Sisters of the Road

by Barbara Wilson

  I told her what was going on.

  “All this has happened since I saw you at the airport two hours ago?” For a moment she was the incredulous girl Penny and I used to tease on the grade school playground, then she became Miranda the nurse again, impervious to bad news. “I’ll see what I can find out.”

  She went to the desk and exchanged a few words with the nurse, then slipped through the big swinging doors. In five minutes she was back.

  “She was hit on the back of the head with a heavy blunt instrument, a crowbar or tire iron, something like that. Her skull is fractured and there’s severe trauma to both hemispheres of the brain. I’m afraid that if she does survive…” Miranda didn’t finish, and I filled in the words to myself: paralyzed, a vegetable.

  Miranda put an arm around me. “I’m so sorry, Pam—but you should know that even if you’d called an ambulance right away, it probably wouldn’t have made any difference. Does she have any family?”

  “No one knows what her last name is. She didn’t have an ID.”

  “What monster could have done something like that?” She shivered. “I’ve got to get back to my floor, it’s busy up there. If you want to stay, give me another call in an hour and I’ll come down.”

  “Thanks, Miranda.”

  I paced at first, then found an empty seat next to an old woman who was mumbling something about canaries taking over the world, and who stank of urine and unwashed clothes. It wasn’t so much that I thought Trish would come back—though I certainly didn’t quite stop hoping she might, as much for my wallet and the deposit as for wanting to know she cared about Rosalie—but that I obscurely and tenaciously felt Rosalie needed someone there, sending her strength, mourning the loss of her future. If it couldn’t be her mother or father, sisters or brothers, it would have to be me, a stranger she hadn’t even been able to talk to.

  I waited forty-five minutes and was just about to call Miranda when the brisk orderly came through the swinging doors and looked around. I sensed somehow he was looking for me and I went over to him.

  “I’m sorry to tell you,” he said, and then paused uncharacteristically. Pain surfaced in his eyes and then was controlled again. “The girl you brought in. She’s dead.”

  3

  BY THE TIME I GOT HOME it was past two in the morning. No one was up to greet me, just as there had been no one to call and tell I’d be late. At the late age of thirty, I was living alone for the first time.

  Last summer I’d moved out of the home I’d shared for years with Penny and our two housemates. At first it had been exciting to set up house by myself. The apartment I’d found was a spacious one in an old ivy-covered brick building on Capitol Hill. It was on the fourth floor and the living room window had a lavish western view of Queen Anne Hill and Elliott Bay. I’d watched sunset after sunset all through the summer and fall, and life had seemed, if not perfect, then more than tolerable. The space and the sunsets went together with a sense of independence less tinged with melancholy than I’d dreaded. I’d bought plants and put up posters and learned to cook for one from the section in the Enchanted Broccoli Forest called “Light Meals for Nibblers.”

  But by the end of fall my solitude no longer seemed quite so adventurous. Starting in November I found myself going through an unusually promiscuous phase. My affair with Hadley last summer had removed me from my old circle of heterosexual friends, and I threw myself into a string of one-night and one-week stands with women, out of curiosity and need, and as if to confirm all my worried sister’s worst fears about lesbians and their rampantly unstable sex lives.

  Over a period of two months I slept with four women—well, maybe that wasn’t so promiscuous; for plenty of people that was a way of life. For Carole at the shop for instance, who went through relationships like new breakfast cereals. But for me, with my vague ideas about commitment, who’d had maybe four boyfriends and Hadley my whole life, it felt pretty daring. I didn’t regret it—I’d learned a lot—but I was thinking about taking a breather. For one thing, it was all so complicated: not starting up, no that was easy, but maintaining an interest, and even worse, breaking off.

  Not that most of the women weren’t very nice people—Betty was a classical guitarist and played me a little Bach chaconnes and gaviots while I ate my breakfast; Andrea made me wholewheat pastries and breads until I felt like a grain terminal (batches of muffins still kept turning up forlornly on my doorstep); Dandi gave wonderful massages and Devlin told great stories. But somehow none of them were quite the ticket. After a shorter or longer period I’d find myself yawning and struggling to keep a conversation going, avoiding places where I might meet one of them, and looking around eagerly for someone new, someone who might be the one. I was afraid of admitting to myself what I knew was true—my time with Hadley, short as it had been, had spoiled me. Not only was that the sort of relationship I wanted, but that’s who I still wanted.

  I never talked about her to anyone, didn’t know how to talk about her. I didn’t have the words to describe what I’d felt with her. The nearest I could come was the phrase, “We were so regular together.” Sometimes I wondered if it had ever really happened. I would have liked to ask her, but she wasn’t even in Seattle any longer. Her father had had a stroke and she’d gone back to Houston to help take care of him. A postcard with a skyscraper skyline had arrived one day in December and its message had been as uninspiring as its view: “I miss Seattle, but not the rain. My accent’s coming back with a vengeance. You’d probably laugh to hear me.”

  Nothing about giving me the opportunity.

  I went around my apartment, nervously turning on lights, trying not to think too much about what had happened at the hospital. But the image of blood running down Rosalie’s face, of Trish’s black-rimmed, frightened eyes wouldn’t leave me. They were so young to be on their own, so young to be using their sexuality, and used for it.

  Rosalie was dead now, and Trish was running. From who, from what? From me, because I’d pushed her? I should have handled it differently, should have handled the whole thing differently. But I’d been afraid of them, hadn’t really looked at them. Just hadn’t seen them.

  In the kitchen I opened the refrigerator out of habit rather than hunger. In a flash Ernesto was there, roused from whatever deep feline sleep he’d been enjoying by the prospect of food. Ernesto was Ray’s cat and I had promised to take care of him while Ray was away. It had been a weak moment and I was regretting it.

  Ernesto was as profusely furred as a mohair sweater and as solid as a tank; big as a dog, but without a dog’s friendly, trusting eyes. Ernesto’s gaze was superior, distant and calculating. Even during the time Ray and I had been involved I hadn’t liked Ernesto much. He had a way of ignoring me when I tried to get his attention that made me feel foolish—and a way of being physically aggressive just when I was least interested, when I was trying to sleep, for instance. Now I faced six weeks of his company, a fact that didn’t seem to excite him either. For when it became obvious that he wasn’t going to be fed, he contemplated me severely and gloomily for a moment before turning and padding heavily back to whatever dark recess of the apartment he’d emerged from.

  Next to food, sleep was most interesting to Ernesto—and after a few more minutes of bleakly staring at the contents of my refrigerator—old tofu, an open can of tomato paste, six bottles of salad dressing and three withered carrots—I decided he was right and went to bed.

  4

  WHEN I WOKE UP FIVE HOURS later the world had that remarkable stillness that comes after a storm, when everything is embedded in a white as soft as cotton. The sky was opalescent with a few rosy clouds and the city had a unified look only a snow cover can give. There was almost no traffic; from the fourth floor I couldn’t even hear the scrunch of boots or the scrape of shovels, just here and there the rumble of an engine trying to start. For a moment, before I remembered last night’s events, I felt only peace and a childish wish to stay home from school and take my sled over to th
e park.

  Then I started rooting around in the closet for long underwear, heavy socks and boots. I found my old yellow-striped knit cap with the white pompom and the blue scarf and mitten set my mother had given me the Christmas before the car accident that had killed her and my father. Penny had gotten a red version; every year our mother gave us some little thing that matched. At the age of five we’d liked our gifts, at ten refused them, at fifteen returned them to the store, and at twenty finally accepted them. Now the blue scarf and mittens reminded me of both my mother and Penny and I was glad to wear them.

  I didn’t drive my car—I’d be glad never to get into it again after last night. Now it had blood—Rosalie’s blood, smear-dried all over the back seat. No wonder Trish hadn’t wanted to stay in the Volvo. But my bag! And the deposit!

  The Monday morning scene up on Broadway was less than peaceful. The street had been plowed and sprinkled with sand, and shivering crowds stood waiting for the slow trolleys. We weren’t too used to snow in Seattle. Those who skied were well-turned out in bright jackets and caps; everyone else looked like they’d thrown on whatever they could find to keep them warm. Still, the spirit was lively and strangers traded excited complaints and stories: “I could barely get out my door this morning.” “My street is one of those that never gets plowed—and then it just turns to ice.” “Did your pipes freeze too?” “Remember the winter of ’79? This is really nothing compared to that. I bet this is gone by tomorrow.” “Well, the kids love it anyway.”

  We packed ourselves into the trolley like frozen string beans and began to expand and cook in the heat. The trolley lurched down the hill and through the city center. “It’s going to be a hard day,” department store clerks complained. “Those girls in Bothell will say they were snowed in.” But others looked forward to an easier rhythm. Things would go on as usual, just more slowly.

  June was at the print shop before me and said that Carole had called to say she’d just gotten back into town after a weekend away and had found her pipes frozen. She’d be in late.

  “You could have expected it,” said June, and I agreed. In her very unreliability, Carole was predictable. Giddy, endearing and exasperating, Carole bounced from one complication to the next, chronically late and astonishingly absent-minded. Every day she lost the keys to her car; every day the thing she most needed disappeared in some mysterious way.

  She’d been working with Best Printing for six months, and kept us all in a state of confusion, as we tried to help her find things and occasionally burst out in frustration, “Carole, what are you doing?”

  In spite of thinking she was completely hopeless, I had been attracted to her on more than one occasion. I’d never let her know. Life was complicated enough already.

  “You didn’t drive, did you?” asked June. “I thought about it, but the streets are a mess.”

  I thought about the Volvo’s back seat again and the whole story came pouring out. It sounded unreal and bizarre on this cold white morning. “And then I waited and waited and then they said Rosalie was dead.”

  “Rosalie, Rosalie. I used to know a Rosalie. I mean, she was a kid who went to our church. Skinny and braids? Probably not any more. I should call my cousin, my cousin knows everybody. What about that other girl, what was her name—Trish? What the fuck was her trip, taking off like that?”

  The muscles in June’s cocoa face tightened, like machinery parts that have gone too fast and seized up, and her brown eyes blazed. “Stupid little bitches, seventeen years old and they think they know everything and can protect themselves. They’ve undercut the whole prostitution racket and they don’t think they can learn anything from women who’ve been working the street for years. You see many women over twenty-five getting knocked off by the Green River killer? No, because they know how to protect themselves.”

  June had jumped up and taken hold of a chair as if ready to bring it down over someone’s head. I didn’t dare bring up the problem of the missing deposit right now. “And you think that goddamn Green River Task Force is out there telling the girls to be careful, telling them what they know about this guy, his little perversions and all? Thirty girls’ bodies found and maybe there’s fifty more. Yeah, if they were from Bellevue or Broadmoor or someplace you can bet they’d have found the guy and sent him up for life plus two thousand years. Little Rosalie No-Name. Poor little Black Rosalie No-Name! I’m going to call my cousin right now.”

  I went to the window and stared out. There were about two inches of snow; probably it wouldn’t stay long. One elderly guy in a long taupe coat was picking his way slowly down the street. I remembered the packed waiting room at Harborview; the homeless were everywhere these days.

  “Yeah, ask her to call me back,” June was saying. Her anger had vanished and she just sounded efficient. She and Penny were two of a kind, organized, model hard workers. “Gotta start running that poster job,” she said, out of her chair before she hung up the receiver.

  But the phone rang again. “It’s for you,” June said, and in a stage whisper, “One of your old girlfriends.”

  Old was a misnomer for this one, Devlin, who still considered herself very much in the running.

  “Hello, Pam! Isn’t the snow fantastic! I thought maybe you’d like to come on up to my house after work and we could take a walk and then have dinner and I could make a fire.”

  I remembered those little fireside chats that had quickly grown so personal. Devlin had had an interesting life of travel and adventure; unfortunately she was definitely into recounting it at length. After episode four (Nepal, the summer of ‘74), I’d had enough.

  “I don’t think so, Devlin.” I wasn’t unsympathetic to people nursing hopeless crushes; my own undying feelings for Hadley fell into pretty much the same category, but at least I had the dignity to shut up about it. “I’m fairly busy today…I…I have to wash my car.”

  There was a silence as frosty as the air outside. “Well, I must say you’ve chosen an excellent day for it,” she snarled and hung up.

  “You’re so popular, Pam,” June said.

  “Yeah, now I have four new enemies that I didn’t have before.”

  “Well, everybody has to sow their wild oats sometime.”

  “I feel a little old for this though.”

  “It’s only because you came out so late,” she said wisely, as if she were my ancient dyke great-aunt and not a practicing heterosexual five years younger. “You have to make up for lost time. You’ll settle down some day.”

  The phone rang again and this time it was her cousin Joyce. She knew everyone in the world, but she didn’t think she knew a Rosalie. She’d tell the parents of the missing girls, though—maybe Rosalie was a fake name. Because Darla’s Beverly was gone and so was Cheryl Brown, you know, that cute girl who used to sing so good in choir. She kind of hoped it wasn’t her, hoped it was nobody they knew….

  June got worked up again and said that the so-called Green River Task Force was probably getting paid by the killer to set the girls up. Probably the killer was even on the fucking task force! Somebody’s idea of cleaning up the streets!

  I looked out the frosted window again and saw another figure picking its way through the snow. It too wore a beige coat, but this one was fashionable and swung open, unbuttoned, and I had seen that hat before. The figure was also carrying something very familiar. It stopped and looked at the building numbers, and by the time it reached our shop I had the door open. I was surprised at how relieved I was to see her. “Come in, come in,” I said. “June, this is Trish.”

  5

  THE YOUNG WOMAN WHO came through the door looked far different than she had last night in my car. That small, pathetic girl with the pale, terrified face under the black hat was actually taller than me, and the stiletto heels of her short soft leather boots made her even taller. Under her fake fur-lined coat she was wearing jeans and a red sweatshirt with a dash of black calligraphy across the front. Her figure was good, in a kind of unnatural Barb
ie Doll way: broad shoulders, spindly arms, large breasts, narrow hips and legs with almost no thigh. Today she was wearing no jewelry other than a silver heart on a chain around her neck, and very little makeup. Under her hat her small features were sharp and pointed; only the widely spaced eyes were outlined; the tiny rosebud mouth was pale and chapped. Strands of frosted ash-blond hair curled over her shoulders. June and I were in overalls and hiking boots, and I still wore my tattered blue scarf around my neck.

  “Have a seat,” I said, and gestured to the couch. June said good-bye to her cousin, pulled up a chair and straddled it. I perched on the couch’s armrest.

  “I didn’t take any checks or money or anything,” Trish began, holding out my bag. Her voice was high and a little nasal; she consciously lowered it and started again. “I just wanted your address.”

  June looked severely at me and then at the bag, a dirty white canvas pouch with a leather strap. “Was the deposit in there? Give me that.”

  While I might have felt constrained from counting the money, June certainly didn’t. She plunged her hand in and took out the deposit envelope, then tossed the bag over to me.

  I said, “You know that Rosalie is….”

  “I know. I called the hospital.”

  “Was Rosalie her real name?” asked June. “What was her last name? Her parents ought to know.”

  “I don’t think she has parents,” said Trish. “She came from California. I didn’t know her long, but…” she ducked her frosted head and opened up her purse, expensive soft leather like her boots. “She was my best friend.”

  I thought for a second she was crying, but when she raised her head again her eyes were dry and their expression distant. She took out a Marlboro and lit it with a cheap lighter. Her hands were small and skinny, child’s hands, with artificial purplish fingernails attached to them like mussel shells.