by Anna North
“I’m sorry,” she said, “I’m so sorry.”
Then she doubled over with fake tears.
“I thought it had stopped,” she went on, gasping and covering her face with her hands.
“What on earth is wrong with you?” Marcelle asked.
“I had an operation. I didn’t have the money for a hospital, so I went to someone I heard about. He didn’t sew me up right, and now it keeps bleeding.”
Something wavered in Marcelle’s eyes. Darcy stepped up her sniffling. She told herself she was a truthful, pathetic, injured person who had every reason to cry.
“You know better than that, Darcy,” Marcelle said. “Go clean yourself up. You’re a health hazard.”
Darcy nodded and wiped her eyes.
“And I’m going to garnish your wages to pay for that steak. I’m not going to reward this kind of behavior.”
Darcy went to the staff restroom, a little Seaboard stall off the kitchen, and splashed cold water on the stain. She didn’t know how she was going to make rent now, but she took the steak out of her jumpsuit and looked at it, and lifted it to her nose and smelled it, and felt a thief’s pride.
When she got home it was dark, but still hot. The smell of rain was heavy as a lid on the air. A street show was going on outside her building. The players came to the Avenida on nights and weekends hoping for spare change, and they usually did one of three routines—girls getting their clothes accidentally torn off, a trained monkey in a business suit dancing around with a briefcase, or a group of men acting out life on the mainland and the origin of the island. This was the mainland show—the Mainland family were huddled together on the sidewalk, shivering. The North Wind was blowing all around them and scattering Seafiber snowflakes.
“What will we do?” asked Mrs. Mainland, a big man whose chest hair peeked out the neckline of his dress. “Our crops are dead and we’re running out of cats to eat!”
Sarah wasn’t back yet. Darcy let herself in and started getting dinner ready. She set the steak, still in its bloody napkins, on a stack of old romance flyers in the cool spot under the window. She plugged in the hot plate, then opened a can of chopped onion. In the mini fridge she found half a can of peas, not yet foul smelling. The pan was dirty. She took it to the bathroom to wash it in the sink. Augusta Beltran was there before her, mixing water with her baby’s powdered formula. The baby himself was strapped to Augusta’s chest—he looked at Darcy with his tiny alien eyes and began to wail.
“He’s just hungry,” Augusta said, and she shook the liquid until it went white. “My bus broke down and I had to walk back here from Chicagoland, and it took an hour and a half and I stepped in monkey shit, and he wouldn’t eat when my mom tried to feed him, for whatever reason, so of course he’s starving—”
Darcy gave her a polite smile and turned away. Augusta was lonely—she worked ten hours a day on a refrigerator assembly line where no one was allowed to talk, and her husband had gone insane and wandered up and down the Avenida talking about some kind of conspiracy, and if you stood next to her for any length of time she’d tell you a story so sad you didn’t want to get out of bed anymore.
The plate was hot when Darcy got back. She set the clean pan down on it, and the water sizzled underneath.
“Mrs. Mainland,” said Mr. Mainland outside Darcy’s window, “I’m sorry that it’s come to this, but we’re going to have to eat the children.”
Heavy boots clomped on the stairs; Verano Ortiz must be back from the refinery. Darcy heard his wife come out to kiss him. Sarah was late. Verano almost never got home before her. Maybe she had taken an extra dive. Darcy unplugged the hot plate. When her mother dove till dark in search of extra pearls, she came back looking like a sea creature—her eyes big and staring, her fingers long and white and cold like the clammy toes of some underwater salamander. Her hair and skin smelled like the ocean, and her speech was always vague and abstracted, and she forgot the names of things.
Darcy unfolded and refolded her mother’s worn-out jumpsuit, her own old school uniform, her one extra T-shirt. She straightened her dolls—rocks with Seafiber skirts wrapped around them—and the cheese-food can cut into the shape of a crown that she’d worn for dress-up as a child. She wiped the dust off An Animal Atlas of the West Coast, the only possession her mother had saved from the mainland. Outside, Mr. Mainland was getting ready to butcher his children. He sharpened a big Seaboard knife on a chunk of rock. The children—two fat men in old-fashioned sailor suits—mewled and cried.
The alarm clock read 10 p.m. The electricity would be going out soon. Darcy lit the oil lamp—the sweet smell of solvent came crackling up. Then she plugged the hot plate back in and filled the pan with steak, onions, and peas. A prerational part of her brain was taking over, and it was telling her that Sarah was more likely to come when she was distracted. She stirred the onions and flipped the steak. She shook some cheese powder into the pan. She tried not to listen for footsteps on the stairs.
On the street below, Founder Tyson arrived at the Mainland family’s house. Mr. Mainland was chasing the children around. The actor playing Tyson was wearing a red coat trimmed in fake white fur, high-heeled shoes, and white gloves. He put on a high, patrician voice.
“Oh dear! This riffraff is going to commit murder. Whatever shall I do?”
Two guards walked by and the actors froze. The guards’ attitude toward the street shows was unpredictable. Usually they approved of references to mainland culture—cowboy bars and baseball teams and even Elvis impersonators supposedly got subsidies from the Board. But those were Old Mainland, before the ice—newer memories didn’t get the same privileged status. Darcy had once seen a guard handcuff a player for making fun of Tyson, and shove him into the back of his shiny black-and-white car.
When the guards turned the corner onto Fifteenth Street, the Tyson actor gave his forehead an exaggerated wipe, then shifted back into character. One of the children stopped running and stood up to Mr. Mainland.
“Wait, Daddy,” he said, “don’t eat us. I have an idea. What if we make a boat and take it over the ocean to where it’s warm outside? Then none of us will have to die.”
“That’s a grand idea,” trilled Tyson, running into the scene. “Let’s tell everyone! And don’t worry, young sir, you’ll get all the credit. I won’t take any of it at all.”
The audience outside laughed, and then the electricity went out. Darcy sat in the folding chair in the waxy orange light of the oil lamp. Even if her mother had taken a dusk dive, she should be home by now. It was 10:45.
The latest Sarah had ever come home was 3 a.m. Darcy had been eight. Before that she had never worried about Sarah. But that night she had looked out onto the Avenida de la Reina and seen it riven with cracks, fissures her mother could slide through that would take her somewhere far away that Darcy could never reach. A bus could run her down, or the man selling solvent on the corner could shoot her with a gun. The two big boys in muscle shirts could kidnap her, the girl gang drinking beer in the alley could beat her up, the guard in his patrol car could arrest her for a made-up crime. Or her bus could explode, or she could drown during a dive, or—most disturbing of all—she could decide to walk away and never come home.
That night Darcy had gotten into their bed and pulled the blanket up around her and cursed all the people she could think of to curse. She cursed her father for dying before she was born and leaving only one person to take care of her, and her grandmother back on the mainland for abandoning her mother and disappearing down some frozen road instead of huddling around her, sag-breasted and wise, like other people’s grandmothers. She cursed the kids at school for thinking she was weird, and the few kids who did play with her for being weird themselves and making her look weirder, and old Dolores Beltran for checking on her and bringing her buñuelos and making her feel like an orphan. And most of all she cursed her mother, for curling against her at night so that without her the bed felt empty, and for making a headdress of parrot f
eathers or a rock doll or a game with cheese-food cans on Sunday mornings so that Darcy never wanted to leave the apartment, never wanted to make another friend, because who would know her so well, who would pay so much attention to her, who would create a little sealed-off world inside the real world where they were the only people and theirs were the only laws?
That night ten years ago, Sarah had come back apologetic, saying she’d been with some friends. It didn’t make sense to Darcy—her mother didn’t have friends then either—and so Darcy had asked her who they were. Her mother had taken Darcy’s hair in her hands and begun to braid it, but she kept dropping strands and having to start again.
“You know when you don’t see someone for a long time,” she had said, “and then when you do, you have a lot to talk about?”
“No,” Darcy had answered.
“Well, one day you’ll know what I mean, and then you’ll understand why I was gone so long.”
“No I won’t,” Darcy had said, very sure. “Who are you talking about? Why didn’t they come here?”
But Sarah had only crawled into bed with Darcy and fed her arms under Darcy’s armpits so they were like one two-headed, four-armed, four-legged animal, and whispered that Darcy shouldn’t be afraid because it would never happen again. Still Darcy had been afraid all the rest of that night, and the next, and for a long time after, and she was afraid now.
She looked out the window and down the Avenida. She saw a small woman carrying a bag, and her belly fluttered with hope—then the woman turned onto Fifteenth Street, and the hope turned to acid in her throat. She uncovered the pan to look at their dinner—a little weak warmth came floating up. All the smells of the food had mixed up together, so instead of steak and peas and onions, Darcy smelled a metallic, chemical funk. She knew she should eat her half now, while it was still a little warm. But her throat felt stopped up, like she couldn’t put anything down it. The napkins from World Experiences were blood-soaked and useless now, so she got some toilet paper from the bathroom. Then she wrapped everything up into an oozy package and stuffed it in the fridge, closing the door fast so as not to let too much cold out. It would serve her mother right to come home to a dinner that looked like what rich people fed their cats. She hated that she had gotten her pay docked for a mess of lukewarm meat, and although she knew it was stupid, she thought that maybe stealing the steak had somehow made her mother late.
Outside, the player Tyson was rhapsodizing about his plans for the island.
“And everything will run on my wonderful new solvent invention,” he said, “which is totally nontoxic and will under no circumstances leach into the ocean and cause the coastline to collapse.”
Darcy got in bed. The sheets needed washing. They smelled like Sarah’s sweat, a smell so familiar and predictable that it was like a time of day. She nestled in the midnight of her mother’s sweat. If she could fall asleep, Darcy told herself, in the morning her mother would be back. She closed her eyes; the weight of the day pulled the lids tight. She thought of setting the alarm clock and decided her mother would set it when she came in. Setting it would be like willing her mother not to come back.
She turned to face away from the window. A woman’s footsteps rang in the hallway. Darcy lifted her head. They died away; she lowered it again. She was listening to the people clapping for the mainland show, and listening to the hallway for the disturbance of a shoe, and then she was locked in her dream again, the dream where the real Tyson was going to give her a house with a hundred white-walled rooms. He was smiling over her, calm and good-looking, like in the news flyers, and all she had to do was sign the deed, but all that came from her pen were curse words, cocksucker and shiteater and cuntface, and no matter how much Tyson yelled or pleaded or threatened her with prison, her hand wouldn’t even begin to form her own name.
The rain had started. The smell woke Darcy, all the stirred-up dirt and parrot shit, the rancid stink of wet trash, and, beneath everything, the sharp, savory smell of the sea.
“Time to get the bucket,” Darcy said, but no one answered.
She turned. Beside her in the bed was a space for her mother, cool, sweat-smelling, and unused.
The air seemed to change color. Yellow walls of panic slid down between Darcy and the world. The splatter of the rain grew dim and Darcy was in a box, a yellow box with nothing inside it but her and the fact of her mother’s absence. She jumped out of bed and the box followed. She ran down the hallway calling, and the box ran with her, and when Dolores Beltran opened her door and asked if everything was all right, her voice barely penetrated the box.
“Have you seen my mother?” Darcy asked.
Mrs. Beltran’s face was yellow. Her loose Seafiber nightgown was yellow, and her teeth and tongue were yellow when she opened her mouth to say, “Not since yesterday morning. Is everything all right?”
The bathroom doors were yellow and the toilets were yellow like someone had pissed all over them, and Dici Quintero’s penis was yellow when she walked in on him in a stall.
“Don’t you knock?” he yelled at her, but she and the box were tearing down the stairs (yellow), out onto the wet sidewalk (yellow), and down the Avenida to the bus stop, where the bus (always yellow, now a sickening liverish brown like beef tea) was just rumbling into view.
On the number 3 bus Darcy realized how late it was. A man’s yellow watch face peeked out of his jumpsuit sleeve; it read 9:15. Darcy remembered the alarm. She should have been at work three hours ago, and now she was on a bus going in the opposite direction. A calculating part of her brain fought its way through the yellow. The island was maybe six, seven miles thick down here, and she wasn’t halfway across. If she got off now she could make it to World Experiences by 10:30, walking. She’d get a pay cut for sure—she was already on thin ice from yesterday—but then maybe her mother would be home when she got back and everything would be fine. But if Sarah wasn’t back, then she’d have to go looking for her the next day, and every day she couldn’t find her was not just another day of fear, but another without Sarah’s wages and thus another fifty dollars they wouldn’t have for rent. Darcy wondered what it was like to be rich and be afraid. Well-dressed, smooth-skinned Manhattanville mothers must get sick sometimes—did their children just fall back on the strong arms of their wealth, sure that the right amount could solve any problem? And if it couldn’t, if their mothers grew thin and gray and faintly translucent as though edging their way out of the world, did the children sob and run in circles and scratch their legs bloody in terror? Or was it true, as Augusta Beltran had once suggested, that rich people didn’t need feelings?
Darcy didn’t get off the bus as it moved east toward the docks. Her calculating brain told her that she should, that there was no use wasting money until she was sure it was necessary. But her animal brain kept right on roiling—she imagined her mother’s body in her slick diving suit, her lips blue, seaweed woven through her hair. To the animal brain this disappearance was the culmination of an old dread, older even than the night ten years ago when Sarah was so late, as old as the first question that Sarah had refused to answer. The animal brain whispered that Sarah had always had a secret place she was half-inside, and now she had gone all the way. Darcy chewed her fingernails as the bus plowed past the Hollywood sign and the Paramount Flyers building, past the Seaboard Sears Tower with the long fingers of parrot shit down its front, down the Strip, past the climate-controlled baseball stadium that cost a month of Darcy’s wages just to get into, and then out onto the narrow road that ran along the eastern shore.
This was the restricted side—on the western beaches you could sunbathe and buy shaved ice and cut school to lie in the sand and huff solvent if you were lucky enough to still have school to cut. But on the east coast, for some reason that Darcy had never fully understood, the only civilians allowed were pearl divers and refinery workers. A retaining wall ran gray and solid along the edge of the road, crowned with barbed wire. Just beyond the wall, clinging to the beach
on its constantly reinforced supports, was the southernmost of the solvent refineries. Even through the shut bus windows, Darcy could smell the hot stench of seaweed being converted into fuel, darker and brinier than that other stench, the one she used to smell back when Solve-head Sammy lived downstairs, of fuel being converted into drugs. Around the refinery, the sea was almost red, the solvent by-products turning salt water into a corrosive industrial blood. At least once a year, her mother said, one of the refinery workers fell in and got the flesh licked clean off his bones.
Strung out along the horizon, past the solvent stain, were the guard boats, their guns pointing east. In the ten years between attacks, the warning sirens had blared a handful of times, but they had always been drills, and people had begun to ignore them. Now the guard boats looked menacing again, and sunbathers on the western beaches would stampede inland at the next siren, trampling their towels and overturning the shaved-ice stands and shoving their elbows in one another’s faces in the fear, and secretly the hope, that this was another real one.
Darcy got off the bus. She walked across the shoulder of the road—spongy seaweed-based asphalt, beginning to liquefy in the rain—to a gate in the seawall, where an old guard with bloodshot eyes looked wearily at her from underneath a gray umbrella.
“Where you headed?” he asked her.
“Persephone Pearls,” she said, and pointed through the chain link of the gate at a squat Seaboard building looking out on a dock. She had never been there before—now she remembered that her mother needed a pass to get in.
“Don’t recognize you,” the guard said. “What’s your business there?”
Darcy thought of saying she was a new diver, but probably he had some sort of ledger he could check, and if he caught her lying he’d never let her in.
“I’m looking for my mom,” she said. Raindrops were collecting on her eyelashes.
“You got a pass?”
“No, but she works here, and she’s missing, and I really need to find her.”