“Nothing,” I said. “Hey, show me those?” I tapped on the glass to indicate a tray of pocketknives. The one that caught my eye had a pearly handle decorated with silver swirls. It gleamed in the light.
“Out of your budget.”
“Can I at least see?”
Another grunt, and Zeg crouched again.
He pushed the knives toward me. “You are wasting my time.” Some of them had handles that looked like bone; others were carved with marks and symbols that I didn’t recognize. I touched my finger to the one with the silver swirls.
“Don’t even think about it.”
I touched another, a longer one that looked less ornate. “Uh-uh.”
I picked up a third, and when Zeg didn’t say anything, I flicked the blade open. It was freckled with a few rust spots but otherwise it seemed okay. It was simple, silver, and a little shiver of feeling moved through me when I looked at it, felt the cool metal against the skin of my palm.
“How about this one?”
“What do you even want that for?” I didn’t really know, other than it made me feel good to hold it. A little less small, a little less afraid.
“Forty-five dollars for that one.”
“Twenty dollars is all I’ve got.” I pushed the bill toward him and his eyes caught on my fingers, the matching Band-Aids, and something like surprise crossed his face. Just for a second, and then it was gone. Sometimes I thought Zeg might have a little bit of the gift, too.
“You’re robbing me blind, kid.”
I handed the ring back to Zeg, pushed my twenty in his direction, and slipped the knife into my bag. Down to $630, but the knife had called to me, and I knew better than to resist a feeling like that.
I was a block away from home when the tingle came back and a vision moved through me, like a kaleidoscope turned too fast. Highways, roads stretching endlessly. A woman baking bread in a sunlight-filled kitchen. A hotel room, the sense of being hit hard across the face. Something soft and pale, something bright—shining discs, hanging above a bed.
I came to exhausted. My limbs ached, the way they had when I’d had the flu last year. The throbbing in my head from the blow lingered, and I had to blink a few times before the street around me came back into focus. Each step toward home felt heavy, full of effort. Her name was in the back of my throat, but I didn’t want to say it, to match up what I knew with the thing I had been afraid of.
The vision was about Julie. Julie Zale. The tooth, Victoria’s crying child. I couldn’t deny it anymore. There was something evil and ugly at work behind these visions. And now someone had gotten to Julie Zale, too. I texted Lily.Please, can we meet?
LUIS
ON HIS DAY OFF, HEbuys food for the cats, and in the afternoon he carries three plastic bags of cans to the bulkhead. When he slips beneath the boardwalk, he takes a moment to relish the shade, the sand that has cooled underneath the planks. To his left, the pier juts out into the sea and a pair of men are talking, one of them leaning against a piling. Luis pays them no mind and stoops to open the first can. The cats crowd around him, curl around his feet. He’s only opened six of the twenty cans when he feels a tap on the shoulder. One of the men from the pier, who jerks his thumb over his shoulder.Get out of here.
Luis points to the bag of cans, to the cats that have only just crept across the beach and who are still hungry. The man shakes his head, and when Luis turns to open another can, the man grips his shoulder and spins him around. This time, he’s raised his shirt to reveal a black gun nestled against his skin. The second man joins him and Luis knows to raise his hands in the air and surrender—all he ever does anymore. On his way back he passes the shop with the golden eye in the window, and when the girl with the red hair looks up at him he scurries away.
Instead of going back to the boardinghouse—its musty carpets, the dim rooms—he makes his way to the lot where his oldhouse was. Now it’s just another gap where weeds have grown up through the dust and people have tossed their empty beer cans. He’s furious that people are so cruel, so indifferent, that they permit the rot he notices at every corner. He stalks away, grinding his teeth, stopping to kick signposts, throwing loose cans and making them bounce off fences and walls. He shoves his hands in his pockets and feels the jingle of his change from the pizza joint, the matchbook he slid from the counter as the man warmed his slices in the oven.
The matchbook. It’s nothing more than a scrap of cardboard, a red-and-white drawing of a pizza on the back, a few sticks inside, and yet, it feels special, important. He stops to study the row of abandoned homes before him: a hint of blue paint on one of the windowsills, a molding doormat on the porch. A sign on the door looks like a warning, but it’s faded enough that he figures if it mattered, it doesn’t anymore. Maybe this house had been cheerful, beautiful even. Happy. And now lifeless, unused.
Inside, the air is thick with mildew and a smell that he recognizes as cat piss, which makes his nose and eyes burn. In the living room there’s a folding table, an armchair covered in shredded, rose-printed fabric, a lumpy old sofa with stuffing poking through the seat. He strikes the first match and holds it to the stuffing, part of him hoping it won’t catch, the rest of him egging it on, coaxing, waiting. He feels a strange pull inside of him, between terror and excitement, fear and hope. It smokes for a moment before the flame starts to grow. Already he is picturing the swarm of police standing in front of the charred ruins, their mouths agape. It pleases him, too, to release the house from its sadness, to hide some of the city’s shame. If it can’t be beautiful, the way it once was, then let it not exist at all. And it will give the cops something to do other than ignore his pain.
He closes his eyes and pictures the candles his grandmother used to light, the tall glass jars with saints’ faces painted on thefronts. He opens his eyes and watches the fire get bolder, bigger. Flames rip from one end of the sofa to the other. He stands in front of it, holding his hands to the heat like it’s a hearth. He feels some of his anger burning up, too, like it has been used up by the flame, turned to smoke. It clouds the air, low and gray, until it makes him cough and his lungs burn. A feeling he’s never been able to forget. For many years after his grandparents died, he would still wake with a start most nights, thinking he smelled smoke wafting down the hall.
The flames catch the end of a pale panel of curtains above the sofa’s left arm, licking their way up the fabric. He would do anything to capture the colors, bottle them: the bluish bud at the center, the yellows and oranges that change to red. He coughs again, gasping now, knowing he should leave but unable to look away. He takes one last look at the fire, admiring what he’s created, then finds the back door, draws the fresh air into his lungs. He vaults himself over the sagging chain-link fence, and runs, flinging open his arms, feeling a little lighter, free.
LILY
ON MY NEXT SHIFT Iwaited until Emily was on her lunch break, then clicked around on the security system to see if there was any chance of looking at the archived footage—the system let me access the past twenty-four hours, but nothing beyond that without a supervisor’s password. We were able to access the hotel’s records to help with our scheduling and billing, but we could only see who was in the hotel at that moment—not who had stayed in the past or when. Just in case, I searched the name “Peaches,” but as I suspected would happen, the system didn’t turn up any results. Clara had wanted me to text her, though I found myself holding out. I was worried that once I told her I didn’t have news she could use, she would bail. And I wanted to keep her close, watch over her. I couldn’t stop picturing that man who had come into her shop. Couldn’t stop picturing Steffanie, the way that, before that night at the club, she used to snort when she laughed.
I was struggling, too, to find anything else about the artist and the paintings from Mil’s. I had gone back to her house to take photos on my phone. As I crossed the street, I’d worried that they wouldn’t be as striking as I remembered, that I had only been impressed by them because they’d been so unexpected.
Mil surprised me by greeting me with a hug. She was wearing a stack of bangles that clacked against my spine.
“Sorry, I’ve got my armor on today.”
