“I want my wallet back,” he said.
It was Bill, wearing black pants and a dress shirt, the armpits ringed with sweat. He turned his wedding band on his finger. I was holding the package of baby carrots in one hand and the briefcase in the other.
“I bet the owner of this place would like to know what you’ve been up to,” Bill said. “I bet he’d find it all very interesting.”
The carrots were cold. I pressed the package against my forehead like a compress. Bill touched my elbow, a little roughly. He asked if I was paying attention.
“You’re too late,” I said. “Everything’s gone.”
“Even the photo?” He squinted at me. His cheeks and forehead shone.
It wouldn’t have cost me anything to give the photo back to him, but that would be hard evidence that I had stolen and that was bad for business. I had to look out for myself in practical ways. I couldn’t rely on magic.
“I get it,” I said. “You don’t want your wife to find out you’re a sleaze. Do you know how old I am? No? I’m a minor, for your information, and I bet some people would be very interested to know about that.”
Bill took a step back. His face went slack, as though I had just slapped him. He didn’t stop me when I opened the door and went inside.
* * *
The first time I went to Coco Cabana, I was fifteen. The night had brought a particularly bad show: we were still doing the saw-a-lady-in-half trick, and my mother had fumbled the reassembly. I was scrunched inside a wood box on wheels, which should have been reconnected to another box with plastic feet—surprisingly lifelike from a distance—attached to the end. My mother hadn’t been able to get the blocks to click into place, and before I knew it, I was drifting across the stage. The audience started booing. Under the glare of the lights, my mother’s eyes widened with panic. Her skin paled beneath her makeup. I could feel her sinking, could feel our lives sinking, like someone had weighted us down with rocks and tossed us into the ocean. When the curtain fell, I was still inside the box, and my mother still looked empty and afraid.
The first time, I didn’t bring the suitcase. I didn’t take anything from the shelves. I didn’t even know why I was there. I just walked the aisles, gazing at the bottles and the liquids inside. It was November, but still warm and humid. I kept thinking how nice it would be to have something cold to drink.
Mr. Phillips was the only person in the store. He stood behind the counter with his paper. I was surveying a display of neon lighters near the front. I picked up a hot pink lighter and made it flame.
“It’s two for one,” he said without looking up. “But you look too young for those.”
“I don’t smoke.” I put the lighter down. I didn’t yet have money of my own.
“Listen to this.” He tapped his index finger against the paper. I walked around to the counter. He wore a gold chain under his white T-shirt and had tufts of gray hair on his knuckles.
“A man is on his way to work, is hit in the head, and gets amnesia. He wanders away, not remembering anything, and goes on to start a whole new life. A year later, he gets his memory back, remembers where he used to live, and shows up on his family’s doorstep.” Mr. Phillips took off his glasses and started cleaning them on his shirt. “What a story!”
“I don’t believe it,” I said. “How did he get hit in the head?”
He put his glasses back on. He looked at the article again and frowned. “Well, it doesn’t say exactly. But look, his picture’s right here.”
He passed me the paper. There was a black-and-white photo of a man with his arm around a woman. Two young girls stood in front of them. Both had braces and pigtails. Everyone was smiling. I couldn’t wait to go home and tell my mother this story and ask if something like that could have happened to my father. I had no way of knowing that when I described the photo with the smiling family, she would hide her face in her hands and begin to cry.
* * *
To no one’s surprise, our next show was a disaster. Backstage, Merlin hadn’t wanted to get into the hat, and once he was inside, he wouldn’t hold still. When my mother tilted the hat toward the audience, a white ear peeked through and people snickered. A woman and her young son, the first family I’d seen in months, walked out. Bill was in the front row, holding a beer and smiling. So far he hadn’t said anything, but I imagined it was just a matter of time. Beyond the lights and the audience, I could see the dinner theater owner standing by the bar, swirling a drink and shaking his head.
When my mother pulled Merlin from the hat, he leaped out of her arms and scurried around the stage for a few minutes before diving into the audience. One man—just the kind I would have liked to buy me drinks later—shrieked and jumped out of his chair. It didn’t take long for the rest of the audience to scatter. In the end, I caught Merlin with the help of a baby carrot and stashed him in our dressing room. Through the closed door, I heard the owner shouting at my mother, telling her our days were numbered. When she came into the dressing room, she didn’t go through her usual routine. She just sat at her table, her cape pooling around her knees, and stared at herself in the mirror.
It was too sad a scene. I left Merlin on the chaise and my mother at her dressing table and went to the bar. Bill was still there, nursing another beer and reading a pamphlet on manatees. Ricky looked at Bill and then back at me, like Now you’re in trouble.
“Are you stalking me?” I stood next to Bill and retied my bathrobe sash. “Do I need to call the police?”
He looked up from the pamphlet. “I’m the one who should be calling the police.”
“I could have you murdered, you know.” I leaned against the bar and crossed my arms, trying to look worldly and assured, which of course I was not. “I know people who do that sort of thing.”
Bill just laughed. “You’re a kid. You don’t know anything.”
“I know you want your wallet back. I know you carry a picture of some stupid tree around. I know you won’t go back to your family and forget all about this like you should.”
“I had a family,” Bill said. “A wife and a daughter and a little dog and a goldfish.”
“Where did you come from, anyway?”
“Wisconsin.”
“Appleton?” It seemed unlikely this man could be from the same place as Houdini.
“Sturgeon Bay. But I like it here, in Hollywood. I think I might stay for a while.”
“Just because you like Hollywood doesn’t mean Hollywood likes you.”
Another man came into the bar, drunk and swaying and asking about the show. Am I too late for the magic? His shirt was untucked, his hair mussed. I sidled up to him and swiveled my hips and soon I was drinking old-fashioneds on his tab.
He was too drunk to be coy, to ask for a magic trick. After two cocktails, he was grabbing my ass and pulling me toward him. His wallet was one of the easiest. It was sitting at the top of his pocket and went straight up my bathrobe sleeve. There was a weird kind of intimacy to the whole thing, with Bill right there, and I’d had just enough to drink to feel invincible. No one else was around. What could he do but watch?
Quite a bit, it turned out.
“Thief!” Bill stood from his barstool. He pointed at me with the manatee pamphlet. “This woman is a thief!”
The drunk man clutched his pockets. Ricky looked up from restocking maraschino cherries and lime wedges. I slipped the wallet down my sleeve and slapped it on the bar.
“It was just a trick,” I said. “You know, magic.”
“Don’t believe her,” Bill said. “Don’t you believe her at all.”
“Thief!” the man slurred.
“Looks like the show’s over,” Ricky said.
A good performer always knows when it’s time to make her exit. I turned on my heels and ran. I went up the middle of the audience section, between the velvet curtains. The lights were off backstage. My heels clacked on the wood. I opened the trapdoor and climbed inside the space. I wedged my head between my
knees and breathed in the cedar smell. I would stay there for as long as it took for everyone to go home.
* * *
As a child, I searched for my father. I would wander down to the beach, where I checked behind garbage cans and underneath picnic tables and white lifeguard stations. Once, a lifeguard found me questioning sunbathers about my father and made me promise to go straight home. I did as I was told, but came back the next day. It was summertime. I was ten. For my birthday, my mother had given me a map of Florida, which she said would keep me from getting lost. I would study the highways and the lakes and the dark swampland. Could he be in Lake Istokpoga? Weeki Wachee Springs? Gatorland? The map made Florida seem vast and mysterious. All these names I had never heard before, all these places I had never been. This was before I understood that my father had disappeared in California, that he’d probably never made it this far east. The thing I remembered most from those days was the shape of the map. I thought Florida looked like an upside-down L.
* * *
My mother and I were awoken by a call in the middle of the night. The phone was in the kitchen, but its ring was as shrill as an alarm. I found her facing the fire escape, wearing a sleeveless cotton nightgown. The phone was pressed against her ear. She was nodding and pulling at the cord. I touched her shoulder, but she didn’t seem to know I was there.
“Get dressed,” she said after hanging up. “We’re leaving in five minutes.”
“To go where?” It was three in the morning.
My mother went into her room without answering. I pulled on jeans and a T-shirt and gathered my hair into an elastic. I forgot to put on socks before lacing my sneakers. Late last night I’d collected Merlin from the dressing room and now he was asleep on my bed. I found the leash I’d made from red silk ribbon and looped it around his neck.
In my mother’s old Camaro, we drove north on Ocean Drive. The sky was dark and starless. The streetlights glowed phosphorescent white. We were heading toward Dania Beach, toward Fort Lauderdale. She rolled down the windows. Normally she listened to Donna Summer in the car, but this time the radio was silent. Merlin stood on his hind legs and sniffed the warm air.
“Will you fucking look at that?” She swerved a little when she saw him doing what we’d tried to get him to do for hours in the apartment. She hadn’t taken off her makeup; mascara was smudged under her eyes and there was a halo of red around her lips. She was still wearing her black pants and white tuxedo shirt.
“Where are you taking us?”
“To the police,” she said, which made me afraid to ask more questions. Had Bill reported me? Had Ricky? I slumped down in my seat and watched the buildings pass.
At the Hollywood police station, we trailed my mother through the glass doors. She asked for a Detective Swan. The station was quiet and bright and deliciously cool. Down the hall, a man was sitting on a bench, his hands cuffed behind his back.
Detective Swan was a woman, tall and broad-shouldered. Her blond hair was wrapped into a bun and stuck through with a pen. She wore a black pantsuit with a blue T-shirt underneath. She looked surprisingly alert for the hour.
“Is that a rabbit?” She pointed at Merlin.
“Does it look like a rabbit?” I held him in my arms, the leash wrapped around my hand.
My mother flicked my shoulder, her way of telling me to not be such a smart-ass.
Detective Swan led us deeper into the station. We passed the handcuffed man, who appeared to be asleep. At her desk, she pulled over two chairs and we all sat down, my mother and I side by side, the detective across from us.
“Is this your daughter?”
I felt her looking me and Merlin over. I wondered what she was seeing.
My mother nodded. “This is Crystal.”
I was more certain than ever that someone had reported me, that I had overestimated the silencing power of shame. Detective Swan handed my mother a manila file folder. She opened it and stared at the contents for a while. She blinked a few times, like she had something in her eye. She wiped her nose with the back of her hand.
“That’s him.” She gave the folder back to Detective Swan.
“Him who?” I said.
Detective Swan asked if my mother would be willing to identify the body.
“Mom,” I said, louder than I meant to. Merlin flinched in my lap. “What body?”
My mother and Detective Swan both stared at me.
“Do you want Crystal to come?” the detective asked. “We can’t have a rabbit back there.”
My mother leaned over and tucked my hair behind my ear. It was a tender gesture, but her eyes were not kind. “Stay here and watch that terrible rabbit. I’ll be right back.”
I stood when they stood. I wanted to tell them that I was old enough to make decisions for myself, but instead I just watched as they walked down the hall.
Detective Swan had left the folder on her desk. It contained a thin stack of paper and two photos: a mug shot of a man and another from the morgue. I had never seen a dead body before, not even a picture of one. His skin looked blue and rubbery. I balanced the open file on my knees and kept reading. Merlin nibbled the edge of the folder.
Knowledge is a curious thing. People talk about realizations coming in jolts and flashes, but this was more like a gradual creeping. I imagined a water stain on a ceiling, the way it darkens and swells before it starts spreading. The man’s face—the angular jaw, the sleek dark hair, the flared nose—was familiar because it was the face my mother had been describing for years. The face she claimed to have seen for the first time at magic school, in a conjuring class. She even drew it for me once, on a magic chalkboard that disappeared its drawings as soon as they were complete. Also: he had the same arch in the eyebrow, the same dimple in the cheek, that I saw in the mirror every morning and night.
Here was what I made of the evidence: there had been no magic school. No cockatoo or hypnosis. My father had never been anyone’s protégé, had never been the Great Heraldo. He had not disappeared from a water-filled aquarium. His name was Derrick Gibson and he lived in North Miami Beach and he had been shot outside a Chinese takeout at midnight.
* * *
In the car, I tried to get my mother to answer my questions. Was the dead man really my father? Had he always lived in Florida? Had they ever even set foot inside a magic school? She held the steering wheel with both hands. The heat had turned the mascara into little black puddles under her eyes.
“We did meet in California,” she said as we turned back onto Ocean Drive. “Once we took a tour of a magic school in Hollywood. They had a theater filled with beautiful chandeliers and red silk draperies. I thought it was the most beautiful place I’d ever seen.”
“How did you get into magic if you didn’t go to the school?” It was close to dawn. The sky was pale with light.
“I took a free class once,” she said. “At a community center.” She had been trained by a woman who made a living doing tricks with cards and dollar bills at children’s birthday parties.
My eyes were watering. Merlin felt heavy on my lap. I was breathing, but not holding on to any air. “Why did you tell so many lies?”
For that, she had no answer.
She pulled over onto the side of the road and got out of the car. She left her door open and the engine running. I followed. Merlin stayed in the passenger seat. A part of me couldn’t help but admire the way he’d rejected our life choices, the way he had taken one look at us and known he didn’t want to be part of this act, of this family.
“Your father came to a show once.” She rolled up the sleeves of her tuxedo shirt. “About a year ago.” She’d glimpsed him in the back of the theater, but by the time she looked up from her next trick, he was gone. I wondered why I hadn’t known he was there, hadn’t felt something inside me shift. Why he had seen me onstage and decided not to stay.
“Why did you bother telling me any of this?” In the distance, I could hear waves coming and going. “Why didn’t you just
keep lying?”
My mother said soon I would be eighteen, no longer a child, and she could see me daydreaming about magic and Hollywood.
“People have to be realistic about their options, Crystal.”
I asked if she was being realistic about her options when she decided to be a professional magician, the most impractical fucking job anyone had ever heard of? Or when she bought the five-hundred-dollar guillotine or the rabbit? Or when she didn’t like the way her life had turned out and decided to just make up a new one?
My mother told me it was time to go home.
“It won’t be our home for long,” I said.
She rattled the keys in her hand, then went back to the car.
At the apartment, she locked herself in the bathroom. I sat on my bed and tried to explain to Merlin what had happened. The more I told him, the angrier I became. Angry at her for wanting me to know the truth, but not telling me herself. Instead she had left the evidence in plain view, knowing I would put it all together. Angry at her for building us a life, a history, out of smoke and air. And angry at myself, because wasn’t I too old to believe in stories?
When I left the theater, it was six in the morning. I stepped around broken glass on the sidewalk and a woman sleeping on a bench in an overcoat, even though it was already ninety degrees. As I walked, I looked for Bill and imagined all the men I had ever robbed filling the dinner theater like ghosts.
At Coco Cabana, I did not have my briefcase. I was just hoping for some luck. Mr. Phillips wasn’t at the counter. I went to the back and wedged three mini-bottles under the waistband of my jeans. I should have stopped there, but then two little whiskeys went into my front pocket. Two more in my bra. I couldn’t keep myself from plucking bottles off the shelves.
I felt hands on my back, right as I was reaching for a miniature gin. I turned and found Phillips Jr. squeezing my shoulders. He wore pressed khakis and a white polo. He smelled of cheap cologne. His hair was combed in a center part. I tipped my head back and smiled.
“Don’t even try it,” he said. “My father has no business sense. And he thinks you’re cute, with that briefcase. That’s the only reason he’s let you get away with this for so long.” He let go of my shoulders. He stepped back and stared at the bulges in my jeans and under my shirt. “But even he would think this is ridiculous.”
The Isle of Youth: Stories Page 13
