Chapter 6
I BOLT OUT OF MY BEDROOM TO FIND JOANNE SILHOUETTED in the door and my mom in front of her, brandishing a wooden spoon.
“Get out!” she shrieks.
Joanne clutches the doorjamb, her quilted vest dangling off her gaunt frame. She’s in her sixties, withered by decades of faith in the goodness of the world, faith that’s constantly disappointed.
Her son died last year. Blew his own face off. An accident, Joanne says, cleaning his gun and didn’t realize it was loaded, but who knows. She doesn’t see much of her grandkids.
I want to like Joanne, but I don’t.
She shoots a pleading look at me over my mom’s shoulder, and the automatic assumption that my mom can’t or won’t listen to her grates, even if it’s true.
Give her some fucking autonomy, Joanne. I can smell the swollen, tender pieces of your organs, the fluid building up where it shouldn’t.
It’s not like you’re the peak of health.
“Hey, Mom,” I say, soft and soothing. “Let me talk to her.”
My mom’s shoulder’s sag. The wooden spoon bangs against her thigh.
“I’m sorry,” I mutter to Joanne, and fish in my purse for the eighty dollars I owe her.
She wants to take it, I can tell, but she still makes a show of protesting until I insist and insist and insist. As she leaves, I smell pity on her breath.
“What happened?” I ask my mom after the door clicks shut. She’s slumped into the couch, thumb idly tracing the corner of the TV remote.
“The flayed man called me.” She sounds like herself, clear and sure. “He said he visited Bill. He said he’s still hungry. Then Joanne knocked on the door, and I got scared.”
“So you yelled?”
“Yeah.”
“But you kept yelling. You woke me up.”
A childlike craftiness gleams in her eyes. “I wanted her to leave.”
“Okay.” Uncle Bill must have called to apologize or explain about the missing blood. She’s just confused or telling me whatever she thinks will get her the most sympathy. “About the call. Did he leave a message?”
“He said Bill’s an asshole and he’s going to leave us.” Her words begin to run together. “Can’t let him. I can’t . . . be good. We need . . .”
I settle onto the couch next to her. The cushions bend so much more under my weight than hers. She forgets to eat, sometimes, if I don’t remind her.
“I mean, yeah, Mom, Uncle Bill comes and goes, but he always comes back. You’re sure it wasn’t him who called?”
She crosses her arms, thinking. “Maybe. You know I get confused.”
“I know. It’s okay. When you said yesterday that someone was watching you, were you confused then too?”
“No.” She frowns. “You know who he is.” She makes claws of her hands and gestures to her chest, the way she used to when I was a kid and she told me stories during the long late-night drives.
“He says Bill is going to leave, and you’re going to leave, and then it’ll be just me and him and his hungry jaws. ”
Her words slur, and she blinks slowly, like she’s exhausted. Or like she’s not sure of what she’ll find when she opens her eyes.
“I’m not going to leave,” I assure her. I reach for her hand, but she flinches away, her face going suddenly wooden.
“You’re not going to leave?”
Something’s wrong, but I can’t quite tell what. “Of course not.”
She pushes herself upright, shoulders squared. “You can’t just barge in here. My daughter’s coming home any minute.”
My stomach drops.
“Mom.” My voice betrays me, shaking a little as I round out the word. “Who do you think I am?”
“Stop trying to confuse me.” She twists away, burying her face in the couch cushion. Her words come out muffled by polyester. “Just leave me alone.”
“Okay.” God, this hurts. Every time, so much that I promise myself the next time has to be easier. And it never is. “I’ll be in the other room.”
Usually that’s enough. But not tonight. Tonight, she whips forward and spits, “Get out of my house.”
It’s not your house, I want to retort. I pay the damn rent. Instead, I say, “How about you watch something on TV?”
“Get out.” She rockets upright, leaning hard on the arm of the chair. “Get out! Intruder!”
I know what comes next if I fight her on this. She goes for a knife, or she bangs on the wall, and the night ends in screams and sobs and apologies to the neighbors.
“Okay.” I grab my coat, shuffle my purse onto my shoulder. “I’ll go. I’m leaving.”
The door shuts and the dead bolt clicks, and I slump my forehead into the cold metal of our apartment numbers. These are the times when it feels like wading through mud just to remember what’s real and what’s not.
What’s real is that the door is locked. I have the keys in my purse, but going back inside will only make things worse. What’s real is that my options are to spend a couple of hours curled pathetically on my own doorstep or find somewhere else to go.
I push the edge of my house key into the pad of my thumb and try calling Uncle Bill. He doesn’t pick up. I feel like a sieve, all my strength escaping out the holes poked through me. I just want to escape too.
Fuck it. I’ll go to Rosy’s.
There aren’t many lesbian bars in Vegas.
Actually, there aren’t any, just a couple of bars where lesbians hang out sometimes, and Rosy’s is the shittiest one.
But it’s close enough to walking distance, and it feels good to be cocooned by the roar of cars and the mutter of fast-food drive-through speakers and the piss-and-trash smell of the sidewalk.
Wedged between a smoke shop, its windows advertising Pipes!
Hookah! Cigars! in gloating gold letters, and an insurance agency with boarded-up windows, Rosy’s is empty inside except for a skinny couple in the corner, with their heads together.
They both have the exact same shade of dark-brown, almost-black hair.
A soccer game flickers on the TV, showering distorted cheers over the scarred leather of a vacant booth.
The bar smells like Pine-Sol and maraschino cherries. I order a Coke. The bartender leaves that hanging in the air with a look of expectation, so I change it to a rum and Coke. It leaves a sugary film on my tongue. When I’m done, I order another one.
“Waiting for a friend?” The bartender asks. The tattoos on her knuckles spell out HOLD FAST DIE LAST.
“Just waiting.”
A couple of bodies fill in the barstools between me and the door. I play with my phone while the bartender pours beers and asks about weekend plans.
“I took my wife to the new Italian spot on the Strip,” she says, when someone turns the question back on her. A glass appears in her hand, thunks down on the plastic mat.
“Special occasion?”
“Anniversary. Fifteen years.” She stretches out the teen like a piece of bubblegum.
“Congrats.”
“Not to my wallet.” She chuckles. “Twenty dollars for a martini. I can make a better martini with my eyes closed!” When the patron laughs appreciatively, she adds, “Good thing it’s ‘till death do us part,’ not ‘till bankruptcy,’ am I right?”
Then the door swings open, and I smell lemons.
Her hair’s slicked back, same way it was when she jumped my car, but now instead of the medic jacket, she’s got on baggy jean shorts, a white tank top hacked off above the belly button, and definitely no bra.
“Tequila!” Veer howls and swings herself onto an open stool at the opposite end of the bar. The movement tugs her hip free of her waistband, and the neon hum of the Budweiser sign above the bar catches on the faint line of a healed cut. Something in me lurches.
I don’t want her to see me like this, alone and miserable.
Especially since she came with friends, a Southeast Asian girl with sleeve tattoos and a million facial piercings, and a pasty stick of a person with a big sharp nose and hair that’s brown at the roots and green at the ends.
I watch out of the corner of my eye as the bartender splashes out three tequila shots.
Veer drums her middle finger against the bar, impatient, and I wonder what it would feel like trapped between my teeth.
I need to get the fuck out of here.
I get the bartender’s attention and pay my tab. Veer’s back is to me. Her hand flicks up to fuss with her already-well-smudged eyeliner, at the same time her neighbor on the left—not one of her friends, some guy in faded brown leather—turns his head. Her elbow catches him squarely on the chin.
I shrink back into my seat.
“Excuse me?” The guy sounds pissed. I guess I would be too, getting an abrupt elbow to the face like that.
“Shit.” Veer peers at him, getting in his space a little. “I’m sorry, man, I didn’t mean to. Can I—”
He doesn’t wait for her to finish, just turns back to his drink, and I only know he says something else because Veer bristles.
She steps off her stool, her mouth a stubborn line.
The air caramelizes like the scorched aftertaste of an electric shock, the dead calm before a hurricane, the tension before the first swing of a fight.
Shit.
I don’t care if Veer gets into it with some guy. I don’t care about her at all. Focus on getting out of here, on going home and nursing my misery. Ignore the smell of spilled beer and soda-sweet breath and walk out the door.
Except when the guy stands, I see the waist holster. Veer’s really in his face now, one of her friends whispering desperately in her ear, trying to pull her away, while the other one hurriedly slides over cash for their shots.
The bartender slams her palm on the bar. “Chill out or take it outside.”
Veer shrugs off her friend’s concern. “I’m chill.”
“It’s fine,” the guy growls. “I’m out of here.”
The door swings wide as he shoves through it, and Veer pushes through her friends to go after him. That’s fine. That’s good. I didn’t want her to see me, and now she won’t.
But she helped you with your car, an intolerable urge hisses. You may not owe her much for that, but you at least owe her this.
I make it to the door about a half step before she does. She doesn’t quite stop, tries to shoulder me out of the way before she recognizes me. I can trace the red lines of exhaustion in the whites of her eyes.
“I know you,” she says, painfully loud. “You work at Sunrise. I jumped your car.”
“Yeah.” Adrenaline makes all my fine motor movements too large, too sudden. “Hey, don’t go after him. It’s not worth it.”
Her glare burrows into the hollow center of my chest. I want to bite into the softness of her throat, want to feel my claws on her skin and her tongue in my mouth. I want, I want, I want.
No. Not here. Not her. That’s the kind of thing to bury deep, because even glancing at it might tip me off the edge of the world and leave me for drowning.
“Veer, you stupid bitch,” one of her friends screeches, and right, I’m in a bar and there are other people here, there’s a whole world around me. But she’s still staring.
“Ellis,” she says quietly. “Right?”
I nod, and for one more electric second my curse and I both want the same thing.
“Let’s go.” The tattooed friend uncrosses her arms, and I see Lavender Menace scrawled across her shirt in big pink letters. “I paid our tab.”
“You should come too,” Veer says.
I shouldn’t. I have too many issues of my own to get tied up in anyone else’s.
“Are you paid up?” It’s the other friend, the green-haired one, from over my shoulder.
I nod again, a little unwillingly.
“Then what’s the holdup? Don’t worry, she doesn’t bite. Unless you’re into that.”
It would be heaven to have one night where I’m not at the mercy of my mom or a patient or anyone at all. To put aside all the shit I’m supposed to be dealing with and try to remember how to be alive. Have some fun, like Uncle Bill wanted. Don’t I deserve that?
No, I don’t. But those are just words, and the want’s in my bones, and when Veer backs out the door, I find myself swept after her.