“Okay …”
“Well, it’s this service, right? Where rich men are looking to … take care of young, attractive women.”
“What do you mean, take care of?”
“They pay you to let them take you out on dates. Buy you nice things, take you out to good dinners.”
“Men pay you to let them buy you stuff? Come on, Des, that’s not all they’re paying for.” I had lived here my whole life; I’d seen how this kind of thing worked. Young women in short dresses getting into the back seats of strangers’ cars, disappearing into the night. In this town full of people who wanted to win and drink and take? No way an opportunity for generosity was what they were paying for.
“I’m serious! There’s all these online services, but with me at the club, we could do it that way.”
“I’m underage.”
“They’ll like that even better, trust me.”
“If it’s so good, why don’t you do it?”
“Ava, so many women do this, okay? It’s how young girls pay for college these days. No one can afford that shit otherwise, and there’s no harm in it. Let some moron buy you nice dresses, have a steak with someone here and there. I would love to do it, but no one wants to go out with an old hag like me.”
“You’re thirty-eight. That’s not old. And I still don’t see why anyone would want to do that—blow money on a stranger. What’s in it for the guy?”
Des sighed, rolled her head in slow circles. The little bones in her neck popped. “Some guy, probably married ten years, bored out of his mind, gets to go to a restaurant with a pretty little thing on his arm, order a good bottle of wine? It makes them feel powerful, alive. Men are like that; they need their egos fed constantly, the poor, stupid louts. Try this, just once. You hate it, we’ll try something else. But it sure as hell would be nice to pay the electric bill. To not have to hide when Bill comes knocking, right?”
Bill was our landlord. He had come around two weeks ago to collect rent. Two months’ overdue. Des and I hid in the bathroom in our apartment above the shop until he stopped yelling. I know you’re in there. You need to give me my money or else, Desmina. I mean it this time.
“Fine,” I said. At least when I saw my mother again, I’d be able to tell her that I did whatever it took to keep the shop going. I could say that I had tried to preserve what she had started. I was going to do it even though the idea made my heart race. Even though I knew full well I was probably saying yes to more than Des had described.
Des squeezed my wrist. “That’s my girl. You’ll need this.” She raised her hips off the chair so that she could wriggle something from the pocket of her shorts: a driver’s license, with the name “Clara Voyant” on it and a photo of Des on the left-hand side. Of course. Of course she had already banked on the fact that I would say yes.
I lifted the ID to my eyes. “Des, come on. This won’t work anywhere. And why didn’t you use my real name?”
She ignored me. “Come upstairs.”
“But what if a customer comes?”
“It’s dead out there. And we’ll be back in an hour, tops.” She rose from her chair and thumped up the stairs.
I called after her. “Des, come on! How are we ever going to fix the shop if we just bail in the middle of the afternoon?” But she was already gone. I dragged our chalkboard inside, drew the red curtains across the windows, and locked the door.
I found her in the bathroom, mixing water and brown powder in a plastic bowl until it formed a muddy-looking concoction. She saw me watching and held up a box of henna hair dye.
“I need to change my hair? No way.”
“You need to match the ID.” Des shrugged. “You really like it brown?”
“It’s just …” I had never thought about it, not really. Des had been dyeing her hair the same bright red my entire life. In the photos I had of my mother, her hair was the same color as mine, a medium brown. Nothing special, maybe, but it tied us together in a small way, and maybe I treasured that more that I’d thought. “Nothing.”
“Well, sit down, then.” She gestured to the toilet. I sat and closed my eyes as she rubbed the mixture into my hair with her fingers. She worked the color from my roots through the tips of my hair, pausing now and then to wipe a stray streak of dye from my skin. It was the gentlest she had ever been with me.
With my hair still wet, it looked the same, though I could make out a flare of color at the tips. I sat in front of the mirror and waited. Slowly, as the dampness lifted, I could see the change. Gradual, and then sudden, a new me sprang up, stepping into a new life. It’s only hair, I tried to tell myself. But I also knew that wasn’t exactly true. I didn’t trust Des not to turn me into someone I wouldn’t like.
* * *
AFTER DES left for the club—heat stifling and no appointments in the book— I locked the shop again and walked to the library. Des and I didn’t have a computer and we used burner phones, adding minutes when we could, so when I needed to know something I walked the eight blocks to use the library’s internet. On the way, I passed two more posters of Julie Zale: one tucked under the windshield wiper of a parked car, another taped to the library’s front door. Even in the photocopied pictures, her smile seemed to shine. I felt the same tug in my gut as when her uncle came: What made her run? Here I was, hoping to run toward love—California, my mother. What about being loved had been intolerable to Julie Zale?
There were only three other patrons at the library, and no one seemed to be doing anything that looked like work. A woman read a day-old newspaper. One man had his feet up on the table, trimming his fingernails. Even the employee at the checkout counter was asleep with her chin in her hands. I had come to search about my mother—a habit I indulged once a week—but this time I googled Julie Zale first. Her uncle had made a website where people could leave information by sending in an anonymous form, if they thought they knew anything or if they’d seen her. It showed the photo from his posters, but others, too: Pictures of Julie running in a meet, her eyes narrowed on the finish line. Julie at junior prom in a beaded blue dress, a flower in her hair. Julie sticking her tongue out while wearing a pink feather boa. I found more websites that mentioned her name, mostly articles from the local papers bragging about her track meet wins, her nomination to All State, the way she broke the record in the 400-meter at an event last fall. Even though she was probably in trouble, and maybe even in worse trouble than me, I felt jealous of her. She had a talent that made people love her, a talent that a whole town was proud of. I had a talent, too, I guessed: I could see things now and then that most people couldn’t, but it felt like a burden. Most of the time, I would have given it away.
Next, I found her Facebook page. More photos of her running track, her in a yellow sundress, eating an ice cream. A shot of her giving a piggyback ride to another girl in front of a pretty redbrick school, the kind that I had only ever seen on TV. I scrolled through the comments people had left behind.
Julez, we love you. Come back home, babe.
J, you are missed. I hope wherever you are, you are safe and sound.
I’m a stranger, but your story caught my eye. God Bless You.
I knew why I wanted to leave, but why would a girl like that just pick up and go? I took my tarot deck out of my bag, shook the cards from their red silk pouch. You weren’t supposed to ask the cards a question about someone else’s fate if they hadn’t requested it, but I couldn’t help it. I’d only pull one card. Just a hint, I bargained. What really happened to Julie Zale? I shuffled the deck and the cards stuck together in the humidity.
The card I drew was the Moon. The card for women. The card that meant mystery, confusion, even insanity. But it could also mean knowing, intuition, or a sign that you needed to face what scared you the most. When she taught me tarot, Des claimed it was mostly learning to bullshit, that the cards were just props, ways to tell a story. But I believed in what tarot could tell me, in letting the cards speak. I also needed to believe that magic and
meaning sometimes reached into our world. Or else there was just my life—the high school diploma I would never get, the shop, the mangy feral cats, the mother who never wrote anymore. Des coming home from a shift at the club with her pupils huge and glossy, rubbing at her nose.
If I wanted to use magic, The Wisdom of Tarot was filled with rituals and spells that promised to guide you toward the information you desired. I could try making an offering—I had never done it before. The book claimed that these rituals were powerful, that if you wanted to cast one, you needed to take great care. I imagined working alongside my mother, grinding dried flowers into powders, lighting sacred candles, arranging crystals into circles. According to her last postcard, four years ago, she lived in the guesthouse of a movie producer: 518 Montvale Road, Los Angeles, California. The main house was pristine and white with a wide semicircle of a driveway, a sweeping green yard. I imagined myself there someday, my bare feet on the lush grass.
On the satellite image you could see the square of the guesthouse, its terra-cotta roof, next to the aqua rectangle of the pool. She wrote once that sometimes when the oranges ripened, they grew so heavy that they fell from the trees and splashed into the water, that a jacaranda tree bloomed with tiny violet flowers right outside her window. I’ll bring you here one day, my love, when the timing is right. When I see the sign. I ran my finger over and over the words so many times that the ink was more faded than any other line. I was still waiting for her to tell me when she was ready for me, when I could join her and start my real life. I had written her so many letters over the years, letters full of questions: Which famous people have you met? What are the parties like? Does it ever rain?
I looked up other things, too: Bus tickets to Los Angeles: $313. A night at a cheap motel: $55. A taxi ride from the Greyhound station to Montvale Road: $45. I checked them against what I had written in my notebook a few months ago—plus money for rent, for food, for clothes—I needed to save enough so that when I found my mother I wouldn’t be a burden to her, the way Des was always telling me I was. Two thousand dollars was the amount I came up with, the number that would make me feel safe.
I walked home and slid The Wisdom of Tarot from underneath my bed. Her handwriting was spidery and strange in the margins, like something that might crawl off the page. The book was heavy in my lap; I flipped through it, a musty smell rising from the mold-flecked pages, until I found the section on the Moon. The book said that the Moon represented what was in shadow, parts of ourselves or parts of others that had yet to be revealed. To learn the truth behind a mystery, it advised leaving a crystal out at night to charge in the moonlight or even a sliver of your fingernail or a piece of your own hair. There were notes scribbled in the margins that I couldn’t make out, but I assumed it meant the spell must be good, if my mother had done it before. I fingered a ribbon of hair at the back of my head, one that I wouldn’t miss. Then I sliced it off with a pair of kitchen shears and stroked it in the palm of my hand.
When night fell, a half-moon low in the sky spread a stripe of white light over the ocean. I set the piece of hair on my windowsill and tamped it under a hunk of white quartz. I added the bandana, too, smoothing it alongside the hair—maybe there was a reason that I’d been compelled to take it, after all. Before I fell asleep, I felt for the place at the base of my skull where the hair had come from, the short spikes sharp to the touch. I dozed off looking at the quartz, bright in the moonlight, the hair a streak of red beneath it, and waited to see what the world would offer me in exchange for this little piece of myself, what kind of secrets it might tell.
* * *
AS SOON as I woke up the next morning a vision came over me. At first, the only thing I saw was a pale shape against a splotchy background. I couldn’t make sense of it, nor could I push it away. The throbbing began in the middle of my forehead and spread behind my eyes. I tried to focus on whatever this vision was asking me to see. A whitish square. Smears of red around it. Crisscrossing lines, like wrinkles. Skin. My mouth filled with the slightly sweet, metallic taste of blood and my stomach lurched, which was how I realized that the pale shape was a tooth that had come loose.
I came to, feeling disoriented, dizzy. The vision didn’t make sense to me. The bloody tooth had no origin, no context, no person attached to it, someone on the other side yearning to be seen or told something. There had always been rules, limits to how my gift worked. Some clients thought I could see their entire futures like a film reel—beginning, middle, end. But usually, what I saw was a glimpse of the past—a moment that pulsed with intensity for them. Something essential to their personalities, an instance in their life that shaped the way they thought. So what was this? Whose tooth?
And why? Once again, I ached for my mother. I reached for the letters I kept in a shoebox under the bed.
Dear Ava,
If you are anything like me, this is the year when you will come to realize the power of your intuition. You’ll be able to see things that no one else can see. Women like us have power, have a deeper understanding, a greater capacity for attention than most. All you have to do is step out of your own way and believe in it. There will be things you know without reason or proof. You’ll see things that should be impossible for you to see. Don’t be afraid. Embrace it. You have more power than you can even imagine. You have more to learn, and I can teach you.
The letter had come a little late. Starting that school year, my head had already begun spinning with images—I think it was something about all those bodies and hopes and worries crammed so close together. That was the year that Des started me in the shop after school and on weekends, when she decided to call me the Great Clara Voyant. Sometimes ideas and images came to me with the suddenness and clarity of magic, but most of the time it meant observing, thinking, trying to understand who someone was the old-fashioned way—watching them and waiting for them to reveal a particular desire or wish. To be honest, it had a lot in common with what Des taught me about stealing: understanding where a person’s attention was, how much you could get away with, what to do if it went wrong.
I ran the tip of my tongue over my gums and winced as I imagined how much force it would take to knock a tooth loose.
The hair on the windowsill was red as a wound against the white paint. The morning was already hot, the air close and thick. But the drowsy, unreal feeling that had pervaded my days was gone. My senses were alert, my attention sharpened to worry. I wondered what exactly I had opened myself up to, what I had asked for.
* * *
DES ROSE at eleven, bleary-eyed and smelling like the club: baby oil, stale beer. It took her a while to get ready, to arrange her hair to hide the hickey on her neck, before we could go try our luck at the spa again.
We walked toward the jitney stop at Bally’s, and on the way Des stopped to reach into a tourist’s tote bag as the woman paused in front of the salt water taffy shop. Des was too slow and the woman felt her, wheeled on her heels.
“What the fuck?”
“Oh, it’s such a pretty bag. I didn’t want to bother you, just wanted to see if it was real leather.” She put her hand on the woman’s elbow, her smile sickly sweet, and the woman smiled back.
“It’s actually from Target,” she said.
“Get out of here,” Des shrieked. “You’d never know!”
“Fucking piece of cheap trash,” Des said, and huffed, as soon as we were out of hearing range. I could tell she was embarrassed. Maybe it was the hangover, or maybe she was losing her touch. Either way, I knew better than to say anything. We passed a poster of Julie Zale in the window of the arcade. I should find a way to return the bandana, I thought. Track down the uncle or put it in the mail. The air was so thick it was hard to breathe, and I felt that same tightness in my throat.
We weren’t on the jitney for more than a minute when the tingle crept into my forehead, soft and slow, before it moved down my neck, to my shoulders. I heard music: that Bruce Springsteen song that people around here played all t
he time, that I couldn’t help but know the words to. It was about being in love with a Jersey Girl, Springsteen’s voice crackling through a staticky radio. A song about dancing all night, holding hands under the spangle of carnival lights. About how being in love made everything else seem okay. I looked around as the music got louder, then so loud that my ears throbbed.
“I wish he’d turn that down.”
Des jumped and dug her nails into my arm. “Jesus! Turn what down? Why are you yelling?”
“Shit. Nothing,” I said, trying to lower my voice, even though I couldn’t hear myself over the wail of the saxophone. I leaned my head against the window, closed my eyes. The jitney smelled sour, like lemon cleaning solution, but for a moment I felt sun and fresh, cool air on my face. I was filled with a thrilling sense of speed, and of hope. I tasted caramel on my teeth.
The song fading to a tinny whine in my ears, I opened my eyes as the jitney lurched to a stop outside of the casino entrance. After I stepped off the bus, I stood in the sunlight and looked around, but there wasn’t anyone else nearby, aside from the hot dog vendor who clanked his metal tongs against his cart. I dug the heels of my palms into my eyes. What had I done with that spell?
“What’s with you?” Des asked. “This was your idea. I need you to be focused.”
“Give me a second. I … I feel carsick.”
“You don’t get carsick.”
I didn’t want to tell Des about any of it. That I had done a spell in the first place. That I thought it might have worked, that now I was seeing things, hearing things, tasting things that I didn’t understand. Des applied another coat of red lip gloss, air kissed the little circle of her compact mirror. Her mouth had the hard, wet sheen of patent leather. The song finally went quiet, but I didn’t like the way Des was looking at me. Like I was making her nervous. I felt something against my thigh, a quick brush of sensation, like a bit of string or a hair stuck to the skin, but when I looked down there was nothing there. Des watched me scratch at it. I felt it again, on my shoulder blade, but ordered myself not to move.
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