Perfect Ruin. Lauren DeStefano
climbs down from the table and dusts her hands on her shirtfront. “I don’t see why not,” she says. “It’ll give me someone to talk to, at least. I’m always left waiting in the hallway. They don’t even offer me any of their snacks.”
“Tell Mom so she doesn’t worry,” Lex says.
“She’s sleeping. Already left a note.”
Alice runs the tap and smoothes water over some defiant strands of hair. She’s done it up in elaborate curls held in place by bronze clips that compliment her curls’ many shades of red. She’s wearing a blue dress that curls and billows around her knees and elbows as she moves through the mundane tasks of putting away the bulbs and straightening an image on the wall. Sometimes she’s unreal. Something that floated down from the sky.
Before the incident, she and Lex were seldom home. She had a dress for every color the sun illuminates and there was always cause to wear one. Even when I was a child, I admired the love they had, the way every outing, every dinner party or hike through the woods was an adventure. Now Alice dresses up only for weekend errands, and Lex’s jumper group every Friday, even though the only people to see her are the shuttle and train passengers. Her job in the gardens requires a drab uniform that I’ve always thought looked like it was trying to smother her.
I feel underdressed in my academy uniform, yet I know that I won’t have time to change. Alice, reading my mind, disappears to the bedroom and returns, pressing silver earrings into my palm; they’re shaped like stars cascading down little chains.
“Better get moving,” she says, jostling the back of Lex’s chair. “If we miss the train, we’ll have to walk.”
Outside, the sky has become a deeper blue, filling fast with stars. As we step onto the train platform, Lex crushes a daisy that’s growing between the cobbles. I wonder if he remembers what flowers are, not only what they look like, but that they exist at all. He’s knocked over plenty of Alice’s vases, and he has no idea what the shattering glass was before he ruined it. He’s told me that he can’t remember how eyelashes are shaped. He can’t conjure an image of our mother’s window boxes full of tomato plants, though he had looked at them every day of his life.
The seven thirty train isn’t crowded. There’s a group of men in suits at the far end of the car; one of them tips his hat flirtatiously to Alice, and she tugs on her earring, smirking for a moment before turning her attention to ushering Lex into his seat. There’s a mother listening patiently as her young child recites the multiplication tables. There’s a girl traveling alone, which I wouldn’t have found strange before the murder. She’s wearing the blue necktie worn by sixth-through eighth-year students. She’s young but her face is pointed up, and something about the ferocity in her eyes is vaguely familiar.
Beside me, Alice rests her head on Lex’s shoulder, and he rubs her arm, says something in her ear that makes her smile.
A patrolman paces the aisle after the train has begun to move, and the girl in the blue tie plays with the ring hanging from her neck as she watches him. I’m sure I’m imagining the snarl she gives once he has passed by. Her eyes meet mine and I look away. I watch the sky slowly turning darker blue. In the long season, the sun burns until late evening, but the short season is approaching now and the days are getting shorter.
“We’ll have two hours to burn,” Alice says. “There’s a tea shop at the end of the block we could try.”
I smile. “Okay.”
“Are you feeling okay?” she says. “You seem a little distant.”
I feel the eyes of the girl in the blue tie watching me, though I don’t look in her direction to confirm. And I feel the patrolman watching me, not just here but everywhere I go. For the first time in my life, I feel unsafe and I don’t know how to help it. The king has insisted that we go about our lives as normal, that the patrolmen will keep us safe, but who was there to keep Daphne Leander safe?
“I’m okay,” I say.
“Dad shouldn’t have let you watch the broadcast,” Lex says. “All it’s done is cause you to worry about everything.”
“I needed to see it,” I say. “I don’t need to be sheltered.”
“Says the girl who still sleeps with the light on after I tell her a harmless ghost story.”
“That was years ago,” I say. “I’m not a baby, you know.”
“I am certain it was only last season,” Lex says, and his voice deepens when he adds, “The tale of the ghost birds that flew into the city and pecked everyone to death.”
“I don’t recall leaving any lights on,” I say, and am impressed by my cool tone.
“Don’t listen to him,” Alice says.
“Do they sell sweets at the tea shop?” I say. “I skipped dinner and now I’m hungry.”
“I’m sure they do.”
Lex says something about my teeth rotting out of my head and how the only way to stop me from crying as a baby was to give me sugar water, and the conversation moves into the comfort of trivial things. But in the window, among the clouds, I see the reflection of the girl in the blue tie. I can’t shake the idea that she looks familiar, even though I can’t remember ever seeing her in the city.
The train stops and Alice and I guide Lex onto the platform, keeping him out of the way of passengers entering and exiting. I feel a tug at the back of my shirt, and when I turn around, the girl in the blue tie is holding a silver star earring in her palm. “You dropped this,” she says. Her eyelids are smeared with pink glitter, and it isn’t until after she has walked away that I realize why she looks so familiar. She’s a younger version of the murdered girl. They could be sisters. And they probably are.
The jumper group is held behind a closed door in a recreational room of the courthouse that used to be a holding cell for criminals decades ago. Even spouses, siblings, and parents aren’t allowed inside.
Alice straightens the collar of Lex’s shirt and kisses him. “Handsome,” she accuses. “I’ll be right outside when it’s time to go home.”
“I’ll be waiting, gorgeous,” he says.
“Gorgeous,” she says, exhaling a little laugh. “For all you know, I’ve colored my face green.”
“Then you’d be gorgeous and green,” he says.
She does her best not to show it, but it’s hard for her to relinquish her husband into the care of a fellow jumper, who ushers him to the circle of chairs. They’ve always shared everything, and this is something he never talks about. There’s a camaraderie among these group members that never leaves the room.
The girl in the blue tie slips past us into the room and finds a seat. She looks so small and out of place there among the others. Most of the jumpers are old enough to have grown cynical about our little world, discontent. I’ve never heard of a child jumping. The others are disfigured and disabled from their attempts, but she looks polished and thin in her pressed uniform. Her hair, the same sweetgold blond as the murdered girl’s, is held back by a white band with a bow on one side. Someone hands her a paper cup and she manages a polite if despondent smile.
“Okay,” Alice says, putting her hand on my back and guiding me toward the door. “Let’s get out of here.” We pass others who linger in the hall, waiting for their loved ones while reading or talking amongst one another. This is where Alice would have waited in her pretty dress, and when she went home she would have simply hung it in the closet again. I don’t know that I can ever forgive Lex for squandering her. And yet she has never complained about having to care for him. She could go out more if she wanted to; if he’s in the throes of a novel, he probably won’t even notice. But she mostly just leaves for work in the greenhouses.
A patrolmen opens the door for us. “Ladies.” He nods as we pass by. “Be safe out there tonight.”