They’d find Zhenya’s address and see what else Gary’s apartment had to offer.
The sun gleamed off the windows of the Social Security mountain up ahead. Horns honked and brakes squealed along the boulevard, the flood of cars carrying people toward snacks at Dunkin’ Donuts and antacid at Rite Aid. But the noise and bustle seemed remote, distant to Tania, as if she were just a projection of herself placed here and the real girl was somewhere far away.
“They told her she was beautiful,” Tania said. “They offered her money. They swore that her family would renounce her, would never welcome her back, not after what she had done. They put their hands on her until she thought they owned her.”
Yoshi gave her a sharp look. “Is that what Gary did to you?”
Tania shrugged. “Close enough.”
“I wish I’d killed him!” Yoshi knotted his hands. “You should have pulled the gun out as soon as he walked in the door.”
She smiled. “Then we might not have learned anything. And anyway… after what happened with Phil, we agreed I’d wait till you got there.”
“I know,” Yoshi said. “I remember.”
Phil’s raging response had been… unexpected. Even with the pistol, Tania probably couldn’t have handled him alone.
“We were lucky Gary turned out so easy,” she said.
Yoshi stared at the traffic as if he wanted to challenge each car to a fight. “Security Boulevard “ he said with loathing.
“And anyway, it was good.” She caught his expression. “No, it was. Now I know what Zhenya heard. And the other girls too. What they heard when they were poor and scared and hungry, when they’d run away and thought everyone back home hated them.”
“But we don’t-”
“What was it her parents said after she left?” Tania said. “‘We have no daughter!’”
Yoshi shook his head. “My brother Avi. That fool.”
“And how was she to know they’d changed their minds, Avi and Rachel?” Tania asked. “She was out of reach.”
They walked in silence for a while. The wail of distant fire engines wove in and out of the traffic’s tidal surge. Then Yoshi spoke: “When we find her, will she come home with us?”
Tania thought about the unsmiling face, the dark, haunted eyes she’d seen in image after image.
“I think so,” she said.
Yoshi nodded. “And then, finally, we’ll be done.”
But Tania barely heard him. She was listening to another voice, the one that had been with her all day.
Most of us make the mistake of thinking that such experiences occur only very rarely,” the rabbi had said. “But it isn’t true. Every wedding, every birth, every death, takes you out of one life and into another. Even the Sabbath lets you escape for twenty-five hours, every week of the year. And each week, the world you join is different from the one you left, just as you, yourself, are different.”
He’d smiled then at all of them sitting in the pews. “Despite the risks,” he’d said, “some of us find these liminal moments the most fulfilling of our lives. We welcome them, cherish them, even come to crave them. Life would be a cold, barren place if they did not exist.”
They reached the Miata. There was a ticket fluttering on its windshield.
“And then we’ll be done, right?” Yoshi said.
Tania felt the memory of Gary’s hands on her skin. She thought of all the other girls he’d touched, and all the girls these new photographers-the eager replacements he’d brandished at them in his last gesture of defiance- would touch as well. Girls who would listen to the serpent words, and through fear or desperation or self-hatred would believe what they heard, just as Zhenya had. Girls who might want to put up a fight, but who weren’t lucky enough to have an Uncle Yoshi or a.22.
She looked up, watched his eyes widen at the expression he saw in hers. “Uh-oh,” he said. “We’re not done, are we?”
Tania smiled at him. They came from the same tribe.
“Not quite yet,” she said.
ALMOST MISSED IT BY A HAIRBY LISA RESPERS FRANCE
Had it not been his body in the huge box of fake hair, I like to think that Miles Henry would have been amused.
At least, the man I once knew would have seen the humor in it: a male stylist who made his fame as one of the top hair weavers in Baltimore discovered in a burial mound of fake hair at the Hair Dynasty, the East Coast’s biggest hair-styling convention of the year. It had all the elements that guaranteed a front-page story in the
I knew him pretty well. In fact, I knew him when he was Henry Miles, the only half-black, half-Asian guy in Howard Park, our West Baltimore neighborhood. His exotic looks ensured that he never wanted for female attention, although they also made him a target for the wannabe thugs who didn’t much cotton to a biracial pretty boy spouting hiphop lyrics. He was a few years older than I was, so our paths crossed only rarely. Besides, he was the neighborhood hottie and I was a shy chubby teenager with acne. The difference in our social statures, as well as the difference in our ages, limited us to the socially acceptable dance of unequals. Meaning, I stared at him and he didn’t know I was alive. It was only when we were grown and found ourselves cosmetology competitors that we began to talk to one another.
Not that my little shop, Hair Apparent, could ever be considered a true threat to Miles’s chain of mega-salons, His and Hairs. There were four His and Hairs in the Baltimore metropolitan area, combination hair-and-nail emporia where Baltimore’s celebrities went to get their ’dos done. In our city, celebrity is defined as female television anchors, the wives of the pastors at the mega-churches, and strippers, although not necessarily in that order. Miles had started doing hair in college as a way of meeting women and discovered he was actually good at it, especially when it came to taking a woman who was close to bald-headed and transforming her into Rapunzel. He was the king of the weave.
He shared his empire with his older sister Janice who had renamed herself Kylani and taken to playing the role of Dragon Lady, complete with super-long talon nails and makeup that emphasized her Asian features. I had never much liked her and I wasn’t alone. She was condescending to everyone and she made a big show of how much money she and her brother were raking in. Miles oversaw the beauty shops, she managed the nail business, and they both joked that their success was based on combining all the salon stereotypes-African-American stylists on one side, Asian nail technicians on the other, gossip everywhere.
Kylani was ambitious, always pushing Miles to expand the business into Washington, D.C. or maybe even New York. Vain as Miles was, he at least recognized that it was better to be a big fish in Baltimore than a small fish anywhere else. He was all about expanding the businesses they already owned and plowing the profits into better equipment, the newest technology, and anything else that made the salon more upscale. Kylani seemed to be all about directing her share toward her wardrobe, trips, and cars. Miles told plenty of people that the nail side of the business would never have been profitable without his constant improvements.
I was privy to such confidences because I was publicity chair for our local branch of Cosmetology Representatives and Appearance Professionals-an organization of hairdressers, makeup artists, nail technicians, and fashion stylists that is known by the unfortunate acronym CRAAP. Miles was president of CRAAP, so we spent more time together as competitors than we ever had as kids growing up in the same neighborhood.
