CHAPTER 11
THE LENS
POV: MAE
It’s twelve-forty. Ronan brought me home, walked me to the foot of the stairs, and said, “Go to bed, Magdalene,” in a voice with nothing in it. Then he went back out into the snow with Theo, the garage door came down behind them, and the house went quiet.
I know where he’s going.
I know who he’s going to find.
I don’t go to my room.
I stand at the top of the stairs in the red dress with my shoes in my hand, and I look at the other door.
His.
Not the one between our rooms. The hall one. Dark wood, like mine. A brass knob.
Six nights in this house, and I’ve never seen where he sleeps. I’ve only heard him. His shower at five in the morning. The creak of the floor when he stops outside my door and doesn’t knock.
I try the knob.
It turns.
***
I find the switch.
I don’t know what I expected. Black silk. Mirrors. Something like the Crypt.
It’s a cell.
A big one. But a cell. White walls. A dark wood floor with no rug. A wide bed with a plain dark headboard, made so tight the corners look like folded paper. One chair. One dresser. One window, curtains open on the snow.
No pictures. No books. No clock. Nothing on the walls at all.
Except one thing.
Over his bed, on a single nail, hangs a small wooden crucifix. Cheap. The varnish rubbed off at the feet where somebody touched it every night for two years before she went to sleep.
Mine.
The one from over my bed at St. Agnes.
I put my hand over my mouth.
On the nightstand, lined up in a neat row, are three bobby pins. The cheap brown kind, a card of fifty for two dollars. Mine.
And beside them, a jar.
Drugstore glass. White plastic lid. Vanilla Silk Hand Cream. Four ninety-nine.
The lid is off.
I pick it up.
It’s lower than it was. I rationed it. I know the level to the quarter-inch.
It’s lower.
He’s been using it.
I stand beside his bed in my red dress, holding my own hand cream, and I picture him. Here. At night. After the screens. Sitting on the edge of this bed with the lid off, rubbing a little into his scarred hands, and holding them up to his face in the dark.
Breathing me in.
My knees go. I sit down on the edge of his bed. The blanket is rough gray wool, like an army cot. I put my face down to his pillow.
Cedar. Candle wax. Him.
I look up at his ceiling.
No smoke detector. No little green light. Nothing.
He watches every room in this house but his own. He’s the only one in Draven House nobody watches.
I sit there a long time.
Then I put the jar down on his pillow, right in the middle, where his face will go. I leave the lid off.
So he’ll know I was here.
So he’ll know I found it.
I close his door and go into my own room.
***
The red dress unzips with a sound like tearing.
I stand in front of the fire and let it fall. It slides off my shoulders and down over my hips and pools on the floor like something spilled. Under it, the white lace set he chose. I know he chose it because he told me with his hand at dinner.
I’m still wet.
Three hours later, and I’m still wet.
I pick the white box up off the dresser where I left it and open it again. The stub sits on its tissue.
PASSENGER: M. HOLLOWAY.
My old name. My father’s name. The name on a cardboard ticket to a boat.
Four days ago, that name was all I had.
I look up.
The smoke detector sits in the ceiling above the bed. Small, white, round, with a little green light that blinks every few seconds. I never noticed it the first night. Now I can’t see anything else.
He isn’t in the house. But he said every second.
He has a phone. He has Theo driving. He has a long, dark ride to wherever Liam Kavanagh is.
He’ll look.
He always looks.
I walk to the foot of the bed, right under that little green light, and hold the stub up where the lens can see it.
Then I tear it in half.
The cardboard is thick. It takes both hands. I tear the halves again, and again, until HOLLOWAY is in eight pieces, and I open my fingers and let them fall onto the red dress on the floor.
There. That’s what I think of your gift.
My hands are shaking. Not from fear.
I take off my earrings. Pearls. Rosa brought them up tonight on a velvet tray and said, Mr. Draven’s mother’s. I set them on the nightstand.
I don’t take off the ring.
I don’t take off the veil, either. I pinned it too well. That’s what I tell myself.
I reach behind my back and unhook the bra.
***
It’s a sin. I know exactly which one. I could name it for a priest in Latin.
I do it anyway.
I lie back on the white sheets, on top of the covers, with the lamp on the nightstand turned up as high as it goes. I turn my face to the little green light.
“You said every second,” I tell it.
My voice sounds strange in the empty room. Husky. Not mine.
I slide my hand down my stomach and under the white lace.
At the Copley I sat at a table with a bishop and let my husband put his hand under my dress. I let him. I opened my knees. Nobody made me. I felt his finger slide into me while the Bishop said the word remedies, and something in me that has been kneeling for twenty-two years stood up.
I think about that.
I think about his face across the tablecloth, calm, while he took me apart with one hand. The way he put his fingers to his mouth afterward, like he was tasting the wine.
I push the lace down my legs and kick it off the end of the bed.
I spread my knees wide. Wider than I have ever let myself, even alone, even in the dark. So the lens can see everything.
“Watch,” I whisper.
I touch myself.
It’s different from the cell. In the cell I was hiding, even with the blind up.
Here there’s nothing to hide behind. The lamp is on.
The veil is spread under my head like a black halo.
I watch my hand in the reflection of the dark window, and I watch the green light blink, and every time it blinks I imagine his eyes.
I’m slick and swollen from dinner, and the first stroke over my clit is almost too much. I gasp. My hips lift.
“Ronan.”
I say it out loud. His whole name. It feels like cursing in church.
I push two fingers inside myself the way he did Thursday night, and it isn’t enough. It’s nowhere near enough. My fingers are too small and too careful. I press harder. I rock against the heel of my hand. The ring bumps against me, cold, the gold warming fast.
He’ll know. He’ll see the numbers. He’ll see my heart go.
The thought makes it worse. Better.
“Watch,” I say again, louder. “Are you watching?”
I imagine him in the back of the car in the snow with his phone in his hand. His hand going still on the screen.
I imagine him looking at nothing else.
It builds up out of me fast and ugly and loud. I don’t bite anything this time. I don’t hold it in. I come with my back arched off the sheets and my free hand fisted in the veil and his name coming out of me in pieces, and the green light blinks, and blinks, and blinks.
When it’s over, I lie there with my chest heaving and my thighs still open and wet on the white cotton.
I don’t close them.
I don’t pull the sheet up.
I think about the Bishop’s soft voice. A marriage entered in haste can always be examined. Annulment. A word I know from books. A door the Church can open.
It should feel like a door.
It feels like a wall between me and the man watching this.
I roll my head on the pillow and look straight up into the lens.
I don’t turn off the lamp.
I leave the lamp on so he can see everything.