“Well, aren’t we all?” Emily said. “Especially around here.” She pointed out the glass to the hallway, where an old man shuffled toward the swimming pool. “He’s heartbroken. And her, too.” She pointed at a woman on a jazzy scooter speeding in the direction of the buffet. “And her, too. I’m sure of it,” she said, about the housekeeper pushing a cart of toilet paper in the direction of the restrooms. “And I am, too, for that matter. Heartbreak is the human condition in this town. Hell, on Earth. I don’t need a psychic to tell me that. Come back when you’ve got something better.”
Perhaps Deidre had, as Emily warned, been keeping an eye on the security footage. We all heard the click click click of her heels coming toward us. Des made for the door, her gold earrings clattering as she flipped her hair over her shoulder. Clara stepped toward me, crooked a finger, and beckoned me to lean forward. She cupped her hand around my ear, her breath warm on my earlobe as she whispered, “You’ve suffered a reversal in fortune. You’ve been through a tremendous amount of pain. You’re lost, and you like having plans, knowing your way. I can help.”
The jolt started in my tailbone, zinged up my spine. I tried to tell myself that it was just a good guess, that everyone could look at their lives and point to loss or pain. She could have said the same thing to Emily, who would have found her own truth in the—what? Prophecy? Even supplying that word in my head made me feel foolish. But what she had said seemed personal. I felt pulled between naïveté and skepticism—an arrow shot in two directions at once.
She backed away and the corners of her mouth tugged up into a smile. “Come to the shop and we can talk some more. The address is on the card. Boardwalk and Baltic.” She turned away just as Deidre rounded the partition of frosted glass. Her mouth hardened when she saw Clara skipping away and Des slipping through the door. From the other side of the glass, Des blew Deidre a kiss and leaned over to exaggerate her cleavage. It took all my effort not to smirk.
Deidre made a sound of displeasure, cleared her throat. “Emily, I take it you’ve let Lily know about those two? Shrinkage has been quite high in this location in particular, and I would guess that they account for approximately half of it.”
“I have,” Emily said. “I don’t think they managed to make off with anything this time. I kept my eyes on them. It helps to have two of us up here.”
“Good. Lily, why don’t you come with me to my office and we can review the manual and go over any questions you have regarding what you’ve learned so far.”
“Sure,” I said. My voice came out quiet, faint. I was surprised to feel a tear leak from my eye, and I hurried to wipe it away before Deidre could see. It was only then that I noticed that something felt different, lighter, and I pulled at the sleeve of my blazer to confirm it.
My bracelet was gone. Clara and Desmina were even better thieves than Emily gave them credit for.
* * *
THE DAY had left me ragged, aching for a drink, and after my mother went to bed I walked four blocks to the local dive, Maynard’s, that I used to sneak into when I was a teenager. Inside, it smelled like stale beer and the sea, the whole place scummed with mildew and salt. When I sat on a stool near the door, the cracked upholstery scratched my thighs. It wasn’t until my first drink arrived that I dared to look around. Right away a familiar pair of eyes snagged on mine: Brett Griffin. We had graduated in the same class in high school. He’d been that stoner-sage kid who slept through geometry yet aced every exam. He rose from his stool and slid his beer glass along the bar top.
“Lily Louten! Well, well, well. Long time no see! How’s my sophomore year history buddy?”
“Hey, Brett. I’m fine.” It hadn’t even occurred to me when I left the house, but of course I couldn’t have lasted one night at Maynard’s without seeing someone I had gone to school with.
Brett settled onto the stool next to mine. I concentrated on the scrim of bumper stickers that had accumulated on the mirror behind the bar. This Car Climbed Mount Washington. Welcome to Sea Isle City!
“What are you doing here? In town for a visit?”
“For the summer.”
“Wait, don’t tell me you’re a teacher, too? I’m doing eighth grade math at Bellevue. Thirteen and fourteen-year-olds are sort of insane, but I love it. Well, most days, you know. I could do without all the state testing bullshit.”
“No, not teaching. I’m taking some time off right now. Figuring out what’s next.” I couldn’t help but cringe at the way I was crutching along on platitudes. But it was easier than the truth: That I had crept home with nothing. That I didn’t know who I was anymore.
“Last I heard you were doing some art stuff. Museums? Wait, no. You wanted to run one of those galleries or something! That was your thing, right? I always envied that about you. You were one of those people who just knew what you were going to do.”
I finished the bourbon and signaled the bartender for another pour. “Well, you can rest easy. I’m not sure I have anything to envy anymore.”
“No, man, it was cool. You were ambitious. I used to see the stuff you were doing on, like, Facebook, and it made me happy, you know? I know we weren’t super-close or anything, but it was fun to see it. At all those fancy openings, all those paintings you’d post about. So you’re not into art anymore?”
I willed Brett to get a phone call, run into someone else he knew. He meant well, but we were circling questions I wasn’t ready for. All I knew was that I wanted to forget what had happened in New York, sock away enough cash to boomerang out of town at the end of the summer, and start over as someone new.
“You know, I’m trying to think of the last time I saw you,” he said.
I knew right away. Steffanie’s funeral. He remembered a second too late.
“Oh, shit. Yeah. Man. I’m sorry. You guys had been so close.”
“Nothing to be sorry for.”
“She was one of the first. I think there’s something like ten kids from our class who have died from that shit?”
“Yeah, that sounds right.”
“Ten, in a class of three hundred kids. Fucking heroin. I look at my eighth graders and I just worry about them so much—you never know what growing up is going to do to you, especially around here. AC, man, it gets into the way you think. You live somewhere where people come to get wasted and blow all their cash—you start to think that’s how the rest of the world is, that that’s what life is.”
Try being a girl here, I wanted to say, that will really fuck you up. But of course I didn’t. Mostly I was touched. His earnestness, that slow, surfery cadence to his voice. Brett took a long, thoughtful sip of his beer, and this time we both looked away.
“Well, I’ve got to run and meet some people, but hey, hope I see you around.” He slapped me on the back, and as he left I felt a twist of guilt and relief. I was so self-pitying, and yet, look at all of the people who Brett and I knew who had sunk into depths I couldn’t even imagine. When I blinked, I saw Steffanie’s gaunt cheeks. I signaled the bartender for a third drink and willed the room to go hazy, for all the din and clatter to get reduced to one low hum, waited for my mind to go blank. The less I noticed about what was around me, the less I felt.
When I paid my bill, I found Clara’s card in my wallet and stared at it as though it would help explain what she had said that afternoon. It was one of the last things I remembered before I blacked out—you are recovering from a broken heart, those crooked little crescent moons.
LUIS
HE SEES HER IN THE morning, during his shift. She’s at the desk with the other girl, and her face is a face he knows, but he can’t say why. It’s the feeling of seeing someone in a photograph and then again, in another, wearing different clothes, their body in a new position, but still that thing that lights up about them, that says SAME SAME SAME. He watches her as he cleans the glass, when he walks past her on his way to lunch, when he comes back. He’s studied so many women’s faces, hands, teeth, hair, elbows, eyelashes. The shape of t
heir jaws and the curves of their ears and the swish of their ponytails and the dots of freckles on their noses and cheeks and arms. He stores her away in his brain, her dark brown hair and her brown eyes the color of chocolate. Her pale skin and the arches of her eyebrows.
After he clocks out, he waits around for a chance to look at her up close, but she doesn’t come into the back hall, where all of the other women keep their things. He knows this will continue to bother him until he sorts it out, the itch of an understanding that’s being withheld. His fingers curl into a fist.
* * *
HE’S ON his way home, to the boardinghouse, when he sees the men walking in his direction, on the opposite side of the street. The sight of their silhouettes gives him a squirming feeling in his guts, like he’s eaten something bad. He stops and wonders whether he should turn around and circle the block or try to slip into a store until they pass, but before he can decide, the man with the shaved head cuts his eyes right to where Luis stands. He taps the dark-haired one on the arm, and smiles, his teeth so big and white and square they shine at him with mean delight—save for one of the teeth, which glints coppery-gold. They cross toward him, their chains thumping against their chests, and Luis braces for what’s next. He could try to run, but last time they caught him, and it only made things worse. There’s a cop car parked in front of a bodega, windows down, but the cops just watch and never help. Gold Tooth runs into him hard, in the chest, so hard that his teeth crash against one another. The dark-haired one grabs his arm tight, the way you might do to a friend, then closes his grip until it shoots a pain into his shoulder. He jerks his arm away, shakes his head, no. It’s been like this for months now, ever since one of them caught Luis staring at a woman in a tight pink dress. She had reminded him of someone he knew once, a daughter of his grandmother’s friend, but there was no way to tell them that. The next thing he knew, the men were shoving him to the ground, kicking him in the ribs. That’s how it’s become around here—there are certain women who belong to men, women who are owned.
The cops come out of the bodega with paper cups of coffee, see the scuffle, smile, and shake their heads. One of the officers calls out to them, which makes the other one throw his head back and laugh. He tries again to pass, but Gold Tooth hooks a foot behind Luis’s knees, sends him crashing to the ground. Luis looks over at the cops, who stare at him, smiling. More rage surges through his limbs, and he extends a leg and kicks the bald man in the ankle. He knows to brace for it—bam—another slap upside the head. His jaw slides sideways. His temple throbs, and his whole spine feels bruised.
The men leave him on the sidewalk and one of the cops spits a chewed piece of gum out the window. Even with their eyes masked behind mirrored glasses, Luis can tell that they’re laughing at him, the corners of their mouths curling up. His heart flutters like a bird trapped in his chest.
He brushes the gravel out of his palms. Out of the corner of his eye he sees a needle in the gutter, a busted plastic lighter, a shimmering film of cellophane. He shudders, stands, brushes more gravel from the knees of his pants. He’s been thinking of ways to avoid the men and the cops who do nothing. But what he wants most is violence, to take a swing at those big, stupid grins, grind their faces into the ground, a swift kick to each of their guts. But he knows what would happen then: his hands twisted behind his back, the silver cuffs biting into his wrists. The rules are different for him. And it wouldn’t be his first arrest—in the spring he was caught in the parking garage of the old Taj Mahal. They must have thought he was up to something bad, but he was only curious. What it looked like empty of all those cars. It makes him feel better to think it, that they don’t know the half of it—if only they knew how often he is somewhere he isn’t supposed to go. If only they knew how frequently he made himself invisible, how closely he could watch.
As he limps home, he thinks about the way the whole city is dying around anyone who is left; slowly, though, like a large animal falling to its knees. All he can see are the ghosts of the places they used to go when he was a boy. The shop where his grandmother bought meat for the week, the one where his grandfather bought him his first bike. He can still remember when the boardwalk was lined with old hotels, beautiful redbrick and decorations that reminded him of frosting on a cake. His grandfather had brought him to the beach to watch as one of the bigger ones was destroyed. He and his grandfather pressed up against the plastic fence and watched the old hotel slide out from under itself, bloom into a cloud of rubble and dust. Other people around him covered their ears. He felt the crash of brick and walls and roof move up from the ground, through his bones, into his jaw. Five years after that he watched another one get smashed by a giant metal ball, but by then neither of his grandparents were alive to watch with him.
Then, the casinos rose up with their horrible red lights that blare through the night sky, their dark insides, their huge, gray slabs of concrete. They teemed with people for a time, but now the people haven’t come, not like before. Now the movie theater has closed, the letters dropped from its marquee. Forgotten playgrounds with rusted merry-go-rounds, swings that hang from one chain. There are fewer visitors, and more litter in the streets. He feels inside of him what it means to have grown up here. Another thing that has seeped into him and made him all wrong on the inside. It’s in his hands, his blood, in his bones.
The next morning he senses the soreness before he opens his eyes. He’s older now and feels things in ways he didn’t use to. The injuries linger, stay in his skin. There have always been the men and the cops like this in his life, people who will use the way his voice is trapped in him against him. People who think it means he’s stupid, that he moves through the world not just deaf and mute, but blind and numb. He goes into work feeling tired, battered, and bruised, his anger glowing in him like a hot coal. Once again he tries to puzzle out where he’s seen the girl before. It chafes at him, but he knows that doesn’t matter. He’ll get it right eventually.
For now he’ll only watch and wait.
CLARA
I TOOK THE BRACELET BECAUSE I could, but also because I wanted to make sure that girl Lily came to see me. I had a feeling about her, something about the way she looked at me, the way what I told her changed her posture, the way she flinched and then relaxed when I leaned close to touch her hand. I could use her. She could be our way in at the spa, if I played things right. She would probably be angry about the bracelet at first, but I was sure I could work on her, get her on our side. That guy she worked with noticed me take it—the janitor. I had seen him in town enough to know there was something off about him, too. Always skulking around on his own. I didn’t usually slip up like that, leave a witness, but I could spot someone with secrets and I figured he’d keep mine.
The next morning, Des clunked down the stairs, and I could tell she was going to see her dealer. She had her shirt tied up above her belly button, knotted at the narrowest part of her waist, and her hair was brushed to a glossy sheen.
“Do we have any readings scheduled for today?” I asked.
“I think you probably already know the answer to that. But hey, take those business cards and hand them out, drum up a bit of publicity. Only don’t do it in Bally’s. I think security has flagged us over there.” Sooner or later I would lose track of all the places we weren’t allowed to go. “Why do you look so sullen? You don’t want to hand out the business cards? Fine by me. Besides, things are looking up for us. I think I’ve lined up your first date.”
I ignored her. I didn’t want to know anything about this date.
“I’ll hand out the cards,” I said, and grabbed the stack from the counter.
Des ruffled my hair. “This color looks so hot on you, babes.”
When she walked away, I felt again for the spiky hair at the base of my skull. I was still confused about the visions, but it felt good to have a secret, a piece of my life that she had no hand in.
I shoved the business cards in my purse but stopped in the arcade before h
anding them out. I played a round of Skee-Ball, rolling the scarred wooden balls up the ramp, arching them into the targets, stopping to listen to the dumb trill of the music that played when you hit the ten-thousand-point mark. The machine spit out a strip of pale pink tickets, which I carried to the counter in the back. The woman who worked there knew me, though she and I never talked much. She looked like she was in her sixties, with brown hair that was white at the temples and skin pale and doughy from all the time she spent inside.
Once, I’d had a vision as I stood in front of her, a quick flash: an old woman embroidering a design into a piece of cloth stretched taut in a hoop. A lot of the things I saw were violent, or sad, but sometimes they were straightforward. Sometimes what I saw was even comforting. I didn’t know how it worked, exactly—what bits of a life came to me, how certain memories sifted to the top and opened up to me. It was another thing I wanted my mother to teach me. How to see what I wanted to, and how to keep out or let go of what I didn’t want—or was afraid—to know. My “gift” still felt bigger than me, a force that moved through and around me like weather. Maybe one day it would make me feel powerful—if I could ever get it under control.
I pushed my tickets toward the woman, and she produced a bin of flimsy metal rings with plastic jewels at the center and a box of chocolate poker chips from the glass prize case. I pointed to the candy and she counted out four of them, paused, then reached in and added one more piece to the pile. I unwrapped one and let the chocolate melt slowly on my tongue. On my way out I tucked a business card into the screen of a Mortal Kombat console.
I held out cards to anyone I passed, chanting Tarot cards palm reading, tarot cards palm reading until the words lost their meaning, my mouth just making the same shapes over and over again. I watched people take cards then drop them on the ground a few steps later. At first, I tried to look people in the eye, tried to show them something about myself: That I was, like Des said, the real deal. That they could trust me. That I wanted to help. Some people took them, thinking it was an offer for a free drink or free Italian ice, like the other shops handed out, and then crumpled the cards in their palms.
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