It rains almost every night through the month of January, and I spend those nights in my car, listening to the rain on the roof. It reminds me of the trailer, with the water pinging a metallic chant on the roof. I have dreams all through those fitful nights. Long conversations with my mother that I never had, making love with Dylan, Cal’s hand tangled in my hair, pulling me to my knees. I watch Meredith, rocking the baby, singing love songs to my daughter. I wake with the rain on the roof and the ghosts of my dreams still hanging in the air of the car.
I spent the days walking the beach. I lived on Karis’s safe list of foods and found that eating is cheap when you don’t eat. The money from the Mexico shoot would last months, living like this. I shower in the cold showers in the building coming away from the beach, rinsing cheap shampoo through my hair in the trickle of the water, slipping backward in time.
The third week, I feel suddenly bored. My wrists are mostly healed but for the angry, red scars, and I get a job working at a dive bar in Oceanside called Pete’s on the Beach.
At first I make nothing in tips, or almost nothing, while the other girls get wads of cash. I take a page out of their playbook and spend the last bit of my Delphi money on some short-short skirts and low-cut shirts. I buy cheap bangle bracelets and cover my wrists with them until I tinkle like bells when I walk. After a few days of ringing, I discard the metal bangles and buy leather strapping, knotted like friendship bracelets. They are quieter and softer and don’t move up my arms. They are a better disguise.
The second week on the job, I find my rhythm, remembering to pay attention to the Navy boys. When I remember how to flirt, the tips get better. They improve even more the lower my shirt is cut and the higher my skirt or shorts are. By the time mid-February comes around, I am thinking about finding a place to live. I have enough for a deposit and a month’s rent. I need a place to live because I need a shower, a real shower, with hot water.
Today, on my day off, I sit in one of the dark booths at Pete’s, looking through the classifieds. Two rooms interest me in the “For Rent” section of the paper. I circle them and use the phone behind the bar to call for appointments.
I am standing on the stoop of the first house, dressed in jeans and a sweatshirt, my hair loose and still damp from the frigid shower. The bell bongs through the house, bong, bong, bong, and the door opens.
“Hi, I’m Alison,” I say to the woman who opens the door. “I’m here about the room.” She smiles, thick lips spreading to show missing teeth along the back of her smile.
“Yes, yes, come in. I’m tidying today. Sorry, the house is still a bit of a mess.” I follow her through the door and pause in the entryway. The house is packed with stuff, and the path she uses to show me to the room is really just that—a narrow walkway lined with boxes and clothes baskets overflowing onto other boxes and baskets. I don’t think tidying is the right word for whatever is happening here today. She leads me upstairs, and magazines are stacked, twenty deep, on each end of each step. Good Housekeeping, Redbook, the Blood Horse.
The upstairs is less cluttered, but still feels crowded. She stands with me at the entrance to the room, which is bare except for a bed and a small, pressed-board dresser, Her eyes are watering in the light from the window, and my skin crawls. I am not a snob—I haven’t come from anything—but something about the clutter and the stark, barren room makes my head spin. And her.
The scent of bleach is overwhelming, and I have a flash that the room is so clean because she recently cleaned the blood of one of her victims off the floor. My imagination runs away with me, and the sense of doom persists. She stands too close to me in the doorway, and I can smell the faint odor of unclean flesh beneath the fragrance of baby powder mingling with the tang of bleach. I feel her hand on the small of my back, pushing me slightly forward, and I plant my feet, shifting free.
“I appreciate you showing me the room,” I say, trying to angle myself back toward the path that will lead me out into the fresh sunshine.
“You should go in and check it out,” she says, her hand reaching toward me, and panic flutters.
“That’s okay. I can see it from here.”
“When can you move in?” She is too anxious, her face is too close, and her breath comes in small, excited gasps. I give her a small, tight smile.
“I have one other place to look at, but I’ll make a decision today or tomorrow.” I am almost scared to tell her that I don’t want to live here. If she had managed to push me inside that room, would she have closed the door and locked me in?
Her face falls, the smile wanes, and her lips press together. “It’s not good enough for you,” she says, rolling her fat tongue over her teeth and sucking air in a whistle.
“I didn’t say that.”
I have to get out of this house. I get to the front door, knocking over a stack of magazines on the stairs in my hurry. I open the door and rush out, letting the cool, dry air of February wash past me into the house. She stops just inside the door with a cold look in her eyes that reminds me of a snake.
“I just have one other place to see. . .” I say, waving briefly as I practically run for my car. I don’t, but it feels like I am. She lets the door fall closed, her words falling out of her mouth, but not registering with me.
“She wanted to eat me,” I say, shivering as I get in my car, shrugging my shoulders to try to remove the feeling of her house, of her eyes on me. Of course, she didn’t want to eat me, but there was something so wrong in that house that I wonder what happened to her last tenant.
I drive to the next address I am scheduled to see: 2121 Valley View. The yard is dry and brown, sloping down into a gully. The driveway is a perfect sled run. I park in front of the house and sit, looking down at it from the street, assessing. It is unassuming and reminds me of the McGill house, except with an orange tile roof. I have to bring up my courage to get out of my car, and for a split second, I wish I had Cici’s gun.
I take a long, deep breath, pushing out the last vestiges of the hoarder’s house from my lungs. I leave my car parked on the street and walk down the slope of the drive. The force of gravity draws me onward at a slow trot. The ground levels a few feet before the house, and I walk up four steps to a small front porch with a rocking chair placed at one end, slowly moving forward and back, as if a spirit lingers there.
I stand in front of the door, ready to run, forcing myself to stay. I cannot keep living in my car. I reach my finger out to touch the bell, and the door inside the screen opens before I make contact. Framed in the door is perhaps the oldest woman I have ever seen. Massive ravines line her face, and her eyes shine out from great folds and soft rolls. Her jowls are long, and I imagine folding the lengths of flesh up to see some semblance of the woman behind the drooping skin.
“Come in, come in,” she says, and her voice is steady, even as it crackles with her age. She opens the screen door, but I hesitate to enter.
“I’m Alison Hayes.” It is very important that she understand who I am before I enter. “I am supposed to meet Vicki?”
“Yes, yes. Of course.” She waves me in. “I’m Ina, Vicki’s mother.” I step into a clean foyer overlooking a step-down living room with plush, white carpet and halls facing away on both sides. The floor of the foyer and the halls are wood, and the walls are white. To my right is a massive wrought-iron cage with a white cockatoo sitting atop it. The bird sings, “Happy Birthday to you. Happy Birthday to you,” with its head bobbing and its long-taloned feet moving from side to side.
“Happy birthday to you!” I say, forgetting myself, laughing. Beyond the foyer, we move into the living room and on through to the kitchen. “Cotton loves to sing,” the old woman says, “but not for just everyone.”
“His name is Cotton?” I ask, and the scent of the kitchen assails me, making my mouth water. It is savory and fragrant with garlic and herbs, and it makes me think of Dylan’s house when lasagna was on for dinner.
“His name is Birdette Bardot. We call him Cotton.”
“I love you!” Cotton calls from the foyer, and I smile, restraining myself from calling back that I love him, too.
“Is Vicki here?”
“Yes, yes.” The old woman stops at the stove and stirs the sauce in the pot, then continues moving toward the back of the house. She slides the door and motions for me to follow her. “There.” She points to the woman sitting in a patch of sun on the back deck, reading. Vicki looks up from her book, her face startled when she sees a stranger, me, standing there.
“I didn’t hear the bell,” she says.
“I didn’t ring the bell,” I answer.
“I knew she was here,” the old woman says, nodding, turning to head back into the kitchen.
“Of course, Mother, you knew she was here.” Vicki smiles, and there is something of awe in her tone. The screen door slides closed behind me, and when I turn back, Vicki is standing with her hand out. “You must be Alison.”
“I am.” I smile and shake her hand. She is beautiful, fifty-ish, with red hair similar to my own. She has the face of a pixie with small features, a high forehead, and a narrow chin.
“Nice to meet you,” she says and motions for me to sit down. Then I catch a glimpse of the back yard and stay standing, taking in the sight. The street name makes sense, now that I see the full spread of the yards behind the houses. Where I thought the slope of the yard ended at the front of the house, I realize now that it continues through the house, and we are sitting on a deck several feet in the air, and below us, a pool glitters in the sun and palms rise up to level with where we sit.
“Wow.” I let the full awe rise in my voice, and I see pride crossing her face. “It’s a great yard.”
“It is,” she agrees. She asks me to tell her a little about myself, and I do. I tell her almost everything about myself, that my mother is dead, that I am alone in the world . . . I catch myself saying things that I have no intention of sharing, but I can’t seem to stop the roll of words out of my mouth. She doesn’t say anything, and I keep talking until I get to the part of the story on how I ended up here. I clamp my mouth closed and turn to look out at the glistening pool. What in the world? Would I next be spreading my arms for her to inspect my scars?
“Would you like to see the downstairs?” she finally asks after we have sat in silence for what feels like a very long time.
“I would.” We go down the stairs from the deck and enter through a sliding glass door that opens into a narrow dining room.
The apartment is the footprint of the house, except a room at the end that has been used for storage and has a shiny lock sealing it from public access. There is a large living room furnished in brown-plaid furniture and a small kitchenette that she describes as a galley. No stove, but two hot plates and a microwave. “If you need to bake anything, you can always come upstairs.”
Past the kitchen is a bathroom and the bedroom, adjacent to the storage room with its padlock. It is dark, with no outside light except that coming through the sliding glass doors. It almost feels cave-like, and normally, I would run from such a closed-in apartment, but as she turns on lights, the rooms glow. I kind of love it.
“You can move in tonight,” she says, and I am surprised.
“I brought references,” I say, startled, having thought there would be more steps. She waves her hand.
“I don’t need your references. You are the only person my mother allowed to come see it.”
“Oh,” I say. That seems odd.
“Did Cotton sing to you?” she asks, as if there is some special meaning to the answer.
I laugh. “Yes, he did.”
“The apartment is yours if you want it.” She puts her hands on her hips and smiles, and I wonder if I haven’t somehow stepped into the land of fairies and will stumble out some years down the road never having known I was gone.