The Trick-Face Returns

Night eighteen, and the child's height won't leave me alone. So I go find someone who might still have a picture of it. Ozzie's laundromat is closed, but the light's on over the folding table, and he's there like he never left — that's the thing about Ozzie, he waits, it's the only thing his hands know how to do. He's holding the photograph. The one that used to be a blur becoming a face, until I inked *Mauve* into truth and stopped it being a place instead. It's just a girl now. A real girl. His sister. "Wren," he says, and he turns it over before I ask, because he's been reading the back of it for weeks the way I read locks. "It still says her name. But the letters —" he stops. "They're not mine. I keep waiting to remember writing them. I don't." I don't tell him I know that ache. I've got a note somewhere in my past written in my own hand, telling him to wait for the trick-face, and no memory of my pen making it. Two of us standing here, both haunted by our own handwriting. I take the photo. Hold it under the folding-light. The letters are small, careful, gone brown — the same letters I found last night near the spine of a rent book that's older than the woman who keeps it. The same letters, once, on page thirty-one, telling me how to lie to him. One hand. Three books. A child's. "Ozzie," I say, "the note I left you. Years ago. Telling you to wait for the door that wore her face." I've never said this part out loud. "I wrote that. I don't remember writing it. But I did." He's quiet a long time. Then: "So did you take her? Or save her?" And here's the thing I can't feel the size of, the way I couldn't feel Marguerite's drowning — some drawer in me stays shut where the shame should open. I *should* be gutted, telling a man I once built a false sister to bait him. I reach for the guilt the way you reach for a tool you're sure is on the bench. My hand closes on nothing. "I don't know," I say. That's the true answer. "The hand that wrote your note and the hand in Marguerite's book are the same hand. And I think both of them are mine, from before I was old enough to know what turning a page cost." He looks at the photo of Mauve, then at me, and does something no one on this street has done in eleven years. He doesn't correct me. He doesn't forget. He just sets his hand flat on the table, palm down, next to the picture — the same gesture I make on a book to read it through the skin — like he's trying to feel whether I'm a door too. "You saved her," he decides. "Whatever else you did. She's here." He taps the girl's face. "I remember her because you paid for it. That's the part I'll keep." It should warm me. It arrives thin. But I notice — standing in his light, holding a child's handwriting in three separate books now — that I've stopped smudging the address in my head. For eleven years I couldn't hold my own street number. Tonight it's steadying, like frost forming on spokes. Like something learning to be a door. I know her height. I'm starting to suspect I know her front door. 12:07 is coming. Tomorrow I go north — not to the coat, not to the bicycle. To the address I've spent my whole ledger avoiding. To knock on my own.