Every Monday for over a year it’s been the same. After she assists while he attends to sick dogs and cats, after surgery, after she mops the bloody floor and washes her hands, they come here. The couch, the desk, the calendars, the photos of Sarah. Shelby breathes in the scent of Lysol. How did she ever overlook that wretched smell? It reminds her of the hospital, of the floor of the bathroom, of the way she was treated like an object not a person.
Harper comes to take Shelby’s arm. “We can talk later.”
Shelby wrenches away from him. “I think we’re over.”
“You’re never happy. It’s never enough with you, Shelby.” Harper sounds wounded, as if he’s the one who’s been betrayed.
“By the way,” Shelby tells him, “it’s a girl.”
Harper looks at her, confused.
“Sarah’s planning on calling her Jasmine.”
“You saw Sarah?” Harper runs a hand through his hair. His expression has darkened. Shelby has moved outside of the box he put her in. One night a week, separate from his real life.
“She couldn’t have been nicer,” Shelby tells him. “I think we could have been friends. We’d have a lot to talk about.” She wants to hurt him, at least a little.
“Listen to me, Shelby, you leave her alone.”
Harper is no longer his usual charming self. See a charmer and you’re bound to see a snake nearby, Maravelle told her, and it’s turned out to be true. Maybe this is just a part of her punishment. She dumped Ben, she was thoughtless and mean, maybe she deserves to have wasted her love on a liar. All the same, she wants to salvage something out of this mess, so she does. She grabs Sarah’s painting off the wall. She’s always liked it.
“What do you think you’re doing?” Harper has moved from faux-betrayed to furious.
Shelby knows what she’s doing, so she ignores him.
“What’s going on?” the girl on the couch asks.
“She’s a maniac,” Harper mutters. “That’s what’s going on.”
The painting is heavy, but Shelby manages to get it down the hall. Leandro helps her by opening the door into the street. “You okay?” he asks. He’s a big, gentle man, and Shelby smiles up at him.
“I am,” she assures him. “Thank you.”
The painting fits neatly into the trunk of the taxi. It will probably be another ten-dollar charge, but Shelby doesn’t care. She wants to look at a field, a stream, a boulder, a blue sky, a landscape of pure white snow. Whenever she does, she’ll think she couldn’t save Helene, and she couldn’t save Sarah, but she can save herself.
CHAPTER
6
The tattooed girl is in the deli, stealing an apple. Shelby is there by happenstance, since she’s rarely in Union Square these days. She doesn’t work at the pet store anymore, and only stopped in to see Maravelle. When she first resigned, they didn’t want to let her go. They offered more money. They kept saying she was too big an asset to lose, when all she did was boss people around in a way that made them think the decisions they made were their own. So she made a deal: Maravelle would be promoted to manager and Shelby would train her, without pay.
Now Shelby is picking up a Swiss on rye with mustard, lettuce, and tomato to scarf down on her way to class. It’s her last semester. She has zero downtime in her day. She’s gone from a pot-smoking failure to a workaholic. She is a tutor at school and works in a lab. She doesn’t know how it happened. It’s like a magic spell, one where there’s a transformation and everything that happens is invisible. One minute she’s a lost girl sitting in a deserted park in her hometown smoking weed, and the next she’s got a 3.8 average at Hunter College and is seriously considering vet school. Her biology professor suggested she apply for a fellowship, which she was stunned to receive. Now the City of New York actually gives her money each month. When she quit the pet store her employees took her out to a club in the East Village, where they danced on the bar and all got extremely drunk. She danced for hours with Juan, who has qualified for the New York City Police Academy and quit the week after Shelby did.
The tattooed girl’s face is covered by blue patterns. People glance at her, then quickly look away. She’s disturbing, like a cannibal queen let loose in New York. Ever since Shelby stole the dogs she’s felt a weird connection to this girl, as if they were soul sisters. What would have happened if fairy-tale logic prevailed and they’d changed places that day? Then it would be Shelby out there begging in Union Square, and the tattooed girl would be lugging a tote bag filled with zoology textbooks.
Shelby glances over as the tattooed girl slips out, the bell above the door jingling. “Make it two sandwiches,” Shelby tells the deli guy.
She knows what it’s like when someone is compelled to show her pain. When Shelby shaved her head it was a public penance, there for the whole world to see. She now has straight, gold-brown hair reaching to her shoulders. Jasmine has told her she can’t believe how pretty Shelby has become. And yet when Shelby looks in the mirror she still sees the bald girl she was for so long.