* * *
ON THE boardwalk I stopped in front of a funnel cake stand, the air full of sugar and heat. I took Clara’s card from my wallet, studied its little misshaped crescent moons, its off-center, faux-gothic text. Why was I feeling so nervous? After all, she was the one who had stolen from me, the one who had done wrong. I crossed the boardwalk to look at the ocean, hoping it would soothe me. There were birds diving out past where the waves broke—my father taught me that meant fish nearby. Sometimes I still tricked myself into thinking he was along the shore, casting a line out into the sea.
In the dunes, the feral cats hissed at one another, prowled through the sand for scraps like desert animals, their fur missing in patches and their whiskers bent from fighting with one another. If this whole town was blasted to bits, the feral cats would outlast us all. They’d go on pawing for scraps among the crackle of dying neon and broken bits of poker chips. The city had tried to spay them, put them in shelters, but it seemed that there were more of them than ever before, their mean, pale green eyes catching mine for a second before they slunk behind a patch of grass.
Clara’s shop was wedged between a store offering cash for gold, trays of pawned rings glinting dully in the window, and a soft pretzel shop, which smelled like starch and salt. There was a chalkboard sign out front of Clara’s. Summer Special, Readings $5. Emily was right—at only five bucks a reading Clara and Des probably needed another hustle in order to eat.
A gold decal of the evil eye stared out at me from the window, which was draped with heavy damask curtains tied with tasseled ropes. The door was propped open, and another cat sat in front of it, licking its paws. I pushed through a tangle of beaded curtains and into the shop, which reeked of incense, the smoke sweet and thick. Along the closest wall, an old jewelry case held crystals and gems, pyrite and amethyst, hunks of quartz, and a pile of polished tourmaline. The glass shelves were grayed with dust. I looked up for cameras—a habit now—and didn’t see any. A leak had spread a urine-colored stain along the ceiling.
“Ah. I knew you’d come.” I turned and saw that Clara had stepped into a room through a door in the back of the shop.
“I just want my bracelet back.”
“What bracelet?” Clara blinked at me.
“Oh, come on. The one you snatched the other day at the spa. Look, I really don’t have time for this, I need to see this phone guy before he closes.” I held out my cracked phone like evidence.
She yawned and stretched her arms above her head, arched her back. Her shirt rose and revealed a slice of skin, concave stomach, the twin bones of her hips.
“Why don’t you sit down, let me give you a proper reading?”
“What, so you can steal from me again?” I tried to stand a little taller, but there was a flutter of nervousness in my voice. I was curious but terrified that she might see in me things I didn’t want to see myself: My desperation. My fear.
“Here.” She pulled out an old folding opera chair covered in gold velvet. The shop didn’t seem to have air-conditioning and I knew it would be uncomfortable—to listen to her read my cards, to sit in that hot, dusty room—but I found myself taking off my blazer and sliding into the chair.
Up close, I could see that the tablecloth was a bolt of fabric that had come off a roll from a fabric store. No one had bothered to hem the raw, frayed ends where it had been cut away. Clara had her back to me, busy arranging something in the glass cabinet. She turned over her shoulder, smiled. I wasn’t sure why. Her braid was coming a little loose, and for a second she looked almost like a girl her age should look, like she had just been laughing with friends over strawberry smoothies at the mall or running across a soccer field after school. I tried to imagine her face underneath the heavy foundation and the thick strokes of black eyeliner: earnest and sweet.
“How old are you? Sixteen?” Clara frowned and I knew I had guessed right. She sat at the table, tamped the cards in her hand the way people do with packs of cigarettes.
“Twenty-one.”
“I don’t believe you. Your mom just lets you do this?”
“Oh, God. Des isn’t my mom. She’s just my aunt.”
“Your guardian, then.”
She ignored me and shuffled the cards, turned one over on the tabletop. It showed a man in a tunic and tights suspended from a tree branch, dangling by a single foot.
“That’s the Hanged Man.”
“What’s a Hanged Man?”
“He usually means that you need to go through discomfort or pain in order to grow or achieve change.” She flipped another card. This one showed a hand extended from a cloud, holding a star-shaped symbol. She turned another one over: three women hoisting golden cups in the air.
Clara ran her fingers over the edges of the cards and nodded. “Three of Cups, Ace of Pentacles. Hmmm.Yes, this all makes sense.”
“What all makes sense? It’s just a bunch of pictures arranged in a random order. How does it make sense?”
“It means that you’ll fall a little further before you can rise again.” Her voice shifted into a deeper register, self-serious and solemn.
“What’s that supposed to mean? Fall further than this?” I raised my arms at the sun-faded Oriental carpet, the rickety table, the plastic crystal ball. “And while we’re at it, what did you mean, that thing you said at the spa?”
“Your pain over your father,” she said. This time she looked straight at me. “You can’t pretend not to feel anything. You can’t hide from it. It’ll only make things worse.”
I was too stunned to say anything else, or even to nod. Clara turned her head to look out the window as though to give me a moment to sit alone with what she had said. I peeled away a strip of skin from the cuticle of my left pinkie until I felt a satisfying pain.
Four years ago, the casino was building a new garage as part of the expansion, but the engineers and the architects had orders to rush things along as quickly as they could. The construction team ended up completing one floor a week rather than one floor every three weeks. Then, on the morning before Thanksgiving, the supports collapsed and seven people were killed inside. Three times that many were injured. My father was one of them. It took hours to even find him in the rubble. He was brought to the hospital in the center of the city, where my mother and I sat by his bed and listened to his machines beep. The doctor was frank when he explained the swelling of his brain, the extent of the internal bleeding, that he was essentially already gone. But still we waited two more days before my mother signed the paperwork, agreeing to let him die. Even with all the charts and images, even with the IVs and the machine that was breathing on his behalf, it still seemed like he might wake up. There was a scrape on his left cheekbone and a cut near his hairline, but other than that, he was my father, with the same face, same expression even, he had when he was simply taking a nap on the sofa in the evening after an early start at work.
I understood that my mother had no choice, that there was no hope, that he was gone, as gone as the rest of the men whose pictures had appeared on the evening news. She lifted her pen, paused above the first space for her signature, and stared at me. She waited to sign until I nodded at her. I still think I will never forgive her for looking to me before signing that paper to remove him from life support, for making me be the one to say yes, go ahead. Take him away. I remember the sound of the pen on the page, the way her hand shook, and then we were left to listen to his body take its last rattling breath. How could we continue, how could we still squish through the grass barefoot to water the basil in the garden, how could we hug the same way, laugh over white wine at lunch, when we had colluded like that?
I jumped when a man pushed his way through the beaded curtains at the entrance of the shop.
“I’m here for a, uh, a private reading?” He seemed anxious, an apron of sweat on the front of his pale blue T-shirt. His skin was the tender-looking pink of a whole pig slow roasted over an open flame. He looked like he belonged in one of Brueghel’s carni
val scenes, a beery shopkeeper draped over a keg.
Clara looked at me as she spoke to him, as though she were trying to tell me something instead. “Ah, yes, please let me show you in.” She rose from her chair and showed him through the door at the back of the shop, raising her finger behind his back to me to tell me to wait a minute.
I thought about what Emily had said to me back at the spa—that Des and Clara were up to something else, something secretive, illegal. I knew it was irrational, but I was angry at her for bringing him into the shop while I was there. I felt like it cheapened what she had just told me, the intimacy of it. The pain.
“What’s a private reading entail?” My voice was mean, snide.
“Shh. Keep it down.” When she’d spoken of my father she seemed open, unguarded, almost dreamy. But now her eyes were narrowed, her jaw clenched.
“How much does it cost?”
“More than you can afford.”
“Do only men get them?”
She sighed. “It’s not what you think. It’s just a … it’s just a date. ”
“Jesus. I can’t believe this. Emily was right. At least tell me you’re still in school?” She looked away, and I knew I’d hit a nerve. It might have been a trick of the light, but her eyes shone. Though she turned back to me with venom in her voice.
“Why can’t you believe? You hardly know me. What does it matter to you who I am or what I do?”
I had the feeling that this was some kind of test, that even as her tone grew angry, she wanted me to do something, step between her and whatever was going to happen with that man. She raked the tarot cards into a pile, but she was having trouble with the drawstring of the silk pouch—her hands had started to shake.
“You don’t want to do this,” I said.
“Do what?”
“Whatever you are about to do. With him.”
“Just go, okay?” Nearly a whisper.
“Fine, do whatever you want.” I slung my bag over my shoulder and made my way to the door.
“Hey Lily,” she said, her voice stronger now. “Catch.”
It was in my hands before I made sense of the shape—my bracelet. The pearls still held the warmth of Clara’s skin. As I stepped out of the shop I shivered to think of that man waiting for her, what he might be asking her for, what she might give. He must have been at least forty-five. She certainly wasn’t eighteen. That pink, cooked-looking skin. The smell of his sweat. The drum of his stomach. That twitch in Clara’s hands. I wanted to scream. Scream for help, for her, for me. For everyone I had met since I came home: Beautiful, brilliant Emily stuck behind that desk. Carrie and the bile on her breath. Luis, whose personality was buried deep within his layers of silence. My mother, who had signed that paper in the hospital, saying yes to an impossible question. My father, and this city’s short memory: another stupid parking garage now stood in the same place where the first one collapsed. And because right then, probably, Matthew was watching the sunset slide behind the Manhattan skyline or in the back of a cab on the way to a fabulous restaurant, and everything I had worked for had dissolved in a single night.
Across the boardwalk, the roller coaster rumbled down its tracks and people cried out as they plunged toward the ground. Were we all like the people on the ride, even Clara, who claimed to be able to see? Whipped around helplessly, our fates playing out on a fixed course?
A man in tattered clothes approached me, shook a plastic cup that jingled with loose change. Every sound seemed too loud, garish. Everything was magnified, intense, too much of itself: The tinny noise of his coins bouncing together. The rank smell of his clothes. The squawk of the seagulls, the red of Clara’s awning that had at first looked tawdry and now simply looked sad. I moved past him, trying to escape the din.
“You stupid bitch!” he yelled. “Your hear me? Fuck you, you stupid bitch!”
I leaned against the wall of the candy shop and tried to slow my breathing, but my vision was getting hazy and everything seemed so crushingly close. I was sweating through my shirt, could feel the dampness collecting and dripping along the backs of my knees. Taped to the glass was a poster of the missing girl, Julie Zale, her photo blanched by the sun.
The anxiety took over, blotted out my thoughts until everything was constricted, filtered through a physical, illogical terror: the heat that seared through my body, the certainty that a curtain of black would fall over my eyes, knowing that my heart was rushing rushing rushing, but there would soon be a pinch of pain in my chest and it would stop. You will fall before you will rise.
It felt like a curse.
LUIS
HE WATCHES HER AT WORK as much as he can without getting caught. A few times she’s tried to speak to him, but someone must have told her that he’s not like everyone else. She’s awkward when she mimes things to him. Points at her watch, then at the mop, her cheeks and neck going red. He dunks the mop into the bucket. She smiles at him, and that’s when he remembers where he has seen her before. He thinks of the man who used to come into the bakery in the mornings, his easy grin, the way Luis never had to wonder what he wanted: a single roll and a cup of coffee, nearly white with cream.
In the break room Luis reaches into his wallet, finds the $2 bill, turns it over, runs his finger along the squiggle on the back. The man always gave him an extra dollar, pressed the single bill into his hand, but that day he must have been out. He raised his eyebrows at Luis as Luis eyed the bill, its careful, intricate design. Then, the man didn’t come the next morning and Luis had a bad feeling. The day before he had been sliding a tray of rolls from the oven when he felt the boom in his feet. His boss ran out the door to see what had happened, came back with his hand over his mouth, scrambled for the telephone. A few days later, the man’s picture was in the newspaper, a grainy gray and white that flattened his smile.
Luis and the owner of the bakery had gone to the churches—so many of those pictures were of men who came in for breakfast, lunch, coffee—and it was in one of those churches where he’d seen her, the girl with the man’s same eyes. She leaned against another woman with dark hair, both of them in black, as they followed the coffin out of the church. It was like seeing the man again, even as her eyes blurred with tears.
Now that he remembers, it hurts to look at her directly, and sometimes he even feels a jolt of anger when he sees her. He doesn’t know what it is about this city, the way it swallows up anything kind and good. He still remembers the dust that coated the bakery windows after the accident, thick enough to choke on.
* * *
HE THINKS of ways he might tell her, might show her without making her afraid. He tried to come up with the combinations of words, but none of them could ever be enough to match what he feels. Every day he went to school and got hurt, teased. Boys stuffed him into the lockers, and once they locked him in the custodian’s closet and no one found him for hours. When he was ten, his grandmother saw the bruises when he took a bath, and he never went back again. He waited for someone to come look for him, his teacher or someone from the offices, to come to their door, insist that he had to go back. He doesn’t know if his grandmother spoke to the school, or if no one bothered to find out where he had gone. But no one ever came.
That was the year his grandparents needed his help more than ever. His grandfather’s limp had gotten worse; his foot started dragging along the floor. His grandmother rubbed cream that made his nose tingle into his grandfather’s knees. His grandfather kept a bullet in a tin box in his nightstand drawer, would hold it up to Luis, point to his knee. Luis would hold the bullet as his grandfather unfurled the map. Europe, with its small pastel shapes, most of them not even as long as his little finger. Then, they would go through the photographs. His grandfather in a green uniform, his helmet tucked under his arm. His grandfather, face smooth and the hair on his head full and dark, doing exercises on the deck of one of the old hotels, a row of men missing limbs, the ocean in the background, large boats hulking darkly near the horizon. Luis was ne
ver sure if the boats were bad or good. If they meant protection and safety or if they were something else to fear.
His grandmother taught him practical things: how to clean an oven, bake a pie, rewire a lamp, mend his clothes. He thinks of her when he goes to work now, the way she concentrated on these small tasks, in doing them well, her lips pursed until a pane of glass shone or a tear in a dress was mended. He tries to think of her when he gets angry—at the people who leave their plastic cups all over the place, who frown at the cleaning women in the halls, as though everything at the casino should clean itself magically in the night. As though the workers are the ones in the way. He is glad that she can’t see the city now, how dark it has become, how unclean. Glass spangled over the sidewalks, used condoms left in the streets.
During his next shift they have him cleaning all day long, changing light bulbs, climbing stepladders to dust the tops of shelves and light fixtures. By the end of the day his hands ache from dusting and wiping and mopping everything until it shines, until the blonde girl nods at him to go home. His fingertips are swollen and his back is sore, but he feels that old pride that his grandmother taught him. He holds his head a little higher when he walks out the door.
He stops at a pizzeria for dinner on his way back to the boardinghouse, points to a slice dotted with circles of pepperoni, holds up two fingers. As he waits, he picks up one of the matchbooks on the counter, turns it in his hands, slips it into his pocket. He eyes the stretchy, gooey strings of cheese that hang off the end of each slice as the man behind the counter slides them on a paper plate. He snows them with shaved cheese and red pepper, his hunger rising up, roaring now.
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