by Amber Sparks
What happens next: she doesn’t show up for Marcus’s bounce-house birthday, and she fails to keep her theater date with Jenny and Jack. She doesn’t call, and she doesn’t text, and she doesn’t write, and she doesn’t answer her door. She doesn’t show up at Nordstrom Rack, or at Macy’s, or at any of her shopping haunts. She doesn’t opine, anywhere, on anything.
Anna and Jonathan finally convince her landlord to let them in. The landlord sniffs, disgust pulling his mouth down. He’s sure she’s probably a corpse, but there’s no body anywhere. Only an overturned Pottery Barn wicker chair, the familiar garnet walls hung with gilt-framed show posters, the steam radiators draped with her wet clothing since she never bothered to get a dryer. Jonathan goes looking, hands and knees, for the globe. He’s sure—quite unexpectedly—of where she is. He wonders how he’ll square his previously practical worldview with what he finds. He sees the glint of glass near the sofa, shouts for Anna. He closes his eyes, opens them. Looks.
But he sees only glass shards and glitter, a few plastic seats and stage fragments scattered over the beige carpet. Their friend is nowhere here, and he and Anna pick up glass and try not to cut their hands on this dreadfully stupid illusion.
The Dry Cleaner from Des Moines
In LAS VEGAS, THE WOMAN HAD FOUND THE KIND OF LUCK she liked best.
Her best luck involved invisibility, the kind that allowed people to overlook her sticky fingers and her quiet dine-and-dashes. She was tan and brown and beige and gray, plain and unobtrusive as backdrop. She wasn’t offensive or even unattractive. Just the one person in the bar you’d pass over as you scanned the potential pickings. The one you couldn’t ID in a police lineup.
Her plainness had been a source of some small pain in her youth; often, she would wonder if she’d ever find love, ever cash in her virginity. Eventually, the disappointment of loneliness gave way to a kind of exhilaration, the understanding that she alone possessed a sort of superpower. As long as she was careful and committed only small crimes, and carried a little luck with her, she could do more or less as she liked.
When she ordered drinks, she chose what was on tap and didn’t linger long—she kept her face blank and drank briskly, though not quickly enough to arouse attention. She sidled off the barstool and strolled out calmly, and often the empty glass left behind was the only way anyone knew she’d been there. In stores, she could pocket things and stroll right out—even when they had camera footage, she was so nondescript the police just shook their heads. She looked, they said, like anyone’s mother. How on earth would they find her?
She moved around a lot, never stayed in one neighborhood long. It was always cities and suburbs, because there she never stood out; so many invisible people haunt the shops and strip malls of suburban America. And now she found herself in Las Vegas, unwilling to leave though she’d surely outstayed her welcome by now. Her luck had just been too good.
She was, she thought, the only person in Vegas who wasn’t there to gamble (though she supposed what she was doing was a version of that) or drink or marry. Or, she corrected herself, to do business; Vegas these days had a whole sideline in conventions and meetings, full as it was of large, cheap hotels and plenty of diversion. She was also, she thought, the only person who actually liked the Strip, but not because it was the Strip. She liked it because of what she became inside it. The grandiose, improbable casinos, competing with one another for pomp versus circumstance, flashing marquis desire versus plaster Paris and Rome. It was all so impossibly large and complex and so well-oiled that a person like her could disappear inside, a plain little pinball pinging around inside a neon nerve network.
She spent her days wandering the false streets of Venice, the plaza of Rome, the Eiffel Tower. She sat with a drink sometimes, watched countless strangers win and lose more money than she’d ever have—sometimes skillfully, sometimes not. Luck, she thought, featured into most winning, but there was also a small group of almost invisible people—invisible like her—and you’d never know it to look at them, but they were the real geniuses at winning. At poker. At blackjack. Some even worked the slots. They were never flashy, or loud, or overconfident. None of them looked like James Bond. They wore faded sweatshirts, cargo shorts, reading glasses, cropped hair. They were quiet, and she knew their secrets only because she’d seen them winning, over and over again. She noticed the special little privileges they had: large sums advanced to them, access to special rooms, complimentary drinks, and exaggerated deference from the casino staff. All of it small, unobtrusive, hushed as aristocracy and real, serious money.
If she’d been a different sort of criminal, she’d have tried to become one of them, imitate or impersonate them. But she couldn’t; there was nothing to grasp, no detail substantial or solid. The regulars were like ghosts. They haunted the places reliably, but beyond their scheduled appearances they were silent and secretive, and anything left of their lives before had been buried.
One late afternoon, she was pocketing soap at a fancy bath store in the Venetian, and a shadow fell over her shoulder. She was ready; she arranged her expression in blank, neutral confusion. She turned. It was one of the regulars, a shorter man in a blue polo and khaki shorts. His hair was in a graying brown ponytail. His face was so unremarkable it was almost a blur. Just like her. She had seen him winning big at the craps tables at the MGM Grand. Yes? she said.
If you want to cheat, he said, go high-stakes. It’s Vegas! Why steal bath bombs? His voice was louder than she’d expected it would be.
She raised one eyebrow. Excuse me, I’m not stealing anything, she said. You must be mistaken. He put his hand in her jeans pocket (her front pocket, the nerve) and pulled out a thirty-dollar soap shaped like a scalloped cupcake. She raised her other eyebrow. The store clerk started toward them and she took it to the counter, furious. The bath she took with this strawberry-scented soap might be perfectly pleasant, but it would not be worth thirty dollars. Her hands shook as she counted out bills, saw the gambler was still standing there, watching her. She was usually cool as milk.
I’ve seen you, he said, walking out, following fast on her sensible heels. MGM Grand. Harrods. Caesars. I’ve seen you pretending to play the slots. What are you really doing here? Not just petty theft, I assume.
You’ve never seen me, she said, walking faster. How had he seen her? No one did. Her heart fluttered and people stared. Her face felt flooded with spotlight.
I used to be a dry cleaner, he said. From Des Moines. But I see everything. I notice everything. Always have. Had an eye for stains, the small stuff nobody else sees. That’s how I came to be a gambler instead of a dry cleaner. Followed my heart, came out here. What’s your passion? I’m staying at the Venetian. I like it here—I like the way the ceiling is a sky, how you can think you’re somewhere cool and breezy. I like the gold things, everywhere. I like gold. They call me Midas at the MGM, I’ve won so often. What’s your name? Where are you staying?
Nowhere, she said, frowning. She reminded herself to be a blank. She was staying at the Mirage and that was much too close to him, just across the street—and anyway she’d have to skip town tonight, get on a bus and bail. She was even angrier at the thought. She liked Vegas. She wanted to stay here. Her sensible, invisible shoes clacked loudly on the Venetian walkway tiles, and she glared at the gondoliers, who seemed suddenly poised to offer her a ride.
Who was this man and why had he ruined her superpower?
Let’s get a pizza, he said, and grabbed her arm. Or a cookie. There’s a great Hawaiian cookie place. I want to talk to you. I think you’re fascinating. I’d love to sleep with you. She stopped. I’ll turn you in, he said playfully, then put his hand over hers. This was the second time he’d touched her, and it was a sensation she was utterly unused to. Her insides curled.
The long con, she thought. He’d be such a perfect mark. She could take, and take, and take, and one day disappear. But she wasn’t made for the long con. She was made for minute-crime, for in and out and
gone. What would happen if he could see her, even just for a night? Would it break some spell? Render her features more distinct, her outline suddenly pulled into a fixed shape?
On the Greyhound to Reno, the man next to her mumbled to himself for a while and fell asleep. He smelled like whiskey and sour smoke. The teenager behind her hit her with his rucksack, and seemed to wonder who he was apologizing to. The bus driver tried to focus on her and failed, squeezing himself behind the wheel and dreaming about his shift end, his Xbox and a cold Bud Light. She leaned back in her seat and sighed. She called the police on the burner phone, told them where to find a lot of recently stolen goods—the thief in room 1205. The Mirage. Hurry, he’s probably still asleep. How did she know? Didn’t want to say. He might be dangerous, careful now.
She’d be more careful from now on. Her luck was made, not found; this she now knew. She tossed the phone out the window and waited for the bus to grind on out of this McDonald’s parking lot, gravel spitting, wheels rolling toward the next big town to take her out of focus.
The Eyes of Saint Lucy
BECAUSE THERE IS NO GOD, MY MOTHER ONCE MARRIED A man named Arnie Barney.
Arnie owned a shooting range in Gary with a badly stuffed bear on the roof. The shooting range was called, confusingly, Barney’s Bear Range; it was assumed Arnie acquired the bear before the shooting range, though no curious party was ever able to ask him—he died six months into the marriage of a massive coronary. My young mother Wendy inherited the shooting range, which took in just enough to keep her above water until she met my father. She did not take the bear when she sold the business, though she told me much later she used to climb up and talk to him when she got lonely.
My mother’s second husband, and my father, was only somewhat more reasonably named Hollis Barcus. The newly christened Wendy Barcus, besotted with martyrs and medieval saints, married a thoroughly modern man who’d martyred himself to that twentieth-century tyrant, time. Wendy made space and stillness, Hollis made lists and timetables. It stood to reason the marriage would be troubled.
But why Hollis? Why Wendy? Why the two together?
WHAT HOLLIS TOLD US:
When he was young and single, Hollis drove by the shooting range every day on his way to work, and often saw my mother up on the roof with that bear.
He started to think of her like King Kong’s Fay Wray, floating dresses and flying hair alongside that misshapen creature. He began to wonder if she was just a vision, if he was going mad. He began to wonder if he could rescue her.
Hollis left his home twenty-two minutes early one morning, and pulled his car off the highway and into the shooting range parking lot.
Would you like to have coffee with me, he shouted up to my mother.
What? shouted my mother.
Hollis Barcus, twenty-five and in very good shape (fifty push-ups every morning immediately on waking), decided to climb. He clambered up the drainpipe, shimmied up the shingles, and hoisted himself onto the hot flat part of the roof. He felt very pleased with himself—especially when my mother turned out to be young and beautiful and somewhat substantial—and he decided to fall in love with her.
WHAT MY MOTHER TOLD US:
She was up there on the roof, green blanket spread over beige shingles, conversing with the bear like she did many mornings. Sometimes she told him stories. Sometimes she prayed, though she didn’t exactly believe in a benevolent god. Hers was an angry god, furious and disapproving, and she prayed mostly for revenges and disappointments. She prayed to be martyred in briefly agonizing ways.
Sometimes she prayed that the bear would spring to life and eat her; she was so very lonely. Her parents—my grandparents—had died in a car accident when she was only a teenager, and she met Arnie Barney when she was just eighteen, turning down his bed at a small motel in Muncie. He was running a booth at a gun show, and she hated guns, my mother. But she hated being lonely and poor even more.
She wasn’t sad when Arnie died. He was middle-aged and purplish and had acne all over his back. He used to weep involuntarily when they made love. It made the bile rise in my mother’s throat. She often prayed they wouldn’t have a child.
Hollis Barcus was handsome, young, and literally climbing a building to rescue my mother.
She thought he was an idiot, also, because he didn’t use the ladder propped up against the siding.
But a handsome and enterprising idiot, and anyway prayers didn’t always turn out exactly the way one intended. That was the problem with prayer.
BOTH OF THESE VERSIONS could be true, and not true, but the facts remain in place: Hollis took Wendy on twenty-minute dates; he learned the fastest route to her little apartment in Gary; he promised her a big diamond and delivered in full; he made the payments from their joint bank account on the 16th at precisely 12:15 p.m. every month for two years without fail. He moved her to Muncie and bought her a home in the suburbs.
Also true: after making do for so many years on her own, my mother was exhausted. She was a young woman with the heart of an old widow. An upside-down fairy tale. She wanted:
To stop working.
To have children.
To buy a home.
To pray in quiet places.
To take up painting.
To be left alone.
Hollis, the efficiency expert, was good at leaving people alone. He performed his husbandly duties twice a week for ten minutes each, ate Wendy’s mediocre meals every day for breakfast and dinner, and otherwise maximized his time elsewhere. He loved my mother, of course, in an abstract way, but the men and women in our neighborhood didn’t spend much time in each other’s company, and that was just the way things were. Hollis went bowling with his coworkers. My mother snubbed the neighbor ladies and their Tupperware parties to make dioramas of martyred saints. She didn’t gossip with Mrs. Wagner, or play bridge with Mrs. Kowalczyk and her friends. When she was pregnant with my oldest brother, she didn’t go to the birthing class that all the neighbor ladies went to at St. Anthony’s. My two brothers were born healthy just the same, and spent their time brawling with other neighborhood boys in our little cul-de-sac.
This time may or may not have been fulfilling for Wendy, but I think she was happy enough in her way. She wasn’t shouting her hopes and dreams over the sounds of gunshots, to a bear on a roof. She wasn’t cleaning toilets or selling soap door-to-door or dropping newspapers off at four in the morning on doorsteps. She was a housewife and mother, and I think that’s what she really wanted. Time to fill and then eventually, us to help her fill it, me and Feral Boy.
IF THIS WERE A NORMAL family tale, here is where I would sketch for you a shape, foreshadow, or just flat out draw a character creeping his way into the story. I would tell you about the first time I fell in love with Feral Boy, and how it was confusing because his eyes were gray-gold and he smelled like wild sage but he was supposed to be my brother. I would tell you how it was even more confusing because everyone should have been a little in love with Feral Boy, he was so beautiful and lost. Perhaps I would start at the end, and tell you that he stars in movies now, and I still love him from far away. Perhaps I would start in the middle and tell you that somewhere in the years of protecting him and hating him, I fell to finding him a hurt flower, a fragile thing. And that resentment fell away at that. Or perhaps I would start at the beginning, with his scraped knees and messy hair and the stricken look on Wendy’s face when Hollis brought him home.
But this is not a normal family story. Things will happen out of sequence, because this is a family out of sequence. Lists will be made, dreams will be probed, jokes will be listed in alphabetical order. And the Feral Boy will climb into this story just like he climbed into my window late at night: when it was time, when it was time, when it was the right delicious time.
I WAS WENDY’S LAST-BORN and I fought my birth, clawing my way out like a baby tiger. Fierce, blood-caked, defiant—I was destined, my mother said, to be fey.
My older brothers allowe
d me to tag along, useless little girl, until I was tough as they were. They taught me how to make a potato launcher, how to throw curveballs, how to throw a punch (thumb on the outside), how to swear like one of the shop foremen Hollis sometimes brought home to dinner. They taught me other things, too: how to cheat at Scrabble and Sorry! and Life, how to put a penny on the tracks and watch the train flatten it, how to blow a bubble big enough to pop, how to whistle, how to lie.
Most mothers would balance this out, teach their girls to wear dresses, throw tea parties. But Wendy wasn’t really interested in those things.
Wendy, by the time I came along, had more or less sworn off sex, so I was a nearly holy miracle. She had become an ascetic of the suburban sort; she still poured a little whiskey into her tea and wore pastel capri pants and chain-smoked, but she also thought a lot—an overwhelming lot, she told me—about hell. Some days she’d keep me home from school to help her make her martyred saint dioramas, or pose for paintings of Saint Lucy or Saint Joan. She said with my big dark eyes I looked just like the girl in the film, gaze tilted heavenward, beatific in saintly suffering.
And she talked to me. She opened her mouth and confessed her life in full, her parents and her childhood and the martyred lady saints and how she admired them so. Men she had no use for, not the saints or popes or even Jesus himself. She loved Mary like the sun, though, and she always wore the Virgin in a locket around her skinny neck.
Men are no good, Wendy often told me. You can’t trust a single one.
Not even my brothers? I asked.
Not even them, said Wendy. They’ll grow into men eventually.
Not even Hollis? I asked.
At that, she closed her mouth to me. Her eyes went small with something, but I couldn’t see what. Times like that, you knew to stop asking questions. I watched her lick the tip of her paintbrush, acrylic scarlet streaks across her chin like blood.