CHAPTER 14 #2
She holds it up against me in the mirror. It has sleeves, long, to the wrist. It has a skirt that falls to the floor. And a neck cut wide and low across the collarbones, so the whole of my throat is bare. Both sides.
The bite is on the left side. Yellow now at the edges, green in the middle. Fading.
In this dress, everyone in New Orleans will see it.
"He wants them to see it," I say.
The dressmaker doesn't answer. She doesn't have to.
I put it on.
It fits like it was made on me. It was made on me. Somebody knew every measurement of my body to the quarter inch, and I didn't stand for a single fitting.
On the dressing table, under the dressmaker's pincushion, there's a receipt. I see the number before she tucks it into her bag.
Fourteen thousand dollars.
I stand in a dress that costs more than my father owed for a year of bourré, in the red of a sanctuary lamp, and I don't recognize the woman in the mirror.
She looks like someone who belongs to someone.
***
He comes in at seven.
The dressmaker is gone. Madame Odile is gone. I'm alone at the dressing table with my hair half up and my hands in my lap, looking at the bite in the mirror.
He's in black tie. I've never seen a man in black tie outside a magazine. It makes him look taller and more dangerous, like a knife put in a velvet case to make it look like a gift. His mother's rosary is on his wrist under the cuff.
He stands behind me. He looks at me in the mirror for a long time.
"It's fading," he says.
"It'll be gone by Friday."
"No, it won't."
He puts one hand on my bare shoulder. With the other, he takes something out of his breast pocket.
A small box. Old blue leather, soft at the corners.
He sets it on the dressing table in front of me and opens it.
I stop breathing.
It's a halo.
A ring of tiny diamonds set so close together they run into a single line of light, like the rim of gold around a saint's head. A band of soft, deep, burnished gold. In the middle of the halo, one stone.
I know that gold. I'd know it anywhere. It's twenty-three karat. It's the gold I lay on saints.
"You made this," I whisper.
"I had it made."
"When?"
"The May after the Blessing of the Fleet."
"That was three years ago."
"Three years and five months."
He takes it out of the box. He lifts my left hand from my lap, and I let him, and he slides it onto my third finger, and it fits. Of course it fits.
I turn my hand under the lamp.
Inside the band, there's something engraved, too small to read. I tilt it until the light catches it.
4.22.23
The day on the ladder. The day I smiled at a saint.
"You're supposed to ask," I say. My voice is gone to almost nothing.
"I asked on Friday night. On the altar step." His thumb moves on my shoulder. "You answered."
"That's not the same thing."
"It's exactly the same thing."
He bends his head.
I watch it in the mirror. I watch him put his mouth on the left side of my throat, on the fading bite, in exactly the same place, and I feel his teeth, and then I watch his eyes close in the mirror as he bites down.
I grip the edge of the dressing table.
It's harder than the first time. Deliberate. He holds on and I watch my own face in the glass go slack and open-mouthed, and my hand with his ring on it flat on the dressing table, the halo catching the lamp.
When he lets go, the mark is red and wet and new.
"Now it won't fade," he says against my ear. "Not by Friday. Not for a long time."
I'm shaking. Every inch of me under fourteen thousand dollars of silk.
He sees it in the mirror.
"Stand up," he says.
I stand up.
He turns me, gently, by the hips, so I'm facing the dressing table. His hand spreads between my shoulder blades and presses, slowly, until I'm bent over it with my palms flat on the wood and my face a foot from the mirror.
"Look at yourself."
I look.
A woman in red with her hair half down and a fresh mark on her throat and a man in black tie standing behind her. Her mouth is open. Her eyes are huge.
He gathers the skirt up in his fists.
Silk slides up the backs of my legs, cool, and then his hands, warm. Over my stockings. Over the tops of them. He pulls the thin cotton I'm wearing underneath down to my knees and leaves it there.
"Keep looking."
I keep looking.
I watch his face in the mirror as his hand slides between my thighs. His eyes stay on mine. The rosary on his wrist, onyx against the red of my skirt, moves against my skin.
"That's mine," he says. He puts his other hand over my left hand on the dressing table, over the halo. "That's mine." His palm settles lightly at my throat, over the bite. "That's mine."
"Yes."
"All of it."
"Yes—"
He puts his lips to my ear and watches me in the mirror.
"Say it where you can see yourself say it."
I look my own reflection in the eyes.
"Yours."
The woman in the mirror says it with me. I don't recognize her. She looks like she has never been ashamed of anything in her life.
His hand moves, slow and exact, and I come looking at her while she comes looking back at me, the red silk gathered at my hips and his mouth on my shoulder.
He does not take me any further.
That is worse.
***
Madame Odile has to re-pin my hair.
She does it without a word, standing behind me at the dressing table where it happened, her face perfectly blank. She pins the curls a little lower on the left side. Not enough to cover the bite. Just enough to frame it.
Our eyes meet in the mirror.
She knows. She's lived in this house for thirty years. She knew his mother.
She pins the last curl and steps back.
"You look like a bride, Miss," she says quietly.
Downstairs, the car is idling in the drive. Gideon is waiting at the foot of the stairs with my wrap over his arm.
I walk down to him wearing his ring and his bite, and I don't cover either one.