Chapter 21 Lily
LILY
I KNEW CLARA WAS WAITING for me in the casino lobby at the end of my shift, but I needed a drink first, some cold blunting gin, the familiar rattle of ice cubes in my glass.
I made my way to the bar on the casino floor, the one near the penny slots.
I was still rattled from making the phone call earlier that afternoon and kept replaying the conversation with Julie Zale’s aunt in my head.
What did it mean that Clara was right? I told myself that all she really knew was the colors of Julie’s room.
A few details. Maybe Clara hadn’t even really intuited them.
I found the website that Julie’s family had made, asking for tips, and scrolled through to see if any of them showed a shot of her bedroom—maybe Clara had already seen it subconsciously, and what she was calling a vision was really just submerged memory, something sifted from the millions of images and impressions we’re bombarded with every day.
I squinted at the background of every shot, but nothing seemed to match what she and Julie’s aunt had described.
I finished my gin and tonic too quickly, ordered a second anyway.
I couldn’t bring myself to meet with Clara, to face what she thought her visions meant or to confront her about those burns.
Was it worse if she’d done it to herself?
Or if it had been someone else? I was so tired of living in a world that abused women.
I kept picturing Steffanie’s face, the bruise already tender around her eye, when I found her in that bathroom, rag dolled around the base of the toilet. Didn’t anything ever change?
Someone put their hand on my shoulder, and I nearly dropped my drink. But it was only Clara.
“What are you doing here?” I asked.
“What are you doing here? This isn’t where we were supposed to meet.”
“I just needed a second to … think …” Clara pulled out the stool next to mine. “Maybe we should go somewhere else. You could get in trouble here.”
“Don’t worry about that,” she said. Sure enough, the bartender came over without a word and poured her a rum and coke.
“You a regular?” I asked.
“I come here from time to time.”
I sighed. “I don’t think I want to know any more about that.
” I had a chance to study her fingers. She had put on fresh bandages.
She noticed me looking at them and dropped her hands into her lap.
“So. What are we doing? You really think that something has happened to Julie, and to the woman who came to your shop?”
“I do.”
“Why?”
“I don’t know. I only know that these visions … they break the rules. This isn’t how things work for me. And I think it has to mean something. It’s not random.”
“I mean, why do you think you’re receiving this information?
If these women are sending out … I don’t know, signals?
Why are you getting them? What are you supposed to do?
” I could feel the heat rising in my face.
Talking that way, about signs and symbols and visions, still made me anxious, made me feel like I was on the wrong end of a prank.
There was a part of me, too, that didn’t want to trust Clara.
I couldn’t imagine what she might be after.
I was wary, on edge. But every time I thought about telling her it was too much, too strange, I saw Steffanie again.
“I don’t know that either. Trust me, this sounds crazy even in my world.
But I feel like I have information, whether I like it or not, and now I have to figure out what to do with it.
Some things just are. I don’t know why so many people refuse to believe that we live in a world where not everything can be explained.
Just because something is hard to explain, that doesn’t mean it’s not true or real.
And maybe if other people around here were open to listening, to feeling things, they’d know it was off, too. ”
I thought again of New York. Of all the signs I’d missed. The creeping sense that something was off-kilter, but being unwilling to say it, because I couldn’t point to it, couldn’t say exactly what it was. Like trying to describe a color in the dark. “So now what? What about going to the cops?”
“With what? I believe what I see, but I still don’t know exactly what happened. Or how the visions are tied together. But they’re getting more violent, more detailed, and I think if we can find Peaches, we’ll have time to warn her. Were you able to look at the cameras?”
“No luck,” I said. “My security clearance won’t work, and I couldn’t get into Emily’s account.” My attempt at guessing her password had been nearly comical. I didn’t know her middle name, or which state she came from.
“Maybe we need to be more organized. Go to other casinos—maybe Peaches got in trouble with security here and can’t come back. Happens to Des and me all the time.”
“Clara, can I ask you another question? Aren’t you worried? About yourself?”
“What do you mean?” she said slowly. Something hardened in her face.
“I mean, you’re meeting with strange men.
Men who clearly think they can get away with abusing you because you’re young, or because you’re vulnerable, or because they’re paying for it.
I saw that mark on your hand; it looks really bad.
If you think something bad is happening to women here—women who …
see men, don’t you think you should take it easy? Lay low?”
“I can take care of myself,” she said. But she wouldn’t look at me; she only ran her finger around the rim of her glass.
“I know that. But I just think you should be careful, okay?”
I was surprised by how quickly the anger clouded her face.
“What do you know about it? You go home to your nice house with your nice mom and live your nice life, and you’re not even grateful for it.
All you want is to leave. Well, guess what?
So do I. But you know it as well as I do—leaving takes cash.
There are no jobs here for someone like me, even if I wanted one. This is how things are.”
“Fine, I just think …”
“Leave it, Lily. Okay? I didn’t come here for a lecture. We just need to make a plan.”
My phone, faceup on the bar, lit up. Matthew again.
Okay, I know you might not want to talk to me yet. But I just wanted to say that I miss you.
Clara snorted. “See? You’re just going to bail again, as soon as you can. Go back to this Matthew guy, forget this whole summer ever happened.”
She sounded so jilted. It made her seem both older and younger at once.
“I’m not getting back together with him. I haven’t even responded to his texts.”
“You’re thinking about it. I can tell.”
I opened my mouth to argue, but she was right.
Despite everything that had happened, this afternoon I’d allowed myself to imagine what it would be like to go back.
To pretend things could return to how they had been.
Parties that lasted until dawn, rooftop views, waking up with my tongue furred from champagne. That hollow, easy life.
“What even happened? What did he do?”
“It’s complicated.”
“So tell me. I’m not stupid.”
“No, that’s not what I mean. It’s just that I’m still figuring a lot of that out.
” I took a long sip of my drink. “It wasn’t all his fault.
Matthew is brilliant, but he’s not conniving.
He never would have thought of all of that himself.
There was another artist, a painter, named Ramona.
She helped him stage the whole thing. I introduced the two of them.
I was hoping to represent her work. I thought I could launch her career.
I guess I did, in a way. Now she’s famous, getting coverage in magazines, making a ton of cash. ”
“Wait, what did they do?” Clara was leaning toward me, eyes wide.
I hadn’t told anyone the full story. My friends in New York only knew what they’d heard passed along the gossip lines, or whatever they read in the blogs, but I had ignored the concerned texts, the querying emails disguised as support.
Like my old clothes, the people I used to spend time with—other artists, other gallery girls—seemed to belong to a staged, unfamiliar version of my life.
I grasped for a starting point, an origin, but I really didn’t know where everything had begun. I had tried to patch together the story all summer, but there was so much I had refused to see.
I described for Clara the time Ramona met me for lunch at Union Square Cafe, me brandishing my corporate card like a proud child.
The night she invited me to her apartment to look at her work in progress, how sorry I felt for her, in the cramped little Lower East Side tenement apartment she shared with three other girls.
Before I knew it, I was telling her she should use a spare room in Matthew’s studio.
I knew Matthew would be angry that I’d extended the use of his space, but he never worked in the mornings, and that’s when Ramona liked the light the best. In my mind, they would never cross paths, never even meet.
“So wait, why did they?” The gin and tonics I was drinking seemed to have materialized from nowhere, and before I knew it I was rattling the ice cubes at the bottom of my empty glass again.
I hadn’t eaten much at the caf, and I had quickly reached the open, hyper-confessional stage of drunkenness, when the person across from you morphs into some idealized receptacle for your stories: the most sympathetic person you know, the most genuine, the most worthy of your secrets, your trust. All of a sudden I was burning to tell.