No One Knows Us Here(66)

If I died now, what was the point? Everything would have been for nothing. Wendy would go back to her grandmother or wind up in foster care. She wouldn’t last a month. She would run away, end up on the streets. Sam would find someone else. My whole life had led me here, to this crumbling little town on the edge of the Old World.

One morning in the new hotel, I woke up to the sound of pounding on the door. A key turned in the lock. Two maids entered, pushing their cleaning cart. They spoke to each other in animated voices. It wasn’t French but some other language.

I sat up in bed and cleared my throat, and the two women jumped. They spoke in French to me then, apologizing. I didn’t catch each word, but I got the basic gist of what they were saying: we’re sorry, please excuse us, we will come back later.

“Désolée,” I said. They were already backing the cart from the door. I wanted to explain to them why I was still in bed at this hour. I didn’t know what hour it was, exactly. The afternoon.

I couldn’t say what day it was, how long we had been here. Leo had booked himself a separate room. He checked on me sometimes, asked me if I needed to see another doctor. What I needed, I told him, was quiet. I needed to sleep it off, whatever it was.

From the balcony I could see the sea, a gray line across the horizon. The sky above was not all the way blue. Everything was bleached out.

After the maids left, I decided I should get up. Take a shower, get dressed, find Leo. I didn’t feel any better than before. Maybe I’d just gotten used to it. This was how I would be now, groggy and achy and half-alive.

I riffled through the contents of my suitcase but couldn’t find anything I wanted to change into, so I climbed back into bed with the Mirror and looked up how to say “I am sick” in French. Je suis malade. I clicked on the microphone and listened to it, over and over. I practiced forming the words in my mouth. When the maids returned, I could tell them what was wrong with me, and they would understand.

I spoke the words into the Mirror, to see if it would understand, and it suggested a video for me to watch. “Je Suis Malade” was the name of a song, a very famous song by Lara Fabian. I watched the video—a live performance, with a pianist and orchestra—all the way through. I didn’t understand anything she said other than “Je suis malade,” but I understood that something was tearing away at her, wearing her down. She was getting sicker and sicker—she didn’t know if she would survive this, whatever it was. She was heartbroken and furious. I could feel it in her voice, see it on her face. At the end, the audience erupted into applause, and Lara Fabian stood there, stunned, as if she had lived her pain all over again during the song and hadn’t yet emerged from it. Like she didn’t remember she was onstage at all.

I fell back asleep and dreamed of my stepfather, Jason, holding that cottontail bunny in his cupped hands. Of Wendy and me running to him, screaming, “Don’t crush it! Don’t crush it!” But as soon as we reached him, he smashed his hands together, twisting them back and forth. We screamed louder, but then he opened up his hands and it flew out. Not the bunny—a bird. A little brown bird. It shot straight out of Jason’s open hands and flapped its wings. The sound of its wings whirred in my ear so loud I shot up in my bed.



My eyes adjusted to the light. The room was different, not the darkened tomb I’d fallen asleep in. A frigid sea breeze billowed the curtains out into the room.

“You’re awake.”

I jumped at the sound of his voice, unsure where it was coming from. Then Leo stepped in from the balcony. He came up to me, placed his hand on my forehead. “Your fever seems to have broken,” he said.

I didn’t know I’d had a fever.

“Feeling better?”

I nodded and sank back into the cushions. I did feel better, I decided. “What time is it?” I squinted and peered out the window, but I had no idea. It wasn’t nighttime. The sky was hazy white. I wasn’t sure how long I’d slept, if it was still the same day or the next.

“Almost four,” Leo said. “I came to get you. You have an appointment downstairs.”

“An appointment?”

“You’ll feel better afterward.”

Leo said I didn’t need to get dressed; I could head straight downstairs wearing what I was wearing now. What I’d been wearing for days. He let me go to the bathroom. I needed to brush my teeth. I needed to go home. I’d feel better as soon as I touched American soil again, I was sure of it. I wondered if I was allergic to France.

It was funny, I mused, how the best part of this job was actually the worst. I’d wanted to go to France. I’d wanted to see the world. Just not with Leo.

All this faking was wearing on me.

I had this friend in college who could speak two languages fluently, Korean and English. He majored in international relations, so everybody always asked him if he wanted to be a translator. He said no. That was one job he would never do, no matter how desperate. It was dangerous, he explained, to spend all day saying someone else’s words. You’d lose a part of yourself.

He didn’t believe in donating blood, either, I remembered, for similar reasons.

That was how it felt, I decided as I brushed my teeth. Like I didn’t know who I was anymore. Always playing a part. That was what ailed me. I was weakening by the minute. It had only caught up to me, making my voice hoarse, my skin break out in angry red bumps. My body was rebelling against me. I was aging out of my role.