Comfort Me With Apples(3)

Sophia strives to make certain they never have cause to regret her.

She pauses in her thoughts. She reaches out her long fingers to touch her image in the grand mirror. The glass is so cool beneath her skin.

After tea, she plans a stroll round the park, then to Mrs. Lam’s to pick up a bolt or two of the new turquoise wool in stock, a quick pop round the shops for supper supplies, then home to prepare it all before sunset, when it is not permitted to be roaming the streets.

It will be a lovely day. They are all lovely days. That’s how lucky she is. That’s how beautiful Sophia’s life has always been and always will be. Not a minute unaccounted for. Not a season unsavored to the last dregs.

She is happy. Her husband is happy. The world is theirs.

I was made for him.

And then, for no reason whatsoever, no reason at all that she can think of later when she looks back and tries to explain everything that happened afterward and wishes so desperately that she’d never done it, so desperately that she almost faints away with the passion of longing to undo time and causality and uninvent the entire concept of furniture, Sophia looks down at the pull-knob on the top left-hand drawer of her vanity.

It isn’t crystal, like the right-hand drawer. All the knobs on all the drawers are different. Copper, amber, white Bakelite, pewter. It makes a very pretty effect, like everything else her husband builds. The towering bed, the dizzying staircase, the splendid mirror, the high hook for her long robe, the heavy walnut table downstairs—as tall as a plowhorse at the shoulder, where she will later perch briefly, swinging her legs in the air, and eat honey and butter on toast points before heading out into the buttery, honeyed light of the afternoon.

Sophia stares at the top left-hand drawer as though she’s never seen it before. It feels as though she hasn’t. She never uses it, after all. Three pots and a compact hardly require all six drawers to fill. But this is her room. Her place at the mirror, boosted by all those pretty pillows. Every day of her married life, she’s sat in this same place, tied her hair back with the same ribbon, and made herself into the same Sophia while the starlings sang. Every molecule of every object in this house is familiar to her.

So why does that drawer look so much like a filthy, ragged stranger standing suddenly in the corner of a brightly lit hall?

The pull-knob is stone. A rough, dull chunk of grey rock. She brushes it lightly with her fingertips. It is dusty. But Sophia allows nothing to gather dust. Not in this house. Not on her watch. Yet untold layers of dust particles float away into the shafts of sun like ash. Underneath, tiny ammonites press up out of the shale rock.

Sophia tells herself not to open it.

There is nothing inside, after all. She knows that! She knows the contents of every nook and cranny in this vast house. It’s just an empty drawer. No reason whatsoever to waste her time on such a lump of nothing! Not when there is so much to do today! Such a silly little head she has on her shoulders. Doesn’t he always say so?

And then Sophia pulls the stony knob anyway, because it is her house and her time to waste and she has every right to both.

The drawer is locked.

But nothing is locked in Arcadia Gardens. It’s not that kind of neighborhood. They don’t lock their front door at night. No one does. It’s so unnecessary. They don’t even have a key to this place—the real estate agent didn’t mention one and after a while they just never bothered to have any made. They are safe here. That’s the whole point. Nothing can touch them here.

Sophia picks up her silver brush and jimmies the thin handle into the crack between the countertop and the drawer.

It doesn’t take much. Token resistance. The sound of the lock popping free is as satisfying as her shimmying, stretching foot finding purchase on the first step of the staircase.

Sophia blinks slowly and stares into the drawer.

It is not empty.

There’s a hairbrush in there. A hairbrush she has never seen before. And beside it, a lock of hair.

The brush is enormous. The back is made of antler or bone, the bristles no soft spring rabbit, but hard, sharp, wild boar. She picks it up and turns it over and over in her hands. The size of the thing makes her feel like a child juggling some forbidden adult prize she can barely hold on to. Someone has burned runes and designs and symbols Sophia cannot understand, except to think they are beautiful in a brutal sort of way, all over the handle and body of the thing: dark, angular, slashing. Maybe they’re letters. Maybe they’re stallions’ heads. Maybe they’re something very, very else.

But it is the lock of hair that troubles her more.

It is not her hair.

Sophia’s hair is soft and fine and curly and the color of good, sweet roasting pecans. The hair in the drawer is straight, coarse, and black as a secret. Each strand is so thick you could almost write with it. No one they know has hair like that. Not Mrs. Crabbe or Mrs. Lam or Mrs. Lyon or even beautiful Mrs. Palfrey two blocks over on Olive Street.

Like a horse’s mane.

Perhaps it is a horse’s mane.

But why would anyone tie the hair of a horse so lovingly, with a white ribbon just the same as the one Sophia uses to pull her hair away from her graceful collarbones every morning?

She puts it to her nose and smells the hair. The stench of it floods her brain and makes her gag: spices and rotting flesh and sour, private sweat and hot sands stretching away into a burning, lonely nothingness.