Things I Have Lost

POV: Viv

The spoon was the only clean thing in the room.

Viv Marchetti crouched in the dark of the Watch depot's back stair, with her skirts hitched in one fist and her shoulder to the damp plaster, and watched it through the crack in the door. It lay on the sergeant's desk beside a cold mug of tea and the stub of a candle: a small bone-handled thing, plated silver, polished by a hundred lazy mornings of stirring. In its bowl, tilted, floated the whole bright inverted room. The desk, the lamp, the sleeping guard in his chair with his chin on his chest and a ring of keys swinging from his belt.

Six feet. Perhaps seven. A door, a floorboard that creaked, a man who might wake.

Or one step, if you knew how to take it.

She took a breath and let the world go thin.

It was always the same. First the cold: a hollow sweetness in the chest, like the moment before you sneeze. Then the pull, behind the navel, as if a hook had caught her and begun to draw her through a very narrow place. Her skin went to light. The edges of her went soft, like a drawing smudged with a thumb. She felt herself, all of herself, hands and hair and the stiff wool of her skirt, flatten, tilt, and pour toward the shining silver curve. The stair went black. The air rang. For one long dizzy instant she was nowhere at all, a slip of image sliding down a bright glass throat.

Then she was in the spoon.

The world inside was small and strange and bowed like a fish's-eye view. The guard's face swelled above her, enormous and porous. His breath fogged the metal. She could feel him as a heat, a weight, a threat; and she moved, the way a reflection moves, sliding from silver to the brass of the lamp base, from brass to the dull brown glass of a bottle, from glass to the polished curve of the guard's own belt buckle, inches from the keys. Each hop took a heartbeat. Each cost a little more of her.

She stepped out of the buckle and into the room with the keys already in her hand.

It was so quick that the guard only stirred, and smacked his lips, and said "Margaret" in his sleep. She held her breath. Then she was back in the spoon, and out of it, and sitting on the stair with her heart going like a bird in a box, and the ring of keys, heavy and cold, in her lap.

Now, she thought. Pay the bill.

…

It was a tiny sort of falling.

She felt it go. There was no pain; there never was. It was a sort of loosening, a silent click, as of a drawer sliding shut in the next room. She stood very still and listened, and tried to find what was missing.

Mama, in the kitchen. Singing.

That was there. That was whole. The kitchen was on the third floor of a tenement in the Italian quarter, with a window onto an airshaft and a pot of something red bubbling on the iron stove. Her mother stood in front of it in her apron with a wooden spoon, one hip cocked, swaying a little as she stirred, singing in the low scratchy voice that Viv had always found embarrassing and now would have given a year of her life to hear.

Singing what?

Viv waited.

The song had a tune. She could feel it, as you feel the shape of a chair in the dark. It went up, and held, and went down, and turned over at the end like a leaf. It had words in Neapolitan, about a boat and a girl. It had a name. Her mother had said it every time, this one is called, and then the title, in her smoky voice, and laughed. She had said it hundreds of times.

The name was gone.

Not hidden. Not on the tip of the tongue. Gone, as if it had never been, and in its place a little smooth hollow with soft edges, the shape of a thing she knew had been there. She opened her mouth and tried the tune, and the tune came, thin and true, and the words did not. She hummed it to the end and stood there on the dark stair.

That's one, she thought. Pay up. Move on.

She took out the Loss Book.

…

It was a cheap pocket diary with a red cover, the kind sold in stationers' for a dime, with the corners curled from handling. Inside, in a small neat hand, ran columns of entries. Dates. Times. A single line to each. She did not decorate them. She wrote them in the flat dry tone of a woman posting a bad debt.

Oct. 3. Forgot the name of the street where Zia Concetta lived. Do not miss it.

Oct. 11. Forgot the color of my first pair of shoes. Brown, I think. Might be green.

Oct. 19. Forgot the smell of Papa's shaving soap. Did not know I knew it until it left.

She licked the pencil and wrote: Oct. 24. Forgot the name of the song Mama sang when she cooked. The one about the boat. Tune intact. Name gone.

She considered it.

Net cost of one set of keys, she added, one song title. Cheap. Dex Hallam would call that a bargain.

She closed the book and tucked it in her bodice, where it lay against her ribs like a second, flatter heart. Then she rose, gathered her skirts, and went down the back stair into the rain with the Watch's keys under her cloak, humming a tune that no longer had a name.

…

Her room was on the top floor of a boarding house on Wick Street, eleven steps from the roofline and a hundred from the nearest friend. It had a bed, a chair, a basin, and a window that looked out over a forest of chimney pots. It had, pinned to the wall above the bed, one thing she had not stolen.

A ticket.

Viv sat on the mattress, and took the Watch's keys out, and put them aside. She took a cigar box from under the bed and counted what was in it. Three hundred and six dollars. A fair stack, for a girl who had, at twelve years old, been worth exactly forty. She counted it twice, as she did every night. Then she stood, and took the ticket from its pin, and held it in both hands in the light of the candle.

SS HALCYON STAR. Merrick Bay to San Francisco, via the Horn. Cabin 14, First Class, Private. Sailing at dawn on the day following the eclipse.

A cabin of her own.

She read it again. She did that too, every night. The paper was heavy and cream-colored, with a border of anchors, and in the corner someone had stamped the shipping line's mark in blue. It cost eighty-five dollars. She had saved for it for twenty-two months. Cabin 14 had a porthole. Cabin 14 had a door that locked from the inside.

Nobody, not her stepfather, not the bonded agency, not the Terrace dancing master with his cane and his smile, would ever again be able to say come here and be obeyed.

…

She had been twelve.

She did not often let herself think it in so many words. It lived in her like a stone in a shoe, a thing she walked on and tried not to feel. Her father had died on a dock when she was ten, a bale of cotton on his head, and her mother had remarried in a year, because there were three of them and rent was rent. The man's name was Corrado. He drank. He was not cruel in any way a policeman would have understood. He simply looked at his stepdaughter one evening, across the supper table, as a man looks at a good coat in a shop, and saw that she could dance.

Charter Hall was always short of girls.

The papers had been drawn up by a smiling gentleman in a gray suit. They were called indentures of apprenticeship. They bound a minor to the service of the Charter Houses for a period of eight years, in return for board, instruction in the court arts, and the sum of forty dollars paid to her guardian. Her mother had cried. Viv had stood at the table in her Sunday dress, and watched her stepfather make his mark, and thought, with a peculiar flat clarity: I've been sold.

Six years she had danced. At every ball and masque in the Gilded Terrace: the autumn Founders' fête, the spring Hannah Merrick gala. She had worn a different gown for every season and a smile that never reached her eyes. She had turned in the arms of men who smelled of port and powder, and had learned to think of nothing at all. She had learned to look into the great chandeliered mirrors along the ballroom walls and see someone who was not herself.

That was how the Gift had come. Not as a blessing. As a door, in a mirror, at fourteen, on a night when she'd been standing alone by the glass with her heart in her mouth, wishing she were anywhere else.

And then, two years ago, a lean boy with a cane had come to the dancing master's office with a bag of coin. He had not said who he was. He had not asked for anything. He'd paid out her indenture in cash, in full, in front of a lawyer, laid the paper on the desk, and said to her, without a flicker, You're free to go.

She had never understood why.

She had asked, once. He had said: Interest. She'd known it was a lie. She'd known it as she knew a bad note in a song.

…

There was one thing she kept that was not in the Loss Book. It was in another book, a very old one, the one that lived inside her head.

A morning on a ship.

She had been six. It was a bad, crowded, stinking steamer out of Naples, with a thousand people packed below decks in the stink of vomit and cabbage, and she had been sick for eleven days. Then on the twelfth her mother had shaken her awake before dawn and said, Vieni. Come and see. And together they had pushed up the iron stair, through the hatch, into a wind so clean it hurt.

The sky had been the color of the inside of a shell. The rail was cold and wet under her hands. And beyond it, from one edge of the world to the other, lay the ocean: not blue, not gray, but every color at once, heaving and silver and vast, and so alive that she had stood with her mouth open and her mother's arm around her and not been able to speak. Mia bella, her mother had said, very softly. Look at that. Nobody can sell you that.

Viv held the ticket to her chest.

Nobody can sell you that.

She had never told anyone. It was hers. It was the one clean thing she had, and every time she used the Gift she lay awake afterward and felt for it, the way you feel for your purse in a crowd. The sky. The wind. The rail. Her mother's arm. It was still there, still whole.

Please, she thought, to nobody. Not that one. Take anything else.

…

"You're late," said Dex Hallam.

He was sitting behind his desk, a door on two barrels, with the lamp turned low and his cane across his knees. It was past midnight. The rain had stopped. On the barrel-head beside him lay a small black leather case, and next to it, open, a ledger, in which his pen was busy. He did not look up when she came in. He had a way of not looking up that was louder than looking.

"I have the keys." She put them on the desk. "Four years of the Watch's rotating pass, every door in the depot. Did you want them in a bow?"

"That will do." He blotted a line. "Cost?"

"What?"

"Don't." He looked up then, and his gray eyes were steady and tired. "The price. Say it out loud."

She had not told him about the Loss Book, exactly. She hadn't needed to. He had a talent for noticing the thing someone did not say. "A song title," she said. "My mother's. It's nothing."

"It's the price of a set of keys."

"Then I got them cheap."

"No," said Dex. "You didn't." He wrote something. She read it upside down, because she had learned to read upside down, in the dancing master's study: V.M. — keys. One song. He underlined it. "Sit."

She sat. It was a hard wooden chair and she took it sidelong, as she took all chairs, with one eye on the door. In the dim room the mirror on the wall behind him showed a smoky slice of the office, a tin ceiling, a window, the back of his dark head. She did not look at it for long.

"I have a job," he said.

…

He told it plainly. A man had come with a case of gold. A heist, unlike any he had run: a vault beneath the Charter Hall, a stone, a ward, a ball on the fourteenth night. Six thieves. A month. A million dollars, to be split.

"A million." She heard her own voice go dry. "Dex, no one is paid a million dollars to steal a rock."

"No. That's the interesting part." He turned a page. "I'd like you to come."

"You'd like."

"I need someone who can pass through glass." He said it without inflection. "No one else on this island can do what you do, and the Hall is made of mirrors. It's the only way in that the ward won't see. Your share is a sixth. Perhaps more. Enough to buy that ticket, and the ship it belongs to."

He had known about the ticket.

She stiffened. "You've been in my room."

"I've been in a great many rooms." There was no apology in it. "I don't pry for pleasure. I pry for numbers. And I knew, when I paid your indenture, what you'd do with the first money that was truly yours." He shut the ledger. "You are not obliged. Understand that. You owe me nothing, Viv."

"I know."

"Good."

"I mean it. I've paid you back. Down to the penny. Twice." She leaned forward. "You were very clear about it, if you'll remember. You said, Interest. So I paid the interest. I do not owe you anything."

"I agree."

"Then why—"

"Because this isn't a debt." His eyes met hers. They were very gray and gave nothing back. "It's a contract. Debts bind. Contracts end. There's a date, and when the date comes, we are done. I thought you'd prefer that."

She sat quite still.

It was, she thought, the cleverest thing he'd ever said to her. It was a man putting his hand out, flat, palm up, with nothing in it. Take it or don't. It was an offer made in the language of ledgers, so that she could take it in the language of ledgers and not feel she had been given anything.

And it worked. God help her, it worked.

"After the Black Noon," she said slowly, "we are finished."

"If you wish."

"I want it in writing. That on the day of the eclipse, the contract ends. That I'm free to go. That I owe you, and the Saints, and every living soul in this city, absolutely nothing."

"Done."

"Say it."

"After the Black Noon," said Dex, "you owe no one anything."

His voice was perfectly level. His hands, on the desk, did not move. But she had spent six years learning to read men in ballrooms, the little things, the fingers, the throat, and she saw the small muscle beside his jaw flicker, once, like a pulse.

He doesn't want it to end, she thought.

And he'd rather die than say so.

…

She stood at the door, her hand on the latch, and looked back. It was something about the light. The lamp had burned low, and the room was a pool of amber, ringed by dark, and he had bent to his Ledger again with the pen scratching and the cane propped against his knee. Behind him, in the old cracked mirror on the wall, she could see his shoulders, and the line of his neck, the shadow of his hair.

He was humming.

She didn't think he knew. His lips were closed. The sound was in his chest, the low unconscious thrum of a man doing sums. A tune. Slow, and simple, and sad, with a long soft turn at the end, like a leaf coming down.

She had heard it before. She had heard him hum it a hundred times, and never listened.

She listened now.

And the breath went out of her, as if she'd been struck. A strange, sharp ache bloomed under her breastbone. It was a feeling she knew without being able to name: the feeling of a word on the tip of the tongue, a door half open, a face glimpsed in a crowd. Tonight she had lost the name of her mother's song. She had searched for it on the stair and found a smooth blank hollow.

But this tune was not her mother's.

It was not a Neapolitan boat song. It was nothing she had ever heard. Yet something in the center of her chest leaned toward it, like a plant to a window, as if she'd lost it long ago and had just that moment remembered what it was to have it.

She stood in the doorway, with her heart going, and did not know why she wanted to cry.