We Wish You Luck

by Caroline Zancan

  “You know what saying I always hated?”

  “What?” It took Hannah a while to get even this lone word out.

  “The house always wins. Everyone seems to think that I’m from somewhere big and crowded enough to have public transportation, but it’s actually the opposite. There was nothing but space there, and no way to cross it. And thank God for it, by the way. I wasn’t one of those small-town kids looking to get out. The space suited me fine—I’m the kind of person big enough to need a little space, you’ve probably noticed. And people are mean on the subway.”

  As if Leslie wasn’t all elbows and death-ray stares once she got to the subways.

  “Anyway, the one thing that came even close to filling all that space in my town was the Kentucky Kings Casino. It was probably responsible for most of the worst parts of my childhood—the poverty, and that smell you never forget once you smell it, or confuse for anything else. That stink of day-old booze on unwashed skin. But most of the happiest moments of my life—even up to now, like, counting all these MFA kicks we get into—so much of the good stuff happened there. I used to go with my complete drunk of an uncle—he was the king of day-old liquor on unwashed skin. He was a drunk, though, not an alcoholic.”

  Being Leslie, she would’ve clarified the distinction before Hannah had time to ask, knowing Hannah had other things on her mind: “Alcoholics are mean, drunks aren’t. Anyway, he took me there every day he had enough change to make it worth getting dressed. That’s where I learned Spanish. From the people who worked the food court there. Some people might think that kind of thing was cruel—taking a kid to a place like that—but the cruel thing would’ve been to leave me home, to make me miss out. Uncle Rick was no saint, or even a winner, but I loved him for knowing that. He didn’t have much in life, but whatever he had was both of ours, which is just about the best thing you can say about a person, don’t you think?”

  Looking over and seeing that Hannah’s face, at that moment, was still not the face of a person ready for words, Leslie would’ve gone on, pretending the question was rhetorical.

  “Even now I still think that. I got to roll the dice every time, and none of the minimum-wage rent-a-cop security guards ever minded, because they were the closest things Rick ever had to friends. He somehow managed to make a life lesson out of every roll, even if he could never figure out how to throw milk out when it went bad, or take out the garbage when it was time. Most of the lessons from each roll contradicted one another, sometimes even within a single day, but one lesson was the same. ‘The house always wins.’ He said it like he didn’t know it was a cliché. Like he was the first person to think of it. He probably thought he was. He wasn’t the kind of person who was above taking credit for someone else’s idea.” She would’ve laughed at this to make it clear that it wasn’t something she minded about him.

  “He said that even on the days he came out on top. Like, ‘Let’s not get too proud about this, let’s prepare for the rainy day.’ Not that he ever put any of the money away. I thought Rick was my only living relative, but when I was fourteen, an uncle on my mom’s side appeared. He had found Jesus and a lot of money at just about the same time, and decided to send me to a boarding school back east. That’s what he said, ‘Back east,’ even though neither side of my family was ever from there in the first place.”

  Hannah was still crying, but silently now—just tears, and her breathing was back under control—and she looked over at Leslie, unable to resist this new piece of herself Leslie was offering.

  “Once I got into a schedule of throwing out the milk and taking out the garbage it was easy enough to remember when to go to school so my grades were good enough that they let me in. So I wasn’t there when Rick died. Somehow he got it into his head to rob the casino after closing one night, and got shot clean through the temple by Sam, one of his favorite guards, who couldn’t make him out in the dark even though Rick had the biggest, stupidest head you’ve ever seen, which was hard to forget once you’d seen it. I never would’ve thought the guards carried guns, looking at their budget, amateur uniforms, and I’m sure Rick figured the same, but I guess they kept a gun somewhere, at least at night. Sam and some of the other employees felt bad enough that they put some money together to throw a far nicer funeral than Uncle Rick ever could have afforded. I remember there was a sash in gold lettering across this classy white casket that was shut, thank God. Uncle Rick was ugly even with his head on. It said: ‘The House Always Wins.’ And at the time I loved it because it was like Rick was in on it—on all of it. He always knew they were gonna take it all in the end. And he was maybe even okay with it. So for a long time I liked that saying, but then I didn’t. Because I realized, the older I got, and the further away I got from those nights at the Kentucky Kings Casino, not a thing tugging on my worry brain except that next roll, that even if Rick hadn’t gone out on a kind of cosmically sick joke, he’d have died in some terrible, grotesque fashion sooner or later. And life was never going to have anything great in store for a person like Uncle Rick. You could tell from his breathing, how heavy it was, that his heart was always two ticks away from stopping. And eventually I was gonna have to figure out something else to do other than gamble away nickels and dimes and shoot the breeze with grown-ass men. So he was wrong, that whole time. About all of it. It’s not the house that always wins, it’s time. Especially for a person like Rick, who was built for failure and misery the way some people are built for left-handedness.”

  Hannah, composed enough now to speak, stayed silent for another beat or two to make sure Leslie didn’t have anything else to add, knowing that Leslie would say all this only once. Finally, when she was sure that Leslie had said the last word she was going to on the subject, Hannah said, “Erotica, my ass.”

  Maybe it was the compliment that would’ve given Leslie the courage to bring his name back up.

  “It would’ve been the same for Jimmy. You know that, don’t you? That kid never had a prayer.”

  Leslie’s eyes would’ve darted to Hannah’s face after she said this, the way they sometimes did, searching for favor or anger, some indication by which to calibrate her next move. Her hair had probably returned to its natural, unkempt state by then.

  “I don’t even mean to make it personal. To make it about him, or even Uncle Rick. What I’m saying is that nothing lasts. That casino is dust and ash by now. And what’s the oldest book you’ve ever read and truly loved? Something from the nineteenth century? Maybe the eighteenth, if you wanna stretch it? What about all the stories that came before that, and the people who loved them?”

  “Is this supposed to make me feel better?”

  “No, but I think there’s a way to make things better. To make them right, even.”

  Hannah snorted skeptically, half laugh, half protest, producing a perfectly round little snot bubble out of her left nostril that probably didn’t undermine her beauty even a little, not even when it popped. “What? By stopping all the clocks?”

  “By making use of the time you have.”

  “And how do you do that?”

  “You fight for the things that you love. You do what you can while you can instead of just letting the clock run out while you shake your head at what’s happening.”

  “I’m still not sure what you’re suggesting.”

  “Who do you think lit the match on that casino?”

  “Please don’t tell me you actually set it on fire?”

  “No, but everybody knew the casino had an unofficial cash-only policy. They hadn’t paid their taxes—at least not what they really owed—in years. And we learned all about the IRS in the AP government class at that fancy boarding school Rick let them send me to. It took one phone call.”

  “We already tried talking to Pearl,” Hannah said, sounding a little hopeless despite Leslie’s confidence. “It didn’t work. You saw him with her after.”

  “No, I k
now. We leave him out of this. I have something else in mind entirely. Sometimes you have to actually light the match.”

  It could’ve gone some other way, of course. We all saw what they did, across the next June semester, but we have no way of knowing how or when they decided to do it. They arrived on campus for the next residency with the groundwork for their plan firmly in place, its intricacies and forethought apparent to us only slowly, in small gradations across those ten sunny days that both horrified and energized us, until we were as guilty as they were.

  Maybe they built their plan off campus, in something as unromantic as an email, or a late-night garbled cell phone call. It’s difficult to shake the image of Leslie, her back to the doors of a smudged telephone booth the likes of which became obsolete at the turn of this century, turning to make angry faces at the bum who needed the booth to conduct whatever dark business he used it for. We knew she had a gift for angry gestures she wouldn’t even have to interrupt her call to make. Maybe they were in one of their rooms on campus, a bottle of four-dollar grocery store wine from town between them.

  What we know is that in the hours immediately after Hannah’s outburst, none of us saw either girl, and that the morning after, an email was sent to the entire student body, asking that anyone who had any information about the fire that had been set in Adam’s Square—the actual name of the Empty Garden—come forward. The email also reminded us that there were certain parts of campus that MFA students were not granted access to. We were guests on this campus; we shouldn’t need to be told and asked to act accordingly.

  Bridget Jameson once heard Leslie refute a workshop troll’s claim that her protagonist was obviously inspired by an ambulatory Larry Flynt by insisting that it was her dead uncle Rick, and Sarah Jacobs says she saw a postcard in Leslie’s on-campus mailbox with a picture of the Kentucky Kings Casino on the front, sent from an address about an hour outside Louisville. When she looked up the casino she discovered that it had been closed for more than a decade, after a losing arm wrestle with the IRS. From a poem Hannah published years after all this happened, we learned that Leslie’s ninth and most fiercely guarded tattoo was the line “People like to say the house always wins, but really it is time.”

  And last, but never least, we know Jimmy’s nameless poem—by heart, all of us—the only thing he ever wrote that was published, even if it was only in the book at the center of Hannah and Leslie’s final fuck-you to Simone, which they never bothered to name any more than they did the poem.

  We’re not trying to exaggerate, or project our own losses with time onto what happened during these residencies. It just seems like the least we can do, getting this right, pinning down all the details we can, making what happened more manageable and less frenzied, something we can contain, or at least wrap our heads around, making it, in some small but still-significant-to-us way, our own—an arrangement of words that puts these bits of gossip and strange half-events and shadows on the wall into a story that is at least as much ours as anybody else’s.

  * * *

  There are two last things of any importance that happened before the next term, but we wouldn’t know about either of them until later, to compare notes on them and secure them into their place in the story.

  The first is the fact that the girls had to have gone to Simone directly before they executed their plan, likely sometime during this January term, after Simone’s reading. After what happened that next June term, Simone disappeared, and resurfaced only years later, and briefly. A spattering of short stories of hers appeared in second-tier glossies and journals, though they were never published as a collection. Around that time, she gave an interview to her alumni magazine, probably one final, unconvincing attempt to make a proper comeback. When the student interviewer asked her about the scandal surrounding her time at Fielding, he must not have been expecting her to answer. She had never gone on record about it, and there didn’t seem to be anything gained by doing so then. She must have become resigned to it all by then, though, because she answered the question, breeding in the interviewer a lifelong habit of asking uncomfortable questions that likely never served him as well as it had that first time. She didn’t admit to anything or elaborate on what had happened, but she made an oblique defense of it. She said, “It was just words on a page. For all the fuss it created, and the mess. That’s what I told the girls who led the witch hunt when they first came to me—it was just words on a page.”

  This is the part we really can’t forgive her for.

  She of all people knows what words on a page are capable of—what they’ve done throughout human history, and in our own lives. The lives of everyone who’s ever picked up a book. What was the point of doing what we all did, otherwise—the one thing we all had in common, despite the various skill and professional levels that we did it on, which seemed to matter less the longer we wrote. This interview, when we read it years later, revindicated our own roles in that next June term. It showed us how capable Simone was of lying, this dismissal of what words on a page could do. It evaporated any lingering fears that she was more innocent than Leslie and Hannah would have us believe.

  The second event of note was an off-campus reading for Fielding students that was held in a dive bar in Brooklyn between our second and third residencies, just before the city started to thaw for the spring, which both Mimi Kim and Joni Kleinman attended. The event itself wasn’t remarkable—the owner of the bar was a graduate of the program, and held the reading every year. It was informal to the point of halfheartedness. Both current program students and graduates were welcome to read, and there was no scheduled order. All you had to do was show up. Those of us who did went mainly for the discounted beer—even dive bars in Brooklyn were expensive by then. None of us tried out new work, or anything we were excited about, which we saved for the glory of on-campus student readings.

  The reading that March was speculation-worthy only because Leslie and Hannah appeared just as it was dwindling, just the right amount drunk for an event like this. There was a musical, fluid quality to their gaits when they blustered through the curtain that separated the rest of the bar from the back room where the reading was held, but they weren’t so drunk that they would’ve caused a scene if everyone there didn’t stop and look twice just because it was them, there. Hannah lived a good four hours away, and while we still didn’t know where Leslie lived, her evident disdain for the industry people while on campus made it seem unlikely that she’d have the patience for full-time residency in Brooklyn. When we thought of Leslie and Hannah in between stretches on campus, in the Real World, we always pictured them together, even if we couldn’t say exactly where, and when Mimi reported that this was in fact the case, at least that night, we felt more confident in all our other speculations about them.

  Leslie looked like a drunk senior at prom—over it, but determined to make a little noise on the way out. She was wearing a highlighter-yellow silk shirt with a short sequined skirt and fishnet stockings with suede navy blue men’s loafers even though there were a good three inches of snow covering the city that night. She had actually put pennies in them, a wish for each foot in the absence of anything to keep them warm. She had a crown of holly in her dirty hair. We assumed, when Mimi told us all this, that Leslie was coming from somewhere else, but now we’re not so sure. Leslie has surely dressed up for less of an occasion than an offsite Fielding reading. While we were all familiar with Leslie’s batty ensembles, this one seemed more appropriate in the Real World, less of a costume than it would have been on campus, and the low light in the bar softened her in a way Mimi said she hadn’t seen before. Leslie was almost sweet looking, according to Mimi, despite the dark, determined roots defending their land against the bleach she used in her hair, and the brass studs on the leather bag she was carrying.

  Hannah was wearing a puffy coat so outrageously cumbersome that it obscured the rest of what she was wearing. The fur of her hood framed her face like
a mane, which only underscored the perfection of her features. She looked better suited for an ice-fishing expedition in Nova Scotia than a night out in Brooklyn.

  The girls perched on the two most distant seats of the empty final row, and waited respectfully for the fourth-term poet to finish an ode to her pet frogs before Leslie did the most surprising thing she could have done. She got up to read, something neither she nor Hannah had done during either term on campus.

  It was Joni who told us that Leslie’s story was about that fussy period babies go through at six to eight weeks, when they start crying every night at the same time, outside of hunger or soiled diapers. Bridget remembers Joni herself crying when she reported this, and everyone knew that Joni and the husband she had moved to Fielding for had been trying to conceive for a while by then.

  The story was a kind of explanation for those nighttime grievances of newborns. According to the story, all babies are freshly reincarnated souls—you enter the womb immediately upon death, an immediate do-over. And when you leave it a wriggling lump of flesh upon birth, you still remember your last life—the smell of the hand cream your mother couldn’t really afford that she wore anyway, and the shape your father’s mouth made when he noticed the smell and decided not to comment on the price. While you remembered these things, you didn’t have the words to tell anybody about them. And every day your old life gets a little more hazy and feels a little more distant, and starts to fade as the new life—the things your new mother spends too much money on, and the shapes your new father’s face makes when he notices them—gains focus, and you start to interact with the new world you’ve been born into. And it’s at six weeks that these little old souls realize what’s happening, that they’re losing the lives they’ve left. And they cry at the end of each day for all that’s been lost—an entire life’s worth of details—knowing that when they finally concede to the gentle urging of their new parents and close their eyes for the night they’ll have lost a little more of it. The color of the sky at sunrise on graduation day or the random, incoherent jumble of letters they used for every computer password. These memories, in Leslie’s telling, were the one lesson any human gets before being dropped back into the middle of the world and all its cruelties and strangenesses again—a reminder of the things that would matter in the end. The things you would cling to when it was all over.