The Appearance of Annie van Sinderen (11 page)

She didn't ditch me after all.

“Please?” she says. Her voice is small. “Could you? I'm sorry to have to ask, but . . .”

Now I remember. I asked her if she needed help. I imagined that I could protect her, that I could fold my arm over her shoulders and rescue her.

It was stupid of me. But I can't let her see that.

“What's going on?” I whisper.

She leans in closer, and for the first time I see that Annie is afraid, too.

“I don't know,” she says, her eyes widening.

“What do you mean?” I ask. I place a hand atop hers. She's cool to the touch, her bones small and delicate within her flesh.

Her eyes hunt around my dorm room, as if the answer might be found pinned up on my wall next to the
Serpico
poster.

“I”—she falters—“I've lost my cameo.”

She holds her other hand up in front of me, waggling her naked fingers. I don't know what she's talking about.

“You've . . . what?” I'm baffled. It's like we're having two different conversations.

“I don't know!” she cries, and then she hides her face in her hands with sob.

“Oh, hey, don't do that,” I say, feeling horrible for making her cry.

I edge closer to her on the bed and put my arms around her. She trembles against my chest, burying her face in my neck, and I feel the spreading warmth of her tears soaking my skin.

“It's okay,” I whisper, bringing my hand to cup the back of her skull. Her hair is soft. The curls over her ears are crushed into my chest, and she smells like dusty roses and something else . . . smoke. And wet earth.

She sobs. Her sob is so loud I glance over at Eastlin to make sure she hasn't woken him, but he lets out a rattling snore and I know he's dead to the world.

“What's going on, Annie?” I ask, one hand stroking her back. She's trembling, and her hands have coiled around my waist and hold me so tightly that it's hard for me to breathe.

“I've lost my cameo!” she wails.

“Okay,” I say, unsure what she's talking about. “We'll find it. Okay? We'll find it.”

She wipes her bubbling nose on my chest and looks up at me with red-rimmed eyes.

“I said I'd come right back,” she says, obsidian eyes searching mine. “Why didn't you wait for me?”

I don't know what to say.

“Wes,” she gasps. “I came right
back.”

ANNATJE

I
t's my mother's bedroom.

I think.

My ears are still ringing from the fireworks, and I rub my eyes. Behind my lids there's an explosion of colors as I dig in my knuckles, trying to rub away the confusion. There's an acrid smell in my nostrils, from the gunpowder, and I can tell that the stench of smoke is still clinging to my dress. It's on my skin and in my hair. Lottie will kill me for wearing this dress. The ribbons and lace make it so hard to clean. She was dead set I wear the other one.

When I move my hands from my eyes to my cheeks, the details of the room become clearer. Yes, it's definitely Mother's bedroom. In our house on First and the Bowery, not my aunt's in Hudson Square where we all went to be safe after the . . .

Anyway.

My hands fall to my sides and I listen.

The house is silent. Eerily so.

“Mother?” I call out.

My voice sounds odd in the room, dead and unechoing.

I stand still, ears straining.

The room looks the same as when we fled a week ago. Lottie's left sand on the floor, which will make Mother wild. She hates to see the residue of cleaning. The coverlet is pulled up over the bed, white knotted lace stretched all the way up over the bolster. Lottie's left the key in the bed frame, too, because Mother's always after her to tighten the ropes. Enamel bowl and pitcher on the washstand, empty. Knotted lace doily on the dressing table. On the doily, a pair of gloves, a silver hairbrush, and a cut-glass bottle of perfume. Mother's sampler from when she was a girl framed over the dressing table, with its alphabet and numbers and quote from Daniel 12:2 framed by laurel leaves.

And many of them that sleep in the dust of the earth shall awake, some to everlasting life, and some to shame and everlasting contempt.

I've always hated that quote.

The pale pistachio curtains are tied back, though, which is another error of Lottie's, as the white glare of the sun streaming through the windows will bleach the wallpaper. It occurs to me that I should close them. Or Lottie should. Someone should, anyway.

“Lottie?”

No answer.

There's no noise whatsoever, which is unsettling. Usually I can hear all the traffic on the Bowery from everywhere in the house, even upstairs. The wagon wheels creaking, the stamp and snort of horses. Right before we left I heard a woman and a man grunting in the alley next to the drawing room, and Mother hustled us upstairs. She doesn't know I've actually seen them, the bright-colored women who walk the Bowery now. There's a lot Mother doesn't know that I know.

I rub a slipper over the floor, and the familiar grate of sand on pine sounds even odder in the silence. It's hot in Mother's bedroom,
because of the sun most probably. I don't remember the sun ever coming in this strong. Usually elm branches keep it shady on the front of our town house. Cool air and rustling leaves once you get a story above the dust and filth of the street. But now the sun is glaring so harshly along the walls and floor that the room seems filled with a pale white haze.

“I should close them,” I murmur to myself. “Mother will be upset.”

My voice sounds strange in my ears. I'm not certain if I spoke the words, or only thought them. When I start to walk to the window, my feet feel like they're sunk in sucking mud.

I stop short, looking down at my slippered feet. I wiggle one set of toes, then the other. I make like I'm going to take a step, but I can't.

“Oh, come now,” I mutter. I reach down and wrap my hands round my thigh, trying to bodily pick up my limb.

It doesn't budge.

I can flex my toes in my slippers, and I can twist at the waist and touch my face and my hair, and run my hands down my dress, but I can't move from this spot at the foot of Mother's bed.

That's when I realize I'm dreaming.

The realization comes to me in a flood of relief. But
of course
I'm dreaming. That oddness, that deadness in the air isn't really there. I'm not waiting around in Mother's bedroom at all. I'm asleep under a quilt with a torn square in the spare room at my aunt's house, the one in the attic with the tiny rosebud wallpaper. There's a calico cat wrapped around my head, its paws kneading my ear. It's the night of the fireworks for the Grand Canal, and I've only just gone to sleep, and that's why my hair still smells smoky. In a minute I'll wake up, and everyone will be down at breakfast, and they'll tease me for sleeping so late, and none of it will have . . .

None of it will have . . .

I frown, trying to remember.

I rub my foot over the floor, and the sand scrapes again. It certainly feels real.

The sun seems to grow brighter in the room. It's so bright now I can't make out the curtains at all. I squint against it, holding my hands up to shield my eyes. When I do so, I observe the backs of my hands, and I hold them a little way away from my face, staring.

My hands are filthy. The palms are smirched with smoke, my arms blackened all the way up to my elbows, and the sleeves gathered over my elbows look oddly flat and gray. The lace is tattered. My fingernails are black, and when I look closer I see that they're crusted with mud. “But what . . . ,” I start to say.

I flex my fingers, picking at the mud under my nails, and that's when I notice that the red shell cameo ring Herschel gave me last week is missing.

“Oh no,” I whisper to myself.

My heartbeat quickens in my chest. I hunt around on the floor, thinking it may have slipped off. I look at Mother's dressing table and at the end table. I shake the folds of my skirt in case it's caught on a thread. I scrabble at my throat, digging a finger into the soft space between my breasts, because sometimes I pin it there, concealed inside the ruffles.

It's nowhere. Gone.

I decide I'm ready to wake up.

“Mother!” I call out, louder this time.

There's no answer, not a mouse skitter nor a finch peep. No voices below stairs, no one outside in the street. The sun whitens in the room.

I grip my skirts in a mounting panic.

“Mother!” I scream. “I'm ready to wake up now.”

Nothing.

The only sound I can hear is the thud of my blood in my temples
and the gasp of my breath. This dress is too tight. I'm growing out of it. It's squashing my breasts down as I try to breathe, like a dress made for a little girl, only I'm not a little girl anymore. I worry the finger where the cameo belongs, frantic. If I'm dreaming, then it's not really lost, I reason with myself. It's really on my finger right now. When I open my eyes, it will be there. I squeeze my eyes shut tight, bringing my fists to my temples, willing myself awake.

“Wake up,” I whisper. “Wake up, Annie. Wake up wake up wake up wake up.”

I open my eyes, but I'm still in Mother's bedroom. The light, though, has grown so bright that it's obscuring Mother's bed. I can only make out the barest outline of the posts.

“I'll wake up any minute,” I assure myself.

I wrap my right index finger around the bare ring finger of my left hand, twisting where the ring should be.

“It's not really lost,” I mutter. “No one knows. You'll find it.”

I pause, looking around myself at the slowly disappearing room. The light rises and spreads, swallowing the washstand, creeping along the floor until it touches the toes of my slippers.

“You can find it,” I whisper.

The sunlight moves over my feet, flowing like water until it reaches the hem of my dress. I recoil when I observe that the hem is ripped into tatters. I swallow, fearful of what Lottie will say. I'm afraid to see Mother's face when she learns the dress is spoiled. I'm always spoiling my good clothes, and I never notice 'til it's already happened.

Up and up creeps the glaring white. I feel the warmth of the sun reaching my legs through layers of silk and linen, and it feels good, like the blood is coming into them at last, like I might be ready to move. I lift my right foot and creep it forward an inch, farther into the sunbeam. This time, my foot goes where I ask it.

“You'll find . . . ,” I hear myself say as the sunlight floods up my skirt to my waist.

I stretch my arms into the light, spreading my fingers and enjoying the feeling of them moving. But then, something interrupts me.

I pause, ears twitching. I hold my breath.

It's almost not there, but it's there.

A whisper.

Startled, I take a step backward, hunting around the room for signs of life, but the light is so bright I can't make out the dressing table or the bed anymore.

“Who's that?” I cry. My voice trembles.

The whispering continues, and I wrap my arms around my waist, cupping my elbows, eyes straining wide to see forms in the room with me. I can't see anything, but I can hear the whispering growing clearer.

It's a young man's voice. Somehow it sounds both very far away, and very close by.

In a strangled cry I scream, “Herschel!” before I can help myself. As soon as his name escapes my lips, I clap my hands over my mouth for fear someone will hear me, that I'll wake up with my aunt leaning down over my bedstead with that curious look she's been giving me all week.

The murmuring creeps nearer, but I can't make out the words. I knot my fists in my skirts to keep my hands from trembling.

“I know you're there!” I shout. “I can hear you!”

The sound seems to wrap around me, and along my neck I feel a breath of breeze. A shadow flits through the white sunlight of the window, and I spin, hunting for its source. My hands find the foot of Mother's bed, and I grip the post. The light is changing, getting whiter and yet dimmer all at the same time. On one wall, a candle flames to life, but it's not in a place I remember a sconce being.

My knees shake, and I can barely hold myself up.

“Please wake up, Annatje,” I whisper as tears squeeze out of the corners of my eyes.

The voices grow more distinct, but I still can't make out exactly what they're saying. The hairs on the back of my neck rise.

“Please go away,” I sob. “Please! Please leave me alone.”

The sunlight collapses in on itself and more candles sputter to life, flames licking up the walls with tendrils of smoke. Though I know the wallpaper is pale pistachio, its color looks wrong. It looks somehow pistachio and red at the same time. I feel more breaths of air along my neck, brushing against my cheek, stirring the curls over my ears.

I shut my eyes, my throat closing as the tears run down my face. The voice is in my head, is in my ears, is behind me and around me and next to me and right in front of my face.

The voices are talking to me.

All at once the town house begins to shake, as though last night's fireworks for the canal celebration were shuddering anew over the Bowery. I hear the explosions and smell the burned gunpowder and soot. The walls and floor vibrate around me like the walls of a bass drum, and the last of the sunbeam is swallowed up by candlelight, pulling darkness along behind it. Under my hands instead of my mother's bedpost something soft springs into being, smooth like tufted velvet.

Without warning, I feel invisible fingers close around my elbow. My eyes fly open and my mouth releases a piercing scream.

And then I hear a young male voice very clearly say, “Listen.”