Please See Us

by Caitlin Mullen

  I always knew when Des was lying, so I could tell that she wasn’t just angry. She meant what she said. She had thought it all along, those times I flinched, felt the creep of the flies, and she narrowed her eyes at me. What if she was right?

  I slid to the floor and pulled the first letter from its envelope.

  Dear Desmina and Ava,

  This is for both of you. I need you to read this carefully, and please do what I say. There is a dark spirit living inside of me, in the space between my left ribs and my collarbone. I have tried everything to get rid of him but now I will need to go to the shaman in the desert, who has experience with this kind of thing. Please send me $500 for the bus ticket, and for the shaman’s fee. If you cannot send the money, I think there are other ways I can barter with him. I have had visions through this spirit that worry me—

  I shoved the letter back in the envelope and opened the next.

  Ava,

  The men I warned you about are getting closer. I have tried to come to you in your dreams but I wonder if it has been too long, if that portal between us is now shut. If you had sent me the money I asked for I could have rid myself of the spirit, but instead I must sometimes speak in his voice. Some days I don’t know which voice is his and which is mine, or if they are both the same, tangled together, twisted like vines. I see so many terrible things now—wars and violence, children whose bellies are bloated with hunger. The world is full of so much evil that rushes at me like arrows. They pierce me, Ava, these things that I see. My sister is angry with me, I think. She sent me away, after all, no matter what she tells you. Please send the money if you can.

  The last letter was dated three years ago. Her handwriting was so messy and frantic that I could hardly make out any of the words. One of the others was written on a Big Mac wrapper. A faded grease stain darkened the middle. The reason was always shifting, but in every letter she asked for money. I almost laughed; in that way she wasn’t much different from Des. Sisters to the core. I had been a fool to think I could change my life by running away to somewhere new, that there was a different life waiting for me somewhere else. I was always telling customers about their fates, that they still could make choices when facing obstacles—but maybe I’d been wrong. Maybe fate did come for us all, slashing through our lives like a sharp knife.

  At the bottom of the stack were more envelopes. The ones I had sent since I learned how to write. All of them were marked Return to Sender: Recipient Unknown. All of them had been opened. Des must have read each one.

  “She never lived there,” I said. “She made it up.” All these years of pulling up the image of that guesthouse in the library, I had been hovering over someone else’s life. The Wisdom of Tarot was splayed on the floor where Des had thrown it, but I didn’t move to pick it up. The book felt more dangerous than comforting now. I had so wanted to believe that my mother had magic, that she had grace. That, once I found her, she could teach me how to redeem myself. Instead, she was a warning. I could end up the same way she did.

  “You see? You want to find her, you go ahead. You think that’ll make you happy? That’s fine. But let me save you a little time. You’re not going to like what you see. Check the homeless shelters and the park benches, okay? My guess is that she’s standing on a street corner, shouting at nothing.”

  I couldn’t see straight. I felt like someone had knocked the wind out of me. Was I like her? Would I go insane? Maybe it had already started—all the ways I couldn’t trust my brain. Was that what the vision on the boardwalk was about, all of those women dead in the marsh? The flies? The crying child? Was it just something horrible and ugly that my mind had turned over and spit out, the way the ocean churned up driftwood and bits of glass?

  Des stood and pushed her shoulders back, lifted her chin in a mean tilt. “Now excuse me,” she said, walking past me and out the door, her shoulder almost brushing mine. I still thought, for a moment, that she might hug me. That she would soften and feel sorry that I had found out about my mother this way. That there might be a similar fate awaiting me, or maybe it had already begun.

  I stayed up late and forced myself to look at the returned letters I’d written. They were full of bargaining, pleading hope. If you let me come, I’ll always clean my room. If I can visit you, you won’t even know I’m there. Why don’t I come help you with your clients? I see things, too. Poor, stupid little girl.

  * * *

  THE NEXT morning, I sat in the shop, my eyes swollen with tears, turning over a few cards, tracing my fingers over the rivers, the stars. I tried to form a question in my mind, something I could ask the tarot, but couldn’t come up with anything. For the first time I could remember, I didn’t want to know what the universe had in store for me, what my future held.

  My phone chimed. Lily: Text me back! What’s going on? We were supposed to talk …

  How could I face her now, when everything I said, everything I saw, might be completely wrong? It chimed again and I picked it up to turn it off, but the text wasn’t from her that time. It was the man who had given me the burns.

  I felt a pang of dread reading his message, but ignored it. I thought about the money Des took, about what it would take to start over again. I couldn’t go to my mother, but I also couldn’t stay—I would think of the marsh every single day, of those women, whether they were really there or not. Luis, skulking through the grass. Wondering when Luis would come back and find me, ready to punish me for what I knew. Wondering who he’d take next.

  One night, $500. The betrayal foretold in my reading had already come true. The money I had hoarded was gone; Des had been the last person I could count on. Maybe there had to be real, physical pain before I could be free. For the price of one weekend, I could be away from Luis—his staring eyes, and whatever was in him that wanted to hurt. I could be free of Des—her moods and her pills and the bitter way the corners of her mouth turned down. I texted him back and asked where we should meet.

  JANE 6

  MY MOTHER WAS OBSESSED WITH my hands. Clean fingernails are a sign of godliness, she would say. I was to wash them twice every time I went to the restroom or if I went anywhere public or outside. Even when I walked to the mailbox and back. When I was old enough, I rebutted her—but only in my mind. Clean fingernails are a sign of a life unlived. A sign that you are a statue, an object. Lifeless. Inert.

  For my birthday, she always gave me soap, lotion, scrubs rough with sea salt. My brothers got basketballs and baseball gloves. My childhood was from another time—I knew other girls didn’t live this way. Preserved, scrubbed into purity. They didn’t go to church for half a day in a dusty old grain warehouse forty miles east, where there was no heat, no air-conditioning, and a former car salesman who called himself Pastor Roy stood on an overturned milk crate and preached himself hoarse, folding chairs creaking and squeaking as we all shifted our weight, uncomfortable and bored. Afterward, the same group of women, my mother included, fluttered up to the pulpit to give him biscuits, cookies, cakes, flushing like schoolgirls. Desperate for approval only he could give.

  By the time I turned thirteen, my mother insisted on smelling my hands before she would let me leave for church, studying them close enough that I could almost feel the flutter of her lashes when she blinked, then pressing my fingertips to the base of her nose. One inch lower and it would have been a kiss, and those years would have unraveled so differently. One fucking inch can be all that divides love from pain.

  “Blood,” she said, spitting the word like a bad taste, dropping my fingers so that my hands swung back, thudded against my thighs. She had probably noticed my pads in the wastebasket, carefully wrapped in toilet paper, so that my father and brothers didn’t have to see them. And still I’d get sent to the sink, scrubbing until my knuckles were raw. Then my hands actually did smell of blood from all of the little cracks in my skin. My mother thought an ability to endure pain was a sign of godliness, too. At least in a woman: Pleasure corrupted. Pain improved.

  M
y brothers went to church with dirt darkening the creases of their palms. Maybe the three of us could have been aligned, at some point, but her attention separated us, made them sheepish around me, me resentful of them. We couldn’t look at one another, or if we did, our eyes met in startled gazes, as though we didn’t know one another very well.

  * * *

  I DIDN’T do the things I did with men to get back at my mother. But her anger, her bitterness, was how I knew what to say when I met with the kind of man who wanted to be punished, who wanted the spike of my stiletto thrust into his back or to crawl across the room on his hands and knees. Those men had the freedom to crave that kind of disdain because their whole lives they had been told how good they were, how treasured and perfect and adored. Their lives kept bearing them up, granting them promotions and money and beautiful things they didn’t necessarily deserve. Men for whom oppression was a novelty. I couldn’t imagine a life like that.

  I didn’t share their desires, but I respected their dogged pursuit of pleasure, and I tried to honor that. My name was passed around in the right circles, among the bankers and doctors, and for a while, it was as reasonable a way as any to build a life. More reasonable than my mother rushing to Pastor Roy with her jam thumbprint cookies or her apple pies or her goddamned banana bread. When I see her in my mind, she’s always in the kitchen wearing an apron, a red checked tea towel tucked into one of the strings, thinking she’s a better person than everyone else because she never expected anything from her life, not even the smallest bit of joy.

  * * *

  ONE OF my clients was the first to suggest I’d make a good venture capitalist, or stockbroker, or commodities trader. Guts and smarts. He was right—I liked giving orders, being in charge. He ended up writing one of my school recommendations, called himself my mentor. We laughed about that, after I paddled him until he was bruised, when he was dressed and we could toggle back to our real personalities, or as close to them as we dared. Emily is a fine young woman, ambitious, wise, and driven. I am confident of her success in Rowan University’s business program. To me, he said: Get a job you can put on your résumé. Somewhere you can get a leg up.

  That’s how I ended up at the spa. The poetic justice wasn’t lost on me, a place that sold women on sanitization, body-hair removal, slathering themselves in chemicals as a way to “restore the body’s natural pH levels.” All that guilt-tinged bullshit promoted as self-love. But it was the only option in town, and one of the few upscale places where I didn’t need to have completed my undergraduate degree. For a while, it did make me feel like I was a part of something, building something. Clipping the name tag to the lapel of my jacket, pacing the marble floors in the heels I had worn to walk along a lawyer’s spine. I had moved on from meeting men in hotel rooms with my bag of whips and floggers, elbow-length gloves and garters with their fussy little clips. I was surprised by how much I missed the presence of someone else’s ecstasy, facilitating it, controlling it. Giving that up felt like a loss. Not to mention the cash.

  Months passed. Two more casinos shut down, and another crop of slot parlors popped up in Queens and the Poconos. The possibility that I would get a bonus was close to nil. I was already enrolled in school, queasy at the loans I’d taken out for my tuition, books, my first laptop. Not to mention rent, car payment, gas. I got a UTI and for all of its blather about wellness, the spa didn’t give me health insurance. The prescription alone cost $175.

  I told myself I would only meet one man a month—just enough to keep me afloat. I tried to get in touch with my former clients, but after the downturn, the wealthy men I had catered to from the Main Line, from Westchester, had taken their vices elsewhere. I couldn’t blame them.

  I started picking up dates at random. Called myself Delilah. My nod to Pastor Roy and his stupid milk crate sermons. To my mother and her avid, searching eyes. My father and brothers for their passive, dumb faces, and the way they pretended not to hear how my mother interrogated me—or worse, looked at me like I deserved it.

  * * *

  I GOT a bad feeling early on, with the last client. I could see him grinding his teeth, the way his eyes kept catching at the cross on my chest. But I thought of the bills, the humiliation of my rent check bouncing, the gas I needed, the loans that had ballooned into amounts so large they didn’t seem real. After inflicting pain on the privileged, I had been naïve about the number of men who might be out there looking for women to hurt. Only once, before the last one, did someone lay a hand on me. I told Deidre I had the stomach flu and stayed home until the bruise along my jaw had faded. But that night, as soon as he got me alone, I felt my throat start to close. I was dizzy with whatever he gave me. He watched me touch the cross at my neck. The smell of his car reminded me of the baking soda pastes my mother had used to get stains out of the living room carpet: the smell of rebuke.

  You call yourself a good woman? Bullshit. He jerked the chain until it broke, fell between my feet. I didn’t have the strength to reach for it. There weren’t enough words to explain. The cross was a reminder. But not about God. Of course, my mother would have decried as blasphemy that I wore it as a reminder to have faith in myself. To live for me.

  When he put his hands around my throat, I tried to scream, but my voice was trapped in my mouth, as though my lips had been sewn shut. And there was so much I had left to do, so much I had to say. I was angry at his anger, his audacity, his desire for my pain. My flesh burned with fury like some self-immolating saint. I kept my eyes on him as long as I could, so that he might see it, feel it. I hoped my rage would brand him, sink into his skin. I wanted it to trail him through the rest of his life, like a ghost.

  There was darkness after that. Darkness, water, mud, flies.

  I hope when they send me back to my mother, there will be wedges of mud under my nails. My poor mother, who had God and Pastor Roy and clean hands instead of a life. I want her to see that I had at least tried to live.

  LILY

  I COULDN’T STOP CHECKING MY phone, but Clara wasn’t texting me back. I sent one more text: Clara, please just tell me you’re okay? I wondered if she still believed in what she’d said, now that she’d had a chance to sleep on it. About Luis, about wanting to leave.And if she was right? What were we supposed to do? My phone chimed once while I was pacing the front porch, but it was only a text from Matthew. You think about it, Lil? I’ll only ask this once …

  Not so long ago, I’d spent hours staring at the screen, willing him to reach out to me. It was hard, already, to believe that I had wanted him with such intensity. But what I wanted was a version of Matthew that only existed in my head: Matthew as I would have fashioned him. Penitent and sweet, adoring and humbled. A Matthew capable of remorse. I shoved my phone in my pocket without answering him. Clara would come first.

  Two more hours passed and I still hadn’t heard from her, so I biked down the boardwalk—something to burn through the pent-up nerves—locked my bike to the railing across from her shop. The Open sign was out front—no star in the corner—and I could see someone sitting at the table near the window, a bowed head, bright red hair. I pushed through that stupid beaded curtain and Des stared up at me. She looked like she hadn’t slept. Had something happened to Clara? Was it possible that she had already left?

  “Ah, Lily. Come for a second reading? It looks like you have a lot on your mind. Don’t worry. I can help you find the answers.” She reached for her deck of tarot cards.

  “I’m just looking for Clara.”

  “Oh, thank God,” she said, in a flattened voice. “I’m hungover as all hell.”

  “Is she home?”

  “No, your little pet is not home. I don’t know where she is and frankly I don’t care.”

  “You don’t keep tabs on her when she’s meeting up with clients?”

  Des bit a hangnail and spit it on the floor. Both of them bit their nails. They had the same raw cuticles. “Ah, so you know about that, too, huh? She cuts me out of the money, she might gain
a little cash, but she loses my protection.”

  “That seems harsh.”

  “It’s her choice. I warned her about this. About turning tricks behind my back.”

  “So that makes you what? Her pimp?”

  “It makes me nothing. That’s business.” Des lit a cigarette, exhaled the smoke in my direction, like she wanted to blow me away. “And I believe the proper term would be madam. But really, what is this to you? Our big-time New York City girl? You must think this place is so small. Clara is small, to you. A project. A game to keep you busy until you get back to your ‘real life.’ Tell me that’s not true.”

  Clara had told me that Des didn’t have any power to see into people the way that she did, but for someone without any psychic talents, she knew how to pin me, how to put me in my place. Was Clara a project? Was she, like the spa, like that night when we went upstairs with those two men, an experiment I was conducting? Something to give my life texture, a dinner party story I would tell one day. “The time I was sort of friends with an underage prostitute from Atlantic City. And get this: She was a psychic. She could see your deepest secrets. We got in some hairy situation together with these drunk guys from nowhere, Pennsylvania. And then we swam in the ocean in the dark.” No, I thought. That isn’t true. Making projects out of people was Matthew’s game, not mine.

  “That’s not why I’m here. I … I … care about her.” I could smell the booze wafting out of Des’s pores, astringent and sharp. It filled me with fury. “Someone has to care about her, right?”