Smoke

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by Meili Cady


  I didn’t want to think about the paintings anyway. It was a string I didn’t want to pull on, for fear of what might unravel. After more than four years, finally catching her red-handed in a lie scared me. It gave me a valid reason, beyond just a gut feeling, to question everything she’d ever told me. I tried to ignore my growing suspicions. Denial was more comfortable, because if I allowed myself to believe that this was just one of many lies, that meant admitting to the possibility that our entire friendship had been a lie, and that working for her had put me in more danger than I could have ever imagined.

  ON THE MORNING OF OUR next flight to Ohio, Team LL assembled on the tarmac at the private airport in Van Nuys. It was early and no one was in sight, save for the team and a few airport employees. I stood by Lisette as we watched Chris and Frankie help airport employees lift about a dozen suitcases into the cargo hold. Lisette kept her eyes on the men as mine drifted to something that caught my attention just beyond where we stood. About fifty yards away from our chartered jet, I saw a parked police car. It sat idle, directly on the other side of the airport fence, facing us. Two men were sitting inside. I couldn’t see their faces from where I stood, but it seemed as though they were staring at us. “Lisette,” I said in a hushed voice, trying not to show much reaction. I tapped her arm. “Lisette.”

  “What is it?” she asked. She followed my gaze to see the police car. Her full lips twisted up into a confident smirk. “Sweetie, this is one of those priceless moments in life,” she said. She laughed. I laughed too, but it was all nerves. “They’re not going to do anything,” she said dismissively as she turned on her Chanel heel and walked away toward the plane. I stared back at the police car for a moment longer, then moved to follow Lisette.

  16

  THE OTHER SIDE

  In the first week of June I went with Brie and a group of friends to the Art Walk in downtown Los Angeles. As we wedged through foot traffic and vendors on a crowded sidewalk, a young girl who couldn’t be older than nine approached me. “Would you like a free palm reading?” she called up to me.

  “What?” I struggled to hear what she said over the chaos around us. I stopped walking and craned my head downward a bit to hear her.

  “She can read your palm if you want,” the girl said.

  “Who?” I asked. The child pointed a few yards away to a woman sitting behind a card table. An empty folding chair held a makeshift sign that read TAROT CARD AND PALM READING. I looked at Brie and our group.

  “What are you doing?” Brie asked me, seeing that I’d stopped. Everyone we’d come with was hungry and set on going to eat at Bottega Louie, which held too many memories with Ben for me to want to rush over. I’d never been to any kind of self-proclaimed psychic before, but it seemed this might not be a bad time to try it out. I looked again at the little girl.

  “Sure, I’ll try it,” I said. I turned to Brie. “You guys go ahead. I’ll catch up.” Brie watched me sit down at the card table.

  Through a laugh, she said, “Okay, have fun!,” before disappearing into the crowd.

  A prediscussed twenty-five-dollar tip later, I agreed to have the “free” palm reading, as well as a tarot card reading. The supposed psychic who sat on the folding chair didn’t strike me as much of an Edgar Cayce. She was distracted by her phone during the reading. She wore a gold Cartier bracelet. I wondered how much money she made from this gig. She told me not to say anything at all to her until the reading was over, which was fine by me since I didn’t feel much like talking anyway.

  To begin the tarot reading, she placed a card on the table. “This is the false face card,” she said. “This means that there is someone in your life who is giving you a false face. They are acting as though they have your best interests at heart, but they don’t. You’ve already started to see this, but it’s about to be revealed to you tenfold.”

  She laid down a second card. She stared at it for a moment looking concerned.

  This is so hokey.

  She lifted her eyes to look at me. “Don’t take this the wrong way,” she said, “but in the next four weeks, your life is going to fall apart. Everything will come crashing down. You will hit rock bottom.”

  “Um, what do you—” I started.

  “Please, no talking,” she said.

  Another card went down. “There will be something legal.”

  “Sorry, can I stop you?” I said. “Legal, as in what?” She blinked at me and said, “Well, I don’t know. I only know what the cards are telling me.”

  “Okay . . .” I shifted in my seat. This reading wasn’t giving me the sense of playful optimism I thought I had paid for. Who goes to a psychic to be told their life is only going to get worse?

  The woman touched her cards and continued on in a casual manner, but not before checking her phone to read a text message. I tried not to be annoyed by how distracted she had been.

  “Sorry,” she said, setting her phone aside. “Okay, yes. As I said, in the next four weeks, your life is going to fall apart.”

  Well, I guess she hadn’t lost her train of thought.

  “When everything comes crashing down—and trust me, it’s going to—that is when you should thank God. Because that will mean that everything is happening as it’s supposed to. Because in six weeks, good things will start happening that never could have happened, had these other things not fallen apart.”

  As I walked to Bottega Louie to join my friends, I wasn’t sure what to make of the reading. I decided there was no sense in forming an opinion of it now, because I wouldn’t know if anything she said would ring true someday. I scribbled a few notes onto a scrap piece of paper and put it in my purse. I planned to look at it in a few months and see if anything she said had actually been right, or if I truly had paid for a common street performance.

  A FEW DAYS LATER, I stayed the night at Lisette’s penthouse on Wilshire Corridor. In the morning, I woke up beneath her lavender silk comforter feeling nauseated. I’d had only a few drinks the night before, but this felt a little like a hangover. Lisette was already up and dressed in black jeans, a plunging red tank top, and a triple circle diamond-and-platinum necklace that rested just above her cleavage. Her BlackBerry rang. “Babe, answer it,” she said, holding the phone out for me to take. “Just say, ‘Miss Lee’s phone, this is Alice.’” I waved her off and sank into her Egyptian sheets. I shook my head.

  “No, I can’t today,” I said. “I don’t feel good.” She frowned slightly, then answered the phone herself. When she finished a short call, she walked to the bedside.

  “I’m sorry you’re not feeling good,” she said. “You can sleep as long as you want. There’s some pizza in the fridge if you want some when you get up. Feel better, sweetie.”

  After sleeping awhile longer, I woke up still tired. Lisette hadn’t installed blackout shades in her new condo yet, and the sun filled every inch of her bedroom with light, making it almost impossible to sleep. I lay on my side in bed and squinted at her alarm clock. It was 10:30 A.M. I closed my eyes to try to fall back asleep. I began to drift into the lazy calm of the morning when, out of nowhere, there was a bounce on the bed. It felt exactly as it did when a small dog jumped on it. It startled me and jolted me into hyperawareness for a moment. I held my breath. There were no dogs here today. I was the only living thing in the penthouse.

  I decided to ignore the strange movement of the bed. I had enough on my mind without adding things I couldn’t explain.

  Just as I was trying to forget the initial bounce, I felt it happen twice more in quick succession, rattling the entire bed and me in it. This was more difficult to ignore, but I was set on doing so regardless. I turned on my other side, spooked and desperately wanting to return to sleep and forget what just happened.

  I lay facing Lisette’s bedroom door. Through still-tired eyes, I watched as the image of a woman walked into the brightly lit bedroom from the hallway. I blinked twice, but her ethereal image remained. I didn’t react; I just lay motionless watchi
ng. She was dark-skinned and wore a red dress with polka dots, in a 1950s style. Her presence was unthreatening, almost comforting. She stopped at the corner of Lisette’s bed and sat down. She talked to me in a very casual manner. As I listened, I understood most of what she was saying, though I wouldn’t be able to remember much of it after. It was something like, “Lisette is at work, but she’ll be back soon. Don’t worry.” I stayed still, observing her in awe, tucked inside the covers and holding on to them for comfort.

  After a minute, the woman in the red dress strolled out of the room and was gone. I didn’t have time to process what I’d seen before the image of a second woman came in from the hallway. She wasn’t like the other one. The moment she appeared, I felt like the air was being sucked out of the room. Whatever she was, it was evil. I’d never felt such a vacuous energy before in my life. This woman was blond and physically beautiful. She wore a light-colored, flowing 1950s-style dress. She stared placidly at me. “Hi, sweetie,” she said in a barely audible whisper. “Are you feeling better?” My body felt frozen in fear. She spoke with the same intonations and had the same mannerisms as Lisette did. She wanted me to believe that she was Lisette. I felt tight in my entire body, including my throat, but I managed to say, “You’re not Lisette,” aloud. The words struggled to come out, like trying to fly in a dream.

  Was I dreaming?

  The woman’s pale face twisted into a closemouthed smile as she started to climb onto the corner of the bed to get to me, making jagged movements with her elbows pointed out and her eyes locked on me. In defense, I put my hand out to block her face. As she launched in, I saw that her body wasn’t sitting on the bed. She’d begun to disappear into thin air. Her neck was airy and transparent now, like smoke.

  When my hand met her face, it didn’t feel like a face at all. It was as though I was an inch away from her, and I was pushing against a heavy wall of energy, not actually touching her. As I pushed against it, her image changed entirely. It was as if her skin was burning off, unmasking her. Her eyes went black, and in an instant her face turned from a beautiful young woman into what looked like a rotting, half-alive skull, with a bony expression pulled back in a silent scream. The horrific image disappeared in front of me, against my open palm. The room was quiet. I had to remind myself to breathe. I lay still, eyes peeled.

  The dark-skinned woman in the red polka-dot dress returned. She acted exactly the same as before, completely benign, and walked out after a minute or so.

  I tried to escape into sleep again, and to my amazement, I was successful, regardless of the blinding light that still filled the room. Every part of me was exhausted. In my last breaths of consciousness, I told myself that what I’d just experienced was merely another bad dream.

  I was awakened some time later by loud sounds of vomiting in Lisette’s bathroom, which was about a dozen feet from the bed. She must have come home early from her meeting. She had a history of strange illness, so I wasn’t alarmed. I knew the sound of her vomiting from sickness very well. I was relieved to know that I wasn’t alone in her penthouse now. I considered going to her and asking if I could help, as I would have in times past, but instead I pretended to be asleep. I was fully rested now and I was ready to get up, but I knew that I’d be expected to help her if she saw that I was wide awake. I didn’t feel like holding her hair as she hurled into the toilet this time. The vomiting stopped after a few minutes. Then nothing. I wondered what she could be doing in there, if perhaps she’d passed out.

  I opened one eye to peer around the room. I didn’t see Lisette’s purse anywhere, and no high heels were tossed on the carpet. I got up and went to the bathroom to see what she was doing, expecting to find her applying makeup or thumbing through e-mails on her phone. But Lisette wasn’t inside. She hadn’t been back since she left in the early morning.

  In two quick steps, I leaped back to bed and hid under the covers for protection, as I had when I was a child. I turned away from the door to face the window, hoping to return to some kind of numbness. I didn’t want to see anything. I didn’t want to hear anything. It was too early in the day for things to get this strange. I curled into a ball and closed my eyes.

  Within seconds, I felt a heavy, draining energy inches away from my face, staring into me and demanding me to acknowledge it. I refused to open my eyes. I squeezed them shut as tightly as I could, trying to will away whatever might be in front of me.

  Almost instantly, a concentrated shot of cold air was blasted directly into my face. I launched out of bed, sprinting as fast as I could out of the room and into the kitchen.

  I grabbed my phone and called my dad. “Dad, some very, very weird shit just happened. I need you to bring me back down to earth. Just tell me about your day.” I listened to him talk about his detailed plans to start an herb garden this year.

  As he spoke, I stared at my hand. This was real. My hand was real, just like my phone, my father, and this floor I was standing on. They were all real. Back in that room, that wasn’t real. It couldn’t have been. I’d heard of people hallucinating from stress. I must have been hallucinating. Apparently my nightmares were no longer limited to times when I was asleep.

  I ran back to the bedroom and threw the covers over to make the bed at least vaguely presentable for Lisette when she came home. I got my purse and left in a hurry. I texted Lisette saying that her penthouse had a strange energy, and I couldn’t spend the night there again. She laughed and told me I was crazy.

  17

  A DRAMATIC EXIT

  I returned to Lisette’s penthouse a few days later on the eve of our next trip to Columbus. She’d asked me to come by to see her in the evening, and I’d reluctantly agreed. “I’m not spending the night,” I warned her when she greeted me at her door. She rolled her eyes and walked into the kitchen to get two tumbler glasses. She poured us both Bombay Sapphire on the rocks. The days of mixers were all but over. We sat barefoot on her new Parisian-style white couch, the only piece of furniture in her massive living room, and sipped our liquor. The empty space and high ceilings made it feel a bit like a carpeted ballroom, with three walls covered in floor-to-ceiling windows. With all the lights turned off inside and the sun gone from the sky, the world below us was illuminated, as though we were floating above the city. Lisette brought the Bombay bottle into the living room and refreshed our drinks.

  As we lounged on her couch, Lisette’s cell phone began to play its usual Scarface remix, alerting her to a new text message. “He’s here,” she said, looking at her phone. “Angel, do you mind going downstairs to get it?”

  “Sure,” I said. I got up to accept a hundred-dollar bill from Lisette.

  “Make sure he doesn’t skimp this time,” she said as I walked to her private elevator entrance. “Check the bags before you accept them. I want them to look like goddamn pillows of yay.”

  Downstairs, I passed through the baroque lobby to go outside to Wilshire Boulevard. A white Porsche waited at the curb. I did a quick once-over of the street to make sure no one was watching me. Lisette’s coke dealer sat behind the wheel of the Porsche. He gave me a familiar nod as I opened the passenger door and climbed into his car. Our exchange was quick, as usual. Lisette generally sent me downstairs with a hundred dollars to get two grams. She always paid for it, and I always retrieved it. Tonight, for some reason, I felt uneasy about everything. I hadn’t wanted to go downstairs when she asked me, but I didn’t want to cause some exhausting conflict. “Tell your girl ‘what up’ for me,” the dealer said before I shut the car door behind me and walked back to the building.

  I returned to the penthouse with two grams of coke. We were stocking up for the trip to Ohio. Lisette examined the tiny baggies of powder. “Okay,” she said. “This looks good. I swear to God, I’m going to bury him if he tries to fuck with me again. I know what a full gram looks like.” She took one of the bags into her master bathroom. I followed her with my drink. “Let’s have a tasting,” she said in a playful tone. Lisette took a white hand
towel off a rack and used it to wipe down her marble countertop. It was part of a set of towels she’d recently had monogrammed in lavender cursive with “L.L.” With the countertop dry, she poured a small pile of coke onto it and cut eight lines with a razor blade.

  After we woofed through the lines, she wiped the counter and picked up both baggies of coke. “Let’s save some for the trip,” she said. “Here you go, sweetie.” She handed the baggies out for me to take. Immediately I had an overwhelming feeling that I shouldn’t take the coke with me. With few exceptions, I’d always been the one to carry it to Ohio for Lisette and me. But I was paranoid tonight, viscerally, more than ever. I didn’t want to drive with it in my purse.

  “Um,” I said, staring at the coke. “Do you mind if I leave it here tonight? Just so I don’t have to drive with it. Since you’re not going anywhere. I’d just be leaving with it tonight, then bringing it back tomorrow morning. It makes more sense to leave it.” Lisette considered this.

  “Okay, no problem,” she said. She tucked both baggies into her crocodile purse for safekeeping.

  I told Lisette that I was worried about getting any sleep before our flight. I needed to be back to her condo by 7:00 A.M. the next morning to report for work. “This will help,” she assured me. She filled a Fiji water bottle with four fingers of gin.

  I left her penthouse late. I could still feel the coke pulsing through my system as I drove. Nervous thoughts raced through my mind.

  I shouldn’t have done any. I’m still high. What the hell was I thinking? Shit. I wasn’t thinking. I’m going to get pulled over. I’m going to get into an accident. Something bad is going to happen. I can feel it . . .

 

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