Twenty-Seven

It was necessary to stop twice for scratch-and-win tickets on the way to work, but Sasha didn't buy many and she managed not to spend very much. She found when she pulled into the diner parking lot that night that she had been expecting the police tape. Her hands trembled on the steering wheel but she felt no surprise. There wasn't much to see. Bright yellow tape blocking the back half of the parking lot, two officers standing around talking in the end-of-day light, a police cruiser. She clocked into the clamor of the dinner rush. Some hours later when the restaurant was quiet she found herself standing next to Bianca, but it was a moment before she could bring herself to ask.

   "No one told you yet? It's an awful thing," Bianca said. "You left what time last night? Around two thirty?" Sasha nodded. Around two thirty. "Well, early this morning," Bianca said, "maybe five a.m., Freddy goes out for a cigarette, I hear a yell. He comes running back in here, pale as a sheet, says there's someone lying in the parking lot out back, says it looks like he's been shot in the chest. Well, you know that detective comes in sometimes, friend of yours?"

"Daniel?"

   "That's the one. He came in last night after you left, and he was lingering, drinking coffee and reading the paper. Told me he couldn't sleep. Anyway, he goes out back to see what Freddy's talking about, makes everyone stay inside so they don't contaminate the crime scene, next thing you know there's cops everywhere."

   "Do they know who it was?"

   "I heard a few of them talking. They said it was some criminal from Utah, some guy with a drug record."

   "From Utah? Are you sure?"

   "You look pale, sweetheart."

   "I didn't sleep well." A new group was coming in, four men in hospital scrubs from St. Mary Star of the Sea Hospital, and Sasha crossed the room unsteadily to greet them. She gave them menus and a forced smile, took orders for drinks and moved on autopilot through the motions of her exhausting profession. There were moments that night when disaster seemed so certain that she found herself paralyzed, concentrating on breathing because breathing was all that was left, but sometimes she was above this kind of panic and floated through the hours in a state of suspended hope. The smooth surfaces of the tickets in her apron pocket every time she reached for change.

   "You okay, doll?" Bianca was watching her.

   "Fine," she said.

   "You don't look it, hon." Bianca's voice would be Anna's voice in a few decades, the low rasp that follows a lifetime of cigarettes, and it reminded Sasha of her stepmother's voice, silent now, rest in peace, her father alone. Her hand hovered in the air for just a second and then she punched in the hamburger, the fries, the macaroni and cheese, the Diet Coke and 7-Up, and on the other side of the thin adjoining wall to the kitchen an efficient small machine spit out a receipt with the order and Freddy tacked it up on the counter, the machinery of the restaurant moving into motion and Sasha at the middle of it. She was if nothing else an excellent waitress.

   "That's not nothing," Anna had said a few months ago, "and surely there's more than that." There was. This evening Sasha looked out over her tables of customers and tried to remember all the things that were transcendent. Swimming, clean passage up and down the lanes. Chloe, a delight, an elf in the school Christmas play, sitting cross-legged on the sofa reading magazines, doing backflips and cartwheels in the backyard, careening down the street on a secondhand bicycle. A bell from the kitchen: an order was ready. Sasha carried the tray of food out into the dining room.

At  e l e v e n  o'clock Sasha went outside to make a phone call. She usually went out back but that was impossible now that the space behind the diner was a crime scene, so she left through the front door and stood by the restaurant's neon sign, its bluish light flickering over the gardenia bushes. She counted thirty-eight flowers while she waited for Anna to pick up.

   "Anna," Sasha said. She'd been so breathless since Bianca had told her, since she'd seen the police tape. "Am I calling too late?"

   "You sound strange." Anna's voice was muffled and sleepy.

   "Anna, they found a body behind the restaurant. They said—" and there were tears now, humiliating but at least Anna couldn't see her and she struggled to steady her voice—"Bianca, my coworker, she said a cop told her it was some drifter from Utah."

   "From Utah?" Anna spoke a beat too late. She sounded fully awake now. " Really?"

"Anna," she said, but it wasn't possible to ask the question. "Anna . . ."

   "What are you asking me?" An edge in Anna's voice that Sasha had heard only once before, a decade ago, when Anna had called her from Utah months after Sasha had seen her last, before Sasha had even realized she'd left town— I'm going to have a baby and I'm not sure if it's Gavin's or Daniel's, do you think I'm awful Sasha? I've run away and I couldn't tell Gavin and please don't tell him either, I'm so scared— and Sasha had done her best to soothe her over the staticky connection, Shh, of course you're not awful, everything's going to be fine, Anna, we'll work it out, and after she'd hung up she'd gone to buy baby clothes at the mall in a gesture of what? Acceptance? Love? Guilt, because her sister had been gone for three months and Sasha had been too caught up in the theatrics of her own life that summer to really notice. She reminded herself that they'd been living in different houses, each with their respective fathers, but still; it was shocking, actually, how easy it had been for Anna to leave town undetected, and Sasha always knew afterward that she should have been paying more attention.

   "Are you still there?" Anna asked.

   "I'm here."

   "Then what are you asking me?"

   Sasha found herself at a loss for words. What am I asking you? I'm asking you if I was complicit in something unspeakable, because Anna, Anna, I already carry so much. The tears hot on her face.

   "That's a good question," she said. "I don't know, Anna. I don't know what I'm asking you." She disconnected and when she went back inside she put her phone in her handbag in the staff room, where she wouldn't be able to hear it ring. For just a moment she felt unreachable and protected, but of course everyone who knew her also knew where she worked.

. . .

Da n i e l  w a s  there at two in the morning, slump-shouldered and harrowed in the corner of a booth. Sasha poured two cups of coffee, milk and sugar for him, black for her. She set the coffee in front of him. He was changed, smudges of exhaustion under his eyes, a tightness around his mouth that she hadn't seen before.

   "Hell of a thing," he said after a few minutes of silence, and it was so inadequate that she laughed out loud. She felt a little giddy. He gave her a look that she recognized from gambling. It was a look she'd seen across poker tables on the faces of men and women who'd been dealt poor hands and hadn't decided whether to bluff or not. Daniel was sizing her up, but he was also afraid. They had, she realized, something in common at that moment: neither of them knew what she was going to do.

   "Sasha," he began, but stopped.

   "Yes?"

   "Sasha, I spoke with Anna earlier. She said you were a little . . . she said you seemed . . ." He had run out of words again. He looked at her helplessly for a moment and then turned his focus to pouring a third packet of sugar into his coffee and stirring it for longer than necessary.

   "How's your investigation going, Daniel?"

   "Investigation?" He looked up as if startled.

   "The body behind the diner last night. The drifter from Utah."

   "Well, it's not my investigation, but in my understanding there's no weapon, no suspect, and no motive."

   "Not much of an investigation, then, is it?"

   "Sasha," he said.

   "Where's Liam?"

   "Gone."

"Gone gone?"

   "Jesus, Sasha, he just left town. People do that sometimes. He said he was leaving for Europe."

   "Daniel," she said, "you told me not to worry about where the money came from."

   "What?" That miserable fugitive look. It wasn't just exhaustion. He looked eaten alive.

   "When you came back from Utah," she said. "All those weeks ago. You told me you'd talked to the dealer, arranged repayment of the money Anna took. I asked where the money was coming from, and you said you'd recently come into an inheritance. Do you remember telling me that?"

   "I remember." He wouldn't meet her eyes. "A man like that has a lot of enemies," he said. " Would you believe me if I said I see this all the time?"

   "Yes," she said. "People who think they're getting a payment and get shot instead, because there was never any money at all. Why did I believe you when you said there was money? I wanted so much to believe that this could actually be over, but—"

   "Sasha, think about what you're saying."

   "What am I supposed to say?"

   " Think about how the things you say might affect other people," he said. " Think about your niece."

   "I am thinking about my niece. My niece is the only reason I haven't gone to the police yet."

   "Who would believe you if you did?"

   "Daniel . . ."

   "But suppose you did go to the police," Daniel said. "Suppose a troubled and unreliable woman with a long history of compulsive gambling did go to my colleagues and tell an improbable story about a detective with an impeccable record, even if that story was somehow believed, I was thinking of something earlier. That girl who was here last night, Grace. Did you know she's a runaway whose mother's in prison?"

   "So?" But she understood, and she felt a chill down her spine.

   "So you could turn Chloe into Grace, just by saying the word. You could take a little girl who lives happily with a mother who loves her, and you could set her adrift." He was speaking very quietly, leaning close across the table. His voice was flat but his eyes were shining. " Grace has been arrested three times, Sasha. She's a runaway living with a stripper and a drug addict. I'd say there but for the grace of God goes Chloe, but it isn't really God who gets to decide this one, is it?"

   "You know that isn't what I want."

   "Then let this blow over," Daniel said. "Let this go."

   "Is that what you've done, Daniel? Let this go?"

   But Daniel paid and left without answering her.

Sa s h a  w e n t  home in the morning and took two sleeping pills that held her only just below the surface of sleep. After three hours she was awake again in the silence of the basement. A troubled and unreliable woman with a long history of compulsive gambling. The sleeping pills had left her dizzy and drugged. She was aware of the weight of her skeleton, her sluggish heart. She lay still for two more hours before she gave up on sleep, turned on the bedside lamp and tried to read but her thoughts were scattered. She showered and dressed and went upstairs into the violent daylight, sat on the front step and called William. He answered through a burst of static. She knew this meant he was far out in the field, in the swamps beyond town where reception was spotty.

   "Can you meet me?" she asked.

   "How soon?"

   "As soon as you can."

   "I'm at work all day," he said. "I could be at the diner by six."

   She wished she could go swimming but she was far too tired; she closed her eyes in the sunlight and thought for a moment she might fall asleep. Daydreams of swimming laps and weightlessness.

   Hours later in the diner she sat across a table from William, who was still in his Parks Department uniform, and it was all she could do to stay awake.

   "How was work?" she asked.

   He shrugged. "I was hunting," he said. William was only supposed to track the Burmese pythons, he was supposed to log their whereabouts and report sightings, but he'd confessed to Sasha that he'd taken to killing them. He knew how dangerous they were. He thought of those kids who lived near the canals and his heart just constricted. He was afraid of opening the paper one morning and seeing that one of the snakes had swallowed a four-year-old. He followed them through swamps with the radio transmitter, a quick loop of wire around the fleshy throat. His boss was turning a blind eye.

   "You seem agitated," he said.

   "I've been thinking about leaving town." Sasha glanced out the window. The crime scene had been dismantled, the police tape gone from the parking lot.

   "You in trouble?"

   "I haven't been gambling. Just the tickets."

   "That's not what I asked."

   "I don't know," she said. "When you were gambling, or anytime else in your life, did you ever . . ." She tried to find the right word while William watched her. "Did you ever witness anything?"

   "Sasha, what are you talking about?"

   "I think I saw something," she said.

   "Are you saying you witnessed a crime?"

   "Two nights ago."

   "Have you gone to the police?"

   "I can't."

   "Why can't you?"

   "I just can't," she said. "William, I need your help."

   "What can I do?" He had set his coffee cup down on the table.

   "I have to leave town," she said. "I have to get out, and I only know one way to raise money."

   "Don't be crazy," he said.

   "Can't you see I have no choice? I saw something." But what had she seen? A man's face tilted up toward the window, something almost plaintive in his look, a possibly imagined instant of falling as she turned away. It didn't matter what she'd seen. She'd lifted her cell phone from the table and obeyed a text message that had perhaps helped send him on his way to the next world.

   "If it saves me," she said, "then isn't it worth it?"

   He was looking at her as if he'd never seen her before.

   "When you were gambling," she said, "it was only horses, wasn't it?"

   "Only," he said.

   "I'm sorry. I just mean that that was the only kind of gambling you ever did."

   "That was the only kind that was a problem."

   "William, I need you to come with me to a poker game."

   "Sasha, please."

   "I need you to come with me to a poker game, and pull me away from the table if I'm losing too much."

   " Think about who you're asking. I can't."

   "I can't ask anyone else, William. I'm sorry." She was finding it difficult to meet his eyes. "William," she said, "I have to leave town soon, and I'm going to go to the casino before work tomorrow whether you'll meet me there or not. But I hope you'll meet me, because I need your help."

   "I can't help you," he said. "You're asking too much."

I n  t h e  casino it was always night. Sasha stood for a few minutes near the door, afraid to go further, adrift on the wild patterns of the carpet. She had slept for only three hours after the end of her shift and then woken in tears from a dream she couldn't remember, heart racing. She felt slightly delirious. It had been some years since she'd been here and she'd forgotten the sounds of this place, the chimes and bells of machines, the voices and laughter. The slot machines, row upon row of men and women staring at screens and pulling levers, cherries and pineapples and bananas lining up and falling away before them. Beyond the slot machines she stood for a moment by the roulette table, watching the game. An impassive woman in a white shirt and black trousers spun the wheel, a dial of smooth heavy wood that gleamed under the lights.

   This was what had caught her once, and held her here: once you stepped beyond the slot machines— and even these held a certain glinting allure— the casino was beautiful. White-and-gold ceilings arcing high between mahogany pillars, complicated parquet floors and thick carpets. When everything else around her had been squalid, there had always been this. This place had always held beauty even when it was killing her and the beauty reached her even now, even knowing what she did about how much could be lost here.

   Sasha walked under mahogany archways into the hush of the poker room, where games were playing out at a dozen tables, bought into a no-limit game and sat with her chips in a small tower before her. After all these years of effort, of Gamblers Anonymous meetings, she was disappointed by an inescapable sense of homecoming.

   The blinds were laid and the cards dealt. For a moment Sasha didn't want to look at her hand. She hesitated for so long that the man sitting beside her— a pinch-faced small person in a cowboy hat— glanced curiously at her. But she did look, finally, and it wasn't terrible. A jack and a nine, both hearts. There was hope there, or she could still fold and not have lost very much. Sasha raised a small bet and put in twenty, the first chips sliding away from her over the felt. She half-wanted to snatch them back and leave immediately before she lost anything important, but she forced herself to sit still. The flop was a two, a five, a queen. Nothing enormously useful, but the fourth card— the turn— was a ten of hearts and she felt the old quickening. It would be difficult, she realized, to hold on to herself here. She was thinking of Delirious Things, of northern lights and snow. She would go to Alaska! A half-formed idea that became a plan between the turn and the river card. She had always loved Florida but if her life was changing into something unrecognizable then she wanted Florida's opposite, she wanted winter and cold landscapes under northern lights. She would be alone there, but she was alone now. The river was the eight of hearts. She had the best hand and won three hundred dollars.

   Her next two hands were useless and she folded, and after this she lost track of time. There was the smooth wood at the edge of the table under her fingertips, a faint scent of orange oil, the clicking of chips. She glanced up and the person next to her was now a large woman with a clipped northern accent. Sasha hadn't noticed when the man with the cowboy hat had left, or she'd noticed him leave but had forgotten it. There were tells and bluffs all around her, patterns in the cards. The stacks of hard disks by her hands rose and fell and rose again.

   Her table was the nearest to the bar. She looked up and across the game and saw William Chandler watching her from a barstool, a jacket over his Parks Department uniform. He was sipping an amber liquid caught between ice cubes.

   "I hoped I wouldn't find you here," he said. She wasn't sure if she'd heard him or if she'd read his lips, but she was certain of what he'd said to her. There was something unreal about the room now, the lights too bright, sound muffled.

   "I know," she said. "I'm sorry." She knew she'd spoken aloud, but no one at the table glanced at her. The man across from her wore reflective glasses and a baseball cap, most of his face hidden. She couldn't tell where he was looking, so she tried not to look at him.

   Sasha had a good hand, a king and a jack of spades, and the flop held a ten of the same suit. She held her breath. The turn was the nine of spades, the river was the queen and she'd just won, she realized, an extraordinary sum of money. The chips moved across the table toward her. She assembled them into careful towers. She was up two thousand four hundred fifty dollars. In the next game she lost seven hundred of this but it came back to her quickly. She couldn't remember having asked for a glass of water but one had appeared beside her chips, and she realized dimly that it was William who had set it there. Impossible to tell, in this room without clocks or windows, how long she had been here now. It had to have been a while, all these hands and the cast at the table around her still changing, the large northern woman with the clipped accent replaced by a larger red-faced man. She tried to remember all the hands she'd been dealt, but couldn't. William was watching her from the bar. She nodded at him in what she hoped was a reassuring way.

   In her new state, she decided, Alaska or someplace else with snow, she would clean the wood of her home with orange oil. She liked the scent of it. The cards in her hands now were a two and a six, unmatched suits, so she folded and let her gaze slide over the room. This room was the promise: if you win enough at these tables you might move forever through rooms like this one, places with solid shining mahogany and warm colors, potted palm trees, high ceilings. All the interiors of your life might be elegant after this, opulent and always clean. Her next hand contained a pair of aces that brought towers of chips sliding over the table toward her and it was some time after this, although she wasn't sure how long, when she heard William Chandler's voice behind her.

   "Sasha," he said, "it's time to stop."

   His voice broke the spell. She looked at the pile of chips before her and realized, waking from the dream, that she was up a little over six thousand dollars.

   "Fold," she said. The game was almost over. She watched the showdown, the dealer's hands sliding the stacks of chips toward the man with the reflective glasses, who broke into an exuberant grin. Her legs were unsteady when she stood. William took her elbow. He helped her cash out her chips and in the gray twilight of the parking lot they stood together by his car. She felt dazed and emptied out.

   " Thank you, William." Her voice was hoarse. "What time is it?"

   " Eight o'clock," he said. "You working tonight?"

   "I got someone to cover for me," she said. "I don't have to be at work till ten. I didn't know how much time I'd need."

   "What now, then?"

"Let's go to the ocean."

"The ocean?"

   "I'm leaving Florida soon," Sasha said. "I don't know when I'll see it again."

   "Okay, then, the ocean. You have a spot in mind?"

   "There's an access point at the end of Cordoba Boulevard."

   "Fine," he said. "I'll follow you."

   She started her car. These mechanical motions, automatic pilot. William's headlights in the rearview mirror. She usually felt more sharpness and purpose in a car than elsewhere but now she drifted through the twilight, palm trees approaching and falling away in the windshield, her headlights a thin glaze on the half-dark streets. Stay awake. Stay awake. She had to remind herself to blink but she felt sleep crowding close around her, a chaotic darkness at the periphery. It would be easy to slide. She wondered where Anna was, but that thought was pure agony and she shied quickly away from it. The six thousand seventy dollars from the casino were divided here and there on her body, some in the zipped inside pocket of her jacket, some in her handbag, some in her sports bra between her breasts. These tropical streets where she'd lived all her life. The long passage down Cordoba and the darkened sea at the end. She parked the car and walked out on the sand in the still salt air. There were three condominium towers by the beach here, but the units hadn't sold. Almost all of the windows were dark, one or two lights shining high above.

   "I'm going somewhere where the air's lighter," she said to William, when she heard his footsteps on the sand beside her.

   " Where you planning on going?"

   "I'm going to Alaska," she said. "Or as close to Alaska as I can get before my car breaks down."

   "When?" "Soon. Maybe tomorrow or the next day." "Then I might not see you again," William said.

At  n i n e  forty-five Sasha was at the diner, reflexively checking the booths and tables for Daniel or Gavin as she walked to the staff room. Neither was there.

   "Sweetheart," Bianca said, "you look like hell."

   "I had insomnia." Sasha moved past her and locked the staff bathroom door behind her. She looked worse than she would have guessed. Her eyes were bloodshot and glassy, her stare unblinking. Her lipstick was gone. There was a shine of sweat on her skin, smudges of mascara at the corners of her eyes. She washed her face, stripped out of her uniform and gave herself a cold sponge bath with paper towels. She tried not to look at herself in the mirror. She dressed and smoothed out the wrinkles with a damp paper towel as best she could, combed her hair and pinned it up behind her head, carefully reapplied her makeup. When she was done she thought she looked presentable, except for the eyes.

   "You'd tell me, wouldn't you, if something were wrong," Bianca said.

   "No," Sasha said, "I think I've been enough of a burden."

   The dinner rush was nearly over, a few stray customers here and there in the booths. Her apron and her bra were full of money, hundred-dollar bills warm against her skin. She stood by the cash register, listening to the muffled clatter of Freddy and Luis washing up from the dinner rush in the kitchen. She picked up dirty dishes and dropped off dessert menus, carried a towering slice of New York cheesecake that seemed to float before her across the room. Sasha admired the gleam of lights in melting ice cream as she set a banana split on a table. Her exhaustion was taking on the force of gravity. She drank cup after cup of coffee and it helped but her heart was racing, spots in front of her eyes when she turned her head too quickly. She was trying not to look out the windows, because it was possible that beneath the surface of the reflections she might see the man's face looking up at her from outside like a corpse in deep water. The idea of swimming. She went to the restroom to splash cold water on her hands. All this money pressed close against her body but the idea of going out on her own was terrifying.

   " Where are your parents?" Bianca asked. They were standing together by the cash register, a momentary lull. The question was unexpected. It took Sasha a moment to compose her thoughts.

   "I don't know anymore," Sasha said. "Why?"

   "It would've been my mother's birthday today," Bianca said. "I've been thinking about parents, I suppose."

   "What was your mother like?"

   "She was kind. She worked hard. She raised five kids. Liked soap operas and calla lilies. Yours?"

   "My mother isn't any good. I haven't spoken to her since high school."

   "What do you mean, she isn't any good?"

   "She just never was."

   "Where's your father?"

   "He doesn't talk to me," Sasha said. "I stole his car and sold it for gambling money."

   "But you're better now, aren't you?"

   "I don't know," Sasha said. "I'm trying to be better."

   It occurred to her around midnight that this might be her last night here. The idea of departure cast the diner in a vivid light, a picture coming into focus. She felt suddenly awake, the fog lifted. The brilliant red banquettes and the gleam of chrome under the lights, pebbled Formica tabletops and all the sounds she barely heard anymore, the clatter from the kitchen and the voices of other diners and the passage of cars on Route 77. She looked around, blinking, she caught Bianca's eye and smiled.

   "I just want you to know," she said, "I've always enjoyed working with you."

   "Well, thank you, sweetheart." Bianca didn't smile back. "You sound like you're saying your good-byes."

   "I don't know," Sasha said. "Maybe."

   She moved like a ghost through the caffeinated hours.