Queen of Hearts, Queen of Swords
It was a fifteen grand kind of night. Legendary. She was in her best: A little black dress with a tight skirt slit to nearly her hip, hair in luscious curls, her lucky moon and star earrings. She was prepared. Prepared, because her guest tonight was the favorite. Nixon—Nix, as the staff called him. Her long-time regular. He was a short, thick man in his fifties, a business executive, a blunt and excitable sort. He had a brash, vehement laugh that grew wilder when you pleased him.
“C’mon Jackie,” he said now. He was egging her on, with everyone watching. “Do that trick you do.”
As always, they were drinking and she wasn’t. The semicircle of his coworkers enclosed her, men in unbuttoned dress shirts, eight or nine in all, more of them than usual. She wasn’t allowed to drink. Club rules. Better this way. They were sloppy, while she had on her razor eyes, picking out the flash of Nix’s credit card.
“Which trick, Nix?” she said into the thick fur of his hair. He held her chin, tapped on her lower lip.
Something unusual about Nix’s crowd tonight. No women. Usually there were a few girlfriends tagging along, affecting an air of cool or looking around them with eyes the size of plates. Putting a brake on how the men acted toward her.
This was good, though. More money to be made this way.
Nix stuck out his own tongue, still tapping her lip. Laughing, she rolled her eyes and pushed him off. She plucked a cherry from the glass of the kid sitting across from her, ate the sodden, sweet fruit, worked the stem in her mouth. Pulled out the knot and held it up to the light. The cheapest party trick, but they chorused as if she had invented light speed travel before their eyes.
“Do that other trick!” Nix cried, pouring wine into a glass. Tonight he seemed bent on his fun with a fury. She felt a rising anticipation. High emotions meant a high spend.
Handed a cigarette, she folded her legs onto the booth. Hooked her right thigh up so that it was bent with her right ankle against her left knee. Tucked the cigarette between her big and index toe, and gestured for someone to light it. She started smoking the cigarette in this way, dipping it to her lips with a smoothness of motion that provoked cries of amazement, or was it ridicule?
§
Jackie Q. was her stage name. Like the heiress, but the O held a lash. So she said when people asked. In the bathroom stall, she checked her tampon. Then she counted the bills, flipping through the ones, looking for bennies. She found them. Three, and it wasn’t even ten yet. She felt it, the updraft of a fantastic night, and it floated her onward like a hit of something pure, so that, as she redid her face, she barely saw the sodden tissue clumping the sink drain, the dead bulb hung in a web of flotsam above her head.
Nights like these, she could almost convince herself that it wasn’t such a bad job. The rusted metal lockers where she and all the girls changed, the grit of broken glass littering the dance floor at the end of the night, the men and their sticky, grabbing hands—but there was Nix, wasn’t there? He was there. He was always there. Solid as a rock. The way he looked at her, the way he sought her out night after night, his money shielding her from the worst of everything in her life, in her job. He made her feel needed, and strong, and powerful, like him.
In the rush of her excitement, of counting her money, she felt a need for him twisting through her. A need not to be too far away from him. A wire hook that was lodged in the softest part of her mouth.
There was something going on tonight. She should get back to him.
§
On the way, she saw Jerry, the DJ. Guy her age, sullen and pasty, except when he was playing his music–that was the only time she ever saw him smile. He was at the mixing booth, wriggling like one of those inflatable air dancers set up outside of used car dealerships. Good thing he wasn’t a dancer responsible for pulling in customers. They’d go bankrupt. When he saw her he pulled his headphones off. “Heard you’re having a great night!” he hollered, grinning at her.
“Too early to tell,” she said, trying for casual, trying to downplay things. He stared at her, his grin fading, and she knew he saw right through her.
“Not from what the others are saying.”
“Jer, you talk about it too much, you’ll scare her away. Lady luck, I mean.”
“Sure, I’ll be quiet. But you gonna be nice tonight?” he said, putting one ear of his headphones back on.
He didn’t have to hold out his hand. She pulled the bills from her underwire, extracted thirty bucks, held it out.
“That’s ten more than usual,” she flared, at the look on his face.
“How much you make in a night because of getting to work here?” he said, shoving the money into his pocket. “You got requests for tracks tonight, you’ll be behind the others.”
§
“Why don’t you get another job?” her sister said. Her face creased with worry. “Why don’t you do anything else?”
Before Jackie got this job, she worked two others, cutting triangles of cold meat in a deli and selling clothes out of a thrift shop at the mall. Working those gigs, it took her three months to make what she could make in one night dancing. Jackie would never forget the look on her sister’s face when she paid her back for the money she’d borrowed for her community college classes all in one go.
“I wanna save up,” Jackie said.
“Save up for what?”
“For anything that could happen.”
She just wanted to survive. To have enough. Remember what it was like when we were kids? she wanted to say to her sister. Remember?
Jackie remembered. The feeling of being hungry. Chewing on her fingers, on her hair, during class, just to give her mouth something to bite. Never being able to concentrate on what the teacher was saying. All her classmates staring at her as she scarfed down lunch, eating so fast her stomach sometimes hurt afterward. Their mother calling the gas company begging for another month’s extension on the bill. Moving every year. All their stuff stuffed into two suitcases and some grocery totes again, the rest chucked into the trash.
As adults, it hadn’t been so different, really. Her sister with her warehouse job and her little girl, Jackie’s niece, a clinging, runty kid who cried all the time. Jackie moving apartments every six months, nine months, dropping out of classes halfway through, overdrawing her bank accounts, changing jobs as soon as some asshat customer blew their fuse at her.
She couldn’t stick to anything. Not apartments, not classes, not jobs. Except, now, this.
§
When she came back, there was another girl in the VIP room.
Another first. Nix usually had Jackie only. “She’s more than enough for all of us,” he’d say, when the club tried to pitch another girl. Then again, there were usually fewer people in Nix’s party. She wondered again what the special occasion was.
This girl was sitting too close to Nix’s side. He was braiding her long blue hair. He was talking into her ear, and giggling in the way that he did when he was high. The girl looked Russian, long like a femur, with stark cheekbones and eyes that were violet in the strobing light. She was whispering back, giggling. Jackie looked at them, and felt rage tighten her throat.
She’d chased other girls off before, talking shit about them to the managers, one time even planting a baggie of powder in a new girl’s locker.
Nix, you said I was the only one here you liked at all.
Jackie, in the middle of the room, danced. Everyone looked up at her. They put down their phones, their heavy heads sprang forward, they stopped thinking about how it would feel to put the new girl’s toes in their mouths, to look at Jackie. The new girl’s face twisted toward her, tugging against the rein of her hair that Nix held in his hand. Jackie danced with rage. The DJ hated her for not wanting to share, but the joke was on him. Every song he played was her song. She swung, whipping her head, her arms taut. At the end of a song, she picked a man, climbing onto the booth with him, making sure Nix had a clear view of them, of what Jackie was about to do next. Then she turned so that she and the man were chest to chest, her arms bracketing his shoulders, and she was looking straight down into his face.
His face was a shock. Not the closeness of it, but the contempt in it, as clear as if she had tried to sit on a seat full of spikes. Averting her eyes, she rolled her body against his, vibrating her pelvis against his sternum.
Then Nix was pulling her back by the hair. “That’s my dance,” he said.
§
Outside the shuddering, sweating room, she saw the receipts, and on each of them Nix’s looping signature. The hostess held her hand to her mouth, her eyes shiny with excitement. Jackie covered the numbers with her hand, handed over the stacked trays. Everyone else would see these numbers too, she knew. In her chest she felt that dizzying rising sensation again.
Even sharing some of the money with the other girl, she was going to beat her record.
“Where are you going?” the hostess asked. Girls didn’t leave the VIP rooms. They stayed and danced and played, peeling bills from their guests’ wallets, urging purchases of ever more expensive bottles.
“The locker,” Jackie said. “I gotta check on something.”
Two other girls were lining up in the hallway, a blond girl and a Latina girl. The Latina girl she recognized—Azure was her stage name.
“What are you doing here?” Jackie snapped.
“The guest called for us,” Azure said smartly back. Everyone knew how Jackie was with her turf.
Jackie grabbed the hostess’s elbow. “Is that true?”
The hostess consulted her device. “Yes, it says right here.”
Shit, she didn’t believe it. She cracked open the door to the suite. “Nixon,” she called into the room. “You order two more girls?”
Nixon looked up. Jackie stayed in the doorway, staring at him. Nixon looked away.
“The guys wanted them,” he said.
Jackie closed the door. Pointed to the trays of receipts that the hostess was still holding. “You mark these receipts as happening before these two got here,” she said, pointing at the two girls.
Then she walked off. Something was up with Nixon. She would ask him before the night was over.
§
She went to the bathroom in the locker area because that was the closest bathroom. No time to waste. If she didn’t get back in time the others would be all over him, and then she might as well flush her tips down the toilet.
In the stall she checked the tampon. She could feel it needed to be swapped. You had to be careful working while wearing one. Didn’t want any pissed off customers demanding the club give them new pants to wear home. And there was the string, too. She learned how to trim her tampon strings from the girls here. You had to cut it at just the right length, otherwise you’d be up in there all night, searching.
She took care of that. Came out, washed her hands. Then counted her new tips. Mostly ones, some twenties, and then the kisser—one more benny.
Outside, at her locker, she was tucking her money safely away in her pack, when someone came in. “Jackie Q., my best girl,” Mitch said. He was a big, square man, with pale grey eyes the color of dirty snow, and a talent for running a tight ship. Girls who tried to drink on the job or who stole from the clients, he dealt with in his office in a way that could be heard two floors up behind closed doors. It was rumored he had connections to the mob.
Shit. She made to close her locker, but Mitch closed the distance between them in two strides, grabbed the locker’s edge and held it open. “Hold up, baby, don’t be hasty,” he said. “I gotta check your things.”
He made a show of shining a penlight into her locker and flipping through the contents of her pack as she stood back. He was full of shit. He didn’t have to do it with her there. He was the house mom, so he had the combinations to all of their lockers.
He pulled out her wallet. It was one of her first purchases with the money she’d made dancing. Way back when she’d started, four years ago. A nice one, real buttery leather. Dangling from it was a small fuzzy brown otter on a keychain that her niece had given her for her birthday this year. “I heard you’re having a big night,” Mitch said. He gave the otter a yank, handed her the wallet and grinned.
Jackie had a good relationship with Mitch because she was one of his highest earning girls. But she knew even she was pushing it with what she did next, which was to bend down and stuff the wallet back into her backpack.
“What are you doing?” Mitch said. “Take that back out.”
He was angry already. How quickly he flipped between affable and rageful. She stared at him, which only seemed to make him angrier. “That’s not how it’s done. Tip your maker. You know the arrangement,” he said.
“I’ll tip you at the end of the night. You’ll get it all at once that way.”
“I need some now.”
“Why?”
She was on thin ice. She didn’t ever ask him why, not seriously. He was the boss. His face got redder.
“What’s gotten into you tonight? You’re having your best night of this entire year and this is how you share your fortune? Fucking bitch.”
Something was wrong with Nix. That was what had gotten into her. Could she tell Mitch that? No. He wouldn’t believe her. But even as the numbers climbed and climbed, she felt it like a stone in her shoe. After four years of servicing him, she knew Nix.
“I’ll fire you!” Mitch was standing above her, his voice nearly a shout.
He couldn’t, though. Not when she was Nix’s favorite. If she left, Nix would follow her to another club. Mitch knew that.
How would Nix deal with Mitch? She’d spent so much time with Nix these past couple of years she knew every hinge of his body, every veer of his mood. Now, she felt his curt, shit-eating grin stretch her mouth.
“Relax, Mitch,” she said loudly. “I’ll tip you at the end of the night. It’ll be more than I’ve ever tipped you before.”
Mitch stood staring at her, and for a moment she thought he might hit her. Instead, he turned and strode out of the locker room.
In the silence that followed, she felt afraid, but also angry. It was like that sometimes working here, her emotions showing up afterward, while during the event she felt evacuated of them. She waited for him to come back in and berate her. When he didn’t, she dug out all the cash from her wallet and stuck it into her bra. Then she closed the locker and punched in the useless key code.
§
On nights when Jackie stayed over, her sister would take Jackie’s coat and hang it up. Her sister would pick glitter out of Jackie’s hair and wash her dresses. Her sister was always looking out for Jackie. Had been since they were kids.
“They don’t treat you right,” her sister would mutter, like when she saw Jackie’s broken nails from when she’d raked an aggressive customer down his arms to push him off her.
“Who is this guy?” her sister would ask about Nix. “Your boyfriend? Look, be careful.”
But she didn’t try to tell Jackie to quit anymore. Jackie left them cash in envelopes every month. Ones and tens and twenties, sometimes even hundreds. Whatever she could spare.
When Jackie spent the night, she could hear her sister and her little girl giggling together in the next room as she drifted off to sleep. Sometimes, when their schedules lined up, they all sat in front of the TV at night, covered with blankets, and watched re-runs of old scary movies together. The little girl wriggling in their laps, her sister clutching Jackie’s arm and hooting in girlish terror. That made Jackie feel okay. Like she could keep doing this job, as long as she had this to come back to.
§
In the room, she made her way past the clasped bodies to Nix. The blonde girl was sitting on his face, juddering, and he was not visible, except his hand, which was plucking the pink string that ran between her flanks like a one-string instrument. The blonde girl looked up at Jackie and Jackie looked at her. After a moment the blonde girl smiled, earnestly. She was a new girl who didn’t know enough to be afraid of Jackie.
Nixon came out from underneath the girl. Wiping his face, he saw Jackie. “Where ya been?” he said petulantly. “I was looking for you.”
“I had to get you something,” Jackie said.
“Oh?”
“Yeah,” she said.
She stood. She had a towel in her hand, which she looped loosely around her waist. To the shouts and cries of the room she shimmied, whisking her hips back and forth with one hand working underneath the towel, until she had gotten her panties off. These she tossed with a flick of her foot to Nix. She retrieved a chair and sat with her thighs split on either side, the towel stretched between. Under the towel there was a gap between her legs just large enough to fit a human head. Here she carefully placed a shot on the chair. Then she looked up at her audience.
“Now who wants to have a drink?” Jackie announced.
One of the men, not Nix, got down on the floor. She tutted. “Where’s your fare?” she said. He pulled a bill from his back pocket and clutched it in his fist, and began crawling toward her, but again she shook her head. “No hands,” she said. He came to her with the bill bit between his teeth.
Their heads rummaging underneath her towel reminded her of blind, burrowing animals.
Then it was Nix’s turn. He was coming toward her on his hands and knees, his friends howling and swatting his backside. How strange it was when their positions were reversed like this—he the supplicant, she the provider, the source of wealth.
Nix paused at the level of her knees. His face tilted toward her like a plate. In that impudent face were his vulgar grin, his winking black eyes underneath his sagging brows. He said something that she didn’t hear, but that caused the room to roar. She didn’t hear it because she was looking at the credit card he held between his teeth. Right before he went in, he touched her knee lightly, as if to say: Be ready. But unlike the others, he didn’t spend a lot of time inside. Quickly he swapped the card for the shot, leaving it leaned against her thigh. Then he was out again, sprawled grinning on the floor, panting and waving at his friends as if he had just returned from another country.
§
Jackie met Nix four years ago, in her first week at the club. She was young and stupid, wobbled in her heels like Bambi, and didn’t know the first thing about trimming her tampon strings or hiding her tips from view. Nix was one of her first clients. He said he liked her because she wasn’t so smooth as the others. Was gawky as a baby bird. You’re like a real girl, he said. Not like the others, whose beauty reminded him of glinting scissors—if money were sutured to your flesh, they’d cut it from you with their silver jaws and skip away whistling. One time he saw her running in late from school in leggings and a hoodie, backpack banging against her butt. In a fit of gallantry, he insisted on paying for her textbooks, then her tuition for a year.
Against her instincts, she liked him. He was blunt, but reliable. He never got pushy or aggressive. He called every day for a week one time, when she was off work, violently sick from eating (for lack of anything else to eat) a cup of leftover chili socked in the way back of the club fridge.
One time she was in trouble with a customer, a real creep. They were in the VIP room; she was trying to push him off her. She wriggled her arm out and slapped the button under the seat, and, after an era passed, the two hundred–pound bouncer came and bodily lifted the man off her like he was a piece of styrofoam. When she was standing out on the curb, smoking, a violent tremor vibrating her from head to toe, Nix saw her on his way in. Gave her his coat. His vulgar grin gone after she told him what’d happened, he looked pissed. “Fucking creep,” he muttered. “He comes here again I’ll rip his throat out.”
His anger made her feel less shaken. She pulled his coat around herself. It smelled like him.
§
He came twice a week to visit her, Thursday and Saturday nights. He never missed a week.
One night, she found herself looking for him. Then the nights after that too. Around the same time, she stopped working her other customers so hard. Stopped answering their texts outside of work hours. She still danced for them, but somehow less of herself was there in the room with them when she did.
She thought he liked her. Like, really. Sometimes she even thought he might ask her to leave dancing for him. That they might have a chance of having some kind of life together, outside of this place. That happened, sometimes, with the girls here. Even if super rarely. She heard the stories.
She didn’t think about it too hard, though. Tried not to. When she did, it messed with her head. The way he rested his head on her chest like he was a child sometimes, clutching her to him like she was a doll, then other times looked past her like he didn’t know her at all.
Like that one time. They never talked outside the club. Except there was this one time, she agreed to go to his car with him. He was nice about it, afterward giving her his handkerchief to clean up. The next day, she came up to him as he was smoking outside and touched his shoulder. Without looking at her he caught her hand and returned it.
It made her angry that he could put her aside so easily.
§
It wasn’t a credit card. It was a debit card.
“What’s this for?” she said.
They were outside on the deck. It was four in the morning. The end of the night. A light mist fogged the street. The others were inside.
Nix slouched against the railing. He yanked the throat of his shirt open, rotated his head on his neck. Opened his mouth wide, wider, as if stretching his jaws, then closed it with a snap, smacking his lips. A yawn, she realized, with a sense of stinging surprise. Surprise that he was alien to her tonight, that she wasn’t inside his every move like she always was.
Now he was staring at her. She felt a calm dread fill her up from her toes to her eyelids.
Nix said, slowly, “Look, I gotta tell you something.”
She stared at him. She was wearing her heels still. It elevated her so that her gaze was almost level with his.
“Tonight’s my last night,” he said.
“What? What do you mean?”
She laughed when he said nothing. “So, what’s this? One last big party?”
“Yeah, you could say that.”
She looked down at the card. The golden hen that laid her eggs.
“You’re buying me off,” she said, realizing now.
“It’s a goodbye present.”
She needed to know how much was on it, but knew he wouldn’t say. “Why’s this your last night?”
Nix looked away. His grimace exaggerated-looking.
“Look, I don’t know how to say this,” he said. “But it’s my kid. Carly. She’s really sick. She’s in the hospital. I don’t know for how long, but could be months more, years. I can’t keep coming here while she is.”
Nixon had a kid? He’d never mentioned one before. She bent the card into a small, tight parabola.
Nix looked at her. She expected him to apologize, to plead with her not to be pissed, to crack a stupid joke to diffuse the tension, but he just stared at her, measuring her response. She thought of that night, a few weeks ago, when he’d shown up at the club unannounced. Wednesday night. A slow night. Just the two of them in a closed room. Nix drunk, his eyes swollen, his breath stinking. His hands, shaking, covering his face. “What’s the point?” he kept saying. “What’s the point of all this?” Wordless, she put her arms around him. She wiped the wet from his eyes with the heels of her hands. “Shhh,” she said, feeling, in that moment, real tenderness toward him. “Shhh.”
Now, when she gave him no response, no tears, no hysteria, no nothing, he looked away from her again. His mouth went hard.
“My wife’s put up with this.” He waved the air, and Jackie wasn’t sure what he was waving at, the whole club, the two of them, or maybe just himself. “But now it’s too much.”
“What’s she got?”
“Who, my wife?”
“Your kid.”
His face twitched. “I don’t have to tell you that.”
“I’m sorry,” Jackie said. “I’m just trying to help.”
He shook his head. “I don’t want to talk about it.”
Jackie was silent. Was he lying? He rubbed his face. “Look, we had a great run,” he said. “But I gotta get home. I’ll miss you,” he added.
This couldn’t be how this ended.
He was lying.
She stepped close to grab him, to pet or throttle the lie out of him, but he caught her hand. There was no wedding band on his. Never had been. Of course not.
“You’re a wonderful girl,” he said. He returned her hand to her courteously, like he’d given her the debit card. Like it was his to give.
§
The girls in the locker room the next night had heard, already. They scoffed. Sure, a sick kid. Probably she had terminal cancer. And hell was a pit of chewy pink jellybeans.
They traded stories about all the reasons clients said they needed to stop coming. His family found out and mortgaged the house to put him in rehab. He found Christ again. The basement flooded, necessitating repairs. Did she know how much home renovations cost?
§
One night that first week after Nix’s exit, Jackie called the closest hospital. She did it unthinking. She needed to know she was right. She asked the operator to put her through to the patient’s room, giving the first name as Carly and the last name as Nix’s last name. But the operator said there was no one there by that name.
She hung up and immediately tried another hospital, the next closest. There was no one by that name at that one either.
She dug out a business card Nix had given her many years ago. The address was close by. He had to live around here too. Sometimes when she kissed his hair it was still wet from his shower. She kept trying.
She avoided seeing her sister and her niece so much. She let her sister’s calls go to voicemail, even when she started calling several times a day, asking if Jackie was okay. She didn’t want her sister to know she’d been right, again.
At the club, Jackie’s nights were newly empty. The other girls steered clear of her. Like her bad luck might rub off on them. Like they knew she’d take her anger out on them if they got too close.
In the two weeks after Nix’s exit, business slowed. Her couple of other regulars seemed not to be coming in much either. The hours stretched, long and tedious. She danced alone until a heel snapped. She put popcorn in her cleavage as a joke lure, then forgot until the damp crumbles sprinkled her toes as she changed back into street clothes. She dug out an old textbook, fixed her hair in a ponytail, stuck on fake glasses, and pretended to do math homework at the bar. On the longest, slowest nights what she had to tip the house mom, the DJ, the coat room attendant, was most of what she made.
She hated him more for it.
All this time, she’d been fucking up. She never should’ve relied on him. Never should’ve thought he’d take care of her. The only person she should’ve looked out for was herself.
She cashed out the debit card. The amount of cash on it infuriated her. Did she know how much medical treatments for a sick little girl cost?
Hospital after hospital. Trying different times, different wards. With every operator that told her that no such person was in residence, her rage and conviction grew. He had lied to her. After years of her honesty. Because wasn’t what she’d had with him a kind of honesty? There was no greater honesty than her own body. The flavor of it, its heat and salts, the way its smell changed with the swerve of her moods, the way it couldn’t conceal a thing, not her softness or her hatred.
With every call she made, she got giddier and giddier. She was closing in on the truth. Soon she’d finish all hospitals in a two, three hour radius. And then she’d know for sure. That he was just like the others. That the softness she felt for him was stupid. She would kill it that way. Stick a stake through her own yelling, yammering heart. Then she’d have her freedom. Her freedom!
She made another call one day. It was one in the afternoon and all the thoughts in her head shook and clanged like loose, sweaty change. The night before had been a late one. She’d stayed up eating salted peanuts and surfing muted TV channels in the VIP room as a customer tossed and muttered in her lap, trying, under the soothe of her hand, to sleep. So when the operator’s voice in her ear said, “Sorry—could you please spell the last name so I can confirm?” she thought she’d heard wrong.
“What?”
“I said, could you please spell the patient’s last name.”
“Oh—yeah. ’Course.”
She gave the spelling. The operator clicked and hummed. “What’s your relation to the patient?”
“I—”
Shock cracked her teeth together.
“Ma’am?” came the operator’s bored voice.
This couldn’t be the one. It had to be a coincidence. He had to be lying.
“Ma’am—can you hear me?”
She had to talk to her to find out.
“Ma’am, in case you didn’t hear, I asked you—”
“I’m her mom!” Jackie said, all at once, in an explosion of breath.
There was a silence. Then the operator said, with exaggerated patience, “Please provide a patient ID number. For verification purposes.”
“I don’t—I don’t have that on me right now.”
“I can wait while you retrieve it.”
“No. You don’t understand.”
Her breath was coming fast. She sensed her opportunity was vanishing. The window’s edge would chop her off at the knuckles in a minute.
“My kid. She’s really sick—”
“Ma’am, I’m sorry to hear that. But I’m not empowered to allow the patient to speak to you unless you can verify your identity. Or unless the patient authorizes it.”
It took a moment for what the operator said to register. Why wouldn’t the daughter have authorized it already? Putting her hand to her mouth, she barely stopped herself from asking.
Had he lied after all—about having a wife?
“Can you ask her yourself?” Jackie said, after a pause.
The operator sighed. There was a sound of clacking, as if of a keyboard.
“Ma’am?” This time it was Jackie’s turn to ask. “I’m so sorry to bother you. But she’s my daughter. I love her like hell. And I know she misses me. Real bad. I’d really appreciate speaking to her today. I’m real scared. What if she passes away before I—”
“Hold on please.”
A feeling gathered in her, a thrilling, sickening keenness. Like she was on a motorbike arrowing into a tunnel’s black-mouthed entrance as it pinched smaller and smaller.
§
Why did she need to talk to the girl? She could’ve hung up right there. It should’ve been enough to know someone by the name was a patient. But she wanted to know her, suddenly. Wanted to intrude into their lives, which Nix had kept hidden from her. Splinter the lock to show she could.
§
Carly’s voice was so soft. “Mom?”
The sound of Carly’s voice undid some tension or defensiveness in her that she hadn’t realized was there. It was so young.
Jackie held the phone closer to her ear. “Hi, honey.”
She said it just the way she said it to Nix, except she made it deeper, warmer. As she did, she sat down on the kitchen floor. Looked at her toenails, pearly as chips of seashell. Waited for the girl to demand to know who was on the phone with her, to name her the fake that she was.
But the girl’s voice was slurred. “I knew daddy was wrong. I knew you made it.”
After a moment, Jackie laughed softly. “Yes,” Jackie said. “Sometimes Nixon is wrong.”
There was no reaction from the girl to her usage of his name. She must be the right kid. “Daddy was wrong,” Carly only said again, insisting.
The effort of speaking made Carly cough. It went on for a while. Jackie’s chest hurt in sympathy. When Carly could verbalize again, she said, in a voice that was as pitted as it was fierce.
“He was wrong. I told him I saw you everywhere. But he couldn’t see you. He said I was wrong. That I was sick.”
Something reached through Jackie then, filling her, soft as a tilted cup. It was like how in the violet-lit moments, in the languorous minutes before zero o’clock, in the circuit of dim rooms where she moved and beguiled and fought, she sometimes intuited what another human being was dying of the lack of, knew it as sure as breathing, and so she touched them in the way they needed.
“I see you everywhere too,” Jackie said. “Love.”
Noises over the phone. Crying muffled against a crumpled blanket. She saw the girl’s face slabbed on her pillow, her wet eyes staring, confronting the blank white wall across from her.
“Where are you?” Carly whispered. “Where are you right now?”
And it seemed like the apartment had gone strange around her. She looked out the window to see the sun racing through the clouds in the sky like a bright ball toward a cliff’s edge, and when she returned her gaze inside, everything appeared in unfamiliar and estranged forms, the milky bulb over the stove, the walls peeled at their edges like skin, the raw hump of her knee.
“In a place where I can see you,” Jackie said. “Where I can see everything.”
There was a long silence, filled only with the whistle of the girl’s breathing. She thought it was slower now, more even. Soothed. Like she was about to fall asleep. Then:
“I miss you, mom,” Carly said. Her voice was fading.
Jackie heard the sounds of other voices in the background. Staff. Rising to replace Carly’s.
A sudden fear jerked in Jackie’s chest. She pressed the hot phone to her cheek and ear hard, like it could keep Carly there longer.
“Hold on,” she said.
There was no response.
“You’ll live,” Jackie said. “This is just a shitty little bump. Carly? You know it’s true. Because I told you. I told you where I am I see everything. I know how this is gonna go. I see your whole life. It’s gonna be so full and beautiful. Carly!”
Someone else came on. A male adult voice. Jackie didn’t hear what he said. Something about the patient weakening, needing rest. She hung up. Still sitting on the floor, she bent over. Her breath puffed unevenly against her knees. Far away at the bottom of herself, her seashell toenails glinted.
§
It was just a short time after that that Jackie Q. had a good night again. It was like where she had been was in her now, growing, overtaking her. She saw everything. The hatreds and needs that trapped them. Their little games of domination and possession. The money that graphed them all like coordinates in a sticky, disintegrating web. All this knowing stripped her of her cares. As she strode the floor with her neckline, ears, and wrists glittering, she felt strong as a puma.
He was just a weak man. Death-stalked. What she’d mistaken for his strength, what she’d thought was his special affection for her, was just a cover-up. She was a way for him to deaden his own nerve endings, to snuff out his own pain. That was why he’d been able to toss her aside so easily.
If she was nothing special to him, he was nothing special to her, too.
There were other men. Why had she ignored them before? They crowded around her again, drawn by her wild ringing laugh, the hot glossy curls of her hair, the speed and sharpness of her retorts. Her air of having been somewhere they’d never been themselves.
§
One night, weeks after, after she had danced in the rain of glitter amid thunderclaps of bass, cajoled and bullied customers into the signing of innumerable receipts, to the delight of her audience cracked a piece of heart-shaped ice between her teeth so that it split perfectly in two, she found a nearby empty booth and arranged herself there, to rest. She was rubbing her thumb into her steady pulse when someone’s voice came to her.
“You look beautiful tonight,” he said. She glanced over her shoulder into the far end of the booth. He was propped up there by himself, a drink by his loose, open hand. He looked almost like he was sleeping, his eyes near-closed, his clothes rumpled. His jowls dragged onto his collar. The posture of a million men who frequented this club at night’s end. Nix, again.
She didn’t say: You’re back. She didn’t say: You lied to me. Instead, she said, “Thanks. How you doing?”
His mouth quirked. “I’m back,” was all he said.
She didn’t want to be around him. She could feel him. The black, corrosive hunger in him. A maw of grief. It ate at her bright, uncaring light.
“You believe in ghosts, Jackie?” Nix said. He closed his eyes completely. The skin of his face, his eyelids, looked hard like wax.
She didn’t like the sound of her name in his mouth, either. Had she ever?
“I was visited by one,” he continued. “A few days ago.”
He kept talking. Musing. Ghosts. Ones from the past and ones to be. They waited at stoplights before crossing the street like everyone else. They knocked their own portraits on the walls just slightly askew. They ate food that was meant for the living. He got a metal taste in his mouth when he spoke their names.
As he spoke, her pity for him grew.
He kept talking, until finally Jackie interrupted. “How is your wife?”
Nix’s face shook. “What?”
“I said, how is your wife? You mentioned last time you had a fight with her.”
“No, no. I never said that.”
“You did.”
She looked at him, curious to see if he would keep it up, this story of his. The proper, civilized woman stabbed between them like a spear, dividing hers from his.
His face was not as she remembered it either. It had a false jocularity to it. Now he laughed in his ringing, brash way.
“You’re remembering things,” he told her. “She’s absolutely fine. I mean, as fine as she can be under the circumstances.”
Jackie laughed too. He looked at her in surprise at something he heard in her voice.
“Yes,” Jackie said. “I know she is.”
DANICA LI is a lawyer and writer whose work has appeared in The Iowa Review, Missouri Review, California Law Review, and Best American Short Stories 2023. Her fiction and nonfiction have been nominated for the Pushcart Prize and the Robert J. Dau Short Story Prize for Emerging Writers. She obtained her law degree from the University of California, Berkeley, where she was also awarded the Eisner Prize in Prose, the university’s highest writing award, as an undergraduate. The first writing prize she ever won was for a short story about unicorns in the fourth grade.