Whose Hands Are These

The first thing I learn about being dead is that it itches.

There is a label, a stiff little luxury label, scratching the back of my neck, and my hand goes up to deal with it before I have even worked out that I have a hand, or a neck, or a problem far larger than a label. The fingers that arrive are long and ringless and tipped in a French manicure I have never paid for in my life. They smell of someone else's hand cream. They move before I tell them to, which is the second thing I learn about being dead, and the worse one.

I am lying on my back on a mattress the size of a small country, under a ceiling of bare grey concrete that someone has decided is a design choice, and the light coming through the wall of glass on my left is the thin scrubbed white of early morning, and none of it is mine. I do not own a bed like this. I do not own a window like this. The last window I owned looked out on a brick wall, and the last thing I owned outright was the half-second of understanding on the way down the stairs.

I died.

I want to be careful about this, because I am a careful person, it is the only thing anyone ever let me be, but there is no soft way to put it. I died last night. I can still feel the exact geography of it, the cold of the stairwell, the smell of poured concrete and her perfume, the way my own name sounded when she said it just before, almost gentle, almost sorry, Talia, like she was tucking me in. Then the floor came up. Then the dark came down, complete, no tunnel, no light, nothing left open anywhere that was me.

And now there is a label itching my neck and a hand I did not order scratching it, and somewhere in the apartment, a low electronic chime, polite as a hotel, announces that it is six forty-five.

I sit up.

I mean to sit up like a person. What happens instead is a marionette whose strings have been handed to someone with better posture. My spine stacks itself. My shoulders roll back. My chin lifts a half-inch to an angle thirty years of practice never got me, the angle of a woman who has never apologised for taking up a room. The body knows how to do this. The body does it without me. I am a passenger in a machine that has its own opinions, and the first opinion it has is that I am magnificent.

There is a mirror.

Of course there is a mirror. The whole far wall of the bedroom is a mirror, floor to concrete ceiling, the kind of mirror you only put in if you are at peace with yourself in a way I have never been, and across thirty feet of pale wood and morning light, a woman is sitting up in the enormous bed and looking back at me.

She is beautiful. That is the first fact and it lands like a slap. She is beautiful in the expensive, edited way, dark hair sliding off one shoulder, collarbones you could hang a coat on, a face that knows its own angles. I have spent two years of my life being in rooms with this face. I have watched this face accept an award for work I did in a basement at two in the morning. I have watched this mouth shape my own sentences and call them hers.

It is Cosima.

I am Cosima.

My hands fly to my throat, which is whole, which is hers, which is warm and unbruised and ringed with a slim gold chain I have never worn, and across the mirror her hands fly to her throat, our hands, and we make, the two of us in the one body, a sound. It is not a scream. I want it to be a scream. It comes out as a single cracked syllable, high and strange, and then I clap a hand over my own mouth to stop it, and the mouth under my palm is the wrong shape, fuller, softer, a stranger's mouth, and that is when the room starts to tilt.

Count. When the world tilts, you count, you find the edges of things and you number them, it is the one trick that has never failed me. One: a bed. Two: a window. Three: a mirror with the wrong woman in it. Four: a phone on the nightstand, glowing, a screen full of notifications addressed to a name that is not mine, under a date that is wrong, a whole season wrong, three months shy of the autumn night I died on. Five: a robe, silk, the colour of old ivory, thrown over a chair. Six: a smell I am only now sorting out from the hand cream and the cold concrete, coffee, somewhere out there, and toast, and the small domestic sounds of a person in a kitchen who thinks the morning is ordinary.

Someone is in the apartment.

"You're up early." A man's voice, from the other room, easy, fond, half-swallowed by a yawn. "I made the disgusting healthy one for you. The seeds. You're welcome."

I know that voice.

I have known that voice for three years. I knew it before she did. I knew it across a pub table when it was nervous, and across a pillow when it was low and grateful, and across two locked years of my own private heart after she took it, the way she took everything that lit up, by walking in louder. I would know that voice underwater. I would know that voice dead, and apparently I am about to test the theory.

Adam.

The body stands up. I do not decide it. The body stands up out of the enormous bed in a borrowed silk camisole and pads across the pale wood toward the doorway and the smell of coffee, and the feet know the floor, they know exactly how many steps it is, they do not falter once, and inside the body I am screaming, do not go in there, do not let him see you, he will know, he has to know, surely a man knows the woman he, but the body is already in the doorway, and Adam looks up from the coffee machine with the small private smile he used to keep only for me, and says, "Morning, gorgeous."

He says it to her.

He says it to me. He looks straight at the wrong face and the right eyes and he sees nothing wrong at all, and a thing at the root of my chest, of her chest, of our chest, comes loose and falls a long way without making a sound.

"Cosima?" The smile slips a degree. "You okay? You've gone a funny colour."

Cosima. The name lands on me like a coat dropped on a chair. It is mine now. I am wearing it the way I am wearing the manicure, the camisole, the collarbones, the whole stolen architecture of the woman who killed me. And a careful person, a quiet person, a person who has been copied and erased and talked over and not believed since school, learns very early to perform a calm she does not feel. To swallow the scream and produce the face. It is the only survival skill they ever let me keep, and I reach for it now the way a drowning woman reaches for anything that floats.

I make her mouth smile.

"Fine," I say, and the voice that comes out is not mine, it is lower, smoother, a cello where I am a reed, and the wrongness of hearing my thoughts in her throat nearly buckles me again. "Just. Bad sleep."

"You and your brain." He turns back to the machine, trusting, unbothered, and slides a glass across the marble toward me, green, vile, full of seeds. "Drink your swamp. Damien called twice already, something about the Meridian timeline, he sounded like he'd swallowed a wasp. Oh, and you've still got that thing in the calendar you keep being weird about, the late one." He waves a vague hand at the air, at a date I cannot see and do not have, a date that means nothing to me and apparently means enough to her to be weird about. "You really won't tell me what it is. Very mysterious of you." He says it lightly, a man reciting the small weather of a shared life, and every word is a stone dropped down a well I did not know was inside me. Damien. Meridian. A shared life. A man who loves me and does not know me, who has never known me, who chose her, and is going to keep choosing her, because as far as the entire breathing world is concerned, she is standing right here in the kitchen drinking a swamp.

Something low to the floor growls.

I look down. A dog. Silver, narrow, elegant as a knife, a whippet, standing in the kitchen doorway with its weight back on its haunches and its lip lifted off small white teeth, staring at me, at the body, with its ears flat to its skull. A low continuous growl, the kind a dog makes at a thing that is wearing the wrong skin.

"Pim." Adam frowns at it, mild. "What's got into you. That's Mum, you idiot." He looks at me, amused, expecting me to laugh, because apparently this dog and this woman are a love story, apparently she calls herself its mother, and the dog keeps growling, and it does not stop, and its eyes do not leave me, and I understand, with a cold that goes all the way to the borrowed bone, that the dog is the only one in this apartment who can tell.

A dog does not care what a face claims. That trick only ever worked on people.

"He's just being weird," I manage. Cosima would say that. I do not know how I know what Cosima would say, but I do, it arrives the way the manicure arrived, pre-installed, and I file that horror to scream about later, in the long list of horrors I am stacking up to scream about later. "Ignore him."

"That's the spirit." Adam kisses the top of my head on his way past, light, habitual, the kiss of a man halfway out the door of a Tuesday, and I have wanted that mouth for two years and now it lands in the wrong woman's hair and I have to grip the cold marble so I do not turn into it. "I'm running. The Meridian lot are in and out all week, be nice. Love you."

The door closes. The dog stops growling, slinks low along the wall to a bed in the corner, and watches me from there.

I am alone, in a glass apartment in the sky, in the body of the woman who murdered me, with three months of her life apparently waiting for me to walk into it, and a man who loves a lie, and a dog that knows.

I go back to the mirror. Of course I go back to the mirror. You cannot not look. I stand in front of thirty feet of glass and I make myself meet her eyes, my eyes, and I take inventory, because inventory is what I have instead of prayer. The dark hair. The hard clean jaw. The mole below the left ear I have spent two years sitting behind in meetings. The hands, her hands, my hands, turning them over, the long fingers, the ring she wears, his ring, on the hand that, three months from now or one night ago depending on which way you count, will close around the back of my neck in a concrete stairwell and end me.

I look at the woman in the mirror and I think, very clearly, in the only voice that is still mine, the one inside: I am going to take everything from you. I am going to walk through your life wearing your face and I am going to find every lie you ever told and every thing you ever stole, starting with me, and I am going to burn it to the ground. And I am going to do it without becoming you. I do not know yet how hard that last part is going to be.

And the woman in the mirror smiles.

I do not smile. That is the thing. I am not smiling. My mouth is a flat hard line, I can feel it, the muscles, the set of it, I am making no expression at all, I am ordering this face to stay exactly as appalled as I am. But for half a second, less, the length of a blink, the reflection's mouth curves anyway, out of step with me, ahead of me. Slow. Knowing. Pleased. A smile I have seen before, from the outside, across a hundred meetings: the exact smile she gave the room the day she took my work and made it hers.

It holds my eyes for that half-second like it is checking I noticed.

Then it is gone, and the face in the glass is only frightened, and only mine, and behind me in the corner the dog has stopped growling at me. It is growling at the mirror.