Please See Us

by Caitlin Mullen

  I was jolted into a third vision. A hand, a woman’s hand again, but it was somewhere new, somewhere inside. The room had a reddish-yellow glow. I could hear that swish, swish, swish sound that was so familiar from other visions. Flies buzzed in my ears.

  My thoughts started to race—Luis, the marsh, the glow of the room, like the neon glow of the signs. The sunset that lit up, one ray at a time. The first vision had also held something familiar. I stood as still as I could and tried to recall everything about it. The shape of the door handle. The look of the person’s hands. And then: The bracelet. Lily’s bracelet. The one I had stolen all those weeks ago, those little pearls, like dredging up a detail from a dream. Lily? Lily was in trouble?

  No, I told myself. There would be a reason for those images. Those thoughts. That was the way I was going to live my life now. Logically. According to what I knew. Facts. That way I could hedge against whatever had made my mother’s brain go wrong, poisoned by her talent. I was thinking of escape, because that’s what I wanted most. A way out of my own life. There were still scraps of whatever I had seen from Luis lingering in my brain. I would learn to control those kinds of thoughts, learn to push them away.

  But those women. The four—or was it five now? or more?—of them lined up together, arranged. The hungry, relentless buzz of the flies. Their blue-tinged skin.

  “I have to go,” I said. “You don’t have to pay me, but I need to leave.”

  He raised an eyebrow. “That’s not what the arrangement was. Remember? Total control.”

  “My friend needs my help.”

  A smile. For a second I saw it through his eyes, how ridiculous I was. A teenage girl with trembling legs, claiming she needed to run off and save someone. I stepped toward the door and heard the thunk of his book hitting the floor, the heaviness of his boots on the carpet. He grabbed my shoulder, pushed me into the wall, shouting insults at me—Stupid slut. Worthless whore. I curled into a ball, sweating, shaking. I didn’t know what would be worse: ignoring the visions and the possibility of something terrible happening, or invoking this man’s rage.

  When I swallowed, it felt like a blade was lodged in my throat. I stood in the center of the room again and waited for my chance. Lily needed my help. He was just one man, after all. Someone who stole library books, someone who was so afraid he needed to prey on other people’s fear. I would find a way to get out of there.

  LUIS

  HE RETURNS TO THE MOTEL one more time, unable to walk past the border where the parking lot meets the grass. He knows he needs to do something, to warn everyone, to make sure the women are found, but he thinks of all that he will lose if he is misunderstood. How dangerous it is for him to be the one who knows the truth. He sits at the edge of the lot, wondering what else he can do. A woman approaches him with a photograph of a teenage girl with bright purple hair.

  For a moment the hair throws him, but then the realization lands like a punch. She’s one of them. The one with the tattoo on her chest.

  He waves his arms, points to the marsh over and over. He refuses to go back, but she could help him. She has a kind face, though she is startled by his gestures, and her eyes get wide. He points again, each time feeling how impossible it is to ask someone to imagine the horror, to make them understand. She reaches in her bag, pulls out a pen, and he starts to wonder if that is a good idea—something she could use as proof. Something that would show he knew about the women before anyone else—she might misunderstand. He turns his back on her, senses her behind him as he walks away and panics. At the shoulder of the road he breaks into a run.

  * * *

  AT HOME he puts his treasured things in a pile, should he need to leave quickly. Whether because of the fires or because someone has seen him going into the marsh or just because it’s finally time. A set of clothes, the photograph of his grandmother, the sheaf of pictures his grandfather took from his hospital days. The two-dollar bill, the German bullet the doctors pulled from his grandfather’s leg. The paintings along the wall eye him, the room filled with lonely stares. As though they hadn’t come from him, hadn’t been made with his own hands.

  He looks over the canvas that he started when he realized the camera wasn’t going to work, that he wouldn’t be able to make himself go back and see the women again. Those frenzied nights when he’d painted until his hands were too stiff to hold a brush. If he destroyed it, who would ever know? If he didn’t, someone might think he had something to do with those women. He took it off of the easel, imagined himself breaking it over his knee, making it small enough to throw away, but he couldn’t bring himself to ruin it. It was another way to say: I SEE.

  It had been so long since he painted—two years? three?—but he soon relived the pleasure of blending paint, the instant satisfaction of a slash of color against the blankness of a canvas. His grandmother teaching him, so long ago, to copy from photographs. The joy on her face when he showed her a finished picture—he always thought it was the happiest he ever saw her, when he brought her something he had made. To think, he once assumed that was how he would spend his life: Showing people what they overlooked. Making sure they didn’t forget. He did paintings of the wreckage from the last hurricane, when the town got pulled apart. Paintings of the days when the casinos closed down, bits of them sold off. Men walking down the street hugging disco balls, slot machines being loaded into the beds of trucks. The portrait of the man who gave him the two-dollar bill—the only kindness Luis could offer after he died. One of a man who bought from him, a man who also sold old chairs, stacks of mismatched plates, tins of buttons. Every month Luis would bring him another picture, until one day he went back and the seller’s tent was gone. He never saw him again. Another person the city simply swallowed up.

  He wishes he had realized how much painting would soothe him, thinks that the fires might have been a mistake, but now it’s too late. The last part of himself that the city has taken—he has become someone who thinks to ruin before he thinks to create.

  * * *

  HE PACES the long hallways that snake through the casino, his hand on his matches in his pocket. He feels the cameras watching him, all of those little eyes embedded in the ceiling. He starts to feel like everyone is looking at him with suspicion. The guards, the dealers, the grounds crew, the girls who carry drinks. The other day he stood behind the blonde woman while she watched a screen: eight views of the hallways and rooms. She pressed a button, and then the windows went black, disappeared.

  Twice he’s seen her in the spa when neither of them are meant to be there. He hates the long lines for the showers at the boardinghouse, so sometimes he sneaks in after work to enjoy the pressure, the hot stream. She emerged from the women’s room in a blue dress, her mouth slicked with pink. It’s one of the reasons he’s so angry about her pushing him away when he wanted to show her his drawing. He thought they had an understanding—the first time she caught him, or they caught each other, she started, but then gave him a single slow nod, as if to wish him good night. But it doesn’t matter now. He’ll make everything burn, everyone pay.

  As he slips in the back way, through the gym, and then along the dim, narrow halls, he still grapples with the strangeness of the place, its whiteness. The hallway of empty rooms. The clean smells that remind him of the medicine his grandmother rubbed on his chest when he was very small, but without comfort.

  He knows it is late, that everyone is gone for the night, so he takes off his shoes, pads through the hallway to the big double door. The room has two beds in it, blankets, square vases filled with small rocks. He cracks open the cabinets, squeezes tubes of cream, unscrews the caps on all the small jars. Then he finds the candle, and it feels like a gift. Recently he can’t stop thinking of his grandmother—those candles with the saints’ faces she would light on the windowsill while she prayed. He had spent that evening of the fire trying to paint the glow of the saints, but the combination of dimness and light had been too difficult. He had meant to move the bottle of turp
entine before he went to sleep, but frustrated by his failures to get the colors right, he’d stormed upstairs to his room. He woke to that same smell of smoke, and the flames were already raging in the hall, dividing his room from his grandparents’ with an insurmountable wall of flame. He was able to escape through his bedroom window, ran to the neighbors’ and pounded his fists on their doors. He remembers looking up at the cold, indifferent sky, the smoke swirling into it. By the time the fire trucks came, it was too late. His grandparents, their whole beautiful, careful life, were gone.

  He finds the box of matches nearby, lights them on the countertop with shaking hands, appreciating the fire’s awesome and terrible power. Wisps of smoke twist toward the ceiling. He runs a finger through the flame.

  He thinks again of the women. The sight of that fifth body, her eyes on him, in the marsh.The woman from the parking lot, holding out the photograph, how he couldn’t trust her to understand. The feeling that he needs to do something crests in him like a wave. He pulls a towel from the rack and dips a corner of it in the flame, his anger glinting, goading him on. He tells himself, as it catches, that there is still plenty of time to make it stop if he wants to—this could be the night he finally gets caught. He runs a finger through it again and the heat, the pain, feels good. His mind fills with one thought: More.

  The flames lick along the material, more smoke rising into the air. He waits for the moment to tip, for his sense of wonder to slide into fear, but he doesn’t feel afraid. It’s both exciting and soothing to watch the flame eat away at the cloth, to silence his mind. Leave behind his worry about the man with the gold tooth, the cops, the people at work, the women and the flies. He drops another towel onto the ground.

  He starts to feel the heat build up and expects that, at any moment, a fire alarm will flash, spray water all over the floor; the cops will come and twist his arms behind his back. But nothing happens. He thinks of the things he sees at night when he cannot sleep, the memories he has of the red-haired girl, her mouth open in terror when she saw him. For a moment a new thought flashes through him. He could step into the heat, feel all of his fear, his anger, burn away, turn to smoke, dissolve into the air.

  Instead, he pulls a small pillow off of the bed, feeds it to the flames, empties one of the jars to watch the chemicals spark. He is surprised when the fire catches the base of a cabinet, when it starts to burn the edge of the wood. His stomach is flip-flopping, and there is something like promise in the way the flame continues to build. The smoke is thickening and he coughs, smiling, eyes burning. The fire feels like a presence now. Its longing, its desire, is familiar. Its language one he knows well: Fury, greed. More more more.

  When the smoke starts to make him dizzy, he reaches for the door handle, the metal warm, pulls it open. He hears the fire respond to the fresh oxygen with a surge of heat and light. He looks up at the cameras in the hall, and for a second, he feels sorry that the blonde girl turned them off. He wants them to see him. Wants there to be witnesses to the things that churn and burn inside him. A witness to the one thing he might have done right.

  CLARA

  AT FIRST, I THOUGHT THE alarms were in my head, and I felt a drop in my stomach. Something else I couldn’t explain—it was different than the feeling I got about Lily. Muddled. Strange.

  But then I saw him raise his eyes at me, and I knew I hadn’t imagined the sound. Doors creaked open in the hallway. The tread of shoes on the carpet. Voices, sounding confused. Then a man, yelling down the hall.

  “Everyone please proceed to the staircase. This is not a drill.”

  The man knocked a lamp from the bedside table, cut his eyes toward me, shoved his cell phone into his pocket, and pushed his way out the door. I took a deep breath. I was aware of how I smelled, the ammoniac smell of a scared animal. But I grabbed my purse and ran toward the stairs.

  The lobby was a mess of people. Potbellied security guards shined flashlights in the direction of the door, tried to yell over the crowd, and couldn’t make themselves heard. I ran to the revolving door and hailed a taxi. I had $20 in my purse. Probably not enough to get back, but I wouldn’t worry about that. I need to call the cops, I thought. But how would I ask them for help before I even knew where I was going? Then, when I looked in my purse, I almost laughed. The man had made me give him my phone, had locked it in the safe. I remembered the little electric beep beep beep as he entered the code.

  The driver looked at me, unruffled by the way my chest was heaving. “The Black Horse Pike. The motels. As fast as you can.”

  “Which motel?” he asked, pulling away from the curb.

  “I’ll know when I see.” He shook his head. I knew what he was thinking—I was going to pick up a man, buy drugs, both. “Drive faster, please.”

  Above us the white globes of the streetlights blurred by, and I knew I was right—I had seen them before. The buildings looked even grimmer in the dark, a row of six or seven of them, wild with weeds, perched on the edge of the marsh like they might one day get sucked in. I rolled down my window, listened to the shush of the reeds. Here. We were close to Lily. To all of them.

  I studied the signs, all of them with broken, missing letters. Then I saw it, down the road—that setting sun, each ray lighting up one at a time then blinking out. The Sunset Motel.

  “There! There!” The driver swerved into the lot. I handed him the twenty and didn’t bother to wait for my change. I stood underneath the sign and studied the motel: two floors, maybe twenty-four rooms. I should call the cops now, I thought, run to the motel office and borrow their phone. But I still didn’t know what to ask for. I remembered the way the light from the sign fell on the floor at a slant in my vision. I adjusted my stance—it had to be one of the rooms on the left side. There was nothing to do but guess. From behind the door of room number 9, I heard a couple arguing about who was footing the bill. I ran to the next room, tried the knob—it swung open to an empty, dark square with two sagging beds. At the third, I looked back at the sign—this had to be it—and pressed my ear to the door: the creak of footsteps, careful and slow.

  I knew the door would be locked but tried the knob anyway. Inside the room, the sound of pacing stopped. I thought again of those early years with Des, when things felt exciting and good. How with one quick flick of the wrists we would outsmart everyone and break into any room we wanted. How back then she made me feel like everything in the city was ours to claim. The motel’s locks were flimsier than the casinos’—and even those didn’t take more than a stiff piece of paper. I still had my business card in Victoria’s purse. Whoever was on the other side would be able to see me working on the door, the card sliding through the crack in the frame. Would be able to brace themselves or arm themselves. And I hadn’t used this trick in years, and this would need to be quick if it was going to work.

  I worked the bottom lock, prayed that the cheap paper would hold. I heard a thunk and tried to stay calm, although I felt my body go cold. Another thunk—what was happening?—as I got the bottom lock open. Now it was just a matter of working the swing bar at the top. I eased the edge of the business card along the bar and tried to see inside the room while I worked: nothing but a slice of streetlight on beige carpet.

  The lock gave, and I lunged inside. Nothing, no one, just a bathroom door to my right, open to a darkened room, the ugly twin beds with depressions in the middle, the smell of mildew. But I had heard someone! Someone had heard me. Or maybe I really was like my mother, it was true. I wasn’t special, just insane. I would grow obsessed with things and people that weren’t there, conjuring strange theories out of thin air. I sat on the edge of the bed, not ready to go outside again and face the long walk back to the shop, face Des, the rest of my messy, messed-up life.

  And that’s when I saw her, the slim curve of her wrist on the floor, the pearl bracelet glowing yellow in the low light—her arm was raised above her head—the rest of her obscured by the dust ruffle on the other side of the second bed.

  When I
stepped around the bed, my breath caught in my throat. She looked just like the others. Her skin was pale. There was a lump above her left eye, the size of a walnut. I kneeled on the carpet, put my hand to her wrist. Her skin was clammy, cold. Nothing, nothing, and then a gentle thump of blood under my fingertips. A pulse.

  I jumped when I felt something brush against my arm, but it was only the curtain blowing in the breeze. And then I noticed the screen on the ground. The open window. The thunk, thunk sound. Whoever had been here was gone.

  I sprinted into the parking lot just as a woman was getting out of her car. Too well dressed to be at the Sunset, too clean, she looked like a social worker, calm and safe. For a moment I wondered if, somehow, she had already been sent to help. She was startled when I yelled to her.

  “Please ma’am, it’s an emergency. Can I use your phone?” She stood for a moment, then nodded. Her face was sad, like she knew something I didn’t understand yet.

  I dialed 9-1-1. At first, when the operator picked up, the words refused to come.

  “My friend needs help! My friend needs help! She’s breathing, but she’s not waking up. We’re at the Sunset Motel. Room 10. Hurry, please!”

  When I turned around, the woman’s car was there, but she was gone. I stood, clutching her phone, then set it on the hood of her car. In the distance, I heard the roar of fire trucks, saw the spangle of lights at the casino.

  I went back into the room, even though I didn’t want to see her like that. When the police came, I decided, I would tell them about the others. I didn’t know how I would explain. I just knew they were close. Closer than ever before. But now the women were silent. I didn’t have any visions, didn’t hear anything other than the shush of the reeds.