No One Knows Us Here(10)

He killed her, he killed our mother! I wanted to yell to Janet about her beloved only son, even though I wasn’t even sure I believed it myself.

I wanted to tell her. The words bubbled up and threatened to spill out, all at once, a hot, red gush. To stop myself, I hurtled my phone across the lobby. I yelled as it somersaulted around and around. It bounced off a wall and landed on the carpeted floor below. I could hear Janet’s voice bleating out of the phone even as it was sailing through the air: “Rosemary, what on earth?”



I went back upstairs. The party was still going on, without me. I walked by them all, straight into the bedroom I used to share with Steele and back into the closet where I now lived. Somehow I thought my twenties would be different than this.

Standing on a precariously stacked pile of old textbooks, I managed to reach the highest shelf. That’s where I kept the little box Mira had given me on the rooftop of the Meier & Frank Building. This box would change my life, she told me. I had left it on the table, but after Mira moved out, there it was, resting on my pillow. It was still wrapped in that polka-dotted paper, tied up in that turquoise grosgrain ribbon.





CHAPTER 4


On Saturday I wasn’t nervous. I was excited. I was standing on the threshold of my new life, my better life. No longer would I be the kind of girl who would sleep with some loser on his narrow dorm bed, his ratty futon. No longer would I venture home to sleep on the floor of my ex-boyfriend’s closet.

I was going to sleep with men, men who were grateful to be seen with me, who would buy me dinner and flowers and pay me $1,000. I would live in a luxury apartment and sleep in a real bed. Janet had sent Wendy to a rehabilitation center, and I called her there to tell her the news. She wasn’t supposed to communicate with her family while she was in treatment, but I begged the woman at the front desk to make an exception. I’m doing it, I told Wendy. I’m getting you out of there. I felt triumphant in that moment, like I was breaking her out of a prison camp and not some sort of cushy residential treatment center her grandmother was paying for. I got her a plane ticket. This was happening.

Wendy had squealed with delight, and for a minute I could pretend it was normal, that she wasn’t there for harming herself to get my attention and that, yes, it had worked, and now I was going to sell my body to fix the whole mess.

His name was Sebastian St. James. I’d never met anyone named Sebastian before, but I pictured someone dashing, dark haired, European. I created this little fantasy about Sebastian: his wife had urged him to call me. She was ill, too weak from some sort of debilitating illness to sleep with him anymore. She wanted him to be happy, to have some physical companionship while she wasted away on her deathbed. (I imagined her like a tragic figure from an old novel, like Beth in Little Women or Fantine in Les Misérables. Consumptive. Fevered brow. Beautiful and pale, wearing a sheer white gown, her hair spread out on her pillow.)

I was ready. In a simple ivory halter dress from Mira’s collection, I felt invincible. She had left me her entire collection of dresses on the rolling rack with a note that read, “In case you change your mind.” She wouldn’t need them anymore. She had paid her dues. Attended dental school and moonlit as a highly paid escort, lived in a cute but crumbled-down apartment with four other people, and now she could go off and live the rest of her life, owing nothing to anyone. She was an inspiration.

Margorie had of course asked about the dresses when she moved into Mira’s old room. I had crumpled up the note before she could see it and said maybe we could sell the dresses at a consignment shop, but neither of us did anything about it, and the rack of dresses just lived there in her room. Patiently waiting for me to come around.

As soon as my heels began clicking down the sidewalk at five fifteen in the afternoon, my mood shifted. I hadn’t considered that to arrive in time for a six o’clock date (wasn’t that awfully early for a glamorous date with a paid escort?), I’d have to leave before the sun had sunk behind the hills. I was click-clacking down the sidewalk in sky-high stilettos looking like—well, like a streetwalker.

My feet were killing me after three blocks, but I kept going. My makeup threatened to slide off my face. I would arrive at the hotel looking like a melted candle, my feet ground down to bloody stumps.

I thought about taking an Uber, but after laying out so much cash to get ready over the last five days, I had promised myself not to spend one more penny on this dubious “investment.” Hair salon, waxing salon, nail salon. I had a legacy to maintain, Mira’s legacy. She never left the house looking anything other than flawless.

The Valerie Hotel wasn’t too far from my apartment—walking distance. I figured a nice fifteen-minute stroll would give me a chance to get into character. I would swan into that ritzy old hotel and toss my jacket to the coat girl, who would look at me with awe and admiration and stammer, “Thank you, miss!” when I slipped twenty dollars into her hand as a tip.

But obviously that was not going to happen, since I wasn’t wearing a jacket in eighty-two-degree weather, and if I couldn’t spare a few bucks to take an Uber, I definitely couldn’t spare twenty bucks to tip a coat-check girl.

Instead of waltzing into the hotel, I slunk in, hoping no one would see me sneak into the lobby restroom. I assessed the damage in the mirror: I was a wreck. A complete mess. My face had bloomed an alarming shade of scarlet from the walk in the heat. Perspiration had dampened the tendrils of hair around my forehead. I took in several deep breaths, breathing in through my nose and out through my mouth like a woman in labor. I needed to calm down. If I could get my face back to a normal shade of pale, I could get through this.