6. Whisper Down the Row
Chapter six
Whisper Down the Row
Lorelei
Offering prep turns out to mean a woman named Odette measuring me for a dress I didn’t agree to want.
That’s the irritating part. It’s beautiful. Not beautiful enough to make me forget nobody asked whether I wanted to wear it, but beautiful enough that I’m annoyed at myself for noticing the way the fabric falls or how the color makes my skin look warmer in the mirror.
The fitting room used to be a guest suite before somebody decided guests didn’t need it as badly as family traditions did.
The bed is gone, replaced by two dress forms and a standing mirror tall enough to show me every angle I didn’t ask for.
Somebody kept the bedside tables, though.
One holds a silver tray of pins. The other has a lamp shaped like a swan that looks embarrassed to still be here.
“Arms up,” Odette says around the pins between her teeth.
I lift them.
She tugs the dress into place, and I stare at the ceiling while she works.
There’s a water stain above the old curtain rod that looks a little like Florida if Florida had been kicked in the side.
I focus on that instead of wondering how many girls have stood here before me doing exactly this — arms up, mouth shut, waiting for somebody else to decide when they’re finished.
The room is full of people pretending not to watch.
Helena stands by the door with a clipboard tucked against her chest. Two women I don’t have names for are adjusting fabric on a second dress form nobody has explained.
Carmen is in the corner chair, one ankle crossed over the other, turning her wedding ring around her finger, which she’s been doing a lot lately, half here and half wherever she goes when this house gets too close.
Odette kneels to fix the hem.
“Don’t move.”
“I wasn’t planning an escape.”
“You were thinking about one.”
“Is it that obvious?”
“Only to anyone with eyes.”
One of the fabric women smiles before Helena looks at her, then remembers she has fabric to arrange.
I catch the whisper while Odette is pinning something near my ankle. Helena leans toward the woman beside her, voice low enough that I’m clearly not supposed to hear it.
“—still won’t answer the door for anyone. Not since the family got word about what’s happening with the boy—”
“Which boy?”
The question leaves my mouth before I decide whether asking it is smart.
Everybody stops.
Even Odette, who has been treating my body like a deadline for the last twenty minutes.
Helena’s face changes while I’m watching it, not much, just enough to let me know she’s searching for the version of this conversation that ends with me accepting whatever she says next.
“Nothing, Miss Lorelei. Arms up, please. We’re not finished.”
“My arms are already up. Which boy?”
“I don’t know what you think you heard.”
“You said a family got word about something happening with a boy. I heard all the important nouns.”
Odette suddenly needs to inspect a pin she placed five minutes ago. The woman at the dress form lifts the same piece of fabric, puts it down, then lifts it again.
Nobody is going to answer me.
I can see it moving through the room, and it isn’t confusion.
It’s coordination.
Carmen stands so fast the chair legs scrape the floor.
“I need air.”
She says it to the room without looking at anyone and heads for the door.
I watch her leave, and not because leaving is suspicious. In this house, leaving a room is one of the healthiest choices anybody can make.
It’s the way she does it.
Head down. Purse forgotten. One hand pressed against her middle like she’s keeping something from coming up.
I know that walk.
I saw her do it once in a grocery store four years ago.
Some woman near the freezer cases said a word that meant nothing to me and everything to my mother, and Carmen left a full cart in the middle of the aisle and walked straight outside.
Frozen peas, yogurt, a carton of eggs, all abandoned.
She didn’t tell me why for two days, and when she finally did, the explanation was so thin I could see through it.
“Mom.”
She doesn’t stop.
I step off Odette’s platform.
“Miss Lorelei, the pins—”
“I’ll bring them back.”
Apparently that isn’t funny to Odette.
I follow Carmen into the hall with half the dress pinned and the other half trying to slide off my shoulder. Something sharp catches me near the hip. I grab a handful of the skirt and keep moving.
“Mom.”
She reaches the stairs before I catch her arm.
“What’s happening with the boy?”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
Too fast.
My mother is a lot of things, but she has never been good at lying quickly. She needs time to prepare a lie, dress it properly, and introduce it to the room like a distant cousin.
“You do. I watched you flinch.”
“I didn’t flinch.”
“You almost left your purse in there. You love that purse more than you love most people.”
“Lorelei.”
“What boy?”
She pulls her arm free and smooths her sleeve, though there’s nothing wrong with it. “Go finish your fitting.”
“Is this about Marcus?”
I haven’t said his name since the night they walked him into the dark. I haven’t even let myself think about it in a complete sentence. In my head, he’s been reduced to pieces: his hands, his voice, the back of his shirt disappearing between two men who wouldn’t look at me.
Saying his name puts him back together.
My mother goes still.
Not calm. Carmen is never this still when she’s calm. When she’s calm, she fixes things — a crooked picture, my collar, somebody else’s business.
This is her holding herself in place.
“You need to let this go,” she says.
“That’s not an answer.”
“It’s the only one I have for you.”
“Everyone in this house keeps saying that like I’m eventually going to hear it enough times and go, Oh, okay, that clears everything up.”
“Lower your voice.”
“No.”
“Lorelei.”
“What happened to him?”
She looks past me toward the fitting room, where Helena has appeared in the doorway but has enough sense to stay there. Then her eyes return to mine.
“You don’t understand what you’re asking me to talk about.”
“Then explain it.”
“I can’t.”
“Can’t or won’t?”
“Does it matter?”
“It matters to me.”
For a second, she almost tells me.
I know my mother’s face. I know when she’s about to laugh in church and when she’s pretending not to be angry because people are around. I know the look she gets when she’s already forgiven somebody but wants them to suffer another ten minutes before finding out.
This is none of those.
Whatever she wants to say reaches her mouth.
Then she swallows it.
“Marcus’s family is grieving,” she says. “That’s all you need to know. Grieving families deserve privacy, not gossip.”
“Grieving how?”
Her fingers stop turning her ring.
“Grieving like he’s dead,” I say, “or grieving like he’s somewhere they can’t visit him?”
“Lorelei.”
“Those are different things, Mom. I’ve been trying to figure out which one it is since the Reaping, and nobody will say it.”
“I need you to stop asking.”
“Why?”
“Because I don’t have an answer that won’t terrify you, and I’m not ready to be the one who says it.”
That shuts me up.
Not because she told me to stop.
Because it’s true.
Everything else she’s said has been arranged for me. That came out before she could fix it.
She isn’t protecting Marcus’s family from gossip.
She’s protecting me from something she’s already seen.
“You know what happened to him.”
My voice sounds different now, smaller than I want it to.
She looks at me, and the worst part is how sorry she looks.
She doesn’t answer.
She turns and goes down the stairs before I can ask the question sitting behind my teeth.
Did this happen before?
Not to Marcus.
To somebody else.
Somebody she knew before him, before Alistair, maybe before Marazul.
I could call after her.
I don’t.
The dress pin digs into my hip again, and I don’t go back into the fitting room.
I sit on the top step in a half-pinned white dress while Helena pretends not to check on me from the end of the hall.
One side of the hem is longer than the other.
The zipper is open halfway down my back.
Every time I breathe too deeply, something pokes me.
I fish through three layers of skirt, can’t find the pin, and give up before I stab myself somewhere worse.
Here’s what I know: Marcus’s family is grieving. My mother knows why. Whatever happened to him is bad enough that she would rather let me imagine it than say it aloud.
Everything after that is guessing.
I guess anyway.
Maybe Marcus is fine. Maybe Helena meant some other boy from some other family, and Carmen only ran because this house has turned all of us strange. Maybe Marcus is sitting somewhere right now, pissed off and alive, wondering why nobody has come to get him.
I hold on to that one until my hand hurts.
I don’t believe he’s dead.
I decide it because I need to decide something, and because dead is too simple for all this whispering. Dead gets a funeral. Dead gets flowers and casseroles nobody eats. Dead has a date attached to it.
Marcus has silence.
Silence takes maintenance.
Somebody has to keep lowering their voice. Somebody has to stop answering doors. Somebody has to tell Helena what she’s allowed to say and teach my mother which questions she isn’t supposed to answer.
Helena passes me on the stairs an hour later. She doesn’t stop or look at me.
I watch her clipboard disappear around the landing and feel stupid in a way that makes me angry.
She knew while Odette was measuring me. The fabric women knew enough to shut up. Carmen knew enough to run. Cassian knew before I ever asked him anything.
I think about the folder on the hall table — cream stock, brass corners, sitting there like it had been waiting for me even though nobody ever said it was mine — and my stomach turns.
I’m still sitting there in the dress they picked for me, trying to learn the rules from what everyone refuses to say, when the pin catches my hip again.
This time I find it.
I pull it out, and a dot of blood rises through the white fabric.
I should call Odette.
Let her rush in with cold water and a white cloth before the stain sets.
Instead, I press my thumb to it and drag it across the skirt.
By the time I lift my hand, there’s a red streak across the front of the dress.
I sit there and watch it dry.