* * *
THOSE FIRST days’ shakes rattle her teeth; the hot cramps sear through her guts. She becomes so dizzy that the stupid sunset photograph turns on its side. But the nightmares are worse than the physical symptoms. Her dreams humiliate and terrify her. She moves through the underbellies of dark, unrecognizable cities, where she’s chased, attacked, beaten. In one, she is swallowed whole by a creature that looks human but can unhinge its jaw and consume her in a single gulp. She’s in the wet insides of its body, screaming and using her fingernails to claw her way out. She dreams of children she went to elementary school with, who lay her out on the teacher’s desk, tell her that her stomach is filled with worms and cut her open while she’s awake. They pluck the worms out, pink and thick, dangle them over her eyes. She tries to scream but finds that her mouth is stitched shut, even though she can feel them writhing under her skin.
Over the next seven days she sweats through her sheets until they smell sour and ammoniac, like pure animal fear. She pictures that tower again, the people free-falling away from the flames, reminds herself that this is her way of answering that card’s demand. And it is more terrible and torturous than anyone tells you. Even sleeping is full of effort. Her jaw aches from grinding her teeth in her dreams.
And then one day she wakes, and the room is clean and bright. She recalls snippets of troubled dreams, but in the morning they yield to something like peace. She realizes that’s her problem, has always been her problem. Peace feels too much like emptiness. She wonders if chemically, neurologically, she’s missing something that would help her differentiate between the two.
The doctor confirms that the worst is over, and talks to her about therapy, about group meetings, about methadone, but she stares past him, at the sunrise photograph on the wall. The metaphor well worn, clichéd, but maybe, just maybe, true.
* * *
THEY NEED to give her bed to a new patient that night, so she stands outside of the facility, her bag at her feet. She counts her money and almost laughs when she realizes that her fifty is gone, all she’s got is a ten crumpled at the bottom of her change purse. She only left the bag unattended for a minute, while she signed her discharge paperwork at the front desk. She should know—that’s all it takes, a second or two; never trust a junkie. A group therapy session went on break, four or five people stepping outside for cigarettes. One of them knew to dip their hand into her purse, find the wallet, shuck the cash out. One of those people would go back to their circle, speak about how getting high wrecked their life, made them desperate and mean, then would go out and score later. The thought made her too jealous to be mad about the money.
When she hangs up the phone, the nurse offers to let her wait, try again, but she shakes her head no. A counselor drops her off at the bus stop, shakes her hand, and wishes her luck. She can’t remember the last person who shook her hand before that.
Back to AC, it is, she thinks. She wonders if they would let her back into the shelter, even though last time she got kicked out for stealing. It was only a half-empty pack of cigarettes, but rules are rules, or so they told her when they asked her to pack her things. She could pick up a john, though she hates the idea of sleeping with a stranger without the treat at the end, the relief of a needle in her hand—that was always the whole point of it all. But she just needs enough for a place to stay, for a bus ticket back to Pennsylvania. A hundred bucks. It seems both cheap and dear, the price of freedom—twenty minutes with a man.
Does she trust herself to fuck a stranger and not use afterward? Maybe. She’s not sure she believes in triggers. But she’s always moved through life throbbing with want. She tells herself she’s defeated the Tower. She chides herself for letting it bother her so much—that girl, that kid, in the shop, playing around with palm reading and cards—but there was something real in the girl’s face when she turned that card over, a combination of worry and sympathy that Peaches couldn’t ignore.
She arrives amid the white light of the afternoon. An ugly, revealing time. For AC, for herself. She imagined that after detoxing she would look like herself again, whoever that was. But her face is puffy and pale, and for some reason the whites of her eyes are jarringly bright, like a child’s.
She doesn’t know what she’ll do about the night, about getting back to her mom’s. Whether her mom will even let her stay. She decides that when the bus gets into the depot, she’ll go to the old parking garage at the Taj Mahal. Whenever she needed to be alone she would slip past the broken pieces of plywood at the entrance, the spray paint warning Keep Out, walk up the sloping ramps until she was at the top. She liked to press herself into the concrete barrier and look out over the city. An ocean view to the east, the hospital to the west, the ambulances pulling in and out all day long. She’d watch EMTs hustle in with their gurneys. From that height, the human drama was shrunk to the size of a diorama like the ones her mother’s students built out of shoeboxes and filled with miniature cars and trees. Easy to watch and think she was not a part of it all.
Her mood gets more resigned, grimmer, as the bus speeds down the Black Horse Pike. Past the Ramada Inn, the Sunset, and all of the other little aqua and pink and coral stucco motels just rotting into the side of the road. She tastes the scatological stink of the marsh, which she’s learned is the sulfurous smell of the mud exposed at low tide. Other people cover their noses with their hands or their shirts. She starts to feel paranoid—that the smell is coming from her, that everyone knows it. Without the drugs to cover it up, the thing that makes her wrong inside is seeping out, filling the air like poison. No, she thinks. Paranoia: the brochures warned about that. It’s a symptom, real but not.
But even after she gets off the bus, she feels the smell of the marsh on her, in her. She wants to shower. Drink a glass of water so cold she can feel the chill sliding down her throat. She uses the pay phone at the bus terminal—before she can decide anything about how and where she’ll spend the night, she needs to know about all the nights after that. This time the phone rings twice before her mother answers, the brisk hello she reserves for strangers.
The word feels unpracticed, underused, and it takes her a second to say it. She can feel the pressure of all the questions she wants to ask. Do you still love me? Do you know that I really am sorry, so sorry? Will you tell me all of the bad dreams weren’t real?
It’s another question, and an answer, at once.
“Mom?”
LILY
I KNEW CLARA WAS WAITING for me in the casino lobby at the end of my shift, but I needed a drink first, some cold blunting gin, the familiar rattle of ice cubes in my glass. I made my way to the bar on the casino floor, the one near the penny slots. I was still rattled from making the phone call earlier that afternoon and kept replaying the conversation with Julie Zale’s aunt in my head. What did it mean that Clara was right? I told myself that all she really knew was the colors of Julie’s room. A few details. Maybe Clara hadn’t even really intuited them. I found the website that Julie’s family had made, asking for tips, and scrolled through to see if any of them showed a shot of her bedroom—maybe Clara had already seen it subconsciously, and what she was calling a vision was really just submerged memory, something sifted from the millions of images and impressions we’re bombarded with every day. I squinted at the background of every shot, but nothing seemed to match what she and Julie’s aunt had described.
I finished my gin and tonic too quickly, ordered a second anyway. I couldn’t bring myself to meet with Clara, to face what she thought her visions meant or to confront her about those burns. Was it worse if she’d done it to herself? Or if it had been someone else? I was so tired of living in a world that abused women. I kept picturing Steffanie’s face, the bruise already tender around her eye, when I found her in that bathroom, rag dolled around the base of the toilet. Didn’t anything ever change?
Someone put their hand on my shoulder, and I nearly dropped my drink. But it was only Clara.
“What are you doi
ng here?” I asked.
“What are you doing here? This isn’t where we were supposed to meet.”
“I just needed a second to … think …” Clara pulled out the stool next to mine. “Maybe we should go somewhere else. You could get in trouble here.”
“Don’t worry about that,” she said. Sure enough, the bartender came over without a word and poured her a rum and coke.
“You a regular?” I asked.
“I come here from time to time.”
I sighed. “I don’t think I want to know any more about that.” I had a chance to study her fingers. She had put on fresh bandages. She noticed me looking at them and dropped her hands into her lap. “So. What are we doing? You really think that something has happened to Julie, and to the woman who came to your shop?”
“I do.”
“Why?”
“I don’t know. I only know that these visions … they break the rules. This isn’t how things work for me. And I think it has to mean something. It’s not random.”
“I mean, why do you think you’re receiving this information? If these women are sending out … I don’t know, signals? Why are you getting them? What are you supposed to do?” I could feel the heat rising in my face. Talking that way, about signs and symbols and visions, still made me anxious, made me feel like I was on the wrong end of a prank. There was a part of me, too, that didn’t want to trust Clara. I couldn’t imagine what she might be after. I was wary, on edge. But every time I thought about telling her it was too much, too strange, I saw Steffanie again.
“I don’t know that either. Trust me, this sounds crazy even in my world. But I feel like I have information, whether I like it or not, and now I have to figure out what to do with it. Some things just are. I don’t know why so many people refuse to believe that we live in a world where not everything can be explained. Just because something is hard to explain, that doesn’t mean it’s not true or real. And maybe if other people around here were open to listening, to feeling things, they’d know it was off, too.”
I thought again of New York. Of all the signs I’d missed. The creeping sense that something was off-kilter, but being unwilling to say it, because I couldn’t point to it, couldn’t say exactly what it was. Like trying to describe a color in the dark. “So now what? What about going to the cops?”
“With what? I believe what I see, but I still don’t know exactly what happened. Or how the visions are tied together. But they’re getting more violent, more detailed, and I think if we can find Peaches, we’ll have time to warn her. Were you able to look at the cameras?”
“No luck,” I said. “My security clearance won’t work, and I couldn’t get into Emily’s account.” My attempt at guessing her password had been nearly comical. I didn’t know her middle name, or which state she came from.
“Maybe we need to be more organized. Go to other casinos—maybe Peaches got in trouble with security here and can’t come back. Happens to Des and me all the time.”
“Clara, can I ask you another question? Aren’t you worried? About yourself?”
“What do you mean?” she said slowly. Something hardened in her face.
“I mean, you’re meeting with strange men. Men who clearly think they can get away with abusing you because you’re young, or because you’re vulnerable, or because they’re paying for it. I saw that mark on your hand; it looks really bad. If you think something bad is happening to women here—women who … see men, don’t you think you should take it easy? Lay low?”
“I can take care of myself,” she said. But she wouldn’t look at me; she only ran her finger around the rim of her glass.
“I know that. But I just think you should be careful, okay?”
I was surprised by how quickly the anger clouded her face. “What do you know about it? You go home to your nice house with your nice mom and live your nice life, and you’re not even grateful for it. All you want is to leave. Well, guess what? So do I. But you know it as well as I do—leaving takes cash. There are no jobs here for someone like me, even if I wanted one. This is how things are.”
“Fine, I just think …”
“Leave it, Lily. Okay? I didn’t come here for a lecture. We just need to make a plan.”
My phone, faceup on the bar, lit up. Matthew again.
Okay, I know you might not want to talk to me yet. But I just wanted to say that I miss you.
Clara snorted. “See? You’re just going to bail again, as soon as you can. Go back to this Matthew guy, forget this whole summer ever happened.”
She sounded so jilted. It made her seem both older and younger at once.
“I’m not getting back together with him. I haven’t even responded to his texts.”
“You’re thinking about it. I can tell.”
I opened my mouth to argue, but she was right. Despite everything that had happened, this afternoon I’d allowed myself to imagine what it would be like to go back. To pretend things could return to how they had been. Parties that lasted until dawn, rooftop views, waking up with my tongue furred from champagne. That hollow, easy life.
“What even happened? What did he do?”
“It’s complicated.”
“So tell me. I’m not stupid.”
“No, that’s not what I mean. It’s just that I’m still figuring a lot of that out.” I took a long sip of my drink. “It wasn’t all his fault. Matthew is brilliant, but he’s not conniving. He never would have thought of all of that himself. There was another artist, a painter, named Ramona. She helped him stage the whole thing. I introduced the two of them. I was hoping to represent her work. I thought I could launch her career. I guess I did, in a way. Now she’s famous, getting coverage in magazines, making a ton of cash.”
“Wait, what did they do?” Clara was leaning toward me, eyes wide. I hadn’t told anyone the full story. My friends in New York only knew what they’d heard passed along the gossip lines, or whatever they read in the blogs, but I had ignored the concerned texts, the querying emails disguised as support. Like my old clothes, the people I used to spend time with—other artists, other gallery girls—seemed to belong to a staged, unfamiliar version of my life.
I grasped for a starting point, an origin, but I really didn’t know where everything had begun. I had tried to patch together the story all summer, but there was so much I had refused to see.
I described for Clara the time Ramona met me for lunch at Union Square Cafe, me brandishing my corporate card like a proud child. The night she invited me to her apartment to look at her work in progress, how sorry I felt for her, in the cramped little Lower East Side tenement apartment she shared with three other girls. Before I knew it, I was telling her she should use a spare room in Matthew’s studio. I knew Matthew would be angry that I’d extended the use of his space, but he never worked in the mornings, and that’s when Ramona liked the light the best. In my mind, they would never cross paths, never even meet.
“So wait, why did they?” The gin and tonics I was drinking seemed to have materialized from nowhere, and before I knew it I was rattling the ice cubes at the bottom of my empty glass again. I hadn’t eaten much at the caf, and I had quickly reached the open, hyper-confessional stage of drunkenness, when the person across from you morphs into some idealized receptacle for your stories: the most sympathetic person you know, the most genuine, the most worthy of your secrets, your trust. All of a sudden I was burning to tell.
“That’s what I don’t know!” I slammed my hand on the bar, and the man next to me turned to look at us. I lowered my voice. “I knew something weird was going on. Ramona and I had met up again to talk about her work, and I was talking about Matthew and she just had this look on her face, like she couldn’t even keep back how much she disliked him. So I asked her, and she said he seemed entitled. Arrogant. Which, yeah, he was. Is. He is.”
“I don’t understand,” Clara said.
“Neither do I. That’s part of it. All I know is that the next thing is my boss, who
represents Matthew’s work, tells me that he doesn’t want me working on Matthew’s show because of our personal relationship. Fine—fair enough. Philip Louis dated clients and it always fucked things up, but he ran the gallery so it was different for him. So I don’t know anything about the show and Matthew was always really secretive about his work, especially when it was going well. Superstition or whatever, and for a long time I found that really charming, so I respected it, gave him space. The night the show opens, I get to his studio, which is in this giant warehouse in Bushwick—that’s this sort of gritty neighborhood in Brooklyn, so ugly that people think it’s cool—and there’s a crowd of people there, and this energy, a tingle of something, about the way people are looking at me. And I feel like I’m being paranoid or wonder if it’s sort of, you know, nice attention. Like, oh, there’s his girlfriend, she’s so lovely, rising star, blah blah blah.” Even in this open, unfiltered mode I felt embarrassed to admit that—that I had wanted to be admired. Craved it enough that I was willing to ignore the feeling of low-grade dread tugging at me, telegraphing that I should be wary. That something was off.
“You needed to listen to your intuition.” Clara tapped her forehead to indicate her third eye. “Seriously. I don’t even believe in all of that psychobabble stuff and I’m a psychic, but I’m telling you. Trust yourself more. Anyway, keep going.”
“So the show, I find out, is comprised of two artists’ works. And the other artist is …”
Clara leaned in even closer, her knee touching mine, her hand on my wrist. “That bitch Ramona!” For a second I remembered just how young she was. How, when I was her age, my friends and I were riding our bikes to the Wawa and pooling our money to buy a milkshake to split.
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