by Cole McCade
Toward morning, she slept. Thin and fitful, with the lumps in the futon digging into her ribs and his body heat as uncomfortable as a swampy Southern night, but she slept—and woke with his arm draped over her. His fingers cupped against her breast. The sky through the slats turned into bars of soft and pillowy gray, nearly white, paper waiting for sunrise to paint its colors. She squinted against the rising light, then pried off the heavy dead weight of his arm, zipped up her hoodie, and let herself out.
Leaning against the rusted rail of the exterior walkway, she fished a battered pack of Djarum Blacks from her pocket and lit up, breathing in the aromatic smoke of the clove cigarette and looking out over the parking lot. So quiet, in these hours when the slum children of the city had gone to bed. The wholesome and the good were just waking up, rubbing the sleep from their eyes and aching in their bones at the thought of another sixteen-hour day that would be just enough to put a roof over their heads. Whoring themselves for a place to sleep, just like her.
Thoughts like these were why she didn’t like sunrises.
She stubbed her cigarette out with the toe of her boot and peeked back inside. Mr. White Russians was still asleep. In the morning light he had the kind of sunken chest that made her think of the big crucifix over the pulpit during morning services in Catholic school. She’d always thought it was weird, the way the teachers and bishops had talked about chastity and purity, then spent half their day kneeling at the feet of a half-naked man with a body sculpted in exquisite detail, down to every tight, lean muscle. That was what he looked like. Sleeping Jesus, with his hair spilled over the dirty pillow and the scruffy scraggle of his beard.
She slipped back into the apartment and dug in the crumpled wad his jeans made on the floor, until she found his wallet. Wrinkled singles, fives, tens, damp as a sweaty palm. Pot money, probably. Tips. He’d said he was a waiter. They always were. She took a ten, enough for bus fare, coffee, and something to eat, and stole out into the rising yellow glare of day. He wouldn’t mind, and she’d never see him again. He’d known that. She’d known that. If she hadn’t made the choice, he would have. It was easier that way. Throw them away before they threw her away.
Made it hurt less.
She stopped at the Starbucks on the corner and treated herself to a cappuccino and a muffin, avoiding the barista’s eyes. She knew what she looked like, with her fishnets ripped in huge holes over her thighs, clunky combat boots that weighed more than she did, and her L’Oreal Whispersoft Blonde hair spilling out of her hood in limp straggles, sticking to the smears of lipstick and mascara and the thin sheen of sweat glossing her face.
She a strawberry, she thought, and cracked a smile that felt just a little too much like a lunatic grin. Cocaine her pimp.
God, she hadn’t seen that movie in years. She’d been twelve the first time, sneaking it in the dark of her family’s living room with the sound down to almost nothing, the TV’s flicker reflecting off the dark, richly paneled oak walls and gold fixtures. Her mother would have killed her if she’d found out. Little Leigh, watching a prostitute crawl on her hands and knees toward Richard Gere, biting her lip at the unfamiliar tingle in her panties and wondering what it would be like to live with that kind of freedom.
Maybe she’d take her leftover change and grab it from a Redbox tonight. Find someone with a DVD player. Do what they wanted her to do, what she did best, then put them to bed and lose herself in a little nostalgia, remembering when she’d been naïve enough to wish she could look that sexy in thigh-high stilettos.
With her cappuccino warming her hands, she caught the bus uptown, tucked into a corner and sandwiched away from a thick man with roving eyes and stale pizza breath that clouded around him like cologne. He got off at the edge of the business district. She stayed, curled in on herself and listening to her battered, scratched pawn-shop iPod while Melanie Martinez lilted in her babygirl voice.
Hey Mom, please wake up, Dad’s with a slut…
The bus let her off in the Rooks district. Run-down little barrio houses shouldered up to new townhouse developments, posh for those who liked to pretend they weren’t so very pretentious, rich-kid runoff from Blackwing Downs proudly established on the ground floor of gentrification. As she meandered down the street, she kept her head down, but felt the soccer-mom stare from the woman unloading groceries from her minivan, and another arranging the flowers in her outdoor window box. Leigh smiled to herself.
It’s okay. You don’t know it, but I’m one of your tribe.
When the squeals of children rose over the lazy hum of her music, she slowed—half a block from the playground, with its brightly painted red climbing bars and wooden cutouts of grinning monkey faces pinned to the chain link fence. Her heart turned sluggish, and nearly stopped cold. It always did, though she did this nearly every day. She was supposed to feel happy, staring in at those cheerful colors and nodding little heads of messy hair while tiny fingers grubbed in the sandbox and chubby legs chased back and forth.
Instead all she felt was a deep loss that carved into her and left a hole somewhere in the center of her chest, in this low dark place she couldn’t touch but knew held the ugliest, rawest, most beautiful parts of her.
He was with the new girl today, clinging to her hand and looking down at his sneakers with quiet solemnity. The girl was a redhead, slim, perky, with the kind of freckles that made her look like a tawny sweet little animal. As far as Leigh knew Jacob had hired her just a few weeks ago, and for a heavy hateful moment Leigh wondered if he was fucking her.
Fuck it. She didn’t care.
She only cared about that beautiful, overly serious little boy who didn’t even know who she was.
He had on his Osh-Koshes today. She’d figured out he loved them just from how often he wore them, even though they’d gone threadbare and the legs were a little too short now; one of the buttons had been stitched back on with wrong-color thread, crimson against Thomas-the-Tank-Engine blue. He had Jacob’s deep black hair, but Leigh’s wide brown eyes and fair, almost translucent skin. He didn’t like to talk. He didn’t like to talk at all, but she could see so much happening behind those eyes, his little mind turning over and over and seeing so many things.
But he didn’t see her.
She fumbled her phone from her pocket. Her old shitty TracFone that didn’t even have any fucking minutes; she couldn’t remember the number because she never gave it out, never used a phone after she’d left her last one in the dumpster, full of texts she’d never answer and a thousand missed calls. But the TracFone had a camera, and she flipped it open with shaking fingers and held it up and zeroed it in on that quiet, grave little face with its delicate nose and stubborn jaw.
Quick flash. Done. Stored away with over a thousand other pictures, one for nearly every day of the last four years, broken by painful gaps on the days she couldn’t get close enough. That was it. She was finished. She should go.
But she lingered, watching him bend to pick up a white and pink clover flower, before he tilted his head back to ask the nanny a question Leigh couldn’t hear. She couldn’t stand it. Couldn’t stand seeing him look up at that clean, pretty, wholesome girl with such innocent trust.
So she turned and walked away, because she’d never known how to do anything else.
CHAPTER TWO
SHE SPENT THE DAY AT Gary’s, with the dusty clouded half-light of the sun streaming through the windows of his shitty little shoebox bar, tucked into a back street in the Jackdaw district. They had an arrangement, unspoken and informal. She swept up behind the bar; he let her have beer on tap, kept the backpack containing all her worldly possessions upstairs, and looked the other way while she cruised for her next nameless bed each night.
“You look like hell, girl.” Gary leaned on the bar, watching her through his one good eye, a milky witch-thing that bulged from the socket and made the clear, bright, utterly lifeless green of his glass eye look normal. “Where’d you wake up this morning?”
“B
ack of the Nests.”
“Not a good place to be.”
She scrubbed a dried skim of beer foam from the rim of a shot glass. The bar wouldn’t open for another five hours, and she had a lot of glasses to clean. “You say that about every place I wake up.”
“Because you wake up in shit places.”
“Don’t start the Daddy act again.”
He shrugged with a phlegmy snort. “I hate talking to the cops. Don’t really want to have that conversation, being the last fucking person to see you alive.”
“You won’t.” She turned on the water and lingered over the bitter-froth taste of her Amstel Light, savoring the sweet fuzzy high of a minor beer buzz while she watched the flow course over the glasses in the sink until they looked like crystal rocks in a whitewater stream. “I know what I’m doing.”
“Which is why I don’t understand why you keep doing it.”
“Because…” She pressed her lips together until her teeth stamped against their soft insides. “Because I need to.”
“What the hell are you looking for?”
She shrugged. “I’m too sober for this conversation.”
“And I’m too drunk.” He straightened the cuffs of his perfectly tailored shirt. That was Gary’s thing. He looked like the resurrected corpse of a drowned sea dog, but he loved those fucking shirts and wouldn’t be seen anywhere without one, hanging on the sagging bones of his body. “Just don’t want to see you end up in the gutters, girl.”
But the gutters are where some of us belong.
“You ever read any Oscar Wilde, Gary?”
“I don’t read anything but Playboy.”
“Liar. I’ve seen your Kindle.” She toyed with her beer bottle, watching the liquid slosh dully against brown glass. “The Picture of Dorian Gray. He says ‘You will always be fond of me. I represent to you all the sins you never had the courage to commit.’” She smiled to herself. “I want that to be me. I want that to be my legacy. A lifetime of all the sins I’ve ever wished for, and the courage to follow through.”
He grimaced. “Hard to have a legacy when you’re unemployed and homeless. Job’s still there if you want it.”
“I have a job.”
“Washing glasses drunk ain’t a job.” He eyed her, that witch-eye rolling and the lid twitching. “That’s just a damaged little girl doing shit that don’t make sense, and one old man stupid enough to let her.”
“But you serve a damned good beer. And damaged implies I don’t want to be exactly the way I am.”
“Yeah?” A measuring look raked over her, and he snorted. “Then you’re doing a shitload better than most of the human race.”
Leigh laughed and shut he water off, then plunged her arms up to the elbows in the icy coolness. Her body always ran so hot, a fever under her skin, and she liked the feel of cold prickling goosebumps everywhere and chill slick water matting the fine golden hairs of her arm against her skin, as long as it wasn’t blowing on her. Jacob had always hated that, when she’d turned the air conditioner off in the sweating stickiness of deep summer.
Jacob had hated a lot of things.
I love you anyway, baby girl. That’s what love’s about. Forgiving your imperfections.
Yeah. Her imperfections.
“Hey. Leigh.”
She looked up into that marbled eye. Gary dropped his gaze and fiddled with his cufflinks. Little gold horses, running against a pinstriped field. He swore in his glory days he’d run a stable, making six figures a year on race cups. Get him drunk enough and he’d tell a hard-luck story about I Spent it All on Peonies and the broken leg that had ruined his life, bankrupted him, and sacrificed his eye to an angry bookie.
Wasn’t a bookie, one of the early-shift bartenders had told her one night. Jimmy. Jimmy with the too-easy smile and the roving eyes that liked to peer down the front of her hoodie, hoping maybe one night when she rolled the dice she’d land on him. He lost that eye in a mugging. Hands up, whimpering like a baby, pissing down his leg, begging the perp not to hurt him. Guy stabbed him and ran.
She liked Gary’s version better.
She waited him out, while he made garbled noises in the back of his throat and turned those cufflinks around until they spun like carousel ponies. He spat on the floor and swore, then glared at her.
“Fuck. Look. My car’s in the shop. I gotta start inventory, but I need to pick up the car before close of business today. You think you could run grab it for me? I’ll pay you. Easy fifty bucks.”
“I don’t need your charity.”
“It’s not fucking charity. I need a goddamned favor and it’s a pain in the ass. I’d pay fucking Jimmy too, but that fuckshit’s late for his shift again.” His shoulders came up around his ears; he avoided her eyes. She snorted.
“God, you’re a shitty liar.” She pulled her arms out of the water and dried them on a towel. “All right. But you’re finishing your own dishes.”
“And you’re not driving buzzed. Go upstairs and sleep it off.”
“Thought you were in a hurry.”
“I could lose my liquor license letting you walk out of here. The car can wait another hour.” He waved toward the stairs. “Go. I’ll call ahead and let him know you’re coming.”
Rolling her eyes, Leigh tossed the towel down, trudged up the stairs to Gary’s cluttered patchwork single-room apartment, kicked off her shoes, and crawled into the old man’s bed.
She’d slept here more than once, on days when she needed a nap or nights when she dozed off at the bar and didn’t wake up enough to stop Gary from carrying her up and tucking her in like he was hoping she’d wake up and call him Papa.
It was the only bed she ever slept in without having to open the coin slot between her legs to pay for it. She knew what he was trying to do: trying to put a roof over her head, give her some kind of stability when she refused to take a job or rent an apartment, when she’d rather find a dry cardboard box in an alley on a rainy night than settle into anything permanent. Or even something as mercurial as shacking up with the same guy night after night, instead of sneaking out before they could ask her number and mumble about wanting to see her again.
Gary didn’t get it. Gary didn’t understand that her blood was made of ennui and missed chances, and she’d given up trying to explain a long time ago. Some things just were what they were.
But she kicked her boots off and sank into the floral patterned quilt that still smelled just a little bit like a woman who hadn’t been around to make Gary’s bed in years, and let herself enjoy feeling safe for a few quiet minutes before safe could start to feel like caged.
* * *
She woke with the sun in her eyes and the clink of bottles coming from below. Yawning, she rubbed the crusts of sleep from the corners of her eyes, rolled out of bed, and rummaged in her backpack for clean panties. She’d have to use that fifty to get some quarters for the Laundromat later, or play domestic for a few minutes longer and borrow Gary’s washer-dryer.
After rinsing the taste of old beer from her mouth, she stole an apple from Gary’s fridge and clomped downstairs. He’d left a note on the bar, with the address and the name of the shop. She scanned his crabbed handwriting, gnawing little bird-bites out of her apple so it would last longer and make her feel fuller. Blackbird Pond, in the lower Ravens. She shrugged, stuffed the note into her pocket, then waved at the back of Gary’s head through the storeroom door as she trudged out into the midafternoon sun.
The city 67 line took her from the worn-down kitsch of the Jackdaws to the Ravens. She tilted her head back as the bus passed under a white stone arch draped with the red, black, and white flag of the Arapaho Nation. The painted brick cut the sky in two, and she peered up and imagined she was crossing the border between worlds while her music thumped in her ears and snarled we’re killing strangers so we don’t kill the ones that we love.
She got off a few blocks later and followed the directions on the note, turning off the main street and onto a narrow la
ne that was mostly empty burnout lots with overgrown grass poking through the remnants of chain-link fences. Squatter’s paradise. The jutting edges of cracked sidewalks caught on the treads of her boots as she took a few skipping steps and hopped over some of the more jagged fissures. Step on a crack, break yo momma’s back.
The address on the note led her to one of the few buildings that didn’t look ready for demolition. She stood on the sidewalk and studied the garage. New renovations on an old building, like putting a fresh coat of makeup on an old whore, but clean enough. The sign over the door said Blackbird Pond next to a silhouette of a girl, her skirts blowing in an imaginary wind. The garage door had been rolled up against the summer heat, exposing an almost manic level of organization, every tool in its place. Two out of three lifts were occupied—a slick older model Firebird on one, gleaming fresh-painted black with the logo on the hood in a vivid ice-blue fade. The other looked like it just might crumple under the weight of Gary’s massive boat of a Chevy Impala.
A pair of worn combat boots stuck out from under the Impala like the Wicked Witch’s ruby slippers. Leigh smiled to herself, tugged her earbuds out, and tip-toed closer, listening to the scuff and clang of rough hands at work. She stopped next to a pair of long legs in dirty, frayed jeans, rested her hands on her knees, and bent to watch, holding her tongue.
“You do know I can see your shadow.” A low, gritty voice drifted from beneath the Impala. Dry, coolly masculine, inflected with a certain cultured, exacting articulation, yet rough about the edges—as if he spoke so rarely his voice was rusty, ill-used. That roughness brushed over her skin like chill breath, and she shivered. That voice didn’t belong in the light of day.
“Ghosts aren’t supposed to cast a shadow,” she said.
“Is that what you are?”
“That’s how I live. Somewhere between the world of the living and the world of the dead.”