Portland Noir - Kevin Sampsell [85]
My face felt hot. What had she said, one night while she sat on the bed and flipped through a magazine, talking in long circles—He left one girl with sixteen broken bones out by the gorge. He’s served six years in prison already.
When I heard the door slam I stood up, looked out the window until his van had pulled out of the parking lot. I counted to thirty and then knocked. There was no answer. “Lila,” I called out. I pounded on the door.
She finally opened up and her suitcase was upside down, the clothes everywhere. Her left eye was half-closed and starting to bruise. She looked at me. “He took the money,” she said. “And he won’t let me work until my back and my eye are healed.” She pulled the neckline of her T-shirt down over her shoulder and I could see what I had done, the X, red and raw.
I sat on the bed and pulled her down next to me. “So you don’t need him anymore,” I said. “We go somewhere else.” I thought of the two of us, months from now, lit up in the summer sun. We would take the bus into the city and dance drunk in a dark bar. It would be exactly as it should be. Her bottom lip between my careful teeth, far from the string of motels, the dented van that pulled up in the dark.
“You don’t get it,” Lila replied. She sounded angry, the way she had sounded that first night at the Tik Tok. “You don’t get it at all.”
I touched her hair. “We’ll be fine.”
She pushed my hand away. “No one walks out on Mark. Especially not me—he’d fucking kill me.”
“He can’t be that bad—”
“You haven’t worked for him,” she snapped. Her voice was cold and she didn’t look like the Lila I knew. “How would you know?”
I remembered a story my mother had told me about a woodcutter, clumsy, and his sharp axe. He kept missing the tree and his right arm went first, then the rest, left arm, right leg, left leg. Until a woman came by and looked at him, crippled and sad. I’m sorry, he said, I am only half a man. She laughed and answered, Look, and because she was so lovely and he was lucky, his legs grew right back to skin and bone. But his heart beat so fast it burnt right through his chest, and he died anyway, for love.
Lila stood up. “Just go,” she said.
In my own room in the dark I stared at the curve of the lampshade, the square of the doorframe, shadowy slips that floated and opened their angry mouths, and I thought, She has to love me again. Ten years ago the little girl and her mother had left with her puppy and I had never seen her again. Her blue dress at the foot of my bed like a broken promise. She has to, I thought.
Mark didn’t come back the next day, or the day after that. Lila knocked on my door and she didn’t seem angry anymore. I gave my key to the front desk and slept in her room, curled against her, listening to her slow breathing.
The next morning she shook me awake. “We need sixty-five dollars,” she said. “We need sixty-five dollars today.”
I thought about my apartment. There would be an eviction notice on the door by now. I couldn’t bring her there, not to that. The grocery store would have hired someone, and I couldn’t be that far away from Lila for eight hours, anyway. I had thirty-four dollars left. Not enough for another night. “Tell me what to do,” I said.
The man was neither more nor less handsome than I expected. He was wearing gray sweatpants and he pulled a white envelope from the stretched waistband. He coughed. “You have the greatest legs,” he said, “They’re truly great.”
I imagined his hands were Lila’s hands, running up over my breasts. His tongue became hers. It was all for her, I thought. The envelope was tucked under the little red handbag that she had loaned me.
“The gams of a movie star,” the man said. “The face of a dog, but the gams of a true old-time beauty.” His pink lips like two punctured balloons, dragging over my skin.
When I opened the door to Room 42 Lila was brushing her hair. We put the money inside the lining of her little suitcase. I lay beside her that night and she smelled like honey and when I couldn’t sleep