Like a Charm

by Karin Slaughter

  The bracelet was in the window of an antique shop when he saw it, and it stopped him dead. It had been years since he'd seen a charm bracelet. They were so out of style in the States, he never came across them anymore. This one was gold, not silver like the ones his foster sisters had owned before their mother died and he had been moved back to the children's shelter. Theirs had probably not really been silver, either – silver plate, maybe, if they were lucky – and they had worn them on their ankles instead of their wrists. His foster mother had worn no jewellery at all, but like his sisters she had always had her hair 'done', blonded to the point of surreality, teased high over the top of her head, as if she had to anchor a Vegas headdress and wanted to make sure there was enough to keep it from falling off. Mistress Pamela hadn't worn any jewellery that he'd recognized when he'd gone to see her the night before. She'd barely worn any clothes. It wasn't any good, the way these women went about it. It was much too obvious that they were playing a game. He'd had a picture of her stuck in his mind, stuck so firmly that he had been unable to erase the number from his memory even by burning it, but when he'd gone up to the flat at the top of that long narrow flight of stairs, she'd been nothing at all like he had pictured her.

  'If you want to make sure to get what you want,' one of the other teachers at Meredith had said, 'go to New York. They have them every which way in New York. You can get them made to order.'

  John Robert didn't want to get one made to order. He wasn't in the habit of visiting prostitutes. He wasn't in the habit of indulging himself in any way. If he wanted to indulge himself, he could always take up the offer Lisa Hardwick was making him. Maybe she'd be willing to make a party of it and invite in Marianne.

  The bracelet had a lot of charms on it: a monkey, a tiger, a tiny key. There was even a miniature Fabergé egg. His foster sisters always chose charms for good luck, as if having a heart-shaped charm with their boyfriend's initials on it would call forth a proposal of marriage. There was a heart-shaped charm here, but he couldn't see initials on it. There was a pair of dice. They would have liked that one. He wondered what had happened to them after their mother died. Thud and suck. Thud and suck. He went into the shop and looked around.

  Mistress Pamela had turned out to be a small woman trying to make up for her lack of stature by wearing very high heels. Her hair had been dyed red but very thin. Her voice had been high and stressed. The only truly impressive thing about her had been her fingernails, and he had told her how much he appreciated them: grown long and filed sharp, painted red with flecks of gold glitter in them, so that they winked in the light. It was about money, that was the problem. It was always about money, and he needed it to be about something else. She had had her instruments laid out on a table: a hairbrush, a tawse, a paddle, a cane. She'd had a cigarette going in a blue plastic ashtray on top of a heating grate. He could feel the whack and grate against the bare skin of his ass as the paddle came down, over and over again, the air whistling through its holes, the edges of her nails scratching him every time her hand made contact with his skin. He could feel the sting, still, under his clothes. All his muscles hurt. There were no women like his foster mother here in England, not that he had seen. Englishwomen did not seem to put on that kind of weight.

  The woman at the counter in the back of the antique shop was not fat at all. She was compact and middle-aged, her grey hair pulled back tightly at the nape of her neck.

  'Is there something I can do for you?' she said. 'Is there something you've come to sell?'

  John Robert wondered who this woman was. Did she own the shop or just work here? Did antique shops in England always have saleswomen who could speak so precisely, as if delivering lines from a textbook exercise on educated speech? He looked back at the window.

  'There's a charm bracelet,' he said.

  'That's right.' She came around her counter and to the front. The back of the window was open, covered only with a cloth, which was supposed to provide a background for the things that were offered for sale. She reached through the slit in the cloth and came back with the bracelet.

  'It really is gold, this one,' she said. 'You don't get that very often in a place like this. Antique, too, some of it.'

  'Some of what?'

  'Some of the charms,' she said. She held the bracelet out on the palm of her hand. 'That steam engine is old, I think. And the bear. Nineteenth century. You have to wonder who would have brought it here.'

  'You don't remember who did?'

  'I wasn't the one who took it in,' she said. 'It's well past its date for sale. People bring things here and leave them. I don't know why. I've always wondered if this one belonged to somebody's mother.'

  'It could take a lot more charms,' John Robert said.

  'I even have charms,' the woman said. 'Those we get, all the time. Little bits of gold. People think it's valuable, gold.'

  'Isn't it?'

  'Sometimes. But little bits are little bits. You're not going to get rich with a charm the size of a thumbnail. Do you mean to give that to your sweetheart? I have those other charms, if you want to put some on. I've got them right behind the counter.'

  'I was thinking of a souvenir,' John Robert said. 'Something special to bring home from England. We're only here for a week.'

  'From America,' the woman said.

  'From America.'

  'I've got an American charm, too,' the woman said. 'A dollar sign, in gold. But that wouldn't do as a souvenir from England, would it?'

  They were at the counter now. John Robert couldn't remember how they had gotten there. He shouldn't try to operate on too little sleep. The woman reached under the counter and came up with a tray. It was full of gold, not only charms, but bangle bracelets, earrings, rings, studs that might have gone through someone's nose, or someone's penis. In Mistress Pamela's room the wallpaper had begun to peel in strips off the walls and the single window hadn't shut properly. Every time the cane came down on him, he had cried out. He knew when he began to bleed because he could feel the slickness dripping on to the tops of his thighs. He thought somebody would hear them. He imagined the street below them filled with undercover police, all of them holding tape recorders. His body began to buck and rise against the table she had forced him to bend over. His arms pulled against the wrist restraints. His legs strained against the ropes that secured him to the table legs, pulling him wide. The cane came down again and again, again and again, and he was shrieking long before he began to find release. He thought about Lisa and Marianne and his foster mother and his foster sisters and the long line of women down the years, old and young, young and old, it didn't matter. He was spurting out on to the carpet and the wall. Mistress Pamela was getting back to business.

  The woman flicked through the bits of gold in the tray and came up with the dollar sign. 'See?' she said. 'A dollar sign. An American must have brought it. Or somebody who thought they could buy a charm and it would make them rich.'

  'I knew people who did that,' John Robert said.

  'We all know people who do that,' the woman said. Her hands were soft and lined. The nails were short and clean and without paint. She put the dollar sign down on the counter by itself. 'I can put it on for you, if you like,' she said. 'It's not hard to do. You only need a soldering iron. I have one.'

  'Could you do that?'

  'Of course I could. I offered. It's not people like you we get in here most of the time. I didn't realize it, when I bought the business.'

  'Realize what?'

  'How sad the people are,' the woman said. 'It's just that, you know, that was the shock, taking this on. You see them every day, in the street, and you don't notice it. You don't think of it. But you have to think of it in here.'

  'Acts of corporal charity,' John Robert said.

  'I'm sorry?' the woman said.

  'I was thinking of it,' John Robert said. 'That word, corporal. You only hear it used one of two ways. Corporal punishment. Acts of corporal charity. I've always thought they were much
the same thing.'

  'Do you want me to put the dollar sign on the bracelet?' the woman said. 'Maybe your sweetheart will think you're trying to bring her good luck.'

  Mistress Pamela's nails were fake. She broke one during their session, and as he stood in the middle of her room putting his clothes back on she fixed it with a kit she kept in the table drawer.

  'That's a souvenir to take home from a holiday in England,' she'd told him.

  That was true. He was going to have the marks on his ass for a long time. He was going to have the embarrassment, too, the way he felt standing naked in the middle of her room with blood running down the back of his legs.

  'I'll just go and put this on then,' the woman in the shop said. 'I don't care what kind of charity it is. There isn't much in the way of charity anymore. Not round here. People are sad. There's sadness everywhere.'

  The woman in the shop did not look sad. She walked away into the back and the lights glinted on the gold in her hand.

  He was late getting to the plane in the morning. He was supposed to go on the bus with the rest of them, but he wasn't back in time to get the bus, and the only way they knew to leave without him was because he had remembered the number of one of the other teachers' cellphones.

  'I'll be at Heathrow,' he'd said, giving as little as possible in explanation. It wasn't their business, anyway, and he wasn't holding anybody up. His free day had been the last. The rest of them expected to be on duty now, right up to the end. He wouldn't have gone back to the hotel at all except for the fact that he had to get his clothes, and he needed his flight bag to pack away the charm bracelet.

  'You have to be at the airport at least an hour before we're supposed to leave,' Carla Massey had said – it was her cellphone, the least sympathetic of the teachers on the trip – and then she'd hung up on him, as if she thought he didn't know what was necessary for travelling these days. He was standing in a phone booth on a windy street he didn't recognize. He still had no idea where he was. He shifted the parcel in his hands and looked at the advertisements taped to the sides of the cubicle. He'd been looking forward to the tall red boxes he'd seen on Doctor Who, but this phone booth was nothing like that. It might as well have been a booth in Boston or New York.

  He had the charm bracelet in the pocket of his shirt. It was bulky and awkward there. Bits and pieces of the charms stabbed at him. He moved it around for comfort and went out on the street to find a cab. The parcel felt warm to the touch, as if body heat did not dissipate after death.

  'A sticker,' his foster mother had called him when the social workers asked. The social workers came once a month to sit in the plastic chairs at his foster mother's metal kitchen table. They looked at the cheerful yellow curtains and the samplers she bought at craft fairs: If home is where the heart is, I live at Nieman Marcus; My dust bunnies bring Easter eggs; I fight poverty, I work. They took notes on yellow legal pads with plastic pens printed with the words 'Department of Children and Families'. They tried not to look at his foster mother's size, or at the dogs coming in and out of the pet door with the mud of the yard all over them, or at the smoke curling up from the tip of her cigarette. 'He sticks to things,' his foster mother would say, putting the cigarette out in an ashtray overflowing with butts and pale pink wads of chewing gum.

  Back at the hotel room, he sat down on the edge of his bed one more time and put the parcel on the bedside table. He went into the shower and washed for the first time in nearly two days. He put his dirty clothes in his suitcase among the clean ones, not really caring, one way or the other, if the clean ones would be ruined or stained. There was no blood on his clothes. There had been blood on him the night his foster mother was murdered, because he'd gone slipping and sliding in it (thud and suck) when he knelt down to turn her over on the drive. She had been chewing gum when she died. When he nudged her, the gum fell out of her mouth. When he looked up to find the moon, the sky was covered with clouds. Once, in the student centre, Lisa Hardwick had grabbed his crotch and squeezed, and he had never been able to tell anybody about it. You couldn't tell people that kind of thing. You could get brought up on charges of sexual harassment.

  'It's not so common to find men who like it real,' Mistress Pamela had said as he was reaching for his clothes when the session was over. 'They want to play at it, that's what. They don't want pain. You do.'

  'I do what?'

  'Like pain,' she'd said.

  He got clean underwear and a clean shirt and a pair of jeans out of the same suitcase he'd put his dirty clothes in. He put his loafers on without bothering to look for socks. He found the charm bracelet where he'd left it on the bed. The gold dollar sign was shinier than the other charms. He'd noticed it before. That made sense, somehow. Money was always more fascinating than any of the things it could buy. He wondered who would want to buy a zoo full of miniature animals, especially a snake. He wondered what the dice were for. His foster sisters had bought charms for special occasions as well as for luck. They'd had their nails done at a salon in a strip mall just outside of Keene, carved up like topiaries, studded with glass crystals and multifaceted beads.

  'He never lets you know what he's thinking,' his foster mother had said – but she'd had that one wrong. The truth was, he wasn't thinking anything, most of the time. His head was like an enormous sea shell broadcasting the sound of the ocean. Thud and suck. Thud and suck. Everything drifted. Everything was the same.

  'It would look better with more charms,' the woman in the antique shop had said, fastening the bracelet round her wrist to model it for him. 'I've never worn charm bracelets myself. I've never understood them.'

  He reached forward and raised her arm into the light.

  'Charms are supposed to mean something,' the woman said.

  He took the parcel off the table and unwrapped it. He'd been careful to cut the hands off up over the wrists. It was easier that way. Wrist bones were impossible to saw through. He had tried. Fingers lacked what he needed: definition, maybe, or just a place to put the bracelet. He always left them with bracelets. He always bought them something before he let them go.

  'It's beautiful,' his foster mother had said, that night in the kitchen, before she'd walked down to the end of the drive to talk to the man who wanted cordwood. 'Turquoise plastic. I don't think I've ever seen a bracelet made of turquoise plastic'

  'I've got a bracelet in turquoise plastic,' one of his foster sisters had said. 'I bet he stole it from my room.'

  Down at the end of the drive there was a wooden gate and a big mailbox, big enough to put packages in. His foster mother hated to go down to the post office with those little yellow call slips to pick up whatever she'd had mailed to her from catalogues. She liked to order special edition plates with pictures of angel-children painted on them that she could prop up on little stands in a display case in the living room. She liked people to admire her collections.

  'It's beautiful,' she'd told him again, ignoring her daughter, which she usually did. Then she got up and started down the drive to the gate and her appointment. If he'd waited another month or two before he killed her, it would have been maple season and she would have been boiling syrup on the stove.

  'I never saw anybody come before just from the pain,' Mistress Pamela had said, straightening the instruments on her table. 'I never saw anybody as young as you before, either. It's old guys I get, most of the time. Sour old men all shrivelled up and waiting to die. You have to wonder what they've done they think they need to be punished for.'

  'It won't look right until it has a few more charms,' the woman in the shop said. 'Not to me.' Then she took the bracelet off and laid it on the counter.

  He had meant to buy the charm bracelet for Miss Pamela, but when he had seen it on the arm of the woman in the shop he hadn't been able to imagine it anywhere else. He'd bought another bracelet later, a tin and copper one in a souvenir shop in Leicester Square, with the outline of Tower Bridge engraved on it. He found that one in the pocket of his soiled p
ants and put it down on the bed next to the charm bracelet. Then he picked them both up and put them away in his flight bag. This was not the first time he had brought a hand back from Europe. He'd done it only last year, after the German trip. The trick was to know what they were looking for, and to keep all things made of metal in their own separate place.

  The hands lay in plastic sandwich bags he'd brought from the States. He'd had no idea if they sold plastic sandwich bags in London, and he still didn't know. Miss Pamela's hand was curled in on itself, the nails long and glittery, bare of the rings she'd been wearing the night before. He had had to take off the rings, because they could have tripped a metal alarm. The old woman's hand had never had any rings on it, and its fingernails were as plain as ever. She wouldn't waste her money getting bits of plastic and glass drilled into them. His jeans were loose and fluid – 'relaxed fit', they were called, meaning they were made to be worn by men who were growing fat. He was not, but he liked the looseness in the legs. He put the bag with Miss Pamela's hand in it down the inside leg on the right and pinned it there. He put the bag with the old woman's hand in it down the inside leg on the left and did the same. He was careful to keep the fingers pointing upwards so that the tips under the plastic brushed against his balls. He liked the feel of the plastic-covered palms pressing against his inner thighs. He would take Miss Pamela's hand out of its bag in the bathroom on the plane and put the bangle with Tower Bridge round the wrist. He would leave it under the tissues in the wall dispenser so that nobody would find it until the plane was being readied for take-off down the line. By then, he would be in a cab in Manhattan, leaving the other one.

  'Listen,' Lisa Hardwick had said to him, that day she'd grabbed his crotch in the Student Centre. 'Don't kid me. You always think with your dick.'

  Maybe he would sit next to Lisa Hardwick on the plane, in one of those three-across arrangements, with Marianne parked between them. He would take the old woman's hand off his thigh in the bathroom at JFK and put the bracelet on it. He would put the hand and the bracelet in the pocket of his jacket, so that he'd be ready with it when it came time to leave it in the cab. The bracelets always came off. They fell into sewer grates and on to tables. They fell down the cracks in couches. He had left the one from Germany in a drawer in a hotel room on 1-95 in New Jersey, next to a Gideon Bible, and although the story had made the papers the very next day, there had been nothing said about a sterling silver bangle bracelet with clusters of daisies round the edges.