“More than you can afford.”
“Do only men get them?”
She sighed. “It’s not what you think. It’s just a … it’s just a date. ”
“Jesus. I can’t believe this. Emily was right. At least tell me you’re still in school?” She looked away, and I knew I’d hit a nerve. It might have been a trick of the light, but her eyes shone. Though she turned back to me with venom in her voice.
“Why can’t you believe? You hardly know me. What does it matter to you who I am or what I do?”
I had the feeling that this was some kind of test, that even as her tone grew angry, she wanted me to do something, step between her and whatever was going to happen with that man. She raked the tarot cards into a pile, but she was having trouble with the drawstring of the silk pouch—her hands had started to shake.
“You don’t want to do this,” I said.
“Do what?”
“Whatever you are about to do. With him.”
“Just go, okay?” Nearly a whisper.
“Fine, do whatever you want.” I slung my bag over my shoulder and made my way to the door.
“Hey Lily,” she said, her voice stronger now. “Catch.”
It was in my hands before I made sense of the shape—my bracelet. The pearls still held the warmth of Clara’s skin. As Istepped out of the shop I shivered to think of that man waiting for her, what he might be asking her for, what she might give. He must have been at least forty-five. She certainly wasn’t eighteen. That pink, cooked-looking skin. The smell of his sweat. The drum of his stomach. That twitch in Clara’s hands. I wanted to scream. Scream for help, for her, for me. For everyone I had met since I came home: Beautiful, brilliant Emily stuck behind that desk. Carrie and the bile on her breath. Luis, whose personality was buried deep within his layers of silence. My mother, who had signed that paper in the hospital, saying yes to an impossible question. My father, and this city’s short memory: another stupid parking garage now stood in the same place where the first one collapsed. And because right then, probably, Matthew was watching the sunset slide behind the Manhattan skyline or in the back of a cab on the way to a fabulous restaurant, and everything I had worked for had dissolved in a single night.
Across the boardwalk, the roller coaster rumbled down its tracks and people cried out as they plunged toward the ground. Were we all like the people on the ride, even Clara, who claimed to be able to see? Whipped around helplessly, our fates playing out on a fixed course?
A man in tattered clothes approached me, shook a plastic cup that jingled with loose change. Every sound seemed too loud, garish. Everything was magnified, intense, too much of itself: The tinny noise of his coins bouncing together. The rank smell of his clothes. The squawk of the seagulls, the red of Clara’s awning that had at first looked tawdry and now simply looked sad. I moved past him, trying to escape the din.
“You stupid bitch!” he yelled. “Your hear me? Fuck you, you stupid bitch!”
I leaned against the wall of the candy shop and tried to slow my breathing, but my vision was getting hazy and everythingseemed so crushingly close. I was sweating through my shirt, could feel the dampness collecting and dripping along the backs of my knees. Taped to the glass was a poster of the missing girl, Julie Zale, her photo blanched by the sun.
The anxiety took over, blotted out my thoughts until everything was constricted, filtered through a physical, illogical terror: the heat that seared through my body, the certainty that a curtain of black would fall over my eyes, knowing that my heart was rushing rushing rushing, but there would soon be a pinch of pain in my chest and it would stop.You will fall before you will rise.
It felt like a curse.
LUIS
HE WATCHES HER AT WORKas much as he can without getting caught. A few times she’s tried to speak to him, but someone must have told her that he’s not like everyone else. She’s awkward when she mimes things to him. Points at her watch, then at the mop, her cheeks and neck going red. He dunks the mop into the bucket. She smiles at him, and that’s when he remembers where he has seen her before. He thinks of the man who used to come into the bakery in the mornings, his easy grin, the way Luis never had to wonder what he wanted: a single roll and a cup of coffee, nearly white with cream.
In the break room Luis reaches into his wallet, finds the $2 bill, turns it over, runs his finger along the squiggle on the back. The man always gave him an extra dollar, pressed the single bill into his hand, but that day he must have been out. He raised his eyebrows at Luis as Luis eyed the bill, its careful, intricate design. Then, the man didn’t come the next morning and Luis had a bad feeling. The day before he had been sliding a tray of rolls from the oven when he felt the boom in his feet. His boss ran out the door to see what had happened, came back with his hand over his mouth, scrambled for the telephone. A few days later, the man’s picture was in the newspaper, a grainy gray and white that flattened his smile.
Luis and the owner of the bakery had gone to the churches—so many of those pictures were of men who came in for breakfast, lunch, coffee—and it was in one of those churches where he’d seen her, the girl with the man’s same eyes. She leaned against another woman with dark hair, both of them in black, as they followed the coffin out of the church. It was like seeing the man again, even as her eyes blurred with tears.
Now that he remembers, it hurts to look at her directly, and sometimes he even feels a jolt of anger when he sees her. He doesn’t know what it is about this city, the way it swallows up anything kind and good. He still remembers the dust that coated the bakery windows after the accident, thick enough to choke on.
HE THINKSof ways he might tell her, might show her without making her afraid. He tried to come up with the combinations of words, but none of them could ever be enough to match what he feels. Every day he went to school and got hurt, teased. Boys stuffed him into the lockers, and once they locked him in the custodian’s closet and no one found him for hours. When he was ten, his grandmother saw the bruises when he took a bath, and he never went back again. He waited for someone to come look for him, his teacher or someone from the offices, to come to their door, insist that he had to go back. He doesn’t know if his grandmother spoke to the school, or if no one bothered to find out where he had gone. But no one ever came.
That was the year his grandparents needed his help more than ever. His grandfather’s limp had gotten worse; his foot started dragging along the floor. His grandmother rubbed cream that made his nose tingle into his grandfather’s knees. His grandfather kept a bullet in a tin box in his nightstand drawer, would hold it up to Luis, point to his knee. Luis would hold the bullet as his grandfather unfurled the map.Europe, with its smallpastel shapes, most of them not even as long as his little finger. Then, they would go through the photographs. His grandfather in a green uniform, his helmet tucked under his arm. His grandfather, face smooth and the hair on his head full and dark, doing exercises on the deck of one of the old hotels, a row of men missing limbs, the ocean in the background, large boats hulking darkly near the horizon. Luis was never sure if the boats were bad or good. If they meant protection and safety or if they were something else to fear.
His grandmother taught him practical things: how to clean an oven, bake a pie, rewire a lamp, mend his clothes. He thinks of her when he goes to work now, the way she concentrated on these small tasks, in doing them well, her lips pursed until a pane of glass shone or a tear in a dress was mended. He tries to think of her when he gets angry—at the people who leave their plastic cups all over the place, who frown at the cleaning women in the halls, as though everything at the casino should clean itself magically in the night. As though the workers are the ones in the way. He is glad that she can’t see the city now, how dark it has become, how unclean. Glass spangled over the sidewalks, used condoms left in the streets.
During his next shift they have him cleaning all day long, changing light bulbs, climbing stepladders to dust the tops of shelves and light fixtures. By the end of the day his hands ache from dusting and wiping and mopping everything until it shines, until the blonde girl nods at him to go home. His fingertips are swollen and his back is sore, but he feels that old pride that his grandmother taught him. He holds his head a little higher when he walks out the door.
He stops at a pizzeria for dinner on his way back to the boardinghouse, points to a slice dotted with circles of pepperoni, holds up two fingers. As he waits, he picks up one of the matchbooks on the counter, turns it in his hands, slips it into his pocket. He eyesthe stretchy, gooey strings of cheese that hang off the end of each slice as the man behind the counter slides them on a paper plate. He snows them with shaved cheese and red pepper, his hunger rising up, roaring now.
He’s standing outside, about to take his first bite, when he sees the dark car, the windows tinted black, the purple sticker with the silhouette of the busty woman on the back. The men. He starts to walk away, thinking he can slide from their view, slip loose. He feels them behind him but refuses to turn around. He walks faster, feels footsteps slapping, sees their shadows on the ground, and then a hand claps him on the shoulder.
