Hennessy was alone before she even quite understood what had happened.
She sat in the chilly chair for quite a while, not wanting to move in case her mother returned. After an hour, she pulled up the drop cloth to wrap around herself and wait some more (little ghost!). Finally she let herself shiver and admit Jay wasn’t coming back.
With a little sigh, she padded barefoot across the cold floor to the elevator, but discovered it wouldn’t move without the code, which she didn’t have. She went to the door without a knob instead, but it wouldn’t open. It was locked; the keyhole was empty.
Hennessy was trapped in the studio.
At first she called down very nicely, though she didn’t think either of her parents would hear her over their own raised voices. Then she shouted. She banged.
Finally, she gave up. She waited.
It became night.
Hennessy wiped away her tears and turned on the floor lights, which threw hard, lacy patterns across the floor and walls. She went to see the canvas her mother had worked on all these weeks.
It was awful.
It was the worst painting Hennessy had ever seen her mother do. It was twee and cutesy, a straightforward and boring portrait of a daft, plucky little girl sitting awkwardly on a chair. The eyes weren’t alive. The hands weren’t alive. Hennessy, who’d been working and learning with her own art all this time, was embarrassed for her mother. It was terrible that she wasn’t coming up here for Hennessy and her growling stomach, but it felt even more terrible that anyone would ever see this piece.
Hennessy looked at the canvas for a long time, and then she counted, telling herself that if one of her parents came for her by the count of six hundred, she wouldn’t do it.
Six hundred seconds went by. Eight hundred. One thousand. Hennessy stopped counting.
She searched the drawers by the wall and collected all the paints she wanted. Then she moistened her mother’s oils again on the palette, picked up the brush and began to paint. After a few minutes, she dragged over the full-length mirror from beside the sofa, and she redid the portrait’s gormless face with her actual wary expression. She overpainted the boring shadows in the white shift with subtle colors instead. She shrugged the shoulders of that chilly girl just a little, not quite shivering, but wanting to. At each step, she got up to compare her brushstrokes to the other paintings in the studio. She made the eyes alive. She made the hands alive.
She painted the portrait that Jay should have painted. It took all night.
It was a J. H. Hennessy by way of Jordan Hennessy. It was another day after that before her mother came to get her, and by then Hennessy was fitful and burning up with a fever that had come on during the second night. Bill Dower had gone again.
“This turned out better than I thought,” Jay said, looking at the canvas, hovering her fingers over her signature in the corner, painted by Hennessy hours before. “Oh, Jordan. Stop complaining. I’ve got some paracetamol downstairs. Come on, what a trial. Next time don’t hide so long and you won’t feel as awful.”
Hennessy’s first forgery was of herself.
Sitting in the basement of Aldana-Leon’s house, crisscross applesauce on the roll-up mattress, Hennessy took out her dreamt phone and held it in her lap. She looked around the dim basement. It was stacked densely with cardboard boxes, a family that had either not yet unpacked from a move or was packing for one. One corner had been reserved for a small desk covered with tubes of poster paints and cheap brushes. There were a few pieces of rippled paper there that had been painted on, and some child had painted the top of the desk instead. Hennessy respected that child.
With a shiver, Hennessy told her dreamt phone to call Jordan.
It rang for nearly a minute, and then:
“Jordan Hennessy,” Jordan said politely, not recognizing the caller ID. “Hello?”
Jordan’s voice hit her like a sack of stones.
Hennessy’s best forgery. Jordan, by way of Hennessy. All those years together. All the other girls, dead. Why hadn’t Hennessy called her before now? How had she forgotten how Jordan was the only thing that ever made this feeling inside Hennessy go away? This awful dread, this feeling of the Lace, even when she was awake.
Hennessy hadn’t spoken yet. She didn’t know what to say.
On the other side of the line, a bland voice sounded in the background. “I’m getting it to go—it’s faster that way, even with the walk. Do you want baba ghanoush or no?”
Declan Lynch.
Declan Lynch.
Why was she surprised to hear his voice? She’d known Jordan had left in his car, weeks and weeks before.
Jordan’s words were slightly muffled as she turned from the phone. “If you’re paying, yes. Get me every side dish they have.” Then, back to the phone, “Sorry, who’s this? I don’t know you’re coming through very well. I can’t hear you.”
This voice, the one she was using on the phone, was a very different voice than the one she’d just used for Declan Lynch. She’d used her outside, professional voice to talk to the phone, her inside, real voice to talk to Declan Lynch. Hennessy and her girls were the only ones who used to get the second one. They’d been the only ones who were important.
Hennessy’s cheeks felt hot.
“Hello?” Jordan said. Then, to Declan, “No, a crank caller, I guess. Or a bad connection. One doesn’t like to assume malice.”
“Safer to assume,” Declan said drily, and Jordan’s laugh faded as she pulled the phone away from her head.
Hennessy hung up.
She sat back on the mattress.
She let herself think it. This is what she’s always wanted.
It wasn’t that Hennessy had wanted Jordan to be unhappy in her absence. After all, Hennessy was the one who’d insisted Jordan go with Declan in the first place—right? Her memories were muddy. She could hear a little voice suggesting Jordan had actually come up with the idea, but carefully worded it so Hennessy would think it was hers. Was that true?
She thought about going upstairs to find Ronan. He would remember. He was there that night.
But finding Ronan meant finding Bryde, too, because they were together in the bunk bedroom, and also because the two of them were inseparable. And Bryde would just try to spin her current misery into a lesson. Hennessy didn’t think she could take any more lessons.
The basement was cold. She pulled up the sheet around her to cover her shoulders and, just like that, was transported to her memory in Jay’s studio. Little ghost.
What if Jordan stopped loving her? What if she’d never loved her, only needed her? What if Hennessy had lost the only real thing in her life by running off to chase dreams with Bryde and Ronan Lynch?
What was she doing here?
They weren’t a company of three dreamers. Bryde and Ronan were one thing. Hennessy was something else.
Hennessy was so tired of being alone.
She was so tired.
She turned the phone over in her hands. Even the phone was a reminder of how little she belonged here. If not for Ronan, it wouldn’t be a phone in her hands, it would be the Lace, just like at Rhiannon Martin’s farm. Angrily, she tapped through the options, looking to see what her subconscious and Ronan’s subconscious had dreamt into it. Contact numbers. Speakerphone. Text messaging.
Timer.
Before Ronan and Bryde, Hennessy had always set a timer before she fell asleep. Twenty minutes. That was the longest she could sleep before starting to dream. Eventually she had to set the timer while she was awake, too, because it turned out that sleeping without dreaming eventually left one prone to drifting off even while painting or driving.