Swan Song

by Tracey Ward

  “Shut the door and keep quiet,” he tells me as he disappears into the bedroom.

  When I shut the door, Rosaline grabs onto me and buries her face in my shoulder, silent sobs racking her body. I don’t say a word and I don’t hug her back. I just stand there going numb, shutting down.

  I hear Tommy curse from inside the room then he reappears, his expression grim.

  “How long ago?” he asks sternly.

  Rosaline ignores him and continues to weep into my shoulder. I have to shake her to get her attention. “Rose. How long ago?”

  “Um,” she sniffs, standing up straight and wiping her eyes. “Not even half an hour. She was here with Lucy when I got home from the club a couple hours ago. She, um, she was weird. Acting looney.”

  “What do you mean?”

  Rosaline shakes her head faintly. “I don’t know. She was saying crazy things. Talking to people who weren’t there. Calling Luce and I by the wrong names. She called me by your name once, Aid, yelling at me about some number she didn’t want to do. It was like she thought she was still at the club.”

  “Mickey said she threw up in the car,” Tommy says. “And she threw up in there, but is that it?”

  “Yeah. Yeah, just those two times.”

  “Sit on the couch,” he commands. He glances around suddenly, looking alarmed. “Where’s the other one? There are four of you, right?”

  “Lucy,” I confirm. “Rose said she’s in the bathroom.”

  “I’ll get her and bring her in here. Stay together and stay quiet. I gotta find a phone and call the doctor.”

  “But she’s dead… isn’t she?” Rosaline asks weakly, sounding hopeful that maybe she’s wrong.

  Tommy looks her hard in the eyes. “She’s gone. But we need the doc to tell us why.”

  “Should we call the police?”

  “Are you simple?” he asks her harshly, his eyes flashing dangerously.

  I put my hand up and glare at him. “Easy. She’s upset, give her a break. I’ll talk to her. Just go get Lucy.”

  Tommy storms out of the room in search of the bathroom while I sit Rosaline down on the couch. She slumps down hard, the wind entirely out of her sails. I gently brush her brown hair out of her eyes as her tears start up again.

  “We can’t call the cops until we know what happened,” I tell her softly, hoping I won’t have to repeat this for Lucy. “We need to know if it has something to do with the club or with the Outfit. If it does, it’ll be handled privately.”

  Rosaline looks up at me with worried eyes. “You won’t let them just dump her body, will you? What if they want to put her out in the woods somewhere or sink her in the river? You won’t let them, right?”

  I stare back into her pleading eyes and know I can’t promise her that. So I give her what I can.

  “I’ll sure try,” I whisper.

  Rosaline nods then leans over to lay her head on my shoulder again. I take her shaking hands in my own shaking hands, and together they feel somehow solid. Steady. As though their mutual fear cancels each other out and we’re stronger because we both feel it.

  Lucy comes walking into the room looking like a ghost. Her face is pale, her white nightgown flows around her with each step, but her eyes are hard. Rosaline and I are shaken up, but Lucy is different. Lucy, much to my surprise, is fightin’ mad.

  “Scoot over,” she commands. “Your boyfriend told me to sit down and shut up.”

  “I’m sorry, Luce,” I mutter, not sure what I’m apologizing for. About Tommy being harsh with her? About Alice dying so young? About bringing Alice into the club in the first place, putting her in harm’s way? I don’t know, maybe all of it.

  Lucy sits down and waits beside us. We all fall silent, the only sound is Rosaline’s occasional sniff. The small apartment smells uncomfortably of vomit and the inside of an outhouse. It’s wafting out of the bedroom and filling the space with death and decay. With the entire contents of Alice’s body that she left behind when her soul vacated the space.

  Tommy eventually returns with the familiar face of the German doctor on his heels, the same one who attended to Eddie when he was shot last month. I nod hello to him when he enters but he ignores me. Instead, he follows Tommy straight into the bedroom where I hear him plunk his black medical bag down and begin muttering indiscernibly. I hear Tommy’s voice every now and again, low and rumbling, impossible to understand from here but somehow still reassuring. Eventually Rosaline stops sniffing and I wonder if she’s fallen asleep. I wish I could. Though considering what’s happened in that bedroom, I don’t know how I will.

  “Was she taking anything?” Tommy asks loudly, startling us all.

  He and the doctor are standing in the room, their tall, shadowed figures looking down on the three of us.

  “I don’t know,” I answer. “I don’t think so.”

  “A sleep syrup,” Rosaline says, sitting up straight. “I don’t know what kind but it’s in the kitchen cupboard. Brown bottle.”

  “You mean zis?” the doctor asks, holding up a brown bottle with no label and a small cork in the top.

  “That looks like it, yeah. Where did you find that?”

  “Under the bed,” Tommy says darkly. “It musta rolled under after she drank it.”

  “Do you know how full ze bottle vas?”

  We all shake our heads. No one knows. I didn’t even know she was taking it.

  The doctor nods thoughtfully, looking at Tommy. “She must have procured it from another doctor. I did not prescribed her zis.”

  Tommy nods in agreement. “Nicky. His doc.”

  “Zis vas her boyfriend?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Nicky who?” Lucy asks. “This is the first I’m hearing of a boyfriend.”

  “She was dating some big shot named Nicky,” Rosaline tells her, sounding exhausted. “He drove her home in limos all the time. Bought her clothes. Took her out to the theater. She tried to keep him a secret, but how could she? I think everyone knew. I mean, he’s practically a Capone, for God’s sake.”

  “That doesn’t matter,” Tommy interrupts, glaring at Rosaline. “Here’s what happened. Alice has been seein’ someone. He got her knocked up. She demanded he marry her. He’s already a married man with three kids so he says nothin’ doin’. Tells her to hit the bricks. She gets sad and scared. She gets a little too drunk, takes some sleep syrup to try and forget her troubles and BAM!” All three of us jump in surprise. “Lights out. Permanently.”

  Lucy casts Tommy an angry look. “You want us to say she committed suicide?”

  “No. I want you to agree she took the wrong drug with her hooch and it killed her. You can call it an accident if you want, I don’t care, but that’s what happened. Some guy, you don’t know who,” he says pointedly, making eye contact with each of us, “broke her heart and she made an emotional mistake. It happens a lot. It’s a damn shame and a terrible loss, but it is what it is.”

  There are a lot of problems with this story. Problems like how drunk Alice was at the club before she took the sleep syrup. Like the fact that I don’t believe for a second that Alice was pregnant. Like the fact that she and I had the same headache and nausea symptoms just a couple weeks ago.

  “Tommy, can I talk to you? Alone?”

  Tommy shakes his head. “I don’t got time to listen to you cry over your friend, Adrian. There’s a lot still to do tonight, like call the cops and that chaps my ass.”

  “Just for a second. With the doctor?”

  Tommy frowns at me, but I have his attention. He gestures for me to lead the way into the kitchen. “What’s this about?”

  “I don’t believe she killed herself,” I put up my hands asking them to wait when both men begin to speak, to tell me that’s the story and I need to stick to it. “I’ll say she accidentally did, that’s fine. Don’t worry about that. But she and I were both having headaches for weeks. We both felt sick a lot. Like throwing up. She actually did a couple times. Then we felt better
just after Thanksgiving, but it started up again almost immediately.”

  “What’s your point?” Tommy asks impatiently.

  “My point is, I’m worried.” I look to the doctor. “Could it be something else that killed her? Could I be sick with it too?”

  He eyes me shrewdly, looking me over for signs of something I don’t understand. “Vhat are ze symptoms? Nausea? Headache? Is zis all?”

  “I get dizzy sometimes too. It gets hard to focus.”

  “Vhen do you feel zis vay? In ze morning? Afternoon? Evening?”

  “Always in the evening, always after I’ve been at the club for a while.”

  “Hmmm. And you are a performer? Up on ze stage all night?”

  “Almost entirely, yes.”

  “Alice was too,” Tommy tells him. “She was in the chorus.”

  The doctor puts his hand on my throat and begins prodding gently. “You eat at ze club?”

  “Sometimes,” I reply with a shrug. “But not always.”

  “Has anyone else complained of zese symptoms?”

  Tommy shakes his head. “Not that I’ve heard.”

  “Ze bright lights? Do zey hurt your eyes?”

  I nod emphatically. “Yes.”

  “Uh huh.” he removes his hand from my throat and steps back, speaking to Tommy. “It is headaches. A very severe headache can cause nausea, dizziness, ze sensitivity to light.”

  “That’s it?” I ask, feeling annoyed. “You’re diagnosing my headaches as headaches?”

  “Severe headaches,” he corrects, ignoring my tone and digging around in his bag. He hands me a brown bottle, one that looks eerily similar to what they found under Alice’s bed. “Zey could be brought on by ze lights or made vorse by zem. Ve don’t know. But I vill give you laudanum. It vill help. You take one dosage before you start vork. It vill keep ze headaches avay.”

  “For how long?”

  The doctor shrugs. “Maybe alvays. Or until you do not need it.”

  “If I’m taking it to head off the headaches, how will I know if I don’t need it in the first place?”

  “Some nights you do not take it. See how you feel.”

  With that, he tips his hat to Tommy, snaps his black leather bag closed, and leaves the apartment.

  I stare down at the bottle in my hand with an uneasy feeling in my gut. One that tells me this might have been Alice’s solution too, and I wonder if Tommy’s story about how she died isn’t closer to the truth than I’d like to think.

  “I hate doctors,” I mutter.

  “Me too,” Tommy agrees quietly, lighting a cigarette. “But they’re a necessary evil. Like taxes and toddlers.”

  Chapter Eleven

  The night Alice died was the longest of my life. Tommy eventually called the cops and when they showed up they had an entire team with them. Our tiny apartment was filled to bursting with detectives, doctors, and a few nosy neighbors. Alice was photographed, examined, and eventually carted off to the city morgue. There would be no autopsy. Based on the accounts of her state before her death, the cops were pretty convinced it was an accidental suicide. She got too drunk, took too much sleep syrup, and died almost instantly. Case closed.

  By the time they all left Lucy, Rosaline, and I alone, the sun was already up. Lucy had to get to work in a couple of hours, something I actually envied. I was dying to be busy, to be thinking about something other than what happened to my friend, but it wasn’t in the cards. For me or for Rosaline. We couldn’t sleep, no matter how tired we were, and there was cleaning up to be done. The doctor had taken Alice’s body but he’d left her mess. It was up to us to clean up the urine, feces, and vomit that now saturated that small bed and dripped down onto the floor underneath, staining the dark, worn wood.

  We opened all the windows despite the cold and worked bundled up in our heaviest coats. We got some rubber gloves from our neighbors, promising never to return them, and took the mattress down to the ally. I didn’t hesitate to throw some old lamp oil on it, strike a match, and light it on fire. As the flames licked it greedily, snapping and popping as it heated the moisture in the center and sizzled it into the winter air, Rosaline and I watched on with our hands stuffed in our pockets and our shoulders pressed close together. We waited until it burned out, making sure it took nothing else with it, then we marched wordlessly on numb feet back upstairs to the dark apartment.

  After we cleaned up the room and ourselves, we turned on the radio and sat down on the couch together. Neither one of us wanted to eat a thing so we took turns laying our heads on each other’s shoulders and drifting in and out of sleep. That’s how we stayed all day until Lucy came home and we knew it was time to get ready for work.

  Through the entire day, neither of us said a single word to each other.

  Now here I am at the club and I’m still not speaking to anyone. Everyone must know what happened, the news traveling quickly along the gangster grapevine, because no one says a word about Alice being missing. No one seems to care Rosaline and I are dead on our feet either. Even Clara, that wretched little bitch, is leaving me alone. I almost wish she’d start with me so I can lay into her. So I have somewhere to go with all the emotions I’m feeling.

  I’m angry, sad, confused, and afraid. I don’t even know where to begin, so I do what I’ve done for the last six years; I stomp it all down until it can’t touch me anymore. I ignore it. I stow it away and I try my hardest not to let it bubble up and smother me where I stand.

  As I apply my makeup, I realize that despite being too tired to think straight, I don’t have a headache yet. I’ve been here for hours but my head feels fine. I honestly can’t remember the last time that happened. Before Drew left, I know that.

  Just the thought of him brings an ache to my chest that I can’t understand. One that feels strange and hollow yet full of things I haven’t felt in years. I wish he was there. I wish I could tell him what happened and have him try to cheer me up in that horrible, awful way of his. I want to look into his steady, steely eyes and pull strength from them.

  And yes, a part of me wants to curl up against his chest, bury my face in his shoulder where I can smell the strange, intoxicating scent of him, and hide from the world if only for a moment.

  I stare at the brown bottle the doc gave me. I wonder if I need to take it or if I can skip it. Can I avoid taking it all together? I’ve seen people get hooked on the stuff the same way some get hooked on the hooch. I’ve never had a problem with that before, but then I’ve never taken laudanum either. I hear it makes you loopy. Sleepy and stupid, sloppy. I can’t be that way here. Not surrounded by secrets, lies and—

  “Are you ready?” Tommy asks quietly from the door.

  I look at him in the mirror on my vanity and I’m reminded of the night I first met Drew. Tommy is standing exactly the same; hands in his pockets, coat flared out over his perfect body, dark, handsome eyes staring into mine through the glass. It’s like looking into an alternate world or seeing into the past through the mirror. If I could go back and do it again, would I step through? Would I bring Alice back and start over with Drew? Would I wait at that table for him and get that taste of something I can’t understand but crave in my gut, or would I save myself the trouble and tell him to beat it? I only got a small sip of him, just a sample of something strange and new, but I can’t forget it and I can’t deny it. I glance at the bottle again thinking maybe I’m wrong.

  Maybe I have been hooked on something before.

  “Yeah, I’m ready.”

  “Did you take the laudanum?” he asks, following my gaze.

  “No. I don’t have a headache.”

  Tommy strides into the room and uncorks the bottle deftly. He pours a small amount into a glass of gin I haven’t touched and pushes it in front of me.

  “Down it,” he commands.

  I look up at him with as much fire as I can muster. “I said I don’t have a headache. I don’t need it.”

  “You also heard the doc when he said the
lights could be what’s givin’ you the headache. Drink it.”

  Too tired to fight and too sure he’s right, I take up the glass and swallow it all. The gin and tonic mixed with the laudanum is a terrible combination and I have to will my stomach to keep the liquid down. But I finish it all, slam the glass on the table, and glare up at Tommy.

  To my surprise he grins down at me, his face almost affectionate. Soft. He takes up the glass then leans down to lay a gentle kiss on my forehead. “Good girl,” he whispers, his breath on my skin making me shiver.

  That night I don’t suffer a single pain and I go to sleep without trouble.

  ***

  Alice’s body is transported back to Idaho. Her parents ended up buying her a train ticket in the end, just like she said. There’s no funeral here, no mourning really. She was here one day and then she isn’t. Like magic. Empty, hollow smoke and mirrors.

  Every night that I work, Tommy comes into my dressing room and makes sure I take the laudanum. Some nights I have a headache and an unsteady stomach already, some nights I feel fine. Some nights are worse than others, some nights I have no trouble at all. But every night without fail I take my medicine under Tommy’s watchful eye. I react to it pretty well, though I do feel a little loopy sometimes. I get tired after I take it and I feel drunk. On the second week, just days before Christmas, I stop drinking hooch altogether. The laudanum leaves me feeling strange enough. I don’t need the extra push. Tommy continues to be surprisingly sweet to me about the entire thing. He’s there watching closely when I take my medicine and he’s there to help me stumble off the stage on the nights when it hits me harder than others. He’s also there when I’m hurting from the headaches or the loss of my friend, and I’ve taken to leaning on him for support, something I’ve never done with any man.

  And, of course, there are nights when the laudanum loosens me up and his bourbon makes his hands bold, and the lines we’ve drawn over the years become blurry and indistinct.

  “Your skin is like satin,” he mumbles against my bare shoulder.