Twenty-One

Sasha was raised on stories of brave children entering magical countries. Narnia was behind the coats in a wardrobe. Alice fell down the rabbit hole. There was another story whose name she couldn't remember about a brother and sister picking up a golden pinecone in the woods and in that motion, that lifting of an enchanted object from the forest floor, a new world rotated silently into place around them.

"Once you step into the underworld it's hard to come out again," she said to William Chandler. This was a few months before Gavin appeared in the Starlight Diner with his arm in a sling. Sasha and William met in the diner a few times a month to drink coffee together before the start of her shift. William wasn't her official sponsor at Gamblers Anonymous, her official sponsor had left town a long time ago and Sasha wasn't sure what had become of her, but they had gravitated toward one another over years of meetings and he often seemed more like a sponsor than a friend.

was true, she'd never sold herself to pay her gambling debts or been physically harmed. The meetings were full of lost marriages and personal bankruptcies and parents who had lost their children forever and women who'd turned to prostitution to finance their debts. She'd played poker a few times in high school, gathered with friends in someone's parents' basement on boring Friday nights. The game made them feel like adults, even if they were usually just playing for pennies. She'd begun playing regularly in her first semester of college, just to have something to think about other than English literature and finance.

It would have been impossible to imagine the slide that followed. By the end of the first semester she was playing almost every day. She'd lost a student-loan payment and had to leave school. She'd stolen money from two previous jobs. She'd taken her father's car and sold it in a parking lot and now he didn't talk to her anymore. She'd lived in terror of a particular loan shark. She'd skated across a dark surface, but the surface was all she'd needed to touch. Sasha could always find the door in the back of the wardrobe after that, she was always already halfway through—"I'd like ten lottery tickets," a man murmured near her in a dusty convenience store on Caroline Street, and there was that shadow angling over the day again. Traces of her old world were everywhere. She saw it in glances, in people sitting together in parked cars, in exchanges of envelopes outside closed businesses. She was aware of it all around her, as if all the off-track betting parlors and basement poker and scratch-and-win tickets were part of the same game, a never-ending continuous transaction of currency and numbers and cards that she could sense in the air but no longer touch. When she drove the streets of Sebastian she always knew where the casino was, where she was in relation to it. She was constantly aware of the casino's gravitational pull, dark star.

Sasha shuffled and reshuffled a deck of cards in the evenings in front of a television set, almost without noticing anymore. She felt tainted but also she wanted to slip back in again, back to the beautiful casino poker room where she'd always been on the verge of winning everything, everything, the patterns of cards unfolding around her and the night so bright sometimes, evenings of ice cubes glinting in glasses and hard chips and money.

"You're getting better," Anna said. "When was the last time you lost any money?" She'd been living with Sasha for years now, ever since she'd broken up with the guitarist and come back down from New York with her daughter and enough money to pay off Sasha's gambling debt. Sasha had known that night that never again in her lifetime would anyone show up on her doorstep with eleven thousand dollars in cash. She'd known that this was her last chance and she'd fought every day since then to not gamble, but she could never bring herself to think of it as a disease. She'd had arguments with William about it.

"It's thinking like that that keeps treatment programs underfunded," he'd said, and changed the subject. He'd never felt he stood a chance before the poisonous allure of horse racing. Now, sitting in front of the television set shuffling a card deck over and over again, Sasha looked up from the cards and didn't know what to say. Anna was watching her from the doorway. Cards made Anna nervous.

T h e i r s h a k y mother married twice. Sasha and Anna had different fathers and different last names and different clothes, and one was luckier than the other. "Your mother dresses that kid like a whore," Sasha's father muttered once when Sasha was thirteen or so, picking her up from her mother's house where Anna waved good-bye on the driveway in high cut-off shorts and a too-small tank top, and Sasha felt bad about him saying this but she couldn't disagree. People didn't know they were sisters and it was the shame of her life that she sometimes didn't mind this and sometimes even let it slide. Anna wore clothes that Sasha wouldn't have left the house in. Anna often had bruises and did poorly in school. Anna was suspended twice for fighting, once for graffiti. Anna ran away for days at a time. Her friends were mostly drug addicts and dropouts until she changed schools and found the jazz quartet.

Sasha hadn't minded Anna hanging around on the outskirts of the quartet but she'd always secretly thought of Anna as a bit of a basket case, wayward child, lost girl. When things were bad at their mother's house, during Sasha's increasingly infrequent visits, she tried her best to protect Anna because she thought it was her duty. She'd told Anna to go upstairs and she'd faced their mother and Anna's father on her own, scared but also a little virtuous about it, and it was shocking that after all this Anna had been the one to save her. Sasha had owed ten thousand seven hundred dollars to a man named Lizard who was threatening to beat her and then Anna appeared one night on her doorstep with Chloe and eleven thousand dollars, all that remained by then of the hundred and twenty-one thousand from Utah after three years of rent and groceries and the production of Deval & Morelli's first album. Sasha had just got off the phone with Lizard when the doorbell rang. Anna stood on her doorstep holding the tired three-year-old's hand and asked why Sasha was crying, and by late afternoon the next day Sasha's gambling debts were erased. Anna tried to pretend it was nothing. "You'd have done the same for me," she said, and through all the days of her life Sasha hoped this was true.

Sa s h a h a d been working the graveyard shift at the Starlight Diner for four years now. At first just because she was new and had no say in her schedule and they needed someone for the night shift, later because she liked it. She felt too jangled there in daylight, overexposed in the clatter of plates and voices, always falling behind. She arrived every night in time for the dinner rush. It was the time of day she most hated, but she knew it was necessary. The diner served decent dinner entrees, and it was a popular destination. The tips from the dinner rush were what made the night shift financially viable, and beyond the rush lay the promise of long quiet hours.

The nights were serene. Usually just she and Bianca or sometimes Jocelyn, Luis and Freddy in the kitchen. Bianca was in her fifties, Jocelyn forty-three. They had both been working nights for years and had identical looks of permanent tiredness. They'd told Sasha they didn't want to work days, though, and Sasha understood. It was Sasha's first night job but she already knew she didn't want to work in daylight again either.

The best part about working at night was the silence. She stepped out of the diner for a cigarette sometimes in the quietest hour, between three and four in the morning, stood alone at the edge of the shadows out back listening. Not that the silence was ever complete— cicadas, frogs in the canal across the street, rustlings in the bushes, the occasional passing truck or car— but daylight was cacophonous by comparison. The diner was never crowded at night. The pace was calm, and calm was the state that Sasha most longed for. A few coked-out nutjobs or shadow-eyed meth addicts seized by sudden excitable cravings— a strawberry milkshake! Chocolate mud pie!—staring down their forty-eighth consecutive hour without sleep, but mostly just a steady stream of truckers and strippers and insomniacs, a few night staffers from St. Mary Star of the Sea Hospital a mile away. This is what a steady life looks like, she told herself sometimes, when she was driving home in the early morning, and took pleasure in the thought. It's just that it happens at night. She liked watching the progression of darkness into first light into morning.

Daniel came in sometimes. She'd take a quick break— no managers at night, that was the other nice thing, just Sasha and one of the sympathetic night-shift veterans, either Jocelyn or Bianca— and sit with him for a few minutes. He'd started coming here about a year ago. His grandmother was in and out of St. Mary Star of the Sea. He came for dinner after visiting hours. It was startling, how much he'd changed in the years since high school. She hardly recognized him the first time she saw him after all these years, almost didn't know where to look.

"What happened to you?" he asked, the second or third night he came in, and it could have been a cruel question but he spoke so gently, he was looking at her with such kindness and sympathy that there seemed no reason not to tell the truth— he was Daniel, they'd played music together in competitions in the days of band and orchestra and the Lola Quartet, she'd known him since the eighth grade even if years had gone by when they hadn't seen one another— so she poured herself a cup of coffee and told him about the lost student-loan money, the frantic bets and the almost nightly poker games, the enormous sums of money won and lost and lost further, the boyfriends who thought she was fun at first, a novelty, a girl who drank whiskey and loved poker, until they saw that it was pathological and finally left her when they realized she couldn't stop and that their watches were missing, the miserable long slide, but she stopped when she got to the part where Anna had reappeared in Florida because she remembered that Anna was where their stories intersected. She looked at the table, flustered.

Sasha nodded. She knew that part. It was the part that always made her perversely jealous. She'd been spinning down into a tedious glazed-eyed oblivion of scratch cards and poker and Anna had been fleeing across the country with a baby and a gym bag full of money, Anna had been falling into the arms of jazz musicians and evading villains across the continental United States. Anna insisted that this life had mostly been a dull grinding shadow existence but there was a small part of Sasha that didn't entirely believe it. That life did sound horrible, but also — and she was shot through with guilt whenever she let herself think this— it sounded more exciting than Sasha's life had ever been.

"Next? Then there were two marriages in five years," Daniel said. "Four children between the two of them. Two divorces, police academy, police work, a number of promotions, a thyroid condition, and a decade of crushing guilt. Nothing about my life is exceptional except my children. May I have another cup of coffee?"

"Of course," Sasha said. She crossed the room to the coffee station and refilled two cups. Bianca nodded at her from behind the cash register. They'd been working together for years and had an understanding: unlimited breaks when the restaurant was this slow. There were only two active tables just now, both Bianca's, both eating dessert.

"I've told Anna she should try to get child support, but she says she doesn't think Chloe needs more than one parent. I think she's embarrassed that she left him and ran off with you. I don't know," Sasha said, "he had to have known she was pregnant. There were so many crazy rumors flying around about Anna just before you two left for Utah, and then he ran into me buying baby clothes. I heard he's a newspaper reporter or something now."

He came in once or twice a week after that and they talked about Anna, about Daniel's kids, about Chloe, about nothing. It wasn't romantic. It was nice to just sit with someone for a half-hour or so. She felt that he understood her; he'd fallen too. She didn't really have friends besides him and William Chandler, and she was never entirely sure if William Chandler was her friend or her sponsor.

Anna was going to night school three nights a week to qualify as a paralegal, and on those days Chloe went from school to Gloria's house. Gloria was Liam Deval's mother, the closest thing Chloe had to a grandmother, and she'd moved from the suburbs of Miami to the suburbs of Sebastian a few years earlier. Gloria had visited Liam and Anna a few times when they'd lived together in New York and seemed to consider Anna and Chloe part of her extended family.

"I don't know," Anna said. "She told Gloria she was a real estate agent, but she didn't give her a card before she left, and now Gloria can't remember what her name was. We don't know who she was. She said she was from a real estate company, then she said she was with the bank—"

"No one's found us," Sasha said. "There's no they." She was looking at Daniel now. "There's just a him. One person. Who probably hasn't left Utah." Daniel was expressionless. "Who probably has no idea where you are and probably stopped looking years ago. Everything will be fine. Listen, Daniel's here." Anna made an indecipherable noise. "Let me talk to him about this."

"Of course you can't go to the police." Daniel spoke softly, looking into his coffee. "The only police you can tell is me, and that's only because I'm your friend." He stood up from the table and left some money next to his coffee cup. "Let me think about this. I'll be back in tomorrow or the next night."

She almost asked why they couldn't go to the police, but she under stood as she watched him leave. Anna was in trouble because she'd stolen a hundred and twenty-one thousand dollars. Anna was the criminal. Once you've slipped into the underworld, it's difficult to come back out. Shadows slanting over everything.

An n a w o r k e d full-time as a file clerk at a law firm. She never missed a day of work but when Sasha came home that morning she was still in her bathrobe, red-eyed at the kitchen table with a mug of coffee in her hand. She'd been crying. Sasha wanted to go to bed but she sat across from Anna instead.

"Because he's my best friend," Anna said. Sasha had never understood this. She found it unnatural. All of her own relationships had ended in disaster and she couldn't conceive of being friends with any of her former boyfriends. "Because he said to call me if I was ever in trouble, and we talk all the time anyway. And because Gloria's his mother," Anna said. "It's his mother's house. He needs to know."

"Anna, I have to get some sleep. Let's talk about this later." Sasha stood and left her sister alone in the kitchen. Theirs was a very small house on a street of small houses. Two bedrooms, a kitchen, a living room. But the basement was finished and she had it to herself, which suited her. It was a large room with her own small bathroom and a cool cement floor, easy to darken completely against the daylight. She drew the blackout blinds, locked the door and undressed, turned on the air conditioner and lay still on the bed. The ceiling was creaking softly, Anna pacing overhead. She heard Chloe and Anna talking but couldn't make out the words. She fell asleep and dreamed of snow.

Sa s h a w o k e at two in the afternoon. The movement upstairs had ceased. She opened the door to the stairway, blinking in the light from upstairs, and the silence of the house came over her. There was a note on the kitchen table. Liam arrived in town. We're staying with him in his motel for a while. I'll call you. Love, A.

Her first thought was that now it would be easy to gamble, and the fact of that having been her first thought made her shiver. She went through the mechanical motions of coffee and breakfast, and even though she was almost always alone at this time of day— Anna at work, Chloe at her after-school program— their absence from the house was overwhelming. The light through the windows was too bright. She drank two cups of coffee, spent a long time in the shower, tidied the basement. She moved slowly, willing the time to pass, but when she was done with all of this she was still alone, there were still hours to get through before she could go to work. She called Anna, but Anna didn't answer her phone.

Sasha did a load of laundry, sat in the basement watching the dryer spin. Four fifteen. She did the ironing, hung up two clean uniforms and went outside. She stood on the front steps for a few minutes, unsure what to do with herself. It was going to rain later but for now light still hung in the air outside. She found her deck of cards and sat in front of the television set while the afternoon faded outside the window, shuffling and reshuffling and playing solitaire until her cell phone rang at four forty.

The television couldn't mask the emptiness of the house all around her. When she'd disconnected the call she went from room to room turning on every light, but it wasn't enough, so she left early and spent a half-hour drinking coffee and reading the paper in a booth before her shift started.

After the dinner rush she clocked out on break and returned to the same booth with her dinner. The rain had started. William Chandler shook his umbrella under the awning, a spray of silver droplets flying out through the air, and set it down in the foyer before he came to her.

"I am." Sasha hadn't turned the lights off before she'd left because the thought of coming home to a black and empty house was unbearable, but now she was worried about the electric bill. She thought of the house with every window ablaze through the night, a beacon on the darkened street. Rain was streaking the diner windows, light slipping down the glass. She found herself wishing for a real storm, for a hurricane, a reason to get in the car and drive away from this life. She'd read that the evacuees of Hurricane Katrina had dispersed to every corner of the country, a New Orleans diaspora from Washington state to Boston to California. Couldn't she join them? There were moments when she wanted to leave everyone, even Anna and Chloe, strike out alone into a new state and a new way of living. After everything Anna had done for her.

"Twelve," Sasha said. It had been so easy to slide back in. The tickets were so bright and as she'd carried them out to her car they'd seemed almost like real tickets, like slips of paper that might transport her to another place. The colors vibrating with possibility.

He knew her well. She'd kept them in her apron pocket. She laid them out on the table, iridescent rectangles with gray smudges where she'd scraped away the film to reveal the numbers. Across the room she was aware of Bianca watching her with concern. They'd been working together for years now and Bianca knew about the Gamblers Anonymous meetings, about the tickets, about Sasha's ruined credit rating and her fallen-down life. They'd talked about scratch-and-win tickets. Bianca had had a drinking problem when she was younger and said she understood.

She'd seen it as a sign, but of course she couldn't tell him that. One hundred twenty-one thousand, twenty-one, the mirror of twelve, twelve tickets, if this wasn't a pattern then what was? But she knew where the rabbit hole led and so she looked away from the twelve rect angles on the table and said, " Could you please take these away from me?" and when she looked back they were gone.

Sh e w a s tired at six a.m. but the suburbs were beautiful, the heat already rising and the sky streaked with pink, streetlights fading out as she drove. She was frightened but she had some hope. Daniel had come in after William had left and told her his plan. His grandmother was very close to death, he said, and he didn't like to think of death in these terms but the fact was that he was expecting an inheritance. He was going to go to Utah and negotiate with Paul. "People like him don't really want to draw attention to themselves," he'd said. "There's no reason why he wouldn't be willing to talk." She could have wept for happiness, but she'd settled for kissing him on the cheek. He was leaving for Utah the next morning.

Lakeview Crescent was in a planned development, the houses set at angles around a man-made lake with palm trees all around it, small piers out into the water. The meeting was being held in a private home. She drove slowly with the scrap of paper William had given her in her hand, reading numbers on mailboxes, but even before she read the street address of the meeting house she saw the cars out front.

"It's stocked with fish," a woman, Loreen, said. It was her house but she seemed anxious and out of place in it. She wore a white blouse and jeans and her hair was spiked up. The impression was of a punk rocker trying to impersonate a housewife. There was a white guitar leaning against a wall at the end of the room. The sleeve of her blouse slipped up as she passed Sasha a cup of coffee, and Sasha saw the edge of a tattoo — the letters "ocks" in gothic script, blurred and faded with time and sunlight. She wished she could ask to see the rest.

There was the usual round of introductions. She found herself looking out at the water, mesmerized and caffeinated, bone-tired, thinking about swimming. She wasn't a strong swimmer but she'd always enjoyed it, the shock of a new element, the moment of plunging when the water closed over her and she was suspended. She felt a little feverish, as always happened when she was exhausted, sweat between her uniform and her skin, and she realized that everyone was looking at her and that she'd heard her name at least once.

"I'm sorry," she said. "I just got off the night shift." There were sympathetic smiles but most of the people here were day workers, well dressed and polished, going to an early-morning meeting because after this they were driving to their offices, and she saw that they didn't really understand. "My name's Sasha," she said. "I used to gamble. I lost everything of value."

"I spent a student-loan payment on Lotto tickets and poker games," Sasha said, "so I had to drop out of school after a semester. I was studying English literature and finance. I know it doesn't matter anymore, but my grades that first semester were really high. I stole some watches. I stole my dad's car." She'd told the story so many times that it sounded flat to her now. A recitation about loss and poker games and tickets. "I bought some scratch-and-win tickets today," she said. "I mean yesterday. Before work."

"I did that too," Loreen said. "Just last week." The conversation shifted away from Sasha, toward scratch-and-win tickets and how they were everywhere now, every 7-Eleven and gas station and grocery store, and Sasha's attention drifted back to the lake. "It's all part of the sickness," someone said. Reflections of palm trees shimmered over the water.

"I'm fine." What could she possibly tell him? William understood gambling. He understood what it felt like to slip away from yourself and to move beyond your own control, to turn into someone you never meant to become who did things you never wanted to do, but he didn't know that her sister had stolen over a hundred thousand dollars from a drug dealer. She'd been sitting on the front steps for an hour, because she couldn't bear to be alone inside.

After the phone call she stayed on the steps for a while longer looking out at the twilight, restless and utterly alone. There were kids playing basketball in a driveway across the street. She waved when one of them looked at her, but he didn't wave back. There were hours to go before she had to leave for work but she didn't want to stay here anymore. She went back inside for her handbag and a clean uniform, draped the uniform carefully across the backseat of her car so it wouldn't get wrinkled, and left the neighborhood. She was as alone in the car as she'd been in the house, but at least the car didn't echo with anyone else's absence.

Sa s h a p a r k e d at the end of a beach access road and walked down to the water. There were two new scratch-and-win tickets in her pocket from when she'd stopped to get gas. Two was a manageable number. Two wasn't the end of the world. She wouldn't dive into the ocean tonight but it was nice to think that she could. The lights of a yacht shone over the water but other than that there was nothing, only the sea and the sand and the bright stars and Sasha, the tickets stiff and sharp-edged in the pocket of her jeans.