He starts with the easier parts—the sign with its setting sun, the letters he remembers: the letters that could be the name of the place,VACA CY, the square building perched on the edge of the road. Then, grass bending in the wind, the thick, dark mud. He comforts himself by drawing a heron in flight, putting off the work he knows he has to do next. That hair, tangled with muck. Those open, staring eyes. He sketches the outlines of them first: their hands, their bare feet. He knows it’s not important to the meaning of the drawing, but he feels he owes it to the women, to take the time to outline all fifty of their toes.
He hadn’t thought about what he might do with it, who he will show it to. He won’t take it to the cops, who could easily choose to misunderstand. Not his landlady, who had once been a friend of his grandmother’s—he could never show such a horror to her. Not the girl with the red hair, who looked at him with such hatred, such fear. Maybe at work, though, there is someone who will listen. Not the girl with dark hair—he still wants to show her the note he wrote for her—I SEE—but this would only confuse her, get in the way. Maybe the blonde woman who helps him with supplies, the one who everyone listens to. He wonders what he will do if she gets angry, or sad, or afraid, or even calls the police. But he thinks that, of anyone he knows, she mightknow what to do. He folds the drawing until it’s small enough to fit in his pocket, next to his matches. Another secret he’s forced to wear close to his skin.
THE BLONDEgirl smiles at him when he comes in the next day, then points to places he needs to clean—dust on the counters, dirt on the floors. He still feels that same buzz of energy and worry from everyone around him, everyone moving quickly, as though there is some emergency, something gone wrong. He spends the first half of his shift performing his duties with more care and attention than ever before—he knows he needs to win her, to earn her trust, before he asks her to see, to know what he knows. Sometimes the women creep into his mind, and he feels himself about to get sick again. The water in the dirty mop bucket reminds him of the color of their skin and he runs to the bathroom and heaves.
He waits until she’s alone at the desk, one hand fiddling with the shining cross at her neck. Her gesture reminds him of the women—their bracelets and necklaces flashing in the sun. He takes the drawing from his pocket and unfolds it slowly, as though it could bite, and holds it in front of her. She glances at it, then looks at his face, frowning. He expects horror, anger, but she makes a face of disgust, like she stepped in a piece of dog shit. She turns to watch a woman approach the door and widens her eyes at him, nods her head in the direction of the back hall.No.He stands there, feeling injured, until the blonde points, her mouth making hard, angry shapes. As he steps away, he crushes the paper back into his pocket, watches her switch on a smile for the woman who’s come in the door.
After that, his only comfort is the matchbook in his pocket. A few times during his shift, he steps outside to strike a match, lets it burn down until he feels a sting on his fingers. The craving forheat is huge, total. It fills him up, hollows out where other things used to be. But every time he closes his eyes, he sees the women again. Arranged, as though they are animals who have been hunted. In the back hall he tears the drawing into strips, feeling a rack of guilt as he looks at the ruined picture, the tears like additional wounds to the women’s bodies. He shoves the scraps into the garbage near the coffeemaker, pushes them below the wet coffee grounds and greasy napkins and orange peels.
There are two more hours left on his shift, but for the first time in his life, he cuts out of work early. It shocks him, how easy it is. To simply walk across the parking lot behind the casino, past the dumpsters filled with the waste from the buffets: half-gnawed cobs of corns, the bones of rotting fish, a thousand crumpled paper napkins dark with grease. Past the marina, a few motorboats tied up, bobbing alongside the docks, and the overgrown bushes near the valet. The day feels both damned and filled with renewed potential. He can’t save those women. Their open eyes will follow him wherever he goes. But he can set a fire, a signal. Something larger, more ruinous than ever before, that will show everyone just how cruel, how ugly and wrong this city has become.
LILY
ON FRIDAY MORNING, I GOTto the library before it opened, waited for someone to come and raise the metal grate at the front door. I wasn’t the only one lingering—a woman with a cart full of plastic grocery store bags and crumpled newspapers waited with me. I shifted from foot to foot until someone came and rolled the grate up and unlocked the door.
The woman who worked on the archives, Sue, was small and tidy-looking with a neat crop of silvery hair. Once she arrived and settled in, I showed her the pictures of the paintings on my phone. At one—the diving girl done in blue—she reached out and held my wrist.
“That one. We have a photograph like that. Give me a few minutes.”
She left me at a linoleum table rutted with gouged-out initials. Mil had texted me on Wednesday to say she hadn’t had any luck with her husband’s papers, but she hadn’t gone through everything (PACK RAT!!!she wrote, accompanied by a frowning emoji) and would let me know if she found anything at all about the paintings. I knew Mil was doing what she could, but it seemed less and less likely that she might find something useful in her husband’s notes.
Sue came back with a folder and tenderly removed a black-and-white photograph, laid it on the table in front of me. The storage conditions must have been poor, too humid, because there were flecks of mold along the edges of the frame, but the correspondence to the painting was immediately clear. The painter had adjusted the angle of the diving girl’s face, gave us more of her expression, adjusted the focus on the crowd so the expressions blurred, save for a few leering smiles.
“This is one of my favorite images in the collection, but maybe the painter worked from others. It would take a long time, though, to look through the whole collection and see if there are any other matches. I can try, but it might take a few weeks. We also have photos of the Thomas England Hospital, but none of those look familiar to me.”
“I’m mostly curious about figuring out who they are—the painter. Do you have any sort of record of who else has looked at these?”
“You can’t check them out, like a library book, so we don’t have the same information we would with a book or DVD, unfortunately. The collection, as far as archives go, is small, and we get so few visitors who ask to see them, unfortunately—I guess that’s just as well now that I’m only here two days a week.”
“Do you remember anyone coming to look at this photo in particular?”
She closed her eyes and rubbed her temples. “Not this one, no. We had a man who’d come in quite often, but he was a professor over at Stockton and was researching something for a book. Stiff sort, strictly a historian. And there was a woman who used to come in, every now and again. Sometimes she’d bring her grandson with her, and she’d just look through things. She’d been a nurse, so not sure how artsy she was.”
“How long ago are we talking?”
“Oh God, this is the seventies. She and I got to chatting a few times. Her name was Maria. It’s a shame—if I remember this correctly, she died in a house fire a few years after I met her. The boy got out, but Maria and her husband didn’t. Such a sad thing. She was a lovely woman.”
I felt deflated, depressed. For a moment I had thought that this woman could have been my painter—a woman, too. God, I would have loved that. But if she died in the seventies or eighties, it wasn’t possible—some of those pictures were from the late eighties, early nineties. The big hair, the bulky costume jewelry, bright as candy, the saturated colors, then the entropy, the slow creep of decay. She would have missed all of that.
“Would you like to look through more of our materials? If you give me a little time, I can pull additional folders—we do have a decent collection from the war, Camp Boardwalk and all that. Not as many of the Thomas England Hospital, but you might be interested to see them.” I checked the time. I was due to start my shift in half an hour. I felt on the verge of something, though. I thought that if I could only spend the day searching, thinking, locking myself away in the quiet upper room of the archives, then I would be able to make something out of it, inch toward a narrative. There were so many issues plaguing the city: corruption, addiction, recession. But I still thought that the paintings would help. They could show people what we had survived before.
“I need to get going to work, unfortunately. But maybe I can come back the next time you’re here.”
“If you want to email me any of those pictures, I can also try to do some more matching today.” She wrote her email on a Post-it, rubbed her hands together. “It’s exciting to have a project. I have to say, these archives are underused, and it breaks my heart. There’s a lot to see here.”
“Thanks, Sue. I’ll see you on Monday.” As I made my way downstairs, I thought about how the whole city felt that way. Alot to see and no one willing to look. Except for this painter, whoever they were.
I had my hand on the door when I heard a man’s voice behind me.
“Excuse me, but did I hear you talking about some paintings?” he asked. I turned to see him, in his mid-thirties, tall, dark-haired. He hadn’t been a part of the group waiting at the front door in the morning—he must have come in when I was with Sue.
“Yes.” I tried to keep the annoyance out of my voice. I didn’t want to have to explain the paintings to this eavesdropper. Words didn’t do them justice.
“It’s just that … well … my grandparents have always had a few of them in their house—paintings of Atlantic City—and I wonder if maybe they were done by the same person. Portraits. Mostly.”
I was, despite myself and my fear of getting my hopes up, intrigued. “Like what?”
“Someone on the boardwalk. Another one of a politician in a sort of weird old hat.”
