The Winters(46)

“Oh my God, like this!” she said, losing patience. She grabbed the lipstick and clutched my chin in the claw of her hand, gathered my lips in a loose pucker, her mouth so close I could smell the wine on her breath. She was fifteen, I kept telling myself. This is a fifteen-year-old girl. Fifteen-year-olds shouldn’t be smoking pot and drinking alone in their dead mother’s bedroom. As she drew on my lips with a color I knew would be lurid, I thought frantically what I could say to stop this game. She let go of my face.

“Wow, yeah,” she said, squinting at her own work. “That is really not your shade.”

She turned my face to the mirror. My mouth was clownishly stained and her grip had left my cheeks dotted white. She picked out a different color.

“Don’t bother, Dani, you won’t find a flattering shade. I don’t normally wear lipstick.”

I couldn’t go back to our room with my mouth like this. Max might be home by now. There was a door ajar. The bathroom. I crossed to it, continuing to talk to her as though nothing about this episode was abnormal, as though she wasn’t a wasted teenager putting her dead mother’s lipstick on her future stepmother’s mouth.

“So, as I was saying, we’d have to leave here by noon, but I totally understand if you’re busy . . .” I felt inside the room for the switch and flicked on the light.

It wasn’t the bathroom. This was what I could only describe as a sunken oasis, not a closet so much as an exclusive boutique, with an island in the middle that was larger than the Aquarama. On the island were the pictures of Rebekah that had disappeared from the gallery, most of them now freed from their frames and spread out in seemingly organized piles, as though Dani were in the middle of an elaborate art project. The backgrounds of some of the larger headshots had been cut away and layered over one another, dozens of Rebekah faces in various emotional states. I felt my knees wobble and I turned to leave, but Dani, now close behind me, gave me a slight shove inside.

“I know, right?” she said with glee. “Isn’t it sick? Check this out.”

She hit another switch, and a set of large doors slid sideways into their wall pockets, exposing a collection of gowns, organized by color, from white sequins on the left all the way to black satin on the right, with every conceivable shade in between. Dani began to flick through the dresses methodically, conducting a sartorial show-and-tell, like a bored instructor.

“Met Ball, Tonys, second Bush inauguration, first Obama.” She paused, catching her breath. “Dior runway, Met Ball, Oscar de la Renta sample, Emmys, her last Met Ball. Oh my God, my fave.” She pulled out a strapless white poufy cocktail dress embroidered at the hem and waist with black flowers. “Givenchy. Vintage Audrey Hepburn . . .” She intently scanned the remainder of the dresses at the darker end of the scale. “I’m going to try . . . this one on, and you . . .”

I took a few steps back. So many dresses, so many occasions for them to appear together as a couple, and Max had yet to take me anywhere fancier than a French bistro in Southampton.

“I’m not in the mood to try on clothes, Dani. It’s very late—”

“I know! This!” She yanked out something black and long, thrust it towards me. “This’ll fit. It’s stretchy,” she said. Her smile was wide, genuine. “Please?”

The second I took the velvet thing from her hands, Dani stripped, tossing her nightie in the corner. I averted my eyes from her nakedness, but not before noticing she already waxed off most of whatever pubic hair she might have at her age. Everything felt wrong about this.

“I should go. We can talk at breakfast.”

“Come on. We never do anything together. Just this one time?” She wriggled the Givenchy over her hips, turned around, and lifted her hair. “Zipper, please and thank you.”

I placed the velvet dress on the island and did up the zipper, the bodice swallowing up her spine. She turned to face me, dropping her hair back around her shoulders.

“Now you.” She reached for the hem of my nightshirt and lifted it over my head with such force it caught on my nose.

“Dani!”

I covered my breasts, the dire facts of the moment closing in on me. I was now naked in front of a teenage girl.

She snorted. “Of course you wear granny panties,” she said, bending to form a funnel with the black dress, lowering it in front of my legs. “Step in, step in! Use my shoulder,” she commanded.

If only to cover my body, I stepped into the dress. Dani shimmied it over my hips. I gathered the rest of it over my breasts, quickly surmising that it was strapless. She spun me around and zipped the back. Then she took one look at me and bent over laughing. The bodice, once filled with Rebekah’s ample breasts, now wilted hollowly over mine.

“Oh my God, you’re so shy,” she teased, pinching the breast pockets, accidentally clamping one of my nipples. “Have you and my dad even had sex yet? Or are you waiting for your wedding night? Oh wait—I know the answer to that!”

“Dani, stop. I feel ridiculous.”

“I know what this needs!”

She yanked open the top drawer of the island and pulled out two fleshy disks. When I reached around back to unzip myself out of the dress, she shoved the disks down the front, roughly handling my breasts until they were perfectly in place.

“So much better.” She spun me around to face the mirror, and placed her chin on my shoulder as though she was regarding her best work yet. “Gorge, right?”