1991–2003
Long before she became Sophia, desired by men and envied by women, she was Abigail. Her middle name, which everyone preferred. Even her mother.
The sad thing was that Abigail loved her mother, in spite of everything. If Joanna Lake had been bad all the time it would have been easier: Abigail could have hated her, simply. But Joanna wasn’t bad all the time. Sometimes she was wonderful. Or at least had wonderful impulses.
“Let’s go somewhere,” she said to Abigail one afternoon. It was a raw Philadelphia day, the wind hurling itself around in the rain. Joanna was in bed under the comforter, shivering. A loose windowpane rattled in the room next door. Abigail was supposed to be at school, but Joanna had been sick when she got home late in the night. Abigail had found her asleep on the bathroom floor with her hair in a sour splatter of puke and her makeup in ugly streaks on her face. She’d been fully dressed in the clothes she’d gone out in, skinny jeans and the short green leather jacket over a gray roll-neck sweater, silver hoop earrings, and the dozen clinking bangles Abigail loved. Even passed out, Joanna’s magical glitteriness had still been plain to see, but spoiled and dirty. It had made Abigail think of the Christmas tree she’d seen that time stuffed into a garbage can, still with its tinsel crushed and clinging.
“Where?” Abigail asked. She was gathering up clothes from the bedroom floor. It had been her plan to get quarters from Joanna for the laundromat down the block, where the owner, Mr. Lee, knew her and usually gave her a Coke or a donut for free. She’d been wearing her current clothes, including the torn red parka that was too small for her, for three days. Besides, the laundromat was filled with dreamy heat. The house, on the other hand, was freezing since the gas had been cut off. You could see your breath.
“Anywhere,” Joanna said. “The world’s our oyster.”
“I want to go to school.”
Joanna sighed. “For Christ’s sake,” she said.
“Okay, let’s go somewhere. I just—”
“No, no, I wouldn’t dream of it. Why would you want to go somewhere with me when you could be doing fucking algebra or whatever?”
“I didn’t mean it. Let’s go somewhere. I really want to.”
Joanna stared at Abigail as if she hated her for being her only friend. In these moments of wonderful impulses the girl knew everything could go wrong. She had to be careful.
So she kept still and said nothing. Her mother’s eyes were fierce and pleading. Then they filled with tears and Joanna rolled over onto her back.
Abigail put the clothes down on the floor. She wanted to get into bed and wrap her arms around Joanna. No matter how many times she saw her mother cry, she never got used to it. It was as if her chest cracked down the middle and a hurrying emptiness filled her.
Instead she went to the kitchen, stood on the stool to reach the counter, poured a cup of coffee from the pot (lots of cream and sugar), and took it back to the bedroom.
“Mommy?”
Joanna was staring at the ceiling’s brownish stain from where the roof had leaked last winter. The stain was roughly the shape of an elephant. Abigail imagined it trapped there, separated from its normal elephant world. She felt sorry for it.
“I made you some coffee.”
No reply. Abigail set the cup down on the nightstand and went to find her mother’s purse. It was still in the bathroom. Purple fake leather. With its zipper open it was like a soft face with only a mouth. She hunted through the makeup and loose change until she found a crumpled pack of Winstons and a yellow plastic lighter. There were three bent cigarettes left. She took the pack and the lighter to her mother.
“Here’s your cigarettes,” she said.
The last time she’d done this, a couple of days ago, Joanna had held her and kissed her and said, Oh, honey, you’re my angel, do you know that? You’re my guardian angel. For Abigail it had been as if the icy house filled suddenly with warm sunlight. But then the phone had rung and her mother had put on her makeup in a hurry and gone out and not come back until the following day. When she went out that way, with urgency and a kind of sheen to her face, it was as if Abigail had stopped being a person and had instead become just an ordinary thing, like a cushion or a shoe or an old TV magazine. It was as if her mother didn’t even know she was there.
“Mommy?”
Joanna hadn’t moved. She was still staring at the elephant.
“Get me my purse, would you?”
This was for the other things, Abigail knew. The medicines. She’d brought the coffee and the cigarettes but she’d left the medicines in the purse. She didn’t know why she didn’t trust them. They definitely made her mother better, sometimes happy and full of a sort of bright craziness—but there was something about the whole business Abigail didn’t like. It was as if the medicines knew something about her mother that she, Abigail, did not.
Nonetheless, she went and got the purse.
“Go look out the front window and tell me if the car’s still there,” Joanna said.
Abigail knew her mother didn’t like to take the medicines in front of her. She also knew the car was still there. This was just to get her out of the room. But she went anyway.
“I’ve thought where we can go,” Joanna said, as she pulled the battered Ford out of the driveway.
“Where?”
“You’ll see. It’s a surprise.”
The medicine had done its thing. Joanna had put on fresh makeup and perfume, and when she drove it was as if everything about driving was a delight to her.
“Where?”
“You’ll see. You’ll like it.”
“Have we got any money?”
“Some.”
Abigail didn’t ask what she wanted to ask. But her mother had the magic now.
“Enough for a hot dog and soda, probably,” Joanna said.
They went to the recently opened New Jersey State Aquarium across the Delaware River. It was an ugly concrete building with a white dome on top, and inside was a strange smell and a lot of echoey noise bouncing around like at the indoor swimming pool.
Abigail was nervous when they had to pay. Sometimes her mother would hunt through her purse and find she didn’t have enough. But this time it was okay. Abigail decided she wouldn’t say anything about a hot dog or a soda unless her mother asked.
“Do they have sharks here?”
“I guess so. I guess they have everything. Turtles, dolphins, jellyfish, hell, maybe they’ve got a whale.”
“A whale?” Abigail had school facts about whales. Beneath the skin lies a layer of fat called blubber. Whales can be up to 110 feet long and weigh up to 150 tons. The thought of one of them being in a glass tank in a building made her feel queasy.
“Well, maybe not a whale,” Joanna said. “What do you want to see first?”
“Sharks.”
“But what if you fall in?”
“I won’t fall in.”
“But what if I push you in?”
“I’ll pull you in with me!”
“You will, will you? We’ll see about that, missy.”
Her mother was glimmery with the magic. When she smiled it filled Abigail with excitement. But always in the excitement was the thought of the medicine and the fear of when it stopped working. She tried not to think about it.
There were no sharks. There wasn’t anything apart from fish, and most of them were gray or brown. All of them were ugly, with bottom jaws longer than their top ones. They looked as if they were in a bad mood, though they just kept gliding back and forth in the tanks, doing nothing.
For a while the magic lasted, though Abigail could see her mother was only pretending to find the fish interesting. Abigail wasn’t interested either. Common carp. American shad. White sucker. Brown bullhead. They all looked pretty much the same. Only the catfish were different, with their whiskers that made them look like Chinese wizards. Her mother got tired of reading the names. “You read them,” she said (as the magic wobbled). “You’re the one reads everything.” Then she seemed to catch the wobble and steady it. “Look at this dude,” she said, pointing to a largemouth bass. He’s like: ‘I hate this goddamned place. I get out of here, I’m going to Florida.’”
That became the game: Abigail would point to a fish and her mother would do an impersonation of what it was saying to itself. She did different voices. It was funny.
They were leaving the aquarium when Joanna remembered the hot dog and soda.
“It’s okay, Mommy, I’m not hungry.”
“Don’t be such a drama queen. You can have a hot dog or a soda. Which do you want?” Her voice had changed. The words “which do you want?” made Abigail’s throat tighten with a feeling of selfishness. It was like she was doing something mean to her mother.
“Come on, which? I don’t have all day.”
Abigail’s mouth was dry. The thought of eating a hot dog made her feel sick. But she wanted to go to the bathroom (she didn’t want to say that, because the restrooms might be miles away) and if she drank a Coke that would be worse.
“Hot dog, please,” she said.
She had only taken two bites by the time they got back into the Ford. Her mother was moving briskly now, as if the trip to the aquarium had made her late for something. The day had darkened and the wind rocked the car.
Joanna turned the ignition.
Nothing happened.
Joanna sat back in the seat and closed her eyes, breathing hard through her nose. Abigail kept trying to think of something to say. She was afraid of saying anything, but her mother’s silence and closed eyes and hard breathing were unbearable. It had started to rain.
“Could we…”
“Could we what?”
“Could we take the bus?”
Joanna opened her eyes. She laughed. “The bus?” she said. “Oh sure. Or what about a taxi?”
Abigail knew she’d said the wrong thing.
“Shall we take a taxi?” Joanna said.
Abigail shook her head. No.
“No,” Joanna said, smiling. Her forehead was shiny with sweat, though the car was so cold. “No, maybe we won’t take a taxi. You know why?”
Abigail didn’t answer.
“Because we just spent the last of the fucking money on your fucking hot dog. Which you’re not even fucking eating.”
Abigail said nothing. Hot tears hurried out of her eyes. The empty space in the car, the whole empty space of the day and the rain and the darkness pressed around her. Weirdly, in the middle of everything, it made her picture a whale in a huge tank of dirty water, not moving.
Her mother went through her purse, throwing every item one by one onto the floor. She found a quarter and a dime.
“Stay here,” she said, and got out of the car.
“Where are you going?”
Joanna just slammed the door and walked away.
The only thing Abigail could think to do was finish the hot dog. If she ate the hot dog at least her mother wouldn’t hate her for not eating it. It was almost impossible. Each bite made a bigger, drier ball in her mouth, and each time she forced it down her throat got tighter and more tears came.
She couldn’t see out the windshield for the rain, which was heavier now, so she rolled down the window. Her mother was standing at an unsheltered pay phone across the parking lot, talking fast into the receiver, getting drenched.
Zeke came and picked them up in his car. Abigail didn’t like him. He had a magic of his own, soft and musical, and when he talked it was like a lullaby—but the sort that made Abigail think that if she fell asleep she’d never wake up again. His skin was smooth and brown and he had strange marks tattooed on each of his knuckles. His car smelled different than theirs, a sour cigarette odor something like herbs and molasses. He blinked slowly, his long eyelashes meeting and parting with a kind of sly tenderness.
They were still a ways from home when Abigail began to feel she couldn’t hold her pee any longer. The whole ride back to Philadelphia she’d been in agony. She was terrified of asking to stop and terrified of wetting herself in Zeke’s car.
Meanwhile Zeke and her mother said things she didn’t understand.
“Quid pro quo. That’s Latin. Know what it means?”
“I can guess.”
“You got a fat tab already, girl.”
“You know I’m good for it.”
Zeke laughed.
They pulled up in front of the house. Neither Zeke nor Joanna made a move to get out.
“Mommy? Can I have the keys? I need the bathroom.”
“You got heat?” Zeke said to Joanna.
“No.”
“Jesus.”
“Mommy? Please can I have the keys?”
Zeke looked up and down the street.
“There’s heat in here.”
“Yeah. Sure, what the hell.”
“Momm-eeee!” Abigail wailed. Her legs were crossed so tightly her thighs ached.
“Give the kid the keys, for Christ’s sake. She’s gonna piss herself.”
Abigail got out. Uncrossing her legs made her feel dizzy and wide open, as if she were on stilts. She went to her mother’s side window. Joanna hunted in her purse. Seconds. She couldn’t hold it. She couldn’t. Not one second more. The window rolled down.
“Go in and stay upstairs,” Joanna said.
Abigail snatched the keys and ran. There was a wooden side porch and a door that led into the back hall and the downstairs toilet. She would make it. She would.
But in her hurry she tripped on the top porch step. Without time to get her hands from between her legs she went thud-rasp flat on her face on the boards—and the pain and shock made her let go of holding her bladder—and she wet herself.
The first moments were pure joy. Hot pee spread through her jeans and she didn’t care about anything. She felt her face smiling, even.
Then the warm wetness began to cool and the joy went and she tasted blood in her mouth. Two splinters of pain shot up the length of her nose. She didn’t stop peeing. Just lay there and let it come.
She got to her feet. Her face was hot in the cold air, nose and mouth throbbing. She looked back to the car to check if her mother had seen what happened. But Joanna was talking to Zeke.
After a moment Zeke put his hand on the top of Joanna’s head and guided it down toward his lap until it disappeared from Abigail’s view.
Despite her ravaged education, Abigail learned and understood things quickly. Their house in Harrowgate had belonged to Joanna’s mother, who had left it to Joanna. They’d been losing it ever since they moved in, and one day when Abigail was eleven they lost it for good. Nothing was said about it. Money and possessions traveled in one direction only: away from them. One minute they were in the house, the next they were in a bare apartment in which the sole fragment of beauty was the blue flame in the immersion heater.
Abigail accepted the changes, adapted, found whatever new minimal footholds were available, assumed it would all change again. She was a skinny girl with her mother’s blond hair and green eyes and a fierce privacy that put people off her. She had a big, erratic intelligence. When she realized Joanna was a drug user and a prostitute and by most people’s standards at least half-crazy, she realized, too, she could feel sorry for her own younger self, the four- or six- or eight-year-old Abigail who’d had to cope, without knowledge. She realized this, but turned away from it, as if it were a dead thing.
She missed too much school and, despite her intelligence, never racked up the hours vital to putting the various things she learned together. Her life was one of forced practicality, in which all actions derived from a single goal: keeping Joanna alive. Which meant food, the laundromat, cleaning up vomit, lying to people, stealing. She had to keep her mother alive because her mother was all she had.
Joanna, meanwhile, came in and out of reason, manageability, presence. There were periods in which she willed herself into competence. Even, occasionally, jobs: washing hair in a salon; waitressing; cleaning. For a while she helped Mr. Lee in the laundromat. None of it lasted.
Still, her beauty held, precariously. The blond hair and green eyes emerged from the wreckages more or less intact, renewable. Her glamor was a fortune resistant to all but the most reckless spending. And even by the time Abigail turned fourteen the spending wasn’t, quite, reckless.
Then, in the winter of 1999, everything changed.
“Honey, you got something to eat tonight?”
They were in the bathroom, Joanna drying herself, Abigail in the tub. The latest was that Joanna was dancing at a club called Jezebel’s in Frankford. An attempt to shed Zeke, whose protection skills weren’t what they had been. Abigail knew her mother couldn’t possibly just be dancing, though Joanna sometimes came home bearing traces of glitter and smelling thrillingly of dry ice.
“Ariel’s bringing pizza,” Abigail said.
“Girls’ night in, huh?” Joanna said.
This friend, Ariel, wasn’t quite mythical, but Abigail had exaggerated their relationship, which only very occasionally involved hanging out for a couple of hours after school.
“Well, at least you can watch a movie this time,” Joanna said.
The television was out of hock as of yesterday. Courtesy of Jezebel’s they had light, heat, hot water.
Joanna got dressed, plainly by her standards, in a pink puffer jacket from thrift, jeans, and shit-kickers. Her dancing gear was at Jezebel’s. Abigail leaned against the radiator, looking out of the window. The black streets were gashed with frozen slush. Tiny snowflakes swirled in the dark.
“Don’t stay up too late,” Joanna said from the doorway.
Abigail spent the evening in what she supposed other people would think was a strange way. It had become her habit to eavesdrop on the building’s inhabitants. Best, of course, were the overheard conversations. Often very ordinary, but occasionally something valuable.
You knew I didn’t want to.
No, I didn’t.
You knew I didn’t want to and you went ahead anyway.
You’re talking crazy.
You like it better that way, if you know I don’t want to.
For God’s sake.
This was the other world, with sex running through it like a dark river. She’d been masturbating regularly for some years now. Initially it had been nothing more than instinctive physical self-comfort. Later it was attended by images from magazines and the Adult section of the video store—and eventually by the inevitable shock of knowing, really knowing, that this was her mother’s life, too. Abigail didn’t know what to do with the feeling of empty sickness and compelling excitement. The guilt just seemed to heighten her pleasure. It was as if she’d come into a dirty inheritance, a wretched legacy that had been waiting for her since birth.
After working her way up all four floors (nothing particularly good tonight) Abigail went out onto the building’s roof through a security door that should have been locked but never was.
This, too, was something she liked to do, stand up there under the sky and know that below her all the overheard lives were going on, and to imagine herself and her mother, one day soon, getting far away from the city, to a time and place where everything she knew now would be a distant memory.
She was asleep on the couch in the small hours when she heard the apartment door open and her mother, breathing heavily, slam it behind her. It was still night. The snow had stopped.
“Mom?”
Joanna stumbled in the dark to the bathroom and turned on the light, then the shower.
Abigail went to look. Her mother was sobbing, pulling off her clothes. With the exception of the puffer jacket, not the clothes she’d gone out in. These were clothes Abigail had never seen: a short dress of green spangles and a pair of white knee boots. One of the white boots had a splash of red down its side. More red on Joanna’s thigh. Abigail knew it was blood.
“Mom, what happened? Are you hurt?”
Joanna didn’t say anything. The tiny bathroom was filling up with steam.
“Mom where is it? Where are you hurt?”
Joanna yanked the dress over her head. She wasn’t wearing any bra or panties. She was shaking.
“I’m not hurt,” she said. “Oh God, Abby. Oh God.” She covered her face with her trembling hands. The unstained boot was still on. “Shit,” Joanna whispered, behind her hands. “Shit, shit, shit.”
“Please tell me what’s wrong,” Abigail said.
Joanna uncovered her face. Her green eyes were alive and desperate, her skin moist. She put a hand on Abigail’s shoulder for balance as she lifted her leg to unzip and pull off the boot. “I’m so stupid,” she said. “I’m so fucking stupid. Let me … I need to get in.”
She pulled back the curtain and stepped into the tub for the shower. But a moment later she whipped the curtain open again, stepped out, and pushed past Abigail. She dropped to her knees and threw up in the toilet.
Abigail, as she had many times before, held her mother’s head. It was a strange thing, she supposed, to know the weight of your mother’s head like that, the way it felt with heat in the bone and the brain inside and vomit coming out of the mouth.
The next day Joanna didn’t leave the house. Nor did she tell Abigail what had happened. All she would say was that there had been an accident and someone had got hurt.
At the club?
No. Afterward. At a friend’s place.
What friend?
Just a friend. Jesus Christ. Stop interrogating me.
Joanna was horribly alert. She couldn’t sit still. She called Zeke twenty times, but he didn’t answer.
On the morning of the following day, Abigail woke to find her mother gone. All her clothes were still there. Only her purse and the jacket were missing.
Abigail walked up and down in the apartment. She spent an hour at the window, looking out into the wet streets, where slivers of frozen slush remained, dirtied by the traffic.
It had been dark for an hour when Joanna came back. Her hair was damp and Abigail could smell the cold on her skin. Joanna went straight to the bedroom and took the battered Nike tote bag from the wardrobe.
“Pack your clothes,” she said to Abigail.
“Where are we going?”
“Never mind. Just do it.”
“Mom, I don’t—”
“For Christ’s sake just do as I tell you!” Joanna screamed.
There was a knock at the door. Joanna froze. Grabbed Abigail and put her finger to her lips.
More knocking. Louder this time. Then a man’s voice:
“Police, open up.”
Joanna stared at Abigail, not seeing her.
“Joanna, for God’s sake we know you’re in there. We just watched you come in. Don’t make us break it down.”
Joanna exhaled, heavily, as if she’d been holding her breath for a long time. She straightened up, smiled at Abigail, sadly, then went to open the door.
It was just one guy, with his badge held out. He wasn’t in uniform. He was slightly shorter than Joanna, with broad shoulders and narrow black eyes. He looked like a Native American who’d cut off his long hair and forced himself into regular clothes. His face was slightly pockmarked on the left side. He had beautiful hands and a big wristwatch like the ones divers wore. Abigail wondered why he’d said “we.”
“Detective Garner, Homicide,” he said. “Need to ask you some questions.”
“About what?” Joanna said.
“About Tuesday night.”
Pause.
“Joanna, we know you were there. We can talk here or we can talk at the station. Up to you.”
Joanna let him in. The detective saw Abigail standing in the bedroom doorway. He smiled at her, showing perfectly straight white teeth. The smile changed his whole face.
“Playing hooky?” he said.
“She’s sick,” Joanna said, closing the front door. “Honey, go in the bedroom while I talk to the detective.”
In the bedroom Abigail sat on the unmade bed staring at the worn gray carpet, listening to the murmur of their voices. She couldn’t hear what they were saying, but it was mainly her mother talking. Until the last few minutes, when the detective spoke, very quietly, for what seemed a long time.
The apartment door opened and closed. Abigail heard the detective walk down the hall. It sounded as if he were trailing his fingernails against the wall. She listened until she was sure he was going down the stairs. Then she went in to see her mother.
Joanna was sitting on the couch holding her knees, gently.
“I’m in big fucking trouble,” she said.
“What is it?”
Joanna just shook her head. Closed her eyes. Opened them. She looked as if she was going to cry.
“Is he going to send you to jail?” Abigail asked. She had a clear image of her mother stepping into a barred cell, the door closing slowly behind her. A clang of metal.
“No,” Joanna said. “He’s going to help us.”
There was initially a strange period when Detective Lawrence Garner, “Larry,” was simply Joanna’s boyfriend. For a while he showed up at the apartment two or three times a week. On more than one occasion he took Joanna and Abigail out for dinner.
“I don’t like him,” Abigail told her mother, when they’d come home from one of these uncomfortable evenings at a Korean restaurant.
“Why?” Joanna asked. “What’s wrong with him?”
“You don’t like him.”
Joanna laughed. There was a brittle brightness to her around Larry, around the subject of Larry. To Abigail it was as if her mother was terrified of something and had convinced herself that as long as she didn’t look at it then it couldn’t really be there.
“What a thing to say,” Joanna said. “Of course I like him.”
“You hate him. It’s like he stinks and you’re holding your nose.”
Joanna laughed again. It wasn’t even her real laugh. “You’re crazy,” she said.
“He hates you, too.”
“What?”
“He hates both of us. You know he does.”
Joanna’s smile faltered. Since Larry, she had a new version of the magic, the same unreliable glitteriness, but with panic right underneath it.
“Don’t be silly,” she said. “He’s looking out for us.” Then she forced herself back into brightness. “I wish you’d let me cut your hair,” she said. “You look like a goddamned gypsy.”
One night not long afterward, Abigail woke in the small hours and heard her mother and Larry laughing in the living room. There was an odd atmosphere, as if the apartment were alive and had whispered something to her while she’d slept. She went to the bedroom door and opened it, carefully.
Larry was sprawled on the couch, still wearing his shoulder holster, though his red shirt was half unbuttoned, showing plump chest muscles so smooth and hard they looked plastic, like a G.I. Joe’s. He had a glass of scotch in his hand, ice cubes tinkling. Joanna was down on her knees, cutting lines of coke on the coffee table, her skirt bunched up around her waist. She tucked her hair behind her ear and looked up at him. Larry opened his mouth and curled his tongue up like a happy lizard.
School (Abigail was there more now that her mother had Larry on the scene) was an escape and an imprisonment. Escape because in spite of everything her mind went into some of the stuff. She was good at biology, math, geography. (Later she would theorize that she liked these subjects because each of them in its own way took her far away from the regular world: to the invisible molecular level; to the clean realm of numbers; to countries and people thousands of miles away.) More than anything, though, she loved literature. The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. The Old Man and the Sea. To Kill a Mockingbird. The Pearl. She read The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter five times. Before she’d begun reading seriously, she’d assumed half her thoughts and feelings were uniquely insane. But it turned out other people had such thoughts and feelings, too. In spite of this—or perhaps because of it—she kept her mouth shut in her English class and scored lousily on her papers. For her it was private and inarticulable. While she was reading them, the books and their characters were living, fluid things. Talking and writing about them in class killed them.
So much for escape. School was an imprisonment because she had no friends and most of the teachers seemed afraid of her. They treated her as if she were a bomb that might go off if they got too close.
Ariel had abandoned her. The two of them had been to a party where Abigail had hit a guy in the head with a big glass ashtray because she’d overheard him call her mother a whore.
One strange thing happened. It was her last day of junior high. She was coming down the steps that led out into the parking lot when the strap of her shoulder bag, which had been rotting for months, snapped. The bag dropped and spat out some of its contents. Abigail got down on her haunches to retrieve them. When she stood up she saw Daniel Coulter leaning on his motorbike, watching her. Daniel was two years older. His kid sister was in the year below her. Abigail remembered Daniel in the way she remembered all the older boys who had gone on to senior high, as remote figures utterly unconnected to her. Daniel beckoned to her. As if it were a movie, Abigail found herself checking over her shoulder that there wasn’t someone else he was beckoning to. There wasn’t. Daniel grinned and repeated the gesture. She went over to him. She knew it was going to be something unpleasant, since he was cool—had been cool even two years ago—but she couldn’t stop herself.
“Anyone fucking you yet?” he asked her.
This struck her as such an outlandish question that she thought she must have misheard.
“What?” she said.
Daniel laughed. He had a glamorous face, with blue eyes and shoulder-length dark hair. A silver hoop earring.
“I said,” he repeated, smiling, “is anyone fucking you yet?”
She wanted to walk away. Her face was hot, her legs strands of chiffon. But he stared at her, full of brightness. She was confined to a terrible privacy with him.
“No,” she said.
Daniel shook his head, smiling. He glanced down at the ground, then back up at her. “Someone should be,” he said.
Abigail was speechless. She couldn’t stop staring at him.
“Listen,” he said. “I’m doing you a favor. Get your shit together. Put on some goddamned makeup. Stop dressing like a fucking tramp. Shave your pussy and come see me when you’re ready. Now exit.”
Abigail walked away. Not because she’d been told to but because her impulse to walk away finally got the better of her.
Was it a joke? No one had ever said anything like that to her before. She didn’t consider herself pretty. It was a joke. Some ruse to shame her in public. Daniel would wait until she was naked, then open the door for everyone to look and laugh. This was what she told herself.
But that night when Joanna was out with Larry, Abigail took a shower and blow-dried her long hair and put on some of her mother’s makeup. Eyeshadow, liner, mascara, bloodred nail polish and lipstick. When she’d finished she stood naked in front of the full-length mirror on the back of the bathroom door.
She was slightly astonished. She was slim, and her breasts were small and firm. She had Joanna’s features and coloring, the rich blond hair and green eyes, but she’d always taken her own invisibility for granted. In her mind, Joanna’s beauty was something unrelated to her, an impenetrable phenomenon like lightning or an earthquake. Now, with the cosmetics, Abigail felt a thrilling share in it. She went to the bedroom and put on a pair of Joanna’s high heels. They were black suede, with open toes and a strap across the ankle like something a slave girl would wear. She returned to the bathroom. More astonishment. She’d never worn high heels in her life. It alarmed her that the image in the mirror was her. A different her. She looked like Joanna.
In the days that followed, she repeated this ritual often, when she was alone. Outwardly nothing changed. She never wore makeup in public. She continued to dress the way she always had, featureless jeans and tops, sneakers that looked exhausted. But she had, whether she liked it or not, a new secret to share with herself.
One evening, after performing the transformation ritual, she masturbated in front of the mirror. The resulting climax was a delicious explosion of shame. It frightened her. It frightened her because even telling herself (in the immediate profane afterglow) that she wasn’t going to do this again, she knew beyond any doubt that she certainly was going to do it again.
Which she did, the very next time she had the place to herself. It became a cloudy, wonderful addiction. For a while, each time she did it, it felt as if she were daring God to punish her. She imagined the sins like a heap of stolen coins, a dirty fortune getting bigger and bigger. But after a while she stopped thinking in that way. The heap of coins was sprawling, but she just didn’t bother about it.
That summer they moved into Larry’s first-floor apartment in Manayunk. To Abigail it seemed huge, but there was too much dark wooden furniture. The couch and armchairs were deep green vinyl. Larry had a black electronic recliner only he was allowed to sit in. She had her own room, with nothing in it but a bed, a badly put-together wardrobe, and two empty filing cabinets with rust around the edges. There were office blinds instead of curtains over a small window that looked out onto Grape Street.
Abigail spent as much time as she could out of the apartment. When she wasn’t reading she wandered the city and fantasized about leaving. She went to the Schuylkill River, since the water gave her the sense of a route into distant openness. The leaving fantasies had a treacherous duality. They began with her and her mother on a bus, pulling away from the city with a feeling of millions of tiny threads tearing. There would be hot coffee and icy sandwiches, dusty sunlight and the bus’s wheezing gears, signs saying West. Freeways and eventually prairies; soft, giant sunsets. Intercut with this footage, flashes of Larry coming home, seeing they’d gone, raging, gradually realizing his helplessness. But the fantasies that began this way always morphed into a version in which, by the end of the journey, Joanna had disappeared and Abigail got down from the bus in a strange city alone. When she imagined this, the feeling was of waking from a dream, as if her mother had never been with her on the bus at all and she’d made the entire trip by herself.
One evening she came home from the river and heard her mother and Larry talking in the kitchen. They hadn’t heard her come in.
“This is going to be something fucked up,” Joanna said. “Otherwise why the big money?”
“It’s not going to be anything fucked up,” Larry said. “I told you: This is a solid guy. I know this guy.” His voice sounded different. Softer. Full of gentle reasonableness. “Plus, he’s not dumb. He knows me.”
“I really don’t feel like it, baby. Really.”
There was a pause. Abigail stood perfectly still.
“Look,” Larry said. “Just go to dinner. He wants to take you to dinner. If you get the wrong vibe, just get up and walk out of there, no sweat. Absolutely no sweat.”
“I just … Why do you want me to do this?”
“I don’t want you to do anything you don’t want to do, Christ, you know that. But I’m in a cash-flow jam right now. I’m in a tight spot and this would really help me out. It’ll help us out. This guy is loaded.”
Another pause. Then the sound of a chair moving slightly and the creak of Larry’s leather jacket. Abigail heard her mother sigh. Abigail could picture Larry with his hands resting on her mother’s hips. He had a habit of doing that, then sliding his right hand up and gently squeezing the back of her neck in a soft massaging movement that always made Joanna close her eyes and let her whole body go loose.
“The kid’s gonna need new stuff when school starts next month,” he said. “You said yourself you’re sick of her walking around looking like a goddamned homeless person. I mean I’m doing what I can here, but … You know?”
“I thought you said you were working on a deal?”
“I am, but it takes time. And money. I got two more mouths to feed, after all. Say you’ll do it.”
“Jesus,” Joanna said. Then sighed again. “Dinner first. And if anything feels wrong—”
“You don’t like it, you walk. I’ll be close by, I promise.”
Abigail tiptoed back to the front door. Opened it and closed it, loudly, as if she’d just come in.
She hadn’t realized how glad she’d been that her mother had stopped fucking men for money. The relief had been eclipsed by her loathing of Larry, whom her mother was fucking not for money but because she was afraid of him—which was worse. But when Abigail saw Joanna getting ready to go out one evening a few days later and understood that the date of the arranged dinner had arrived, all the desolation of her childhood came back, and with it, this time, a fresh ache for her mother and, weirdly, a disgust with herself.
“Don’t do it,” she said.
Joanna was getting ready in front of the mirror. She was wearing a white halter-neck dress and her hair was pinned up, with two artful long blond curls dangling down each cheek. “I don’t know what you’re talking about,” she said.
“Don’t do it,” Abigail repeated. “You don’t have to do this anymore.”
Silence.
“Mom?”
“Leave me alone, will you, for Christ’s sake. You have no idea.”
“No idea of what?”
“Of what I do for you.”
For a moment this silenced Abigail. She was standing behind Joanna, who was struggling with the clasp of her silver neck chain.
“I don’t know why you didn’t just have an abortion,” Abigail said. “Think of all the shitty stuff you wouldn’t have to do for me.”
The room tightened. She’d never said anything like that before. The words coming out of her mouth surprised her.
What surprised her more was that Joanna hit her. A hard blow with the back of her hand as she spun on her heel away from the mirror. The still unfastened silver neck chain went flying across the room. They found themselves facing each other. It had been years since Joanna had hit her. And when she’d done it in the past it hadn’t been like this. Smacks on the bottom or the legs, humiliating rather than painful, no more than an offshoot of Joanna’s general craziness.
In shock, Abigail stood there, her hand to the side of her face where the blow had struck. Joanna grabbed her by the shoulders and shook her.
“You don’t know anything,” she hissed. “He can put me in fucking jail. Don’t you understand?” Tears sprang from her eyes. “He can send me to prison, Abby.” Speaking the name “Abby” fractured her. She pulled Abigail tight against her and wrapped her arms around her. “I’m sorry, baby. Oh, God, I’m so sorry.”
Abigail held her. Her face was still stinging, as if a hot leaf rested on her cheek. All the feelings jammed: rage; fear; hurt; sadness; disgust. She and her mother hadn’t held each other like this in a long time. Abigail had forgotten the warmth, the shape, the smell of her hair. For a couple of seconds even the jammed feelings fell away and she felt only a deep physical peace.
“Hey?” Larry called, coming in the front door and slamming it behind him. “You ready, babe?”
When they’d gone, Abigail paced the apartment. He can send me to prison. The phrase repeated itself, gave shape to an understanding that had been vague. Not even vague. Just denied. All those hours she’d spent trawling the city, fantasizing, reading, escaping—doing nothing about what she knew except pretending not to know it. She was disgusted with herself.
All right, she was disgusted with herself—but no more pretending. She had to think what to do.
It was a muggy night and the apartment’s air-conditioning was feeble. She would take a quick cold shower and go out. Cold water to wake herself, then the city’s spaces to think in.
The bathroom had changed its nature since becoming the arena for her illicit transformations and the pleasure she’d discovered in herself. The dirty fortune of sins was beyond measure now. She knew God was still counting the coins even if she wasn’t. This was how God worked. His patience was a kind of cunning, to see how far you’d go. It didn’t sadden Him, as her early teachers had said. It satisfied Him, proved He’d been right about you all along. The scale of her deviance frightened her, suddenly, added to by the dizzying feeling of having somehow cheated her mother. You have no idea of what I do for you. Was that true? Could everything her mother did…? The thought was vast and terrifying, a weight which, if she accepted it, would suffocate her.
She showered, quickly, in icy water.
She didn’t hear Larry come in. One minute she was alone in her room taking clothes from the wardrobe, the next he was in the open doorway. She was wrapped in a pale blue bath towel. Her hair dripped on her bare shoulders. When she turned and saw him, some inner gear shifted in her and she knew. She supposed, now, that she’d known this all along, too.
“Get out,” she said.
Larry opened his arms and rested his hands, one on either side of the door frame. His leather jacket spread like the wings of a bat.
“That’s not going to happen,” he said, quietly, with a smile.
All the things she could say rose in her—then dissolved, uselessly.
Larry stepped into the room and closed the door behind him. His smell came in with him: cigarette smoke and aftershave, leather, alcohol on his breath. He used a hair wax that had an odor of concentrated coconut.
“Princess, you and I need to come to an understanding,” he said.
Abigail was trembling. The water dripping on her bare shoulders was a torment. Larry leaned back against the closed door. “Let me ask you something,” he said. “How do you feel about your mother going to prison and you going into CPS?”
She didn’t know what CPS was, but she knew if it was anything good it wouldn’t be an option.
“That won’t happen,” she said. It was nothing. Just a reflex refusal. She had no argument.
“Well, the great thing is,” Larry said, “that’s exactly what’ll happen. Do you know your mother’s an accessory to murder?”
Abigail’s insides lurched at the word “murder.” It was a dark presence in the room with them, suddenly.
“I don’t believe you,” she said.
“I think you do. My guy was there. And will testify. Your mom made some bad friends at Jezebel’s. I’m pretty sure you know that.”
“My mom wouldn’t kill anyone. You’re lying.”
“I didn’t say she killed anyone,” Larry said. “I said she was an accessory. Do you know what that word means?”
Abigail didn’t answer.
“Sure you do. You’re a smart kid. Smart and pretty. The problem is,” he continued, moving toward her, “you’ve got no modesty. You’re smug.”
He was right in front of her now. “You need to come down a couple of notches,” he said.
“You touch me and I’ll—”
Larry grabbed the towel where it was tightened around her chest. His fingers against her flesh were hard and cold. Abigail flung up her hand to try to hit him, but he blocked it and pushed her back onto the bed. In a moment he was sitting astride her, kneeling on her arms. She thrashed under him. His jeans smelled freshly washed. He put his hand around her throat and tightened it. Enough to let her know he could go on tightening it, if he liked. In the middle of her horror, she realized that he had literally never laid a finger on her before.
“Lie still,” he said. “I haven’t finished talking to you yet. Lie still and I’ll let go.”
Abigail stopped struggling. Larry eased his grip on her throat. But he left his hand there. Her solitary pleasures in the bathroom massed in her body like a disease she hadn’t known she was carrying. She had the clear thought that this was her fault. For enjoying looking like Joanna.
“You say a word to your mother, she goes to jail. You run away, she goes to jail. In fact, princess, there’s only one way now Mommy doesn’t go to jail, and that’s if you start pulling your weight around here and being a little more appreciative of just what I’m doing for you.”
“I’ll tell,” Abigail said.
“Didn’t you hear me? If you tell your—”
“I’ll tell your boss.”
Larry looked at her incredulously. Then he laughed, as if she’d genuinely amused him. “Go ahead,” he said. “You think he’s going to believe you? Or your mother? Her lifestyle, it’s a miracle she isn’t already in the fucking slammer. And just so we’re clear: You tell anyone, including my boss, and your mother goes to jail, even if he does believe you. Even”—he laughed again—“if he sends me to jail.”
Abigail felt the room pressing around her, in addition to his weight on her. A long time seemed to pass in silence, but for the sounds of their breathing. She turned her head from him and stared at the ceiling. The need to find something to say was a stone in her chest.
“I’ll kill you,” she said, at last.
Larry slid down slightly, releasing her arms from under his knees. She tried to leave her body. For the briefest moment it seemed she had succeeded. She had a view of herself as if from above, with him crouched over her like a giant beetle.
Then he put his fingers back under the towel and yanked it open. His face warmed, visibly, as the air touched her exposed flesh.
“Yeah,” he said. “I’m sure you’ll try.”
He began undoing his belt. “Meantime I’m going to take charge of your education. Think of it…” He laughed as the buckle tinkled and his cock sprang out. “… as homeschooling.”
Abigail had only ever had one recurring nightmare. There were several versions, but the central element was always the same: She had killed someone. Sometimes by accident, sometimes on purpose. The lead-up in the dream didn’t really matter. What mattered was that the victim hadn’t deserved it. She would wake from this nightmare and for the first few seconds not know it was a dream. In those first few seconds it was as if the blood was still warm and wet on her hands. She would lie there in silent horror, knowing that she had done something—the worst thing—and it could never, ever be undone. The stain on her soul was indelible. She was damned.
Then, as the moments passed and she realized it was a dream, that she hadn’t killed anyone, the relief was such joy it brought tears to her eyes. She would lie there filled with extraordinary tender happiness, repeating to herself that it was just a dream … It was just a dream … The feeling was so good it was almost worth the horror she had to pass through to get it.
After the first time with Larry she had only the horror. It wasn’t a dream. The relief couldn’t come. The stain was indelible. She had done something that could never, ever be undone.
Except she hadn’t done it.
It had been done to her.
From then on her life reduced to a single imperative: Stay out of his way. There was no end to the contortions she produced to keep herself out of the apartment. For a while Larry seemed to accept that it was a game between them. Seemed to relish it, even, as if the rarity of getting her alone increased his pleasure when he did. But soon enough the novelty of cat-and-mouse wore off for him.
He showed up at her school, leaning against the side of his car, grinning.
“Fuck off.”
“Get in the car, princess. You know how this goes.”
She did know. No matter how many times she went over it in her head, the logic didn’t change. She couldn’t tell and she couldn’t leave. The only option was to get herself and her mother away. Far away. And Joanna wouldn’t risk it.
“Jesus, why not?” Abigail asked her, when the nightmare had been going on for six months.
“I’ve told you,” Joanna said. “You don’t know what he’s like. He’ll find us.”
“Mom, this is a big country. We could go … I don’t know. We could go anywhere.”
“He’s a cop, for God’s sake. You don’t think a cop could find us?”
“Not in Alaska. Or Mexico. What’s to stop us going to—”
“Oh, yeah, sure, I didn’t think of that. We don’t have any money. Or did I miss you winning the goddamned lottery?”
The just-this-one-time trick had, of course, become Joanna’s regular obligation. Larry handled the money, of which neither Joanna nor Abigail saw a cent, short of minimal disbursements to keep them alive. The only concession (to Joanna) was that Larry kept the drugs coming.
“If I get money, will you go?”
“Oh, God,” Joanna moaned. “Just leave it, will you? I don’t understand why this is such a fucking crucifixion for you. I mean for Christ’s sake. What do you want? What do you want from me?”
Abigail adopted a new strategy with Larry—of complete deadness when he raped her. Struggling had in any case proved useless. Instead she learned pages of biology or geography by rote, and forced herself to repeat them, mentally, word for word, while he did what he did. The new frozen passivity gave her something, though she couldn’t say precisely what. He didn’t like it.
“Fuck is wrong with you?” he said, the third time he found her inert in his hands.
She didn’t answer. He hadn’t yet hit her in any way that would leave marks.
“Hey,” he said, shaking her. “You think this is going to make a difference?”
Abigail stared at the ceiling. “‘Plants and various other groups of photosynthetic eukaryotes collectively known as “algae” have unique organelles known as chloroplasts,’” she said.
“What the fuck are you talking about?”
“‘Chloroplasts are thought to be descended from cyanobacteria that formed endosymbiotic relationships with ancient plant and algal ancestors.’”
For a few moments he didn’t respond. Then she felt him understanding that she hadn’t lost her mind but was doing this for herself. He laughed.
“I get it,” he said. “That’s a neat trick, princess. Let’s see if you can keep it up.” He grabbed her by the hair and yanked it, tugging her shoulder so that she was twisted over onto her belly. She felt him spreading her legs with his knees.
“I’ve been saving this for a special occasion,” he said. “And I’m damned if this isn’t it. Ready? Here we go…”
One afternoon at school she had cramps so bad she could barely walk. She didn’t tell anyone. Just got up and left. All the way home pain came and went. There were moments when she stood still, eyes closed, teeth gritted, riding it out.
When she made it home, Larry’s car was outside the apartment. She sat down on a nearby stoop, wrapped her arms around her shins, leaned her head on her knees. Watched and waited. The pain embraced and released her like a demon that couldn’t make up its mind. All she wanted was to get in, take some of her mother’s painkillers, and sit in a hot bath.
After more than an hour, Larry came out carrying a crumpled-up plastic bag. He got in the car and took off. Abigail pulled herself to her feet and hobbled across the street. In the sunlight after the stoop’s shadow she felt herself shivering. She hadn’t realized she was cold.
“Mom?” she called. No answer. But when she pushed the bathroom door she discovered Joanna fully dressed, slumped on the floor as if she were taking a nap. Abigail shook her.
As soon as her mother’s eyes opened, Abigail knew this was a different drug.
“Oh … Hey, sweetie,” Joanna said, smiling. Her speech was soft-edged, struggling back through a veil of bliss.
“Mom, what…?”
Joanna’s eyes closed again, though the smile remained.
“Mom!” Abigail bellowed, shaking her again. “What did you take? Jesus Christ, get up. Get up.”
“No need,” Joanna whispered. “I’m fine. I’m resting.”
Abigail scanned the bathroom for needles. Checked the trash. Nothing. Except of course what could have been in Larry’s plastic bag. She got Joanna up and onto the couch—then doubled up at a fresh assault from the cramps. She sank to her knees, rested her head on the couch, breathing carefully. Joanna put her hand in her hair and made a slight massaging movement with her fingers.
“It’s so nice you’re here,” Joanna whispered. “We don’t do this often enough. I love you so much…”
Abigail stayed where she was. There seemed no absurdity in it. For a while the hopelessness itself was a kind of obliterating peace.
Eventually, when she could stand again, she got up, took some Advil, then curled up next to Joanna on the couch.
There was no reasoning she disallowed. One night on the bridge over the Schuylkill, with a full moon silvering the slow-moving water, she found herself considering calling his bluff. She would either leave or go to the authorities. Not the cops, obviously, but to CPS, which she now knew stood for Child Protective Services. Suppose the bluff failed and he got her mother convicted? Okay, Joanna would go to prison. Abigail found herself trying to make room for that in herself: the girl who got her mother locked up. Maybe it was the one thing that would fix Joanna? The other drug was the only drug, lately. Abigail could actually see that people would understand. Some people would applaud. It wasn’t, if you took the feeling of betrayal away, the wrong thing to do. Intellectually she knew it was possibly the right thing to do. The problem was she couldn’t take the feeling of betrayal away. It was an impossible subtraction. No amount of intellectual honesty could shift the belief that Joanna simply wouldn’t survive in prison. And in any case, prison for how long? It could be years. How long would she, Abigail, last in a place like that? Days? Weeks? Definitely not years.
She couldn’t do it. She went over it so many times it was worn smooth in her mind—but always the same end point: She couldn’t do it.
Which left killing Larry.
Another mental object worn smooth. She didn’t doubt she could do that—only that she could get away with it. The months had gone by and she hadn’t done it. Not least because Larry knew she was capable of it and exercised an uncanny vigilance. He was scrupulous with his gun, for a start. When he wasn’t wearing it he kept it in a home safe in his closet. Nights he was home and sleeping with Joanna, he locked the bedroom door. Even wasted, apparently, he kept half an eye open. I wouldn’t try that, sweetheart, he’d said once, when Abigail had crept in from the kitchen carrying a knife. He and Joanna were on the couch, Joanna passed out with her head in his lap. Abigail had assumed, from his closed eyes and slack mouth, that he was in the same state. Not so. Gonna have to do better than that, he’d said, then winked at her.
The breeze lifted her hair. She looked down at the water, and for the first time (this was a shock to her, that it was the first time) thought of killing herself.
It was an exciting prospect. She was a month from turning sixteen. She let the idea in, enjoyed it, imagined soft darkness covering her like an angel, a whispered shshsh … then the peace of nothingness.
But she couldn’t hold it. Rage got in the way. She would be gone but Larry would still be alive, and her mother’s situation would only get worse. It was impossible.
She got back to the apartment late, to find Joanna in a state. She was half-dressed, and had applied all her makeup except lipstick. It made her mouth look cruel. The place was a mess, drawers open, cupboards turned out.
“I can’t find my purse,” Joanna said. She was shaking.
“You’re strung out,” Abigail said.
“How can I not find my purse? Jesus Christ, it was right there on the couch.”
“Sit down,” Abigail said. “I’ll look for it.”
Joanna ignored her, carried on rummaging frantically. She had on a black T-shirt and a denim jacket. Panties and unmatching ankle socks. There was a plum-colored bruise on her left thigh.
“Where is he?” Abigail asked.
“He had to go to Jersey. Fuck. Fuck.” She stopped and looked at Abigail, glassily. Her face was moist. “Did you take it?” she asked.
“What?”
“You took my purse.”
“Mom, for God’s sake—”
“You took my fucking purse.”
Joanna went to Abigail’s room. Abigail followed her. Joanna was on the floor, looking under the bed.
“Mom, stop for a second, will you?”
“Why do you do this? Why do you do this to me?” Joanna got to her feet and pulled back the comforter. Nothing. She stood there, trembling, mouth open.
Abigail went to the kitchen and unhooked her mother’s purse from where it was hanging by its strap on the edge of the door.
“Here,” she said, tossing it on the bed.
Joanna snatched it up, hunted, found a twenty-dollar bill. Her face thrilled.
“You know about it, don’t you?” Abigail said.
It was the strangest thing. She hadn’t thought she was going to say that. The words were out before she could stop them. You know about it.
There was only a split-second fracture in Joanna’s eyes—but in that split second the world shifted for Abigail. It wasn’t, she understood, that Joanna did know. It was that even if she knew, it might not be enough to make a difference.
Something between them, the invisible umbilicus that had always been there in spite of everything, snapped, silently. For the first time in her life, Abigail realized she was absolutely alone.
She thought of her mother being dead. And realized without horror or even surprise that it would open the door to something, a dark space in which, because she would care about nothing, anything would become possible. She tried, immediately, to unthink the thought—but it was too late. She felt old, suddenly.
“What?” Joanna said. The split-second fracture was gone. Now she was back in the flow of urgency, clutching the purse and the twenty, moving toward the door.
Abigail felt the thought forming and knew there was nothing she could do to stop it.
I hate you.
It was pure and clean. The stale air she’d been breathing her whole life was replaced, suddenly, by a cold, fresh alternative. She felt empty and light-headed.
“Nothing,” she said, as her mother pushed past her.
Abigail woke to the sound of the phone ringing. Either from exhaustion or from the aftershock of the truth, she’d slept long and without dreams. The light and the sounds of Grape Street said the day had been up and running for hours. Her body was sweetly rested and alert. She got up.
As she entered the living room, the answering machine picked up the call. It was Larry.
“Joanna, for Christ’s sake where are you? I’m still in Jersey, but I’ll be back around four. I got a big job for you tonight, so get your shit together.”
He hung up.
Joanna’s bedroom door was half-open. Abigail could see her mother’s bare leg outside the covers.
She went to the kitchen and drank a glass of water. Then refilled the glass and took it to Joanna’s room.
Her mother’s face was turned away from her, the thick blond hair half covering it. She was still wearing last night’s T-shirt and denim jacket.
“Mom?”
Joanna didn’t stir. Abigail sat down on the edge of the bed and set the glass of water on the nightstand. Outside in the street below, someone went past on a skateboard.
“Mom, wake up.”
She put her hand on her mother’s knee to give her a shake.
And the moment she touched the flesh she knew Joanna was dead.
It wasn’t just the coldness of the skin. It was that the sound of her own breathing caught up with her, suddenly, the loud absence of any other breathing.
The room had known. The whole apartment had known, while she’d been sleeping, with the day growing bright and warm outside.
She moved Joanna’s hair off her face. There was a small brownish stain next to her open mouth. Abigail pulled the comforter back. An empty syringe and a length of thin rubber tubing on the mattress. These objects were witnesses, too, bright and distinct with what they’d seen.
Abigail sat very still, knowing nothing except that last night she’d thought about her mother being dead and now here was her mother, dead.
I hate you.
In the street outside, the rear door of a delivery truck opened up with a soft roar. Abigail imagined the driver climbing in the back with his clipboard, looking for the right package. And the person the package was for coming to the door, signing for it, taking it inside, opening it. Maybe it was something they’d mail-ordered, or maybe it was a nice surprise.
She thought of her mother saying: I love you so much.
For a long time she drifted into this, knowing nothing.
But eventually she came back. She heard the delivery van start up and drive away and somewhere else a police siren whooped, once, as if asking a question.
She imagined herself returning to this room, to her mother, to everything that was real. But somehow in the meantime there was this unreal time to be got through. She thought of calling an ambulance, imagined herself answering questions, watching while the medics loaded Joanna onto a gurney and wheeled her out the door. Things would follow from that, the authorities, something would be done with her. Vaguely, she accepted that at some point these things would happen—and yet she couldn’t accept that they would happen right now. Picking up the phone was not in her power. Every atom of her failed at the thought.
She looked at the clock. 3:22 P.M.
I’ll be home around four.
If she went away and came back later this might turn out not to be real at all. She knew this was impossible and that she had to give it a chance to be possible.
It was a Friday and the city was winding down, people leaving their offices early. She could feel the mood of tired celebration even in the thickening traffic. She walked without knowing where she was going, though it was a gentle necessity to keep moving. Some instinct said that if she walked long enough she would eventually arrive at the next thing to do. She hadn’t eaten since yesterday morning, and now her hunger was like a friend keeping her company. Her face throbbed in the warm air.
She found herself outside their old house in Harrowgate. A pretty black woman in a sundress of tiny red and white flowers was watering some potted plants on the side porch. All the woodwork had been repainted in a pale blue that made her think of a rare bird’s egg. She thought how strange houses were, that people came and lived in them and had all their conversations and meals and dreams—and then moved out to go somewhere else and some other people moved in. Houses were helpless things, being invaded and abandoned. They must have a kind of wisdom, she thought, though they could do nothing with it.
Zeke was outside his apartment building, tinkering under the hood of his car. Abigail would have thought she’d forgotten where he lived, yet when she saw him it felt inevitable. He looked exactly as she remembered, still with the maroon suede jacket and white shirt and black Levi’s. His face had the same smooth calm, like a wood carving. For a moment he didn’t see her. She stood on the sidewalk watching him doing whatever he was doing to the engine.
Then he looked up and noticed her. He didn’t recognize her immediately—then he did, and smiled.
“Holy moly,” he said. “Look at you, all grown up.”
Abigail didn’t answer. Something was happening.
“Your momma still sleeping with the enemy?” he said.
She was thinking of herself masturbating in the bathroom, wearing her mother’s makeup and shoes. Larry had said to her, once: You won’t ever wash clean, princess. Don’t waste the soap and water.
“Hey,” Zeke said, straightening up. “You spaced out, kiddo?” With a kind of reflex, he looked up and down the block. Then back at her.
“I need some money,” Abigail said.
Zeke laughed. “Who doesn’t?” he said. “You got a direct approach, I’ll give you that.”
“Can you loan me fifty dollars?”
“Can I loan you…?” He laughed again. “Holy shit, girl.”
“I’ll pay you back.”
Zeke just stood there, smiling and shaking his head, as if his disbelief were a delight to him.
“I’ll pay you back,” Abigail repeated. “I swear.”
Zeke put his hands on his hips. “You are sensational,” he said. “How old are you now?”
“Eighteen,” Abigail lied. She didn’t know why she lied, only that she had to.
Zeke, still smiling, turned back to the engine, made a final adjustment, then unlatched the hood, lowered it, let it drop.
“I’ll tell you something,” he said. “I believe you. Even as a kid you were a serious little soul. If I loaned you fifty bucks I’m pretty certain you’d pay me back.” He leaned against the car, took out a cigarette, and lit it. The daylight had gone while they’d been talking. Abigail was seeing Larry standing over the bed. Her mother just as she’d left her. Somehow, with the lighting of Zeke’s cigarette, she knew she wouldn’t go back to the apartment. The chance she’d given it to be a dream was over. The street and the world beyond it gathered its reality, hard and clear and beyond any argument.
“Trouble is,” Zeke said, blowing out smoke through his nostrils, “I won’t be here to collect. I’m leaving.”
“Where are you going?”
“Sin City.”
She didn’t understand. He grinned.
“Las Vegas, sweet pea. Entertainment capital of the world.” He put his hands together as if in prayer. “Where a fool and his money are easily parted, forever and ever amen.”
In Manayunk, Larry would be doing things. Whatever things it would take to make none of it cling to him. She could sense the mass of his lies like a rapidly growing organism only a couple of miles away. You won’t ever wash clean, princess. The girl who’d killed her mother by hating her.
That wasn’t true.
But its truth was in her anyway. It gave her what she’d been waiting for.
“Take me with you,” she said.
Prostitution was something to her, a kind of homecoming. She hadn’t known she was looking for a life to give shape to her rejection of life, but when she began it was like slipping into a set of dirty clothes that had been waiting for her to come and claim them. It helped her perfect the art of never quite seeing herself. Her consciousness remained otherwise occupied, though she couldn’t have said what occupied it, except superficially: a movie; a great vanilla shake; banter with the croupiers; looking good in a new dress; room service on a client’s tab. She gave herself a working name: Sophia. People didn’t expect a blonde to be called Sophia, for some reason. It added a curiously valuable frisson.
For nine months she worked the Strip, the casinos, for Zeke, who, after the first time, didn’t touch her. He fucked her once, experimentally, to see what being her mother’s daughter had made of her. Didn’t like the result. She knew he was a little afraid of her.
Eventually she shed him. Got a fake ID and started working for an agency. She was good. Most tricks, she knew within a minute what she was looking at. Men either hated women or worshiped them and hated themselves for it. Either way, hatred was the currency. She had a numb curiosity about it. A man might start as a worshiper—oh, baby, you’re so sweet, you’re a fucking angel, how can you be such an angel?—but she generally knew ahead of time if he was one for whom the worship would segue into hatred—that’s right, move your ass, bitch, show me what a filthy little cunt you are. She wasn’t infallible: More than once she misjudged a trick and ended up taking a beating, one of which left her with a concussion and a lost molar, another in which she narrowly escaped a knife—but she forced her instincts to improve by giving them no alternative. If she got the wrong vibe, she walked. Very soon she had all of them, men, calibrated. Some vaguely functioning analytical part of her said she ought to relish the genuine masochists, but she found them frustrating. There was one guy, for example, who paid her five hundred to whip him until he was bleeding, then piss in his wounds while he jerked himself off. Her curiosity, initially engaged, was derailed by the absurdity of him having to get in the bathtub because he was worried about the hotel room carpet. These slapstick accents took her back to herself. Comedy towed the larger world and life’s generosity back in—and it was the larger world and life’s generosity that she didn’t want.
She got to the end of a good year. Almost subconsciously for months she’d been creating order for herself based on a very simple logic: The better she was at what she did, the more in demand she would be, and the more in demand she was, the more she could charge. The more she could charge, the more money she had, and the more money she had, the more she could control her life. If anyone had asked her, she would never have admitted to a need to control her life. In fact she would have said the opposite, that she lived to see where life would take her. Yet by the time she turned eighteen (twenty-two as far as the agency was concerned), she had a rental apartment in North Cheyenne, a tiny battered Honda, regular health checks, and a list of clients for whom no one but “Sophia” would do. She moved through her time as if it were a bridge collapsing behind her with every step she took. She lived as if there were nothing to look back at.
But in the spring of her second improving year, something in her changed. It was as if life had lulled her into accepting it could get better, seduced her into a dream of expectation, a fantasy of hope. It was as if life had been on the verge of making a fool of her—and she’d spotted the ruse just in time.
She started doing coke. She’d always drunk, and occasionally shared a joint with some of the other girls, but hitherto she’d stayed out of Class A. Couldn’t afford the compromised judgment. Risk assessment depended on clarity. Then one night, when a client had chopped a half-dozen lines and invited her to join him, she did. No premeditation—just a reflex kicking in. The drug gave her a sense of hurrying with delight toward something that would change her forever, like rushing through driving snow, happy and magically impervious to the cold.
Naturally it ate into her money—and her professional competence. The good second year eroded into blurred decisions and bleak comedowns. She lost first the apartment, then the car. Moved into a rented one-room. There was a satisfying soft flow to it, like a receding tide she’d been waiting for.
As with Joanna, her looks endured. She was a lithe, striking creature. A current of glamor crackled in the green eyes and fabulous blond hair. One customer said to her: You’ve got the most exquisitely formed hands and feet of any woman I’ve ever seen.
But her arms ached, putting on her makeup. She got a urinary infection. In the clinic waiting room the fluorescents’ buzz was deafening. When she vomited there was no one to hold her head, as she had her mother’s. And all the while the Vegas neons and bleached afternoon skies offered her a bright, flat endorsement, as if they were happy she’d come back into her correct alignment, her proper mode.
She went with sleepy deliberation further away from herself. When she wasn’t working, she wandered the malls or drank tequila in the casinos, where there were neither windows nor clocks and time dissolved in the coin-gobbling slots and the subdued jabber of the tables. Any noise was preferable to silence.
Joanna’s ghost wasn’t with her, but as the weeks and months passed, Abigail had a sense of her mother somewhere not far off, as if each of them inhabited different rooms in the same big civic building.
“Hey, angel, buy you a drink?”
She’d sensed the approach from her left. She was at a joyless bar of black and red vinyl, walls plastered with music posters, on the north side of the Luxor. Her dealer had called ten minutes ago, postponing till midnight. Four hours. Time bristled and fizzed ahead of her. Her rule was agency work only. She turned.
Dark hair, blue eyes, tall, well dressed. Coyote-handsome, comfortable in his own charm.
“No thanks.”
“Come on, that glass is just melting ice.”
“I’m waiting for someone.”
The word “waiting” hurt, stretched the four hours to a vanishing point, an empty desert road. She realized her need was visible, tried to gather and tighten her atoms.
“No problem,” he said. “I’ll leave you to it. But thanks for bringing a splash of beauty to an otherwise lousy day.”
He moved back to his stool at the end of the bar. Ordered a screwdriver and salted peanuts. Turned his face up to the wall-mounted TV and began to watch the soccer game with a pleasant smile of benevolent superiority.
On her way out a few minutes later, he said: “If you’ve been let down, I can offer you more than a drink. No pressure. Just saying.”
His name was Karl, and his Audi was in the Luxor’s lot. As soon as she got in, he gave her a hit from a little silver tin and snort spoon. “It’s not altruism,” he said. “It’s just more fun with company.”
All the way from the bar she’d kept up an inner mantra: It’s okay, it’s cool, you’re all right … but after the coke’s first glittering lift it faltered, and she relaxed into the Audi’s dark embrace, the pixels of her spirit vivified.
His house in The Lakes was a sub–Frank Lloyd Wright structure of flat roofs and white walls, cut, it seemed, into the side of a slight hill. Inside, glass and steel and big, lonely looking furniture. Native American art. Copper pans hanging from the kitchen’s suspended rails. Granite patio and kidney-shaped pool out back, a garden of cactus and dark cypress trees.
He put on music, saying: “Don’t ask me what any of this shit is. My nephew just sends it to me. He’s cool, so I play it.”
Champagne and more coke. He said: “So do you want a simple barter system, or do you want to pay me for the coke when I give you the cash?”
It halted her for a moment, though she was in the middle of laughing at something, at nothing.
He studied her, straight-faced, earnest—then burst out laughing himself. “You should see your face,” he said. “Jesus, I’m kidding. You’ve been spending too much time with assholes, obviously. Marching powder’s on the house, angel. Wait here.”
When he returned, he handed her five crisp hundreds. “Okay?” he said.
“Okay.”
She felt good, better than she had in a long time. Something dragged at her, a killjoy spirit, but she shrugged it off.
While he took a shower, she swam naked in the pool. The water was soft and cool under the warm desert night. She floated on her back and looked up at the stars.
Afterward he made her lie in the sun lounger and gave her a long, slow foot massage with scented oil. It wasn’t news to her. Worship was just another thing. She ought, she knew, to be adopting the tone and demeanor of a haughty and spoiled princess (it was what he was angling for) but the coke got in the way. They talked. He used to be in the music business, now didn’t do anything much, didn’t need to. Restlessness, he said, was a problem.
In the spotless bedroom she lay facedown on crisp white sheets that smelled freshly laundered. The massage and the talk continued, as he eased his fingers around her shoulder blades, up and down either side of her spine. It was impossible for her to let go completely. Caution was a small, permanently glowing red light, like the standby indicator on a TV, but she was as relaxed as she had ever been with a client. His kisses had returned repeatedly to her feet and anus. It was a slight weariness to her that in all likelihood she would soon have to inhabit some version of the dominatrix role, say the things, express the controlled contempt with conviction—crucially without laughing, despite the coke’s continual good-natured prompting.
“Feel like a princess?” he asked.
“Yes.”
“Good.”
He grabbed her by her hair and yanked her head back so hard it almost snapped her neck.
At some point she passed out.
Flashes came in the darkness. She smelled the night. Then the Audi’s pine air freshener and cold leather.
She vomited. Went back into darkness.
Hit the ground and tasted dust on her tongue.
Joanna’s voice said: Well, you wanted me dead, didn’t you?
When she woke it was to the smell of antiseptic. A white ceiling and the hum of technology. Hospital.
She turned her head.
A guy she’d never seen before sat with his chin on his chest in the chair next to her bed. His dark hair was tousled and there was faint stubble on what looked as if it would at all other times be a meticulously clean-shaven chin. Boyish and slim. Twenty-five or thereabouts. Long eyelashes. White shirt and black pants. City shoes.
She opened her mouth and tried to speak, but only air came out. She cleared her throat—and immediately her body fired up in a protest of pain.
He opened his eyes.
“You’re awake,” he said. “Hold on, I’ll get someone.”
He got to his feet and went out. His black jacket hung on the back of the chair. She was in a room by herself. Windowless. There was a drip attached to her left wrist and a weight on her chest which she discovered was her right arm, in a sling and plaster.
When he returned a few moments later it was with a doctor, a tall, freckled woman with a froth of dark curly hair pulled back in a ponytail.
“I’m Dr. Manion,” the woman said, taking hold of Abigail’s wrist and checking her pulse. “You’re at the Valley Hospital Medical Center. Can you tell me your name?”
Abigail swallowed—and winced. Her throat ached.
“Wait a second,” Dr. Manion said. She took a cup with a straw from the table by the bed and gently raised Abigail’s head. “Here. Drink some water.”
Abigail drank. It was one of the sweetest physical sensations she’d ever experienced. Can you tell me your name? The familiar anxiety massed. She’d spent so long avoiding or scamming officialdom it was as if she’d been asked for an incriminating secret. Sophia? Abigail? Abigail wasn’t even her first name. It was her middle name (after her grandmother) but it was what Joanna had always called her. It seemed extraordinary, suddenly. Her given first name was like a ghost that walked ahead of her, ignored except for the occasional form-filling or school report. The name on her fake ID was Samantha Holmes, but her ID was in her purse and she doubted she’d made it out of the house with that. She had a memory of Karl buttoning her bloodstained shirt and jamming her shoes onto her feet. Through the pain it had felt like a brutal version of her infancy, being dressed for kindergarten hurriedly by her grandmother.
“Samantha Holmes,” she said. She needed to sound alert, capable, well enough to get out of here. She had no medical insurance. As the doctor dropped her wrist, Abigail thought of the hundreds—probably thousands—of dollars she must have already racked up. The meter was running even now, just by her lying in this bed. She had to get out.
“I’m fine,” she said. “I need to get home.”
“Please don’t worry about anything,” the guy said, as if he’d read her mind. “It’s taken care of.”
“You’re not fine,” Dr. Manion said, albeit with a slight impatience, the suggestion that there were other (legitimate) people she should be attending, people far less fine than Abigail. “You have three broken ribs and a broken ulna. It’s a miracle your spleen isn’t ruptured. Do you want to tell me what happened?”
“Car hit me,” she said.
Dr. Manion looked at her, shook her head. Too tired to bother exposing the fiction. She’d seen it all before.
“For future reference,” she said, “large amounts of cocaine and alcohol get your liver to produce cocaethylene, with which the body has a very good chance of killing itself. Something you might want to consider.”
“I need to get home,” Abigail repeated.
“That’s against my advice,” Dr. Manion said. “But we can’t keep you here if you want out.”
An odd little atmosphere of unsaid things between the three of them. Then the doctor turned on her heel and left.
Abigail was flailing, mentally, trying to reconstruct. She was surprised to be alive. But at the cost, it seemed, of this subtraction of time.
The guy was standing next to her bed. There was a quiet intensity to him. He looked as if he didn’t know what to do with his hands.
“Who are you?” she said.
His name was Adam Grant, and it was a curious relationship.
It wasn’t going to be a relationship, as far as Abigail was concerned.
“I don’t understand,” she said. He was driving her home from the hospital. She was fuzzy with codeine and disproportionately confused by the fact of her arm in its sling. She had never broken a bone before. Amidst the churning thoughts it was a delicate novelty, an intimate signature of the violence she’d suffered and a terrible, distinct affirmation of her mortality. Adam had tried to talk her into remaining in the hospital, but she had stood there, with her legs’ gravity all wrong, saying no, repeatedly. The only thing she wanted was to get out from under the scrutiny of authority, even an authority with her own well-being as its goal. Dr. Manion had made her sign a notice of voluntary discharge against medical advice and told her to ice the ribs regularly. Beyond that it was obvious she regarded Abigail (Sophia, Samantha) as time wasted, a lost cause.
“What’s to understand?” he said. “I saw you lying on the side of the road. I stopped. I called an ambulance. It’s nothing. It’s ordinary.”
She couldn’t work him out. He seemed happy about something entirely private. She didn’t know if it was her intuition or just come-down paranoia. The sunlit city went by outside the car windows and refused cheerfully to settle into her comprehension. It was as if she’d lost not hours but days, months. She had no apparatus to bring to what he’d done, except that she assumed he found her desirable.
“Is it a walk-up?” he said, when they pulled up outside her dismal apartment building.
“I can manage.”
“Don’t be crazy,” he said. “Let me help you.”
She was light-headed, partly from having to shallow-breathe around her ribs. There was no-nonsense pain there if she dropped her guard. The thought of climbing even the four steps of the front stoop made her feel sick. Genuinely nauseated. She opened the passenger door and swung her legs out, but for a moment she could only sit like that, wondering if she was going to vomit on the sidewalk.
He came around the car and squatted down on his haunches in front of her.
“I wish you’d stayed in the hospital,” he said. “You’re really not well.”
The word “hospital” brought back the reality of cost and money. He had paid. He must have paid. It was an awful betrayal to her, as if the ground beneath her feet was no longer solid.
Suddenly, out of this image, she realized that her keys were in the purse that hadn’t made it out of Karl’s house. She couldn’t get into her apartment.
Something extraordinary happened. She found herself in tears.
“What is it? What’s the matter?”
She couldn’t get a word out. Her apartment was a tiny, bleak, functional thing and at that moment it was all she wanted. To lie down on the bed and hold her ribs and close her eyes. And yet there was a great space behind this simple need that terrified her with a kind of demand. It was as if the world had, without warning, decided to want something from her after all.
The time they spent waiting in the car for the building manager was very difficult for her. Something had caught up with her. She didn’t know what, only that she was afraid. Meanwhile he was giantly normal, as if this were the sort of thing that happened every day. She was aware of him not asking her what had really happened, beyond a token inquiry about whether she got a look at the car that had hit her. He seemed utterly unruffled by the obviousness of her lie. He was clerking for a judge in San Francisco, he said, had come to Vegas for a college friend’s wedding, was staying on for a week.
In the middle of it she heard herself say: “What do you want?”
“What do you mean?”
Anger kept offering itself to her, impotent in the face of her fear. “Jesus Christ,” she said. “What do you want?”
He waited a long time before answering. Whatever aftershave or deodorant he’d been wearing the day before had thinned. Now he smelled of tired skin, hospital coffee on his breath. Aside from his black jacket draped over her shoulders, she was in the stained skirt and blouse of the night before. One of the nurses had discreetly given her a pair of disposable underpants. Her own, like her purse, hadn’t made it out of Karl’s house. She had an image of Karl sitting naked on the bed, with the bloody underwear hanging from his fingertips. There was a swelling on her left cheekbone where he’d hit her.
“Nothing,” Adam said. “Just to make sure you’re okay.”
“I’m fine,” she said. “I can wait on the stoop.”
It wasn’t the first time she’d said that. But still, here she was. It was frightening to her, that she hadn’t been able to get out of the car.
He came to see her every day. She couldn’t, obviously, work. Without the codeine she would have been in real trouble. Four days passed without cocaine. It wasn’t good, but she was practically broke. He took her to restaurants but she had no appetite. She picked at salads, melon, ice cream. She told him she was a telemarketer. Which was the cover job, a few hours a week, the paltry legitimacy. She knew he knew she was lying. It infuriated her, but always, underneath and far bigger than the anger, was fear.
His family, far back, had made its money in eastern steel. Seven generations later it had become microelectronics. The Grants had followed their money west, had been in California since his grandfather’s time. The whole thing was a story to her, as remote from her experience as Snow White or Aladdin. She wondered why he worked, since he didn’t have to. He had gone to Berkeley. Law. He was, she thought, sad when he talked about it.
The week passed and he didn’t leave.
Very gradually, her strength came back.
One night they had dinner at his hotel and she stayed with him. All her instincts had told her to get rid of him, but she was at the mercy of some other force that made her a stranger to herself. They lay in bed together side by side, holding hands. He hadn’t, yet, even kissed her. To her it was like a TV show that didn’t make sense but which she couldn’t stop watching. She had no intimation of her mother, though she reached for it, mentally. Her past was a shoreline she’d lost sight of. There was just open dark water in every direction. In a spirit of sheer blind experiment, she turned toward him in the bed. He hesitated, then kissed her.
“Be careful,” he said, meaning her injuries. The soreness from Karl’s abuse had abated, but her tender parts were firmly closed on themselves in determined, self-healing sleep. It occurred to her that she had never had sex with anyone except when she’d been forced or had forced herself, for money. For her that was all sex was. The thought that it could be anything else filled her with hopelessness.
In the small hours she woke to see him standing by the window, looking out through a gap in the curtains at the city’s neons.
“What is it?” she said quietly.
It startled him. He came back to bed, didn’t touch her. They lay for a while in silence. A gentle panic was in her limbs, as if they were only now coming back to her from their trauma, shocked at their own survival.
“You know what I do, don’t you?” she said. The words were out before she’d really known what she was going to say.
“Yeah,” he said. “I know.”
“And?”
He lay in silence for a few moments, not blinking. To her it seemed as if some long calculation on which his brain had been working was coming to its conclusion.
“And it seems to me you don’t want to do it anymore,” he said.