Lady Luck's Map of Vegas

by Barbara Samuel

  I dry my hands, smooth back the corkscrew curls poking up out of my scrunchy, head back into the bedroom. Pick up the phone again. Dial the numbers fast enough I'm not tempted to hang up. It rings. Once. Twice. Three times.

  I'm almost ready to hang up when he answers. “Hello.”

  “Hi, Jack. It's me.”

  “Jesus, Mary, and Joseph! I've been worried sick about you. Are you on the road?”

  “Yes. I'm sorry I was so rude.”

  “Where are you now?”

  “We're in Santa Fe.” I settle on the edge of the bed, look around. “It's a gorgeous room, at the La Fonda Hotel. You'd like it—first class all the way.”

  “Good bathroom?”

  I smile. “The best. Ceramic tiles, and vigas, and I even have a little kiva fireplace with a sand painting over it.”

  “Sounds lovely.”

  I don't know what to say next, and the silence stretches, echoey and pressing into my chest. Suddenly, I blurt out, “Jack, I'm so—”

  At that exact instant, he says, “India, I'm—”

  “You first,” I say.

  “No, please. Go ahead.”

  “Oh, I insist.”

  A touch of humor in his voice. “Ladies first, of course.”

  I take a breath. “I'm sorry I took off like that. It was rude.”

  “And I apologize for not calling the very next morning. I was surprised, that's all.”

  “We don't have to talk about it tonight.”

  “All right.” I can't tell what this agreement means. “How is it all going? Any sign of your sister?”

  “Not yet.” The stunning weight of the past two days comes rushing back over me. “It's quite amazing, this trip,” I say, and scoot up the bed until I'm leaning against the wall. “We've been right on Gypsy's tail, and I'm hoping she might show up here in Santa Fe overnight. She might have gone on to Gallup—she doesn't seem to stop here as often, but my mother loves it, so I thought it would be nice for her to have a day of enjoyment.”

  “That's good.”

  “Yeah. I've heard some stories from my mother that are a little bit of a shock, but it's good that she's telling me.” I curl the cord around my finger, watch it bounce. “You were right about that one thing, that time goes too fast. Tonight, over supper, I was thinking that she's a lot older than I realize. I mean, her health is good, but she smokes like a fiend.”

  “Ach, don't discount her health. My grandfather smoked till he died, and he was eighty-seven.” A pause. “He was kicked by a mule, so it wasn't even smoking that took him.”

  “And I suppose he drank six pints of Guinness a day too.”

  “Sure.” He chuckles.

  I missed his voice so much! I'm feeling the color yellow in me, pouring, gilding, flowing. No, not yellow, exactly. The amber shade of alfalfa honey. “How are you?” I ask. “Finish up your meetings?”

  “It's all finished, thank God. Signed papers yesterday.”

  “Very good. I know it's been driving you crazy.”

  “Well, that's that. What sort of things did your mother tell you? Or would you rather not share?”

  “No, I don't mind. It's just … odd. She's lied about a lot of things, but I'm not quite sure why.”

  “Such as?”

  “She grew up poor, for one thing. Her mother had a psychotic breakdown when she was eleven or twelve and she had to help raise all these brothers. She was a waitress. It sounds like her father lost it and my mother was stuck holding things together.” I frown. “I mean, I guess I can understand being ashamed of poverty and maybe the business with her mother was painful, but she also lied about where she grew up—in Oklahoma, not Texas. Why lie about something like that, especially when there isn't that much difference between them?”

  “Because none of the rest is true, perhaps?”

  “You mean she made up the whole life, so she had to set it in a different place?”

  “Right.”

  “That makes sense.”

  “Or she committed a terrible crime and was running from the law.” He chuckles to let me know he's kidding, but it scares me.

  “You know, Jack, all of a sudden I realize I don't know her at all. Maybe she did kill somebody back there.” I sit up on the bed. “You know, she ducked a question today about what happened to the man she ran out of town with. Maybe she killed him !”

  His laughter is low and soft. “Perhaps. I somehow do not see your mother as a murderess.”

  “No, me neither. Unless she tried to charm someone to death.” I think of her at the shelter in Espanola. “She gave a pack of cigarettes to a group of homeless men this afternoon.”

  “It sounds like you're enjoying yourself, India. I'm glad.”

  “She gets on my nerves, but I do love her. There's really no one like her on the planet.” A spear of something goes through my heart. “It's just that …”

  “What is it?”

  “Did I ever tell you that she and Gypsy and I made this trip when I was a kid?”

  “You mentioned it.”

  “Well, what I didn't know is that she was leaving my father. Or maybe I did know it,” I say, thinking of my memories this afternoon of the man in the white suit bringing my mother a Coke in the plaza. I sigh and rub the place between my eyebrows. “I guess I did, more or less. A man showed up.”

  “No one is perfect, India. And you don't know what was happening in their marriage.”

  “That's true. My father was quite a lot older than her. And she did go back to him.”

  “Right.” He pauses a moment. “It's hard to remember that our parents are only human.”

  I think of the baby, wonder if he's thinking of it, too. The silence stretches between us, thickening as the time goes on. I think of Eldora's mother, trying to kill her children. It makes it impossible to breathe.

  He begins, “India—”

  Interrupting, I say brightly, “I met some Irish girls this afternoon. From Cork.”

  “Did you.” Is that disappointment I hear, or relief? “India, I truly am sorry I did not call sooner. We've always said there'd be no talk of the future.”

  “I know. I don't want to talk about it now, either.”

  “We'll have to.”

  “It's not your problem, Jack. I just wanted to tell you. It seemed fair.”

  “It seemed fair to tell me but you'll not listen?”

  Pressure builds in my chest. “It will wait for a few days. I had plenty of time to think about it. You haven't.”

  “I have now.”

  “Jack, please. Let's not tonight, okay?”

  A short pause. Then I hear him sigh. “All right. Perhaps then you should get to your bed.”

  “It's much later where you are.”

  “That it is. And I admit I am quite tired tonight. When do you plan to get to Las Vegas?”

  “I'm not quite sure. We'll stop in Gallup tomorrow, but maybe we won't stay overnight. It's a pretty depressing little town, in my opinion. We'll see. Then Las Vegas for a couple of days and we'll come back home.”

  “To sleep with you, then.”

  “All right. You, too. I'll call you tomorrow night.”

  “India, you know that I think of you all the time, don't you?”

  A welter of quick tears came to my eyes. “Me, too, Jack,” I whispered. “Good night.”

  Chapter Twenty-five

  Eldora

  In my pretty, Southwestern-style room, I settle the freshly filled ice bucket on the dresser, kick off my shoes, and pour myself a hefty bourbon and Coke. There are long doors leading to a tiny balcony. I open them up and light a cigarette, blowing an easing breath of nicotine into the cold night. A new scent of snow is hovering. I have to wrap a sweater around my shoulders.

  I look north, as if it is possible to see across the night and the miles and the geography of mountains between us; as if I can see my girl out there, as if all it takes is me looking hard enough at the dark to see her revealed.

  I
try to see her in a shelter, warm beneath a blanket, or failing that, in the arms of her Indian. There's a backpack she's good about carrying with her, even when she's delusional, and I tuck in packs of cigarettes when I think about it. Since they go so fast, I also put in rolling papers and bags of Red Man tobacco so she can roll her own if she needs to.

  “Ah, Gypsy-girl,” I say to the night. “Where are you?”

  From the deck that makes up my collection of shames, a card detaches itself and flutters to the floor of my memory. The last night in Santa Fe, back when I was running away from my good husband and my good home to chase … what? I take a sip of my bourbon and Coke. Can't go there right now.

  I also can't stop thinking of Gypsy. There's a sense of dread or worry in me, and I don't know if it's the weather or the men we saw today— oh, God, they'd break your heart, the whole lot of them—or visiting graveyards. It might be that I'm just remembering too many depressing things.

  What I'm really worried about is a sense of something bad that might be happening to my girl tonight. I take a long swallow of my drink, trying to ease the heat of it, wash away the pictures that come to me of my daughter's body broken and bleeding, or too cold and frozen. I used to like those crime shows on TV, but I just can't stand to see the morgue shots anymore. Too many things could happen to my baby.

  “Keep her safe,” I pray to whoever might be listening. I try a visualization Candace gave me once: praying an army of angels in white around her, a wall of safety and protection.

  The first time she ran away, we all nearly died of frantic worry. For weeks, Gypsy had not been herself. Not that she was an ideal teenager, you understand. Me and Don had been at wit's end about her for quite a while—she showed up at school when she felt like it, and took up smoking cigarettes and other things; she stayed out all night with boys drinking, and no matter what we did, it wasn't enough to stop her for very long.

  It's easy to see in retrospect that she was self-medicating, as they say, trying to find some relief. Nowadays, the schools or the courts or some other official would have seen the pattern and slapped her into a teen rehab program, and likely someone there would have recognized that she was schizophrenic.

  But this was the seventies. The world had been turned upside down, and nobody hardly knew what to do about it. Things didn't settle down again for a long time. Gypsy was hardly the only drinking-drugging teen on the block.

  Just after Christmas when the girls were seventeen, I noticed she was getting a little odder and a little odder and a little odder. It was a lot of little things that didn't seem too strange until you added them all together. She'd always been particular about her food, so it took me a while to notice that she was not only avoiding all round food, but also anything green. Not only vegetables, which she used to eat pretty well, but green Jell-O and green Kool-Aid and green hard candies. Not that there are that many that aren't round.

  She wouldn't eat meat or cereal of any kind. She lived on milk she drank out of a particular glass she liked, made of carnival glass, with a blue rim, and saltine crackers spread with peanut butter.

  She was also afraid of me. She tried to hide it, but I could tell. She'd shrink down into herself if I came into the room. If I accidentally brushed her body in some way, she'd actually shudder down to the bottom of her shins. When I asked her what was wrong, she only looked at me with her flat, emotionless eyes.

  It was something small that tipped me off finally, related to something my mama used to do, a little ritual of lining up her fork, knife, and spoon, just so with the edge of the table. The bottom of the plate had to be in line with the edge, too, and the napkin. And only then could she allow food to be put on her plate.

  Now, as I said, Gypsy had always been a little bit weird. That's a terrible thing to say about your own child, maybe, but it's true. She was fussy and peculiar and eccentric. This habit of lining things up didn't seem so strange, considering she wore a line of safety pins attached to the top layer of the skin of her wrist. Most children discover this trick at one point or another, and teenagers are notoriously strange, but a whole row of safety pins, all lined up with the edge of her palm? Weird.

  Don brushed me off several times when I tried to bring it up to him. Her grades had never been as good as India's, especially as regarded anything to do with reading. She was a terrible reader from the git-go, and we tried to avoid ever making her feel bad about it, and she was truly gifted at artistic things, so we tried to keep the focus on the good things. Don was busting with pride over the personal interest Gypsy's art teacher had taken in her. The pair were working to put together a portfolio of her work, and the teacher had managed to get Gypsy invited to an exhibition. It all looked promising.

  And I wanted to believe it would be okay. That she'd come out of the dark period of adolescence and we'd all chuckle over the horrors of that period. In my own defense, I didn't know much about mental illness. I thought you were born crazy or not. I didn't know that schizophrenia doesn't show up until later.

  So I kept letting it go, and letting it go. And for that, I do blame myself.

  One night I realized that she'd been wearing the exact same clothes for more than a week, sneaking them out of the laundry and back into her room every night. At supper, her nails were grimy.

  I decided to make Don listen. He was watering the early tulips in the softness of twilight when I carried a fresh bottle of RC cola for him to drink. “Don, honey,” I said, lighting a cigarette. “We need to talk about Gypsy.”

  He gave me a quick look, one that showed he'd been worried about her, too. “She's all right, Eldora. Just eccentric. A lot of artists are a little odd, don't you think?”

  “It's more than that, honey.”

  “What do you mean?”

  I glanced over my shoulders at the blank windows of the back of the house. “She needs a doctor.”

  “No,” he said, and wiggled his nose, stuck his hand in his pocket. “She's fine.” He said it loudly, as if that would make it more true.

  “Don—”

  He shook his head stubbornly. “We both know what crazy looks like, and it's not Gypsy.”

  I knew better than he did, but didn't say it. He was referring to poor Bea, his ex, who probably wasn't crazy until I came along, and I just plain couldn't stand to think of her. “What would it hurt to just take her in, honey? Make sure she's okay?”

  “She'll get labeled, that's what.” He moved the hose back and forth, back and forth, over the thick sturdy leaves of the tulips. “And what difference will it make if she's a little bit crazy all her life as long as she has us to look after her? I don't want her to start thinking of herself as different.”

  I lost my temper. Moved in close and said, hard and quiet, “Don, the only food she can eat is saltine crackers. The only fluid she can drink is milk and whatever alcohol she can get her hands on. She's terrified of me and keeps asking me what's wrong with my voice.” I narrowed my eyes. “I think she's afraid of water. She is not showering. She goes in there and turns on the tap so we'll think so, but there's grime on her skin that hasn't had water on it in a long time.”

  “That's silly. Why would she pretend?”

  “She's afraid of the shower, sweetheart. Just like she's afraid of my voice and the color green and round food.”

  He could be the most stubborn man on the planet, and this time, he couldn't stand to think that Gypsy might really be sick. He took a long pull of his soda, and cleared his throat. “Let's give it two or three weeks, huh? I'll really pay attention, I promise. If she seems bad, still, we'll take her in.”

  I took the last drag off my cigarette and stubbed it out in the ashtray on the picnic table. I thought of my mother and my brothers and how much misery could come out of it all, not just for us, but for poor Gypsy. “Don—”

  “One week, then. Please?”

  I touched his arm. Nodded. Went back inside.

  It was too late anyway. Gypsy was gone. We heard nothing from her for nea
rly seven months; when she surfaced in a homeless shelter in Tu-cumcari, New Mexico, she was completely delusional. They only knew to call us because we'd put her on a network of runaway children.

  It was the first time we lost her, but not the last.

  Not by a long shot.

  Chapter Twenty-six

  India

  I wake up in the dark of my hotel room with a sense of abject terror weighing on my chest. For a minute, coming out of the nightmare, I'm disoriented, dry-mouthed with unuttered screams, and I don't know where I am—the windows are not those of my apartment in Colorado Springs or the condo in Denver or the spare bedroom in my mother's house in Pleasant Valley. For a moment, I think I feel Jack's warm body next to mine, but when I fling out a hand, the illusion of body warmth bursts like a soap bubble.

  Finally, it comes to me: I'm in Santa Fe, in the La Fonda Hotel, and I am forty, not eleven. The dark presses into me, malevolent and impenetrable, and I reach over to turn on the lamp. My nightmare retreats.

  My body has a fine trembling beneath the skin, even when I pull the covers tightly around me. I fervently wish for someone to be with me, to pull me close, pet my hair, tell me everything will be okay. I've been pretty much alone for the past twenty-three years, since Gypsy took off the first time. There are times I'm heartily weary of it. Punching the pillows into a better shape, I try to make a nest, covers and pillows piled up to protect me and keep me safe, all alone.

  Like all nightmares, this one abates the minute there is light and reason on it. It was Gypsy, beneath a bridge, shivering and screaming, fighting off—I curl my knees closer to my chest—what? It was never clear what she was fighting, what was after her. Nothing real.

  It's no mystery why I dreamed of her and her nightmares, either, in this room, in this hotel. This was where she had the first of her very, very, very bad dreams. We were eleven.

  She woke me up, thrashing and screaming with such horror it scared me half to death. I put my arms around her, but that seemed to scare her even more, and she started babbling in some unknown language and I couldn't make out what she was saying.