House of Steel (3 page)

Delaney lifted the mug toward her lips,
hesitating at the sound of a car door shutting outside. She peered
out the double window facing Drew Street before closing the
curtains on the white flakes scattering to the ground. As she
placed her mug down on the desk, she reopened the laptop to a pink
box that contained the familiar, one line.

“Are you there, D?”

I always am.
Her lips turned upward
as she slid open the drawer to retrieve her mask. She felt the pink
satin fabric slip between her fingers before she slid open the
metal drawer of the green file cabinet to move a stack of file
folders. A pile of lace in varying colors revealed itself. She
picked a matching black top and bottom, setting them on top of the
desk before dancing her fingers across the keys.

“In five minutes. Twelve-fifteen.” She
paused before entering the next line, “CST.”

Delaney walked over to the full-length
mirror, encased in gun-colored metal as she lifted the sweatshirt
over her head. She released the elastic tie in her hair, allowing
the brown waves to fall to the middle of her bare back. Her
disheveled hair wouldn’t matter now, not after she was done getting
dressed. She slipped the sweatpants down, kicking them gently to
the side. Standing naked in front of the mirror, she studied her
body for the transformation. Her supple breasts looked the same,
alert and full. Her smooth, milky skin still shined an unblemished
sheen. The bones of her narrow hips jutted from her pelvis, just as
they always had. Her body had effectively remained unchanged. But
she felt different. Her body was hers.

She stood straight as she placed the mask
over her eyes, tying a knot over the back of her hair. Her eyelids
fluttered free as she stared at the reflection. A beautiful, naked
woman in a pink mask. She stepped into the lace and fastened the
bra, lifting her large breasts even higher than they naturally
were. Unlike the rest of the women in the My Campus Hotties
community who took their clothes off for men, Delaney’s only client
had a special request that she had conceded to, happily. She
stepped into a long, floor length black dress that clung to her
body over her lace underwear. Even though she hadn’t needed to put
the matching lace set on, it had given her a satisfaction knowing
what she had underneath. What he was missing.

As she finished plumping her hair, she
reached for a paintbrush from a cup spackled in paint and scooped
out a blank canvas underneath her bed. She shot one last look at
the reflection of a woman in a black gown and pink mask before
moving to her laptop. 12:15. She began to type.

4

DAY 1: Thursday, December 18 - 12:00
p.m.

V’s knee-high laced boots sunk into the snow
as she moved in silence to the back of the house. Her eyes wandered
to the neighboring single-story home. She wondered what she might
look like to the inhabitants if they saw her.
A small white
flash? A child?
V thrust the thought out of her head. She
wouldn’t be caught. Not now. She felt the knit of the white ski
mask rub against her face. Her pristine gloves, jacket, pants, and
boots were all white. She was pure.

The sound of a car door shutting echoed from
the front. The rumble of an engine followed. She peeked around the
corner, watching the truck back out of the driveway and onto the
road ahead. Mark Jones was gone. She turned back to the house,
watching Delaney move inside through the kitchen, swigging from the
leftover wine bottle on the counter. V ducked underneath the window
as Delaney turned her head, looking out the same window. V held the
air in her lungs until the burn was too much to bear. She exhaled,
letting the cool stream of white fog blow in front of her. The
student was gone. She had watched him leave, fleet out of the
kitchen door half-dressed, into the brisk morning turned afternoon
air. V followed the brown head of hair into the bedroom around the
side of the house, watching as Delaney turned to her laptop.

Another bang shattered the stillness of the
day. Delaney’s brown waves reacted to the noise in the front,
drawing her to her bedroom window. V tucked her head down, this
time breathing inside her elbow to mask the vapors. She tucked her
body close to the siding as she heard the curtains close; the same
siding she had rested against for more than an hour last night.

V slipped through the backyard and onto the
back street. She lifted the ski mask from her head to reveal
cropped, dark brown hair and porcelain skin. She would return to
the office so they wouldn’t miss her. But, she would come back. The
cameras would have to wait.

5

DAY 2: Friday, December 19 – 9:00 a.m.

Delaney stepped onto the small porch outside
her front door and into the fresh morning air, locking the door
behind her. With her bag slung over her shoulder, she moved
sideways down the steps that had been covered with the previous
night’s snowfall. Only an inch of snow had dusted the cold
concrete, and as Delaney stepped, she felt the usual layer of ice
underneath the snow. The winter. God, did she hate the cold. She
spotted a bag of salt and a shovel leaned up against the side of
the house on the porch. Mark was too good to her.

As she bent down to lift up the garage door,
she noticed the door was cracked open on the bottom, revealing a
scattering of snow just inside the garage door. She planted herself
and yanked the door up, rattling the thirty-year-old aluminum as it
rested on its track near the top of the garage. Her eyes scanned
the garage, but nothing had been moved. Her white Civic remained in
its place as she had left it – in the dead center of the one-stall
garage.
No one-stall garage. No non-motorized garage door.
Her father and Mark had pointed out the house’s deficiencies
after
she had signed the contract and moved in. They were
right, though; they usually were.

She opened the door and threw her bag onto
the passenger side seat, noticing how small her bag really was. She
didn’t need much for the weekend and the dress was already at the
house.
Waiting.
Just like everyone else.
Her youngest
brother, Ben, was getting married tomorrow and despite the fact
that she had to spend the late afternoon hours in the one place she
feared the most, she was genuinely happy for Ben and Meghan. She
would smile through the sympathetic looks she would get from
everyone else who didn’t know that she never planned on getting
married. That consisted of most everyone, except for her mother,
Ann Jones.

Her chest tightened as she thought of the
relentless woman that she had left. When Delaney had hesitated to
move to Appleton because she had wanted to spend more time with her
mother, Ann Jones had insisted, even yelled at her daughter to
leave. Her wig, dangerously close to tipping off her head, had
waved back and forth in disgust when Delaney mentioned staying in
Milwaukee. Delaney had been shocked at her disapproval; the
enveloping wing she had kept over her daughter was retreating back,
but Delaney hadn’t known that her cancer-ridden mother had already
realized her protection was waning. Ann’s expiration date, as she
called it, was nearing.

Four months ago, Delaney had purchased the
1920’s bungalow after the real estate broker, who unofficially
coined himself the realtor to the “ivory tower of Leighton,”
finally convinced her that the house on Drew Street was the idyllic
home for her. The fourteen hundred square foot home, after all, was
just five blocks from campus and it
had
been better than the
first six houses he had shown her. It was also the smarter choice
when compared to renting, according to Michael Jones.

When the realtor had opened the front door
to the bungalow, the resemblance to her family’s house back in
Milwaukee - the house she’d grown up in starting at the age of six
- had been unsettling. She had moved from one room to the next,
surveying the architectural details. She had run her fingers across
the craftsman trim, repainted several times from previous owners,
in the living room just as she had as a child. She had even closed
her eyes while standing in the middle of the kitchen, envisioning
her mother standing in front of the sink washing the dishes in
scalding water - water that was always too hot for anyone else to
touch. Delaney released a sigh before she backed out onto the
driveway, got out to close the garage door and pulled onto the
quiet street to head two hours south.

The desolate campus radiated a beautiful
eeriness; an undisturbed dusting of white covered the sidewalks and
streetlamps surrounding the buildings. It was winter break after
all, and most of the student population had headed home to spend
the weeks with their families. She wound her car down by the river
and passed the new academic building, Parker Tower. The exposed
steel beams erected sixty feet up loomed over the remaining
buildings that constituted the 150 year old campus. Parker
Enterprises was constructing the massive building funded through
private donations, including a cool $6 million from none other than
philanthropist extraordinaire himself, Holston Parker.

The relatively quaint and historic riverside
campus in Wisconsin remained a reputable liberal arts college with
a student population of only about fifteen hundred. The campus
notoriously attracted prestigious academics graduating from elite
institutions, including Harvard and Brown. So, when Delaney had
received the call from the chair of the Fine Arts Department the
previous spring asking her to visit campus for a tour and to
discuss the recent vacancy, she had dropped her weekend plans and
headed north without hesitation. Within weeks, she had signed her
contract with the university to become the new Assistant Professor
in the department. A job. Her first real job. A job that encouraged
her to continue to paint. It had been the next logical step to
take. She would be crazy not to accept the offer. It was, after
all, an honor. The word hummed in her head, yet the current state
of the campus stood in stark contrast to the lush green landscape
and rolling river on her first visit.

Delaney had spent the entire past semester
buried in her office and textbooks, trying to learn the ropes of
teaching at Leighton. The tenured faculty members with more than
thirty years of experience were polite and encouraging, but they
remained skeptical of her young age and accomplishments. She tried
with fervor all semester to meet their standards, staying well past
midnight most nights in the studio to produce pieces for a display
at Appleton’s Trout Museum of Art. Showcased at the end of
December, it met lukewarm reviews across the art community, only
igniting her further. She would prove her place in the tier.

It wasn’t an entirely unfamiliar place for
Delaney to be, and it didn’t bother her that she would spend more
of her spring semester dedicated to her work. After all, she had
endured eight years of post-graduate education moving to this
point. She was all in.

While her college classmates were busy
drinking and having one-night stands, she had spent her evenings
with
Winsor and Newton; the oil paints that, in
most cases, always listened. She would then nap for a few hours in
her studio amid black teas on the same couch now stationed in her
living room. Despite the social media craze that had hit during her
last years, she had also avoided the mindless, time-sucking idling
of her generation, with the small exception of her sessions on her
My Campus Hotties account that was leading to a small stockpile of
cash. Her preferred methods of in-person meetings were “archaic”
according to a studio mate. It had been better that way, Delaney
told herself, fostering her relationship with her art instead. She
had flown below the grid for so long, but had finally resorted to a
smartphone when she moved to Appleton to maintain contact with her
family, particularly to keep tabs on Ann.

Her Civic continued to hum against the road,
moving along the river and her usual morning running path. Her legs
itched as she eyed the trails. She had skipped her five mile run
the past two days and knew she would miss it again tomorrow, but
she would be back on Sunday to beat on the trail. She longed to
stretch her legs and to inhale the clean air into her lungs.
Running always had a way of clearing her mind, the physical
counterpart of painting. Delaney watched as the academic buildings
turned to two-story, Victorian houses packed together, only about
ten feet separating one from the other. Bikes and shabby couches
spotted the porches, half-covered with the snow that had
accumulated over night.

Theron.
She looked at her phone lying
in the console. There were no messages. It had taken all of
yesterday to determine that she couldn’t make the mistake of seeing
Theron again. She was grateful that he had pushed her past the
hurdle of her quasi-virginity, if she could call it that, at the
age of twenty-eight. She would always remember that, but she had
made a huge error in judgment. She knew almost nothing about him
except that he was a football player with a ridiculous eye for
perspective drawing and that his father died in combat overseas,
the military tags never straying from his neck. They could never
have a relationship; the ties needed to be cut. It had to be quick
and painless. It had to be everything unlike the night that had
left her a wounded, scarred teenager.

Delaney had, unsuccessfully, attempted to
rid herself of the traces of that night. Yet, even the smells
lingered. She could still remember the scent of the votive candles
burning only inches from her face. The odor of her singed hair
nauseated her on days when she took too long to blow dry her hair.
And, she couldn’t stomach to be close to people with colds for fear
she might get a whiff of the menthol on their breath.