“Look at that, she’s good with children,” Marianne says. “How long you two been together, long time?”
“Only eight months,” Jamey says. “It feels like longer.”
But Elise is looking at the lustrous open request of Bethany’s eyes, the chubby dimpled hands that rub a tired face, the tiny bum plunked on the chair, feet kicking air as she works the assembly line of dirty yellow clay.
Now Elise can’t block out a row of phantom kids’ eyes from another home, all beaming from one bed, reflecting a Bambi night-light plugged into the wall.
Those kids wonder where Elise went, why she’s not there to kiss them good night, to tell them morning will get here soon. Elise used to stamp fear from their hearts. She told them You’re safe even though it wasn’t true. They knew the fear could come back, they would recognize it like a sleeping face knows the legs and wings of a roach crossing your cheek even before you wake up.
Or worse, the fear would return as your brother’s friend, who invites you into your own mama’s room, because she’s at work, to show you something, and you get a cookie after, and he’ll kill you if you say a word.
Yeah, sorry I couldn’t stick around, kids! Elise thinks. It’s been fun. Good luck with everything. Oh, the world will treat at least half of you like half a person at best, not worth any investment cause you’re already damaged and undereducated and emotionally weird, even though yeah, they can see something kind of great in you, but isn’t it just a losing battle, throwing good money after bad? Your environment is so fucked that your behavior gets more and more impossible, till society claims they can hardly use you for anything but its lowest tasks—an orderly at an old folks’ home, garbage-truck guy—and you’ll barely support yourself.
BUT you could try this little piece of candy you put in a pipe, and you’ll be beamed into white light and heavenly love, which will in five minutes turn into a greater problem than you ever knew, so you’ll then have a new problem to solve, and you’ll solve it by doing things you never dreamed of doing. Good luck with that!
Not sure in the meantime who’s gonna dress your little bodies, make a ghost costume or Magic-Marker a Batman mask onto your face for Halloween, guide your hand to spell your name ’cause you keep making the s backwards, change your pajamas if you wet the bed, tell you you’re special on your birthday, hold you after you had a nightmare and you can’t stop crying, put you on the bus your first day of school, teach you to catch snowflakes in your hand on the last day of winter….
The kids in Bridgeport know her now as another person who just vanished—like their dad went upstate, and their sister hit the streets. So sorry! Hope you manage. I’m sure you’ll understand that I felt like there was no other way for me to leave than to leave completely, absolutely, to never fucking see your mischievous and hopeful eyes one more fucking time.
It’s getting dark early as they stand in line. Coney Island Cyclone, here we come. They move through a labyrinth of fences, the late sun collecting like gasoline rainbows in garbage-can water and gutter puddles and bottle caps.
“How you feel?” Elise asks.
Jamey shrugs, tries to smile. “Liberated?”
They’re first, they’re next. A carny wipes down a seat for them. Elise holds Jamey’s hand, presses it, for her comfort or his assurance.
They sit in the cab. They get belted in, the clunk of the metal bar closing and locking, and then the silence, the emptiness of time and thought as the roller coaster is sent into movement.
And then the glide and click, jewelry rattled and bones jangled. The face drawn open then closed. The stomach distended then crushed shut, exultation and nausea. Seeing and smelling the top of the sky, on a lonesome New York ride, not in each other’s arms but instead in the arms of the day.
Amazing that such a rickety old machine can take them so high.
Clark’s in a mood today. His morning bloody mary hasn’t helped his hangover. Now he’s just cockeyed. He’s bawling out anyone who gets in his way, cursing Gillian up and down for lukewarm coffee, and telling Mitford he’s dressed like a Mexican pool boy and should go home and change.
Jamey tries to be invisible, the way he’s always done when the adults around him rant and rave. He’s the little boy pressing himself into the backseat of a swerving car.
Jamey stares at his own hand, clutching a mug. It’s not a child’s hand.
“I think I’ll go home too,” Jamey suddenly tells Clark.
“Excuse me?” Clark says, mid–pain au chocolat, licking a flake of croissant from his oily finger.
“I’m done at Sotheby’s for good, actually. But thank you for having me here this whole time.”
“You’re…quitting?” Clark asks.
“I just quit. Yes.”
Clark stares at Jamey swaggering down the hall, jacket slung over shoulder while his other hand undoes the top buttons of his shirt.
“Don’t come back then!” Clark feels venomous, and they both understand something greater happened than Jamey resigning from an auction house. Jamey has somehow spit in Clark’s eye. Clark wants nothing to do with him, sniffing treason like a bloodhound. He’s heard rumors anyway. Before Jamey’s even sealed into the elevator, Clark is whispering with anyone who will gather to his desk.
Elise gets butterflies when Jamey tells her he left his job.
“Really?” she asks. “?’Bout time, I guess.”
Swinging, he let go of one branch before grasping another.
She also explored that in-between place, after leaving Bridgeport and before arriving at Robbie’s. Hitchhiking with sweatshirt hood up, she looked like a boy, then she pulled it back to say thank you once in the seat. Her eyes slid back and forth, blink-blink, as she devoured polluted Queen Anne’s lace along highways, Indian town names on green signs in Pennsylvania and New Jersey, truck-stop counters with lemon meringue under Saran Wrap in a pie case. She panhandled in Syracuse, alone on the median, while cars passed in either direction. When you don’t have to be anywhere, you can figure out where to go.
Now Jamey and Elise look at classifieds, draw hearts around listings. They hang in free fall from one life to the next. Jamey’s got a few grand left in his account so they just doodle and talk.
Cocktail Waitress. Pharmacy Technician. Milk-truck Man. Limo Driver. Front Desk. Aquatics Coordinator at YMCA in Bensonhurst. Macy’s Merchandiser. Coffee-shop Counter Girl in Dyker Beach. Experienced Fish Cutter in Midwood.
They hear a poetry reading by a tall man whose pale red hair falls over his face as he bends above his pages at the microphone.
Later she play-pushes Jamey on the sidewalk: “I’ll die for your sins if you live for mine.”
“What?” he says, pulling the knit cap over her eyes.