It was early, but Tropicana already jangled with arcade noises. Fake trumpets and prerecorded applause warbled out of the slot machines, mingled with the phlegmy coughs of senior citizens and people carrying on loud cell phone conversations as they wrestled quarters from Ziploc bags heavy with loose change. The cigar bar near the poker lounge was already muggy with thick, sweet smoke. A man with wide shoulders and a broad, stout build stood as I passed, and I jumped because he reminded me of the two men from the night before. He eyed me for a moment before turning his attention to the cigar pinched between his lips, flicking a lighter and turning it slowly in the flame.
In the window of a boutique, a shopgirl changed a mannequin from a blue sequined dress to a red one with a slit up to the hip.What’s the point?You never saw anyone dressed glamorously in AC. Most people wore track suits, fanny packs, sweatpants with elastic cinched at the ankles. Dresses like that belonged to a different time.
I drifted aimlessly through the Quarter, passing the restaurant where I had gone with Tom—that felt like years ago now. I made my way to the hotel lobby, where a man was waggling his finger at a reservations agent, his wife at his side, her hands on her hips.
“Mice!” he roared. “We had fucking mice in our room! And if you don’t do something about it now we’re going to blast that out over the internet and this dump is going to be in even worse trouble than it already is!”
I had the urge to sob. Everything felt hopeless. Finding Peaches. Figuring out what caused these visions. Leaving. Staying here. Reuniting with my mother. Saving the shop. It was all one big Rubik’s cube that I didn’t know how to solve. And all the while, the image of the Tower loomed in my mind. It wasn’t just Peaches who was going to face an upheaval. I felt something about my life was about to shift, to possibly break.
I sat on the concrete lip of the fountain and stared up at the false sky of the Quarter. The shapeless, smeared-looking clouds, the egg yolk–yellow sun. The tingle only lasted for half a second—a light-headedness, a strange taste in my mouth. Then a vision swallowed me up.
Movement. A woman’s hand reaching for a cord, pulling on it, a lamp crashing to the ground. A man’s work boot—reared back and kicked. The legs of a chair, the broken fingernails reaching toward them. The edges of the room going hazy, the light shrinking to a pinpoint, then nothing but darkness.
When I came out of it, I was on the ground, my head pounding—
Imust have slipped from the edge of the fountain, knocked my head against the stone. A woman perched on a scooter stared down at me, her eyes huge behind her glasses. I pushed myself up, my whole body exhausted, like waking up after a nightmare. My mouth was dry, but I swore I could smell blood. I kept bringing my hand to the sore spot on my head, expecting it to be wet.
“Hun, you okay?” the woman asked. I managed a nod. I wondered if I had bit my tongue. I spit in my hand to see if I was bleeding—the woman’s face changed from concern to disgust, but I didn’t care. I forced myself to keep moving: to the bridge between the casino and the parking garage, the elevator to the ground floor, out onto the street. I knew those hands. Small, like a girl’s. Peaches. I was too late. The brokenness I had felt pulsing in this city all summer, at the center of everything that was wrong, had taken over. I had started to shake and told myself Iwas too cold in the air-conditioning, thought it might help to feel the sun on my face, my arms. I stood at the rails and watched a man with a metal detector make his way over the dunes, toeing at mounds of sand, searching. I gripped the rail hard, until my knuckles turned white.
I sat on an empty bench nearby, took my tarot cards from my bag. I had so many questions that I found it hard to narrow them down. Why hadn’t my mother called for me yet? What was going on with Des? What had happened to them, Peaches and Victoria and Julie Zale?What could I do to help them?I asked.And what do I need to do to help myself?
The first card—the past—was the Two of Cups. Partnership. In a reading, it could stand for a romantic partnership or even a business partnership. None of the men I had been with deserved that word,partner. Des always called us partners, though it had been a long time since she had carried any of the weight. But still, if I thought about it, being with Des could be a little bit of a thrill. Back when I was a kid, some of her cons felt more like a game. Like the time when our water was shut off because she didn’t pay the bill. We didn’t fight about it, didn’t worry. Instead, Des led me to the Hilton, and we snatched little bottles of shampoo from the maid’s carts and snuck into the empty rooms to use their showers. Breaking in was easy—all it took was a credit card, or even a firm piece of paper, a quick slide to force the lock. But the Two of Cups was my first card; it meant that partnership was behind me. Whatever I faced from here on out, I faced alone.
The second card was the Four of Pentacles. It showed a sad man slumped over his fortune, his city in the distance behind him. This card usually meant you were too focused on money, gave it too much importance in your life. Sometimes, it could be interpreted more loosely: you were too fixated on control. I wasn’t sure how to read the card—the visions, the missing women, men using me—it had been so long since I felt like I was in control.If money wasn’t that important, it meant that getting free wasn’t important. I understood why the man in the picture clutched his coins close. The card seemed to imply that he’d lost his home, his relationships, because he cared too much about riches. But maybe he was like me—he wanted to see that town recede behind him. The money, like the stash under my bed, was the only thing keeping him from lapsing back into his old life, into being someone he didn’t want to be.
The future, the Ten of Swords. One of the most violent cards in the deck. A man sprawled on the ground, ten swords stuck in his back. It could mean that you were literally going to be stabbed in the back, a betrayal. A crisis, a painful but inevitable end. The silver lining that I offered people when this card showed up in readings was that you couldn’t control what other people did to you, but you could choose how you wanted to act in response. It could be a card about accepting your pain and having a chance to move on from it. Some people saw the dead man and thought the card was telling them they were going to die, but that wasn’t it, or at least not usually. It meant that, like death, this was the final challenge—but there was peace waiting on the other side. My final challenge was still waiting for me.
I slipped the tarot cards back into their pouch and rubbed the back of my head. A bump had formed where it had struck the fountain, and it flashed with pain when I pushed my fingers against it. The visions were getting more complex, more violent, more consuming. Was that my final challenge? To overcome them? To figure out what they meant? Maybe it was too late to save Peaches and Julie, but then, what did they want from me? How was I supposed to help?
I was ravenous, but I was too anxious to eat. I headed in the direction of the shop and stopped at the 99-cent store to get myself a ginger ale, and tried to decide what to do next. At the front ofthe store, a row of pinwheels spun in the breeze, their metallic colors flashing. Every bone in my body was screamingleave leave leave. I thought of the Four of Pentacles, how happy I would be to turn my back on this city, to look back and see the skyline in the distance. I pulled the tab on my soda and wondered what I was supposed to do about the money. I was watching the pinwheels again when someone crashed into me and the soda fizzed all over my fingers, sloshed onto my shirt. It took me a minute to place him: Luis, the one who worked with Lily. Of course. Every time I saw him, something seemed to go wrong.
He held out his hands, the way people do to saysorryortake it easy.
But then I was somewhere else, outside of myself, beyond the boardwalk. Somewhere wild and untamed. Mud, and grass, a wide open field of it. A sparkle of something bright. Jewelry glinting in the light. The jewelry was attached to women. To their bodies. Their clothes looked too bright and their hair and skin was dull. There were bruises on their legs and arms. And flies. So many flies. Rings of bruises around their necks. Their faces were turned away from me, but I saw the locket, the blonde hair. Someone with Julie Zale’s long runner’s limbs. I could feel the flies everywhere, on every inch of my skin.
I came to, panting for breath. I had dropped the can of soda at my feet. It took all the effort I had to remain standing up. Luis stared at me, and as soon as I could catch my breath I started screaming. He held his hands out again, more insistently this time. As though he were sayingno, stop, please. But I kept screaming, even as people gathered around us. I heard a woman mumble that they should call the cops.No, another voice said.An ambulance. No, another person said.Look at her eyes. I think she’s just strung out.Luis edged away from me, and I fumbled for my keys, collapsed against the doorframe. I managed to stab my key into the lock of the shop door and pounded up the stairs.
I hadn’t taken my own advice, hadn’t listened to my own intuition. He had always given me a weird feeling—the sense that he had something to hide. But what did it matter? It didn’t take back what he’d done to them, to all of them. Peaches, Victoria, Julie, and the two others who had been with them, touching hands. Was this the fearsome fate that my future held? Knowing the truth, and that I could do nothing about it? That maybe if I had paid better attention, those women could have been saved?
I curled myself into a ball on the floor of my bedroom, stayed like that until the light in the sky began to fade and the casinos turned on their signs, and everything was covered in their eerie red glow. The most I could manage was watching the colors of the light change. If this was what the Ten of Swords had been pointing to, it also meant that freedom was close. I knew one fact, consistent as a heartbeat:I have to get out of here.All of the others had probably thought the same.
LUIS
THE DAY AFTER HE FINDSthe women, he paces the boardwalk, up and down and up and down and up and down. All the stores sell the same things—T-shirts printed with pictures of neon sunsets, wire cages filled with sad, slow hermit crabs whose shells are covered with glitter and painted designs: baseballs, moons. But at one of the shops, above the crabs, a row of cameras hangs from plastic hooks, the disposable kind in a bright yellow wrapper—his grandfather used to bring them along on their crabbing trips, or take pictures of Luis and his grandmother on the porch, his grandmother giving him a silly poke in the cheek so that he would smile, and in a few days Luis could hold the glossy images, feeling like a piece of himself was now kept safely inside. He chooses a camera from the display and brings it to the counter. He tries to control the shaking in his hands when he passes his money to the clerk. He know he’s taking a risk, knows what will happen if this goes wrong. Men in black boots kicking down his door. The cops who laughed at him, coming to pick him up, cuff him, haul him away. He thinks of more words.WOMEN, HURT, KILLED. They are the truth, but how little help they would provide him. How little they convey. And still, he knows he needs to try. The women are there every time he closes his eyes.
He jumps at every touch, every person who passes by a little too close, every bird that swoops above him on the boardwalk, flapping its wings in a craze. He waits until he doesn’t have to go to work and leaves early in the morning, when the sun has just edged over the ocean and sits low in the sky. The tips of the reeds are pale gold. He takes photos of the motel sign, the sunset that lights up one ray at a time, the parking lot to its right, the swath of marsh he cut through before. He will have to photograph his path without capturing his footprints—he hopes the police will still be able to find the way. He hopes it will be enough.
His stomach starts to flutter and twist the farther in he steps. In every breath he takes, he swears he smells it now, tastes it: The flesh. The decay. It’s in his lungs, a part of him. He covers his mouth with his shirt, takes a photo looking back toward the motel, to show its size in the distance. He knows he must be close now. The mud has started to creep up his boots, sticky and thick. He takes one more deep breath to prepare himself. Mud, bodies, grass, salt.
Will it be worse?he wonders, before he parts the segment of tall reeds that hid the clearing.Will it be worse, the second time, knowing what’s there?
It is. It is worse. What he sees makes him drop the camera, makes him run faster than before, as fast as he can.
Another girl. A fifth. Her eyes are still open. And they, too, are looking right at him.
This time, when he leaves, the rage takes over. It has tightened around his brain. He feels it spread down his spine, pressing on every inch of his skin. He kicks walls, dumpsters, cans. He buys another camera, but when he thinks about going back again he can’t, can’t face it, can’t get over his fear, his shame. The plastic feels so small, like a toy, and he stomps the new camera under his feet, rips the film between his hands. He feels, more than ever before, the limits of who he is like a cage, a shrinking room.
Though there is another way. He could draw it, he thinks. The way his grandmother taught him before he started school. He closes his eyes and wills himself, for a minute, to think about her patient hands, the way she guided him into making images of milk cartons, sandwiches, red apples, butterflies. Innocent, simple, beautiful things. She always seemed so pleased by his work, kissing him on the head when he finished pictures of dinners he hoped to eat, pictures of places he thought she might like to go. He had liked breaking down the world that way, into line and color and shade and feeling. Pictures came easier than words, which always felt cold and barren no matter how many he learned.
