She must have heard the shakiness in my voice. But I had gone this far. There was no backing out of it now without hurting Mrs. Zale, leaving her confused or forlorn. “I was thinking of how much I liked Julie’s room. How cozy it felt. How it felt like her, all of the decorations and colors.”
“Oh, yes. Well, she hated those pink walls. Ha.”
I looked at Clara. She had said that Julie’s walls were painted green. I started to shake my head. “Her uncle took one look at it when I was done and just saidno way. Said it was all wrong for her. He painted that green right over himself. Tracked it on the white carpet we just had put in. Julie got home from camp and she was never the wiser, said she adored the green. Of course, I should have guessed. And she never wanted to replace that coverlet I made her a million years ago. I asked her so many times ifshe wanted a new one, that old plaid one was what I put together for her when she first got to the house, as a little thing. Sometimes … oh, sometimes I wonder if I smothered her. If she felt overwhelmed here.”
“She seemed happy to me, Mrs. Zale.”
“To me, too, dear.”
“Well, I should let you go, I think. I’m sorry to have bothered you. I just wanted … wanted to talk about her.”
“Call anytime, sweetheart. Okay? And you keep praying. We’ll get our girl back. I know we will.”
I knew if I said another word, I’d cry, so I simply ended the call. Clara gripped my arm. I had crumpled the poster in my hand.
“You’re right, Clara. That was terrible. I— I think I need to sit down.” I was so overwhelmed that for a few seconds I didn’t register Clara’s silence.
“Did you hear me, Clara? I said you were right. At first she said pink walls, but the uncle painted them green before Julie came back from camp, or something. He knew she wouldn’t like the pink. White carpet. She sewed the plaid blanket herself.”
She put her head in her hands. I looked up and started: there was a man leaning against the opposite wall, his baseball cap pulled low, a pair of sunglasses masking his eyes, a windbreaker with the Harrah’s logo emblazoned across the chest. The poker players always skulked around like that, like B-list celebrities in exile. He was already walking away. How much had he heard? It wasn’t so much that I thought he would do something about it: call the Zales, and what, report us? But it was deeply shameful, the idea that we’d been overheard.
“Clara, that guy … I think he heard us.”
She mumbled something, her fingers still over her eyes and mouth. It sounded likeI don’t care.One of the Band-Aids had come unraveled. It had covered a perfect circle of a wound, onethat wept with infection. The skin around it was bright red. A cigarette burn.
“Clara, let me see that.” I reached for her wrist, but she was quicker, pulled it away and hid her hand behind her back.
“What are you doing here?” Emily, returning from break early. I pushed Clara’s phone back into her hands.
“She’s just leaving. Aren’t you? I escorted her out here in the hall, so she wouldn’t bother guests.” I tried to stand straighter, hold Emily’s eye. Emily studied me, and I was sure she knew I was being untruthful, and I couldn’t explain why I’d had Clara’s phone. I simply had to hope that she wouldn’t ask.
“Sure, I am.Hypocrite.” Her eyes were narrowed on Emily. She glowered at me, too, which I assumed was just for show, and left us without another word.
“God, can’t keep the grifters out, huh? Lily, I’m assuming you’re ready to go back to doing your job?”
“Yeah. Why’d she call you a hypocrite?”
“Who knows? Maybe she thinks we’re all on the same page. Just some gals stuck here in Atlantic City, peddling our services for a buck until something better comes along. But with those two, everything is just a setup for one of their cons.” Now Emily’s hostility toward Clara made me wince, and for a second I considered telling her about the burns.
A few minutes later, my phone lit up with a new text. I figured it was Clara, asking me when we could meet up again.See a doctor first, I would tell her. But I almost dropped the phone when I saw who it was.
Hey, Lil. Are you over your slumming at the shore phase yet? We should talk.
Matthew.
I had wanted this for most of the summer, hadn’t I? Some kind of acknowledgment from him? But the text only made me furious. I didn’t have time to puzzle out what Matthew wanted, whathe could possibly be up to. I was spent. Cold, where the sweat on my back was now drying in the chill of the air-conditioning. I couldn’t get Mrs. Zale’s voice out of my head. I kept picturing her walking upstairs, creaking open the door to Julie’s room, sitting on the bed. Taking the velvet of that stuffed rabbit’s ear between her fingers, waiting and waiting and waiting for her girl to come home.
JANE 5
PEACHES SPENT THE TWO DAYSafter the tarot reading at the library, leaving only when the librarian rang a bell and announced that they needed to close. All of the homeless men, wearing their puffy parkas in the full heat of summer, the old ladies whose palsied hands made papers rattle in their grip, the mothers scrolling through their phones while their kids tugged on their sleeves and held up picture books. Once, she slipped into the business center at Caesars, using a john’s room key to access the tiny closet on the third floor where the casino kept two old Dells and a creaking, dusty printer. She added her name to lists, researched payment plans and Medicaid coverage. It had been one full day since she last used, and her head was already throbbing, her gut starting to churn.
It took nine calls and three waitlists before she got a bed at a detox center in Hammonton, and she used most of her cash on the cab ride there. She remembers these small farm towns from when she first came to Atlantic City, three years ago with Josh. They remind her of home—all those blueberry trees, the rows of stout bushes, their branches tipped with fruit.Welcome to the Blueberry Capital of the World!a sign announces cheerfully. The cabbie frowns at her in the rearview when she laughs.
The cab cuts through the town’s main street, and she watches other people moving through their tidy lives. A man raises the grate on the front of the hardware store, a paper cup of coffee in one hand. A woman lifts a pastry from a waxed paper bag, closing her eyes as she takes a bite, releasing a puff of confectioners’ sugar into the air. Already, Peaches is sweating so much that her hair is soaked, her stomach lurching. The cab stops at a squat building that looks too ugly to be a place where anyone might get better, might heal. She wants to ask him how much to go back, to turn around and head to AC again. She closes her eyes and thinks of that card, the Tower: the leaping bodies, the creeping flames.
At check-in, she clicks her license down on the counter. In the photo her hair is purple. She fought with her mother about that, her palms still stained with dye.
“Why’s your name Georgia if you’re from Pennsylvania?” the receptionist asks. She pictures the photograph on her mother’s mantel. The stern-lipped great-grandmother in the black velvet dress, a starched white collar tight around her neck. Georgia Maxine Standish, in little black leather shoes peeking out from under her hem, the ones that looked like they pinched her feet into hooves. The original Georgia’s disapproval filled the room, even when she was a little girl. By the time she met Josh, Georgia asked him to call her Peaches. The only way she knew how to free herself from her great-grandmother’s legacy was to make herself into a joke.
