The Best American Mystery Stories 2006 Read online

  She had never allowed herself weakness, never told anyone how it felt to walk into a new city, how she chose her new name just as the train slowed down. Everyone rushed by, gnarled and worn down by the burden of thwarted love; she was free of that, new. She would wash up in the station bathroom and walk out, erased of her secrets: the fact that everything she did with a man was faked, so the only way she could feel pleasure was to give it to herself; the fact that her broken right hand had healed crooked because she couldn’t afford to see a doctor to fix it; the fact that she often ate alone on holidays. In empty coffee shops on Thanksgiving, Ginger looked at the food on her plate, and she knew a strange, burning love for the things the world offered her, real and surprising, again and again.

  ~ * ~

  Evelyn and Ginger rented a room in a Salvation Army and Evelyn began to weep. She curled up on the hard, stained mattress and cried so hard she screamed. Ginger sat beside her, a hand on her shoulder. Sometimes, she had an urge to laugh. Other moments, she wished she could put her hands around Evelyn’s throat and strangle her. She was shocked by the private nature of her emotions, and by the fact that Evelyn seemed to believe she was comforting her.

  During the day, they walked down Hollywood Boulevard, trying to decide what to do. Their breath smelled, darkly, of bananas. In the light, Evelyn talked rapidly; they both listened with hope to the sound of her voice.

  “We will be cigarette girls,” Evelyn announced one afternoon.

  They walked into sixteen bars before they found one that had jobs for both of them. Every night the two of them strode in wearing black tights and rhinestone loafers, selling cigarettes to heavy, sad-looking men with liquored breath.

  Once, Evelyn told Ginger that she tried not to be afraid for five minutes a day. She was impressed that Evelyn could identify when she was afraid, for her own fear floated just outside her skin, like a cloud; she experienced nothing but a heavy numbness. She watched her sister closely, trying to catch her in those precious five minutes when she was clearly not afraid. In those five minutes, Evelyn owned something mysterious, and even the claim of it made Ginger ache to have what she had.

  At home, Evelyn’s grief metamorphosed into a bloodthirsty envy of the loved, the parented. She wanted their expensive possessions: the jeweled brooches, the feathered hats.

  One night, she leaned close to a man clad in a velvet jacket and said, in a husky, unfamiliar voice, “I have a baby at home.”

  Ginger, walking by with her tray, stopped.

  “He is sick,” Evelyn said. “Bad stomach. He needs operation. Look. Please.” She brought out a wrinkled photo of some stranger’s baby. His mouth was open in anguish. “I need just ten more dollars — he cannot eat —”

  “All right,” he said. He dug into his pocket and handed her a bill. His face was haughty with a perplexing pity, and Ginger stared at it, awed.

  Later, she walked with Ginger down the sidewalk and smoothed the bill, like green velvet, in her hands. “I have a baby at home,” she said, laughing. She walked down the street, looking down the crowds of people walking down the street, lifted her hands and said, almost gently, “Fools.”

  ~ * ~

  The next morning, Ginger sat in her cabin, looking through the nine photographs that she owned. They were souvenirs from fancy occasions, set in cardboard frames so old they felt like flannel. She had kept them because she liked the way she looked in them, as though she had been enjoying herself.

  She heard a knock at the door. It was that girl. “I wondered if you wanted some company. Can I come in?” the girl asked.

  Darlene was dressed in imitation of a wealthy person. She wore a sequin-trimmed cashmere sweater that Ginger believed she had seen in the cruise gift shop, a strand of pearls, and a pink velvet blazer. Her shoulders were thrust stiffly backward, giving her the posture of a rooster. The girl’s earnest quality shone through her garb like the glow of a light bulb through a lampshade.

  “Who are you?” asked Ginger.

  “I am his dream.”

  “No,” said Ginger. “Don’t try so hard. Wear your usual and add an expensive piece of jewelry. Make him guess why.”

  Darlene shrugged off her blazer and stepped forward too purposefully, like a salesgirl trying to close a deal.

  “I can buy you a Rolls Royce,” she said, her voice too bright, to the air.

  “No, no! Just hint that you went on a trip to — Paris. The four-star hotels have the best sheets. Nothing he can prove,” said Ginger.

  Darlene looked at the photos laid out.

  “So who are these people?” asked Darlene. “Fill me in.”

  Ginger stood up and picked up a photo. “Here I am on New Year’s Eve, 1965,” said Ginger. “The presidential suite at the Century Plaza Hotel.” She still could see the way the pink shrimp sat on the ice beds, as though crawling through clean snow. “I lit Frank Sinatra’s cigarette,” said Ginger. “I lent my lipstick to Marilyn Monroe.” She remembered the weight of the sequined dress against her skin, the raucous laughter. “Don’t I look happy?” she asked.

  “I would be happy,” said Darlene.

  Ginger’s mind moved in her skull and she felt her legs crumble. She grabbed hold of a chair and clung to it.

  “Whoa! Are you okay?”

  She grasped Darlene’s hand and felt her body move thickly to the bed.

  “What happened? Should I call a doctor?”

  “No,” said Ginger sharply. “No.”

  She let Darlene arrange her into a sitting position, her feet up on the bed. Her arms and legs fell open in the obedient posture of the ill. The girl got her a drink of water from the tap and Ginger sipped it. It was sweet.

  “Thank you,” Ginger said.

  They sat. Ginger picked up another photo. “This was when I met the vice president of MGM and had him convinced I was a duchess from Belgium —”

  Darlene frowned. Ginger realized that it was the same picture she had just described. “They were all at the party,” she said, quickly, “Sinatra and Marilyn and duchesses. It was in Miami. Brazil. The moon was so white it looked blue —”

  Darlene looked at her. “I wish I could have been there,” she said. She reached out and briefly touched Ginger’s hand.

  Ginger looked down at the sight of Darlene’s hand on her own. At first, the gesture was so startling she viewed it as though it were a sculpture. Then she could not look at Darlene, for Ginger had tears in her eyes.

  ~ * ~

  When Evelyn and Ginger began to lie, the world broke apart, revealing unearthly, beautiful things. They began with extravagant tales of woe: deformed babies, murdered husbands, terminal illnesses. They constructed Hair-Ray caps for bald men, yarmulkes with thin metal inside so that in the sunlight the men’s heads would get hot and they would think they were growing hair. They bought nuns’ habits at a costume shop and said they were collecting for the construction of a new church.

  She remembered particularly one scam in which she wandered through the cavernous Los Angeles train station with a cardboard sign declaring: help. mute, half-blind. When strangers came up to her, she wrote on a chalkboard that had chalk attached to it on a string: help me find my sister outside. She handed the stranger, usually an elderly lady, her purse, an open straw bag. She let the stranger guide her out the door and carefully fell forward so that an envelope inside the purse fell out. Ginger did not pick it up. Then there was Evelyn, running forward, yelling, “Violet!”

  Evelyn looked in the purse and said, “Where’s your money?”

  in the purse, Ginger wrote.

  They looked at the kindly woman holding the purse. “Did you take my blind sister’s money?” Evelyn yelled; that was Ginger’s cue to weep.

  “I didn’t,” the hapless stranger would protest, but there she was, holding the purse, with a blind mute weeping beside her; they could get ten, twenty, thirty dollars out of the stranger. When the sucker left, Evelyn would walk Ginger around the corner and hug her.

  �
��Good, Violet,” she said.

  “Thank you,” said Ginger, feeling the solidness of her sister’s arms around her, and she closed her eyes and let herself breathe.

  ~ * ~

  When Ginger woke up from her nap the following afternoon, she did not know where she was. The dark afternoon light streamed through the mint blue curtains. She shivered and sat up. She flung open a drawer, looking for clues. The room felt as though it were moving. The room service indicated that they were on a ship. Where were they going? She flung open her curtains and saw mountains covered in ice. Her mind was a crumpled ball of paper. She stood up, abruptly, as though that would straighten her thoughts. The phone rang.

  “How are you feeling? Do you want to go to the dinner tonight?”

  Her heart slowed at the naturalness of the question, at the caller’s belief that Ginger would continue this conversation. She remembered that they were on a cruise to Alaska. She also remembered that the girl had said something kind to her.

  The room was decorated to flatter the passengers into believing they were traveling in opulence. There were plaster Roman columns, painted gold, topped with bouquets of roses. The waiters’ jackets were adorned in rhinestones that said: alaska ‘03. Ginger kept thinking about what the girl had said the night before — that she had wanted to be at the party that Ginger had attended. Ginger wanted her to say more nice things about her life. Outside the large glass windows, the water and sky, black and clear, surrounded the ship.

  Tonight, Darlene’s hair was slicked up into a topknot and shone, a metallic blond, in the light. Her eyelids gleamed blue, unearthly.

  “How are you?” asked Ginger.

  “I just want to say ... I am someone,” said Darlene. She looked dazed. “I am going to graduate with a B average in communications.” She sat down. “Listen.” She closed her eyes. “I left a message on his answering machine. I said, I’ll do anything. Let me. I’ll change.”

  “What?” Ginger asked, alarmed.

  “I tried to do what you said,” she said. “I know how to fool him. I’ll keep calling him. I’ll be what you said, generous, you’re right, I have been selfish —”

  “No,” said Ginger. “That’s not what I meant—”

  The girl stared at her with her reptilian eyes. “Then what do I do?” she said, and her voice was hoarse. “Tell me, what do I do?”

  Music exploded from a band gathered near the stage. The audience clapped along. “Let’s hear where everyone’s from, all at once!” the cruise director called. The room rang with hundreds of voices. Los Angeles. Palm Springs. Ottawa. Denver. Orlando. New York. ‘Welcome aboard!” the cruise director called. “Time to relax. Shake off those fancy duds. We want to make you all a deal. We need a pair of pants. Someone take off a pair! We’ll give you fifty dollars! Come on, you’ll never see these people again in your life!” Ginger did not know what to tell the girl, and the sorrow in her eyes was unnerving. Instead, Ginger turned her attention to the stage. She used to love crowds, the way the people in them became one roar, one sound. But now, for the first time, all the people appeared vulnerable to her. Passengers drifted onto the stage, performing various tricks: singing “God Bless America,” attempting to juggle, dancing the rumba. They wanted to take off their pants in front of each other or scream out the names of their home cities; they were confused about their place in the world, and they wanted to be told that they did not deserve it. They had everything in common with her.

  Yet everyone on the stage also looked pleased to be up there, happy to be briefly bathed in light. They smiled at the sound of cheering, their faces simple in their hunger for recognition. She did not know what to tell Darlene, and suddenly she envied everyone on the stage. She wanted to be with the others, to have a talent, to simply stand in the clear white light.

  Ginger raised her hand. The emcee called on her, and she made her way to the stage. The lights glared hard and white in her eyes. Clutching her purse, she felt the weight of her money in it. “Passengers,” she called. They stood like sad soldiers before their futures.

  “My name is Ginger Klein and I’m going to make you rich. Give me a dollar,” she called. “Everyone. A dollar.”

  They dug into their pockets and a few brought dollars out. She enjoyed watching them obey her. But what was the next step?

  “Catch,” she called.

  She reached into her purse and pulled out a handful of bills. She threw them into the spangled darkness. There were screams of disbelief, laughter. She dug in her purse and tossed out more. The passengers leapt from their seats and dove for the money. They were unhinged, thrilled, alive. Their screams of joy blossomed inside her. Her purse grew lighter and lighter.

  After a while, the emcee strode onto the stage and gently moved her off the stage. “Thank you, Ginger Klein!” he yelled. “Best talent of the night, huh?” She paused, wanting to tell them something more, but did not know what it would be. Applause thundered in her chest; she had, somehow, been successful. She walked slowly down the stairs, looking for Darlene. “Darlene,” she said, softly, then louder. “I’m here.”

  She did not see her. Ginger imagined how the girl would walk, carelessly, off the ship by herself at the end of the week. Darlene would join the living pouring toward the shore, clutching her souvenir ivory penguins and Eskimo dolls, going to her future boyfriends and houses and lawns and exercise classes and book clubs and golf games. “Darlene,” she said, wanting to walk down the ramp with her, shading her own eyes against the dazzling sunlight, gripping Darlene’s arm.

  ~ * ~

  Sometimes, Ginger could hear Evelyn laughing in her sleep, a harsh, broken sound, and she touched her shoulder, trying to feel the joy that her sister could experience most fully in her dreams. During the day, Evelyn talked about ordinary people, the loved and loving, with too much scorn; Ginger knew that her sister wanted her life to be like theirs. She believed that Evelyn wanted to get rid of her.

  One evening in the bar, Evelyn was talking to a man who claimed to work in the movie industry. His hands jabbed the air with the hard confidence of the insecure. He gazed at Evelyn as though he could see a precious light inside of her, and Ginger watched Evelyn’s shoulders tremble, delighted, under his gaze. She told him offhand, that she was an orphan. He leaned toward her and took her hands in his.

  “I’ll take care of you,” he said.

  Evelyn went home with him that night. The next day, she met Ginger at their room and said, “I am going to go live with him. He loves me and likes the fact that I have no family.” She paused; her face was relieved. “You will have to be a secret.”

  Ginger looked into Evelyn’s eyes and saw that this was the most truthful statement she had made in her life. Her own response was the most deceitful. She nodded. “All right,” she said.

  Evelyn packed her suitcase and was gone, leaving only a lipstick the color of a rose. Ginger waited. Each morning, she put on a new costume, applied Evelyn’s lipstick, and murmured the same false pleas to strangers. Ginger made more money without Evelyn. Strangers could see a new emptiness in her eyes that touched them. After two weeks, she tried, briefly, to find Evelyn. She stood outside the walls of the movie studios, waiting to see the man. Her search paralleled her fantasies of what Evelyn would desire; she waited outside of expensive restaurants, wandered through fancy clubs, but as she rushed past the crowded tables, the patrons’ faces bloomed up, monstrous, unknown.

  It was three weeks before she saw Evelyn again, at the palisades overlooking the Santa Monica beach. Evelyn walked toward Ginger with a curious lightness in her step. She covered her mouth when she laughed. She flicked her wrist at the end of a sentence, as though trying to toss away her words.

  “He loves my hair,” Evelyn said. “He loves my laugh. Listen.”

  The sound made Ginger cold. It was difficult to stand straight; the ground was rising like slow, heavy waves.

  “You look well. I have to go,” said Evelyn. She backed up, as though fearful that Ging
er would grab onto her. Then she stopped and pulled a small red purse from her pocket. “Here,” said Evelyn. She thrust out a purse. “It has two hundred dollars.”

  “No,” said Ginger, stepping back.

  She felt her sister shove the purse into her hands and press her fingers around it. ‘Just take it. Here.”

  Evelyn quickly ran toward the bus stop. Ginger understood that this would be the last time she saw her. It would be Ginger’s own decision to move and not tell her sister where she was going. She sat down for a long time after the bus had pulled off, eyes closed, imagining that the wide blue sky, the gray elephantine palms would be gone when she opened them. When she looked again, the world was still there; Ginger left the purse on the bench and started walking.

  ~ * ~

  The next morning, when she woke up, she did not remember how the crowd had buffeted her like an ocean, how she had finally found a man in a maroon uniform who helped her find her room, but her legs were weak, as though she’d walked a great distance, and her mouth was dry from calling out Darlene’s name.