The Secrets We Kept(78)

The woman packed away her scissors and dyes and gloves. She swept my hair off the floor and put it into a small plastic bag, packing it away in her case. Before leaving, she told me a florist would deliver the nun’s habit to me in a box meant for long-stemmed roses. She opened the door and turned back toward me. “Lovely meeting you, dear.”

“You too,” I said, even though we’d never even given our names.

I locked the door behind her and walked over to the cracked mirror hanging above the bathroom sink to see the stranger in its reflection. I ran my fingers through my few remaining inches of hair. Licking the tip of my finger, I rubbed a spot of black dye off my temple and told myself I could be anyone now.

As I dressed, the thrill dulled. What would Sally think of my transformation? What would Mama have thought? I cupped my hand against the back of my neck. Mama would definitely have hated it. Sally would say it was a statement. Teddy would’ve said he loved it, even if he didn’t.



* * *



—

After Mama’s funeral, I didn’t want to be alone, so Teddy stayed at my apartment, on the couch. On nights when I couldn’t sleep, Teddy would read to me—essays in The New Yorker by E. B. White and Joseph Mitchell, short stories by men whose names I’ve forgotten. Once, on the night when I told him I couldn’t marry him, he read to me from a stack of papers in his briefcase. He hadn’t told me he was the one who’d written what he was reading until he finished, revealing that it was the first chapter of a novel he’d been working on for years. I told him I loved it, that he must finish it. “You really think so?” he asked. When I said I wouldn’t lie to him, he asked if that was true.

I had trouble meeting his gaze, but forced myself to. “I can’t marry you.”

“We can wait. For as long as you need. You’re still grieving.”

“No. It’s not that.”

“What is it, then?”

“I don’t know.”

I could feel him holding his tongue, not saying the words hanging between us. “I think you do.”

“I don’t.”

“Is it Sally?”

“What? No…I have trouble making friends. Real friends, anyway. She’s been a good friend to me.”

“Nothing has to change. I know—”

“I don’t think you know me like you think you do.”

“That’s the thing. I do.”

“What are you saying?” I asked.

“I’m saying I just want to be with you—whatever that means for you.”

But I couldn’t understand. I didn’t want to understand. “What does it mean to you? What do you want?”

“A wife,” he said. “A friend.” He sniffed up a tear. “You.”

“What do you think I am?”

He bowed his head. “Be honest with me.”

I told him I was, and he asked that we sleep on it, to give it time before making any decisions. I had agreed, mostly to get away from seeing him like that, and we parted—him to the couch and me to my bed, where I spent the night listening to him tossing and turning in the other room.



* * *



—

The following day, a storm knocked out half the power in the District. As Teddy drove us to the office, we didn’t speak or turn on the radio. The only sound was the windshield wipers battling the driving rain. When we pulled into the parking lot, I slid off his grandmother’s ring and put it on the dash. He slumped forward, and I left him like that. I had nothing else to say, and I feared anything else would either hurt him more or stop me from getting out of the car. I’d been the one to end it, but it felt as if I was breaking my own heart—not the way Sally had, but in a way that made me feel even more adrift, as though I’d cut the one tether still holding me to the ground.

Teddy didn’t come in to the office that day, and I didn’t see him before I left. He’d retrieved his suitcase and was gone before I returned to the apartment. The next day, I was called into Anderson’s office and questioned about my relationship with Sally. I was told she’d been fired and that my relationship with her had been suspect, which I denied convincingly enough for Anderson to say he believed me. They were the ones who had taught me to become someone else, after all, to lie about who I was. And turning my new power back onto them felt good.

It was all too much to think about. And yet there in Brussels, looking at myself in a mirror halfway across the world, I still couldn’t put it out of my mind. But I needed to. There was no turning back. The mission had begun.



* * *





I wrapped my hair under a scarf and set out for the rendezvous point. Brussels was buzzing, the moon a half disc above the city. The streets were packed with fairgoers from around the world. Passing a crowded café, I overheard people speaking French, English, Spanish, Italian, Dutch. As I cut through La Grand-Place, a group of Chinese men and women stood in the square’s center, gazing at the top of H?tel de Ville while passing around a box of chocolates. Two Russian men passed so close that one brushed my shoulder. Did the one in the fur cap look at me a moment too long? I didn’t turn around or quicken my pace. I just kept my gaze straight ahead and kept walking.

I arrived at the address my handler had given me on rue Lanfray, just off Ixelles Ponds. Standing in front of the grand Art Nouveau building, I was awed by its five stories of intricate inlaid wood and the swirling mint-green iron that climbed its fa?ade like ivy. The entire house belonged inside an art museum. Ascending the curved cement staircase to the double front doors, I told myself I belonged there; or rather, the person I had become did. I pressed the gold buzzer once, counted to sixteen, then pressed again. I felt a light flush of perspiration at the nape of my neck. A man dressed as a priest opened the door. “Father Pierre?” I asked, in Russian.