She laughed, a cynical chortle. “Some of themarecops. But most cops prefer the Asian massage parlors.” I knew the kinds of places she meant. The ones decorated with cheap bamboo screens and thwarted-looking bonsai trees. “We’re not the only ones. Take a look next time you go for a walk around here—every single one of them has the same door in the back. I’m sorry. I’ll tell you whatever you want to know. But right now I really do need you to go.” Every nerve along my body tightened when I stood to leave, but what else could I do?
Instead of walking to my car right away, I stood across the boardwalk and waited. I remembered what it was like, to be thirteen, fourteen, and notice that men started looking at me in a new way. Like they understood something about me that I didn’t know yet. But I wanted to see what kind of man would walk into that shop and arrange to buy someone that young. Who had no qualms about doing it so openly. A man who felt like he had nothing to fear.
A man in a suit who had been standing against a light pole looked at his watch, glanced over his shoulder, and went into the store. Clara came out a moment later, picked up the chalkboard sign, carried it inside. I watched as she switched the hanging sign on the door fromOpentoClosedand drew the curtains across the window.
I listened to thetick-tick-tickof the Crazy Mouse crank up the tracks. I wondered if she was making up everything else. Was all this about the missing girl and the inexplicable visions, the strange sensations, the bad dreams, a way to ask for help without having to talk about the other things that were really going on? I could tell her fear was genuine, even if she was masking it behind this search for these women. And I even believed that she saw things sometimes. But this, with the women, could it be true? I sat on a bench, rubbed my temples. My life here was supposed to be simple, even dull. And now here was this girl—a thief, a con, a prostitute, and maybe a psychic—insisting she needed my help. I didn’t know what Clara could actually see or not, but either way, I didn’t want to fail anyone the way I had failed Steffanie.
I stayed like that until I had the sense that I wasn’t alone—that I was being watched. I looked up and scanned the boardwalk, and the loose, loping gait, the narrow shoulders. Luis. He had already turned his back on me, but I was sure it had been him. What was he doing here? It wasn’t strange that he might come to the boardwalk, but why, when I lifted my face to look at him, had he turned away? Was there something off about him, something I should be worried about? A sense of dread bloomed in my gut, souring the evening’s beauty: the light on the ocean, the creamy-looking sand. Across the boardwalk, the sign on Clara’s door still saidClosed. The curtains remained shut. I lingered for another twenty minutes, but nothing changed, except the steady sense of worry that crimped my shoulders and my neck.
JANE 4
YOU DON’T KNOW HOW HE’Stracked you down. You left no trace, no clues. And then one day you see your own face on a poster at the boardwalk, on telephone poles, in the windows of stores. It’s your old face, the face of a girl who still believed she could live a different life, who believed she could hide from her shadow-self forever. At the bottom, the phone number your uncle had you memorize when you first moved in. You’ve still got the rhythm of the numbers in you—you could call that number from the middle of a dream.
How did he know you were here? You’ve been so careful. You don’t like this, the inversion of things, your second, better life reaching to haul you back. You’d made up your mind about who you are and what you deserved.
Who you are: a girl who sleeps at the shelter, listening to the others cry in their sleep.
Who you are: a girl whose mother wrote to her from prison, only to ask for money in her commissary account.
Who you are: someone who is running out of money to wash her clothes at the Laundromat on Kentucky Avenue.
Who you are: not too numb yet, to not feel afraid.
YOU REMEMBER,moments after you see the first poster, the time you left your wallet next to the sink in the bathroom. You had no plan to use the cards, so you only checked that the cash was missing. Two hundred dollars, gone. You had been so worried about that that you hadn’t thought about the Amex for days. The one your aunt signed you up for in case of emergencies. Chances are, she would call everything since you’ve left an emergency. You realized eventually that if someone had used it here, you could be traced. You hoped whoever stole it would wait until they got to another state. You would have canceled it, but you liked the idea of throwing everyone off. It’s not that you wanted anyone to look for you. (Or … or did you? Do you?)
And then, Jesus, the day you saw him. Your uncle. Sitting there at the cheap little restaurant on the boardwalk, the one with all the yellow plastic tables and chairs, the only person without a Bloody Mary or a mimosa next to his plate. Was this what you wanted? To see your uncle slumped over his phone, probably texting your aunt that he was hopeful the posters would help, even though you saw his posture was broken by exhaustion. And it was all your fault.
You couldn’t help it. You followed him a few blocks after he paid his bill. You thought how easy it would be to catch up with him. Seven, eight strides? Even now that you are no longer in race shape. You could tap him on the arm, say you were sorry. But none of that would change the chemistry of your personality.
How to tell your uncle about that? He and your mother grew up in the same tidy little split-level, on a cul-du-sac, where the streetlights weren’t shot out once and never repaired, where whatever was in your mother must have been wrong since then, and it’s wrong in you. You are different from your friends, yourcoaches, your aunt and uncle. They cared so much about you winning those meets, they screamed your name—your friends even painted it on their cheeks. It had been easy to run that fast, but the attention embarrassed you, made you feel guilty. They couldn’t see that you were slowly souring from the inside out.
You decide you’ll scrounge up enough for a bus ticket somewhere else, somewhere farther away. You’ve heard the other women in the shelter talking, talking about sleeping with men for cash as though it were as easy and impersonal as working a shift at Burger King. And isn’t it your right? Your body, at least you get to sell it or rent it out as you see fit. And besides, you would only need to do it once, just to get enough to get out of here, to go somewhere you can breathe.
It’s not that you think there is anything elegant or noble about suffering—pain is just pain, too abundant and easy to come by to mean anything, other than itself. It does not mean redemption, or absolution, and it doesn’t make you stronger. But happiness can be a burden, too. When it comes down to it, you don’t know how to be a human, how to bear either pain or joy.
WITH YOURmother, you didn’t think of it as prostitution because it was rooted so strongly in need. Cause and effect, no frills or pretenses about it. Prostitutes were women in red dresses and heels, women with too much makeup on, women who marked themselves in obvious ways as available for sex. Women who liked it too much—when you still thought that women weren’t allowed to want sex like men did. You’ve seen those kinds of women around here, too. Like the one with the peach tattoo who got in your face the first time you tried to pick someone up, so you left the bar and were stuck in AC for one more day.
So now you go down to the parking lot of the Sunset Motel. You heard that’s where some of the other girls hang out, that itwould be easy—though you couldn’t expect to get paid as much. You spend twenty minutes toeing bottle caps in the parking lot before a man approaches you.
In the room the light comes through the cheap curtains and you let the man touch you. You feel the shadow Julie stepping closer, the gap between your selves growing smaller than it’s ever been, an arm’s length, then a few inches as you take off your clothes, then a sliver as thin as a slice of paper when he pushes you onto the bed. You’re scared and a little bit embarrassed by his want. It’s not your first time—Kevin Luther, last spring—but it’s already so different that it might as well be. Kevin pausing after he entered you to tuck a strand of hair behind your ear, like you were something delicate, something that could break.
This could be one of the last ways you might understand her. You’re still scared to go all the way, to open the gates of your brain to the drugs, but this … this is something you could point to and, if you were to meet her again (impossible, impossible, but how little all that seems to matter now), you could say that you understood her desperation, understood the sadness and the strangeness and the loneliness of some man on top of you, groaning a name you gave him that wasn’t yours.
Afterward, you weep to yourself on the long walk back into town, the marsh grass wavering, rippling like a prairie.
You wait a day and tell yourself you’ll do it just once more—you want a cushion, after all, just a little bit more cash. You wait until it’s dark, moths weaving in and out under the streetlights. Cars blare their horns at you as you make your way down the shoulder of the road, warning or greeting. Your uncle could drive by at any minute, if he hasn’t already gone home. But still, a part of you wants to rescue yourself, theyouof the gingham coverlet, theyouof the track medals hanging above your bed.
When you get to the Sunset Motel, you’re not the only girl there, but you’re the newest, so you sit on the edge of an oldplanter box until the three other women pick someone up. The parking lot is empty, and all you can hear is the feeble buzz and crackle of the neon sign above your head. The name of the motel, and then a sun, a half circle with sticks of neon that light up one at a time, like rays, and then go dark. A man comes out of a room and you hold his gaze. You can’t tell if he’s checking you out or is about to call the cops. Just in case, you look down at your feet as he comes near.
He introduces himself as John, and you introduce yourself as Suzanna. Your mother’s name. It carries a current on your tongue and makes everything afterward both more real and less real. He asks you if you’re looking to party, which you guess is one of the ways people talk about what you’re about to do.Maybe, you say. You feel stupid, that you don’t entirely know what you’re signing on for if you say yes.
He tells you he’s got some stuff in his room. He’s still looking at you in a way you wouldn’t quite describe as sexual. Hungry, maybe.
He pulls out a chair, motions for you to sit. He offers you a pill, and you hesitate a second before you pinch it from his palm. He watches you place it in your mouth, mime a swallow, and slide it under your tongue. You want to please him but not obey him. What you’ve given up so far has been things or parts of yourself that you were already willing to lose. You wait for him to take a pill, too, and when he doesn’t, when he turns around, you slide the pill into the pocket of your jean shorts, the white surface puckered and cratered where it had started to dissolve. You catch the brassy glint of a ring on the bedside table, the kind of weighty championship ring the football players wear at school. You stifle the impulse to smirk. A man that age still hanging on to a scrap of old glory. You are only eighteen, and yet all of those victories feel like they happened so long ago.
You wait for him to touch you, to ask for something or demand it, but he only sits on the bed, watching you. Once, youand your friends found a list of strange fetishes online, read them off to one another at school, and laughed so hard that your abs were sore the next day. Foot fetishes and men who wanted to be peed on, men who wanted women to talk to them like babies, people who dressed up as fuzzy animals and had sex, men who wanted to be kicked in the balls. You wonder if there is a fetish for watching to the point of awkwardness, for making women uncomfortable.
Minutes pass. How many? Three? Ten? Forty? You can’t tell anymore. The room feels small and the minutes feel long and you start to feel hot, then cold, then hot again.
