Dreamland

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THE POLICE SEARCHED OUR apartment and found nothing, of course.

It was my employer’s mutilated body in the fountain, which was a little problematic, but I didn’t happen to own a massive bloodied knife, and conveniently none had been planted.

No, I didn’t know how she’d gotten there; no, I couldn’t explain the microfungus left to fester inside her chest; no, I couldn’t think of a reason why anyone would try to kill my boss.

These were all lies, ultimately, because I knew exactly why she’d been placed there: She was a message to me. At the time, I thought I understood it. I’d already been warned.

Someone wanted me to stay away.

I had no reason to return to the villa, especially not as a person of interest, though I pushed to the edge of my sanity for one.

Wild thoughts entered my mind, the ideations of a teenage runaway.

The belief that the world was wide enough to disappear into, that nothing about what I currently felt had any limits or constraints.

He’d told me to stay away and then he’d left a body as additional insurance, knowing I had a problem with doing what I was told.

A more literal form of ghosting? I started to laugh in the silence of our apartment and then I stood abruptly and got out my grandmother’s tarot cards.

I cut the deck over and over, asking a question I couldn’t put into words. What next?

I didn’t even notice when a cool, soft hand slid the deck out from under my palm.

“You shouldn’t read for yourself.” My mother’s voice was gruff when she took the seat beside me. She looked at me for a long time, handling the cards like something from her past she hadn’t wanted to revisit.

Then she handed the deck back to me, gesturing for me to ask again, this time with her as the guardian of my fate.

“I thought you didn’t believe in this,” I said as I touched the cards, holding in my head an image of Jude, an elegy of him.

I tried to keep my voice free of conspiratorial adolescent angst, but I always found myself relegated to the same daughterly ennui.

It was like I couldn’t find any other characters when my mother was around; I knew I was capable of better versions, all of them equally pretend, but her presence rendered them impossible, things I either wouldn’t do or couldn’t, in some visceral, physical way.

“I didn’t think your grandmother was doing you any favors filling your head with superstition and false promises.

I don’t believe her readings are always accurate.

She’s a person with her own agenda.” It was the first time I really noticed that my mother still spoke of my grandmother in the present tense.

I split the deck and handed the cards back to her, waiting. In return, she looked at me for a long moment, like it was me she was trying to read.

Which she was. It was what all of us did. The reading isn’t actually about a gift, or even some amorphous future. It’s only ever about the person sitting in the chair.

“She taught me, too, you know. Same as you,” my mother said.

There was a weariness to her then, a sense that maybe the anger I’d thought she had for me was far less specific, an exhaustive effort to keep her own monsters at bay.

“Just because I don’t want you to look for all your answers in the cards doesn’t mean I don’t respect them.

” She motioned for me to break the cards into three piles, and I did.

“Did you ever read your own answers?” What I meant was: Did you see this coming?

My mom glanced coolly away, surveying the apartment. The collective state we’d shared for the entirety of my life, under the auspices of my grandmother’s charity and the reach of her empire. Then she looked back at me.

“I told you,” she said. “You should never read your own cards.”

She gestured for me to flip the top card on each of the piles.

It was a simple reading, the same kind I would have done for myself: past, present, and future.

The first card I pulled was the Empress.

The second card was the Tower. The third was the Wheel of Fortune, which at first I couldn’t read.

I wasn’t sure whether it turned up or down.

“Wait.” My mother saw me trying to interpret the cards and paused me, like she knew me well enough to follow the train of my own thought. Then she motioned for me to draw another card.

“There.” Her voice was a tired surrender, like she’d always known what it would be.

I picked up the card, holding it for a moment between my fingers.

Then she covered my hand with hers.

“I know you resent me right now,” she said.

“I’m pretty sure it’s mutual, Mom.”

“I don’t resent you.” She snapped it. “You think I resent you?”

I wanted to point out that taking this tone did her no favors—that if she had a message to impart, she had better do it the only way I could receive it. (A corpse in the building’s fountain.)

“You don’t like me,” I observed aloud.

“What does that mean? You’re my daughter, I love you.” Enough time in theater had taught me the unspoken note, the unwritten line. Unfortunately.

“Mom—”

“I think you’re very talented, anak.” She paused. “But I also think you’ve chosen a path that will hurt you. Harm you, even.”

It took a long time to find the deep well of banal, repetitive rehearsal. “I get it, Mom, rejection is everywhere, there’s no job security, I know all of that already—”

“I encouraged the acting because I thought it might help you.” Mom wasn’t looking at me then.

“You seemed to find everyone so … confusing.” That wasn’t the word and we both knew it.

“And of course, you were so beautiful, always. Even when you were little, everyone said I should get you an agent. But I only wanted…”

She trailed off, then drew her hand away.

I understood that she wasn’t going to say it.

True superstition meant that we could create our realities ourselves; we spun them into being with thoughts and words and deeds, and once they became part of the fabric of our collective truth, she couldn’t rip out the stitching.

Once she told me what her love was really made of, she could never take it back.

I knew the feeling. Love that mixed indeterminately with fear. That beautiful and agonizing terror of having known another person’s darkness and acquiesced.

The corner of the devil card in my palm was folded slightly, like the edge of it had been handled more times than most.

“Grandma says there’s a devil on my back,” I commented blithely.

My mom looked at me then as if we were finally speaking the same language. She reached out and cupped my cheek.

“The devil was an angel once,” she said. “That means he could be again.”

She loved me, I understood it then. Unfortunately.

“What kind of person did you want me to be?” I asked, which even I knew was cruel. It wasn’t fair to taunt her with one of the other characters in my arsenal, the good ones or rational ones or filial ones. A version of life where love was simple, a blessing and not a burden.

In some life parallel to this one, I had been the one to make the coffee.

There, in a story we both knew, directed by someone we both trusted, I loved her from a place of honesty, a love born from fidelity, one that justified her losses, a profit in the margins of her return.

In that other timeline, in that other world, I didn’t have to create a version of myself, because I already was one.

Because I was a person who felt things at all.

I wondered then what she’d read in her own cards. What card she’d pulled to define her life. What she’d seen about me that Grandma hadn’t. I’d never thought of it that way. I’d always thought it was Grandma who’d seen me more clearly, but maybe not. My mother had always seen things differently.

She stroked my hair again. “She was right,” she said. “You’re going to be famous.”

Then she rose to her feet.

“I love you,” she told me in a voice that had practiced that line a thousand times. Then she kissed my forehead coolly, meeting adjourned, and left me alone with the cards.

The afternoon was a flurry of caution tape and interviews, social media headlines of scripted statements.

Not the kind I’d expected—the de Witt family asks for your consideration and respect in this time of mourning—but a series of local tabloid splashes: Woman found dead in Hollywood apartment complex.

Woman found dead, I repeated to myself. Woman, generic. Found, passive. Dead.

I fingered my work cell phone in my hand.

It was turned off, of course, since I knew they could use it to track me.

Not that it would be hard to find me—the police already knew where I was.

Would William de Witt really go storming after me, after all this mess?

I supposed Jude would have thought that through.

Nobody could get to me now without raising suspicion; I had no reason to go back to them, either, now that my employer was gone.

It was a very neat plan, though I still pictured him cleaning the blood from his nailbeds, the water turning a gradual, rosy pink in the guest room sink.

“Anya?”

I blinked to cognizance when I realized JR was standing next to me, Alistair clutched subduedly in his hands. “Oh. Hi.”

“This is crazy,” commented Roro, who was lingering just out of reach.

I thought for the millionth time that she should just break up with the boyfriend and move back in and make her art without stupidly trying to prove to the family that she could exist without them.

I needed them for context. She needed them for something else, lifeblood, like a reluctant, stubborn vampire.

“That was the woman you told us about? Emmanuelle?”

“Weda,” called Nessa, jogging over to us from where she’d been told to stop poking around the crime scene. “Damn, you picked some crazy white people, huh?”

I sighed aloud. “What are you doing here?”

“Ro’s here,” she said simply. “Y’all suffered a loss.”

“Pick a dialect, Nessa, it’s distracting—”

“She’s not white,” Roro cut in abruptly.

“Girl, did you see those lips?” Nessa said in apparent dismissal.

“Yeah, they’re fake, exactly.” Roro folded her arms over her chest, an odd look of calculation on her face as she looked over at the caution tape.

The body had long since been removed, but the presence of it—of death—was strong enough to make us all look over collectively, like we were admiring a painting in the Met.

“That woman’s hair was bottle blond. And I bet you she had her cheeks and jaw reshaped. ”

“So?”

“She’s not a white woman.” Roro shrugged. “If she’s William de Witt’s sister, then her mom was definitely something else.”

“Ohhh, so she’s like you,” Nessa said with a smirk at me. “Mestiza filled with shame.”

“I am not filled with—”

I thought about the way I’d let Emmanuelle believe my father was a New Jersey Morris, or whatever it was she’d said.

“Mm, right,” said Nessa.

I bristled. “Yeah, because you’re so quick to claim me, Nessa. What’s that you call me again?”

“Bitch, don’t you jump down my throat—”

“You know that other girl worked for Ara,” said Roro, ostensibly to nothing. “The one they still haven’t found.”

“Ignore her.” Nessa leaned in closer to me. “The rich guy dumped her. Now she’s got too much time on her hands. I keep telling her to just get some vitamin D and move on—”

“Gross,” I muttered.

“And the other girl,” Ro continued, “you saw her at the party. And another one, the one who got reported missing this summer, her cousin was one of the people Ara was supposedly trying to help.” Roro shaded her eyes from the irradiant glare of sun.

“It’s de Witt. I think that motherfucker’s a serial killer. ”

“Damn, two Oscars ain’t enough?” Nessa shook her head sagely. “Fame really isn’t everything.”

It didn’t seem worth it to contribute my own explanation. “Why kill his own sister?” I pointed out, more as an accessory to the conversation than anything.

“Dunno,” said Roro, conspiratorially. “Coming unglued, maybe. Wants credit. Same thing all psycho killers want, especially men.” She looked at me. “Maybe he wants you to catch him.”

“You should stop talking so loud,” said JR.

“Why?” Reflexively, Roro pitched her voice even louder. “If I know all this, then there’s no way the cops don’t know. Fucking pigs,” she added, though no one turned.

“There are cameras here,” JR said. He was stroking Alistair’s wings.

I blinked. “What?”

“I noticed them the other day when I was watching for Alistair.” He gestured up, resuming the position he usually deployed when he was scouring the sky. A direction no one ever looked, save for someone with a pigeon. Notably the one Tita Linda had already said would save my life.

“See? There’s one there,” JR said, pointing to the corner of the courtyard directly facing my front door. “There’s one by your spot in the carport too.”

I heard a rush of blood in my ears, swift and sharp. “How long have they been there?”

JR shrugged. “I don’t know, a while?”

“Why didn’t you say something sooner?”

“At first I thought Tita Della put up security cameras, but then—”

I could taste my pulse in my throat then, the eeriness of knowing I’d been watched.

The surveillance I’d agreed to and the one I hadn’t, the misdirection I’d fallen for, that if they waved a hand in front of my face, I’d forget to look over my shoulder.

Which I had. They could always have gotten to me, but it was this I understood to be the point of no return: my awareness, my starring role, my purpose in the script.

I thought of the cameras trained on Jude. The way he, too, lived his life on a stage, for an audience of an unknown eye, watchful silence blinking.

I couldn’t escape the story any more than they could leave me out of it. I’d been one of the players all along.

I fumbled for my pocket and turned on the cell phone the de Witts had provided me, watching it gradually start up. The screen flashed bright and I looked away from it and into the camera, stepping toward it.

Immediately, I felt a buzz in my palm.

Filming starts tonight. See you at the villa.

Or what? I typed back.

No answer. But then, I already had my answer in the form of a dead woman who hadn’t been Jude’s warning after all.

It hit me like a thud overhead, the drop of an anvil. I’d forgotten to take an indirect path the night before, I realized.

I’d gone straight to bed, and now the devil had followed me home.