by Megan Abbott
“Ham always worked for me,” he said, shaking his head. Mrs. Wilson, she scrawled on the form he handed her. “You’re lucky you remind me of my sister Irene,” he said, stamping the form. “Gee, I miss her. She got the lungs bad.”
THE KEEP KLEEN LAUNDRY DRIVER, chest wide as a squeeze-box, rubbed his chin and tilted his head.
“I know they’re quite heavy,” Marion said, twisting her handkerchief between her fingers. “But I’m not going far.”
“Hell, Fritzie, I’ll help you stack ’em on the hand truck,” the baggage claims man offered.
Sucking on his teeth, the driver nodded. “Could do it for five bones. You got five bones?”
Marion said she did.
“YOU SURE this is the place for you?” the driver asked when they turned onto East Fifth Street. A building on the corner promised INDIVIDUAL LOCKERS FOR 450 MEN, 20 CENTS.
“Yes, I am,” she said, fumbling in her purse for five dollars.
Three doors down she saw the St. Curtis, a sun-beaten awning curling across its narrow façade, iron grills spidering along the windows. Painted just beneath the eaves were the words NOW FULLY FIREPROOF. The Iwaki Cafeteria had replaced the Blue Bell sandwich stand, but the same sign covered the window: GOOD FOOD 5 C.
THE SWEATY MAN at the front desk was leaning over some pocket toy and didn’t look up until Marion had cleared her throat three times. His sleeves rolled up, Marion could see a blurry tattoo of a flaming dove and the word FOURSQUARE.
“A room, please.”
He looked up, squinting. “Sure about that?”
She nodded, dabbing her neck with a handkerchief.
“I’d warn you the cops did a lady bed toss just last night, but you don’t look that sort. Then again, these days, there’s all sorts.”
“I’m just tired,” she said, “and need to rest. You don’t need to worry about me.”
He squinted at her again, then set down his toy and handed her a pen, spinning the heat-rippled register to face her.
She signed Mrs. Dove.
“The gal they rousted, she was tired too. So tired she had to be flat on her back every fifteen minutes for three days straight.”
Marion handed the man a dollar.
“I tried to give her Jesus,” he said, sliding four dimes toward her, “but she said Jesus broke her heart one too many times. How you like that?”
Marion smiled.
“She rooked us for a dollar and a half, that pinkpants did, but left this behind,” he said, picking up the pocket toy, a small tin compact, and displaying it for Marion. One side was a smudgy mirror, the other had a picture of a man in a porkpie hat blowing three rings of smoke. “The gig is you gotta get the cigarette in his mouth,” he said, tilting it back and forth, with great delicacy. “It’s tougher than it looks.”
THE KEEP KLEEN DRIVER wheeled the trunks in for her. After a quick survey of the lobby—the man splayed across the spongy wing chair, hat covering his face, the tins of Doctor Bedlam magnetic powder in each corner, the tiny woman in the red hat with the feather, biting her thumbnail and pacing between the front door and the telephone booth in the back—he said he’d take the trunks upstairs, no charge.
“You be careful now, miss,” he said, elbow leaning on the doorjamb, the hotel room nearly too small to hold Marion, the two trunks and him. “This ain’t a place to be for long.”
She thanked him and assured him her friends would arrive shortly for their trunks.
“Kind of a world,” he said, walking away, “leaving women alone in such places.”
THE SORROW CAME CRASHING IN, it overtook her. She thought she might drown in it.
She fought it off. She tried to make it unreal. But the trunks seemed to grow larger and turn blacker with each passing minute. Standing there, the smell of dirty linens, pest powders, ammonia and something like wet fur stifling, she felt a deep, bone-curling aloneness she’d never known before. It was a sorrowful thing, but it was something else too. For the first time since gazing up, baby-eyed, into her father’s long face, she felt no one at all was looking, no one at all could see. No one could stop her from whatever she might do. And nothing she might do would leave a mark, no one would ever know. She felt drunk with it, braced and grimy and fixing to curl her fists—even as those trunks bloomed larger still.
The trunks, it was true, she could hear them creaking in the hot room, the heat expanding the canvas and pine, stretching the slats. She put her shaking hands on them. That was when the smell first came to her, began to seep into the space. She could feel it climbing up her body, skimming under her clothes, under her fingernails and into her skin. It made her think of the clammy bottom of things, dank and lost and dirt-mouthed. She felt something damp on her ankle. Bending down, she saw the puckering side of one trunk, wet to the touch.
It was all too much. It was so much that it might well have been nothing. She sank to the bed and covered her mouth with the cloth pansy she had unclipped from her dress.
Marion, there are things you are sure you’d never do, Louise had said to her once. Until you have.
SHE TRIED TO FORCE HERSELF TO SLEEP, but in her head there were some thoughts and the thoughts filled vivid-to-bursting pressures in her head: Joe Lanigan sleeping off his drunk, thinking he had rid himself of her, some sash weight wrapped round his ankle.
Joe Lanigan, safe in his rich man’s bed, thinking she would surely end up in some doomy prison cell, so love-struck as to never breathe his complicitous name, or so disordered, so hopeless, who would believe her?
“BUT I’M TELLING YOU, he’s not home yet, miss.” It was that private nurse again.
“You put him on the telephone,” Marion said, and it was a voice she’d not known before, a voice filled with iron vibrating, a blade struck to quiver. “You tell him for me, nurse, that he must speak to me, or he won’t like what occurs. You tell him that.”
“Yes, miss,” she replied, voice trembly.
Marion waited, tucked in the lobby’s telephone booth, the woman in the red hat giving her a witchy stare and clicking her heels on the floor, tugging up the ends of the threadbare rug, throwing dust into the air. It was quite a show. It was quite a show this crimson-lipped tootsie was giving, and it reminded Marion, achingly, of Ginny. For a moment, she thought, Oh, I miss Ginny.
The mind can do what it wants, she thought. It can make anything so.
“Mrs. Seeley.” Joe’s voice hustled into Marion’s ear, and it was his softest, deepest, kindest voice and she found herself wishing he were here, wishing he were still caring for her. “Are you with Mr. Wilson? Has he mended your hand?”
“Mr. Wilson never came, Mr. Lanigan. I had to take care of things on my own. I am trying to fix things, but I…” She felt her throat seal around the words. The gaudy red-hatted woman was now tapping her fingers along the glass of the booth, clamoring at Marion to hurry off the telephone. Her face was nearly pressed against the glass, a face from a burlesque handbill, a carnival poster. Marion couldn’t speak, couldn’t look, couldn’t stop shaking.
“I am so sorry, Mrs. Seeley,” he said. “Are you at the station?”
“No,” Marion whispered, voice pitching high, “I couldn’t stay there, don’t you see? I am all alone and the trunks, Mr. Lanigan, the trunks are so large and they can’t be hidden. Everyone can smell them. Everyone can see them. There’s no hiding them.”
“Mrs. Seeley, I want you to listen to me—”
“Don’t forget me, Mr. Lanigan.”
“I would never, Mrs. Seeley. I couldn’t. You know I couldn’t. Tell me where you are and I will reach Mr. Wilson and make sure he comes to you directly.”
Marion felt something crackling in the back of her brain. Joe’s voice, the way he was speaking. The promises and now this.
The woman outside the booth was still rapping on the glass, her shiny red nails rattling away. Marion thrust open the booth door and whispered, rough and raw, “I will call the police, ma’am. Don’t doubt it. I will
call the police else I set my nails to your face.”
The woman backed away with a low curse.
“Mrs. Seeley?” Joe was saying.
“Who is this Mr. Wilson?” Marion demanded, face turned back to the mouthpiece.
“He’s an associate. He is my California medical supplier. Tell me where you are, Marion.”
She began to speak, but then stopped herself. A picture came to her, shimmered before her, of that look on his face when he had dropped her off at the station. That look on his face that almost seemed to say, I’ll not see you again.
“I don’t think I will,” Marion blurted. “I don’t feel like I will meet Mr. Wilson.”
“Marion, listen to me, Marion, my darling…I know you are in a dark, obscure place right now. I cannot bear to think of it. Please, Marion, I want you to listen to me and very closely.”
“I don’t think I will,” she said, and hung up before she began to cry. Taking her forehead between her fingers, she told herself she would not submit to despair. She would not.
RETURNING TO HER ROOM, she saw a small card on the floor had been slid under the door in her absence. It read: Dr. Bell, Room 402. Please see me.
She stepped back into the hallway and saw a woman with sunken shoulders walking slowly in the other direction.
“Did you leave this card?” she called out. “Do you work for Dr. Bell?”
The woman turned around, spectacles balancing on the bridge of her nose, and jerked her head, gesturing Marion to follow.
Marion, pulling her own door shut behind her, did follow. Somehow it seemed she was to follow. She kept her purse in front of her bad hand and followed.
The room was larger than her own, was in fact two rooms with an adjoining door. The smell of ammonia was even stronger than in her own. A steel cart stood in the middle of the room, packed with smoked bottles and a tray with a tangle of pokey instruments.
Marion could feel her wounded hand throbbing chalk white and monstrous behind her handbag, which barely concealed it. Looking at the forceps and iodine swabs made the wound seem to pucker and dilate and she felt herself wincing.
“Do you know how far along, Mrs. Dove?” the woman asked her.
“Pardon?” How does she know my name? Marion wondered, and then thought of the man at the front desk.
“Do you know how far along you are? You can’t be more than six weeks.” She was eyeing Marion closely.
“Oh no!” Marion said. “I’m not…No, no. Why did you think—”
“Don’t worry, Mrs. Dove,” she said, fingering the stethoscope, which curled around her hand like a licorice rope. “It’s completely discreet, I can promise you.”
The woman’s eyes were soft, and Marion almost felt like consenting, even though there was nothing to consent to. That was how eager and tender she felt, so ready for some comfort. Any comfort.
“You’re Dr. Bell, then?”
“Yes. Listen, Mrs. Dove, it will not take long and then your troubles, which seem so immense at this moment, will be gone.”
“But I’m—”
“Times are hard and fifteen dollars will do the job, Mrs. Dove.”
“But I am not here for that, ma’am—Doctor,” she said. “My troubles are not those troubles. But they are troubles.”
And she set her purse down and slipped off her stained glove, strained and pulled to seam tears by her swollen skin.
“Discretion is discretion,” Dr. Bell said, taking Marion’s hand in hers and turning it slowly for a better look. Metal glinted from the center of her doughy palm. “Three dollars. And you can keep the slug.”
BACK IN HER ROOM, Marion was both satisfied with herself and freshly terrified. The baggage claims man, the driver, the desk clerk, the doctor. How many witnesses must I collect, she thought. How many will know? Every hole I dig myself out of brings in another party who may hang me.
The smell was getting stronger and she knew it was time to decide some things.
She turned off the lamp and the room was quite dark, and when she pulled the blind on the window, there was no light but the thin band under the door.
When she was very young, six or seven, she was afraid of the dark, afraid of the night world and the world of sleep, the creeping, terrible feeling of a sleeping house, a sleeping street, a sleeping town and what dangers might come with she alone awake, wide-eyed. To fight this fearsome battle, she had created a creaky passageway in her head and at the end of the passageway, which took some time to reach, like putting a mesmer on herself, there was a special place of gossamer-winged fairies with ruby eyes, palaces etched from sparkling rock, velvet vales with streams threading through and she herself alighting from a white horse with a mane of flowing silver strands. Oh, each time she went to bed, the place grew grander and she fell in deeper and deeper, sinking herself until she could feel the horsehair against her legs, could feel her hands dug deep into that mane, the mane curling between her fingers, pulling her still closer.
Lying in the dark, she remembered that place, could even see it, dip her fingers into the mossy riverbanks and gaze, wonder-eyed, into the curling clouds of endless sky, remembered how easy it was to make everything else disappear.
Those trunks would have to be opened.
They would have to be opened.
My, there was so much she knew, who might’ve guessed, she thought. Who might’ve guessed my mind could think such thoughts, know such things?
Hospitals, she knew—oh, and there was first meeting Dr. Seeley at the hospital, remember, not dashing, but so dignified, so refined, and the way he tended to patients with tender words and gentle hands and had been so many places, had lived all over and had a snap cigarette lighter from San Francisco and cuff links that looked like little gold monkey fists and he was so patient with her, and listened to her with such care, she a flossy-headed junior nurse volunteer, nigh on eighteen years old but felt even younger—how was it she had forgotten all that?—but hospitals, yes, she knew that they would look at teeth, just like the baggage man said. That’s how they find them out. They look at the teeth. It was hard to think of Ginny having dental records, but she might well.
And then there were fingerprints. She knew all about that from the time the San Diego County Hospital called her to retrieve her husband, rolled on the docks and unconscious, and no wallet but fingerprints on file with the Los Angeles Police Department from the vagrancy arrest, or the practicing-medicine-without-a-license violation.
She unfolded the train schedule.
If she did things now, she could be on the seven o’clock train. Back at work Tuesday and nearly unmissed.
If she did things now.
THE LATEST PILL, she let it roll around on her tongue, she let it scatter its dust around the tomb of her mouth, and her head tingly from the last one and from her trip to her childhood vale, she knew she had worked herself into a way of doing, a way of getting things done.
Next thing, she had walked to the five-and-dime and purchased a claw hammer, a box of matches, six towels, thumbtacks, cleaning gloves and a small jug each of borax and carbolic acid.
It was going to be the opening that would destroy her. She knew that what she would see would never be unseen, what she would see would tattoo itself in dark ridges into her brain forever. Her dark spot on the brain.
Yet she did not pause.
There was no time to pause.
Oh, Joe Lanigan, he would not believe she could ever…Oh, Joe Lanigan, did he not always take her too lightly?
She knelt down and slid open the latches on the larger trunk, chest galloping, heart ballooning up her throat.
She felt it give, felt her fingers tuck underneath and lift.
The air seemed alive with the smell, the air itself seemed muddy, a fog, and Marion’s eyes unfocused and her stomach curled on itself.
That was when she saw the blond hair, like a wig in a shop window, loosely curled and filled with shades of honeycomb, sweet butter, daffodil and, as Marion’
s eyes locked into focus, foamed through with black spray.
Then, dipping a gloved hand in, she had to—she had to, don’t you see—she twisted her arm deep, past the shiny black shell, like a mussel plucked from the sea, that had been Ginny’s face. Pushing heel of hand in, she groped deeper, sunk herself into it, fought off the smell and the horror. Her fingers touching everything, her stomach rising in her chest, she felt for teeth, she felt for hard enamel, and in finding, oh, it was an awkward move, and oh, she had to grab a hair hank to make it work, raised the hammer, and punched down hard.
She would not hear the sound. She would not hear the sound of the teeth going.
Then, digging hands in farther, hands sinking into sticky patches of horror, she pulled up both wrists, soft like tuggy blue sponges, and wrapped the carbolic-soaked towel around the bloated fingers, barely fingers, barely solid, but like some loose glove lying limp on top of a dresser. She pressed and pressed. The loops, ridges, slopes and furrows—gone.
Both hands done, she closed the trunk, walked over to the corner of the room, gloves dripping on the towels she’d stretched from trunk to door, and wept. Long, loping tears.
Then she walked over to the other trunk, which looked so small, so dainty, and braced herself for Louise, whose heart she felt beating in her own chest, and whom she now knew loved her with depths as to drown out a thousand Gent Joe Lanigans with his snide beaver coats and shallow heart.
Oh, Louise.
LOUISE’S LUSH THICKET of dark red hair.
And an eye open, turned up, glittering.
The other eye covered by a sleeve.
Something so strange, the elbow resting on her chin. How could it be, her elbow up there like that, a puzzle with the pieces pushed together wrong.
She thought of that old song played on the banjo on summer porches in houses less God-fearing than hers.