would happen. Her life would become an empty thing. Erased daily because she had no one to share it with. She’d become a phantom again, and this time her mother wasn’t around to blame.
She picked up her bag.
Saraub, or The Breviary?
Saraub.
The idea of him caught in her chest and pressed out her breath like a weight. She imagined getting fat with a kid in her belly. She’d try to sit at her desk, and she wouldn’t fit. They’d fire her, and she’d get stuck cleaning the Victorian and playing host to the bitch quartet while with every year, Saraub’s center of gravity got lower, and his smile more fake, and the smudges on the walls became holes. Her breath got slow, and then was gone altogether. Before she found him, when the space in her stomach had been an empty thing called longing, she’d known the truth. Squandering love is the ugliest of sins. She wished she was a stronger person. She wished she could reach inside herself and fix this thing that was broken. But she couldn’t.
In her mind, the asphalt outside opened again into a hungry black hole. It widened like a wave and crashed against all the families walking home from church. It crashed through the hotel window, too. The current pulled her back out and into its depths as it receded. It carried her to a small, dark place deep underground, where she became still as a shadow and she didn’t need to breathe.
The Breviary, indeed.
3
All the Pretty Young Things in the Dark
I live here now. I’m moving in today,” Audrey told the doorman at The Breviary. He was a skinny Haitian man wearing a faded gray uniform with silver buttons. It reminded her of a bellhop costume from the 1950s. She bit her lip and gave him a pleading look: she’d forgotten to call ahead and reserve the freight elevator, and it had only occurred to her now, looking at the sign that read, NO MOVING ON SUNDAYS! that she wasn’t supposed to move in on a Sunday.
He nodded. “I know, Mizus Lucas. Fourteen B. They tell me. It’s in the schedule.”
She cocked her head. The owner? The co-op board who’d approved her application? “Did Edgardo tell you I was moving in?” she asked.
“Edgardo no work here no more,” he said, then smiled at her and went back to reading Borges’ Labyrinths in French.
“Where’d he go?” She was holding her cactus so its dirt didn’t spill.
He shook his head, then returned to his book. Either they were divided by a language barrier, or else he was done talking and had decided to erect an imaginary language barrier. She moved on.
As she rode up the elevator, she noticed that the floors had all been cleaned, and the powdery hotel scent of Love My Carpet wafted through the iron bars. The only remaining evidence of a party on the seventh floor was the cigarette burns—perfectly round circles of black branded into a beige carpet. The ninth floor was still empty, but someone had hammered drywall over the plaster holes where the copper had been torn. The job looked hastily done, or else in keeping with the architecture: none of the boards were level.
She keyed herself into 14B and put down her suitcase. The ceilings were even higher than she’d remembered, and the fifty-foot hall was more cavernous. She pictured herself waking up at night and getting lost, so she took a deep breath and reminded herself that big was good.
Carrying her cactus, she walked down the hall and opened doors, one after the next. First, the small bedroom. A child’s room, she guessed. Where the drowned ones had slept.
After signing the lease, she’d been foolish and had researched Clara DeLea. A divorced has-been opera diva. Worse than a has-been; an almost been. Big, beautiful, and full of temper, her drinking got the better of her and City Opera fired her. The low point in her life transformed her. She checked into rehab and became a new, more generous woman. A few months after her release, she met and married her lawyer husband at Betty Ford. They had four dewy-eyed kids aged ten, eight, five, and two. Their life was suburban perfection—a picket fence, good schools, nice neighbors, a short commute to the city. They grew apart. The divorce got ugly. She accused him of cheating. He accused her of beating the children and giving the infant brain damage. At two years of age, Deirdre Caputo had still