by Jesse Karp
She had a Coke and watched the lobby. Every couple that walked by she followed with her eyes, feeling the calm in herself strain. If her parents could forget her, could she forget them? What if they came in and she didn't recognize them? She fixated on things like clothing choices, strides, handholding, anything that resembled the choices her parents might have made.
Ron and Claire Westlake walked in around eleven o'clock, disturbingly unromantic for a couple on an anniversary vacation. They weren't holding hands, a habit that Laura claimed to find tiresome but secretly thought was sweet. They went straight to the elevators without looking up.
Once in the lobby, she dreaded the elevator ride. Once in the elevator, she dreaded the walk through the hallway. Once in the hall, she dreaded standing in front of the door. Eventually, she stood before 1512, an anonymous length of wood with a handle and a pad for the magnetic key. She stood for so long that two different guests came out of their own rooms and walked by her curiously.
She poised her hand to knock hard, with forthrightness and command, then brought it back down and put her ear to the door. She could hear nothing; not a whisper, not a footstep. She pressed her ear harder to the door, compressing it painfully and still not a hint of anything living beyond it.
Fuck the door and fuck the sound waves for not getting through it.
She pulled away, glared at the door, and knocked on it hard, three times.
Nothing happened, so she hit it again, pounding it, really, then pressed her ear back to the door. Nothing.
She futilely twisted at the handle, then kicked the door and almost yelled through it, but managed to hold that in. She went back to the elevator and down to the lobby and from the corner stared at the desk personnel. Besides the blond there were two others on duty, both women. She walked across the lobby, relatively close to the counter and glanced casually over as she passed them. One of them, thin-faced with big hair and trying to hide her age with too much makeup, may have been in her mid to late fifties.
Laura went up to her and leaned on the counter.
"Diana," she said, reading the name on the little gold plaque Diana wore on her jacket, "I need your help."
"What's wrong?" Diana leaned toward her, looking worried. She had picked up on Laura's manner, more sensitive than a man would be, and dispensed with the smile and the "ma'am."
"My father is in room fifteen twelve. There was some trouble at home last night, and he won't answer the door. I think he's in bed with his cheap slut girlfriend. Could you please give me the key?" Laura was shocked to find herself able to say such a thing about her father and remain completely calm.
Diana did an admirable job of not looking shocked. Perhaps Diana had not had an easy life with men herself. Laura was gambling on it.
"What's your name?" she asked.
"Westlake," Laura said, producing the digital license on her cell as Diana checked on her screen.
Diana only glanced at the license, but did take another moment to look at Laura's face. Laura tried to think of what she would need to look like for this woman to help her. Would Diana respond to someone who was scared, or someone who was—
"Give me your cell," Diana said. Laura blinked and passed it across the counter. She scanned the code of the cellock into it and handed it back.
"Thank you, Diana. Thank you so much."
"You do what you need to do, honey."
Laura took the card and marched back to the elevators. She walked purposefully to 1512 and decided not to knock. She keyed the lock code in her cell and the cellock clicked and she pushed the door open.
Her parents were there, the two people that comprised her past, defined her present, and delineated her future. They sat at the small table by the window, staring out into space. She had expected a shocked response, anger, and action on her parents' part before Laura could offer undeniable proof of who she was. But neither of them even turned. Only when the door slammed behind Laura did her father turn slowly around. His face was a mask of haggard indifference, a look Laura had seldom seen on him in her life. Once, perhaps, after being passed over for the same promotion the third time in a row. Once, when the Mets finally hauled ass out of the disintegrating city and relocated to Las Vegas.
"Claire," he said, now showing a ghost of concern.
Her mother turned, and here Laura fixated on the twitch of every muscle, looking for a sign of recognition, even unconscious recognition, revealed unintentionally by eyes or lips. There was nothing but flat incomprehension.
Her father stood up and took a step forward.
"Who are you? What are you doing?" He wasn't angry, exactly. There was a pass at it, like he knew he was supposed to be riled up, but the emotion just couldn't make it past an uncharacteristic dullness in his eyes.
"Dad," Laura said, her voice going weak. "Dad. I'm your daughter, Laura."
He blinked at her stupidly.
"Are you on drugs?" he said. "Don't you think I'd know if I had a daughter?"
Laura came up and threw her arms around him and he flinched, immediately pushing her away. She wanted him to be angry, to rage at her. That she knew how to handle, because she was the family's emotional balance point. Laura was the composed one, who stilled her father's temper and eased her mother's occasional depressions, who nodded patiently and smiled when her day, her life, was eagerly planned out for her.
Dealing with indifference and apathy had never been in Laura's job description, had never been in her parents' repertoire. That's not who her family was. And she could prove it.
She pulled out her cell, keyed the movie theater app, and beamed the moving images captured over the years onto the wall over the table.
Claire Westlake had submerged much of her own personal ambition within her role as a mother, and was consequently possessed of ferocious maternal instincts. One of the great family stories was of toddler Laura becoming lost at the public pool and, imagining her little girl tipping herself inadvertently into the water, Claire went tearing through the men's locker room, her shortest path to the pool, shoving brawny, naked swimmers out of her way in search of her daughter. Laura's father often recounted with great delight how it had not been five-year-old Laura who had refused to leave her mother on the first day of kindergarten, but Claire who had had her child pried from her own viselike hug.
Claire Westlake looked up mutely at the snatches of home movies bleeding across the wall.
"Mom," Laura said. "Mom." She took her mother's chin and turned it up toward her own eyes. But rather than giving the soft smile that often met her gaze, her mother reached up and slapped her hand away. "Look, Mom," Laura demanded. Angry, terrified tears were streaming down her face. "That's you coming out of the hospital with me all bundled up in your arms." She keyed to the next, and the images on the screen flickered and reconfigured. "This is when Dad was teaching me to ski." Her fingers jabbed agan. "Our trip to Disneyland. My first day of kindergarten."
Clare Westlake's eyes were dumb and empty.
"I don't know any of these people," she said.
"What? Look!" Laura nearly screamed it. "That's you, Mom!"
Her mother's hand came out and interrupted the line of projection, swallowing their history in shadow.
"Please turn that off and leave."
"Mom." Laura's face was soaked in tears and snot. She struggled to make herself understood from beneath her sobs. "You have an appendectomy scar, but you still have your appendix because they misdiagnosed a bad stomachache when you were twelve."
Her mother looked thunderstruck at that.
"Dad." Laura spun around. "This is your Mets hat. You bought it the first time you went to a game when you were ten, and you gave it to me for my tenth birthday."
Her father was shaking his head.
"I don't have a scar," her mother said. "I don't know who you are, but you need help. I'm going to call security."
"No, no! Mom. One of your students made a pass at you once and started sending flowers to the hous
e until Dad—"
"This is preposterous." Her father's dead voice belied the claim, but he took her by the arm and pulled her toward the door. With a burst of hysterical strength, she yanked free from his grasp and lunged at her mother. She got hold of her mother's clothes and tore at her shirt and the waist of her pants, trying to reveal the scar she knew was there.
But her father had her by both arms now and pulled her kicking and screaming from the room and slammed the door in her face.
The key code forgotten, she attacked the door with her hands and feet, tears flying from her face.
"Mom! Mom!"
She didn't stop shouting until hotel security, in suits and dead expressions, came down the hall and took her by the arms. By the time the elevator doors opened in the lobby, she had stopped the tears. She saw Diana, watching from behind the desk, her face sick with sorrow.
"Get the hell off me!" she screamed at the guards, pulling her arms away and walking out of the hotel and into the gray city beyond the doors.
BRATH
MAL HAD A DREAM that he was in his apartment. Not the Fosters' apartment, and certainly not the apartment he grew up in, but his own place, which didn't exist but looked like Tommy's apartment. There was a pounding on the door, which was more than a pounding. It was really a slamming, something massive flinging itself against the door.
In his dream, Mal stood, watching the door buckle but hold, again and again, each blow shaking the hinges, loosening the entire structure from its frame. Every time another blow landed, something in the apartment broke, mostly mirrors, which there were a lot more of than anyone actually ever had in an apartment. He stood and watched the top hinge snap and hang pitifully. He watched the lock start to twist just a little and the middle hinge start to lose its screws. Through the slim line beneath the door, he could see a shadow, big and shapeless.
The middle hinge ponged off the door, not even managing to maintain the ineffectual grasp of the top one. The door tilted, near to giving up. Mal shouted with sudden, overwhelming anger and fear. He charged, cutting his feet on broken mirrors, and threw himself against the door.
He pushed it back into its frame and leaned against it, baring his teeth and taking the impact with a shout of rage at each blow. His skull rattled. He wondered if parts of him were going to start breaking. But he wasn't going to let the door come down. No way. It was a fight now.
The bottom hinge gave; the lock cracked and let go. Mal was essentially holding the door in place himself now. Whatever was out there banged, and Mal shouted in response. Keep banging, he thought. He was here for a fight.
The banging stopped. He held the door up, waiting for the attack to renew. When it didn't, he unclenched his eyes and looked at the door. The hinges were back on, the lock was fine. It was dented, but solid, a fine door. All it needed was someone fighting for it.
He woke up remarkably tense from the dream, his muscles stiff, as though he'd actually struggled with something in his sleep. He got up slowly, stretched himself out, limped to the bathroom, threw water in his face, and rubbed the short bristles of hair on his head. The cracked mirror showed him that sleep hadn't relaxed him at all.
When he picked up his cell to call Sharon, the night table it sat on promptly collapsed, one of its legs having cracked off for no reason Mal could conjure. Another thing to add to the junk heap when he finally got around to replacing all the stuff that had broken over the last few days. It didn't even seem weird to him anymore. Or it did, actually, but now it was just some extra weird in a giant field of weird, no more strange than a building that seemed bigger on the inside than out.
He picked his cell up from the floor.
"Hello?" Sharon appeared, her jaw tense. Mal realized with a flash of unwelcome familial insight that this was exactly the same way he carried his own tension.
"It's Mal. Have you spoken to the police yet?" He could see beyond her, through her window. The dome loomed; the outline of the metal piping that held it up was dimly visible, perched like a giant spider, stalking her from behind.
"Mal," she said, and then, away from the phone to someone else in the room, "it's Mal. What's going on, Mal?" She was back with him. "Did you find Tommy?"
"No. He's—I didn't—it's complicated." He couldn't even begin. "Did you speak to the police? I need the name and precinct of the officer in charge."
"We didn't call the police. George thinks—"
"George! Are you kidding? Tommy is gone and—"
"Don't you shout at me," she interrupted him, not to be outdone. "I spoke with George, and we felt that we didn't know enough to tell them anything. Who do you think you are, telling me about how I should look after Tommy?"
"You're his mother. Supposedly," Mal said quietly.
"You little shit," she said coldly, and he remembered how her voice rose when she was angry, but when she was furious it became quiet, frigid, and hollow, like a cavern of ice. "Where were you when your father left Tommy and me all alone? Oh, that's right. You went with him. Well, your example never gained Tommy a single thing except to send him away and land him in this trouble."
Mal stammered, working his jaw. This was how it was with her. He remembered, but he hadn't actually felt it in years. If she were before him now, he wasn't sure that he could have stopped himself from striking her.
"Nothing to say?" Sharon taunted bitterly. "What a surprise. When it comes down to it, you're just like your father was up to the day he died: a second-rate—"
Her face disappeared and was replaced by another one, a chubby male face with uncomfortable eyes and too much slicked-back hair.
"Mal," the face said, "this is George."
Mal slammed the cell into the wall so hard that the room echoed with the impact. He let it fall away, leaving a spider web of cracks in the plaster. The cell, of course, was still intact. It was sure to be the only thing left after this whole flea-bitten apartment came tumbling down around his ears.
As it happened, Mal had not gone to the police himself. After Annie disappeared, he went back the Fosters' place, thinking she might have gone there, though she'd never been there before. But she knew his name, and his name was on-line along with his address. She might have gone because she got scared, then found his address and been waiting for him. But she hadn't been there, of course. He'd spent a frustrating half hour with several functions on his cell that he'd never used before. Preposterously, he put the name "Annie" into his cell's city phone book app and, not surprisingly, found thousands of listings. He fumbled through the profiler app, feeding it a clumsy description of Annie based mainly on guesses: her age, height, weight, hair color, eye color. Again, he built a queue of thousands to look at and finally gave up just short of blasting his cell apart against a wall.
He remembered the sketchbook then, and went back to Tommy's apartment. Her name wasn't in the book, though Tommy's was, the letters adorned with flowers and vines and gargoyles. He searched through the apartment in a maniacal quest for something with her name on it and found nothing.
He almost went to the cops. He didn't have her last name, but he did have her picture. In the end, he just couldn't bear giving the picture up. That felt like turning the fight over to someone else, like giving up on Tommy. He could get a copy of it made, but he felt time pressing down on him until it was nearly crushing his brain. The answer wasn't in the photo, anyway. It was in that building with the doors, maybe on that top floor. Just thinking of it made his stomach flutter.
He could tell the cops about that. Then they'd come with him, raid the place on a charge of too many doors.
But he had one line left: Brath. Brath was the sort you were always afraid to approach but who always came through once you had. But he was an opportunity of last resort, because once he started doing something, he followed it through no matter what crashed and burned around him.
"Everything okay, Mal?" Gil Foster was standing in the doorway, his eyes tracing a line from the new cracks in the wall to the cell on the
floor, to Mal, standing dejectedly over it.
Mal looked up at him, searching for words that weren't angry or aggressive.
"Sorry, Gil," he managed, barely.
Gil was a short man going thick in the middle, though you could tell from the shoulders and legs that he'd been solid once upon a time. He had a short salt-and-pepper beard and a balding head, and he was dressed in pants and a white undershirt.
"Yeah. We're going to have to—Jesus! What happened to your face, Mal?"
Mal turned his head back down, trying to obscure his bruises again, though it was too late. At least he'd slept in his T-shirt and the damage to his torso wasn't visible.
"I tripped going up the subway steps," Mal nearly mumbled, turning to his bag where he kept all his clothes.
"Subway steps," Gil said, now standing right next to him. "Look, Mal. Look. I understand we're just starting to know each other. But you're going to be with us for a while, I figure. Would you mind a little unsolicited advice?"
Mal did him the respect of turning and facing him, though he remained silent.
"I do know what your life's been like the last year or so, going from one foster family to another. And I know who your father was, of course. Fighting comes naturally to you, and that's probably real good in some situations. God knows, I been in construction for thirty-five years, and it's filled with tough guys. I see men looking for a fight all the time. And I see what they end up with, too, which is nothing. Sometimes, the best thing you can do is let it all go. Just turn around and walk away."
"Give up," Mal said, no emotion in his face or voice.
"Be a bigger man."
"That's ... a lot to think about."