Portland Noir

empty. The door was open. Lila, I thought. A sound of tires squealing and I was up out of bed. I must have been a moment too late, because there was only the empty parking lot, and the city spread out around me like a bowl of lights, a thousand smoke-gray rooms and in each one a person, waiting.

It’s snowing now, but barely, gray sleet driven up over the shoulder by traffic headed toward the 205. I think of her feet, white, delicate as eggshell. I remember the first time I saw snow, how I built a snowman that looked at me with stone eyes and one fell onto the ground. I pushed rocks into his snow mouth and they disappeared. My mother said, Love goes like water, right through your hands. The snow closed up. I pushed a stick right through him.

I have a good route, down to Burnside and up to Johnson Creek. The gams of a true old-time beauty. Lila’s suitcase was still in the corner. Her clothes on me look only approximate, like a memory.

The city wants to plant roses, up and down Eighty-second, to make it peaceful.

Later, my mother’s accordion was sold for a song to a man who slivered the keys off and carried them away in a bag, clacking like teeth. When I dream of Lila there is a tattoo on her chest, a mask, and in the eyes of the mask I am faceup over her heart.

There are sirens outside of the Tik Tok every night and I wait. The waitress refills my coffee. Across the parking lot there is always a lit window with the curtains drawn tight across it. Inside the Tik Tok, the clocks move at once, slowly, like a song written all in the same sad note.

PEOPLE ARE STRANGE BY KIMBERLY WARNER-COHEN

Sandy Boulevard

Whoever said Portland was a friendly city stated it from the comfortable vantage of already knowing people. Aside from the middle-aged clerk at 7-Eleven, who smiled with yellow teeth and attempted broken conversation when she walked across the busy intersection at Eighty-second and Sandy to buy cigarettes and a Big Gulp, Kara had spoken to less than ten people since she arrived four days ago. That included the woman with an eye patch behind the desk at the Cameo (closest non-chain airport motel she could find), Kara already thinking when she paid for a week in advance that it was a mistake coming here. Shouldn’t have strayed from her habit of putting her finger randomly on an atlas and going.

Strangers didn’t start casual conversations with her in bars, usually moved a seat over. Wasn’t simply that Kara could be best described as plain, known since she could recognize her reflection that she would never be one of the blessed few who glided through life; it was the contempt in her eyes that drove them off. Being passed over was a relief, feigning interest in people’s lives irritated her. Happier to sit at the end of the row in some seamy tavern where light didn’t penetrate through grimy windows. Bartenders took pity and threw her an extra drink or two as the clock edged past 1:00 and other patrons sought someone other than her to share the night, or at least fifteen minutes, with.

Kara pulled the battered and stained white plastic fob with 17 printed on it in chipped gold paint from her back pocket, balancing her dinner: a fifth of Bushmills and a barely edible pizza from the dingy store across the street from the massive Safeway.

Would’ve eaten at the pancake house attached to the motel, where she had platter-sized portions for the past three mornings, but Kara couldn’t stand the sympathetic stares from the fat, bored waitresses anymore. Same with the bar down the block, where day workers stopped in after long hours working too hard for too little money; stared her up and down before turning back to their conversations, shaking their heads. Better to stay in the room tonight, as she jiggled the wood turquoise door open that, like all the others, looked as if it’d been kicked in during an episode of Cops.

She could have just as easily slept at one of the chic boutique hotels downtown, with what her parents left her. Car accident when she was thirteen, Father having too many Rob Roys during one of the many charity events they attended throughout the year. Her aunt and uncle took her in after the funeral, shuffled from one affluent suburb to another.

Aunt Suzanne was barren and they doted on Kara. Decorated her bedroom as if she was five years younger (always loathed cotton candy-pink but didn’t have the heart to say it when she saw their expectant smiles), sent her to the local prep school with the same Anglican pretentions as the last one, bought her gifts (clothes that were in fashion but never looked right on her, records for bands she didn’t like, books she’d never read). Nothing worked. Kara would smile and politely thank them, then go in her room and throw it on top of the growing pile in the back of her closet.

Suzanne’s eyebrows furrowed at Kara’s disinterest in others, especially after she read the books the shrink recommended when he diagnosed Kara with an attachment disorder. Blond sons and prim daughters were dragged over with their parents and sat in uncomfortable silence as Kara openly stared at them in the den while the adults had their digestifs. When they were called in from the parlor, none disguised their relief.

Uncle Phillip hid the coroner’s report between the pages of a treatise by Hobbes. Edge of the envelope stuck out, Kara found it the first time she was in the library alone. Detailed how Father’s broken rib punctured his heart as he slammed into the steering wheel. Mother was nearly decapitated when a piece of windshield glass cut through her trachea as the car smashed into the tree, only thing holding her head to trunk were neck vertebrae. When Phillip realized Kara took it, he explained that they hid the details because they thought she’d be traumatized; troubled when she wasn’t perturbed. Since she’d found out what her parents kept from her, Kara had no use for them.

When she was twelve, six months before they died, Kara had nightmares that woke her up every few hours. Always the same, being ripped apart by her mother and another woman whose face was shadowed. Once she was torn, her other half became a mirror image. For weeks her parents looked at each other and made sympathetic noises. Scared to dream, she would sit in the rocking chair, listening to silence until she nodded off. After one morning when she got three hours of sleep, Kara told them hysterically at breakfast she couldn’t take it anymore. Father looked at Mother, who brought out the locked box from their bedroom closet that Kara wasn’t supposed to know about.

Sat her in the formal living room (knew it was serious), box on the end table between them. Father tapped his foot and both began talking at the same time, tripping over each other’s words until Mother touched Father on the knee, her way of shutting him up. Didn’t say anything for what seemed like a long time. Why was she about to cry? Did someone die? What did that have to do with her dreams? “You had a sister.”

“A twin,” Father interjected.

In the time it took for her mother to pat him again, all became clear. No wonder she couldn’t make friends, why no one understood her. Someone did, once, more intimately than anyone ever could. Mother only carried her, Father donated the sperm. Kara rubbed the fingers of her left hand together. “Tell me everything. Start from the beginning. She’s identical, isn’t she? What’s her name? Where is she? You were holding back, all these years. I knew I couldn’t trust you.”

Mother nodded, swallowed hard, tears. “Kaya is, was, your identical twin; born first by six minutes.”

The part of Kara’s brain that had suppressed the memories cracked, flooded her temporal lobe. Snatches of playing with pastel wood blocks in their nursery, patty-cake, sleeping with limbs entwined. “What happened?”

“You were so adorable in your matching dresses, running through the house, always laughing. You’d only sleep in the same crib and we had to have a custom double-highchair made or you wouldn’t eat. Do you remember, Steven?”

Father nodded gravely, stared at the rug.

“What happened, Mother?”

“It was in the park. Your nanny-”

“I had a nanny?”

“Ursula, from Sweden, very nice girl. She never forgave herself.”

“How old was I… were we?”

“About to turn four. You were on the jungle gym and skinned your knee. Ursula was putting the bandage on;