I’ll send for you, secretly. You’ll get a letter in the mail with no return address, and when you open it, it’ll just be a train ticket. That’ll be your cue….”
She’d give me a long hug and hand me something of hers—one time she gave me her watch; another time a pen with a tiny cityscape inside, complete with a ferry that slowly sailed from end to end—and then she’d board the train car and I’d stand there at the platform and watch as the train huffed to life and then made its way down the long tunnel and out of the station. I’d watch until the train was just lights, a swirl of vapor, nothing.
After that I’d walk through the station to the taxi stand, where Julius would be leaning against the car waiting for me, brushing lint off the bill of his driver’s cap. He’d wink at me and nod to the passenger door and I’d get in and together we’d drive alongside the train tracks to Ruppendale or East Hunting, whichever suburb Melanie had actually bought a ticket to. If she didn’t get off at one, we’d drive on to the next, and as we did, no matter how often this happened, part of me always became frightened that this time she wouldn’t get off the train, that today she’d keep on going and ride it farther than Julius and I could follow. But she always
My father moved Melanie out to the West Coast just before my tenth birthday. I was at school and never got to say good-bye. When I got home, my other brothers and sisters were packing her belongings into boxes. She works for our uncle now, and spends most of her time on a plane, traveling between offices. It’s large, but it has pontoons and can land as gracefully as a seagull on the water. There’s a plane waiting for me, too. My real name is painted on both engines.
I’ve seen Melanie just once in the twelve years since she was sent away, at one of our brothers’ weddings, which I’d gone to only out of hopes that Melanie would attend. She acted fidgety and nervous and seemed extremely agitated by me.
“That’s disgusting. What is that?” she said when I showed her a lock of her own hair she’d given me before one of her train rides. She was pregnant, but the rest of her was thin and elegant. An Arabian man was helping her into her coat. “Get it away,” she said. “Why are you showing me that?”
So that afternoon at the Happy Fish, Plus Coin, I was staring at this albino girl from a corner stool, this phantom Melanie, when I began to cry. I don’t know how long I was crying, but at some point Gay appeared and said, “I think you and I are the only ones in this motel God painted by the numbers.”
Something to know about Gay: he had a smile on him. Thirty-two perfect teeth set in twin rows, like two lucky horseshoes dipped in white paint. Also, he had been in some kind of fire, that much was clear: his skin was pink and shiny, like melted wax, and his hands had been baked down into little flippers. His head was hardly more than a hairless knob with a slot for a mouth and one usable eye peering out. And he was paralyzed from pretty high up, his chest, maybe even his neck. He sat buckled into a motorized wheelchair, which he controlled with a reed that extended from a small panel up into his mouth. Still, when he smiled at me I hardly noticed the surrounding mess. I couldn’t stop myself from staring at his mouth, at that grin.
He took the reed into his mouth and maneuvered his wheelchair a little closer. “Hey,” he said. “What are you, gay?”
“No,” I said.
“Well, I am. Gay Isbelle. That’s my name. Isbelle is French.”
“What’s Gay?” I said, glad to be talking to someone.
“What do you mean?” he said. “Gay is just gay. It can mean homosexual or happy. I’m old-fashioned, so I think ‘happy’ when I think of gay.”
“Me too,” I said.
“Well, why aren’t you gay now, chief? You were crying a second ago.”
How to describe that voice? There was a musicality to it, a singsong quality that made me feel safe. It made me want to talk to him, to tell him all about my problems, my family. I hadn’t said my last name out loud in over six months.
“I lost my job yesterday,” I said instead, which was also true. I’d been working in baggage at Orlando International.
“Is that all?” he said, looking up at me with his one good eye, which was plain brown, nothing dashing about it. “Jobs are easy enough to find around Orlando right now. What a time to be living in Florida!”
“I need something sort of low profile, though. I’m watching out for some people.”
“The police?” said Gay. “I don’t hold things like that against people. Know that.” Gay’s nurse, a portly Hispanic man, came over and told Gay he was going to the bathroom. “That’s fine, Edward,” said Gay. “I’ll be right here, with my new friend…” He gazed at me, waiting.
“L.J.,” I said. This was the name I was using right then, after a character I liked in a musical film.
“I’ll be right here with my new friend L.J. when you get back,” Gay said. Edward nodded at me and then walked off. “So, who is this you’re hiding from, L.J.?”
“Just hiding,” I said, though by now I wanted badly to confess. His smile alone was nearly enough to make me do it; it was that glorious, his grin.
“Come on, now. If you’re hiding, something has to be looking for you, right? What is it, girl trouble?”
When I opened my mouth to speak again I had every intention of telling Gay the truth; I was going to tell him who my family was, and about how I’d been running from them since just after my nineteenth birthday, nearly one thousand days. I was going to tell him about how they’d nearly caught me in Seattle, then inside a library in Tuscaloosa; about the female detective in Santa Fe whose leg I may have hurt badly with my car. About how they were surely hunting me right then—about how, at that very moment, they might be jabbing flashlights all over central Florida. I had a pair of earrings hung on a lanyard around my neck—ten-carat pear-shaped diamonds. I’d stolen them from my oldest sister the night I left. They were for an emergency. I thought I’d show them to Gay as a way of starting to explain, but looking at him made me really think about that word,
“Right. Your girlfriend…” He waited for me to go on.
“Nancy?”
“Nancy, right. What’s the problem?”
“She’s mean to me?” I said. “She acts like she hates me.”
“Like she hates you, right,” Gay said. He continued smiling, but held me with his stare for a long moment. So long, in fact, that I became sure he’d seen right through my lie. I felt confident that in a second he would spit in my face and leave me there. And I didn’t want him to leave. Just then, Edward returned from the bathroom. He glanced at Gay, and then at me in a suspicious way, before asking what was up.
“I’ll tell you what’s up, Edward,” Gay said. “What’s up is you and I are going to help our new friend L.J. find a job.”
When I was born, my father gave the doctor a tiny golden spoon to use to scrape the mucus from my mouth. It had a handle of braided ivory, and in the eighteenth century it had been used by a British nobleman to feed the blood of game animals to his baby hounds. There’s a photograph of the doctor leaning over me, pressing the bowl of the spoon between my lips. The picture frame has a special glass compartment for displaying the spoon itself. To this day, I sometimes taste the bowl of that spoon in my mouth. I never know when it’s going to happen, when the salty, bitter sting of it will well up, but when it does, the only thing that helps is to suck on something sweet. I once dated a woman staying at the Shores for a candy sellers’ convention who made giant gummy animals—bats and rats and even gummy beetles as big as my foot. Her name was Rita Beet, and for a while she worked at a Gummy World at the north end of the Galaxy, the area through which Gay and I were now driving, prowling for employment.
The Galaxy was a ten-mile strip along the interstate that housed all the seedier tourist spots, each one a world unto itself: Gator World, Flea World, Orange World (housed inside a huge graying orange), Orlando’s Pawn World, World of Thrills, World of Tees, Scary World (which was nothing more than a plaster cave with a few plastic skulls glued on). As we drove down the strip, though, I started to like the idea of working at one of these places. They looked discarded, like giant, mangled toys flung out a car window. No one would come looking here.
