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  “I think he used to play Atlantic City.”

  “Listen,” I said. “I just wanted to tell you again how sorry I am about this morning.”

  “It was actually pretty funny.”

  “Funny?”

  “I mean, the principal, Mr. Mann, told me when we were walking to your room that he ‘suspected you have some authority issues.’ Something like that . . . Basically, he was saying you don’t like cops.”

  “That isn’t true.”

  “It’s no big deal. I don’t like a lot of cops. But I was getting ready to turn on the charm and change your mind, you know? Because this is the first time I’ve done community outreach and I wanted to make sure everybody was happy. But I get to your room, and before I can even say ‘hello’ you scream at me.”

  I started to laugh.

  “I’m thinking, ‘Man, I must really look like a cop.’ ”

  “You didn’t,” I said. “That was the problem.”

  “Really.”

  “Well, if you were wearing then what you are now I’d have definitely known you were a cop.”

  Krull looked down at his clothes.

  “That came out wrong.”

  “This tie has been in my family for years.”

  “I’m sorry, I—”

  “Kidding.”

  “Detective Krull,” I said, “can I just apologize now for anything I may say or scream in the future?”

  Out of the corner of my eye, I saw Nancy holding out her valentine and asking for Buster the Safety Dog’s autograph. Officer Ricky clamped a pen between Buster’s wooden paws, and, holding them together, skillfully “helped” the dog to sign.

  “There you go, princess,” he said, handing it back to her. My stomach seized up.

  “You okay?” Krull said. “You look a little pale.”

  “Yeah, I’m fine. I just . . . remembered something.”

  I didn’t feel like going home between jobs, so I had a long lunch at the University Diner consisting of an egg-salad sandwich, five cups of coffee and the Village Voice, which I tried to read cover to cover.

  Actually, I was just staring at the print, trying to figure out why I’d gotten Dead Man’s Fingers. My classroom hadn’t been robbed, none of the kids had hurt themselves, even the cops had been personable.

  Maybe the Fingers were a premonition of something that hadn’t happened yet—a hostile customer at the box office, for instance. Or maybe I’d get mugged on the walk home. I looked at my sandwich. Maybe this egg salad would turn out to be bad. “Keinahora,” I whispered.

  I opened my shoulder bag, took out Sydney’s valentine, and reread her hand-written message: Have fun, Samantha. Please.

  The red ink was deep; she’d practically pushed the pen through the card.

  Something happened at the box office. It wasn’t horrible, but it was so completely out of sync with the reality I’d come to know, I found new justification for believing in Dead Man’s Fingers—even if I was forced to rethink their meaning. What happened was this: Hermyn told a joke.

  I had known the woman for three years and even before the vow of silence, she didn’t have much to say. But things change, which Hermyn proved when she breezed into the box office half an hour late, threw off her heavy camouflage jacket and black watch cap, ran both hands through her spiky brown hair and said—in a voice loud enough and cheerful enough to rival Officer Ricky’s—“What’s purple and goes slam, slam, slam, slam?”

  When no one responded, she said, “A four-door grape!”

  Hermyn’s laughter was hearty to the point of operatic—laughter saved up over a three-year period and released from the coddled lungs of a performance artist in the cramped subscription room of an old theater box office.

  Everyone in the room was silenced—even Yale, who had bet Argent Devereaux and me five dollars apiece that he could make it all the way through “I Am the Very Model of a Modern Major General” without breathing. Yale loved Gilbert and Sullivan almost as much as he loved the sound of his own singing voice, but with Hermyn’s laughter lacing the air like a gas leak, he stopped dead in the middle of “animal and vegetable and mineral” and asked, “What’s wrong?”

  Hermyn stopped laughing and smiled at us. Her left front tooth was adorned with a tiny, gold butterfly. “I’m happy,” she said. “I’m in love.”

  “Tell me it isn’t true. I can’t believe it. Can you believe it? I mean, look at her! I can’t believe it, can you?” Shell Clarion, who spoke quickly to begin with, tended to talk even faster when she got emotional. Now she sounded like an auctioneer on Ritalin.

  I was in the small stone courtyard outside the box office, not smoking between her and Yale. Shell was talking only to me. She’d been referring to Hermyn, of course, and the fact that she saw me as a fellow jealous hag bothered me a lot.

  I said, “This kid in my class—Daniel? He got a new fish.”

  “Really?” Yale said. “Tropical or freshwater?”

  “Hello,” said Shell, enveloping my face in smoke. “I’m talking here!”

  “It’s a goldfish,” I said.

  “I had a goldfish as a child, but it got eaten by my sister’s cat . . .”

  “Sammy, I’m serious. Look at her. Turn around, and look in that fuckin’ window and fuckin’ look at her. She probably hasn’t even gotten laid in her entire life and here she is engaged? It’s im-fuckin’-possible.”

  “It isn’t impossible, Shell,” I said. “It’s happened. Hermyn has a fiancé named Sal.”

  “I thought she was gay. Didn’t you think she was gay?”

  “I never gave it much thought.”

  “You are so naive!”

  “No, I just don’t particularly care.”

  “Maybe Sal is a woman,” Yale offered. “My gal Sal . . .”

  I started to laugh.

  “I wasn’t speaking to you.” Shell plucked a speck of tobacco off of her tongue and flicked it into the air. “I am speaking to Sammy, who understands the problem.”

  “What is the problem?” Yale said. “Hermyn is engaged, which we all should be terribly upset about because . . .”

  “Because it should be one of us.”

  “Speak for yourself,” I said.

  “Oh, for God’s sake.” She whirled around and glared through the big subscription room window. “That weird-ass butch bitch is engaged to a mother-fucking dentist from fucking Scarsdale, and you’re as pissed off about it as I am. Only difference is I’m honest enough to admit it.”

  She crushed the cigarette butt under the sole of a black patent-leather boot and stormed back into the box office without saying another word to either one of us. I looked at Yale. “I don’t want to be engaged to a dentist from Scarsdale.”

  “How about a urologist from Short Hills?”

  I took a drag off Yale’s cigarette, coughed. Together we turned and peered through the window. We watched Hermyn hug Argent, watched our septuagenarian boss Roland slap the bride-to-be on the back, watched Shell grab Hermyn’s hand, stare at the large diamond on her finger, drop it like an unwanted flyer and stalk off into the ticketing office.

  “She’s all id, isn’t she?” said Yale.

  “Yep.”

  “Well, we’d better get back in there before Roland gets pissed.”

  “Hey, Yale?”

  “Yeah?”

  “It isn’t like Shell said. And I’d only tell you this. But I think I am a little jealous. Not about the engagement. Just . . . I don’t know. The way she seems to feel, I guess.”

  Yale put out his cigarette and patted me on the back. “Me too, hon,” he said. “Happy Valentine’s Day.”

  Despite Shell’s new theory, Hermyn had not bought the diamond ring for herself. She was engaged to a (male) dentist named Sal Merstein, whom she had met six months earlier. An avid performance art fan, Sal drove into the city like he always did on Saturday nights and went to his favorite bar/space, Industropia, just to see what was going on.

  As it turned
out, more was going on at Industropia than the NEA-supporting DDS could ever have imagined—and according to Hermyn, he had a very active imagination. Dr. Merstein caught a midnight performance of Inanimate Womyn and fell instantly and irrevocably in love. He explained his way into her dressing room and proposed to her that night. Hermyn, who wasn’t speaking at the time, shook her head and mouthed the words “Are you nuts?”

  Hermyn remained skeptical; Sal remained persistent. And adorable. And incredibly funny—at least to a woman who liked jokes about gasoline-powered fruit. Half a year later, at dawn on Valentine’s Day, he’d affixed the butterfly to Hermyn’s tooth and reiterated his proposal. And that’s when she’d said, “Yes.”

  “He’s got to be crazy. Maybe he’s kinky. I hear that a lot about dentists. Too much nitrous oxide.” Three hours later and Clarion was still at it. She was whispering in my ear, so as not to be overheard by Roland as we sorted prepurchased tickets (“will call,” as we say in the trade) at the small, speakered window where customers would later pick them up. I was pondering physics. With a perfectly executed jerk to the right, I figured I could knock out both of Shell’s front teeth, caps and all. Sal could fix them. Maybe throw in a root canal.

  Hermyn was answering phones in the subscription office. I could hear her voice, friendly and musical, saying “Thank you so much for calling the Space.”

  Shell wondered aloud how much money Sal “socks away” every year after taxes and began quoting huge dollar amounts, her whisper disappearing and her vocal pitch rising alarmingly.

  “Unless that’s the price for your silence, we’re not interested!” Yale’s voice resounded from the subscription room.

  Shell shrieked, “Eat me!”

  “All right. That’s enough!” said Roland.

  “I’d rather eat arsenic,” Yale said.

  “I heard that, you twat!”

  “I said that’s enough!”

  I looked at Shell.

  “What.”

  At times like this, I found myself wishing I were back at Sunny Side with the grown-ups. I grabbed my shoulder bag and coat, walked out of the ticketing office, into the subscription room. “I’m done with the tickets. I’m going to take a little walk before the window opens.”

  Roland nodded as he checked off spaces on the seating chart and stopped briefly to turn down his hearing aid. I looked at Yale on my way out. “Breath of Clarion-free air?” he asked.

  I nodded.

  “Well, lucky you.”

  Hermyn, sitting at the desk across from Yale’s, was smiling with her eyes closed. I wondered what she was thinking about, and felt a stab of envy as I walked out the door.

  3

  Worked Up

  I was born in Venice Beach and raised in Santa Monica. And, while there were a lot of things about southern California that I didn’t like—the lazy way that people talked, earthquake drills, strip malls, pastels, stage three smog alerts, Eagles reunions—I always loved the ocean. The thick, salt-laced scent and the continuous whoosh of the waves always worked like a tranquilizer on me.

  The Hudson River wasn’t the Pacific Ocean, but the Pacific Ocean wasn’t walking distance from the Space, so I was willing to compromise.

  On stressful days, even blisteringly cold ones, I would walk to the piers, close my eyes and listen to the water lapping at the wooden supports. The result was an instant, almost Pavlovian sense of well-being. I’d feel the way I did as a kid, when Sydney and I would stand on the beach and watch the sun set over the dark, rolling waves.

  I couldn’t get to the river fast enough that day. My hands balled into fists, I clutched my bag as though it were a poorly designed life preserver and slammed my feet into the sidewalk.

  Before I expected it, I saw the thick gate that shrouded the few remaining piers, the intermittent signs that read Area Peligrosa. Area Unsafe.

  When Yale had first moved to New York as a seventeen-year-old, gay men used to sunbathe on the Peligrosa Piers, as he called them. You’d know it was spring when those tiny basket shorts cropped up on the Peligrosa Piers. They were more reliable than crocuses . . . Prettier, too. During the sticky, fragrant summer nights, the men would return, making Area Unsafe a well-known double entendre.

  Not anymore. Some of the piers had been dismantled to make room for the big gym complex with its bowling alleys and family restaurants. Others, like these, crumbled into the river like old corpses. Only the signs remained, with some of the fence corners cut and folded back, historical evidence. Unsafe. I shivered a little. So many ghosts. So much bad luck.

  I’d been walking along the river for about fifteen minutes before I saw the construction site. There was an Area Peligrosa sign on the fence in front of it. And, even though the fence corner had been cut and folded back, I couldn’t imagine anyone wanting to crawl under it.

  Three tall stacks of concrete blocks bounded the area, the farthest edge of the farthest pile touching the end of a rusty, sad-looking trailer. Faded red letters stretched across the trailer, reading Shank’s Dredging and Construction, and a broken RK AND RIDE sign was propped up against it, even though there was nowhere to park and nowhere to ride.

  Perhaps it was the sign that drew me in. Who would ever park a car in this place? Who would ever ride away from it, knowing they had to return?

  Or it could have been the construction company’s name. Shank’s, as in butchered body parts.

  I knew these should have been reasons to leave—warning signs, literally—but they had the opposite effect on me. No one’s here. No one will be here. No one ever, except you.

  I crawled under the folded-back fence corner.

  On the other side, I stood up and took a few steps toward the trailer.

  I couldn’t quite hear the water—I was still several car lengths away from the river, and the trailer seemed to block out sounds. To the left of the trailer was a huge rusty bin that was nearly overflowing with broken chunks of cement. I wondered when they’d been dumped there, and by whom.

  I crept closer, saw some dead, brown weeds shooting through the concrete, then a few deviant, crumbling cement blocks and, finally, the oily green water of the Hudson. Placed neatly next to the bin like a spectator’s seat was a smooth, rectangular block of cement with a blue chalk scrawl of 1/3/00 across the top. More than thirteen months old. No one will be here . . .

  I sat down on the block. An icy gust flew off the river and bit at my face, but with the hood of my coat still up, I didn’t mind. No one ever, except you.

  My father left home when I was five years old, and I haven’t seen him since. He’s more a voice than a face to me—a loud laugh in the hallway; a hoarse, angry whisper in my parents’ bedroom; a tinny mumble on the other end of the phone, asking Sydney for help. Picturing him is difficult, but if I clear my mind and close my eyes really tight, I can sometimes see his profile.

  It’s a purely mental exercise—not emotional at all—because I really don’t feel one way or the other about him. Fact is, if Dad hadn’t left, Sydney would never have written her first book (PMS: Post Marital Survival ) and become instantaneously famous among self-help enthusiasts. She’d still be a social worker. He’d still be spending most of her salary on twelve-packs of Mickey’s BigMouth. So it’s probably best he got out when he did.

  That said, I used to be crazy about him. One of my happiest memories was the time he’d taken me on the Ferris wheel at the Santa Monica Pier. When our cage turned upside down, I’d laughed instead of screaming like the other kids. And he’d patted me on the arm and said, “That’s my brave girl.”

  Funny how I could remember the Ferris wheel ride as if it had just happened, but I couldn’t remember the day he took off. Especially since, according to Sydney, I’d been the first one to notice the note he’d left on the kitchen table.

  Listening to the sound of the river, I closed my eyes and tried to picture Dad. The hair was easy. It was long and dark and shiny; he usually wore it in a ponytail. But the features were blurry
, and the eye color was a complete mystery. I knew they were brown, but were they amber colored like Nate’s, or were they darker? My own eyes are pale green, like Sydney’s, so they were of no help.

  I’m losing Dad, I thought. It depressed me more than it should have.

  I pressed my palms into the freezing cement block. The water sound was nice. I’d concentrate on that, block out everything else. Nate had once taught me how to meditate. It wasn’t the type of rules-driven meditation that you learn at weekend retreats in upstate New York mountain towns. It was just an inner chant that his acting teacher had come up with in order to relax the class before scene work. Breathe in, breathe out, it went. Think of anything. Think of nothing. It sometimes helped if you said the words aloud, so that’s what I did, over and over and over . . .

  “Relax, princess,” says the man in the Pinto. “Stop moving.” But I can’t. There’s no crown in the car. Not in the front, not in the back. The vinyl seat is hot, sticky on my bare legs.

  “Where is my crown?” I say.

  “Where is my crown?” he repeats, his voice a squeaky imitation of mine. “Princess needs a crown . . .”

  His hand clamps the back of my neck. It’s big and rough and feels like it’s made of sandpaper. He starts to laugh, and his laugh is big and rough too. “Princess needs a crown,” he says, still laughing. “That’s funny, princess.”

  Stop, I want to say. But I can’t. My mouth opens and closes. He squeezes tighter. Pinches my skin between the stubby tips of his fingers. He jerks my head back, then down, like you’d do with a big doll.

  I’m looking at the floor beneath the dashboard. “No crown for prin-cess,” he sings.

  On the floor I see a coiled rope. Next to it I see a roll of thick gray tape. They remind me of two snakes—a mother and her baby.

  “I have something else, though. Something else princess can wear . . .”

  I try to scream, but still nothing comes out. I am a doll. Can’t move. Going to get broken.

  “You can wear this on your neck.” He holds something up to my eyes. It’s silver mostly, but he’s holding it so close that I have to blink to see what it is.