Page 19 of The Lost Heiress
Saoirse stared down at her fork, at the bits of omelet speared on the ends of the prongs. Suddenly it looked revolting. She tasted iron and fat in her mouth, the tang of blood and meat.What am I doing?she wondered. She didn’t eat meat. She didn’t eat cheese or eggs or butter, hadn’t for years. She dropped her fork, and it landed with a loud clang on her plate.
Saoirse looked up, expecting Tabby or her mother to scold her, but neither woman was looking at her. Tabby was stirring her tea, and Birdie was preoccupied with her paper. Saoirse studied her mother for a moment. There was something off about her nose—the slope of it—and the set of her eyes. It wasn’t quite right.
She looked across the breakfast table to see if Tabby had noticed it too, but Tabby was drinking her tea as if nothing at all were amiss.
What the hell was going on?
Saoirse glanced down at the paper her mother was reading. On it was a picture of her father’s face—handsome and smiling and dressed in a suit. Atop it, in large letters, the headline read:Lost: Mayor Charles Towers and wife Birdie presumed dead in plane crash off coast of Catalina.
A cold panic filled Saoirse’s chest as she remembered. She didn’t know how she could have ever forgotten it. Her mother was dead. She’d been dead for years. Birdie’s plane had gone down in the Pacific one week before Saoirse’s fourteenth birthday. It’d taken the rescue team twelve days to find the plane’s wreckage off the coast of Catalina, 120 feet below the water’s surface. The divers had found Birdie’s body still strapped into the fuselage, next to Saoirse’s father.
There’d been closed caskets at the funeral, with bright, smiling pictures in frames posed on top. Saoirse had stood before them, dry-eyed and numb, still too shell shocked to cry. She remembered wanting to pry open the top of her mother’s casket, peer inside. She imagined her mother’s beautiful face swollen now, her lips tinged blue, her face bloated. It would be horrible, but wasn’t it always better to face the horrible truth than to live with whatever terrors your imagination cooked up? Saoirse thought if she could just see her, maybe she couldstop thinking about what happened to a body at the bottom of the ocean, the way that skin absorbed water and peeled away from the tissue, the way fish and sea lice made a feast of one’s flesh.
Saoirse looked at the woman sitting next to her now at the head of the table. Was she just imagining it, was it a trick of the light, or did the woman’s lips have an oddly bluish tint to them? Her face looked fuller than it had a moment ago, her skin doughy. As the woman reached for the orange from her plate, Saoirse noticed how fat her fingers were, like stuffed sausages.
Saoirse’s heart pounded in her chest. She wanted to get up from the table, to run screaming in the other direction, but she couldn’t move. Her body felt impossibly heavy, as if it were held there by invisible weights.
“Who are you?” Saoirse asked, her voice sounding small and afraid.
The woman didn’t even look up from her paper. She continued peeling her orange with her fingers, stripping away the peel. Her nails were broken at odd angles, as if she had tried to claw her way out of something.
Saoirse swallowed. Her throat was dry, and it hurt. “Who are you?” she said, louder this time.
The woman looked up. “I’m sorry, dear, did you say something?” she asked.
“Who. Are. You?” Saoirse said for the third time, her voice steely and loud, closer to a shout, an accusation, than a question.
“Who am I?” the woman repeated, laughing, as if Saoirse had told a joke. She looked over at Tabby, as if this was some sort of prank that Saoirse and Tabby had cooked up together and she was searching for the punch line. But Tabby just shook her head, clearly as lost as she was.
The woman looked back at Saoirse now, concerned this time. “Who am I?” the woman said. She reached out a hand and placed it on top of Saoirse’s on the table. Her skin was cold and clammy, and when Saoirse tried to move her hand away, the woman only gripped it harder. Saoirse felt something tickle her wrist, and she glanced down tosee a small black sea louse crawling along her forearm. Saoirse jumped, recoiling in disgust as a second louse dropped out of the cuff of her mother’s dress and onto her arm. She desperately tried to wrest her arm away, but the woman held her there, pinning her arm to the table, her broken nails now cutting into Saoirse’s skin. Saoirse opened her mouth to scream, but no sound came out, and when she looked up at the woman now, she saw that the flesh of her nose was gone, exposing a snub of gray bone. Foam dripped out of her open mouth, and her hair was a dark, wet, matted mess that hung down her back.
“Don’t you recognize your own mother, child?” the woman said.
Saoirse woke with a start.
She was in the bath. She’d been in so long now that the water was lukewarm and her hands were starting to prune. Her heart still racing from her dream, she lifted her leg and turned the faucet knob on with her toes. It squeaked in protest, and Saoirse could hear the groan of the water coming through the pipes in the floor below her. After a moment, the water started to flow, filling the space by her feet with warmth.
She sat back in the bath again. Saoirse hadn’t dreamed of her mother in a long time. She fingered the elaborate gold chain that rested on her clavicle and the heart-shaped locket with an inscription on the inside. It was a line from a poem by her mother’s favorite poet—E. E. Cummings. In it, the speaker expressed an ardent love, one in which the object of the poem was the very center of their universe, their reason for being.
The necklace had been a gift from her mother—Saoirse remembered it with such longing that it made her bones ache. In the wake of her parents’ plane crash, everyone had forgotten about her birthday. The search-and-rescue efforts were still going on—they hadn’t found the plane yet, and so her brothers, Theo and Ransom, had gone to Catalina to be closer to the search. She’d spent her birthday alone at the house, eating ice cream out of a soup bowl on the sofa and watching reruns ofThe Young and the Restlessin the living room. In the late afternoon, she’d wandered into her parents’ bedroom and sat on the floor of hermother’s closet. It was there she found the cache of gifts her parents had gotten her—all neatly wrapped with pale-pink paper and silver bows. She unwrapped them one by one—a beautiful hardbound book of poems by Rumi from her father, which made her feel sick with guilt for a million different reasons. She didn’t want a stupid book; she loathed reading. But her father was always encouraging in her a love of learning, as if he thought if he could just find the right spark, it would ignite in her a dormant passion. She knew he did this because he loved her, but also because he saw a lack in her he wished to fill, and she didn’t know how to square those two things—that he loved her enormously and that she disappointed him. Along with the book, her father had gotten her a pair of pointed-toe Manolo Blahnik pumps, embellished with a crystal buckle. They were beautiful shoes; she had seen a photograph inVogueof Bianca Jagger wearing the exact pair, and she had begged and begged her father to get them for her. They were the most perfect pair of shoes that Saoirse had ever seen, and now she knew she would never wear them.
Saoirse unwrapped her mother’s gift next—a long velvet box with the necklace in it—and she gasped. Unlike her father, her mother was not sentimental or affectionate. Saoirse wasn’t even sure if her mother really liked her. She remembered with a particular cutting clarity one summer afternoon when she was ten and her mother had thrown a garden party for her book club. Saoirse had been roller-skating on the terrace, and she’d spent all morning mastering the backward skate. When she’d finally gotten it down, she had skated over to the landing and waved at her mother below to get her attention. Birdie was standing in a huddle of women in her white linen pantsuit and designer shades, daintily holding a martini. Saoirse called out to her, and just as her mother turned to look at her, Saoirse lost her footing and fell—all the way down the stone steps, landing in a tangled heap at the bottom in front of her mother and all her friends.
It was one of the other women who helped her up, calling her “poor dear,” brushing off her dirtied pedal pushers, exclaiming over herskinned elbows, while Birdie, still holding her martini, shielded her eyes from the sun and looked past her, up the stairs, her lips pursed in displeasure.
“Where’s Mrs. Talbot?” Birdie asked.
When Tabby appeared at the top of the stairs, two lemonades in hand, and saw what had happened, she’d run down the steps as quickly as her legs could carry her, sloshing ice and sticky sugared water over the edges. She’d pulled Saoirse into her arms and let out a gasp of relief when she saw there were just scrapes and bruises and no broken bones.
“You have to keep a closer eye on her,” Birdie scolded. “She’s always getting into things.”
But perhaps somehow, Saoirse had misunderstood her. Every gesture of her mother’s that she’d read as aloof or inattentive, every word she’d interpreted as blatant dislike, had really been something else. Here, this necklace—its inscription—was proof of what her mother really felt toward her but, for whatever reason, could never say out loud, could never show her. Saoirse slipped the necklace on, and even now, she rarely took it off, even in the bath.
Saoirse sat up reluctantly. She had better get out and get ready for the day. Breakfast would be over soon, and Tabby was always so strict about sticking to a schedule. Saoirse’s stomach was still queasy after her dream. She didn’t know if she could eat, but she would have some coffee at least, to get her through her morning lessons.
She gripped both sides of the tub and stood.
Saoirse heard them before she saw them—a woman’s laugh and a man’s voice, low and rumbling as he told some story. As she rounded the doorway to the dining room, she saw them—Salvador, with the girl from yesterday. Ava or Alice or Abigail—Saoirse couldn’t remember which. She hadn’t given her another thought, really, after she’d left her sleeping nearly naked on the beach. She’d thought surely that wouldbe the last time she’d ever see her. But here she was, looking fresh and cheery and completely unruffled as she ate her breakfast, Salvador next to her. The girl’s eyes sparkled with something as Saoirse entered the room. With what, Saoirse couldn’t say, exactly—bravado? Smugness? Whatever it was, Saoirse didn’t like it.
