Three Makeup Princess fashion dolls, the reviled plastic modepoppen, sat on top of the television, smiling at her from their cardboard cases. Grace poured half an inch of ethyl acetate into two bowls and mixed into each a stream of bright nail polish, one magenta and one turquoise. She would paint this solution on their loose diamonds and other pale gems, turning them into garish plastic fakes that she would use to bedazzle the dolls’ lamé headbands and plastic necklaces, which were ideal for concealing gems in plain sight. She could have hot-glued the Hope Diamond to one of those dolls and no one would see it. On the off chance she and Alls were checked at customs, their savings should be safe in these toys Grace had supposedly bought for her nieces back home. Alls would have preferred to tape the stones into suitcase linings than fool around with bulky toys, but Grace was a better actress when she had nothing to hide. Then she could really believe.
They hadn’t bothered about customs until now, traveling around the EU unchecked for the past few years, but they had never traveled with quite so much. As soon as he finished the safe he was working now, they would leave for London. It was a shame they couldn’t sell this lot in Antwerp, but they never sold a piece in the same country where they’d picked it up, even after Grace had reset all the stones. They would stay in London only long enough to sell. They hadn’t decided where to go after. Alls was tired of Europe and Grace wanted a break from jewelry, parties, laughing at other people’s jokes. They had been moving so precisely, so purposefully—dancing, really—and neither could imagine what it would feel like to slow to a stop. “You don’t think we’ll get bored?” she’d asked him, really asking him if he would. Those too-quiet moments of doubt were perhaps the same in any kind of marriage: How much do you love me, and what other choice do you have? But he said he wanted to get bored, just enough to sleep through the night.
Sometimes she missed loving someone who she knew would always love her more.
They had three secondhand safes, each no larger than a microwave, in their apartment right now; Grace reset their combinations periodically so Alls could train for speed. Now she fetched the loose stones and spread them out on the newsprint. She began to dab at the first one with hot pink, holding it down with a toothpick as she moved her brush over the facets.
The commercial ended and the movie came back on. The voices were immediately familiar. Grace looked up to see a mink-clad woman, middle-aged, stubbing her cigarette out in a fried egg. Mrs. Graham had loved this part, hissing when the cigarette hit the yolk.
Ah, no. Not this. Not tonight.
To Catch a Thief. Grace had not thought about the movie in years. She watched, stock-still, as Grace Kelly swept into the frame in a yellow flowered day dress. She knelt on a damask couch, crossed her golden arms daintily over the back, and arched, smiling and preening. “You know, you might look a little like her,” Mrs. Graham had said, and Grace had soaked in that compliment, though she was not so golden, her jaw not so haughtily square. But now she recognized herself in the preening smile, the balletic gestures of the other Grace, the one she’d meant to become. She watched the other Grace throw her shoulders around, tilt her face to the sun, spill her silvery voice like coins falling into a pile. Grace had loved that voice’s faux-frank arrogance. The other Grace was all surfaces, as if she’d somehow rid herself of herself.
Grace remembered herself in the mirror, trying on Mrs. Graham’s lipstick when she was a girl. Crushed Rose, wasn’t it? If only she could laugh. Instead the ache of longing rushed up in her too fast for her to stop it. She set down her brush, the polish already dried hard on the bristles. She wished Alls were home. She could have told him she was having a magnolia spell—a euphemism for this sudden anguish—and he would have helped her through it. He was not immune to such difficulties himself. But he was out, alone, on his belly in black on some cold floor, and she was home alone.
I don’t think you know what love is, Hanna had said.
Grace turned off the TV and sat in the quiet apartment full of fumes. She opened her computer and typed 429 Heathcliff into the search bar. Garland Tennessee USA. She didn’t allow herself a moment to recognize the mistake she was making. She needed to see the house, the front door, the hemlock tree they had climbed, the roof they used to lie on. First was the map, the dumb green arrow pointing to the location of another Grace, left behind.
But under the map was a photograph, too nice for satellite.
Poplar Realty Featured Properties: 429 Heathcliff Ave.
The Grahams were selling their house.
She clicked.
Wonderful family home, the listing began. Grace pored over the photographs, every lamp and every rug an unreadable sign of life: the needlepoint pillow of sunflowers, the pie safe with punched-tin doors, the brass tripod floor lamp they’d bought when the boys had knocked over their third lamp in a year. In the dining room, Grace saw her, a ghost in white lace with a high neck, her sandy hair swept up into a shell, her hands hidden by dark glossy leaves and open white blooms. Grace couldn’t see the details in the photograph, but she knew them by heart.
Grace knew what love was.
She hurried toward the bathrooms and stairwell, trying to get away, but then she was in the bedrooms, first the brothers’ and then Riley’s. Grace didn’t recognize his room at first—gone was the striped blue bedspread, the cork board crowded with the detritus of their childhood. Now the walls were painted pale lilac, the furniture white wicker. A guest room. But there was a stuffed rabbit on the twin bed, long ears strewn across the pillow. Then she recognized the toile-shaded lamp, and then her old quilt, folded across the back of a white rocking chair. She clicked through the rest of the rooms, all unchanged. Her attic was not pictured. It was probably used for storage now. Grace did not recognize that bunny on the bed. It was not Mrs. Graham’s.
She went back into the dining room. On the wall with Mrs. Graham, on the other side of the shot of the boys in the leaf pile, was a family photograph—new, or new to her.
Grace zoomed in until the photograph filled her screen, hopelessly blurred. The Grahams were shadowy silhouettes whose details she could not sharpen. They were standing together, water behind them. A lake or a beach somewhere. All four brothers, but she couldn’t make out their faces, and two women Grace did not recognize, one with a blond ponytail and a white tank top, another with dark curls. Dr. Graham and Mrs. Graham stood in the center. It was Riley, she thought, standing next to his mother. If only they had been lined up better, she would know the boys by height. Grace leaned in toward the screen, desperate to see it clearly, but she couldn’t. She could only see the baby girl, a fat infant in a red sundress, whom Mrs. Graham held in her arms.
Who’d had a child? Mrs. Graham was fifty-four now. But they could have adopted. Grace heard the refrain as if Riley were singing it to her: always wanted a daughter. Or a grandchild. Jim was the oldest, and Nate had had a serious girlfriend, Ashley, but was that her? Who were those women? Wives? Whose? Could Riley be a father now? Whose baby was Mrs. Graham holding? Who was she? Grace screwed her eyes onto that blurry little girl but she could not tell a thing.
The bedroom must be for her, Grace realized.
It didn’t matter whose baby it was. Mrs. Graham had got her girl.
Grace had thought that she’d left a piece of herself behind in that house, some earlier girl who haunted the attic, a sweet and sorry ghost. But she was the haunted one, and here was the evidence. All signs of her were gone, replaced now with someone real. She had not left herself behind. There was no such thing. You couldn’t leave yourself. No matter how far you went, you were always there.
Alls wouldn’t be home for hours still. Grace took a deep breath and dipped a cotton ball in acetone and began to work the hardened paint from her brush. She picked up a three-carat square-cut diamond with her tweezers and dipped it into the paint solution, deep-end blue. The modepoppen stared from behind their plastic windows, flat eyes fixed ahead. Grace tried not to watch the door, waiting, as she coated another gem in plastic. She knew about love. She knew all the angles.
Acknowledgments