The Book of Masks (Vol. 2)

Mother Loves

Previously: "Like Leaves in the Forest" 

You feel wrung out, like an old washcloth, when you wake, and you lay back staring at the ceiling for what even you know is too long a time, as life slowly returns to your joints. But your brain is sluggish too.

But it doesn't take long—only a few moments—to orient yourself, to know who and where you are, and what you've done to yourself. The knowledge leaves you cold all over, and the reluctance to touch yourself is one reason you are reluctant to move. It was bad enough—it was a hard scare—when you woke with Carol Lowell-Whitney's memories while still inside your own body. It was like your whole body had rotted away into strange and loathsome shape.

But now, waking with the mask on you as well— Well, it should be more comfortable, shouldn't it, matching Carol's mind and memories with her body? You would think! But you recovered your own sense of self before putting the mask on, and now you've got a similar feeling as before. Only now it is you, not Carol Charlotte Lowell-Whitney, who feels alienated from a new body.

Still, you know you've got to move, so with a vast reluctance, you sit up, and let your new boobs fall and wobble into place.

At least you feel more human as you get to your feet. The stiffness in your joints vanishes as soon as you start to move, and though you still flinch a little from touching yourself, it's not nearly as nasty as you were sure it would be. And after tugging on the silk panties and snapping on the bra, and pulling the dress down over you so that you're not naked and alone with Mrs. Whitney's body anymore, you actually begin to feel normal. You start to muse over the thought How would Carol think and feel? as you pinch and pull and straighten out the dress. Aside from—y'know—being copied and hijacked and replaced by a strange teenage boy.

Teenage boy. You pause in mid-fidget and blink as a flash of memories come back: of being at a Saint Xavier's function and drinking in the sight of all those young, strong, newly mature but still slightly dewy boys in the sixth form. Carol wound up getting slightly drunk, and more than slightly horny, and finally had to badger Thomas into taking her home early for fear she'd make a fool of herself around some of them.

With trembling hands you snatch up the cord-like belt and wind it around your waist. Think of something else, you chide yourself. Think of anything else! Think of what to do about Charles!

That is scarcely better. To his mother's eye he is unchanged. But you know that not himself anymore, and though you hardly feel the same motherly affection for him as Carol does, you do feel sympathetic cold lump form in your chest. As well as a paralysis of indecision about what to do about it all.

You're saved, for the moment, at least, by a recognition that as Carol Lowell-Whitney you've got a place to go and are late getting to it. You quickly but expertly pull on the sheer stockings, and grab up your pumps before marching out of the bedroom and up the stairs to Carol's own dressing closet. (That's what she calls the suite of bath, toilet, clothes closets, and vanities where she preps herself daily.) A quick glance in the mirror confirms that her makeup got blurred in the copying, so you sit down at a brightly lit vanity table and set to work touching everything up, from lips to brows to lashes to hair.

Jesus, kid, you mutter angrily to yourself as you smudge away some of the finer wrinkles that have broken through. You thought I could be fifty? Bad enough being on the far side of forty. But I'm still closer to it than to the—shudder—half-century mark. And I look good for forty-three, if I say so myself. You pause to watch your reflection out of the corner of your eye. Okay, I was going to say I could pass for ten years younger, but no, that's not true, not if I'm honest with myself. I could pass for thirty-seven, if I admitted to having bad genes. Forty, if I rounded. But no— You sigh, and pick up the mascara. I do look forty-three, God damn it, even if I do look good for the age.

And— You tiny smile jerks at one corner of your mouth, even as you wither a little internally. And there are some pretty sexy guys out there who will take me this way. That's one reason, Carol realized with mortifying self-consciousness, she had to hustle herself away from Charles's schoolmates. It would have been self-deceiving to think the eighteen-year-old football player with the chiseled jawline and the broad chest and the shoulders that strained at his shirt would want to get into bed with her. But given who does get into bed with her, it wouldn't have been outrageously self-deceiving.

The repair work done to your satisfaction, you fluff out your hair a little before touching it up with a little hair spray, and give yourself a brittle smile. Too bad it looks so desperate. Come on, man, you chide yourself. Get into character. The assholes you're going to be fighting don't seem to have trouble acting like their impersonations!

But the motivational talk doesn't help, and it's with a dread and an anxiety that you pluck the pumps off the table, switch off the light, and go back downstairs again.

Will Prescott, as you'd directed him, is loitering downstairs with his phone. He looks up with a glum, fearful look.

"Alright, here I am," you say. "Don't tell me I look beautiful, 'cos it would be fucking weird. You get any texts or messages I should know about?"

"Just one from Caleb, asking if we're gonna go get Tilley and do something with him."

You chew your lip, then catch yourself and stop it before you can fudge your lipstick. "That's probably just normal stuff, but play it safe and stay in today. Especially if you hear from anyone like ... your new friends." He nods, and you give him your number so he can keep in contact with him.

You can't help watching him as he trudges for the front door—a lanky, almost stork-like youth—and a feeling that you recognize as a motherly concern wells up within you. Jesus, you think with a start. All this time I was just thinking about what this fuckery was doing to guys like me and my friends. It hadn't occurred to you that it could hit the parents pretty hard as well. How would Caleb's mom—who only had Caleb after her husband ran out on her—feel if she knew that Caleb was a fake, that he was really someone else, and that usually he wasn't even that someone else?

As you slide on your pumps and gather up the enormous purse that Carol had laid on the end table near the door when she came in, you remember that Will's hair will need trimming if he isn't to be instantly spotted as a fake of a fake. So you fumble out the cell phone and text him an order to stop by a hair stylist before going home. You know the kind of cut they need to give you, you tell him, because you yourself remember the directions that you gave the stylist when you got your hair trimmed back into something more mature looking.

Then, at the door leading into the garage, you remember your wedding ring. You tense all over as you make a detour back into the bedroom to take it out of the jewelry box. You're quite aware of the multiple reasons Carol had for leaving it off.

Finally, with a hard sigh, you stride out to the garage. It was to switch cars that Carol came home—and to use the bathroom—so you hang the keys to the Mercedes onto one hook while plucking the keys to the SUV off the other. At the touch of a button the garage door rumbles and starts to grind its way up. You slip into the SUV, slide on the pair of sunglasses that Carol keeps on the dashboard, and wedge your cell phone into the charger. A few minutes later you're on the road and headed back to town.

You're just coming opposite the mall when the phone rings. With practiced ease you glance at the screen and tap the answer button. "Hello, Aidan!" you call out. "I'm just on my way, I got caught unexpectedly at home!"

Aidan Seabury's voice is as supple as oiled silk. "I was just calling to tell you we couldn't make our quorum after all. But if you still want to meet—" He trails off invitingly.

Desire—a fiery column of it—almost lifts you out of your seat.

Aidan Seabury is the president of the Saratoga Falls Arts Council, on whose board Carol serves as one of the many "public service jobs" she holds instead of being employed. It was to a meeting of the council that you are hurrying—a meeting he has now informed you has been cancelled.

Aidan Seabury is also one of Carol's lovers—the one that makes her feel twenty years old again. Aidan has never crooked a finger that Carol has failed to answer, and he has just made a hole in his schedule and your schedule both.

Next: "Favors Asked with a Sinister Flavor" 

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"Table of Contents (Vol. 2)" 
"The Book of Masks (Vol. 2)"