Near the end of our movie, when we were happily tipsy, my phone rang. I glanced at the display.
Martin.
My heart kicked. “I need to take this,” I said as I rose from the sofa and padded toward the bedroom.
Dana stopped just short of stuffing a fistful of popcorn into her mouth. “Who is it?”
“Martin.”
“Are you serious?” She stuffed the popcorn into her mouth, reached for the remote, and hit pause. She stared at me as I connected the call. “Tell him you’ll call back, Ellie,” she said around her mouthful. “We’re just at the good part. We’re almost at the end.”
I held up my palm as I said into the phone, “Hey, Martin, hi. Dana’s here and we’re in the middle of a movie—can I call you back later?”
He laughed, but I heard an edge. “You always forget the time difference, don’t you, Ellie? It’s already past midnight here.”
I checked my watch. “Oh, I—tomorrow morning, then?”
“I’ll be on a plane. Look, I need to know stat. I’m going to Nevada for a week—Reno, Vegas—got some people I need to see about a development down there. Do you want to come?”
“I . . . When are you going?”
“I just said. Tomorrow.”
Dana held up the wine bottle and gestured to my nearly empty glass. I held up two fingers and mouthed, Wait two minutes. A dark look entered Dana’s features. She turned her back on me and poured the rest of the wine into her own glass. She hit play.
I went into the adjoining room. “Can I think about it? I’ve got some work that—”
“There’s no time, Ellie. And what’s to think about? Vegas, you, me. A couple of nights on the town gambling. I need a yea or nay right now, so Gertrude, who’s handling the reservations, can ensure us seats together on the plane.”
“Ellie!” Dana yelled. “Do you want to watch the end of this movie or not?”
Tension tightened. I was not good at decisions on the fly. I preferred to think things through ad nauseam.
“Yes or no?” Martin pressed. “I’d fly into YVR on the red-eye—be there early tomorrow morning. Gertrude is holding us seats together for the Vancouver–Vegas leg. I need to tell her either way stat.”
I ran my hand over my hair. “You’ve booked already? For me?”
“Sort of. Hedging bets. You can always say no and she’d cancel.”
My mind spun. I could do my concept sketches while in Vegas. And if I put in a few extra hours when I returned . . . I could pull off my deadlines.
“Yes or no? I’ve got a call coming in from our Indonesia sales office, and I need to take it. If—”
“Yes.”
A beat of silence. “Yes?”
“Yeah. I’m coming.” Delight burst through me. He’d expected me to say no—I heard it in his voice. I’d surprised him and I loved that. I’d been in a funk. And I craved seeing him like a drug. I relished this feeling of recklessness. Like when we’d had sex in the elevator.
“Oh, I do love you, girl,” he said. “Pack something dressy, sexy. We’re going to live it up, babe. Gertie will be in touch about your tickets. Can’t wait.”
The phone went dead.
I stared at the phone in my hand, a little dazed. I went into the living room. The movie credits were rolling. I plunked myself back down on the sofa beside Dana and reached into the bowl of popcorn.
Dana angled away from me, gulped down the last of her wine, killed the TV, and tossed the remote onto the coffee table. She got up and dusted potato chip and popcorn crumbs off her pants. “I’ve got work tomorrow. I need to go.” She fetched her purse from a barstool at the kitchen counter and padded on her socked feet into the hallway. She reached for her coat hanging near the door.
“Dana—”
“Don’t.” She punched her arms into her sleeves and grabbed her boots. “Do not Dana me—you couldn’t call him back?” She sat on the bench and shoved her feet into her boots. “Just once, Ellie? Does this Martin guy have so much pull over you that you can’t enjoy a date with your girlfriend—your oldest friend? The one who hung around for you when you were at your very lowest?” She came to her feet and reached for her woolen hat.
“Oh, come on, Dana. You can’t possibly resent my relationship with him. Do you? After all I went through with Doug and—”
“I resent being treated like a doormat and shunted aside for a rich prick.”
“Christ, he’s not a prick.”
Her gaze locked on to mine. I saw hesitation in her features. Her eyes softened, but just a little. “Ellie, you’re vulnerable right now. You’re just getting back onto your feet. You shouldn’t make any huge commitments.”
“It’s not a commitment.”
She regarded me. “What did he want this time that couldn’t wait?”
I felt my cheeks heat. “He wanted to know if I’d join him in Vegas.”
“And that couldn’t wait like one second?”
“The flight is early tomorrow morning.”
She blinked. “He booked you a flight before asking?”
“He’s got a high-powered and fast-moving job, Dana. He’s just that kind of guy.”
“Like your father? Like Doug?”
My face began to burn. Anger rushed softly into my chest.
“You’ve barely gotten back from Europe and the Cook Islands. What about your new contract?”
“I’ll manage.”
She buttoned her coat. “Everything is always on his terms, have you noticed that? And he’s isolating you from everyone, including me. He’s monopolizing all your time. He goes all out, spends every minute with you, then he pulls back and disappears and makes you pine for him. Then just when you’re getting really desperate to be with him, he clicks his fingers like this”—she drunkenly snapped her fingers—“and you drop everyone, come running. Like a puppy dog. He forces you to make a snap decision to commit to being exclusively with him in some distant locale, no time to think or even call him back?”
“I’m the one who chooses to be with him, Dana. He’s not forcing me to do anything.”
She stared. “Really? So you chose to speak to him during the rest of the movie, during a time I had set aside to spend with you? What am I? Some . . . some old toy that you take out of a box for amusement and then drop when something better and shinier comes along?” She reached for the door handle, but then swung back to face me. “I canceled a prior arrangement to hook up with you, you know that? Do you not see . . . Wait—never mind. I’m not looking for sympathy. Just—just don’t bother to ask me over again unless you actually want to spend time with me, okay? I’ve got a life, too, you know. I’m not some piece of shit you can just walk all over.” She reached for the door handle.
“Dana, that’s bitter.”
“Yeah, whatever.” She opened the door, stumbling slightly. She’d had more wine than I’d thought. That was all this was—just the booze talking.
“How are you getting home?” I asked.
“Fuck off,” she muttered.
“Excuse me?”
She barked a small laugh but had a sad look in her eyes, like she wanted to cry—Dana did that sometimes—got all weepy I-love-you drunk sometimes.
“Stay here tonight, Dana. The sofa is a pullout and—”
“Be careful.” She pointed a finger at my face. “Be very careful, Ellie.”
A feeling of coolness washed over me at the way she said it, at the sudden change in her face.
“What do you mean?”
“I mean, I . . . I’ve got a bad feeling about that man. Your aura is weird after you’ve been with him. Dark. Wrong. Something is badly off with that guy.”
“You’ve had too much to drink.”
“Just don’t come crying to me when he’s screwed you over. Not this time.” She swayed slightly. “This time you’re choosing to be a victim.”
“I cannot believe you just said that. After everything I’ve been through with my marriage, with losing my ch
ild—”
“You know what? I’m tired—we all are—of your victimhood. It’s always all about you, Ellie. All about your losses. When did you last ask me what’s really going on in my life? Huh? When did you last ask me about Tom?”
I swallowed. Guilt pinged through me.
“Have you ever considered you might be using your mental breakdown, your loss, as a crutch, and that you like to milk empathy? Because you’ve gotten used to playing this role and actually thrive off the attention?”
“What has made you so angry, Dana?”
“Tom was laid off last month. I told you that night at the Mallard.”
My mind reeled. I vaguely recalled her mentioning that now, but I must have been too drunk to properly encode that snippet of information. Fear whispered through me. I’d remembered all of Martin’s conversation later that night—had I not?
“Yeah. Well. We still don’t know where his next paycheck is going to come from. Have fun living it up in Vegas.” She stepped out of my apartment into the corridor, spun around, swayed for a moment, reached for the wall to steady herself, and said, “Maybe those Oahu police should have dug a little deeper, huh?” She shut the door.
I began to shake. I stared at the closed door, half expecting her to walk back in and say sorry, but also knowing she wouldn’t. I didn’t do conflict. I didn’t like conflict. My father was right. I’d do anything to avoid it if I could. How could she have dared say that about the police—what in the hell could she mean?
I dimmed the lights and hurried to the window. I waited until I saw her exit onto the sidewalk below. She popped open an umbrella and stepped into the rain. The streetlight glistened on the raindrops. She crossed the road. Anger, hurt, guilt—it all swirled in a toxic cocktail inside my chest. Dana was jealous, I decided as I watched her move into the shadows on the far side of the road. She stopped suddenly beside a parked car with its engine running—exhaust fumes puffing out the rear and crystallizing in a soft cloud in the cold air. I tensed as I watched her bend down near the driver’s side window as if to talk to someone inside. Dana then looked directly up to my window. My heart quickened. I stepped back. Was it the same car that had been parked in that same place yesterday? The car that had been there when I’d arrived home—an orange Subaru Crosstrek with misted windows obscuring the occupant? I’d noticed because it was the same model and color Subaru I’d seen in the underground parking garage. It was not a common color. Dana straightened up and continued down the sidewalk under her umbrella. The Subaru pulled out of the parking space, did a U-turn across the lanes, and drove off in the opposite direction.
A chill crawled down my spine, and I felt a sort of tick tick tick along the edges of my mind, like dry twigs against glass, trying to get in.
THEN
ELLIE
Almost two years ago, May. Las Vegas, Nevada.
“You put a spell on me . . . I was bewitched by you . . .” A curvaceous lounge singer with a sultry Billie Holiday voice crooned the words into her mike. Martin and I sat listening in a plush booth in a corner farthest from the stage. Alongside the songstress a male magician in a Charlie Chaplin outfit performed pantomime magic tricks aided by a young woman with eerily white skin. She wore a twenties-style bathing suit. A bloodred slash of ribbon around her pale neck and her red Cupid’s-bow lips were the only splashes of color on the black-and-white set. It was like watching an old silent movie, only alive and choreographed to the beat and cadence of the song.
This late-night magic-show-cum-cabaret was being performed at the Abracadabra Club downstairs in our Vegas hotel. Martin and I cuddled in a comfortable alcoholic haze, flush with our night’s wins and too many complimentary cocktails from the Second Chance Casino.
The song and tempo changed. “Luck be a devil tonight . . .”
I laced my fingers through Martin’s and leaned my head back against the padded seating. I felt blissfully buzzy and, yes, beautiful. For almost two weeks I’d spent days by the pool, or at the spa, while Martin had his meetings, and the nights had been ours. Dressing up. Shows. Fabulous food. Trying our luck. I was tanned and so much thinner now than when I’d met him on that blustery January day. I was relaxed and in love, and it showed in my face and body. I really felt as though I’d turned a corner. I’d gone down into the abyss of loss and grief and managed to crawl out. I had overcome.
The Charlie Chaplin magician waved his wand with jerky movements that replicated the choppy, almost comical action in early silent movies. He reached up to remove his hat, as he’d done several times during the show, and pulled out a live rabbit. I gasped.
Martin laughed at me.
“What’s so funny?” I said, punching him playfully. “That was brilliant! There was nothing inside his hat—I saw. He tipped it to the audience several times.”
Martin’s eyes danced in the light of the little candles in jars on the tables. He cupped my face and looked at me with kindness in his eyes.
“My Ellie. I do love you.”
I snuggled against him, and he put his arm around me. But I felt a whisper of unease. He was being patronizing. Or was that just me being sensitive? Like my father always accused me of being. Doug, too, sometimes. A memory washed through me—Doug chiding me for letting Chloe play with a toy that had loose buttons. One of the buttons had come off. She’d put it into her mouth and nearly choked.
“You can be such an idiot sometimes, Ellie . . .”
“Passive-aggressive Ellie.”
Martin didn’t mean it like that, I decided. He wasn’t like that.
“I still didn’t see the trick coming,” I said, unable to let it go. “He’d been wearing that hat on his head the whole time when he wasn’t tipping it to the audience, and when he did, you could see it was empty.”
Martin considered me, something strange, foreign, forming in his eyes. “Like Houdini once said, El, you saw something, but it’s not what you thought you saw.” He reached across the table and plucked an olive from a plate of snacks. He popped it into his mouth and chewed. “That’s the best thing—what I love—about magic, about trickery,” he said as he swallowed the olive and reached for his glass of Scotch. “The trick is to misdirect, to make us all look and think one way while something is slipped past us another way.”
“You’re making me out to be a fool.”
“On the contrary.” He took a sip, set his glass down, and leaned forward. “When we step into a magic show, we arrive actively wanting to be fooled. Magic is . . . It’s a kind of willing con. You’re not being foolish to fall for it. If you don’t fall for it, the magician is doing something wrong.”
I glanced at the stage. I supposed I had been distracted by the assistant’s choker—she’d drawn attention to it moments before the rabbit trick. The choker had made me think for a moment her white neck had been slashed and the ribbon was blood.
“We crave the deception,” Martin said. “We want to see our world as a tiny bit more fantastical and awesome than it is. That’s why we go to the theater, or movies, read books. The magician is much the same as a storyteller—a trickster who uses misdirection, sleight of hand, to manipulate a person’s beliefs about the world. And we see storytelling everywhere—marketing, politics, religion, over the garden fence.”
I regarded Martin. He had a strange feverish quality in his eyes as he spoke of magic. He’d had too much to drink, I reckoned. The weather had been too hot, the sun too fierce, when he’d sat with me for a while by the pool.
“Another cocktail, ma’am?” I jolted at the sudden intrusion and glanced up to see a server who’d appeared out of nowhere. Just like magic. He bore a tray with a pink champagne fizz and another glass with whiskey and a single block of ice.
“I’ll regret it,” I said, looking at the champagne fizz.
“Come on, last one,” Martin said. “It’s our last night.”
“Oh, all right.”
The server placed the pink fizz on the table in front of me.
“And you
, Mr. Tyler?” the server said to Martin. “A refill?”
“It’s Cresswell-Smith,” Martin said coolly and sat up straight. He reached for his glass, threw back the last of his drink, and plunked the glass down hard on the table, his mood suddenly dark.
The server set the fresh whiskey on the table and silently left with the empties.
“What was that about?” I asked quietly, watching as the server disappeared through a dark door in the black wall.
“He must have assumed we were married when you gave him your name,” Martin said.
“I didn’t give him my name.”
“You must have. When you made the reservation for tonight.”
“You made the reservation.”
“Somewhere else, then—you must have given it to someone somewhere. I don’t see why they’d assume I had the same name as you. Why not assume it was the other way around—that you had my last name?”
I frowned at him. “Martin, I didn’t give my name. I’m certain I didn’t. Besides, what’s the big—”
“You didn’t use a credit card over the past few days? You didn’t call down to the front desk using your name? You didn’t make any reservations at the spa, the pool?”
“I . . . maybe.” My head felt thick, woozy. “I just don’t understand what the fuss is about. The server made a simple mistake.”
“These people keep tabs on everything, Ellie. The more they know about guests, the easier it is for them to sell you something that you didn’t even know you wanted. These small things matter to them.”
I hiccuped, pressed my hand to my mouth. Giggled.
“What in the hell is so amusing?”
“You. Being so annoyed by being called Mr. Tyler.”
He stared at me with an unnerving intensity that reminded me of a cat stalking a bird. And suddenly I knew what was bugging him. Yes, he’d had too much alcohol, but I figured the reason he’d been knocking drinks back so hard and fast had something to do with the way he’d appeared edgy when he’d returned to the hotel after his business meeting this afternoon. Something had upset him. Things hadn’t gone as he’d hoped, but when I’d pressed, he’d said it was nothing. In hindsight his malaise had been hovering just below the surface all night, despite the good time we’d had. And now the alcohol was chipping away his facade.
In the Deep Page 10
