“Except I can’t even do that right now. I use oil-based paints, and the fumes aren’t what you want to be breathing in when you’re pregnant.”
The General is leading the gang of dogs into the underpass. On the other side is a field. Shelby doesn’t say anything. She just breathes. So Harper is a liar. Or maybe he thinks omission doesn’t constitute a lie.
“I never walk through there,” Sarah says as the dogs romp ahead, through the underpass. But now they have no choice but to follow the path of the pack ahead of them. “But I guess we’re safe with all these dogs. Right? No one’s going to kill us in broad daylight.”
“Right,” Shelby says. She’s got the leash clenched in her fist.
They walk inside the underpass. There is writing on the wall and spray-paint art. Shelby prefers Sarah’s landscape.
“Congratulations on being pregnant.” Shelby’s hands are freezing; she sticks them in her pockets. Sarah is wearing leather gloves. Nice ones. “I happen to hate kids.”
Sarah laughs. “No you don’t.”
“My best friend has kids, but they’re the only ones I like.”
“You’ll love your own baby,” Sarah Levy says.
She sounds so sure of herself. How would she like to see a video of her husband and Shelby fucking in his office? The office smells like Lysol, and there are dog calendars scattered about. Sometimes they do it on the floor, even though Shelby always wonders what else has happened on the tan throw rug.
“I prefer dogs,” Shelby says. She lets Blinkie down once they’re through the tunnel, and he trots off.
“It’s a girl,” Sarah says.
“Excuse me?”
“My baby is a girl. I haven’t even told my husband. He said he wanted it to be a surprise. But I had an ultrasound. I couldn’t stand not knowing.” Sarah has big, beautiful eyes. “I don’t know why I’m telling you all this.”
“I don’t either,” Shelby says.
They both laugh, then Sarah begins to cry. “It must be hormones,” she says. She fishes a tissue out of her pocket. “Sometimes I can’t tell my husband anything. I feel like he’s judging me and weighing his response.” She blows her nose. “I just want someone to be happy when I announce the news.”
“I’m happy,” Shelby says. “I’m glad you’re having a girl.”
Sarah throws her a grateful look. “Thank you.”
“You’re welcome,” Shelby says.
They are walking through the grass, off the path, following the dogs. Harper told Shelby that he definitely would not be with Sarah after the first of the year. He said so last Monday, when they were having Chinese food at his desk. Orange-flavored beef, chicken in plum sauce, mushrooms and broccoli.
The dogs have grown tired. Sarah clips on the pit bulls’ leads. Shelby does the same with Pablo and the General, but Blinkie is still wandering around.
“Do you mind holding them?” she asks Sarah. Shelby ambles across the grass. She could grab Blinkie and run, leaving Sarah holding on to the leashes. When Harper came home, there her dogs would be and then he’d know that she understood that he’s a liar. But when it comes down to it, her dogs are more important to her than Harper is. That should tell her something.
Shelby scoops up Blinkie and heads back, takes her leashes and thanks Sarah. Together they walk toward the Ninetieth Street entrance.
“So what are your favorite girl names?” Sarah asks.
The park is much more crowded now. There are kids everywhere, or maybe Shelby doesn’t usually notice toddlers and babies in strollers.
“My friend’s daughter’s name is Jasmine.”
“That’s pretty,” Sarah says. “I love that.” They’d reached Fifth Avenue. “Are you going down Eighty-Ninth?”
“Nope. Downtown.”
“I’m going to think of her as Jasmine.” Sarah pats her belly. “Thanks for the name. Thanks for being happy for me.”
Shelby stays where she is. Sarah crosses Fifth, then turns and waves. Shelby waves back.
Then Shelby starts downtown. No cab will stop for her until Fifty-Ninth Street.
“I have to charge you extra for the animals,” the cabbie says. He’s nothing like the first driver.
“Fine.” Shelby gets in. “Go down Ninth Avenue.” She directs him to the veterinary hospital. She promises him an extra twenty bucks if he’ll watch the dogs for five minutes.
“But just five minutes,” the cabbie says. “Otherwise it costs more.”
Shelby goes to the entrance. She knows the maintenance guy, Leandro, who cleans the cages and watches over the kennel on weekends. When she taps on the glass, he waves and buzzes her in.
“It’s not Monday,” he says to her. Everybody is aware of her schedule. Everyone is aware of what she’s done. He seems concerned. “Are you sure the doc is expecting you?”
And then she knows. He’s got someone else back there.
“Oh, yeah,” Shelby assures Leandro, a nice man, about her father’s age. His worried expression isn’t changing, but Shelby takes off running down the hall. She can hear them before she opens the door. The murmurs of lovemaking; a girl’s thick voice, and then his, a voice she would recognize anywhere. Shelby walks in, braced for it; still she’s stunned to see him fucking a girl on the couch. She’s young, with masses of long black hair; maybe she works in the billing department, or perhaps she’s one of the veterinary students interning for a semester.
Harper gazes at Shelby, and for a moment it’s clear that he doesn’t recognize her. She just stands there as the girl pulls on her shirt. Then Harper’s eyes light up. He looks like he’s already thinking of ways to spin the situation to his best advantage. “Shelby, this is not what it looks like.”
She can’t believe he’s just said that. That’s dialogue from a movie that she doesn’t wish to see, let alone star in. “Really? Then what is it? You’re doing to me what you do to Sarah. Lying.”
Harper is pulling on his jeans. “Shelby. Don’t be like that.”
“Do you know her?” the black-haired girl asks.
“I’m Monday night,” Shelby tells her competition. “I assume you’re Sunday morning.”
“What is she talking about?” the girl asks, a break in her voice.
Every Monday for over a year it’s been the same. After she assists while he attends to sick dogs and cats, after surgery, after she mops the bloody floor and washes her hands, they come here. The couch, the desk, the calendars, the photos of Sarah. Shelby breathes in the scent of Lysol. How did she ever overlook that wretched smell? It reminds her of the hospital, of the floor of the bathroom, of the way she was treated like an object not a person.
Harper comes to take Shelby’s arm. “We can talk later.”
Shelby wrenches away from him. “I think we’re over.”
“You’re never happy. It’s never enough with you, Shelby.” Harper sounds wounded, as if he’s the one who’s been betrayed.
“By the way,” Shelby tells him, “it’s a girl.”
Harper looks at her, confused.
“Sarah’s planning on calling her Jasmine.”
“You saw Sarah?” Harper runs a hand through his hair. His expression has darkened. Shelby has moved outside of the box he put her in. One night a week, separate from his real life.
“She couldn’t have been nicer,” Shelby tells him. “I think we could have been friends. We’d have a lot to talk about.” She wants to hurt him, at least a little.
“Listen to me, Shelby, you leave her alone.”
Harper is no longer his usual charming self. See a charmer and you’re bound to see a snake nearby, Maravelle told her, and it’s turned out to be true. Maybe this is just a part of her punishment. She dumped Ben, she was thoughtless and mean, maybe she deserves to have wasted her love on a liar. All the same, she wants to salvage something out o
f this mess, so she does. She grabs Sarah’s painting off the wall. She’s always liked it.
“What do you think you’re doing?” Harper has moved from faux-betrayed to furious.
Shelby knows what she’s doing, so she ignores him.
“What’s going on?” the girl on the couch asks.
“She’s a maniac,” Harper mutters. “That’s what’s going on.”
The painting is heavy, but Shelby manages to get it down the hall. Leandro helps her by opening the door into the street. “You okay?” he asks. He’s a big, gentle man, and Shelby smiles up at him.
“I am,” she assures him. “Thank you.”
The painting fits neatly into the trunk of the taxi. It will probably be another ten-dollar charge, but Shelby doesn’t care. She wants to look at a field, a stream, a boulder, a blue sky, a landscape of pure white snow. Whenever she does, she’ll think she couldn’t save Helene, and she couldn’t save Sarah, but she can save herself.
CHAPTER
6
The tattooed girl is in the deli, stealing an apple. Shelby is there by happenstance, since she’s rarely in Union Square these days. She doesn’t work at the pet store anymore, and only stopped in to see Maravelle. When she first resigned, they didn’t want to let her go. They offered more money. They kept saying she was too big an asset to lose, when all she did was boss people around in a way that made them think the decisions they made were their own. So she made a deal: Maravelle would be promoted to manager and Shelby would train her, without pay.
Now Shelby is picking up a Swiss on rye with mustard, lettuce, and tomato to scarf down on her way to class. It’s her last semester. She has zero downtime in her day. She’s gone from a pot-smoking failure to a workaholic. She is a tutor at school and works in a lab. She doesn’t know how it happened. It’s like a magic spell, one where there’s a transformation and everything that happens is invisible. One minute she’s a lost girl sitting in a deserted park in her hometown smoking weed, and the next she’s got a 3.8 average at Hunter College and is seriously considering vet school. Her biology professor suggested she apply for a fellowship, which she was stunned to receive. Now the City of New York actually gives her money each month. When she quit the pet store her employees took her out to a club in the East Village, where they danced on the bar and all got extremely drunk. She danced for hours with Juan, who has qualified for the New York City Police Academy and quit the week after Shelby did.
The tattooed girl’s face is covered by blue patterns. People glance at her, then quickly look away. She’s disturbing, like a cannibal queen let loose in New York. Ever since Shelby stole the dogs she’s felt a weird connection to this girl, as if they were soul sisters. What would have happened if fairy-tale logic prevailed and they’d changed places that day? Then it would be Shelby out there begging in Union Square, and the tattooed girl would be lugging a tote bag filled with zoology textbooks.
Shelby glances over as the tattooed girl slips out, the bell above the door jingling. “Make it two sandwiches,” Shelby tells the deli guy.
She knows what it’s like when someone is compelled to show her pain. When Shelby shaved her head it was a public penance, there for the whole world to see. She now has straight, gold-brown hair reaching to her shoulders. Jasmine has told her she can’t believe how pretty Shelby has become. And yet when Shelby looks in the mirror she still sees the bald girl she was for so long.
Shelby waits for her sandwiches, pays, then goes looking for her doppelganger. The girl is in front of Barnes & Noble, hunkered down, eating the apple. Maravelle always says give a beggar what he wants and all you do is teach him to beg harder. But Maravelle believes in rules, and Shelby never has.
The tattooed girl was probably sixteen the first time Shelby saw her. She doesn’t look so young now. She’s probably lucky to still be alive. There are abscesses on her mouth and on her arms. She’s wearing light sneakers, even though it’s a chilly November evening, along with torn jeans and a black hooded sweatshirt. Shelby stops and hands her one of the sandwiches, wrapped in white paper.
“What the fuck is this supposed to be?” the girl says. The blue patterns are asymmetrical on either side of her face. It makes Shelby dizzy to look at her.
“Swiss on rye.” Shelby sees the uptown bus pulling away. She’ll have to wait for another and will probably be late to class.
The tattooed girl grabs the sandwich. “It better be good,” she says.
Shelby thinks about the girl’s comment all evening during her zoology class. It’s almost funny how entitled she was. Shelby goes up to her professor after class and apologizes for being late. She’s a better student than she ever would have imagined. “You are definitely a workaholic,” Maravelle says when they talk on the phone later that night. Shelby is in bed with the little dogs and Pablo is sprawled on the couch. Pablo is seriously in love with the couch. He doesn’t even want to get off when it’s time to eat. “My problem with Jasmine is that things come too easy to her. She gets As in nearly everything without even trying. She’s slacking off and this is the year she applies to college.”
Maravelle often complains about her daughter. Jasmine wears too much makeup, she pays no attention to her studies, she dresses like a slut. Frankly, Shelby doesn’t think a short skirt and boots equals slutdom, and one C does not a loser make. Maravelle is convinced that Jasmine has a secret boyfriend, one of the older guys from the park. Maravelle’s mother has come to live with her and help out with the kids, and that’s driving her crazy too. It’s a whole lot of people in a one-bedroom apartment. Maravelle and her mother both sleep in the living room now, Mrs. Diaz on the foldout couch and Maravelle on a blow-up mattress. This is one of the reasons Maravelle is going out to Long Island, to look at a house in Valley Stream. The other is Jasmine. “I’ve got to get her out of Queens. I don’t like the way guys in this neighborhood are looking at her.”
“Guys are going to look at her no matter where you are,” Shelby informs her friend. After all, Jasmine is gorgeous. “But maybe a move is a good idea.”
Jasmine has confided to Shelby that she does indeed have a boyfriend, but she’s made Shelby swear she won’t tell Maravelle. Now Shelby is riddled with guilt, keeping this secret from her friend. The boyfriend, Marcus Parris, is older, not in school. From what Shelby has heard, he has a bad attitude, and that is likely his best quality. He texts Jasmine half a dozen times a night to make sure she’s not cheating on him. Maravelle has her suspicions. She found a gold necklace he gave Jasmine for her birthday stuffed into a drawer.
“Maybe I should shave her head while she’s sleeping,” Maravelle says to Shelby. “Then she’ll look like you used to and all the boys will stay away.”
When Maravelle finds the house of her dreams, she insists that Shelby come to give her opinion. Shelby takes the Long Island Rail Road to Valley Stream, where Maravelle is waiting in her mother’s car. Mrs. Diaz and her two sisters, one in Puerto Rico, one in Fair Lawn, New Jersey, have offered to help Maravelle with a down payment.
“Miss Suburbia,” Shelby says with a little smirk. “What’s this?” she says of the car Maravelle is driving. “A Volvo?”
“That’s Ms. to you,” Maravelle says. “It’s a Subaru. The Volvo comes next.”
The house is in a nice neighborhood. It’s a brick colonial with wooden shutters and a manicured front lawn and a big backyard. There’s already a basketball hoop over the garage.
“Let me guess,” Shelby says. “The boys love it.”
“Love it to death. And my mother is overjoyed. There’s an apartment over the garage for her. We can live together without actually having to live together.”
They go up to the porch, and Maravelle takes out the key. “Ta da,” she says, unlocking the door.
“Don’t we have to meet the Realtor or something?”
“We don’t need a Realtor, baby. I bought it! Well, me and
my mom and my aunties, but my name is on the deed.”
There is a big oak tree on the front lawn. It’s leafless now, but come next fall it will drop all its leaves and be a real pain in the ass. Shelby knows the downside of suburban life, but she doesn’t mention all the work that awaits Maravelle. Get out the rake, the lawn mower, the snow shovel, the grass seed. “Nice tree,” she says.
When they step inside, there’s still paper rolled out to protect the hardwood floors and ensure that potential buyers don’t scuff things up.
“Is it gorgeous or what?” Maravelle chirps.
It probably is to somebody and that somebody is Maravelle. Why should Shelby burst her bubble? There’s a gas fireplace and a good-size dining room. In the kitchen there are new appliances and white floor tiles that Shelby knows will be hell to clean when the boys stomp around in muddy sneakers.
Shelby goes to the window and gazes into the yard. It reminds her of where she grew up, out in Huntington. There’s even a picnic table.
Jasmine is going to hate it.
Maravelle comes to stand beside her. “Pinch me,” she says. Shelby does, and Maravelle squeals. “Hey, bitch!” Maravelle rubs her arm and grins. “This house is due to you, you know.”
Shelby gives her friend a look. She refuses to take responsibility for Valley Stream.
“You made them give me the manager’s job,” Maravelle says gleefully.
That’s true, but Shelby won’t admit it. They go out the kitchen door to the patio. It smells like rain and grass.
“You know Jasmine’s not going to want to move here, right?” Shelby says.
“She’ll get used to it. The high school is three blocks away. I don’t have to worry about the kids taking the bus. My mother can walk to the supermarket.”
Shelby sits cross-legged on a retaining wall and lights a cigarette. She knows there’s no safety in this world, even if you’re on Long Island. What happens in Queens can happen here too. Still, she keeps her opinions to herself.
Faithful Page 11
