Jane, Unlimited

  “They’re not going to make her move to some horrible, remote place, are they?”

  “Nah. She’ll be allowed to live wherever she wants. She’ll just have to take a trip to Geneva every couple years for follow-up.”

  “Why does Mrs. Vanders let her have dangerous information?” Jane says indignantly. “Why does Ivy need to know where the Panzavecchias are going?”

  “She doesn’t know,” says Patrick, “and she still won’t know when she gets there. I don’t know either. Mr. and Mrs. Vanders do a good job of keeping things from us. Even from their son, Cook.”

  “I bet they do,” Jane says, thinking of Aunt Magnolia.

  “Hey. Knowing the truth in this business is really dangerous. People die.” The words are punching themselves out of his mouth.

  “Like your parents,” Jane says.

  “People die,” he says simply.

  She studies him in the darkness.

  “I don’t know Kiran very well,” Jane says. “But I can relate to how she’s feeling. It’s . . . confusing. Horribly. It’s like having everything ripped away from you and then thrown back at you all sharp and unrecognizable. But I can see you had a not-too-terrible reason for your lies. You didn’t do it out of selfishness, or maliciousness, or cowardice.”

  “I still shouldn’t have lied,” says Patrick, choking over the words. “She trusted me, and she was always honest with me. She knows me better than anyone, and I lied to her. What was I thinking? If she never forgives me, I don’t blame her.”

  Patrick turns his face from Jane, because he’s crying. It takes Jane a moment to realize she’s crying too. This is Aunt Magnolia’s apology, these words coming out of Patrick’s mouth. Aunt Magnolia can’t say them herself. She’s gone. But she made Jane promise to come to this house.

  It was all she’d been able to do.

  The rain seems to be clearing away. Clouds push across the sky, revealing stars and obscuring them again. Jane rests a hand on her own shoulder, where the bell of her jellyfish tattoo sits under her sleeve. It’s the visible proof that Aunt Magnolia is a part of her. “How long do you think we’ll be waiting?” she asks.

  Patrick wipes at his face with the back of his hand and squints at the sky above the water. “Not too much longer,” he says. “You don’t have to wait, you know. There’s no reason for you to get pneumonia.”

  “I’ll wait,” Jane says, not certain why she doesn’t want to leave him. “Will you tell me what happened to Charlotte?”

  “Charlotte?”

  “Kiran’s stepmother.”

  “I know who she is,” Patrick says. “I don’t think anyone knows what happened to her.”

  “So she wasn’t tied up in this spy stuff?”

  “Oh,” he says. “I see why you’re asking. No. Charlotte was an interior designer. She had no connection to any of this. Mrs. Vanders even made some serious inquiries—discreetly—after she went away, but nothing came of it. Charlotte’s departure is a mystery.”

  “Okay,” Jane says, then swallows. She pushes the words out. “What about my aunt?”

  “Your aunt?”

  “Ivy told me to ask you for some sort of information about her.”

  Patrick pauses. “You mean the part where she died?”

  Jane breathes in.

  “Yeah,” she says. “The part where she died.” She breathes out.

  “You’re right to ask,” says Patrick. “Just before the Antarctica trip, she came to a gala. At some point during the night, she left us without saying good-bye, which was unusual for Magnolia. We knew she was headed to Antarctica to take pictures of whales and penguins; it wasn’t a CIA trip. Then we saw the news about how she got lost in a storm on the peninsula. She was well-regarded as a photographer, so it got picked up, and we pay attention to the news. How did you learn about it? Did you get a call?”

  “Yes.”

  “Do you remember who called you?”

  “The connection was terrible,” Jane says. “His name was John Something but I couldn’t hear straight. Someone from the research station; he didn’t really know her. Then we got cut off, and I kept hoping the whole thing was some sort of mistake, until someone from the university came to talk to me. They mailed me her things from Ushuaia. They never found her body.”

  “Right,” says Patrick. “Well, whenever an operative dies, we do some digging as a matter of course. When we dug deeper about Magnolia, our sources in Argentina told us she had the flu when her ship crossed the Drake Passage and she never left her cabin. Our other sources told us that she had the flu in Antarctica at the research station too, and never left her room. Next thing we know, she went out, got caught in the storm, and died.”

  “But—why would she go out if she had the flu?”

  “You’re missing my point,” says Patrick. “What I’m saying is that none of the people we’ve talked to ever actually laid eyes on her. No one can confirm seeing her on the ship or on the peninsula. She was always ‘in her room,’ but we haven’t been able to figure out who was initiating that story. And we can’t find any records of her flying from any American airport to any airport in South America, either. You see what I’m saying? We’re not convinced Magnolia ever went to Antarctica. The CIA has her categorized as a fallen operative, but we haven’t been able to confirm how or where she actually died.”

  Jane’s body is an ocean, removed from feeling and from any consciousness of time. She knew, Jane thinks. She had a plan. She left her wool hat behind for me. She made me promise to come to this house. She left me a message.

  Jane sits up straight and stares at Patrick in the dark.

  What if . . .

  “Oh, for the love of god,” Patrick says with sudden violence. He’s staring out to sea.

  “What is it?”

  “That woman is a piece of work,” he says, pointing to the sky above the water.

  Jane turns to see what he’s looking at and is met with the vision of an oblong shape barely visible against the night sky. It’s like a whale in the sky, with a few flashing lights where she imagines its belly to be. “Is that . . . a blimp?”

  “It’s a freaking zeppelin,” Patrick says.

  “A zeppelin!”

  “She owns a helicopter, this lady, and a seaplane, but she decides to pick up the children, the art, and my sister in her zeppelin. That means long ropes, and Ivy having to deal with the stress of not dropping Christopher or Grace or a Brancusi or a Rembrandt into the ocean. It’s unnecessary!” he says.

  “It’s surreal,” Jane says.

  “It’s romantic,” Patrick says scornfully, “coming to the rescue in a zeppelin. Poor Philip. He’s got to drop out of the zeppelin and there’s no way he’s not going into the drink.”

  “I didn’t know anyone actually said ‘the drink,’” Jane says.

  “It seemed like the right term to describe the water under a zeppelin,” Patrick says, still disgusted.

  Jane snorts, and Patrick snickers despite himself.

  It’s too dark to see what’s going on out there. After what feels like a long time, the zeppelin moves off into the clouds. Patrick pushes to his feet. “Stay here,” he says, then runs out to the beach with his flashlight and flashes it a few times toward the water in a rhythmic pattern.

  Before too long, Jane sees The Ivy returning to shore, then hears the purr of its engine. When the boat gets close, someone climbs out, drops into the water, and begins to move toward shore. The boat zips away again, perhaps to be moored on some other part of the island.

  Patrick returns to the brush with the new person, who turns out to be Philip Okada, soaked through and shivering.

  “Hi,” Jane says.

  “Hi,” says Philip, running a hand through wet hair, not seeming particularly surprised to see her. He’s wearing all black with his orange Chuck Taylors.


  “Did Ivy and the kids make it into the zeppelin okay?” she asks.

  “Yeah.”

  Patrick pushes through branches, reaches for the big stone door, and hauls it open. Philip ducks through.

  “You coming?” says Patrick to Jane.

  “I’ll catch up,” Jane says.

  “You sure?”

  “Go ahead,” she says. “I won’t be long.”

  Jane is left alone, to soak in the night. The clouds are drifting fast and the waves are crashing hard on shore. Her own shivering has calmed.

  Jane has things rooting her to the earth. She has her anger; she has her grief. She’s awake now, and centered in these things. And she’s not alone. There’s a friend out there in a zeppelin. There’s a dog back in the house. There are people in the house, who have resources. There’s an umbrella she intends to rebuild. There’s a message from Aunt Magnolia. And there’s the seed of a new question—just the seed, which will grow as Jane feels able to nurture it—about whether maybe—just maybe—what was lost could be found.

  A bell rings somewhere in the depths of the house,

  sweet and clear, like a wind chime.

  Mrs. Vanders, the little girl, Kiran, Ravi, or Jasper?

  Aunt Magnolia? Jane thinks. Where should I go?

  In Which Someone Loses a Soul and Charlotte Finds One

  Jane decides.

  What if Charlotte’s disappearance is the puzzle piece that will make sense of everything else?

  “Okay,” Jane says to Kiran, starting down the stairs. “I’ll walk with you, and you can tell me about Charlotte.”

  But Kiran doesn’t respond right away. She’s cupping her ear and frowning as if she’s trying to hear something. “Did you hear that?”

  “I can’t hear anything but the world’s most anxious dog,” says Jane, who’s reached Jasper’s landing. Jasper’s now butting his head against her boots, whimpering. She reaches down and rubs his neck in a spot he can’t reach with his short legs. He tries to climb into her lap, which nearly topples her.

  “Come with us, Jasper,” Jane says, disentangling herself. Still whimpering, he follows her down the steps, crowding her feet.

  * * *

  Kiran walks Jane through the Venetian courtyard and the east arcade. “These rooms are all relevant to Charlotte’s story,” she says. “We’ll end up in the winter garden, where we can play chess if we like.”

  Next she leads Jane into a green room with floral wallpaper, brocaded settees, and a fussy green carpet. “May I present the green parlor,” Kiran says. “Charlotte redesigned it in the style of Regency England. Like, Jane Austen,” she adds, when Jane crinkles her forehead.

  “Ah,” says Jane, understanding. Linked arm-in-arm with Kiran, taking a turn about the room, she feels like they could be Elizabeth Bennet and Caroline Bingley. If Mr. Darcy were composing a letter at the elegant writing desk, he’d be aghast at her striped jeans and sea-dragon top. “My favorite parts of the house are the parts where everything seems to fit together,” says Jane. “Like this room, or like the Venetian courtyard with its matching tile and marble. You can imagine a whole story here. In the hallways where nothing matches, I just get kind of confused.”

  “Yeah,” says Kiran, pulling Jane across the room toward a door. “The matching parts, that’s all Charlotte’s doing. She had weird theories that the house is suffering, because it was built from pieces that were torn from other houses.”

  “What do you mean, suffering?”

  “Oh, you know,” Kiran says. “From its troubled origin.”

  “Charlotte thought houses suffer?”

  “Charlotte always talked like houses were people,” says Kiran. “As if they have souls, or at least, as if they should have souls.”

  “That’s kind of nice,” Jane says. “But, as an idea. Are you saying she actually believed it?”

  Kiran shrugs. “She thought that Tu Reviens had been deprived of a soul because of its origin story. ‘Its parts are bleeding,’ she said. ‘Can’t you see them bleeding?’”

  “Um,” Jane says, then pauses. “Can you see them bleeding?”

  Kiran smiles. “I know how it sounds. But that’s just how she talked. You know, I realize I’m not supposed to like the lady who takes my mother’s place, especially the blond, skinny, too-young, white lady, but I really do like Charlotte, even if maybe she started to get kind of obsessive about the house. She’s from Vegas, but she hated it there. She told me the city had a lost soul. She said she could hear the voices of centuries of suffering.”

  “So, cities have souls too.” Kiran has pulled Jane into a sort of rec room, composed of soft blues, with wraparound couches, built-in media shelves and cabinets, and a gigantic fish tank. A huge painting, taking up an entire wall, shows a scene of an old harbor city at night with two moons glowing in the sky. The double moonlight makes trails across the sea. The painting reminds Jane of Aunt Magnolia’s coat, with its purple sky, silver moons, and candles gleaming gold in the windows of towers. Jasper seems to like the painting. He flops onto his stomach, rests his chin on his paws, and sighs up at it with fondness.

  “Charlotte is very sensitive,” says Kiran. “She suits Octavian so much more than Mum ever did. He’s the kind of person who needs a devoted companion, and Charlotte really loved—or loves—being with him. Though it did get to the point where Charlotte seemed more wound up in the house than she was in Octavian, but even then, Charlotte shared all her house thoughts with him. He was even trying to help Charlotte find the house’s soul.”

  “How?” Jane says, then frees her arm from Kiran’s, absently, because she needs to touch her ears, and pull at her earlobes, and try to alter some sort of air pressure problem she’s having. Her ears feel stuffy, bloated, as if they’ve eaten too much.

  “Charlotte kept saying that the house is made of orphaned pieces,” says Kiran.

  “Orphaned pieces?” I’m an orphaned piece, aren’t I?

  “Yeah. Charlotte said the only thing unifying all the parts is pain. That the house is in constant agony. Charlotte wanted to find another way to unify the house, to bind its pieces. So the house can rest.”

  “Rest?” Jane says. “What does that even mean?”

  “I have no idea,” Kiran says, taking Jane’s elbow again and pulling her into another, smallish room. This one has showy chairs and tables inlaid with gold filigree and complicated gold-and-garnet fabric on the walls. It’s another cohesive little world, a tearoom in the Beaux-Arts style, but Kiran tows Jane on to the next room before Jane can ask more. She’s beginning to notice her own disorientation. It’s a sort of sleepy distraction. It’s because each room feels like a new world, a new era, she thinks.

  “My impression,” says Kiran, “is that Charlotte thought the house needed some kind of glue to unify its parts, something positive and healing, and whatever that thing was could be the house’s soul.”

  “That sounds nice, really,” says Jane. “And so she tried to unify each individual room? Or something?”

  “That was the start,” Kiran says, “but unifying the design of each room does nothing for the unmatching parts of the house’s basic structure, you know? The foundations, the skeleton. And Octavian was happy for Charlotte to add things and move things around, but he wasn’t okay with Charlotte getting rid of anything. Like, they had an argument about the shelving in the library, because it came from the libraries of lots of different houses around the world. Charlotte wanted to rip out all the shelving and rebuild it with wood sourced from local, sustainable forests. That was too extreme for Octavian. He was trying to convince Charlotte that the house’s disparate origins were part of its charm, and therefore part of its soul. Charlotte kept saying, ‘It can’t be, it can’t be,’ then finally she stopped talking about it. ‘I’ll make a soul,’ Charlotte said.”

  “Out of what? Duct tape? Or . . . glass
,” she adds, with wonder, because Kiran has pulled her into a room that seems fashioned out of light. Enormous and L-shaped, this is the winter garden. The base of the L is a greenhouse, unruly and magnificent, while the long part is yet another space with armchairs and card tables, bathed with natural light and the shadows of green leaves. This room, Jane realizes, is where the hanging nasturtiums are cultivated, and the lilacs and daffodils too. A woman is cleaning the moldings with a duster.

  “I think she tried to make the soul in a lot of different ways,” says Kiran, stopping at a small, square table with a chessboard, its pieces lined up and ready to go.

  “Your move,” Jane says.

  Kiran leans down and advances a pawn. Walking to the other side of the table, Jane does the same, noticing how expansive this board feels, how smoothly the pieces move, compared to the tiny magnetic travel set Aunt Magnolia had owned. The light through the glass walls is warm on her back.

  Kiran advances another pawn. A couple of minutes pass while each of them contemplates the board and shifts things around in turn. Kiran is better at chess than Jane is. Zugzwang, she thinks suddenly, remembering the word for a situation in which one’s obligation to make a move in chess puts one at a serious disadvantage. Ivy will love it; Jane’ll have to remember to tell her.

  “I guess we should sit,” Kiran says, “if we’re going to play.”

  There’s something about the feeling of the air against Jane’s ears that stops her from wanting to sit. It’s an inchoate instinct, to keep moving and find a more comfortable place. “We could,” she says doubtfully, advancing one of her knights. “How did Charlotte try to make a soul for the house?”

  “Mostly she just got more intense,” Kiran says. “She would talk about listening to each room and letting the room tell her what it wanted to be. She was working so hard, day and night; she was letting it run her ragged. And then she disappeared.”

  “Yes, I heard she disappeared.”

  Wind pushes at the glass and the house makes a rumbling sound around them, stone pressing back at the wind. Then another noise, a sort of laughter, unstable and faint, like a faraway train whistle. As Lucy St. George and Phoebe Okada walk into the room, Jane’s skin is prickling. She’s starting to wonder if she’s getting an ear infection. The pressure in her head seems to be growing.