“Where’d you put it?” he says. He looks mildly amused.
“What?” you say, but you know he means the pill.
He sighs. “You’ve gone and made this difficult, haven’t you?”
It’s like your body knows something before your brain can put it into words. Your jeans go damp. You are nine years old again, still pissing the bed in your aunt’s house every night. He rises from his chair, and the next thing you know there is a cracking noise that splits the air and you cry out, but then something covers your face and you can’t breathe right, then you can’t breathe at all, and your lungs are burning, burning in a way that reminds you of running. In your mind you are running, running out of the parking lot, back down the dark road, down the boardwalk, which stretches on and on, somehow carries you all the way back home.
Home, which has nothing to do with Suzanna, or with this version of yourself you’ve been experimenting with. Home, where you climb underneath the gingham coverlet and sleep.
JANES 1, 2, 3, AND 4
IT IS NEARING THE ENDof July and there has been no break in the heat. The women remember a time when heat like this was related to desire, a ripening of hunger, of want. The kind of heat that made you crave wet, juicy foods. Peaches whose juices dribbled down your forearms; cool, crisp watermelon; cherries that turned your mouth a sultry purple. Desire for feeling, too, to wear tank tops without a bra so that the fabric skimmed your nipples. For the cool water of the ocean sluiced between your legs, the shimmer of sweat collecting between the jut of your hip bones, the reassuring weight of a damp towel over your shoulders, like an embrace.
There is a sisterhood among them, these women in the marsh. Each time he brings another one, they understand what she has seen. His hatred of them, which he had once masked to look like love, or desire, or sometimes something they interpreted as fear. The way the pill he gave them made the edges of their vision go blurry and a strange halo of light appear around his head, so that he looked like an angel or a saint cast in stained glass. How they only saw him grit his teeth with the effort of it at the end, glance at the blocky sports watch on his wrist as though to count the seconds they had left, as their lungs burned and their limbs became so heavy and their thoughts were reduced to single words thatfilled their whole bodies: NO or OH or PLEASE. And then the blind, mute pain, the state beyond language, and after that there was only darkness left.
Fireworks have exploded over them, trails of sparks streaking through the sky. Then there was a memorial service for a young man who drowned in a boating accident, and his family carried candles and white carnations in the sea. For a moment the white heads of the flowers bobbed on the surface of the water. The next morning many of them washed up, a mess of wrecked petals or woody green stems stripped bare. The women shivered with jealousy. All of those footprints in the sand, those hands cupped protectively around flames.
The indifferent orange neonVACANCYsign of the Sunset Motel blinks weakly through the dark. The building is one of seven squat structures still standing along the Black Horse Pike. They were erected in a strip in the 1950s to accommodate the overflow of tourists pouring into the city on Eisenhower’s new highways, cheap and cheerful alternatives to the big hotels along the boardwalk. Pictures of these motels looking bright and sweet were stamped on postcards, sent to Grandma back in Allentown or Binghamton or Rego Park.Greetings from the Gateway to Atlantic City.
Families used to stay here: mothers who packed picnic baskets lined with cloth, fathers who taught their boys to throw footballs in perfect spirals, children who ran around with a thick paste of zinc on their noses, grandfathers who showed kids how to catch crabs in the inlet. But the motels’ doo-wop cheer has long faded—the aqua and coral awnings blanched by the sun or torn away by storms, so that their metal skeletons are exposed. Their stucco façades are spotted with gray mold. In the 1990s, they were used to house people on welfare, until county officials raised concerns. Now there are oil stains in the parking lots, syringes in the gutters, condom wrappers and chewed gum and mashed cigarette filters collected in the empty planters. It’s a place for hard drugs only, where dealers sell heroin, coke, crack, speed. Guests wake up with welts from the bugs and rashes from sheets—but if they’re here in the first place, they’re usually too far gone to care. Fifteen bucks a night for a place to sleep, you take what you can get. It’s better than the street. Sometimes if a girl makes enough money here, she’ll buy herself breakfast at the Quality Inn across the road—seven bucks, all you can eat.
The motel manager will grumble to anyone who will listen that he has to replace light bulbs all the time—crack addicts make off with them, scrounging for anything they can sell. Sometimes you get a room with no lights at all and no one will come fix them, no matter how many times you call. Men beat women out in the parking lot, and everyone pretends it’s not their business, even as the screams get louder and louder and they can hear the fleshycrack-crack-crackof the blows—who can risk the cops showing up, shining flashlights into cars and knocking on doors?
The women see, too late, the symbolism behind the name, why he drove them here on that last night: He told them that the sun had set on Atlantic City. There is something bad in the air and in the water now, something rotten and wrong. A moral disease. The city needs a warning, a biblical punishment. It needs to change, to repent, before the sun can rise again. He wants to bring them all to their knees. God has clearly brought a few misfortunes to the town: The storm that tore away a stretch of boardwalk and filled the streets with water. The way so many of the casinos have shut down. But bad luck and floods are not enough. That’s where he comes in.
There is a fourth woman with them now, a young woman with blue toenail polish and long, dark hair. Their bodies hummed like tuning forks as he carried her through the tall grass, arranged her like the rest with gloved hands. The rhinestone in her nose sparkles in the sun.
The marsh is supposed to be protective, a buffer between the land and the sea. It’s where things transition, where water and land slide together into one. Blue claw crabs scuttle through the murky water, sometimes finding their way back to the ocean. Birds raise their young here, where there are fewer predators and plenty for them to eat. Egrets pick their way through the mud with elegant care. But for the women, it’s purgatory. Nothing in the marsh is either/or, water or land, lost or found. Their bodies are starting to become something else as their tissue softens and the blood pools in their limbs, something not bound by muscle and skin. They’re not women anymore, and yet they aren’t free and light like spirits. Free to float away, to rise above the marsh like ghosts.
They sense the shift in the wind during the final stretches of July. They know that this new month will bring warmer water, longer nights, cooler breezes. Then, the ocean will brew storms, hurricanes that surge their way up the coast. Wind that tears atthe grass, tides that could scatter them, wash away what’s left. They think this means they’re running out of time. Time to tell their stories, time to be heard. They plead again for someone to see before it’s too late.
CLARA
IT DIDN’T TAKE ME LONGto see how quickly a person’s code could crumble, how easily the world would wear away at your rules. Des had told me I wasn’t supposed to meet anyone she hadn’t found. At first I listened, content to scrounge money from the ones she approved of with an extra sticky-sweet smile, an extra kiss. But then, one afternoon I lifted a porcelain doll from the gift shop at the Borgata and was walking to Zeg’s to see what he’d give me for it, when a car pulled up, the window cracked. The driver asked me if I felt like going for a ride. I could only see his sunglasses, which made me nervous. But the math won out. After paying Bill, I was back to $250 again.
I knew I was being reckless. For a moment I thought of Des pointing out a woman on the street once, when she saw me staring at the strange scars on her face. “Acid,” she said. “She got together with the wrong man and now look at her. She’ll have his marks on her until the day she dies.” Her skin looked like it had melted into itself, the glazed-looking scars, the tragic air that hovered around her because she still carried herself as though nothing about her had changed. And then I thought,So what, and reached for the handle of the passenger’s side door. I had been dreaming of oranges that week, oranges heavy with juice,on the knife’s edge between ripeness and rot like the ones that my mother said splashed into the swimming pool outside of her guesthouse. It felt like a sign—I would rot if I stayed in town any longer. My life would have to get uglier, messier, before it would be clean and bright—I would need to do whatever it took to be free.
“Sure,” I told him, making my voice husky and low. But I couldn’t help but look over my shoulder before I got in, and now I really knew what those girls felt, the ones I had watched all my life. How they probably wanted one last fresh breath of air, one more moment to arrange their face before surrendering themselves to someone else.
HIS CARsmelled like cologne and peppermint candy. He tried to act calm but he was nervous—he gave it away in the way he kept scratching at the side of his nose.
“What do you have there?” he asked. I held up the doll. He laughed so hard he sprayed spit all over my arm. “A whore with a fucking doll. This place is too damn much.”Yeah, I thought.I feel the same way.
He drove to the parking garage at Bally’s, a shady spot on the upper level. He reclined his seat, unzipped his pants, closed his eyes. When I hesitated, he took me by the hair and pushed my mouth toward his crotch.
When it was over, he gave me a hundred bucks. Up to $350—$1,650 and then I’d never have to do any of this again. He didn’t offer to drive me anywhere, so I got out in the parking garage. I was studying the constellation of old chewing gum at my feet when he called to me.
“Hey,” he said. He hadn’t asked my name. “You forgot this.” He handed the doll out the window. I could hear him laughing as he drove off. Once his taillights disappeared, I threw the doll ashard as I could against a concrete pillar. Her face broke into pieces: a sliver of cheek, a blue long-lashed eye. Outside, lightning crackled in the distance, the clouds dense and greenish, otherworldly. The wind whipped through the city, and finally the clouds deepened in color before they broke apart and released rain. Huge drops fell, splashes as big as poker chips, and the thunder boomed through the garage, loud enough to trigger a few car alarms. I sat and watched the city get drenched, listened to the blare of the alarms, and savored the feeling that no one knew where I was. For the first time I could understand what would make a girl want to disappear. No one else to see the bad things you had done.
I HOPEDthat Peaches would come back—some people did, after a tough reading. They wanted it to be like the casinos, when a new deal, another shuffle, might refresh their luck. When she didn’t, I decided to search for her: in the dim little casino bars on the floor, at the nightclubs, where I sat at the bar and drank an orange soda until the strobe lights gave me a headache. Every time I heard theclick click clickof high heels on marble, I turned to make sure it wasn’t her, strutting in those heels with the ties. I didn’t hear the crying anymore, but I was still having visions, a baby’s hand uncurling then clenching into a fist. Little legs kicking in the air. Another, of moths fluttering in and out of a streetlight, the blare of horns. But what I didn’t know, couldn’t understand, was why the visions lingered, repeated on a loop. They interfered with anything else I might see. For the first time in years, I couldn’t use my intuition, those little bread crumbs of knowledge that had been helping me get through the world. Like when I was younger and a bad storm rolled in off of the ocean, and the TV went fuzzy, then dim. I hadn’t thought of how vulnerable I might feel without my visions. One more reason to go to my mother—to ask her what was happening, to see if she could help.
I had been looking for Peaches at the Borgata when I met the next man. At the other end of the bar three drunk girls screeched along with a karaoke machine and spilled their drinks over the rims of their glasses when they danced. We sat one stool apart, but he ignored me at first, simply sipped a beer and frowned at the women in small denim skirts helping one another climb up and straddle the mechanical bull, cackling when they toppled to the ground, their leopard-print underwear exposed for everyone to see. Then I felt his eyes fall on the skin of my forearms, where I’d scratched a few jagged tally marks—one for each man who touched me. He slid over a stool and bought me a drink, something cloudy with sugar that held a bright sprig of mint crushed under cubes of ice. I knew I was being stupid, getting in over my head, but I’d make my money fast, get to California, and learn how to forget.
As we talked, I kept one eye on the hallway, the slow trickle of people passing by. I watched for the other woman, too, the one who’d run away from her reading. If I saw her, it would feel like proof that whatever trapdoor was supposed to open in the universe and swallow her up had been faulty. Maybe she had already gone home, back to whoever was waiting for her. But that didn’t make sense. If the first woman had left, why had Peaches found her purse on the side of the road? And even if I found Peaches, would the answers help? Still, I carried that purse wherever I went, hoping it might bring one of them around, like bait.
In the man’s room, the chill from the shuddering air conditioner sent a prickle of goose bumps up my arms. He pulled my hair so hard I pictured a fistful of it coming out in his hands. I didn’t cry out, even though he probably wanted me to. I bit my lip and waited for the sharpness of the pain to ease into a dull throb.
He kept a length of rope coiled in his dresser drawer, like a snake. He tied me to a chair, knotting it tight enough so that myhead jerked on my neck with the force, and the rope rubbed and scratched against my arms. Then he sat across the room, lit a cigarette, and watched the smoke curl toward the ceiling. I watched him, both knowing what was coming and hoping I was wrong. He looked at the cigarette and tilted his head, playacting like the idea had just come to him. I shut my eyes and listened to his footfall cross the room. He stood over me until I opened them again, and that’s when he pinned my hand down and pressed the coal of the cigarette into my middle finger.
