Chapter 4: Learning to Be Her

Zaria’s POV

The lessons started at six in the morning. Marguerite was standing in the hallway outside my room before I had even found the light switch, holding a hardback book in one hand and looking down at my bare feet.

“Shoes,” she said.

The shoes were Kira’s, cream leather with a thin heel, and they were half a size too small. I put them on, and Marguerite set the book on top of my head and stepped back. I walked the length of the hall with it there. It fell at the third door, and she picked it up without saying a word and put it back.

Kira sat in an armchair at the far end with a cup of coffee and her legs crossed, watching me the way people watched a show they had seen.

“She’s stepping like a waitress,” she said.

“I am a waitress.”

“Then stop stepping like one. Heel, then toe. You don’t rush anywhere. If the house is on fire, you find a way to get out of it slowly.” She took a sip of coffee. “And you keep saying sorry. That’s the fifth time.”

“I said it twice.”

“Fifth. I counted.” She held up a hand and folded down her fingers. “I don’t say sorry. I say Oh, like it’s interesting that you’re in my way.”

I tried it. “Oh.”It came out too soft, and she looked at me over the rim of her cup.

“Again.”

By noon I had a blister on each heel, and by dinner the blisters had broken. A maid named Tilly, who wouldn’t look at me, left a box of bandages outside my door without knocking. I taped my feet up in the bathroom with the door locked, then sat on the edge of the tub for a while, listening to the pipes.

On the second morning, Marguerite handed me her phone at breakfast. “Two minutes.”

Odette’s voice was thin and slow, and there was a hum behind it that I didn’t recognize, a different machine in a different room.

“They gave me a window,” she said. “There’s a tree in it.”

“Is it a nice one?”

“It’s a tree. Are you eating?”

“Yes.” Marguerite was three feet away, buttering toast. I turned toward the wall and lowered my voice. “Grandma, I have to tell you something. The first day they gave me a tablet, a small white one in an amber bottle. I took it before I knew what you meant.”

She was quiet for so long that I said her name twice. Then she said, very carefully, “How many?”

“One.”

“Then don’t take another, Zaria. I mean it. Not one more.”

“They watch me swallow it.”

“Then you find a way.”

The line clicked. Marguerite reached out, took the phone from my hand, and slid it into her pocket. She kept looking at me as she did it.

The tablets came at eight every morning, in a glass of water on a small tray, and Marguerite stood at the door until the glass was empty.

On the third day, I tucked the tablet between my cheek and my gum, drank the water, said “Oh” the way Kira had taught me when Marguerite asked if I’d swallowed it, and went to the bathroom.

I spat it into a tissue and pushed it to the bottom of a sock in the back of the drawer.

It took until the fourth day to notice it. I was in the bath with the door shut when I heard the cook downstairs, two floors below, say to someone, “That’s the third lamb she’s sent back.”

I sat up, water running off my arm. Nobody in the house was talking loudly. I could smell rosemary, then garlic, and underneath them, hot butter. I thought I was imagining it until I walked into the kitchen an hour later and found the lamb on the counter, rosemary scattered across the tray.

That night I woke at two because someone was talking. The voices came through the floor, through the wall, into my pillow. It was Marguerite, speaking low and tired. “They only have to hold through the ceremony.”

“And after?” Gerald asked.

“After, it won’t matter.”

A chair scraped. I lay still, my heart beating hard against the mattress, until the voices stopped, and then I stayed there longer.

We left the next morning. Two suitcases of Kira’s clothes went in the trunk, and my bag with the lake photo went on my lap. Marguerite sat in front. Kira didn’t come down to say goodbye.

I looked up at the windows as the car pulled away and thought I saw a curtain move in one of them, and then I didn’t.

We drove north for most of the day. The road went from highway to two lanes, then to a narrow one with trees so tall they made the afternoon dim. Somewhere in the middle, I put my forehead against the window and looked at my reflection in the glass.

My eyes looked back at me, and for a moment, the grey-green was gone. A warm gold flashed across them, then disappeared.

I blinked and sat straight up, staring at the glass. My eyes were grey-green again.

“Something wrong?” Marguerite asked from the front seat without turning around.

“No.” I picked my bag up from the floor and held it in my lap. “The sun. It hurt my eyes.”

The gates came up out of the trees, black iron, twice as tall as the car. Beyond them, a stone house stood on the edge of a cliff with the sea gray behind it. Gerald stopped the car and never got a chance to open his door. Mine opened first.

A man was standing there with one hand on the top of it. He was tall enough that I had to tilt my head back to see his face, dressed in a dark suit with no tie, his black hair cut close. His eyes were pale gold.

“You’re late,” he said.

He drew in a slow breath through his nose, then stopped and looked at me.

His fingers tightened around the edge of the door until the metal creaked.