drank neat double shots of Wild Turkey at Blondie’s Bar, or waited until she wasn’t home and punched something. It had only recently dawned on her that those eye-level round smudges on the white-painted walls in his study alcove were evidence of his fists.
So, when he’d raised his voice for the first time that she’d known him last night, she’d understood that something was brewing. One month after their breakup, they were about to have their first knock-down, drag-out. As soon as she figured that out, she’d hung up fast, like the phone was radioactive.
Now, the phone continued to beep in her ear. But she’d signed the lease at The Breviary. Even if she wanted, there was no turning back. So she hung up, then wiped her eyes, because they were wet.
Out the crud-covered window and a few stories down, horns bleated. The diesel fumes from trucks making their Manhattan produce deliveries darkened the air. Farther north, along the Marcus Garvey Housing Projects, families wearing their Sunday best headed off to church. They walked in groups of three and four. A pair of girls, twins she guessed, wore sailor dresses with matching straw bonnets.
Unbidden, she imagined her children with Saraub. Dark-skinned towheads with wise little eyes. She’d dress them in something obscenely adorable, and they’d complain it was child abuse. “Matching corduroy overalls?” she’d shoot back. “If that’s your biggest problem, I win mother of the year.”
As she watched, her grin faded. In her mind, the concrete sidewalk rose up like a boil until it burst. It swallowed the happy family, and like a wave, dragged them down underground. The trees and buildings, idle on a windless day, would make indifferent witnesses, and steel trucks would honk without cease, as if it had never happened at all. Would the grown-ups go first, she wondered, or the kids? Or did that matter, because eventually, this city swallowed everyone?
She closed her eyes, ran her thick, scarred fingers along the window. She’d been imagining holes a lot lately. Partly it was a real fear, partly it was the obsessive-compulsive disorder—she got ideas in her head, and couldn’t evict them until they were ready to go. Over the years, she’d learned to control her disease, and took some pride in the fact that not even Saraub had ever guessed that her meticulousness was actually a pathology.
If she patted her left thigh and needed to even it out and pat the right, she did it so slyly that only someone looking for it would notice. Wrinkled knuckles reminded her of tiny baby rodents, so she never looked at people’s hands, and when possible, kept her own in loosely curled fists. When she’d felt compelled to scrub the bathroom floor two times (or maybe three) while living with Saraub, she’d done it with the door closed and run the tub so he’d thought she was taking a bath. When she had bad thoughts, like imagining poking out Saraub’s baby nieces’ eyes with her fingers, or having gross sex with homeless smackheads, she’d learned that trying to expel them from her mind only gave them strength. Instead, she let them fade, like bubbles in a bath. Until now, all that had worked. She’d passed for normal, and, all in all, was probably only half as neurotic as your average New Yorker.
But these holes lately had proven stubborn. The more she ignored them, the stronger they got. She even dreamed about them: a yawning black mouth that gnawed her toes, then her feet and legs and arms, until she was a cripple. A flopping trunk, useless and terrified. And then the hole consumed her entirely, and she was nothing at all. Just a shadow—a dark stain left by the woman she’d once been. In her more paranoid moments, she got the idea that the images were portents of things to come.
The disease, and the fact that she never got treatment for it, had made her departure from Omaha all the more surprising. She still didn’t know how she’d found the courage. It might have been Betty’s hospitalization that had jolted her into action. She’d figured: now or never. Then again, maybe it wasn’t Betty at all. Sometimes you get so tired of living in your own skin that you’ll do anything to peel it off. Even the hardest thing: change.
From the day she’d arrived at the Port Authority Bus Terminal four years ago, New York had tried to spit her back out. She’d met with a thick-accented Corcoran