by Kailin Gow
“Wow...” the manager, Claire, looks at me. “Are you sure you weren't a boxer in some past life or something?”
I laugh it off. But the truth is, I don't know. I could have been.
Moving my body gives me release. Exercise gives me release. Muscle memory, after all, seems to have survived amnesia, and when I'm training, boxing, punching, I know what to do since the first time since I survived my accident.
“Dunno,” I say. “Maybe.”
“I think you've found your calling, Viola” she grins. “Hey, maybe you could teach some of the classes next week? There'd be a pay rise in it for you. Not much, but at least there's something.”
Something is enough to let me move into a private room in the shelter staff quarters.
Not enough for me to actually start saving. After all, when you don't have an identity or a social security card, it's pretty impossible to get a bank account, a credit or debit card, anything that lets you participate fully in the economy. But I'm not starving. And I'm doing something with my days. And for now, that will have to be enough.
Claire, the manager, is pleased with my progress. She even suggests I start doing outreach work – heading onto the streets to talk to sex workers and make sure they're aware of what our facilities offer. Handing out clean needles, sealed condoms, trying to make the best of a bad situation for everyone involved.
“Just a few more months of training,” she says, “and you'll practically be ready to take over my job, Viola! You've got a bright future ahead of you here!”
But every night, when I close my eyes, I dream. I dream of a man with starlight eyes holding me off the side of a boat, pushing me in, hitting me over the head, pushing me in the water, letting me drown, standing there, watching, while I drown. I don't know if it's a memory or just terror. But every time I look down at the place my ring might have been, and think there is a man out there who has let you die, I start to worry.
Am I safe, where I am now?
Do I even want to be found anymore?
Chapter 2
Time moves onwards. Days, weeks, months go by in my new life, the life where I am Viola, the life where I am somebody, maybe, but not the person I really am. Or maybe that's who I am now: Viola Sebastian, after all. After all, what does it mean to be somebody, anyway? To have their memories? If that's so then I'm not the woman I was before I fell into the water anyway. I have Viola Sebastian's memories, only, and so Viola Sebastian is who I really am.
I don't have a lot of other options, anyhow. I don't have any form of government ID whatsoever, I keep all my money in cash stuffed in a pillow under my bed, I don't have a social security number – nothing. It's like I don't even exist. I feel like a trapped animal in a cage, knowing that. Knowing that I'm just stuck. Nobody. Some nights, when I lie awake wondering about the life I led before I got here, I start to wonder if I really exist at all. I wonder if life is just a dream, whether both the life I led and the life I'm leading now are just visions dreamed up in some alternate world. After all, what's real, anyway? The old me or the new me? Or neither of us? Or nothing at all?
I try not to dwell on the past, hard as it is to do that.
After all, I don't have a choice. Nothing I can do will change what happened to me, or magically bring my memory back. Nothing I do will make any difference. I tell myself that over and over each night. Stop living in the past. Stop living in your fantasies, your memories that aren't even real. Make the most of the time you have now. Make the most of life at Shelter House.
It's not that my work here isn't rewarding. It's meaningful work, most of the time, and that is more than I could expect given my lack of CV items or education, as far as I know. Even the boring tasks, like dealing with budgets or excel spreadsheets, are worth doing, because I know I'm helping women, here, helping people who need my help. It's rough seeing so many women come in here – sometimes they're abused wives or daughters, sometimes they're sex workers getting away from a pimp, sometimes they're women who have fallen intro drugs or other addictions for any one of a host of reasons. I go home exhausted at the end of every day's work, wondering how the world can be so cruel to people. Wondering how things like that can happen – and how so many people don't do anything at all to stop it.
The women I interact with are kind to me. They're shy, at first – or sometimes hostile, taking out their anger at the people who have hurt them on me, because I am the only person around, because they have no other choice. But I do well gaining their trust. They talk to me. They confide in me. And in return I teach them self-defense. Not just physical self-defense – although that's always my strongest suit – but strategies to cope with the men who would abuse them. I teach them about their legal rights – who is required to pay child support and how much and how often, how to get legal charges dropped. I'm healing them, as best I can, mind and body alike. Sometimes it feels like it will make up for the fact that I know I'll never be able to heal myself.
I spend a lot of time on the streets, in the red-light district. It's a dangerous job, trying to separate a sex worker from her pimp. A lot of them don't like them around. We advertise ourselves as a health outreach group – a place to get clean needles and contraceptives, to get free STD testing, to get resources they need to keep doing their jobs as safely as possible. But we also make sure every girl knows if you don't want to be here, you don't have to be. We'll take care of you.
The girls know me on the street. Maria and Bunny and Jaymie are used to me coming around with a giant sack of condoms. “You're like the sexual Santa Claus,” Jaymie told me once, shaking her long blonde hair. She's a sweetheart – looks like she could be my kid sister. “Gordon” – that was her pimp “thinks you're my sister when you come out there. I tell him that so he won't get suspicious. But I wish we were sisters,” she said, one night, when I got her to spend the weekend in the shelter. That weekend I thought I really had a shot of getting her clean. But she was back on the streets by Monday.
“Sorry, Viola,” she said, the next time I saw her. “You know I love you. But where else am I going to go?”
One morning in July, I got a call from a number I didn't recognize.
“Hello?”
“Are you there?” The voice was shaking, but I recognized it. It was Maria. “This is the number of the Shelter House, right? And this is Viola, right?”
“This is Viola. Maria, are you okay?”
“It's Jaymie...” she's sobbing. “Viola, we need you right away.”
Somehow I know. Deep down in the pit of my stomach, I know. When I arrive on the corner of the street locals call Lady Alley to find Jaymie's corpse – beaten to a pulp – lying between the garbage bags, I'm not even surprised.
“It was Gordon...” Maria is sobbing. “He figured out who you were – he figured you weren't her sister, that she was talking to you, that she wanted to get clean, to get out. He said he wasn't going to let any one of his girls cross him and live. And he wants to get you, too...”
It hits me like a ton of bricks.
This is my fault.
“No,” I whisper. “No, that can't be right.”
“I'm risking my life just telling you this,” Maria says. “But Gordon is out for blood. He knows you're trying to get us off the streets – and believe me, sometimes I want that more than anything in the whole wide world. But I'm not stupid, Viola. I know what will happen to me if I try that. It's better if you just leave us alone. All of us. And get out of town as fast as you can. Don't go back to the shelter. His men might be looking for you there. I have to go...”
I lean over Jaymie's body. She's so frail, lying there. So beautiful and pale, the bruises don't even look real. They look like somebody painted them on.
“Jaymie,” I whisper. “Poor Jaymie – I'm so sorry....”
So, this is what my meaningful work has come to. A woman dead because I tried to interfere. Because I tried to change her life.
And suddenly, it hits me.
I can't
unbreak the world. Anymore than I can unbreak myself. No matter what I do at Shelter House, no matter where I go, no matter how hard I try, the world will keep on being as cruel and as unforgiving as is feels today. Innocent people – innocent women will die – and no amount of my well-intentioned kickboxing lessons will change that. All I've done is make everything else worse.
No, I think, fury rising within me. The only way that men will change – men like Gordon, men like my mysterious husband (for by now I'm sure that it must have been my husband who tried to kill me), men like the domestic abusers I see every day – is if I make them. It's not enough to teach women to defend themselves. I have to go on the offense. I have to hit them where it hurts.
“I don't want to stay long...” Maria says. She hands me a purse. “Look, this is everything that belonged to Jaymie. Maybe you could track down her family – something like that? Let them know what happened to her. Or maybe it's better if they never know.” Tears flow down her cheeks.
She hands me the purse.
“Goodbye, Viola,” she says. “I'm sorry. But you need to run, too.”
She takes off before I could stop her.
I look inside the purse. Some lipstick – dark red. Nail polish. A few tampons.
And a wallet.
A wallet with a driver's license, a credit card, and a social security card inside.
Gordon thinks you're my sister.
An animal panic rises up in me.
This is your chance.
All my money, my few worldly possessions, my entire life is back at the Shelter. The Shelter I can't go back to, because Gordon's men have staked it out, because for all I know they'll kill me the moment I get inside.
I text Claire to warn her – but I know with a sinking feeling it's not Claire Gordon will be after. It's me.
All I have in the world is inside this purse.
A government-issued ID that looks just enough like me that nobody would ever suspect it wasn't. A social security number.
A chance.
And I have no other choice.
“Hey?” I hear a voice – a man's voice. It's Chris, a man I recognize as one of Gordon's men. “Hey, you – come here!”
I don't have time to think, to weigh the options. My heart is pounding so hard in my chest I can feel it in my throat.
Chris has come to kill me. Gordon will come to kill me.
And so I do the only thing I know how to do.
I run.
Chapter 3
They're chasing me. I can hear their footsteps behind me, clattering on the pavement. They are like horses, following me, or hounds. I run faster, my heart beating faster with my feet. Sweat is pouring down my face as I speed up, turn a corner, try to shake them.
But still I hear them – in hot pursuit.
“You can't run forever!” Chris cries. “Believe me, girlie. You'd better give in now. If you turn yourself in we'll make it quick for you.”
But I don't believe him. I've stolen one of Gordon's girls from him, and so he'll never forgive me. He's going to want me to do more than die. He's going to want me to suffer first: proof that his control over women is absolute.
I am terrified. Is this what it's come to – I wonder? Am I going to be killed like this, just another woman, just another anonymous woman in the red light district? Am I going to die before I ever learn the truth about who I am, about who I was, about the man with starlight eyes who still haunts my dreams, the husband I still do not know whether to love or to fear?
My heels kick at the pavement. I am out of breath. The stitch in my side is agonizing, but I know that I cannot stop. To stop would be to surrender. To surrender would be to die.
I don't want to die. That's all that goes through my head, blaring into my brain like ambulance sirens. Please, I don't want to die.
I have to live for something, after all. The sea swallowed me up and then it spit me out. The sea refused to take me. It refused to take my life. If it did not drown me – it was for some reason, right? I was supposed to live.
Not die here. Not die now.
And so I keep running. I turn onto another street – it's late at night, now, and although I've run from the red-light district to a far posher part of town the streets are deserted. No policemen. No passersby. Nobody to help me. Just me and Gordon's men in hot pursuit.
No no no no no I whisper.
Then I see it.
A door, slightly ajar.
It's a beautiful Beaux-Arts townhouse: one of many on this elegant residential street. Elsewhere, the doors are locked tight: it's late, after all, and these wealthy residents shut themselves indoors, hiding from the riffraff outside – riffraff like me.
But this one townhouse is different. Somebody's just gone in – a butler is standing in the doorway, stiffly, staring at me as he starts to close the door. From within I can hear the strains of jazz music...
“Wait!” I cry.
He looks up at me in surprise.
“You're here for the party?” From the way he looks at me, head to toe, I get the impression I'm not exactly the caliber of guest he expects.
“Yes...” I say. “The party.”
He looks bemused.
“I mean – I'm on staff.”
It's the first lie I can come up with, but it seems to placate him – despite my lack of any sort of catering uniform.
“Right,” he says. “You're late. Come in.”
He shuts the door behind me. Locks it.
I catch my breath. I'm safe at last.
“You can change in the back...”
The butler takes me inside.
And that's when my jaw drops.
This isn't the party I thought it was.
They've gutted the inside of the mansion, transforming all the ground floor rooms into a single open ballroom-space. Poles stretch two floors to the ceiling. And on each pole: the most beautiful naked girl I've ever seen. Gyrating – but it's not gyrating the way I've seen in the low-rent strip clubs on my beat, the ones where Gordon's girls go to self-advertise. This is aerialism, acrobatics, dancing. These women move with the elegance and grace of swans.
“What the...” My mouth falls open.
And that's not all. In the corners, naked women are sitting on the laps of elegantly dressed men in tailored suits or black tie or tails, straddling them, kissing them, sometimes more than one with the same man.
It's surreal. It's gorgeous.
And it's strangely arousing.
The feeling of desire is a new one to me. Since my accident I haven't been attracted to anyone at all. Attraction seemed like something tied in so closely with identity – the old me, whoever she was, must have felt it, but Viola didn't know how. Viola couldn't remember touch, scent, caress, pleasure.
But watching these men, these women, locked together in embrace – in one corner, a couple is already entwined mid-coitus, in another, a woman is on her knees, servicing a man – it makes me feel things that are at once familiar and strange. Once more, my body remembers what my mind forgets.
“You!”
A drop-dead gorgeous man comes over to me.
“I don't know you.”
I've never seen a guy like him before. He's well-dressed, like the other men in the room, but there's something different about him. The tattoos visible beneath his thin, silky white shirt. The piercings in his ears. The muscles that ripple. This isn't just some hotshot finance guy. This is a badass man of the streets.
He swaggers over to me like he owns the place.
Hell, maybe he does own the place.
“No...” I begin.
“Edward told me that you identified yourself as staff.” He cocks his head at me. “But I personally know all the girls who try to get in here. And I've never seen you before. If you're a cop....”
“I'm not a cop,” I say quickly.
“We value our discretion, here, at Belle Reve.” His hand is tight on my shoulder. “If you're a journalist looking to make a buc
k – if you're looking to expose us – or blackmail us – I'll have my staff escort you out. I don't want any trouble, Miss. And neither do you.” He considers me. “Though you do look like the kind of girl who likes trouble.”
This is not Gordon: brutish and cruel. This is a suave, powerful man. A man to whom – I must confess – I am instantly attracted.
I can't go outside. I know that. Gordon's men might be still staking the streets. Which means I only have one chance.
“I may not be staff now,” I say. “But I will be.”
This takes him aback. “Excuse me?”
“I'm here for a job. How much do you pay, anyhow?”
“Oh, no, miss.” He laughs. “We only invite the very best here. You don't just come in here – a place you're not even supposed to know exists, and demand money – pretty as you are.”
“How much do you pay?” I ask again.
' “More money than you could make in your wildest dreams,” he says. “Plus tips.” He looks amused.
More money than you could make in your wildest dreams. Enough to start a new life – a life where I'm not dependent on meager cash savings. A life that would give me the freedom to spend time researching my past – trying to figure out who I really am.
“I'm your girl,” I say.
“You've got moxie,” he says. “I'll give you that. But can you even strip – Miss...what's your name, anyway?”
The way he asks it – I know what he's after. Proof. Cold, hard proof. Emphasis on the hard.
My logical mind says back out now. Says you don't have to do this – just to get off the streets. Says this is a bad idea and you know it.
But my body is responding before my mind has a chance to make a decision. I feel a wetness between my legs I haven't felt before. Suddenly my whole body is overcome by an aching, a savage, a passionate need. Maybe it's the adrenaline of having almost been killed. Maybe it's the hunger, after so much loneliness, to feel some warmth again: to feel some warmth for the first time I can remember.