THERE IS AN APARTMENT FOR RENT across the street from the building where I was supposed to live. The landlord takes me up four flights of stairs because the elevator is broken. The stairwell smells like piss, the rent is more expensive, the apartment more dingy, but the light is better. From my living room window, I have a straight on view of Doyle’s building. I take it. Not because I can afford it, but because I can’t afford not to have it. I can move in in a week. I sleep in my Jeep in the meantime, a sweatshirt rolled beneath my head, not wanting to waste money on a hotel. I sneak into a fitness center and use their shower a couple of times, promising myself that one day I’ll get a membership to make it up to them. During the day, I wander the streets of Seattle—Pike Place Market, the pier. I take the ferry to Bainbridge Island; I ride the elevator to the top of the Space Needle. I eat in a restaurant that has thousands of oysters piled into icy silver bins. When I pour the silver meat into my mouth, I can taste the ocean. I’m instantly hooked. I’ve never seen the ocean, but on the banks of the Sound and in the exotic, salty meat of an oyster, I can taste it. I sit on the bench outside of Doyle’s building and watch for him. I write everything I spend in a notebook, so I know how much I have left.
Loaf of bread and peanut butter: $4.76
Socks and shampoo: $7.40
Toilet wand: $3.49
Coffee: $5.60
Aspirin and milk: $6.89
This week I spent 137.50. Try to spend less next week! I write in the margin of the notebook.
I think of the places I’d take Judah if he were with me: to the market, and across the Sound on a ferry, a stroll on Bainbridge Island, a lunch at my favorite oyster bar. I call him once, but hang up when I hear his voice. I don’t know what to say to him, and I’m afraid he doesn’t miss me. When the day arrives for me to pick up my keys, I carry myself into the rental office, sure something will happen. They will decide I’m not good enough to live there, they’ll find out I killed a woman and burned her body, they’ll know what I am and send me to prison instead. When the landlord sees me, he exclaims, “It looks like you’re here to identify a body, not pick up your keys!” I laugh at the irony and relax. If he’s in this good of a mood, he’s not prepping to tell me that I won’t be moving in today. In the end, the landlord hands me my keys and shakes my hand, congratulating me on my new home.
I carry my garbage bags of possessions up to the fourth floor and deposit them in my living room before I wander around. It’s beautiful. It’s mine. I want Judah to be here. I want my mother to be proud. I wipe both of those thoughts away quickly and pack my few possessions into the closet. A job, I think. A job, and Doyle, and life.
I buy things: a chair, plates, knives and forks, a blowup mattress, and a blanket with a large, black crow on it. A coffee maker. During the day, I walk the streets, looking in store windows for HELP WANTED signs, and speaking to bums who assume I’m one of them. I take that as a bad sign and buy some new clothes, the type of things that may get me hired. I practice facial expressions in the small mirror in my bathroom. I smile, laugh politely, and keep my voice even and demure. I try to be the type of person someone would want to hire.
And, then, on an unusually sunny day, I am eating a small lunch of salad and soup at an all night diner in Capitol Hill, when the manager jokingly asks if I am looking for a job.
The diner is called Myrrh, and serves everything from waffles to crab legs. They let me work the graveyard shift because I am one of the few who is willing to do it. I start my shift at nine when the dinner crowd is thinning, and the servers who have worked all day are moody and short tempered, eager to go home for the night. I help them wrap their silverware in napkins, and sweep their sections, just as eager to see them gone. There is another girl who works the late shift. A pretty Asian girl named Kady Flowers. She keeps to herself, and so do I. We work together seamlessly, communicating with painfully short sentences: Refills for table five. Ran your food for twenty-three. Taking bathroom break. It works well for both of us. I sometimes wonder what Kady is hiding. Did she kill someone, too, or did someone kill her?
My shift ends at five, right as the sun is coming up. There is something both deeply demeaning and deeply satisfying about waiting tables. The jostling in the dining room, the blank-eyed stares that make you feel like an intruder when you’re just refilling a water glass, the yelled-out orders, minus the thank you. You are just a face, a nametag. It gives me the anonymity that I need, and an emptiness that I perhaps deserve. Mornings, when my shift ends, I walk to my tiny apartment and make myself tea with bags I steal from Myrrh. I sit at the window and think about Judah, and Nevaeh, and Little Mo. I think about my mother too—the way she used to be when she loved me. I am bone deep lonely.