, a young Black boy popped out of the horse’s belly in alarm asking me if I was all right. I shouted that of course I wasn’t, why did he think he was? He was eaten, we were all eaten, and I ran on.

Eventually, years or minutes later, I ended up in an alley so narrow I blocked it entirely when I set my hands on the wall and emptied my stomach down a broken drain. My face tingled, and my throat burned, but I felt better, and when I stepped away from the mess, I stepped straight into Odile’s arms.

“Oh, there you are,” she said. “I was so worried about you, where have you been?”

She sounded worried, and much more relieved than I would have expected; maybe she really did want to be friends. I wanted to tell her about faces, about beasts and labyrinths and carnivorous horses. I tried to speak, but only a sob came out, and she gathered me to her like a mother might, pressing my face against her powdered throat.

“It’s all right, I’m here. You’re safe now, see?” With her arm around my waist, she began to lead me out of the alley. “Come on, let’s get out of this awful, awful place. I have a surprise waiting for you, and it will make you feel so much better.”

I believed her. There was no place on earth that felt as awful as this. I let her wipe my face with her handkerchief and then lead me to the hotel.

She escorted me into a gorgeous brass cage, the bars forming diamonds that expanded and contracted in time to my breath. It took me a moment to realize that she had only herded me into the elevator, and I looked around in wonder at the images painted on the wooden walls, undulating shades of blue and over it all broad-winged herons in flight.

“Don’t worry, we’re almost there,” Odile said, squeezing my hand.

It seemed to me that the hallway she led me down was in reality no less terrible than the one I had escaped. It was wider, perhaps, but such secrets lingered behind each door. When she opened one door out of all the others, I ventured inside without a pause, looking around solemnly at the pillowy loft of the red-and-gold bedspread, the old-fashioned kerosene lamp left burning on the table, the mysteriously uncommunicative painting of the barn in a snowy field that hung on the wall.

I started to ask Odile what she made of the barn, if she felt it was as haunted as I did, and then she was unpinning my hat from my head, laying it aside, and reaching for my gloves.

“Now, don’t fuss,” she said, though I hadn’t said anything. “We’re just going to rest here. When you wake up, you’ll be as right as rain.”

My mother had told me about rain in An Giang, how it had fallen straight down from the sky like a girl unpinning her hair. It lasted for weeks, everything drowning on dry land. The wet found its way inside even when there were so many servants kept running back and forth to keep it out. I started to tell Odile about this. I wanted to tell someone, but she shushed me and went to meet a young boy at the door. She conferred with him briefly before she came to lie down next to me on the bed. Our shoes made dark marks on the bedspread, and when I would have sat up, she pushed me down again. I made a startled sound when she unbuttoned the top of my jacket, and then as if that was not enough, the blouse underneath it, batting my hands away when I tried to protest.

“There. You can breathe better now, can’t you? These jackets can be so restrictive. Just rest. You need your rest. This season has been so difficult for all of us, you in particular.”

Her idle fingers found the stitches at my hairline. They’d grown more subtle over time. I had been taking my face off less, sleeping in it several times a week. I could tell that it would hurt terribly if I took it off again. When. When I took it off again.

“I didn’t even know you could trade your face out entire,” she murmured. “I knew about voices and noses. Eye color, of course, and stealing the pink from grosbeaks for our lips and other places, but I never knew about this. They told Laura. Laura knew everything: where to go, how to speak, how to make everyone love her. Everyone loved Laura.”

Her voice changed when she spoke of her dead cousin, the girl in the amethysts. I tried to tell her it was fine not to love someone everyone else did, but there was lead injected into my joints, into the space between my temples, the back of my throat. Breathing wasn’t hard, exactly, but it took more concentration than it should have, and she stroked my face with her gloved hand.

“You are so beautiful,” she said.

Beautiful in her mouth had nothing to do with my borrowed looks. When women call other women beautiful in that particular way, it’s greed and jealousy. It’s a declaration of something they mean to acquire for themselves. I realized I was in danger. I realized it wasn’t just champagne I had been drinking.

“You little bitch,” I tried to say, and I reached for the ceramic ashtray by the bed. It clattered from my numb fingers, and she pulled my hand back, settling it on my stomach like a doll she wanted to arrange to its best advantage.

“Now, now. You’ll spoil your looks if you get all worked up again. Why don’t you close your eyes and sleep? You don’t want to be awake for what comes next.”

I tried to spit in her face only to have it dribble down my chin, and angrily, I forced myself to lie back as she directed. If I struggled before there was any good in doing so, I would be exhausted when the time came. All I had to do was stay awake and alert for another moment, and another moment after that.

Odile rose and paced the floor, and I watched her from underneath my half-closed lids. My thoughts were clear, or at least I thought they were clear, but so very slow. I wondered if she had changed over the course of the season, become more wily, more clever. I decided she hadn’t. She was afraid, and desperate, and that might make her more dangerous than cleverness would.

The tap at the door came once, brisk and light, and before she went to answer it, Odile stepped close to the bed again. She had no vicious blood-letting box. Instead she removed the agate brooch from her throat and made two savage puncture wounds in my breast. The pain was instant, a blunt ache dulled by whatever she had given me, and the wounds filled with blood and spilled almost immediately, staining the top edge of my chemise. Odile set her pin aside to answer the door, stepping back into a deep curtsy as she did so.

“My lord,” she said, and Sebastian walked in.