by Tanen Jones
When my brain came back online I got this thick jolt of adrenaline. I sat up, sending the springs wild, creak creak creak, and froze in place as Leslie frowned in her sleep at the sound.
There had been something not right about her. That strong, sick smell she’d given off last night, clutching my arm. I could still taste it in the back of my throat.
It was gone now, whatever it was. Asleep, Leslie was just another drunk upper-middle-class lady on her Vegas weekend, crashed out in her wrinkled Ann Taylorwear. Her throat rattled as she drew in a dry breath through her mouth, and her chest rose and fell slowly.
She wasn’t my friend. Not really.
I thought suddenly: I could pick up her purse. Put it over my shoulder, walk right out to her car. I’d be halfway to LA before she noticed I was gone.
Leslie kept sleeping as I got slowly out of bed, dressed, and went over to her purse, which she’d left slouched against the wall. I unzipped it and drew out her wallet, one of those Vera Bradley paisley wristlets. She had at least six or seven credit cards in there along with her ID and insurance stuff. I remembered how she’d said she’d lost her job. Maybe she was maxing them out, one by one. The pouch had a lot of cash, though. Four twenties, a five, and a few ones.
I thought about her big fancy wedding set and her nice new-smelling car and how she was probably going to get her fifty grand even if it was after a lot of legal shit instead of right away like she wanted. I thought about how she probably deserved to wait for it, the way she’d talked about her sister yesterday. She owes me money, sucking on one of my cigarettes.
Then I took all the cash, stuffed it in my duffel, and closed the door on her as gently as I possibly could.
* * *
—
Outside, standing in the thin shade under the awning of the entrance to the motel, I sent another text.
baby?
we have a lot to talk about
can you pick me up?
im at
I glanced around. The motel was on the corner of some street adjacent to Boulder Highway, but I couldn’t find the street sign. Farther away, on the edge of the highway proper, I spotted a Blueberry Hill next to the Walgreens on the corner and realized I was totally starving.
im at the blueberry hill on boulder hwy. breakfast on me
The restaurant was already crowded, and I started to feel good about myself after a few minutes sitting on one of the drugstore-style stools at the counter slurping my Diet Coke. I’d ordered one of their half-ton platters of chilaquiles and the restaurant was playing the underrated Canadian folk anthem “You Were On My Mind,” which felt like it was telling me something about me and Paul. I took out my phone and started playing Fruit Ninja.
I felt somebody at my elbow and twisted around, the thank-you halfway out of my mouth before I realized it wasn’t a server with my chilaquiles.
Sam tapped the man beside me on the shoulder. “Could you scoot down, please, sir? I want to sit next to my girlfriend.”
The man shifted over one stool, and Sam hefted himself onto the pre-crushed vinyl. “That’s what I told my friend you were,” I said to him, eyeing the other man over his shoulder before I let my eyes rest on him. “My abusive boyfriend. I said you stalked me and hit me.”
Sam chuckled. “Is that so? Well, wouldn’t I be flattered.”
“Maybe I wasn’t lying. Seems like you’re stalking me now.” I sniffed. “I’m feeling kind of emotional about it, actually. Like I could start crying to some strangers in this restaurant about the scary man following me. If you don’t leave me alone.”
The waitress appeared behind the counter and set down my chilaquiles, her face lighting up as she saw Sam. “Been a while, Sammy! We missed you around here. You want anything? Something to drink?”
“Maisie! How you doing? If I could get a…” Sam craned his neck to see the edge of my plastic menu underneath the chilaquiles. “A buttercream waffle, and a cup of coffee, please. Thanks very much.” He winked at me. “Breakfast on you, right?”
I slumped in my seat. “Fine. Do you want more money? Is that what this is about?”
“It’s about you still talking to Paul,” Sam answered, filching a chilaquile. “Honey, you got to cut it out.” He rested his chin in his hand and looked at me for a few seconds without speaking. I stared back, trying to keep my face neutral. “You’re not getting back together with him,” Sam said finally. “I don’t know if you get that, you know, in here.” He tapped my breastbone with two thick fingers uncomfortably hard.
I regarded him, his little round blue eyes, his round pink face, and tried to figure out the best way to get myself out of there alone. Finally I put on a wide, warm smile, showing all my teeth. “Don’t you have better things to do than worry about me, Sam?” I asked, resting my hand on his arm.
“To be honest, I do,” he said, crunching on another one of my chilaquiles. He nodded to himself. “Yes, I do. But I have a soft spot for you. You got that pretty face, you got legs for days. You deserve more than this Paul guy, honey. You deserve to never have to work again. You could really set yourself up, you know? You could have more than this.” The waitress dropped off a mug of coffee and he paused to smile at her. Then he looked at me and the smile disappeared into his puffy face. “But unfortunately, I think you are intent on wasting your potential on guys like Paul. Rich guys who tell you they’re gonna take you to the Maldives while they run around behind your back telling all the other pretty dummies the same thing. You’re that kind of girl. You’ll just pine, and moan, and work your good looks right off. Maybe you’ll do some meth to stay skinny. Eventually, you’ll be a little wasted shell of yourself, forty years old. And then,” he said, stirring sugar into his coffee, “maybe you’ll finally lower yourself to be my lady friend for real, huh?”
I barely breathed for a few long seconds, feeling my jaw tense and relax in a compulsive rhythm. When I could speak, I said, “Oh, Sam. I wouldn’t fuck you if your dick would cure my cancer.” I stood up, grabbed my duffel bag, and extended two fingers to tap his khaki-covered chest. “I don’t know if you get that. In here.”
He laughed and caught my hand. “I’m just telling you the truth. I know you don’t hear it that often.”
I wrenched my hand out of his grip.
“See you next Saturday,” he said. “Get your tips ready.”
I leaned in and said into his ear, “You’ll never see me again.”
He snickered and turned back to his coffee as I headed for the exit.
11
Leslie
Someone had pulled the plug, or maybe there had been a power outage; the bedside clock read —:—. Next to me, my phone went fbbbbbb against the mattress. I swiped green. “Hello?” I whispered.
“Oh, shit, I woke you up,” Dave said in my ear. He sounded so close, like he was in bed with me. “I’m sorry.”
I sat up. “No, no. I’m fine.” I yawned a little, feeling my jaw pop, and glanced over at the other bed.
It was empty.
My heart began to pound. “What time is it?”
“It’s a little past ten. Wait, is Las Vegas Pacific time? It’s nine for you, then.”
“Nine already?” The room still smelled sour. Me, maybe—I’d slept in my clothes—or Mary’s cigarettes from last night.
Her duffel bag was gone.
“You didn’t pick up last night,” Dave said. I could hear rattling in the background. “Have you been out for like ten hours?”
“I guess so.” I crawled out of my bed and leaned over hers to look in the gap between the bed and the wall. No duffel. “It was a long day.”
I stepped away from the beds and stumbled toward the bathroom. My mouth was sticky. Bits of peanuts littered the carpet between the beds and the door to the bathroom. I pushed it open and turned on the light.
“Did you fi
nd her?”
It took me too long to answer, standing there in my wrinkled clothes staring at myself in the bathroom mirror.
I was alone.
It was over.
Finally I said, “Yes.”
“Well, that’s great! She’s in Henderson, then, right?”
I put Dave on speakerphone on the nightstand and went over to my purse and pawed through it. I’d left my wallet unbuttoned last night; it was lying half-open on top of everything else. I tossed it on the floor and pulled out the iron-free dress and pair of underwear I’d packed. “No.”
Television in the background. Dave’s voice was tinnier on speaker. “What do you mean? She wasn’t at the address?”
I took my wrinkled clothes off, my fingers clumsy on the buttons. “I—”
There was a rattling noise and a knock on the motel-room door. I yanked the dress over my head and hurried to open the door.
Mary was standing there, makeup-free, in cutoffs and that utility jacket from yesterday. She held up a Walgreens bag. “You said she was blond, right?”
“Is that her?” Dave asked from the nightstand.
All the breath went out of me in a rush. I snatched up the phone and switched speakerphone off. “Yeah. I think she’s going to, um, come with me,” I said, voice wobbling. “We might be back late tonight. I’ll text you.” I looked at Mary as I said it, but she only pushed past me into the musty room, rummaging in the Walgreens bag.
“Good.” A pause. “I’m missing you, baby.”
“Me too,” I said automatically. “Dave, I—”
The television in the background shut off, and Dave laughed. “Eli says—”
“What?”
“Eli says—”
Mary finished tugging on her tank top and turned to face me as she sat on the bed, crossing her legs. She opened her mouth, then closed it again. There was something uncertain about her expression, a slackness to the muscles there. “Can I call you back?” I said into the phone. “I need to talk to…”
“Robin?” Dave asked.
“Yes,” I breathed.
12
Mary
“Was that your husband?”
Leslie nodded. She was in a shapeless navy shift dress now, still wearing those pearl earrings. The skin around the earrings was red and irritated from where they’d dragged against the mattress in her sleep.
She was just standing there, clutching her phone. I held up the box dye and wiggled it. There was a picture of a frowning woman on the cover with a platinum Cleopatra bob. “Didn’t you say Robin was blond?”
Leslie let out a breath. “You mean it?”
I shrugged my jacket off and hung it over the chair. “It’s just a week, right?”
“Yes,” Leslie said almost before I stopped talking.
“And we never see each other again.”
“Yes,” Leslie said, “yes—I’ll get you a burner phone, you can toss it as soon as you leave.” She shut her mouth on whatever else she was going to say. Her eyes were red-rimmed, makeup caked in the corners.
“I want to get out of here,” I confessed. “I need to not be where—where Sam is.”
“What about your parents?” Leslie asked. “And your car? Will anyone come looking for you if you’re gone for a whole week?”
“Wow, Leslie,” I said.
She blanched. “I didn’t mean it like that.”
“I know you didn’t.” I glanced down. “No. No one will come looking. I don’t have…people like that, people who would worry.” I shrugged. “It’s just me. And you now.”
For a second we were motionless, staring at each other, linked invisibly by our ridiculous partnership. Then she stumbled across the room toward me. I could have brought my arms up to defend myself, but I didn’t. I let her fall against me. She clung to me, smelling of yesterday’s schnapps and Lancôme powder and sweat. She hugged me, like I was saving her from something.
* * *
—
I slipped the cash back into Leslie’s wallet when she went to take a shower. When she came out, I was watching an infomercial about a food processor, with the bits and pieces of the hair-dye kit scattered around me on the mattress.
“I can’t open this,” I said, holding out the bottle of developer. “Hey, have you ever used one of these things? The chopper thing? Does it work?”
Leslie took the bottle from me and pulled at it. “They don’t chop things evenly,” she said. “So some stuff cooks all the way through, some gets burned…It’s a—let’s go into the bathroom, I feel like this is going to explode—it’s a scam.”
I gathered up the rest of the kit and followed her meekly into the stuffy motel bathroom. “Am I going to have to watch videos?” I blurted suddenly, watching her wrench at the cap.
“What?” Leslie glanced up, her ears peeking through her wet hair.
“Like of Robin,” I said, the name feeling foreign in my mouth. “Do I need to, like, watch videos of her so I can pretend to be her?”
She frowned and pulled again at the developer bottle. The cap came free at last and Leslie sighed in relief. “We never made home videos or anything. There’s a few photos of us in old albums and things, but…it’s really just signing her name. I guess you could practice her signature, but I doubt anyone’s going to be looking that closely at it.” She swallowed and handed the bottle back to me. “You just have to act normal. You don’t even have to act like you like me. She definitely didn’t.”
“What if I get caught?” I asked. The bathroom lights were bright blue fluorescent, washing us both out in the mirror. “What if they find out I’m not her?”
“Albert—the lawyer—he’s met her maybe twice, more than ten years ago,” she said. “If I say you’re her, I’m the one who would know. I don’t have any other close relatives. Dave’s never met her. There’s almost zero chance that you’ll get caught. But there is a risk. It’s fifty thousand dollars and it’s not really your money.”
I poured the developer into the dye and shook the bottle. “And no one knows she’s dead? She’ll be in the city records as Rachel Vawhatever?”
“Rachel Vreeland,” she said. “Yes. No one knows except me, I’m pretty sure. She was living under the other name since she moved to Las Vegas, I think.”
I put on the plastic gloves and lifted the bottle to my hairline.
“How did you end up in Vegas?” Leslie asked, watching me spread the dye along my scalp.
I hesitated. “A boy,” I said at last, dragging out the second word. “He lived out here. A little older than me. He helped me move and everything, set me up in his apartment. It didn’t work out, but it sure was nice while it lasted.” I made it sound more romantic than it was so that Leslie wouldn’t think I was a sucker.
“Where were you from before?”
“My folks are in Texas. Outside Dallas. I don’t talk to them now. They didn’t much like me running off to Vegas for a guy.” I sucked in air through my teeth as I spread more dye across the back of my head. “Gosh, this stings! I didn’t know it was gonna hurt.” I looked in the mirror, at Leslie behind me, her broad shoulders and long pale face. There was a funny flat spot just at the bridge of her nose. “Come on, distract me,” I said. “Tell me something about you. Something Robin would know.”
Her forehead twitched, and she leaned against the damp sand-colored tiles, folding her arms. “My middle name’s Elizabeth. After my grandmother.”
“Aww,” I said, scrunching my fingers in my hair. “Were y’all close?”
Leslie shook her head.
“How about you and Robin?” I said. “You made it seem like she didn’t like you much. You were the older one, right?”
“Four years,” Leslie said, seeming to shrink against the wall. “When we were really little, I guess we were close. We shared
a room and everything. Then when I was in middle school she got her own room and suddenly she hated me.”
“Wow,” I said. “Like, for no reason?”
Leslie lifted a shoulder. “I never really thought about it. She was just a kid. You can’t blame kids for things.”
I finished scrunching dye into my hair and came over to crouch on the tile floor. After a minute, Leslie slid down the wall next to me. “I gotta wait on this stuff,” I said. “Twenty minutes. Tell me more. How did your parents meet?”
Leslie’s shoulder brushed against mine, and a little more color came into her voice. “He was older. He was forty-four when they met and she was twenty-six. He was a lawyer, so he didn’t really have time to date. He met my mom at a restaurant where the department store she worked at was having a Christmas party. He said when she used to tell the story, she said she almost didn’t go to the party because she was getting over the flu. She sat in the corner and coughed and coughed, and he brought her a glass of water, and then he asked her out. She said she would go out with him if she was well by New Year’s. He had a care package of cough medicine and Kleenex and soup delivered to her store. So then she had to go out with him.” She smiled, crooked tooth on display.
“That’s adorable.”
“Yeah.”
“What happened to your mom?”
The smile disappeared. “She died,” Leslie said. “When I was twelve.”
“I’m sorry.”
“Yeah.”
“When did your dad die?”
“A few months ago. It wasn’t a surprise. He had thyroid cancer. He couldn’t do much for the last seven years or so.”
I itched at my scalp. Leslie watched me do it. She had pale eyes, as unsaturated as the rest of her coloring, so that against the vanilla tiles she could have been part of the motel décor.
After a while she said, “I think that was part of why Robin ran away. She didn’t want to deal with it.”
I stayed quiet, squatting next to her.