*
Ariel holds the door handle for dear life. The taxi driver has floored the gas pedal again, and swerves violently left, into the lane of oncoming traffic, trying to accelerate past the slowing streetcar, but he sees another car coming straight at them and slams on the brakes and yanks the wheel to the right—
“That was close!” he yells in English, with what seems like glee, and pulls back behind the tram. As the oncoming car zooms past, its driver makes an obscene gesture. The taxi driver shrugs, as if this is just part of the job, to have other drivers furious at you.
The yellow streetcar comes to a full stop to disgorge passengers while others push aboard. Ariel looks past these people to a building’s whitewashed wall, a broad stuccoed expanse to which posters are pasted, advertisements that all seem to be for American brands: a spectacular woman wearing preposterous clothing; screenshots of snark for a social-media app; an influencer hawking cosmetics. American culture, American commerce, American lies, everywhere.
Ariel asks to be let off on the far side of the square, where she can surveil her hotel before climbing out of the taxi. She pays particular attention to the lone men, taking careful inventory while crossing the square, then escaping the heat into the quiet of the hotel, dimly lit, cool tiles. She rides the small elevator, its gears audible, machinery that’s hidden but not secret, not mysterious.
In her daily life at home, the only elevators she rides are at the hospital, with which she has an excess of unwelcome familiarity. Some people have never even been to the hospital, barely know where it is. Ariel wishes she were one of them, blissfully ignorant.
George had been born premature, and had spent five terrifying weeks in the NICU. It then took the boy years to catch up developmentally, his whole childhood defined by tests and treatments, doctors and hospitals, specialists and therapists—occupational, physical, speech. Her child was ten years old before Ariel could imagine him sleeping under someone else’s roof, even his best friend’s house down the road seemed too far, a one-minute drive, Ariel could run it in five minutes if she needed.
Her son was one of the reasons that Ariel felt like she’d been living on high alert, waiting for some bad thing to happen. Something else.
CHAPTER 8
DAY 1. 4:27 P.M.
“Hello?” Ariel sees that the call is coming from the landline of her bookshop. She assumes it’s a problem.
“Hey! It’s Persephone.”
“Hi P. What’s wrong?”
“Wrong? Nothing. I’m calling to give you the weekend numbers, like you asked.”
Ariel had dumped a flurry of last-minute instructions before she left the shop in the care of her employees, a ragtag bunch of part-time high-school kids and a couple of college girls home for the summer, plus full-time Persephone, whose real name is Ember.
“I loathe the name Ember.” This is the name that’s on the young woman’s paychecks, her paperwork, her driver’s license; she hasn’t yet mustered the conviction to make the legal change. “It’s not even a, like, name. My parents are idiots.”
Persephone was probably right, at least about her mother. Just a couple of months ago, Ariel had seen her standing in front of a flabbergasted judge trying to justify her moving violation while wearing a WINE O’CLOCK T-shirt. This was a woman who’d gotten dressed knowing that she’d be a defendant in court.
“It’s like they tried to name me Amber—which to begin with is a kinda stupid, semi-trashy stripper name—but, like, failed. They misspelled Amber.”
“But it’s a nice idea, isn’t it?” Ariel asked. “An ember? It’s a spark.”
“No, actually. It’s a hot sooty hunk that’s left over after a fire has gone out. An ember is a dangerous piece of garbage.”
Ariel didn’t disagree, but it would be impolite to pile on, especially during the job interview, when Ariel and Persephone didn’t yet know each other. She also didn’t want to engage in a discussion about the young woman’s chosen alternative.
“Per-se-pho-nee,” she’s constantly repeating slowly, clearly exasperated and perhaps surprised that more people aren’t widely conversant in Greek mythology. “You know: queen of the underworld?”
“Per-what?” People ask this all the time, and Persephone inevitably rolls her eyes.
“Per-se-pho-nee.” She manages to suffuse that last syllable with her many disappointments, her frustrations. It’s going to be a long hard life.
But who was Ariel to question someone else’s fantasies of herself? Someone else’s reinvention? Ariel doesn’t begrudge anyone changing her name, trying to become someone other than what her parents chose. Ariel had done the same exact thing.
*
Her last half-day at the shop before heading to the airport was semi-frantic, spent mainly in the office-storeroom-breakroom in the basement, a low-ceilinged, windowless, claustrophobia-inducing space that had taken Ariel years to get comfortable in, with houseplants under grow lights, and book-promotion posters hammered into the walls.
She finally came upstairs after lunchtime, carrying a stack of heavy cookbooks to replenish the shelves. Persephone was behind the register, engrossed in a postapocalyptic fantasy novel, a genre that was somehow related to her oft-mentioned studies in grad school, that golden moment when everything was still possible, when her future looked so bright. But Persephone was beginning to suspect that it had been a false glow on the horizon, not the rising sun of a bright new day, just the remnants of a dying bonfire of oversold, overpriced, undervalued educational achievements that turn out to be almost meaningless on the job market, after twenty straight years of full-time schooling interspersed with hourly jobs in retail, folding shirts, punching buttons on cash registers.
This is why Ariel had hired the young woman. Not because of her encyclopedic knowledge of nearly everything, especially genre literature, which turned out to be a tremendous asset for bookselling, but because Ariel recognized the terrible weight of world-shattering disillusionment. She wanted to help ease it.
The bell on the back of the door tinkled. Persephone said “Welcome” automatically but cheerfully as a pair of women breezed in, leaving the door wide open despite the carefully hand-painted sign that pleaded, A/C IS ON!—PLEASE CLOSE DOOR—THANKS!
“Assholes,” Ariel muttered, pushing the door closed with her hip.
The women seemed to be debating the merits of different safari destinations—“Well yes, gorillas, but, on the other hand, y’know, Uganda?”—and one of them said something Ariel didn’t catch about flying commercial to Africa, and then suddenly there was silence. The women had stopped talking. The unnatural break made Ariel look over.
“Oh. My. God.” One of these women was staring at Ariel. “Laurel?”