Chapter 4 Clara
CLARA
IN THE FOUR DAYS SINCE the man had come to the shop, the posters asking for information about Julie seemed to have doubled.
I saw her face around every corner: in the window of the saltwater taffy store, at the bus shelter on Pacific and Kentucky, the door of Tony’s Baltimore Grill.
I couldn’t look at her picture without thinking that there was something hidden in the riddle of her disappearance that I should have been able to see.
I felt the same fluttering in my gut that usually meant I was about to have a vision—both uncomfortable and pleasant, almost like the tingle before a sneeze, but it took over my whole body, starting with the center of my forehead and spreading outward through my limbs.
It reminded me of the sensation I got when I thought about my mother, tried to picture what she must look like now, or remember the way she smelled, the sound of her voice.
But when I tried to picture what was waiting for Julie Zale, I only saw a dark shape, like a spill of black paint.
On Sunday morning, Des and I sat in beach chairs in front of the shop, waving paper fans at our faces.
A feral cat crept up from under the boardwalk and splayed itself in the shade of our awning.
I poured it a small dish of milk, but it wouldn’t drink and the milk curdled in the heat.
A middle-aged couple in matching khaki shorts approached from the candy store.
A plastic sack of salt water taffy dangled from the woman’s hands.
She paused in front of the doorway and stared into the shop.
“Come in,” Des called to them, in the voice she used for clients—honeyed and sweet—though she couldn’t always keep it up. The gruff, cigarette-roughened Des eventually slipped through. “Come find out about your future. We do tarot readings, palm readings, anything you like.”
The woman leaned into the man’s shoulder, whispered something in his ear. He shook his head, took her hand, and they walked on. I watched the sweat stain on the back of his gray T-shirt move down the boardwalk until they disappeared.
“Fuckers,” Des said. “I’ll tell you what’s in his future: heart disease. You see the gut on him?” I tried to hide my smile. Des was probably the last person who should be calling anyone out for a lack of self-control. After all, the pills kept her thin.
“Hey Des, have you heard anything about that missing girl?”
“What girl? There’s always missing girls.”
“The one whose poster is all over town. She was here, apparently.”
Des shrugged. “Someone is wasting a lot of paper, if you ask me.”
“Her uncle came in. For a reading. Wanted to know if I could help.”
“Shit. What’d you tell him?”
“Nothing much. That I could feel her presence in the air.” That had been true.
That feeling, that pressure on my throat, the tears that had built behind my eyes—I had convinced myself that they meant something, that I should care about what happened to her.
Maybe that’s why I stole the bandana—I wanted to keep a piece of her close.
“You don’t know anything, do you?” I asked.
Sometimes, Des had said, girls showed up at the club looking for jobs as dancers.
Runaways, girls fresh off the bus from farm towns in Pennsylvania, the smell of hay and manure lingering in their hair.
Girls who hadn’t heard that any glitz had rubbed off Atlantic City years ago.
“Zilch. Though she better not trot out that young ass, looking for a job. I’m probably about to be canned any day now. All Larry needs is some fresh little thing with decent tits waltzing in there, and I’m out with the garbage.”
“You say that every week.”
“Gets more and more true all the time. You should probably be more worried.”
“We’ve still got this.” I spread my hands to indicate the front of the shop.
“You know that’s not enough. It hasn’t been, not for a long time. That’s the problem with this town. Nothing good gets its due here, not anymore. Shit, I mean you’re practically the real goddamned deal, and we still can’t pay rent on time.”
Des was right. We got word-of-mouth clients for readings every few weeks, but people didn’t seem to want to know their futures anymore.
They came to AC because they wanted to escape from the unrelenting predictability of it all—their boring jobs, their indifferent partners, the same meals they microwaved night after night and ate in front of the TV. I couldn’t blame them for that.
“We need to be more proactive,” I said. “We should try the spa again tomorrow. I think those are our people—these ladies pay two hundred bucks to let someone rub lotion on them and put a bunch of hot rocks on their backs; they should be able to cough up ten bucks for a reading here and there.”
“We got blacklisted there, remember, little miss? They said they’d call security if we came back.”
I crossed my arms. Last time, Des and I paid $20 each for a day pass and spent a few hours offering to read cards for women who came into the lounge. We made $50 off a woman from Binghamton before someone turned us in and an employee in a dark suit demanded that we leave.
“They didn’t mean that,” I said.
“What we need is to make friends with someone on the inside, someone on the staff who will work with us. Let’s just try it. It’ll beat sitting here, sweating, my goddamned cellulite sticking to this stupid chair.”
“You don’t have cellulite, Des.”
She turned to look at me, slid her sunglasses down the bridge of her nose.
“You know when you look like her the most?” I didn’t need to ask whom she meant.
Des almost never talked about my mother, so when she did, I tended to hold my breath.
I could count the facts I knew about her on two hands: she liked mint chocolate chip ice cream; she and Des moved here in 1987 from Newark after their mother died; she had visions, too, just like me; and she left for California when I was a baby, to become a psychic to the stars.
I received letters from her every year on my birthday until I turned twelve.
The only other piece of her I had was the book she left behind: a heavy old hardcover with browned pages, called The Wisdom of Tarot.
I liked to read it before I fell asleep, so that some of its magic, some of her, might sift through my dreams.
“You make the same face as my sister did when you tell a lie.”
“What kinds of things did she lie about?” I asked.
But Des didn’t answer, and I watched her stare out past the boardwalk and the beach to the thick blue line where the ocean met the horizon. The air above it shimmered in the heat.
“I have an idea I’ve been meaning to float by you,” Des said.
“Shoot.”
Her eyes were still locked on the water—she knew I wasn’t going to like what she had to say. “There’s this flier someone was passing around at the club. One of the other girls gave it to me. A business opportunity.”
“Okay …”
“Well, it’s this service, right? Where rich men are looking to … take care of young, attractive women.”
“What do you mean, take care of?”
“They pay you to let them take you out on dates. Buy you nice things, take you out to good dinners.”
“Men pay you to let them buy you stuff? Come on, Des, that’s not all they’re paying for.
” I had lived here my whole life; I’d seen how this kind of thing worked.
Young women in short dresses getting into the back seats of strangers’ cars, disappearing into the night.
In this town full of people who wanted to win and drink and take?
No way an opportunity for generosity was what they were paying for.
“I’m serious! There’s all these online services, but with me at the club, we could do it that way.”
“I’m underage.”
“They’ll like that even better, trust me.”
“If it’s so good, why don’t you do it?”
“Ava, so many women do this, okay? It’s how young girls pay for college these days.
No one can afford that shit otherwise, and there’s no harm in it.
Let some moron buy you nice dresses, have a steak with someone here and there.
I would love to do it, but no one wants to go out with an old hag like me. ”
“You’re thirty-eight. That’s not old. And I still don’t see why anyone would want to do that—blow money on a stranger. What’s in it for the guy?”
Des sighed, rolled her head in slow circles.
The little bones in her neck popped. “Some guy, probably married ten years, bored out of his mind, gets to go to a restaurant with a pretty little thing on his arm, order a good bottle of wine? It makes them feel powerful, alive. Men are like that; they need their egos fed constantly, the poor, stupid louts. Try this, just once. You hate it, we’ll try something else.
But it sure as hell would be nice to pay the electric bill.
To not have to hide when Bill comes knocking, right? ”
Bill was our landlord. He had come around two weeks ago to collect rent. Two months’ overdue. Des and I hid in the bathroom in our apartment above the shop until he stopped yelling. I know you’re in there. You need to give me my money or else, Desmina. I mean it this time.
“Fine,” I said. At least when I saw my mother again, I’d be able to tell her that I did whatever it took to keep the shop going.
I could say that I had tried to preserve what she had started.
I was going to do it even though the idea made my heart race.
Even though I knew full well I was probably saying yes to more than Des had described.
Des squeezed my wrist. “That’s my girl. You’ll need this.
” She raised her hips off the chair so that she could wriggle something from the pocket of her shorts: a driver’s license, with the name “Clara Voyant” on it and a photo of Des on the left-hand side.
Of course. Of course she had already banked on the fact that I would say yes.