Molly turns the paper over and grabs a pen in her shakingfist. How? she writes, because the answer isn’t really no, butshe can’t even imagine what help would mean.
When she returns from the restaurant, she finds another note—longerthis time, the handwriting in the self-assured and blocky font of anotherwriter. The man, she thinks. Scott, that syllable so clipped and firmand final.
Ten miles out from here they’ve cleared the marshes andbuilt a town. There’s people living there. Ordinary people, like you and me.You’d be safe there. We can take you with us when we go.
Molly instinctively crumples the paper as if Mother isstanding over her shoulder. She has no real idea of what a town would mean. Shecan define the word, but she can’t fill in the details. She is looking again atthe note when one of the regulars passes through the lobby on his way back frombreakfast, stepping heavily, his eyes—what she thinks of as his eyes, she’s notreally sure—staying, for a while, on her.
Molly rends the note in pieces, then reassembles it andtapes the pieces back together. She hides it between the pages of her leastfavorite romance novel, the one where a man who is a highlander—what this isexactly, Molly doesn’t know—kidnaps a princess en route to her family’s wintercastle and ravishes her in a barn. Molly recognizes that this is supposed to betitillating, but something about the confinement, the darkness, is onlyfrightening to her. There is a sentence about the moonlight coming through thecracks in the ceiling, shadowing the highlander’s face, his eyes in thedarkness like glowing cinders. Molly thinks about this sentence whenever shegoes in to see Mother at night and the two have become somehow connected in hermind. She hides the note on the page where the hated sentence appears, whereshe will have to overcome an extra layer of dread to look at it again. This isthe safest thing to do.
The couple does not try to talk with her anymore, althoughthey persist in bothering the regulars at breakfast. The end date of their staynears and Molly thinks of the note but does not reread it. When she goes into7A to change the couple’s sheets and clean their bathroom, she tries not to befascinated with the souvenirs of the other world that they have brought withthem: the silver aerosol bottle that makes the woman’s hair smell likechemicals, the lipsticks in burgundy and rose and peach. The man’s razor liescarelessly beside the sink, inches from two toothbrushes. These are like magictalismans to Molly. She reverently does not touch them. Only once does she letherself try a lipstick, smudging the rose across her mouth and trying the sameold romance novel cover pose in the bathroom mirror. She only looks bloodiedand unclean; she can see, in the subdued midmorning light, that she does lookolder than forty-six, much older, decades maybe.
Molly used to get the words ravished and ravagedconfused when she started reading romance novels as a child. She imagined theheroines getting gored to death like the Flamingo’s guests did, their skinviciously unzipped, their organs ripped out. She thought that those women,titian-haired and lovely, were also getting fed to someone who was never goingto stop being hungry. She felt neither fear nor excitement when she imaginedthis to be her own eventual future condition: it just seemed true, tooinevitable for her to have feelings about.
◊
Mother’s looking sickly when Molly goes into her room. She’sslumped down in the lounger, her stalk-like fingers resting weakly on theclosed lid of the cooler. Molly goes into the closet and gets the IV equipment,fingers shaking as if this is the first time. Stupid girl, she thinks, youcould do this asleep. Mother shifts drowsily as Molly prepares the bag and theneedle. Molly gently lifts Mother’s hand by the shortest of her fingers andsets it in Mother’s lap. She’s reaching for the cooler’s lid when Mother takesa sharp, sudden breath and slaps her hand down across Molly’s. Pain like a beesting flickers across the back of Molly’s hand, lifting the same blisters thatalways come from contact with Mother’s humid skin. Despite the pain, Mollyholds perfectly still for a second, watching Mother look at her throughheavy-lidded eyes.
“Not from there,” Mother mutters.
She wants the couple in 7A, Molly realizes. She knows what’sbeen denied her and she’s punishing Molly for withholding them. Molly is not supposedto have things for herself; Molly is only supposed to be Mother’s long armreaching into the lobby and the overgrown parking lot, plucking morsels of foodto be devoured by Mother’s hungry dark mouth.
“You can’t have it from them,” Molly says through grittedteeth.
A smile crawls across Mother’s face, landing in the hollowsof her right cheek. “Not them,” she rasps, letting her hand fall back. “Or her,I should say. She’s impure. I slum it like that, I might as well haveone of our regulars. You think she looks like you, don’t you?”
Molly feels herself nod.
“That’s what her kind does. Like will-o-the-wisps, lead youinto the marshes and drown you in the swamp, stuff rotted moss in your mouth soyou’re puking black forever like the head of death herself. She invite youout?”
“No,” Molly lies.
“I don’t want anything from her. It’s you. You’re the purestthing in this putrid world, girly. I’m so weak tonight. Pop a vein and fill thebag. Only blood tonight, that’s it. You’ll eat a Twinkie and feel perfect inthe morning.”
Molly feels like a thin thread inside of her, floss-thin,spiderweb-thin, is snapping. She looks into Mother’s dark glistening eyes,waiting for—what? Nothing, she thinks, there is nothing to see. She leaps upand tears her hand away from Mother’s and runs to the door. After she slams itshut, she turns the key in the lock. Then, horrifyingly, she throws the key asfar as she can, seeing the metal glint as it moves through the air beforeplunking with finality into the swamp. She can’t come back now. This offense istoo unforgivable. If Mother lives, if, Mother won’t take her.
She goes to 7A and knocks heavily on the door. Scottanswers, Janine at his shoulder.
“I want to come with you,”
