NUMB: Isaura's Grace

Isaura Valcourt had learned that the face was a door, and that a door could be painted to look like a wall. She sat on the edge of the bathtub at ten past five, before the house woke, with the little lamp clipped to the mirror and the tap running low to cover the sound of her own breathing. The light made everything honest. It showed the yellow-green bloom under her left eye, the split in her lower lip that had begun to knit, and the long violet bar across her collarbone where the edge of the stair rail had met her the night before. Or where her father had met her with the stair rail. The difference mattered to no one but her. She opened the tin she kept inside an empty tampon box, because no one in the house would ever open that. Inside were her tools: a green corrector the color of mint leaves, a peach one, three foundations she had mixed into a shade that matched nothing sold in stores, and a sponge worn thin from use. She had bought each piece one at a time over three years, with coins from the bottom of coat pockets and the occasional crumpled note Neriah pressed into her palm and pretended was a loan. Green first, to cancel the red. Then peach, to cancel the blue. Then the foundation, pressed rather than rubbed, in small patient taps, the way she had taught herself from videos watched on her phone with the sound off. She worked in silence. Her hand did not shake. It had stopped shaking a long time ago, and she had noticed that stopping, the way you notice a clock that no longer ticks, and had decided not to think about it. When she finished, a girl looked back from the glass. Twenty years old, dark hair twisted into a knot, pale skin, a little tired. A girl with nothing to hide. "There you are," Isaura whispered. It was something her mother used to say, in the mornings, when she pulled the curtains back and found Isaura buried in blankets. There you are. Seraphine Valcourt had said it as though finding her daughter each day were a small miracle she never grew tired of. Seraphine had been dead for eleven years. Isaura switched off the lamp and put the tin back inside its box. She wiped the sink twice. Evidence was a thing you had to think about even in the places no one looked. * * * The kitchen was already warm when she came down, and already occupied. "You're late," said Ottoline. It was not true. It was twelve minutes to six, and Isaura had been up for an hour. But Ottoline Valcourt did not say things because they were true. She said them because they were useful, and a stepdaughter who was always slightly in the wrong was a stepdaughter who never quite felt able to look up. "Sorry," said Isaura, and took the apron from its hook. Her stepmother sat at the head of the breakfast table in a silk robe the color of old wine, one manicured hand wrapped around a cup of coffee Isaura had not yet been allowed to make correctly. She was a beautiful woman in the way of polished furniture: everything about her gleamed and nothing about her gave. She watched Isaura move around the kitchen the way a landlord watches a tenant. "Eggs for your father. Soft, not runny. And the toast cut diagonally, he doesn't like it straight." A pause. "Wrenna wants the cereal, not the eggs. Make sure there's no almond milk left in the house, she says it's making her skin break out." "Yes." "Yes, what?" "Yes, Madam Ottoline." The corner of Ottoline's mouth moved, a tiny satisfied flicker. It was the nearest thing she had to a smile. Isaura cracked the eggs. She kept her left side turned toward the stove, as she always did, so that the light fell on the better side of her face. She had been in this kitchen every morning for nine years, since the wedding, and had come to know its sounds the way a sailor knows weather. The clink of Ottoline's cup meant patience. The scrape of a chair meant irritation. The heavy, uneven tread on the stairs meant that it was time to make herself small. Bertrand Valcourt entered like a man arriving at a meeting he intended to dominate. He was broad and gray-templed, in a good suit he had not paid off, with a face that had once been called distinguished and now merely looked unforgiving. He did not say good morning. He took the newspaper from the table, snapped it open, and sat. Isaura set his plate before him, the eggs soft and the toast cut at its angle. He looked at it for a moment too long. "The toast is dry." "I buttered it, Papa." "Is that how you speak to me?" The kitchen went still. The knife in Isaura's hand felt suddenly very small. Out of the corner of her eye she saw Ottoline lift the cup to her lips and hide a look of quiet interest behind the rim. "I'm sorry," Isaura said. "I'll bring more butter." He stared at her. Then he returned his eyes to the paper, and the moment passed, folded up and put away like something to be used later. That was the worst of it, she thought. Nothing was ever finished. It was only postponed. Wrenna arrived at six-fifteen, in the uniform of an exclusive girls' academy that Isaura had never been allowed to attend. She was nineteen months younger than Isaura and a head taller, with Ottoline's cheekbones and a long, glossy fall of hair that she touched often, as though checking that it was still there. She dropped into a chair and slid her phone across the table. "Oh my God, look at this," she said to her mother. "Ilsabet Moreau got the lead in the spring production. Ilsabet. She can't even hold a note." "Terrible," said Ottoline. "Isaura, my juice." Isaura brought the juice. Wrenna took it without looking and then, as Isaura turned, said in a pleasant, carrying voice, "Your makeup's a bit much today. Are you trying to impress someone?" It was a dart thrown with perfect aim. Isaura felt her pulse jump behind her ribs. She did not look at her father. "It's just a normal day," she said. "It looks like a mask." "Wrenna," Ottoline murmured, in the tone of a woman who had no intention of stopping anything. Isaura said nothing. She had learned that silence was a kind of armor, thin but sometimes sufficient. She wiped her hands on her apron and began to gather the dishes, and when Bertrand's chair scraped back she kept her eyes on the plates in front of her. "Fix your face before you go out," he said, passing behind her. Quiet. Casual. "I don't want people thinking I run a house of slovenly girls." His hand rested for half a second on her shoulder, right on the bruise. Pressure, deliberate, brief. Then he took his briefcase and left. The plate in her hands did not rattle. She stood at the sink with the water running over a cup that was already clean, and counted the seconds until the front door closed. Eleven, she thought. Twelve. There you are. * * * The walk to school took twenty-two minutes if she did not stop. Isaura did not stop. She had a rule about the walk: she let herself think only about small, solid things. The cracked paving stone outside the bakery. The cat that slept on the wall of the chandler's shop. The way the morning light came down the length of Pelham Lane in long, pale bars, and how if she kept her pace even she could cross them one by one, like a girl stepping across a stream. It was the only time of day that belonged to her. At the end of the lane, a figure was waiting at the gate with her arms folded and her chin lifted in the posture of someone who had been left standing in a cold wind for quite long enough. "You're four minutes behind," said Neriah Quill. "I timed it." Isaura felt something in her chest loosen, as if a knot had been undone by a gentle thumb. "Ottoline was in a mood." "Ottoline is a mood. She's a weather system." Neriah fell into step beside her with a decisive stride, her scuffed boots ringing on the pavement and her dark curls trying to escape a scarf the color of marmalade. She was small and quick and fierce, built like a sparrow and carrying herself like a hawk. Her eyes went to Isaura's face and moved across it in a single, practiced sweep, left to right, a doctor reading a chart. She did not ask anything. That was the courtesy of her. She only said, very low, "Collarbone?" "Just a little." "Show me." "Not here." "Isaura." A pause. A breath. Isaura pulled the collar of her blouse aside for exactly one second. Neriah's jaw went rigid. A muscle ticked in her cheek. When she spoke, her voice was perfectly flat, which Isaura had learned was much worse than shouting. "One day," Neriah said, "I'm going to go to your house and set that man's car on fire." "You'll do no such thing." "I would be so good at it. I've thought about it carefully. I'd wear gloves." A laugh escaped Isaura before she could stop it, small and cracked and real, and the sound of it startled her. When was the last time she had laughed? It felt like finding a coin in a coat she had not worn for a year. Neriah looked pleased and furious at once. She hooked her arm through Isaura's and said nothing more, and they walked the rest of the way together beneath the long bars of light. At the school doors, Neriah squeezed her arm once. "Tell me if it gets worse," she said. "It won't." "It always does." Isaura did not answer. It was the one question she had no cover for. Behind her, the bell began to ring, and she went in with her shoulders straight and her face painted and her small, perfect, practiced smile, a girl with nothing to hide, while the bruise on her collarbone burned like a coal beneath her collar. * * *