Chapter 14 Lily #3
She sighed. “You should let your hair down. Literally. You look like a librarian.” I winced.
Matthew had always liked when I looked a little stern.
Or rather he liked undoing it—pulling my hair out of a bun, stripping me out of my pencil skirts.
With Matthew, my seriousness had made me feel important, like I could anchor his more impulsive, erratic qualities.
The unpredictable schedule. The disregard for paperwork, his lack of interest in grocery shopping, of simply making sure there was milk for the coffee and bread for the toast and soap for the shower.
There were times when I resented it, a little bit, but he could always sense that.
He had a habit of naming my poses as though I were a sculpture he had made: Lily Chopping Onions.
Lily Scrubbing. Lily, Arms Crossed. Some of my anger would unravel then, but I wished now that it hadn’t.
Maybe that anger would have protected me.
“Thanks for the fashion advice. Now, please go.” But she didn’t budge. She seemed to be weighing something in me, measuring me, and it made me uneasy.
“Okay, I’ll leave you alone, but I want to talk to you about something first.”
“Me? About what?” I had the feeling she was going to ask me for money or for a favor that could make me lose this stupid job.
“I don’t want to talk about it here. Meet me somewhere?”
“I don’t know, Clara, Emily warned me about you. And that thing after the reading, how I felt …”
“Emily’s a hypocrite!”
“Shhh! Keep your voice down. Okay, okay, fine. If you leave right now, how about I come by after work? I get off at six.” I glanced up at the women again, now just a few feet from our door; I felt flustered and annoyed that Clara had manipulated me.
But then I reconsidered. How different my life at sixteen had been compared to hers.
Maybe she needed help: Going to the cops. Finding a way to get away from Des.
“Meet me at the shop,” she said. “Des will already be gone for work by then.” She sauntered away, and I watched the trio of women sneer at her as she left.
I sighed. I had planned on doing more research on the paintings when I got off work—whatever research meant, when I only had a single legible initial, a broad range of dates.
But after I checked the women in and walked them to their lockers, I wondered if Clara might be able to help me there, too.
It was a ridiculous, almost feverish thought, and yet—she knew things she shouldn’t know.
She saw things she shouldn’t have been able to see.
Would she be able to tell me something about the paintings?
Maybe not. But I had next to nothing to go on.
If she was going to rope me into meeting her anyway, it was worth a try.
I felt a flush of shame at my selfishness, how quickly my motivations had flipped from altruistic to self-serving.
Maybe Matthew and Ramona had rubbed off on me more than I had thought.
I WAS hungry from another depressing lunch break in the cafeteria, and the smells of fries and soft pretzels and fudge on the boardwalk made me ravenous.
I approached Clara’s shop and saw a new message on the chalkboard sign out front.
A picture of a crystal ball in the center, and in the corner, a tiny star.
I looked in and saw she was alone, sitting on the floor in front of an oscillating fan with streamers tied to the grate, turning the pages of a People magazine.
I pushed through the curtain, the beads tangling in my hair.
“Ah, good. You’re here.”
I picked a jade Buddha statue off the counter and turned it over in my palm. Embarrassingly, I was nervous again. In the spa, I had authority, I could enforce the rules. But not here.
She flipped the magazine closed. I noticed that the mailing label on the cover was addressed to the spa, under Deidre’s name. Of course.
“Have you seen these posters around?” She rustled behind the counter where the old register sat and handed me a piece of paper. It was the poster about the missing teenager, Julie Zale.
“Yeah, I’ve seen them.”
“What do you make of it?”
“What do I make of it?” If I were being honest, I would have to say that I hadn’t thought about it much.
But it was different, looking at the girl’s photograph up close.
According to the date of birth on the poster, she was eighteen.
I remembered what it was like to be eighteen.
The year before was when Steffanie and I had started sneaking into clubs.
A girl that age was hungry for all kinds of experiences, even ones she knew might hurt her.
I’d done a lot when I was eighteen that I had told myself I would laugh about one day.
The night I let a stranger finger me in the mosh pit of a concert.
The time a couple of guys Steffanie and I had crushes on convinced us to kiss and feel each other up in the middle of a crowded party after too many hard lemonades.
The pill I took with a boy I hardly knew, thinking it made me look brave and bold and carefree not to ask what it was before I washed it down with a mouthful of Bacardi Razz.
Julie Zale was any of us. But one of the mistakes that she told herself would build her character, make her into a woman, had destroyed her somehow.
“I feel sorry for her. Whatever happened to her—whether she chose it or not—probably happened faster and more easily than she ever could have thought. Why? Do you know her or something?” I thought about finding Steffanie on the bathroom floor that night, her face pale, pressed against the tile.
By the time she died, it had been four years since we talked.
I had heard rumors, though, about her drug use.
From New York it was easy enough to dismiss, pretend that it was just hearsay.
But at the funeral I couldn’t avoid seeing how gaunt her face had become.
I knew that whatever had happened to Steffanie since we left high school had everything to do with that night at the club.
I knew, even though we had never talked about it, that she spent the rest of her life feeling like she’d been used up and thrown away.
“Her uncle came to me, asked me if there was any way I could help him find her. But things don’t really work that way for me.
I can’t just solve mysteries. Or else I’d be a cop, or detective.
Famous, probably. Rich.” She smiled at the idea.
Selfishly, I felt disappointed: it didn’t sound likely that Clara would be able to help with the paintings after all.
“But things have been weird ever since he came by.”
“Weird how?”
She rubbed her eyes with her palms. “Ever since, I’ve been having weird visions.
Not the usual stuff. Normally I get a glimpse of something, of someone, but they have to be …
available to me. They have to be near me, close enough for me to see them, to get a sense of them, the way they move in the world.
But this … I don’t know. I’ve been having visions that don’t have any context. ”
“What kinds of things are you seeing?”
She hesitated. “A few days after he showed up, I started seeing things and hearing things, but I couldn’t tell why, where they were coming from.
Music, mostly, but also this weird vision of a bloody tooth that was like …
knocked loose.” I couldn’t help but wince and touch the tips of my fingers to my mouth.
“Then another woman came to me and she was acting really weird. She ended up leaving before I even read her cards. A few days later, I started hearing a baby, crying, screaming.”
“Okay … ” What was she getting at? Was I falling for a ruse?
“Like I said, that’s not how things work.
But for days, I was hearing this crying sound.
When I was on the boardwalk, when I was in the casinos, at night when I was trying to sleep.
” She smoothed her hand over her upper arm.
“And I keep getting this feeling, like something is crawling over my skin.”
“You’re not on drugs, are you?”
“No! Come on, be serious. I never ask anyone for anything. But I feel like I’m going crazy. And I need help.”
“Okay, okay, I’m sorry. Can’t all of those …
visions … just be some kind of … I don’t know, fluke?
Like you’ve got a signal crossed or something?
” The absurdity of the situation wasn’t wasted on me, sitting there parsing out problems with a psychic’s sixth sense.
I didn’t even have the vocabulary for a conversation like that.
But Clara seemed genuinely upset. The detached, composed girl I had met on my first day of work was gone. She was asking for help.
“Yeah but then, a week later, another woman comes and she has this first woman’s purse.
Said she found it on the side of the road, which makes me think something happened to the first woman.
Maybe the crying was, like, a warning. Maybe there was something I was supposed to do.
Or that I’m still supposed to do. A few days ago, I started having visions of blurred streetlights.
Like I was in a car. And I felt sick, like I was going to throw up.
There were other things, too, sort of random.
Someone’s hands, with lots of little cuts around the knuckles. The floor underneath a bed.”
“But those things have nothing to do with one another.”
“I know. But I can’t get over the feeling that this might also have something to do with her.” She nodded to the poster of Julie Zale.
I couldn’t help but sigh. “I thought you said you weren’t in the business of solving mysteries.”
“I know, and I probably wouldn’t be thinking about it so much if Peaches hadn’t just shown up with the other woman’s bag.” She reached under the tablecloth and produced a little tooled leather purse. A prop, a ploy?
“Peaches?”