7 Souls

by Barnabas Miller; Jordan Orlando

  “Yes, that’s mine,” Mary said, stumbling as she reached for it. “Thank you, thank you—”

  I dropped it on the way in, she thought. Whenever that was—whatever I was doing here.

  Whomever I was with.

  But she still couldn’t remember a thing.

  Once the phone was in her hand she felt better. Flipping it open, she saw no messages, no texts, no missed calls—and a nearly dead battery. One bar, flickering.

  “Such a pretty young girl; you no need to be in such trouble. You go to confession,” the cleaning lady told her. She was handing over a beautiful new twenty-dollar bill that nearly made Mary salivate because she needed it so badly. The comforter was slipping to the floor as she took the money—and the cleaning woman took her hand and squeezed it. “You confess your sins, you feel better.”

  “Right.” Confess my sins? She would have settled for remembering her sins.

  THE AIR WAS DAMP and cool. The sky was white, as featureless as untrampled snow—it was the kind of windless, overcast day that could make you squint from the glare of the city’s low, cold blanket of clouds. The echoes of SoHo traffic ricocheted harshly around her ears, around the cloud of dirty black hair she swept back from her sweaty forehead as she pressed forward, hurrying down the shaded edge of the sidewalk.

  Everyone was looking at her, the eyes of passersby widening before they turned quickly away. Mary understood: she saw her fast-moving reflection flow past in the windows of the storefronts along Houston and knew that she looked like a homeless waif, a drug casualty, a hospital escapee or a runaway, her makeup smeared, her hair askew, her body clad in a ridiculous beige coverall that fit her all wrong, with a waistline high up on her rib cage, and a zipper she couldn’t reach tugging painfully on a tangle in her hair, making her eyes water with every step. Her feet were clad in oversize white tennis shoes that had seen better days; a blackened wad of gum was smeared over one of the soles.

  She hunched her shoulders against the cold March air as she darted around a pair of skateboarders who grinned wildly, obviously reacting to her crazy Amy Winehouse appearance. Her ankles were aching from the speed at which she’d been moving. The polyester coverall was rubbing against the cuts on her back, rhythmically scratching them like sandpaper.

  Mary had to swallow to hold off a sudden need to vomit—and the faint, nauseatingly stale taste of tomato sauce filled her dry throat.

  Why am I tasting tomato sauce?

  A fleeting image of a dark red tablecloth flickered into her mind. Faint opera music in the background … the clatter of silverware and the babble of dozens of voices …

  Nothing else. She couldn’t remember.

  I’ve got to get home, Mary thought. It was a few minutes past seven, according to a big, old-fashioned clock on a bank she was passing. I’ve got to get home and get dressed for school—and get ready for my birthday.

  Mary wasn’t quite ready to think about that part yet. Here it finally was—the morning of her seventeenth birthday, a day she’d looked forward to for years—and it wasn’t exactly starting the way she’d imagined. Nobody was bringing her breakfast in bed and handing over brightly wrapped presents. None of her friends had texted her with a morning birthday greeting.

  Come on—it’s early yet, she told herself. Everybody’s just waking up.

  But were her friends waking up with hangovers too?

  Whom was I with? What happened?

  Walking into the shadow of a fire escape, Mary realized that the air was thickening with heavy humidity; already the flat white sky was darkening, showing watery gray traces of lower, heavier clouds. Five cabs had cruised past, each with its sign maddeningly unlit. Like all Manhattan residents, Mary knew that the chances of finding an empty taxicab downtown in the morning were about the same as the chances of finding a hundred-dollar bill on the sidewalk.

  Eduardo’s!

  That was it. She suddenly remembered going to Eduardo’s—the, well, the “budget” Italian restaurant in her neighborhood—with her sister and her mother, who didn’t think of the local one-star spot as a budget restaurant at all, since she almost never ate out (or even left the apartment). Mom took us to dinner—a pre-birthday dinner, Mary remembered. The stale, ghostly tomato taste in her mouth made sense now: she could dimly remember the tiny, cramped restaurant and the red tablecloths and the piped-in opera and the plate of fettuccine marinara that Patrick or her friends Amy and Joon would have taken one look at and refused to touch, sending it scornfully back to the kitchen—and then bodily dragged her down to Balthazar or a place more her speed.

  Because that was the point of Mary Shayne’s birthday; it had been the point since forever. It was always something big, something crazy. In middle school it had been tame stuff: pizza parties at Two Boots, ice-skating parties at Chelsea Piers, frozen hot chocolate at Serendipity. Then it had changed; it had exploded into an underground legend for the private school set—New York’s self-described “playas under eighteen.” Mary never even planned the parties; they just formed out of the ether like darkening storm clouds: last year’s ridiculous scene at Nana’s, an underage speakeasy by the West Side Highway; two years ago, when they commandeered Inganno on Gansevoort Street and distributed free pancakes to everyone in the restaurant on Mary’s friends’ dime; a succession of bottle service bills and backstage passes and ragers in parent-free apartments, escalating—everyone knew—to the big One Seven, Mary’s last Chadwick blowout, and to whatever was coming tonight.

  Which was why Mom had taken them out last night—rather than try to compete with all that—actually leaving their apartment and bringing Mary and Ellen to that red-draped table at Eduardo’s. Mary remembered it all now: chewing and swallowing the mediocre fettuccine and drinking the red wine they’d brought, sitting through the awkwardness while Mom watched her proudly across the yellow candlelight and beamed, her little girl already seventeen (or nearly), my God, how time flies. Which was the last thing Mary wanted to hear, because she just knew what came next: It’s too bad your father’s not here to see this …, Mom’s cue to get misty about her husband, which Ellen always encouraged. Wanting to be anywhere else; refusing dessert (even while looking around for a waiter with a cupcake and a candle in it, ready to smile and cover her face as the restaurant patrons sang “Happy Birthday,” but that never happened); finishing the wine … as Mom (her feelings hurt, as usual) made a big self-pitying show of dropping money on the table and leaving early; and after that, Mary and Ellen getting the check and their coats and then …

  And then what?

  She had no idea what had happened next.

  “Taxi!” Mary yelled, vaulting forward into the street. A lone cab was approaching, its rooftop lights shining. Mary was still so queasy that she was afraid she’d stumble and faint with the effort of running, but she was already in a footrace with a pinstriped Wall Street type who obviously had to get to the trading floor by the first bell and wasn’t going to let a crazy-looking teenage cleaning lady take his cab away no matter how high her cheekbones or how luminous her pale blue eyes, glittering through slits of smeared mascara.

  “Taxi, taxi!” she called out again, burping up more marinara-flavored stomach gas and sprinting toward the cab.

  She won the race—barely—grabbing the cab’s chrome door handle and giving Wall Street Man a pleading look (with a slight pout), which seemed to do the trick: he smiled tightly as she heaved the door open and tumbled inside the cab.

  “Ninety-fourth and Amsterdam,” she told the driver, who obediently hit the gas. Behind them, she caught a dwindling view of Wall Street Man scanning the empty street.

  Have I got enough money? she wondered suddenly. SoHo to the Upper West Side—five miles of Manhattan traffic—was going to cost more than twenty dollars. Yet another thing to worry about.

  Deal with it later, she told herself. One problem at a time.

  The back of the taxi was freezing. Mary had her arms wrapped around herself as she huddled against t
he backrest, still shivering (nonstop since she’d awakened), her dried-sweat-covered skin scratching against the cheap weave of the borrowed coverall (which she was so tired of being grateful for, because she hated it), the cuts on her back itching.

  Mary’s BlackBerry was giving its familiar, hateful LO BATT chime. She peered at the screen again—still no calls, no texts, no e-mails. It’s my birthday and nobody cares, she thought dismally, before reminding herself that it was only 7:08 A.M. (according to the BlackBerry’s display). Scrolling back a day, she saw the indicator for a “To Do” item and thumbed it—and stared at it, suddenly remembering.

  THURS EVE TEST PREP SCOTT

  That’s right, Mary realized, leaning forward as the taxicab banged over steel plates in the street, heading west. Of course, of course—that’s what happened next.

  Or what was supposed to have happened next.

  The one blight on her day, today, the one flaw in the perfect diamond of her seventeenth birthday, was Mr. Shama and his hateful physics test—something about Bernoulli’s Principle, which she had never come close to understanding. Shama’s frantic blackboard scribbling—all those symbols and numbers scrawled across the board while the diminutive teacher waved his arms, fluorescent lights gleaming on his bald head—was nonsense to her, pure hieroglyphics. Which was where Scott Sanders came in.

  Scott was in the class with her. He was quiet and shy and round-faced, with gold-rimmed eyeglasses like those worn by Mr. Shama, whose every utterance Scott seemed to instantly comprehend in his preternaturally calm way. Scott had gotten early acceptance at Princeton or Stanford—Mary couldn’t remember which—and would soon be joining the ranks of pasty-skinned, virginal Star Trek and Battlestar Galactica fans who handled all the engineering and ran all the computers in the world.

  But, more important than any of that, Scott was Mary’s “nerd lifeline” (although she’d never say it that way to him). Out of the goodness of his heart and his Borg Collective brain, Scott had agreed to help her with physics (just like he’d helped her with chemistry and geometry last year, and, come to think of it, every hard class they’d shared since he’d arrived at Chadwick in eighth grade). In a school full of snarky pseudo-debutantes and trust-fund jocks, Scott was that wonder of wonders: a legitimately nice person who was willing to help those less endowed with genius than himself. How many times had Scott’s homemade flash cards and drill sheets and “private tutorials”—evening hours spent together at Chadwick or at the Midtown branch library—completely saved her? Mary wasn’t sure, but the thing that amazed her the most was that Scott never seemed to want anything in return. He was “happy to help”—he was always happy to help, and left it at that.

  And that was the next stop, Mary remembered now, her head throbbing as she stared across the Hudson River’s pale, gleaming surface at the haze-choked New Jersey buildings that stood far away, beneath the cold white sky. After dinner with Mom and Ellen, she was supposed to meet Scott at the Midtown library. He was going to be there anyway, he had explained, working on some kind of Advanced Placement research paper or whatever he had said—and Mary was welcome to join him and get a quick prep for the Shama test today. That was the plan—dinner with Mom (groan) and then a cab ride to the library and one of Scott’s patented tutorials.

  But what happened next? What really happened?

  Mary still couldn’t remember any of it. Fettuccine, red wine, Mom’s proud, watery eyes—and then, nothing.

  Her thumb was already scrolling through the BlackBerry’s contact list, finding Scott’s cell number and dialing it. The phone gave another of its LO BATT chimes, and Mary clenched her teeth in frustration as she raised the handset to her aching head, straining to hear the low hum of Scott’s cell phone ringing.

  “Hel—hello?”

  Scott’s voice—thank God for small favors. He sounded groggy; she was pretty sure she’d woken him up.

  “Scott!” she began, pressing the phone closer to her ear. “Can you hear me?”

  “Wh-what—?”

  “It’s Mary,” she went on, more loudly. The connection wasn’t that great—Scott seemed to have dropped out. “You there, Scott? I need your help.”

  “Mary—wait, what?” Scott sounded profoundly confused, like he was still half-asleep. “You’re Mary. What the—What day is it?”

  “It’s Friday,” Mary said impatiently. This was not going well. Who would have guessed that the smartest kid in school would be such a basket case when he woke up? Some little nerd-wife was going to have to deal with that, sometime—if Scott ever got married, which was doubtful, since he always seemed more interested in equations than girls. “Friday, Scott, the day of the physics test—the big killer test. We were supposed to meet last night to power-cram, remember?”

  “Physics test,” Scott repeated, as if she was speaking a foreign language. “The physics test—of course. But—but, holy shit, that’s—”

  “It’s today, Scott. Come on—will you wake up, damn it? Snap out of it! This is serious.”

  “Serious,” Scott repeated. It took all of Mary’s self-control not to scream into the phone, to insist that he put his brain back in or perform whatever mysterious morning ritual turned him from this confused zombie into the super-genius she knew. “Right, I was—you were supposed to meet me—I forgot that we were—But—”

  “Scott!” Mary tried again. The phone was dying; there was no getting around that. Mary stared over the cabdriver’s shoulder at the West Side buildings. “Scott, I’m trying to remember last night—what happened last night, I mean. I’m blacking out on some of it and I can’t remember if I met you after dinner or—Hello?”

  Nothing. Silence. The call was over; the BlackBerry’s glowing display told her the call was ended. LO BATT indeed. As she stared, the phone’s screen went dead.

  * * *

  THE TINY FIFTH-FLOOR LANDING of the Shaynes’ apartment building was warm and dark, filled with the familiar smells of musty air and Pine-Sol cleanser and that faint garlic aroma that never seemed to go away, barely lit by the dim yellow light from what must have been a five-watt bulb within a cracked glass fixture on the brown-painted wall. The ancient elevator door was rolling shut behind Mary as she approached her family’s black front door, enormous borrowed tennis shoes squeaking on the cracked tiles.

  What she hoped for, what would have been really ideal, was for Mom to be still asleep and Ellen to be right there, on the other side of the door, loudly moving around as she prepared to leave for school. Pressing her ear against the door, Mary strained to hear, hoping for the familiar sounds of Ellen’s quick footsteps creaking on the floorboards.

  Nothing. No such luck. Silence.

  Taking a deep breath, Mary raised her fist and pounded on the door.

  The dizziness wasn’t quite as bad now, but it was still there. The cold metal of the door was soothing against her cheek. She pressed the doorbell, and heard its piercing buzzer rattling deep inside the apartment, and then the slow, dull padding of her mother’s slipper-covered feet coming closer.

  “Just a minute,” Mom called out in her perpetually weak woe-is-me soprano. “Who is it?”

  “It’s me, Mom,” Mary said. “Sorry—I don’t have my keys.”

  Or my clothes. Or my bag. Or anything else.

  The door’s five latches thumped and clattered as Mom slowly threw them open. Mom did everything slowly—Mary and Ellen were used to that. “Just a minute, honey,” Mom called out.

  Mary felt herself stiffening as the door swung open. She had watched all her friends get yelled at by their parents at one time or another. Even Joon, whose formal, austere mom and dad seemed to believe that she walked on water—Mary had seen Joon return from Sunday lunch-and-mani-pedi with her own mother and had noticed the dim pain in Joon’s eyes, the ordeal of getting called out by your parents when you were old enough to realize just how little their opinions really mattered but still young enough to feel it in your gut: that unavoidable shame and fear that made
it seem like you were five years old again—the last remnant of childhood that you knew—you hoped—you’d finally grow out of, one day.

  But for Mary, it was different. Mom never yelled at her. Since Dad died there’d never been a single time when Mary could remember her mother scolding her, even mildly. When the usual argument started, like at dinner last night, Mom made her favorite move: she just left. It was like all of Dawn Shayne’s parental instinct—even the occasional desire to play the role of a stern mother—had vanished on that winter day ten years ago when her husband was taken from her.

  And honestly, Mary missed it. She hated to admit that—she loved to tell her friends about how great it was to have a truly “hands-off” single parent and watch their eyes widen with jealousy at the concept of being left alone the way Mary was. But it wasn’t really true.

  Now, as Mary’s eyes adjusted to the darkness and her mother stood in front of her in a pale yellow nightgown, her unbrushed graying hair clouded around her head like a dandelion flower gone to seed, Mary knew she wasn’t going to get scolded. No “Where have you been?” No “What happened to you last night?” No nothing.

  And, of course, no “Happy birthday”—but you got that last night, remember? Mary told herself. You got a whole plate of fettuccine from her. Don’t push your luck.

  “Hi, Mom.” Mary entered the warm apartment, shivering again as the door swung shut. The familiar Mom smells of cigarette smoke and aloe filled Mary’s nostrils. “Um—sorry; I didn’t have my keys.”

  “That’s okay, angel,” Mom told her while she slowly twisted the five latches, not looking at her. Mom hadn’t seemed to notice Mary’s bizarre attire or her escaped-maniac wild hair and smeared makeup. “I was awake…. It’s almost time for my meds anyway.”

  “Is Ellen still here?” Mary asked, following Mom down the apartment’s narrow corridor, past the kitchen and the hall closet and the study door, which was tightly closed as usual. Dad’s “study”—the apartment’s tiny fourth bedroom—hadn’t changed in a decade, and both Mary and Mom avoided going in there (although Ellen apparently found it a soothing place to read, which was all she ever liked to do). Even after ten years, the unmistakable aroma of Dad’s pipe smoke (Borkum Riff tobacco—Mary still remembered) had barely dissipated; probably nothing short of a fire could remove that distinctive smell from the walls and rugs and furniture in there. The slightest whiff forced a nostalgia trip that Mary was never in the mood for, and she usually found herself holding her breath as she passed the study door. The corridor could have used a paint job—like the rest of the apartment—but nothing like that had happened in a long time. They were living off Dad’s life insurance, which was a good thing, because Mom couldn’t work. The insurance kept them in groceries and necessities, but nobody was hiring any painters anytime soon. “Mom? Is Ellen—”