“Did you really think it would never come back to haunt you?”
Pea looked distant, thoughtful. “Maybe I did? Maybe I didn’t care? It’s hard to remember, now. I’m not the girl I was, then. Nor the woman…”
She looked down at her belly, cupped the child between her cursed hands, and smiled.
The next day, Tamara called Walter again.
His new assistant answered the ring after three tries and promised to leave a message. He called that night, while she and Phyllis were playing gin with a set of regular Bicycle cards in the salon.
Tammy left her and took the call in the kitchen. Pea could still hear her if she wanted, but she supposed that was only fair.
“Walter, you watched Victor all those years, when he found people with the hands?”
“What, I don’t even get a hello?”
“This is important.”
He laughed a little. “You mean when he killed them? Yes. I remember very well, Tammy.”
“Did you ever notice … anything that they shared? The people he killed? Besides the hands.”
Walter let out one of his slow, steady breaths. She imagined his mild expression, his wise eyes and the crease between them. “They weren’t white,” he said. “I think one was Jewish.”
“Anything else?”
“They lived their lives a little … outside of the stream. Panhandlers, numbers runners, Times Square dancers—apologies to our Pea, that sort of thing. As though the hands were pushing them against the current. Almost none of them had families or even steady lovers. Dev was one of the few who actually worked for the establishment, but, well, you saw how that turned out.”
“And did they ever say? I mean, if you talked to them, before…”
“Sometimes,” he said, shortly.
“Did they ever say what they felt the hands wanted? Where they were being pushed?”
He held a silence again, a soft space in which she wondered if she shouldn’t have asked.
“It’s funny,” he said at last. “Only one ever told me anything very specific. He painted walls down by the docks, was always getting chased out by police and the owners. He said that he wanted to ‘make it right.’ And now I seem to recall that Alvin said something similar, didn’t he? It’s enough to make you wonder.”
“Wonder what?”
“If the dreams, the hands, might not be precisely luck. Maybe something closer to a possession.”
Tamara, who had kept her silence about Phyllis’s fits and her uncontrollable hands, felt her throat close like a fist.
7
When she was seven years old, Tamara’s best friend was Little Sammy, so called because his daddy was Samuel Senior, and his mother wanted everyone to know it. His mother was the neighborhood prostitute and Samuel Senior was a big man, more protector than pimp. Little Sammy had a dream come down when he was ten, the only one in their generation, but before then he was a little kid like the rest of them, running barefoot to the creek before their mothers could tell them to put their shoes on, fishing with bits of string and hooks they bent from old needles and chicken wire. Even then, he had a knack for the fishing line. Tammy didn’t, and one day when she was trying to get a rock perch that was wiggling on her hook, the metal went clean through her hand. They took her to the town doctor, who let her drink Grandma’s medicinal bitters while he cleaned and bound her wound. “Just take it easy with that hand,” he had told her. But even though it hurt, she could not leave that puckered flesh alone. She would unwrap the bandage and show it off to Little Sammy and his friends. At night alone, she’d poke around the bloody edges, marveling at how the most swollen areas went white at her touch. It got infected, of course, and then her mother had to take her to Richmond for stronger medicine; her daddy gave her a whupping for it when they got back, as though an infected hand weren’t enough punishment.
But Daddy wasn’t here to whup her anymore—Tamara’d whup him right back if he tried—and pressing the wound of Phyllis’s ugly past and ambiguous present was a torture too exquisite, too perfectly suited to her oldest needs, to leave alone. So what if she made herself sick over it? She wanted to goad Pea until one of them popped.
So she asked more questions, each more intrusive than the last: Who was the first person you killed? Who was the ugliest? Who was the richest? Did you steal from their bodies? Did you end up covered in blood? Did you hide their bodies? Did you lie to Dev? Did he really know exactly what you were up to?
At that, Pea gave her an answer dry and raspy as a cat’s tongue. “Even better than me, Tammy. Don’t make the mistake I did.”
“What mistake would that be? Leaving him?”
Pea laughed, filled with a strange and distant delight. “Imagining that he is easy to know.”
That stymied her into silence for the next day. The larger Pea got, the less Tammy could stand the sight of her. Winter lingered into the start of spring and she felt consumed with bitterness, like a root vegetable left too long underground. Phyllis should have felt it too, but she seemed impossibly content with her slow, careful movements, her long, dreaming silences, her early-morning phone calls to New York mobsters.
Tamara wrote Clyde:
I’ve been thinking of a play, a kind of cross between French existentialism and surrealism, all the actors in a round standing like statues as they scream at one another. Here’s the setup: two people at the edge of the River Styx. One’s a killer, a real nasty piece of work. Mobster with so many skeletons in his closet he’s gone and bought a few extra closets. The other’s a normal sort of person, not too bad, not too good; made some compromises, sure, and maybe watched someone die, but certainly never did anything active to kill them. Here’s the twist: the
