The casino penthouse was much more well appointed than any place Mom or I had ever lived. The projects Mom worked on were almost always in progress, so we were lucky if our accommodations had indoor plumbing. It was thrilling to know there would always be enough towels.
Mom walked into my room and rubbed her hands across her face. “Is this okay, honey?” she asked.
“Very funny, Mom.”
She smiled. “Yeah, well. Don’t get too used to it. Who knows how this is going to go?”
I know, I wanted to say.
“I’m going to lie down, I think.”
I didn’t know how long she’d been up, but I hoped she would sleep through the night. It took a lot for Mom to look tired. Even on two nights without sleep she looked great. But that was because she was good-looking to begin with. Her skin was ridiculously perfect—no wrinkles, no pimples, just this golden honey color that looked its best in the sunshine. Even in the unflattering artificial light inside of the Silver Saddle, Mom glowed.
It didn’t always bother me that Mom was so pretty. In fact, when I was younger, I loved having a pretty mom. People treated me differently, better, because of it. Everyone we met, clerks at the Federal Express, cab drivers, gas station attendants, and ticket agents, all of them were extra kind to me when I was with Mom. But it wasn’t just her prettiness that did it. It was the money, too. The way Mom looked, you could tell she had money to spend. When the money started to come, she let it wash over her. As I got older, I watched people size her up. Their thoughts were painfully easy to read. They had no idea that Mom and I used to go through other people’s garbage looking for shoes.
Mom got this smile every time someone underestimated her like that, thinking she was just an accessory for some anonymous old rich man. She told me once that when someone underestimated you, it was a gift. She told me it was like getting a head start in a race. People thought that Mom had always been rich, that she was born to it, and Mom let them think that. I have no idea who my dad was, but I was fairly sure I’d inherited what were mostly his looks—a sharp nose in an otherwise rounded face, medium brown hair, the same color as my eyebrows, medium brown eyes, and a thoroughly medium body. The only thing Mom ever told me about my dad was that he loved Van Morrison, and that’s why she called me Van. In those moments when I thought about him, I imagined that he would be most impressed by how well I played guitar. Anyway, it’s not like anything was wrong with me. I just wasn’t like Mom. I wasn’t like Mom in most ways, though.
I was generally grateful that the vortex of mysteries that worked inside of Mom hadn’t yet appeared in me. But sometimes, I felt a stab of envy—what would it be like to be a genius, to be lifted away like that? Every day I wondered if that wildness was gathering strength inside of me.
I unpacked my bag and heard Ida shuffling around in the next room. I noticed Mom’s door was cracked open, and I crept inside to check on her. I could tell she was in a deep sleep, which was good. She’d probably taken one of Ida’s pills. Mom slept like a silent film actress, with her hair flowing all around her face and one hand up at her forehead. I closed the door with a little squeak and headed back to my room.
Ida called to me from her room in a whisper-shout.
“Van,” she said, “is this really happening?”
“I think so,” I answered, but in my normal voice. I knew Ida was excited to be around more people, and that made me nervous. We were used to open spaces and emptiness, where there was nothing but the special chemistry of our three minds. I didn’t know if we would work correctly in Las Vegas. There were too many people already inside of the building, with different frequencies and snags to catch onto. I knew that we would have to change to survive here. I just wasn’t sure how.
Chapter Two
The next morning, I opened the door to the most elaborate breakfast I’d seen in a long time. A gaunt, uniformed blond man with an acne-scarred complexion rolled in a table on wheels covered with silver trays of food. It was like a Fancy Feast commercial.
Mom poured herself a coffee as we started to eat. There were normal things, like pancakes and eggs, but there was also an array of heart-stoppingly gorgeous pastries—all burnished gold with some kind of invisible glaze. Ida and I kept eating and making faces at each other. I hadn’t eaten at all during our thirty-six hours of travelling—I could never eat on planes—and was just trying to cover all of the ground that I could.
“I’m glad you two are impressed,” was all Mom said. It was the first thing she’d said all morning.
“Can you blame us? If I could make love to this breakfast, I would,” Ida said.
“Sick!” I laughed and gagged on my bite of pastry.
“Really, Ida,” Mom said, seriously, but with a smirk.
In Sirdaryo, we’d eaten a steady diet of mutton shashliks, noodles, and lepeshkas. Occasionally, as a special treat, we’d had cottage cheese. It had been a long time since I’d seen a croissant. I noticed Mom hadn’t touched any of the food. I waited for Ida to say something, to tempt Mom with a Danish or something, but she didn’t.
“Are you sure you’re not hungry?” I asked.
“No, sweetheart, I’ll get something later. I can’t be late to my first meeting.” Good, I thought. Reasonable.
Mom slipped out to meet Chantal while I got dressed for class. I didn’t bring a lot of clothes. I never did, when we moved. It seemed silly when I didn’t know what I would be doing or even what the weather would be like. For Vegas, I’d brought some jeans and T-shirts, but nothing I cared about. I always left those kinds of things behind. It was easier to do that, to deliberately cast those things away, to choose what I was losing.
The doorbell to our new apartment—the suite even had a doorbell—rang at ten minutes to eight. My mouth stung with mint toothpaste and my hair was still wet from the shower. Ida lounged on the sofa in her pajamas.
When I opened the door and saw Alex, I tried to rush out—but I wasn’t fast enough. Ida caught his eye from the living room and sashayed over to the doorway.
“Antonio! What a surprise,” she trilled, delighted.
“Good morning, ma’am. Hey, Van,” he said.
“Oh, you can call me Ida, sweetheart,” she simpered. Ida adjusted the tie of the silky complimentary robe that had been waiting in our new bathroom.
“Oh God,” I said, and pushed Alex out through the door, my hand just at the spot you’d put a name tag on your shirt. Once we were in the hall and the door closed behind us, I felt weird, maybe a little guilty for touching him.
“Sorry about Ida,” I said. “She loves the fellas.” I winced, immediately wishing I could unsay “fellas.”
Alex laughed a little, like his smile was pushing up against a real laugh. I tried not to feel too relieved.
“No, I get it. Let’s go,” he said, and led me to the brass-plated elevator. “So, you came from Uzbekistan?” he asked, once we were inside.
I looked up at the mirrored ceiling. It was veined with gold paint, an unsuccessful attempt to mimic the pattern of natural marble.
“Yeah. Yes,” I said.
I could almost feel him trying to make conversation, like all of his molecules were reaching out to me, but I kept my gaze on the elevator ceiling, and he stayed quiet.
My new classroom was called the Bill Pickett Room. All of the conference rooms at the Silver Saddle had names instead of conference room B, or whatever. Half of the light bulbs in the ceiling had burnt out, and you would think that the general gloom that coated the place would mask the worst of the wear and tear. It didn’t. Instead, the ragged lighting drew attention to the burned and stained carpet, and the peeling, mildewed wallpaper.
“So, now you know where to go,” Alex said, standing in the open door.
“Yep, thanks.” I hated when I said things like yep.
Alex waved and left me alone. I hadn’t brought anything with me; I was so desperate to get him away from Ida. I was lucky I’d put my shoes on, at least. I sat in a fo
lding chair at one of the battered banquet tables and waited.
My tutor, Erica, was exactly what I’d expected. She rushed in, only a few minutes late, and got me started right away, asking me to explain what I’d studied before and how in-depth those studies had been. She seemed pretty impressed with my answers, which made me feel good. Erica was young, a graduate student at Nevada State studying chemistry. She was small and thin, with a severe, practical haircut. Her thick-framed glasses were so large that they looked like they had colonized her face in the name of eyewear. I liked her just fine. Erica was no great youth educator, but she was nice. She was really interested in math, and that was fine with me because I loved math almost as much as Ida loved the fellas.
Chapter Three
I saw Mom and Ida in the mornings and the evenings, but I was trying to leave them alone to do their own things. We all seemed to be giving each other room. Before, we’d had to cling together to weather our extreme and silent surroundings. We’d been like three astronauts in a spaceship—not in Vegas though. At the Silver Saddle, it was like we were back on Earth and it was time to re-enter the general population.
Ida, especially, seemed to have her own things going on. She strutted around the casino like she owned the place—she called out dozens of new names and laughed with people who were still strangers to me, while I just kept my head down and tried to weather this new, chaotic place. I was so distracted by doing my best to avoid human contact inside of the Silver Saddle that I almost succeeded in being unbothered. But, in that hive of human bodies and overbright light, it was hard to stay hidden.
• • •
I squinted down into the blur on my notebook that was supposed to be about antidifferentiation, so I didn’t hear Alex when he knocked.
“Excuse me? Van?”
I looked up, and he took that as an invitation to stroll on in. He gave me a half-smile and looked down at my notebook.
“What are you working on?”
“Calculus. It’s Erica’s favorite.”
Alex shuddered. “You’ll never use it in real life,” he said.
“How do you know that?” I asked him, my pencil still pressed into the notebook. “How much real life have you logged so far?” I heard how mean it sounded after I’d said it, but it was too late to take it back.
Alex laughed though. “Fair enough,” he said. “Listen, I know you’ve been hanging out in here after class—”
“I’ve been doing homework in here after class.”
“Right, well, whatever you’ve been doing, you’re going to have to do it somewhere else. This room’s booked pretty much every night for the next eight weeks.”
I gaped out at him. “This room? People are paying money to use this room?”
Alex coughed out that same, surprised laugh again, and I was embarrassed by the satisfied warmth I felt deep under my rib cage.
“Yeah, well, you can thank your mom for that. I guess she convinced Chantal it was kitschy, and that we just had to market the space to people who can appreciate all of this.” Alex swept his arms out, as though showcasing the splendor around us. “It’s pretty amazing, actually.”
“Yeah, she’s pretty amazing.” I meant what I said, but knew it sounded too sharp.
He looked at me; his eyes narrowed. “I’m sorry you’re losing your calculus shrine.”
“It’s fine,” I said, collecting my things.
And it would be. I probably could scale back on the homework. I needed to start practicing again.
Back in the suite, I opened Ida’s guitar case and sat there on the bed with the golden-bellied instrument propped up on my lap. I couldn’t get started. I hadn’t really played since we arrived. The soundproofing in our suite was terrible—you could always hear shenanigans in the hall. I couldn’t go anywhere in the casino without hearing a rumble, a ringing, or a roar of laughter. I drummed my fingers against the guitar’s body. It was as familiar as a pet, and I felt just as guilty about neglecting it for so long. I really needed to find a quieter practice space.
I decided to ask Ida about it. I found her primping in our shared bathroom. She’d been flirting a lot with Ovid, this older, I guess kind-of-handsome blackjack dealer. She’d started sitting out at his table during his shifts. Sometimes she played and sometimes she didn’t. Chantal didn’t like her sitting out there, but she couldn’t say anything since Ida was with Mom. I sided with Chantal on the matter, but only because Ida’s coquetry made me nervous.
“Hey, honey,” she said, applying a slick of gloss to her thin lips.
“Do you have a second?”
“Sure, pull up a chair,” she said, waving the wand of lip gloss over the toilet.
I closed the lid and sat, watching as she adjusted the neckline of her glittery top.
“Well?” she asked.
“I need to find a place to practice,” I said.
“What do you mean? You haven’t been playing? Why not in here? You always play in your room.”
“Yeah, well, my rooms have always been . . . quieter.” Even as I said it, I knew I wasn’t telling her the full truth. I’d avoided practicing because I didn’t want to bring that private habit to the surface in this new life, where public exhibition seemed unavoidable. I looked at Ida’s face in the mirror. She’d taken up a bright blue pick from the counter and winced with every pluck at her silver do.
“Hmm, I see what you mean.”
I could tell she was only half listening to me. I sniffed the collar of my sweatshirt. It reeked of cigarettes. The smoke at the Silver Saddle was pernicious. It snuck into every fiber of clothing and every hair follicle. It was like a fourth roommate in our suite. Ida didn’t mind at all. She said it was like the good old days.
“I mean it, Ida. I’m not going to remember anything if I don’t practice.”
Ida turned to face me, the pick still in her hand. She tilted her head and smoothed one of my eyebrows down with her thumb. “You’re such a pretty girl, Van. Smart, too. Too smart.”
“Oh my God, Ida,” I let loose an embarrassed grunt of frustration. “I mean it! Seriously!”
“I got it, I got it!” Ida said, holding her hands up like a cartoon bank robber. “You know Ida always takes care of everything.” She turned back to the mirror and traded the pick for an enormous cylinder of hairspray. She looked at me once more. “Better clear out. I know how the odors offend you.”
“You don’t have to tell me twice,” I said, backing out of the brightly lit and already heavily scented bathroom.
“Don’t worry,” she called when I was nearly in the living room. “Tomorrow. I got it.”
• • •
I believed Ida when she said she would figure it out for me. I felt kind of useless, though. I was nearly an adult—shouldn’t I be able to solve my own problems? I went looking for a place to practice on my own, but most corners of the Silver Saddle were occupied. I finally found an empty linen closet on the third floor and squeezed inside, barely wedging Ida’s guitar in after me. It wasn’t perfect, but it was quieter. It was something. I dropped to the floor, my back against one wall and my stretched-out legs touching the closed door. I started to tune up and settled into the old feeling, that rush of doing something well, of doing something completely.
When I heard the scratching, though, I got nervous. What if it was an animal? Some giant rodent or feral cat?
Scratch, scratch, scratch.
I wondered whether I was losing my mind. And not in the casual way that expression gets thrown around. It scared me, sure, but it also thrilled me—I had watched Mom my whole life, and always wished I could know what went on inside of her. I thought, maybe, that the wild chaos of the Silver Saddle had loosened something in me. Maybe I was finally metamorphosing into what Mom was.
The door opened the tiniest bit, revealing a long, bright splinter of light.
“Van? Is that you?” It was Alex. I could tell by the tallness of the shadow in the crack of the door.
“Yea
h, it is.” I moved my legs.
Alex pushed the door open enough to ease his lanky body through, and closed it with his back.
“This is weird,” he said.
“It’s weird that you followed me here. Did Chantal ask you to keep an eye on me?”
“It’s weird that you’re in here.”
“I just needed somewhere quiet.”
“And you chose this microscopic murder closet?”
“It’s the quietest place I could find,” I said.
“What is that smell?” Alex tilted his head.
I shrugged and hugged Ida’s guitar closer against my chest.
“Of course. A strangely scented murder closet is the perfect place for a girl new to Las Vegas. I think I can show you an alternative that’s a little less crime-sceney.”
“I don’t know, I’m pretty happy with this.”
“Van. Come on. I talked to Ida. If you want quiet, I know a better place.”
“You talked to Ida? She said she would take care of it.” I cringed at how juvenile and whiny I sounded.
“She did. She talked to me. Let’s go.” He waved his hand like he was trying to bring more of the closet odor toward his face.
“That’s not how we usually do things,” I muttered. It wasn’t—normally, Ida kept everything between just us. Then I realized how creepy that sounded, even in my head.
“What was that?”
“Never mind. Is it bigger than this? The place you found?” I asked, before I stood up.
“It really is,” Alex said.
I followed Alex so easily, even though I’d never followed a boy anywhere before.
“I didn’t know you played guitar,” Alex said. “Are you good?”
“What? I mean, I don’t know. I practice a lot. Not as good as Ida, probably.”
Alex stopped and I nearly collided with him.
“What?” he said, looking down at me. He was standing way too close, I thought. “Ida? Ida plays guitar?”
“Well yeah,” I said. “She’s the one who taught me.”
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