Ghost Flower (2 page)

“We were just ordering,” Bain said and proceeded to do it. He and Bridgette took their cappuccino (him) and mint tea (her) to a table that a family of five had just vacated in the corner.

Roman rounded on me. “You’re on probation, you know,” he told me, his little eyes flashing. Out of the corner of my eye, I watched Bridgette carefully brush the crumbs the family had left behind into a napkin and fold it precisely into a little envelope before throwing it away. “We’ll discuss this after work.”

The anger on his face was just a mask for the excitement beneath it. Roman knew I needed this job. He suspected there was something hinky about my ID, that I should probably be in school, which meant he felt he had power over me. In the past he’d tried to use that power in ways which—

Well, in ways. And even
I
wasn’t lonely enough to want that.

I’d managed to avoid his attempts through a combination of skill and luck. But it was getting harder.

Bain and Bridgette sat, heads bent together, talking earnestly for fifteen minutes, glancing over at me every few seconds. They reminded me of sleek, well-groomed mountain cats—they were beautiful, but there was something predatory about them. I pretended not to notice, but my heart was pounding, and I’m pretty sure several people got their coffees for half price because I wasn’t paying attention to what I was doing.

Bridgette’s grey stingray Filofax was on the table, and Bain grabbed it. From the corner of my eye I saw him take out a piece of paper, scrawl something on it, push his chair away, and stand up. As Bridgette gathered her bag, sweater, and sunglasses and moved to the door, he walked to the front of the line and slipped me the paper.

“We have a proposition for you. Call if you want to hear about it.”

I quickly palmed the paper into the pocket of my apron, aware of Bridgette’s eyes on me. There was something unreadable in her expression, something I couldn’t put my finger on, but it wasn’t friendly. She was toying with the ring on her finger.

When I got my break, I pulled the paper from my pocket. On one side was some kind of list written in pencil. On the other, in pen, two numbers. One was a phone number. The other was “$100,000 cash.”

I could hear Nina’s catcall whistle, the one she was so proud of having perfected, as if she were standing next to me. God, I wished she were. “You must have something they
really
want,” her voice marveled in my head.

I must
, I thought. I flipped the paper back over and scanned the list. I assumed it was in Bridgette’s writing; it certainly seemed to fit what I’d seen of her. The top said “For Marisol,” and below it: “Remove contents of spice rack, wipe with damp cloth, replace in alphabetical order. Remove contents of medicine chest, wipe with Clorox antibacterial wipes (blue not yellow), and replace in chronological order from earliest expiration date to latest.” I had a sudden vision of her doing the same with me, remove contents, wipe clean, and replace in a new improved order.

This is a person I don’t want anything to do with
, I thought. I shoved the note into my pocket, rearranged my face, and went back to work.

“F
orgetting is harder than remembering,” Miss Melanie liked to say. She lived next door to my last foster family at the Efficiency Suites Apartments. She was the oldest resident in the complex and kind of our unofficial caretaker. I picture her sitting on the scarred Naugahyde armchair that she’d had us move onto the flat roof of the building, sectioning and braiding my foster sister Nina’s hair. Nearby some of the indistinguishable boys who also lived in the complex kicked a half-inflated ball. The dusty summer night hung around us. It was hot, scorching, even with the sun down, but you could catch a slight breeze if you got up high enough.

Miss Melanie’s hands worked like hummingbirds, darting in and out, up and around, pausing only so she could reach for her Kent 100 and take a deep sizzling drag. “You can try and try,” she said, “but the memories are still there, waiting for you like thugs out behind the liquor store.”

I laughed and said, “I wish.”

“Yeah, that doesn’t make any sense, Miss M,” one of the boys who’d been playing soccer shouted over. “If that were true, I woulda
been an A student acing my exams instead of hanging out with these losers.”

There was a chorus of jeers, but Miss Melanie ignored them. “Just wait.”

I’d been waiting, but I’d still found the opposite was true. I was a professional forgetter. My memory seems to have been ransacked, not with professional precision but crudely. I’m left with pieces of memories dangling like the red fleshy sinews of the severed limbs in zombie movies—streaks of headlights on wet pavement or “Tom Yaw” or the line of my real mother’s jaw as she is about to turn toward me.

I can’t remember my actual mother’s face. When I see her in my mind, it’s always from the back, her standing in front of something, a painting, a window, but mainly the ocean. Walking not away from me but toward it, to put her toes in and feel the glittering chill of sand gathering between them as the cold water hits and the crabs run tickling along the bottom. Without turning, she holds out her hand to me to join her, but I stay on the shore watching the long-legged birds, trying to figure out why some fly and some stay. When I ask my mother, she says, “Everyone has a choice.”

She flew. I stayed. Although I suppose you could see it the other way as well.

There’s no ocean in Tucson, but there are still plenty of ways to drown yourself. I’m not talking metaphorically—life is complicated enough without word play. I mean the way that you can drown in something as mundane as a plate of chicken soup. Essentially you are always just one inch of liquid away from death. That’s why I’ve never understood why people make such a big deal out of planning suicide. Even generic store-brand soup will do.

The triggers for a memory can be obscure, mossy little embankments with unexpected wormholes that lead you into unknown
regions of your psyche, but there didn’t seem to be much mystery to why my thoughts would turn to my mother on Mother’s Day. I’ve wondered, though, if there might not have been some tiny groove I stumbled into without knowing, some part of me that longed for family, that also got touched off without me realizing it. If that’s what ultimately made me do it.

T
he rest of the day was a blur until closing time. That’s when Roman struck. “The cash drawer is ten dollars short,” he announced, eyeing me. “I think you know what that means.”

He took a step toward me. I took a step back.

“I had nothing to do with that.”

“Then who did?” Another step toward me. The coffee grinder was pressing against my back now.

“I don’t know.” I reached behind me to steady myself, and my fingers closed around the handle of one of the ceramic Easter mugs we were putting on sale.

“Well, what do you propose to do about it?” One step closer and his body would be pressed against mine. His breathing was already heavy, and his eyes were locked on my breasts. They’re not big, but his expression said they would be adequate. “I think we’ll have to do a whole body search.”

I lashed my arm forward, sending the heavy mug bashing into his cheek where it met his eye socket. The mug shattered, and he reeled backward, gasping.

“You stupid bitch,” he said, gripping his eye. “You stupid bitch, you could have blinded me.”

I wanted to correct him. I knew what I was doing, and it wasn’t anything that dangerous. But he was recovering, and it was time for me to go.

“You stupid bitch,” he repeated, apparently liking the sound of it, lurching toward me. He was between me and the exit. “I’m going to make you pay for that. I’m—”

His meaty hand reached for me, and I ducked, throwing him off balance. As he stumbled, I shot toward the end of the counter. I felt his fingers close on the back pocket of my jeans, but I kept going. My heart was pounding in my ears so loud I only barely heard the rip of fabric, but the release sent me sprawling forward.

“I’m going to call the police. You stupid—”

On my hands and knees I crawled for the opening of the counter. He tried to pin my foot, but I kicked up and was rewarded with a groan. “You stupid bitch, I’m going to have you arrested. You’re going to—”

I didn’t hear the rest. I was on my feet and at the door, fumbling with his keys in the lock.
God, why wouldn’t my fingers work? Work dammit wor—

And then I was outside, in the warm night air, the mountains’ dark silhouettes against the blue and gold of the late dusk sky. I ran—I don’t know for how long or how far. Finally I had to stop, leaning against a rust-red boulder, panting, crying. I looked down at my hands, and they were pocked with shards of pink and lavender and green and white ceramic from crawling over the mug I’d broken. A small yellow daisy from the rim was dangling from my left palm at a weird angle. I looked around and had no idea where I was.

I had no idea about anything. The only clear thought I possessed
was that I could not go back to my room in case Roman really did call the cops. There wasn’t much there, nothing anyone could use to find me, but it also meant I had nothing except an ID in the name of Eve Brightman and the clothes on my back. I certainly couldn’t plan to pick up my last paycheck.

The wind changed, bringing the smell of desert sage, which meant it was raining somewhere nearby. I looked up and saw the eerie grey shapes of storm clouds massing around the mountains on the horizon. I looked down and realized I was still wearing my apron. Reaching in, I felt a crumpled-up bill and the piece of paper Bain had given me.

“We have a proposition,” he’d said. “$100,000 cash,” the note read. There was a crack and a rumble of thunder. The storm was getting closer.

He didn’t ask questions when I called, just told me to sit tight, he’d be there as soon as he could. I used three of the ten dollars I’d stolen and stashed in my apron to buy an ice tea and sat on the side of the road waiting, watching the storm clouds crawl closer. My mind should have been going a mile a minute, but instead it was just… blank. My eyes focused on the silvery-white cocoon of a moth or butterfly beneath the boulder next to the one I was sitting on. Apparently I wasn’t the only one making a new start at this particular intersection.

Forty-five minutes later a silver Porsche Carrera did a U-turn and stopped like an impeccably trained panther coming to heel in front of me. Bain rolled down the window and gave me a smile. “Ready for the ride of your life?” he asked.

A voice in the back of my head whispered that this was too smooth, too easy. My hand hesitated on the door handle for a moment. If I did this, whatever it was, there would be no going back. No escape.

You can keep running
, the voice said.
There’s no reason to stop now. Turn and run away again.

I opened the door and dropped into the seat. “I’m ready.”

At the time I thought I was.

He made another U-turn and headed west, toward the clouds.

I
watched the raindrops slide down the window, finding pathways through the dust. It’s fascinating to watch how they do that—one of them leads the way, and then the others follow in that path, perhaps veering slightly and making it wider, but generally sticking to the same direction unless acted on by something powerful like the wind picking up or a sudden turn. Watch them sometime; their reluctance to chart their own course is remarkable. And if raindrops exhibit that—raindrops that have nothing at stake in their brief lives—how unsurprising is it that people do it too, following paths carved by others, even if it leads nowhere good.

Surface tension was what did it, held them in place, I knew. They stayed that way because of the cohesion of molecules, their attraction to the surface, the superficial.

Bain said, “Do you need to go to Van Cortland Street to pick anything up?”

“You know where I live? Did you follow me?”

“It’s called due diligence. I wanted to make sure you were suitable.”

The word
suitable
sent a creepy chill prickling between my shoulder blades. “And what did you learn?”

“That you’ve been living there for a month, during which time no one has come to visit you, you told the landlady you’re an orphan, you have no cell phone, and you’ve never gotten a phone call there.”

I stared at him for four breaths until the creepy feeling receded. I said, “No, I don’t need to get anything.”

He changed lanes, getting on the ramp to the highway, the clicking noise of his blinker the only sound in the car. Once he’d merged into traffic, we drove in silence, heading north. After about a mile he glanced over at me. “How long have you been on your own?”

I paused, deciding which story to pluck from my quiver and shoot in his direction. I said, “My mother drove me to a Greyhound bus station when I was ten, said to wait there while she went to get Twizzlers, and didn’t come back.” It wasn’t the whole story, but it was true.

I could tell I chose well by the way his lips compressed and his fingers curved over the mahogany inlay on the steering wheel. The atmosphere in the car shifted slightly, the way it does when someone burps and is embarrassed. “I’m sorry,” he said.

“I managed.”

“I had no right—”

“No, you didn’t.” There would be no more questions about my childhood, I was sure.

The windshield wipers traced smooth overlapping semicircles out of the raindrops on the glass, like a flamenco dancer opening and closing her fans. Lightning flashed in shining silver veins across the sky, and thunder rumbled far away.

I picked out a question with care. You have to be careful with strangers; questions can reveal as much as answers. “People always say it never rains in the desert.”

“You’re not from here,” he said, almost to himself, like he was filing it away. “You’ve never seen a thunderstorm in the desert then?” He glanced to see that I was paying attention. “They can be pretty amazing. Wild and out of control until suddenly, abruptly, they just stop. Ro—Aurora—loved thunderstorms. She’d run outside in them and just stand there for as long as they went on, getting soaking wet.”