The Villa(22)

I’m just reaching for The Portrait of a Lady when something else catches my eye.

The spine is so warped, I can barely make out the title, white creases scarring the dark purple, the shiny foil letters dulled with age and use, but the curlicue “L” is unmissable.

Lilith Rising.

I pull the book out from the shelf, surprised at just how thin it is, and study the cover.

It’s your typical seventies trash, all that deep purple, the silver foil, the haunted and overly large eyes of the girl with the long, straight blond hair, one bloody hand raised like she’s reaching out to the reader.

The pages are yellowed and curling slightly around the edges, and I imagine how many times this book has been read in this house. Maybe out by the pool, the spine cracked and folded around so that the reader can hold it in one hand, chlorine and rosé eventually dotting the pages.

I turn the book over, my eyes drifting over the cover copy, every bit as purple as the cover itself, zeroing in on the tiny little bio of Mari Godwick at the bottom.

Born in England, Mari Godwick lives in Edinburgh, Scotland. Lilith Rising is her first novel.

That’s it.

No mention of her famous parents or her famous stepsister or her famously dead boyfriend.

No picture, either, and I reach for my phone.

There aren’t that many photos of her online, and the most prevalent one seems to have accompanied her obituary, a simple and serious shot of a delicate-looking woman in her late forties with reddish hair pulled back from her face, her eyes dark, her lips pressed together in something that isn’t quite a smile.

Scrolling down further, I finally find what I’m looking for, a picture of Mari when she was nineteen. The summer she stayed here.

The photograph is black and white. She’s standing outside what looks to be an Italian courthouse, her small, pale face set off by a high-necked black dress and a huge pair of Jackie O–style sunglasses. Her head is down, one arm raised toward the camera, a desperate attempt to block the flash. It’s a surprisingly eerie echo of the cover of Lilith Rising, that hand reaching out, covered in blood.

“Ooh, are we snooping?”

I look up, startled, to see Chess in the doorway. She’s wearing leggings and a sports bra, her hair pulled back from her face in a sweaty ponytail. She must’ve gotten a run in around her errands. Chess does love to multitask.

“Finding something to read,” I tell her, holding up the book.

She looks not even the slightest bit worse for wear from last night, and takes the book from me, eyebrows raised.

“Well, this is a whole lot,” she says. “I’m going to send a picture of this to my editor, tell her it’s what I want the paperback of Swipe Right on Life! to look like.”

“You’d look good with the seventies hair,” I reply and she winks at me.

“The bloody hand might be harder to sell my publisher on.”

“Tell them it’s the blood of the patriarchy,” I reply, and she breaks into a high, giddy laugh that I used to assume was fake but now I know is the real thing.

“So, you’ve never read it?” she asks, sounding surprised.

I shake my head. “Just saw the movie. Sarabeth Collins’s house, remember? Sleepover for her twelfth birthday party.”

Chess shakes her head, putting Lilith Rising back on the top of the bookcase. “I didn’t get invited to that one, clearly.”

Except she did, I’m sure of it. I didn’t know Sarabeth that well, and I was a shy kid. There was no way I would’ve gone if Chess hadn’t been there, too. But it’s not worth contradicting her.

“Well, it was on TV that night, and we missed, like, the first twenty minutes, but we watched the rest of it, and even though we made fun of it the entire time, I don’t think any of us actually slept afterward.”

I’d never watched the movie again, and more than twenty years later, I have only hazy memories of the plot. I remember the lead actress, her face covered in blood à la Sissy Spacek in Carrie, and I remember these shots of the house, this big, looming Victorian mansion against a very blue sky. That had made it scarier, I’d thought. Awful shit was supposed to happen in the dark, late at night. But when Victoria kills her family, she does it in the middle of the day, the blood almost garishly red in the sunlight.

“Maybe this can be my pool book,” I add, and Chess wrinkles her nose.

“Kind of dark, don’t you think?”

I shrug. “Might be neat. I mean, we listened to Aestas the other night, why not read the book that was written here, too?”

“Because Aestas is gorgeous and vibey, and this book has literal blood on the cover and the movie scared you so badly you wouldn’t sleep in your own sleeping bag.”

I laugh, but what she’s just said snags in my brain. She’s right, I hadn’t slept in my own sleeping bag that night. I’d curled up on someone else’s. I thought it was Chess’s but she just said she wasn’t there.

I almost push her on it, but shake it off. What does it matter if she was there or not, if she remembers or not?

Still, I can’t help but feel momentarily strange.

Disoriented.

It reminds me of those long months when I was dizzy all the time, my stomach lurching, and every doctor telling me there was nothing there, nothing wrong with me at all, and I shove the paperback back onto the shelf, suddenly wanting nothing more to do with Lilith Rising.