by Lisa Unger
“Ma’am?” He’s looking at me as if he’s been trying to get my attention.
“Sorry.”
“She says to come up.” His name tag reads Sam. I thank him and head down the hall, summon the elevator, wait to see if it’s working. The door opens and I climb in; it rumbles slowly up.
On the seventh floor, Merlinda swings her door open, strides quickly toward me and pulls me into a pillowy, fragrant embrace. She draws away, puts papery ringed hands to my cheeks and stares deep into my eyes as if she’s searching my very soul. I can feel my phone vibrating—does it ever stop—but I wouldn’t dare look at it. Merlinda calls them soul stealers, thieves of life.
“You’ve met someone,” she says. I look down the hallway toward our old door. Who lives there now? I won’t ask, because I don’t want to know. How can someone else be walking the same floors, cooking on the same stove, showering in the same old claw-foot tub?
“No.” I shake my head. “Not really.”
Lines crease her brow in a worried frown. “I’m making tea.”
She breaks away from me, glances in the direction of our old apartment, then ushers me inside hers. Cluttered, dusty—every surface covered with crystals and statues, lamps with ornate shades—her place hasn’t changed a bit.
She motions toward the low couch and I sink into it as she glides off, long skirt swishing, bangles on her wrists jingling. From the window, I can just make out leaves from the park up at the end of the street. She’s been in this apartment for decades, rent control the only reason she can still stay in this neighborhood. Out on her fire escape, a hundred different wind chimes clatter—wood, shells, bits of metal and glass. It reminds me of my conversation with Noah, about the living haunting the dead. Is Jack trapped somewhere, trying to move on? But I’m holding on too tight.
When Merlinda returns from the kitchen, she’s carrying a bag I recognize, something I’ve carried all over the world because, lightweight and quick-drying, it makes a great day pack and folds into nothing when it’s empty. It was hot pink when I bought it. Now it’s faded and frayed from hundreds of hours out of doors.
“Where did you get that?”
She cocks her head.
“You brought it here to me,” she says. “It was late. After—Jack. You asked me to keep it until you came back for it, to tell no one. I thought that’s why you came. You don’t remember?”
She hands it to me. That I have no memory of this encounter is deeply unsettling. Life, awareness, memory have always been firmly in my grasp.
“And you kept it?” I ask. “Jack was murdered, and for a time I was a suspect. You weren’t worried that I was hiding something from the police?”
She waves me away, sits across from me.
“You? Lovely, sweet Poppy? You’re one of the good ones. And trust me, there aren’t many. If you want me to keep something for you, I don’t ask. I just do.”
I want to open the pack; it’s heavy in my lap. But I don’t want to open it, either. It’s Pandora’s box, once I crack the lid I won’t be able to close it again, or control what I find inside.
“Afterward, when I learned you were in the hospital, I tried to see you,” she says. “But they wouldn’t let me.”
This is news to me.
“Who? Who wouldn’t let you see me?”
“Your friend, the rich one,” she says with a sniff. “And your mother.”
“What do you mean?”
“She told me—your friend—that you had enough problems without memories from your life with Jack, especially me with all my messages from the beyond.”
It sounds like Layla—fiercely protective, sharp-tongued. She’d have viewed Merlinda as a threat to my moving forward and treated her as such, though she never mentioned it.
“I’m sorry.” Then: “Did you? Have a message from the beyond?”
“No,” she says. She presses her lips together regretfully, shakes her head. “That’s not my gift. Me, I just read the cards. And I see the heart. I cut through all the layers and people are laid bare before me.”
Her thing about seeing to the heart—I believe it. I am relaxed here, with her, in a way I haven’t been. She knows me and I don’t have to pretend; I don’t have to don the layers I put on at work, even for family and friends. In this strange room, with this funny fortune-teller, I can just be.
I look down at the bag again. It sits in my lap like a pet; I rest my hands on it as though it might try to get away.
“What’s inside?” I ask.
She shakes her head vigorously. “I wouldn’t look. That’s your business.”
“What did I say when I brought it to you? Exactly.”
She closes her eyes, as though trying to remember. Then she looks at me carefully, her eyes full of empathy.
“You said that you knew what happened to Jack. That they were all liars. You were very upset. I tried to keep you with me, but you said you had to go.”
I toy with the tied knot. What’s inside? What message did that lost Poppy have for the woman I’ve become? What did she know that I’ve forgotten? And what was so horrible that it drove her to a nervous breakdown? Or was she already so far gone with grief that when she came to Merlinda, she had already departed from herself? The answer is in the bag, but I can’t bring myself to look.
“Can I take your picture?” I ask Merlinda.
She leans back, folds her arms and stares at me with eyes, heavily lashed, shadowed in ice-blue. I lift my phone and take the shot. The resulting image is a chaos of color—her eyes, her bright orange blouse, dyed red hair, the rich fabrics all around her, the way her gnarled ringed hand rests on her folded arm.
“The world is a patchwork quilt,” she says. “We are all bits of scrap stitched together. It doesn’t always make sense to us—things don’t always match. But that’s because we can’t see the big picture. No one can—only God.”
Her wind chimes sing in the breeze and the curtains billow. She’s prone to this, waxing philosophical. Around her apartment, there are statues on every surface—the Virgin Mary, Jesus on the cross, a laughing Buddha, a golden Ganesha, the goddess of overcoming obstacles. There are altars of candles and dried flowers, clusters of prayer beads, black rosaries. Merlinda thinks that there’s only one God and the various religious practices are just different ways of speaking to Him—or Her. She’ll call on any saint, god or goddess from any religion for help and guidance. She doesn’t discriminate.
I see it then, her deck of tarot cards. It sits on the old dining room table, which is too big for the small space. It’s a beautiful old thing with legs ornately carved, heavy wood. Varnish fading, covered in nicks and scars, cold candle wax dripping from its edges.
“On New Year’s you were reading my cards,” I say. “We got interrupted. You never finished.”
She looks away from me for the first time, down at the ground beneath our feet, then out the window, seems at a rare loss for words. “The cards are flawed, just like the reader. Just like life.”
“What did I draw?” I press.
“I don’t remember.”
“Merlinda. Please.”
She takes and releases a long breath, threads her fingers together.
“You drew the Seven of Swords,” she says finally. “In the three-card reading, it was for the present.”
I know a little about the tarot—that every card has dual meaning depending on which way it is laid upon the table, that no message is dark or negative really, that every negative has a positive, that every end is a beginning.
When I don’t say anything, she goes on.
“It’s the card of deception and betrayal. When I draw that card, it means that either the person before me is hiding something and it’s about to catch up. Or it might mean that she is the victim of deceit, trusting people who should not be trusted.”
Layla’s voice bounces around my head. You’re a fucking liar!
“What else?” I ask. “There was another card.”
Again, she hesitates, shifts in her seat. Then, “In the future position, you drew the Devil.”
I know the card, the image featuring a satyr and a couple chained to him. It’s only after looking closely that you see the chains could easily be removed. “It can represent hidden forces of negativity in your life—addiction, attachment to unhealthy ideas or relationships. Or it could mean that there’s someone in your life who doesn’t wish you well.”
A memory comes back to me, sharp and vivid. I am standing in the dark, in the hallway outside the living room. Jack’s talking, his voice low but vibrating with fear, anger.
“Look.” He stands by the window, huddled over the phone, clearly trying to keep from waking me. “I can’t just walk away from this. It’s not—right. I won’t do it.”
I want to enter the living room, to confront him.
Who are you talking to? What are you talking about? Tell me.
Something stops me. Instead, I return to bed.
“What’s going on?” I ask when he returns to the bedroom. He’s quiet, the way he is when he doesn’t want to answer my question. “Who were you talking to?”
“Alvaro,” he says. It’s a lie. I don’t believe him. “He’s having some issues.”
“What kind of issues?”
“Nothing important. Can we talk about it in the morning?” He kisses me on the cheek, then turns over.
I want to press him. But I don’t want to be that kind of wife—needy, prying. I wish I had been. I wish I had turned on the light and made him tell me the truth.
* * *
“Poppy,” asks Merlinda, shuttling me back to the now. “What is it?”
I shove the pack into my tote and rise.
“Nothing,” I assure her. “I’m just—tired.”
That word has taken on a whole new meaning. She rises with me, a bustle of fabric, a jingle of bracelets, and takes my hands.
“Be careful, Poppy,” she says. Her eyes have turned dark with worry. I promise her I will be, and leave clutching the tote to my body.
The day outside has turned frigid and gray; I can’t get a cab so I start walking downtown.
I call Ben to tell him I’m running late.
“Nothing on the calendar today anyway,” he says lightly. Then: “Are you going to tell me what’s going on? Can I help?”
“I wish you could,” I say. “There are just some things I need to figure out. Holding down the fort there is the best thing you can do for me right now. Okay?”
He lets go of a sigh and I can envision him massaging his beard, looking thoughtful and millennial. “You got it. Don’t forget—I’ve got mad skills. I can help with all kinds of things.”
“How could I forget?” I say. “I’ll check in later. Promise.”
Still no cab to be found and my head is swimming. After writing in my journal last night, I did take the single prescribed pill—but nothing else since I flushed it down the toilet. Now I have a sleeping pill hangover, and my thoughts are wild, bouncing between dreams and memories, memories and dreams.
When my phone vibrates again, I fish it out of my bag. The detective.
“So now you’re not returning calls?” I never called him back last night. A glance at my phone reveals that there’s another message from him, too.
“I’ve been—busy.”
“I know that,” he says. “You’re not good at taking good advice, are you?”
I think about Noah, the nightclub, the mystery bag I can’t bring myself to open.
“I don’t know what you mean.”
“Let’s get together,” he says. His voice has a coldness to it that puts me on edge. “We need to talk.”
20
I am shivering in my too-light jacket as I push into the diner. Overnight it seems that winter has come. The cold has seeped into my bones, where it will stay until spring.
Detective Grayson is in the far booth, nursing a cup of coffee. I’ve noticed this about him before, that he chooses the seat from which he has the greatest vantage point of the room. Detectives and photographers, maybe not so different. Always watching.
A cup of coffee, still warm, waits for me, too, as I slide in across from him. The air is heavy with the smell of frying grease and burnt coffee, loud with people shouting orders and customers chatting on cell phones, waiting for to-go egg sandwiches.
“What about being low risk did you not understand?”
I bristle. “Are you following me?”
He pins me with his gaze. “I told you to stay home. Not to go to a nightclub with your new boyfriend and start asking questions.”
“Sorry, Detective.” I hold the cup in both hands, hoping to leech off some of its warmth. “You don’t get to tell me what to do.”
He rubs at the bridge of his nose, pressing hard with his thumb and forefinger, a gesture that seems to express his state of perpetual fatigue with the world.
“Okay,” he says. “Look. I’m not telling you what to do. I’m trying to look out for you. Someone’s following you, right? We still don’t know what happened to Jack. The way I see it you’re either going to fuck up my investigation or get yourself hurt.”
I hang my head, thinking of the backpack, which is tucked inside my tote, still unopened. I am afraid of what’s inside. I should give it to him, open it right here in front of him and face what’s in there together. But I don’t. I can’t. Something powerful stops me.
“So those names you gave me?” he says. “I did some looking. Two of them seem okay. No records, nothing weird online.”
He takes out his notebook, flips it open, old-school. Squinting, he slides on a pair of black reading glasses. “But this guy—Noah Avidon. Some kind of artist, right? He’s got quite the history with women.”
Noah—his words are still ringing in my head about the living haunting the dead. And more. The feel of his hand in mine, his kindness, his willingness to take me where I wanted to go, to make sure I got home safe.
“What kind of history?”
I sip the coffee. It’s typical diner swill. No excuse for a brew this bad in a city where there’s a barista every few blocks.
“His girlfriend in college was killed.”
“A car accident,” I say. “He told me.”
“Well, maybe not,” he says holding my gaze. I want to take that notebook out of his hand and read what he has there for myself, rather than wait for him to dole out the information he’s gathered. “The police report indicated that she’d broken it off with him, and he’d been stalking her. That he was following her in another car at the time, that he tried to force her off the road, causing the accident that killed her.”
My stomach does an unpleasant flip, and I feel a kind of shaking, uncertain anger. Did he lie to me? Did he misrepresent what really happened in his past? The man standing in my living room last night was good, respectful of my space, offering a piece of his hard-won wisdom. I try to reconcile this with Grayson’s news. It doesn’t quite fit.
“He told me it was a drunk driver,” I say.
“He was following her,” he says. “It’s in the report.”
“Was he convicted? For causing her death?”
“According to the arresting officer, there wasn’t enough evidence to support the charge. Mr. Avidon is a person of means. His family hired a powerful lawyer,” says Grayson with a cop frown, skeptical, knowing. “And the other driver involved in the accident was, in fact, drunk.”
I let the detective’s information sink in while he taps a finger on the table, knocking out an impatient beat. What had Noah told me about it? That Bella had been killed by a drunk driver while visiting her parents. Did he ever mention that he’d been there, following her?
“There was another woman,” he continues into my silence, “who also claimed, according to the restraining order she filed, that he was stalking her. They met online, dated once. She ghosted him, stopped texting, returning calls, tried to disappear. He showed up at her work, at her apartment. Get this. He sent her orchids.”
I remember you. Do you remember me?
A little roar starts in my ear. The sound around us seems to ramp up—the chatter, the clanking of silverware on dishes, the drone of a jackhammer outside.
“He got loud one day in her lobby. That’s when she called the cops and got the restraining order. He backed off after that.”
“Well,” I say, not wanting this to be true. “That could be like a he said, she said thing. Right?”
“There’s a video,” he says. “Of the guy losing it in the lobby. It isn’t pretty. He’s got a nasty temper.”
I try to imagine the soft-spoken, easy person I know raging in someone’s lobby. I can’t picture it. Am I so out of it that I can’t see what’s right in front of me, that I’d think he was a good guy when actually he was a stalker? The thought turns my stomach to acid. Layla was right. I’m not in a good place; my judgment is off.
“How long ago was that?” I ask, taking a breath.
“Three years or so.”
“Nothing since?”
“No,” he says with a shrug. “Nothing on the books.”
“People change?”
“No.” He shakes his head. “Guy like that—in my experience—he gets worse. Older, angrier, accruing more bitterness against women.”
“I don’t see it.”
He shrugs. “You wouldn’t,” he said. “Not yet. If you saw it, you’d be miles away already. That’s how predators work. They give vulnerable people what they want or need, at first. They see a need, a desire, then they exploit, manipulate. When you’re hooked, that’s when the abuse starts.”
