“No, your little pet is not home. I don’t know where she is and frankly I don’t care.”
“You don’t keep tabs on her when she’s meeting up with clients?”
Des bit a hangnail and spit it on the floor. Both of them bit their nails. They had the same raw cuticles. “Ah, so you know about that, too, huh? She cuts me out of the money, she might gain a little cash, but she loses my protection.”
“That seems harsh.”
“It’s her choice. I warned her about this. About turning tricks behind my back.”
“So that makes you what? Her pimp?”
“It makes me nothing. That’s business.” Des lit a cigarette, exhaled the smoke in my direction, like she wanted to blow me away. “And I believe the proper term would bemadam. But really, what is this to you? Our big-time New York City girl? You must think this place is so small. Clara is small, to you. A project. A game to keep you busy until you get back to your ‘real life.’ Tell me that’s not true.”
Clara had told me that Des didn’t have any power to see into people the way that she did, but for someone without any psychic talents, she knew how to pin me, how to put me in my place. Was Clara a project? Was she, like the spa, like that night when we went upstairs with those two men, an experiment I was conducting? Something to give my life texture, a dinner party story I would tell one day. “The time I was sort of friends with an underage prostitute from Atlantic City. And get this: She was a psychic. She could see your deepest secrets. We got in some hairy situation together with these drunk guys from nowhere, Pennsylvania. And then we swam in the ocean in the dark.”No, I thought.That isn’t true.Making projects out of people was Matthew’s game, not mine.
“That’s not why I’m here. I … I … care about her.” I could smell the booze wafting out of Des’s pores, astringent and sharp. It filled me with fury. “Someone has to care about her, right?”
Des rolled her eyes. “Okay. What’s her name, then?”
“Her name?” I repeated dumbly. It took me a moment to even puzzle through what Des was asking me. At first it seemed like a trick, but as soon as I understood I could have smacked myself. Of course her name wasn’t Clara Voyant.
Des didn’t need to say anything else. She smiled and cut the deck of cards, turned the top one over for me to see. “The Devil.”
“That doesn’t sound good.” I looked at the card. The ugly blue-lipped creature had the tiny wings of a bat and the curved horns of a ram.
“Depends. Right side up, he means bondage, fear, addiction, materialism. Upside down, it means breaking free. What do you want to break free from, Lily? What’s holding you back?”
“I thought you said you were too hungover for a reading.”
She shrugged and, of course, that, too, reminded me of Clara. “The cards are just a tool. You don’t need to be a psychic to ask the right questions.”
“I’ve got to go. Will you tell Clara I stopped by? Tell her I’ll be at work tomorrow?”
“Sure,” Des said; the implied second half of her sentence seemed to beIf I feel like it.
Atlantic City was a small place, but it was large enough thatif someone was hiding, or missing, they could make themselves difficult to find. The honeycomb of hotel rooms. The dark nooks of the casinos. The shadowy piers. I wondered if I could call the police and leave an anonymous tip about Luis. My phone was still in my hand. I dialed a 9, deleted it. Dialed it again, then a 1. Surely they would trace my call—what if Clara was wrong? I would seem deranged. I could even get in trouble, couldn’t I? But the way she had looked at me the day before. Like I was failing her. By the time I got home, it seemed like the only thing I could do was wait and hope she would text back or call.
I stopped in the driveway to pick up the newspaper, shook it from its plastic sleeve, and sat on the porch to read it. More cops and firefighters were losing their jobs. More abandoned houses had been set aflame. The governor had signed off on a new tax on fantasy sports. Hurricane season would be stirring up soon, and the paper offered tips for protecting your house. I flipped to the obituaries. A former linebacker who’d sat behind me in history class in eleventh grade had died, the obituary worded the way Steffanie’s was.Taken from us suddenly,in lieu of flowers please send donations to Drug Free NJ.I remembered that his cheeks used to get ruddy in gym class and it seemed like it took the entire afternoon for him to lose his flush. I didn’t know how his death connected to Clara’s vision of the bodies in the marsh, but something brutal was still happening here—and maybe Clara knew more about it than anyone else.
I HADa short shift that afternoon, two to eight. I was surprised to see Carrie at the desk when I arrived. She was sucking down one of her blended coffee drinks, a sludgy mess of whipped cream and chocolate syrup.
“Oh, thank God you’re here,” she said. “Emily pulled a no-show. I have a mind to fire her ass.”
“Wait, what? And we have that meeting today? That Whitney thing.”
“I know! Can you stay up front? I’ve gotta go prep. If you see her, send her straight back to me. Fuck, my heart is racing.” I heard her swearing under her breath as she walked away from the desk.
I texted Emily.Where are you? Carrie is flipping out! Everything okay?I waited for her to write back, hoping for good news on her behalf. That she’d gotten a better offer somewhere else and just split without a second thought. What was going on?
Luis was back, though, and he came around the desk to polish the coffee table. I watched him while he worked. His hands, the long fingers. I tried to imagine them doing damage, tensing with rage, and couldn’t. There was love, attention, in the way he touched things—it made me feel guilty. I had spent the summer thinking everything here was beneath me, that to do this job well would be some sort of a compromise of my talents, and yet there were so many people, like Luis, or even Emily, doing well at the quiet work that never won you coveted seats at restaurants, that never landed your photo in the pages of glossy magazines. I thought of the painter, too, who must have pressed on through anonymity, indifference, to create something beautiful. There was so much to admire in that.
It was stupid, maybe, to think of that as proof of Luis’s innocence, an essential kindness at his core. But I believed it anyway. But what did that mean about what Clara had seen? What made her think Luis was connected? And where the hell was she? I felt hollowed out, jilted. I had thought she would at least say goodbye. No new texts. No missed calls. No Clara. No Emily either. I was bereft and lonely, and there was nothing to do but wait.
I stared at the clock on the computer screen, then googled Emily, then Clara. I don’t know what I expected to find, but I couldn’t stand feeling so helpless, and at least it was somethingto do. I googled Matthew next—at least that would offer me some small distraction. I had a feeling that something with his offer had been off. Still, the result made me gasp: “Hotshot Artist Dropped by Representation after Public Row at Downtown Opening.” A fallout with Philip Louis. I could picture it perfectly, the two of them boiling up at each other with rage. Matthew flinging some reckless, horrible insult—something with too much of the truth in it, maybe. Philip Louis dropping him to save face. It explained everything. The visit, the offer. I texted Matthew a single word:no.
I OVERHEARDsnippets of Carrie’s conversations with Whitney and the passel of pastel-suited women who walked through the spa, their smiles too wide, their eyes focused and judgmental. Emily would have been such a help to her, could have charmed them and dazzled them and maybe convinced them that we actually knew what we were doing. After my shift ended I did what I had done so many other times that summer—retreated to a dingy dive bar and willed myself to go numb. By the time I ordered my first drink, I still hadn’t heard anything from Clara or Emily. I was convinced my phone wasn’t working and turned it off, thinking that when I turned it on again, my screen would flood with information: apologies, explanations.
Someone pushed the door open, and for a moment the light from the streetlight leaked in through the crack, and the smell of the ocean cut through the molding smell of the bar. It was the kind of night when there was so much brine in the air you felt like you could lick it from your lips. I ordered another drink, then another after that. No Emily, no Clara, and now, no gallery. I’d thought I’d feel triumphant after rejecting Matthew’s money, but my mood was bleak. Also, a little voice piped up in my mind: What if I had just made the biggest mistake of my life? I ordereda fourth drink, a shot that slid down my throat, hot and tasteless. I didn’t want to think about anything except that beautiful burn in my gut.
