The response is a soft kiss against the hollow of my neck, his hands sweeping the hair over my shoulders. It has been too much to lie beside him every night, feeling a rag doll’s emptiness, to have the fragmented dreams of June Beans on silver trays and winding mansion hallways and hedge maze paths that took me no nearer to his presence.
Now I feel the full weight of him. And it’s making me greedy, making me tilt my head so that his kisses to my neck reach my lips, and making me take him with me as I lean back into the pillows that clatter with beads. A gemstone button is pressing into my back.
The smoke of the incense is alive. It traces the length of us. The heady perfume of it makes my eyes water, and I feel strange. Weary and flushed.
“Wait,” I say when Gabriel slides the strap of my slip down my shoulder. “Doesn’t this feel weird to you?”
“Weird?” He kisses me.
I swear the smoke has doubled.
There’s a rustling sound on the other side of the tent, and I bolt upright, startled. Gabriel blinks, his arm coiled around mine, sweat trickling from his dampened hair. Something has happened. Some kind of spell. Some supernatural pull. I’m certain this can be the only explanation. There’s the feeling of returning from someplace far.
Then I hear Madame’s unmistakable cackling. She pushes into the tent, clapping, her white smile floating in the smog. She’s saying something in broken-sounding French as she stomps on the incense sticks to extinguish them. “Merveilleux!” she cries. “Lilac, how many was that?”
Lilac slips into the tent, sorting through a wad of dollar bills. “Ten, Madame,” she says. “The rest complained they couldn’t see through the slit.”
Horrified, I hear male voices grumbling their disappointment on the other side of the tent. Amid a curtain of beads I can see a deliberate slit in the tent. I swallow a scream, cover myself by hugging a pink silk pillow to my chest.
Gabriel’s jaw tenses, and I put my hand on his knee, hoping it will quiet him. Whatever Madame was planning, we must play along.
“Aphrodisiacs are quite potent, aren’t they?” Madame says, reaching into a lantern and snuffing the flame with her finger and thumb. “Yes, you put on quite a show.” She’s looking at me when she adds, “Men will pay great money to see what they can’t touch.”
is painted in red cursive on a broken plank from an old fence. She is building a cage from bits of rusted wire and coat hangers. She has Gabriel bend the lengths of wire into curves and paint them with a coating I’ve spent the morning mixing from gold eye shadow, water, and paste. The girls are not happy to forfeit their gold makeup. They shove me as they pass; their lifeless eyes bore into me; they mutter words I can’t hear, spitting on the ground. “They’re jealous,” Lilac says, a pin in her lips as she sews ruffles onto a white shirt. “New blood and whatnot.”
We’re huddled in the red tent, and I’m dunking gray feathers onto a galvanized bucket of blue dye and then fastening them with clothespins to a makeshift clothesline to dry. I wonder what type of bird had to die for this cause. A pigeon or seagull, I’d guess.
The dye stains my fingers, lands in fat drops on the threadbare oversize shirt that makes up my entire outfit. Madame will not have dye spilling onto her good clothes.
“No, no, no!” Madame cries, bursting into the tent and shaking all its walls. “You’re making a mess of those feathers, girl.”
“I told you I didn’t know what I was doing,” I mumble.
“No matter.” Madame grabs my arm and pulls me to my feet. “I wanted to speak to you anyway. Lilac will finish your gown.”
Lilac mutters something I can’t hear, and Madame kicks a clod of dirt at her, making her cough onto the ruffled shirt.
“There’s a washbasin and a dress laid out for you in the green tent,” Madame says. “Make yourself presentable and meet me by the wheel.”
With effort I’m able to scrub most of the dye from my fingers. Some of it is trapped along my cuticles, outlining my nails in blue, making my hands look like sketches of themselves.
When I meet up with Madame, the Ferris wheel is slowly turning. “The gears have to warm up in this chill,” Madame says, wrapping a knitted shawl around my shoulders. “But we have things to discuss,” she goes on. “Things that would be overheard on the ground.”
Jared pulls a lever, and the wheel comes to a stop with a car waiting for us.
Madame ushers me ahead and then climbs in after me. The car rocks and creaks as we ascend.
“You have remarkable shoulder blades,” Madame says. I can’t tell what type of accent she’s trying for today. “And your back shows just the right amount of spine. Not too knotted. Subtle.”
“You were watching me change,” I say. It’s not a question.
She doesn’t bother denying it. “I need to know what I’m selling.”
“What are you selling?” I say, daring to look away from my clenched fist and at her smoke-shrouded face. Embers flit on the wind, and I feel their tiny pinches on my bare knee. Up high, away from the device Jared uses to warm the earth, it’s blustery cold. My nose is starting to drip. I hug the shawl around my shoulders.
“I’ve told you,” she says. “An illusion.”
She smiles, her eyes dark and faraway as she traces her finger down the slope of my cheek. Her voice is low and sweet. “Soon you’ll crumple into yourself. The flesh will melt from your bones. You’ll scream and cry until it’s done. You have less than a handful of years.”
I ignore the imagery. It is easiest to overlook the truth sometimes.
“Will you charge admission for that?” I say.
“No,” she sighs, and tosses her spent cigarette over the edge. She looks small and incomplete without it. “I intend to make my customers forget these ugly things. No one will look at you and think about your expiration date. They will see youth stretching out like a canyon.”
I can’t help it. I look down. Most of the girls are sleeping through the day, but a few of them are up and about, bossing the children, tending the weedy gardens, flaunting themselves before the bodyguards for a bit of attention. Anything they can do to feel that they’re alive. All of them hating me for being so high over their heads.
“You’ll put on a good show for me, won’t you?” Madame says. “There is only one rule. You and your boy must behave as if you are alone. My customers will not want to be seen. They are not behind the walls but are the walls themselves.”
The idea of performing for “the walls” gives me no comfort. But I only need to play along until I find an escape, and there are worse things than being trapped in a makeshift birdcage with Gabriel, pretending we’re alone. Right? My throat feels dry and swollen.
Madame reaches into the infinite bright scarves draped over her chest and pulls out a small silver compact. She opens it, revealing a single pink pill.
I eye it warily.
“It’s to prevent pregnancy,” she says. “There are lots of fake pills going around since the birth control ban, but I have a reliable seller. Manufactures them himself.”
As though to mock us, a child screeches as one of the Reds drags her past the Ferris wheel by the hair.
“I can’t waste them on all my girls, of course,” Madame says. “Only the useful ones. I shudder to think what other horrors would fall from Lilac’s womb if I let her reproduce again.”
Lilac.