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The master bathroom in Sorina’s home— the one we all share to bathe in— is unfathomably, unbelievably, luxurious.
I’m dwarfed in the bathtub, dwarfed by the hot water that has filled it, and hidden, too, under the soap Dolores insisted I use and put in that had turned the water from crystal clear to a milky colour. I had wanted her to join me; I had tried so hard, appending an ‘oh please, Dolores, please?’ while holding her hand to my cheek that she had to refute by leaning down, not quite kissing, a hand on my shoulder to stop me from taking one, to murmur on the skin of my lips that she couldn’t possibly risk something that bold, just yet.
Yet was such a scandal to hear. Is scandalous to say. I repeat it in my head until the warm tenor of her voice has muddled up, of the inflection she put into it, the warmth of her accent and the heady dip of her tone is all that’s left.
The walls are rich blue, gold leaf; white tile, soft plush rugs that offer warmth before the sink, the toilet, the bathtub. And the water. It’s so warm still, after a long hour of soaking that moving to peek over the lip of the tub and look again at the interior— how large the room is, big enough to rival my bedroom in Evrilly, and decorated, as everything else is, stylishly, a plant hanging from the ceiling to drape over the tub and the entire wall behind it a mirror with curtains— is almost too much effort.
Sorina loves her gold. Gold taps and gold colouring on the walls and gold towel racks. Like her hair, like her accessories, like her pianist.
I look over at her pianist. Igraine. Pretty, tall, golden haired Igraine. In her dark blue day clothes that show too much skin, the chest and her shoulders and the short sleeves that bare the long twist of her wrists; missing her leather gloves, the absence so notable, glaring, in sight and in the smell. Just soap, and skin, and the smell of her toothpaste.
No leather. No oil. No smell of often turned sheet music.
It’s... odd. Is this the woman Dolores gets? The hint of ink staining her hands, the set of her resting face not displeased neutrality but a bland, ever-present smile, the peek behind the curtain that shows her as diligent and fastidious and unembarrassed? She loves looking at herself, certainly; into the mirror on the sink and the wall.
I wanted to draw the curtains shut on it. Something about it, about having to see when I got out, or, in haste to close them while wet, leaving a water stain that would grow damp and then would smell. None of them would make such an obvious mistake in the home. Dolores would pick it out as my fault immediately and then I would be on the receiving end of another of her lectures about how to conduct myself in such an old, well loved house, and then it would get back to Igraine, who might see when tending to the plants or would overhear at breakfast when she appeared in her spot when I hadn’t noticed her, and from Igraine I would get laughed at. And if Igraine knows, Sorina would. And how would I defend myself from her? For making a mess of things she keeps so clear and clean?
I don’t want Igraine in here with me; she had insisted, barging in, occupied, with her usual smile.
I had asked, “Did you need something?”
“I don’t mean to bother,” she had replied, lying, stepping in her heels right up to the bath to look down at me, click, click, click, “but it is past ten and I’d like to prepare for bed.”
“I didn’t know it was that late.”
“That is obvious.”
I hadn’t replied.
“May I use the sink?” She asked, while running the taps.
“...of course.”
I wish Igraine would go to bed. It’s been long enough. Then, I wouldn’t have to see her again till morning. It would be rude to say that, and I can’t be rude. Not when Dolores is fast asleep. And, I know she wouldn’t, but I can’t relax, for fear Igraine might look at me. See me. What if Dolores found out? Could I lie to her, could I convince her, to take my side? Would she? She’s known Igraine for so long, there isn’t anything I could possibly say that she wouldn’t be able to refute, or explain, or, worse, accept with a smile.
And what would I do if she saw me? What would I let her do?
I can’t be rude. She does live here. Has lived here longer than I have. Maybe this is simply the habit of her deep friendship with Sorina; coming in, using the amenities, with only so much as a please and thank you and conversation while they both got ready. It’s certainly more convenient to just use the same bathroom so late, for something so small, when everything— so many creams and lotions and paints and all sorts— for her nightly routine was in here. Dolores used the same things. I can only imagine Sorina does, too.
Maybe it was rude to expect privacy when I should have been in bed. It wasn’t... totally my fault. Dolores insisted, and then she left, and then...
“Annette,” Igraine says, every part of her still but for her mouth. I’m watching, and her eyes don’t move from her own face. “Are you alright?”
I hide my sullen expression in the water. “Yes.”
Igraine turns her head aside to yawn, turns it into a stretch; it strains her shirt, already tight to her body, against the shape of her back. She had such a broad back. She spits into the sink and washes her mouth out, “You’ve been staring.”
“I didn’t mean to...” I mull, feeling the words in my mouth like marbles. I add, “Just— I was just lost in thought.”
“Yes,” she looks at me and I hate it. It isn’t really looking at me so much as it is sending her gaze in my general direction, every so often, like she expects me to jump her. I couldn’t possibly... she would never... I would get... had Sorina said something to her? Encouraged her to mind me like some venomous thing that can’t be trusted? Is that why I can’t seem to talk to her, still? “so it seems.”
The silence stretches, and it makes me nervous. “I just. I’m still not used to it. How big everything is.”
Igraine hums, looking at herself in the sink mirror. “You are so small, Annette, you’re drowning in that tub by doing nothing at all.”
There is something wrong about her eyes, more than their unnatural colour, orange more than brown; shifting imperceptibly to piercing, finding me, looking through me. I glance, focusing on the shape of her leg in her skirt— not as defined as Dolores’, or Sorina’s, but still strong, still. Shaped so nicely— but when I find her face in the reflection, she’s staring at me. Her face sharpens into clearer mockery, raising her brows and looking at me like I am the odd one here.
She doesn’t try to pick up the conversation again, and I let it simmer away with the heat of the water. Though Sorina had complained once, when I had just gotten back one evening and feigned tiredness so Dolores would leave me in the hall and heard through the door she opened, so clearly, that Igraine loved to talk. And she did, seem to, with everyone.
Except me.
I never can follow the thread of conversation when she doesn’t want me to, talking in circles, of different things, using words I don’t understand or which mean the same thing as a smaller, easier to understand one that I can’t piece together fast enough. She does it in both languages, too, as easy as breathing. To rub it in. She speaks like Mama used to. ‘Proper’ vowels and ‘proper’ words.
She’s always rubbing my face in my own ignorance.
It’s not fair. I didn’t know anything about her, still don’t know anything about her. Mama never mentioned Igraine, not by name, not in passing, not in any of her letters had she come up, nor was she in any of the photos Mama had kept. But she came to see mama after she died, was a shoulder for Dolores to lean on, sympathetic and caring and listening, reminiscing along, adding her thoughts, when Dolores recalled a memory to share. She paid her respects. Touched Mama’s things with a strange familiarity; not wistful, not respectful, with disbelief to find things that had never changed once my entire life.
The only one in the dark about her, as usual, seems to be me. I grind my teeth together. She’s just too much to think about. Of course mama would leave me a surprise for me. I should have known. She never could be honest even all alone. I can’t help but wonder, wonder, wonder. Is Igraine like Dolores?
I stare as she washes her face, removes her earrings. She picks through the cupboards with a familiarity that makes me jealous, snagging various things like it is all second nature to rifle through cupboards and be at ease in this house. I was so certain I had seen Sorina using those. Have they been for Igraine this whole time? Just how close are they?
“Again, Annette,” Igraine says, the flick of her flame bright eyes is withering. I watch every movement. Uncapping, squeezing, rubbing her hands together. She rubs lotion into the arch of her cheekbones, “You’re staring.”
I look away. Not quickly, but not slowly. “Sorry.”
“Don’t grind your teeth, either.”
I roll my eyes, at my knees. “Sorry...”
“Are you?”
I lay my head on the wall of the tub. “Yeah. Of course.”
I’ve never been good at subtlety. The heat saps any energy left for it out of me; when she turns away to brush her hair, I go back to staring. Wanting her to leave, wanting her to stay. She’s only insulted me twice, which is a record low for our conversations. I want to continue it. Keep hearing her keep them low and veiled; I’m too tired to parse her words for more barbs, so they float, formless, blissfully neutral.
When we had first met, I thought she was so like Sorina. Identical. Wearing colours that matched her, matching hair, the same looming height and careful sneer that revealed itself only in glimpses. Only at Mama.
I wasn’t totally wrong, they are similar. Alike. The product of a lifelong friendship, I think, in matters of style and taste and closeness. But Igraine is... odd. Eager. She smiles for so much of the day; how do her cheeks not ache after keeping her lips quirked upwards for hours at a time? Even in the hallways, even out of conversation, walking up a street or down some stairs? Sorina I have only ever seen frowning, or neutral, maybe the hint of a smile I know she has; she laughs, I can hear it through the walls sometimes at night, during the day, when I’m out of the room and she has just Igraine and Dolores to talk with. It’s hidden, secret.
Sorina is always on task, too. She doesn’t talk to me unless there is explicit reason for it. A question she wants to ask, or events she needs recalling, state of students that she can shake her head about and turn to Dolores over. Igraine is morbid. And strange. I once overheard her ask Miss Novik if she had any plans to be a widow any time soon. Miss Novik had replied she still wasn’t married, and Igraine had replied, with a smile, that she wasn’t talking about that sort of widowhood.
She did it all in that strange way she usually talks, like birdsong; jumping up and down tone and pitch and speed to match her conversation partner. Mocking tone of voice dropping into sincere at the flip of a coin. Igraine isn’t even a dancer, but she plays her roles so well; diligent, thoughtless, aggressive.
Except with me. She cast me into ‘nuisance’ and has never let me change. Everyone else gets to change, be something else, get a slightly different facet of her; but not me. I always get ‘annoyed Igraine’, ‘Unhappy to see me Igraine’,‘Wished I would shut up Igraine’.
Igraine puts her lips to my ear, “Are you sure you want to make that face at me?”
I flinch. I was staring at her, wasn’t I? I can’t remember watching her move. How did she sneak up on me? I turn my face up to her, face to the skin of her neck, the throb of her pulse. I must look like a trapped animal. My neck stuck in the teeth, glassy eyes looking up to the sky while it all reels overhead, unburdened by the loss of me.
How did she sneak up on me?
I can’t figure it out. She was there, at the sink, and she is in heels still, and they click on the tiled floor and are barely muffled by the carpet. And now she is right here, leaning over me. She smells like her lotion.
Igraine skims her fingers over the water and sets them deliberately on my arm; I breathe in. I’m shivering? Her touch is heavy, with no pretence of gentleness; her hand slides smooth like a snake, up to my shoulder. Her nails are sharp, the paint on them smooth, the shine gleaming. I had watched her apply a new coat, something colourless, to them just that afternoon, while there was the glimmer of spring sun that didn’t quite grab the land like it should have. Dolores had been there. Sorina. Talking, laughing. Something I’m not quite allowed to join. Her thumbnail cuts my skin when she drags it across my collarbone, teasing a bruise there— one from Dolores— that has not quite faded.
I swallow. “Am I making a face?”
The steam is cooling on her neck. I can see it just before it touches her white skin and forms small, miniscule, droplets. It’s wrong. Her touch is so hot, hot like the steam, the same temperature. Warmer. They shouldn’t be cooling. She pinches my ear and I wince. “It’s surprising your ears are bare.”
“Oh, um—”
“—what am I saying? Of course they are,” She digs her nail in, the point of it, until I’m unsure if the drop that falls is the water on her fingers or my blood. Where she touches me aches, skin prickling, blood rushing like it will do anything but stop me from hearing what she’s saying, “Hortencia always had lovely earrings, you know.”
“I’ve seen the photos.”
She goes on, like she hasn’t heard me. “She had her loops and studs and ones that fell to her neck. Heavy silver, small gems. Dolores still has some of them, somewhere.”
I wonder how long she is going to be leaning like that. Over the tub, so far she might tip in. Her head so close I could reach out and touch. She’s not even wobbling. No strain on her face, or her body.
“You wouldn’t suit them, would you?”
I smother a nervous giggle.
Igraine shakes her head, frowning, “You didn’t know Hortencia well at all. Just a face and none of the substance.”
“Mother never mentioned you,” I retort, when she doesn’t move, trying to be leading instead of accusing. My hand shakes when I put it on hers, but I don’t have the nerve to do much more than wiggle my finger between hers and my ear, “she knew everyone, and everyone seems to remember her. But she never once said your name.”
Igraine says something I don’t catch, because her hand slides from my ear to my throat. I try to shrink away but she digs her fingers in and claims each centimetre of my neck with casual entitlement. I touch her fingers, uncertain, and she pushes me hard into the side of the tub until I let go.
When I can breathe again, shaking, its to her face, oddly discordant with the rest of her. Her eyes are dark, pupils wide, and she isn’t smiling; her lips aren’t neutral either, but softly pouting, and her thumb rubs. Soft circles, above the dip of my collarbone. Every breath, I feel her nail, her thumb. A little harder, and I wouldn’t be able to breathe at all.
Her voice is soft, pensive, when she finally talks, “You have no idea. None at all.”
Why does Mama have all these women riled up, paying attention to her? Why? “Why tell me? It’s my fault.”
Igraine smiles, all teeth, “Perhaps the only good thing you’ve ever done.”
How do I press this? How do I ask more?
“Hm,” Igraine hums, “Hm. Does that make you ready for me, I wonder?”
My skin aches where she touches, “...‘ready for you’?”
“For us.” She mumbles, odd toned, irritated.
What does that mean?
I don’t know what that means. I don’t... I feel the bite of her nail, the vice of her hand squeezing, and then—
Water surges up my nose; I snort hard, desperate, but the next breath in is all soapy water. I’m in it, I’m under it, it’s everywhere— It’s everywhere. It’s everywhere. It’s everywhere!
I grab her hand harder than I have ever dared touch her, with no time to marvel at anything at all; she is anything but soft, anything but gentle. The muscle of her hand is so hard, so unshakable, so tight around my throat. Except for that single, strong hand I can’t find where she is and where I am; I slide up to her wrist, and then she peels me off, shakes me, hits my head against the side over and over. I elbow my own ribs trying to get at her, breathing water, tasting soap. I surface for a moment, and hear a splash; Igraine’s legs are on either side of me, then, her skirt tangled over the top of me, the harshness of the fabric of her shirt against my face.
I inhale wetly, the last of the water in my mouth. Her hands slam over my face and force me back down. She bats my hands away when I try to claw at her, and all I end up doing is whacking her chest. In rhythm, like a heartbeat; one, two, one, two. Weaker and weaker. The fabric of her shirt is wet and clingy, tangling around my fingers and burning what little calm I had left into panic when I can’t pull away anymore. It sticks to me, it clings, when I pull my hands back still tangled in the folds of it I bring her down on top of me.
I throw my weight against her, but I’ve got no centre of gravity, nothing to dig my heels in. Just her, and the water, and the water, and the water—
My eyes burn when I gasp in air again, shivering, coughing, still pressed against her chest. It takes a long, long moment to realise that she’s laughing, burying the sound in my hair. I can feel her smile pressed into my scalp, the hard way she cups my nape to hold me there. Like I’ll squirm away. Like I have the strength to try. She’s on top of me. She ruined her outfit to try and kill me. She tried to kill me. She tried to kill me?
She tried to kill me, and she’s laughing about it.
The feeling of her thumb stroking my spine comes to me in slow, blotchy moments, her other hand holding my waist tight; with it the sounds of my crying. My face hurts. My nails tingle, and my tongue, and my teeth; my gums ache into the gaps between them. I can’t breathe in without coughing, and when I cough I cry harder from how much the air burns my throat, how gross it is to not be able to turn my head to spit the taste of soap out. I’ve made a mess of her shirt instead. White splotches on dark blue.
My hair stings my eyes, but with air comes fear; the fear of it happening again, of knowing that bringing my fingers up is too much, might provoke her. I can’t even feel my hands, tangled in her clothes.
Everything hurts.
Igraine is still smiling when she grabs my face, awful and mocking. She is right-handed; I’m so used to Sorina’s left that when Igraine slaps me to get my attention, I flinch into her striking hand.
“Stay with me,” She says, “Annette, you need to spit it out.”
I splutter out more water. She says it again and again, and when I vomit she holds me over the side of the tub, onto the tiles. I heave water, soap, a bit of blood; something that tastes like dinner and tastes like the acrid smell of spoilt lamb guts. It lingers on my tongue.
Belatedly, hanging there dry heaving, wondering what it ever felt like to have full, useful lungs, I realise Igraine moved the rug to the side. It is such a little thing. Of course she would. The relief, though, saps what little muscle use I had left; I bang my forehead on the edge of the tub.
Igraine pulls me back to her, into her. It’s so hot. My throat feels scalded. My eyes are; aching, burning, dry and too wet.
“Good.” Igraine says quietly, contentedly. Her hair is wet. A dribble of it sinks down from her temple, over her cheek, down her smile line and into her teeth. Gleaming, gleaming teeth.
I need to ask why; she presses our lips together. I feel my hands spasm, pressed against her chest, and her curled over her shoulder. I stare at her heat-dyed pink skin. Her eyelashes are blonde, too, framing her smiling orange eyes. I’m not ready. I’m not ready. What if Sorina sees? What if Dolores sees? What if there was noise, what if I made noise, make noises?
I gasp— what can I do?— and Igraine’s tongue slides into my mouth.
Her weight pushes me closer to the water, treacherous and eager to maim; how easy I can see it now. The burn lingers, the heat makes me dizzy; I cling to her because I have to. Because it is safer to. Or I might drown, choke, like— I don’t want that!
I have to stay close! I have to!
I want her to keep me close. Igraine tilts her head back softly; I open my mouth to her deliberately, soften my lips, become pliant putty the way Dolores taught me to. It works on Igraine just as well. I let her take my waist in both of her hands and pull me flush to her, a smile, renewed vigour in the way her mouth claims mine; my nudity to her clothed body. The contrast is... familiar. Comforting. I hold her shoulders, whine when she tries to part again.
It is the bare minimum that it be pleasant after what she did, but my next gasp makes her smirk, and my ears, ringing, bleeding, burn with more than just scalding. Her breathing is heavier when she pulls away for good, when I can’t follow anymore, but all I can hear is the frantic thumping in my ears. My head throbs and my throat hurts. My ribs ache, behind them, below them. Igraine smiles, really smiles, the first she has ever given me that isn’t forced or condescending, that I can see so clearly.
I want to fall apart.
Igraine leans close, again, I track her mouth more than her eyes. Waiting for what she’ll say, what she’ll do. Will I get another warning, or am I hoping for something that was barely a courtesy? I stay still when she leans down, cupping my face in both hands, and plants another kiss to my forehead, under my eye, over the bruise she has left dribbling blood like tears on my chest. Her eyelashes tickle. Her lips do, too. Unbelievably soft. Was it really a kiss, or just the brushing of her flesh over mine?
She stands, gets out of the tub, arranges me to slump, head propped on the lip of the bath facing the mirror wall. My eyes are blurry, watery. The minutes pass like seconds. My ears don’t get any better, neither do my limbs, but my breathing evens, smooths into something like a rhythm. I can hear the wheeze in each inhale. I sound like mama.
Igraine is looking in the mirror above the sink, fluffy towel in hand to pat at her cheeks, “You shouldn’t fall asleep in the water, Annette.”
“But you—”
“Would like to get changed.”
I can’t lift my head to look at her properly. I keep watching her in the mirror. Her reflection seems warbled, pointing at something I can’t see. A towel rack? “Because you’re wet.”
Igraine laughs, the condescending kind. The laughing at me kind. I’m confused. I want the delighted laugh from before, the awful one, the pleased to hurt me one. “Because it is past eleven, and I do intend to sleep tonight.”
Be pleased with me, please, won’t you? Just for a second more? “But you... you just—”
“Annette,” Igraine turns my head with two fingers, smiling differently, cruelly. Cruelty just for my sake. “That didn’t happen.”