Del was not the one who had made the mistake. It was not Del who had risked Marshall’s world. And how far is one obliged to carry the weight of a single mistake?
Because she had been wrong. She had risked Marshall’s world for the love of a man who would not have loved her for life (as Del, in his way, had) but it was the world’s cruelty, its inanity, that had amplified that mistake. It was the world that had put June and Del and Marshall and a little girl in Alabama in a hold they could not break. Or was this the real issue at the heart of everything else in her life? That she could always blame something other than herself?
Once she had been the girl smoking on the high school track; once she had let Leon Kronenberg touch her breast; once she had run away to Vegas; once she had opened a casino; once she had believed that the world could become new again, that the right people in the right place could make up any rules they wanted. And none of that was true. They had all paid the price. And, really, where was the moment that should have happened differently? Which was the choice that had set all the others in motion? And would a different choice have been the right one?
June and Del had been good partners at the El Capitan. She and Marshall were good partners there now. They made a lot of money; Del had been right about the opportunities he saw. But how long would it last? For all the millions they had spent, for all that it seemed there had always been something under construction, something being added, some area being renovated, the El Capitan was tired and small and old now. The Strip was moving south, the El Capitan was at the edge of being in the wrong part of town, closer to Circus Circus and the Stratosphere than to the empty land that would surely be the grand casinos—the carpet joints—of the next century. If there had been a niche to carve out for the El Capitan three decades ago, it was not clear that there would still be one for three more.
Already, she was fighting to hold on to their cash cow: to the entertainment that drew everyone in. She had stuck with the formula that she and Del had initiated. Four months after he died, she had signed a brother-and-sister magician act from Belarus, paying them twice what anyone else would have offered. And once again, her instinct for talent had been true. The act grew into that salary and past it, and the pair lured the gamblers, the drinkers, the players, the shoppers, the eaters, the lookers. Casinos were all about people and how many hours you could keep them in your joint. What they did there really didn’t matter, because sooner or later you always made money from them. All you had to do was get them in the door and keep them too distracted to walk back out.
And she owed her life to this challenge, she supposed. To this simple trick that was not simple at all: how to keep people coming in, how to make them stay, how to keep up in a town that raced and bucked and reared and roared, ever forward, ever faster. You had better be ready for the ride, because Vegas wasn’t for the weak and it wasn’t for the cowardly; if you really wanted to win, you had better take off your hat, wave it to the crowd, and smile like an idiot. You had to make it look fun. Would any other life have sucked her up, taken her in, kept her going, held her fast? Would an easier life have kept June Stein Dibb alive?
Could she have climbed up on any other steed and survived the moment when Del walked out with a basket trailing a soft pink blanket and weighted with six pounds of her soul?
It had not been easy. She had fallen off again and again.
For weeks after Del had taken the baby, June had refused to see anyone. For years, she had stumbled through her days, death-eyed with pills, with gin, with crazed antics that had finally forced Del to sell the house and buy on the other side of the Strip. There was the time the man next door called Del to say his wife was naked on the street; the time she had terrified the newspaper boy with a pair of kitchen shears; the time when Cora, in her eighties by then and already sick with cancer, had run from house to house, from the park to the school to the wash, trying to find Marshall, who had wandered out on his own, looking for help with his mom, who was passed out on the stairs.
She didn’t remember Marshall’s first day of school. She might not have been there. She didn’t remember him learning to ride a bike, or catching his first baseball, or sounding out words in a book. Those years were gone for June. Del had done it all: run the El Capitan; taken care of Marshall; hired the sitters; managed his grandmother; held a sobbing, vomiting June; and found the center that she had finally agreed to try—where she had gone for the spring that Marshall was in the first grade, and where she had finally, finally, come back to herself.
She had come out of rehab just in time for summer.
Every day, she and Marshall would swim in the early morning and in the evening. He wouldn’t leave her those first months; didn’t want to play with friends, didn’t want friends coming over. So they canceled day camp, and they ignored the phone, and they spent those months—that hot, blistering summer—together. Seven years old, and he drank his mother’s nearness like a wilted plant sucks water. Del came home often, running in for an hour in the middle of the day, and leaving work early most nights. He made Marshall laugh by jumping in the pool in his dress pants and tie, by wearing his shoes with his swimming trunks, by banging off the low diving board and cannonballing in to swamp June when she was trying to keep her hair dry.
If there had been three years of misery, there were then three months of joy. And after, it was true, there were years and years of a good life. They had been to hell, but they had come back. You could say what you wanted about what they each did, about the choices they made—she and Del and Eddie—but in the end, her little family had been happy.
Still, when Del died, the first thing June did after calling Marshall and arranging a way for him to come home, was to go to her husband’s office and dig through the one cabinet that he kept locked from her. She didn’t want Mack or Leo or his attorney to get there first. But there was nothing about the baby. There were some papers about Hugh, which she knew would be there. There were receipts; she didn’t look at the ones for hotels in other places. There were cards, and quite a few letters from someone named Charles; she looked at one of those because she saw Eddie’s name on it, but it didn’t say anything more than that they had met, not long before Eddie left. There were records having to do with Augusta Jackson and her children. Del had stayed true to his word and taken care of Ray’s family. But there was nothing from Alabama, no record of those receipts, nothing from Eddie, no birth certificate, nothing about a school, nothing about expenses, nothing personal, nothing official.