One thing I love about doing hair is, I almost always feel tired at the end of the day.
Physically tired, I mean. Feet, arms, back, shoulders. It’s standing all day, sure, but it’s more than that. It’s a lot of bending and pulling and crouching; it’s mixing color in the back and doing shampoos when it’s busy and helping with cleanup, too. I like the movement of it; I like how I get into the car when I’ve finished for the day and roll my neck in relief. I’ll think to myself,I’m going to sleep so good tonight, and it’s almost always true.
But when Adam, Salem, Tegan, and I finally decide to take a break, after hours of mostly me talking—talking about things I usually hate talking about, hate thinking about—I feel a kind of tired I try to avoid.
Mentally tired. Emotionally tired.
Tired straight down to my soul, and the truth is, I doubt I’ll get any sleep tonight.
“We can try again after we eat,” Salem says casually, standing from the honey-colored leather armchair she’s been stationed in for most of the afternoon. We’re in her hotel suite—I can tell Adam is still appalled that she’s gotten an entire deluxe suite—and the early evening light has cast everything in the room faintly rose gold, which I could probably appreciate if I wasn’t so wrung out.
“Something might come to you after a meal,” she adds.
Across from me, in the other armchair, Adam cranes his neck and looks up at her, jaw set. All day, he’s been this way with her: one-word censures or tense looks of frustration as he ran the interview. I don’t know exactly what happened between them in that rooftop bar last night, but I know he’s not happy about it. I certainly know that nothing in New Mexico has followed our carefully constructed plan, because Adam hasn’t taken a back seat to anything.
“We can call it a night,” he says tersely. “Let her get some sleep. She might remember something with fresh eyes.”
Inwardly, I cringe.
He might as well be working security for me.
“I could eat,” chirps Tegan from beside me. We’ve sat together on this small loveseat almost all day, her presence both a comfort and burden. On the one hand, it’s easier between us now; it’s as though we’re finally on the same side, and a few times today during the interview, she even broke the tension with a gentle joke or a complementary memory or an announcement that she suddenly had to pee.
But on the other hand. On the other hand, sometimes, as I talked, I could feel her watching me with a rapt, unblinking attention that flushed me with renewed guilt.
She’s so desperate to know anything about Mom.
“Like, I could really go for a pizza,” she adds, sounding totally unbothered, and that’s something, at least.
Salem clucks her tongue. “We’re not eating pizza in Santa Fe. I want to try this sopaipilla place the concierge mentioned.”
Tegan shrugs and stands, too, and Salem starts tapping on her phone.
I feel strangely outside of myself. On the rough-hewn slab of wood that’s functioning as the suite’s coffee table, my mother’s five postcards sit, all but one—the one we’ve been puzzling over for the last hour or so—picture-side up. They stay flat now, their curtain-rod hiding place not even a shape memory anymore.
“Jess.”
When I meet Adam’s eyes across the space, I get the sense that he’s had to repeat himself more than once.
“I’m sorry,” I answer. “I missed that.”
It’s awkward, overly polite, but the interview was like this, too. The whole time, I held within me a separate but inescapable worry that had nothing to do with talking about my mother.
What if someone would be able to tell?I kept thinking.What if someone could tell by the sound of my voice on this recording how I feel about the man who’s asking me these questions?
What if they’ll be able to hear something that’s so private to me?
Even to my own ears, my voice had sounded strange as I’d talked. Stilted and slightly robotic.
“Do you want to go get something to eat?” he asks.
I stare at him. Stubble along his jaw, faint purple half-moons beneath his eyes. What I want is to be alone with him. To crawl into his lap and tuck my entire self into the ledge his body makes for me. I want us to talk to each other in voices that hide nothing about how we feel.
“Why don’t Salem and I go?” Tegan says. She’s moved over to stand beside Salem, who obviously has been showing Tegan a menu on her phone screen. “We can bring it back here, try again after we get some food in us.”
My eyes drift down to the Olympia postcard. The writing-side-up one.
Dear Jessie, I can see. The words beneath blur in front of me, as though my eyes have decided they’re not participating in this find-the-grifter game anymore.
