You Can't Catch Me(10)

“I’m at your service, ma’am,” Liam says, then throws his head back and laughs.





Chapter 5

Card Tricks

Liam walks me back to my apartment, a few blocks away from the bar. Jose, the three-card monte man, is set up on the corner of Greenwich and Seventh, the way he often is. He’s got a crowd of tourists around him, smiling and wasting their one-dollar bills like businessmen in a strip joint. Whatever floats your boat.

Liam watches Jose’s hands, which I know from him is what you’re supposed to do rather than watch the cards. Jose is very good, but if you look carefully enough, you can see what Liam pointed out to me years ago: he flashes the red queen, then palms it so it’s one of the other cards that hits the table first. Thinking that you’re following the card the dealer shows you is the mistake everyone makes, the reason the monte always wins unless you guess right through blind luck.

“You going to take him on?” I ask. Sometimes Liam likes to torture the three-card guys by beating them at their own game.

“Not tonight.”

“Instead of saving all of us, you should’ve trained us up like Fagin in Oliver Twist.”

“Find the lady,” he says, tapping my sternum lightly. “Don’t think I didn’t consider it. With you and Daisy, we would’ve made a killing.”

I watch his face. It’s hard to know if he’s joking sometimes, or what he’s thinking in general. He was pretty clear, though, when I made a pass at him on the night of my college graduation a few months before I turned twenty-three. He removed my hand from his thigh gently and told me to get some sleep. I hid out from him for most of the year after that, but it was hard to stay away from Liam forever.

“What held you back?” I ask.

“Is that a serious question?”

I shrug.

“None of you deserved to be used anymore.”

The crowd lets out a loud Ahhh! Jose just took a guy for fifty dollars.

“That guy’s a plant,” I say.

“Oh yeah?”

“Pretty sure.”

Liam checks out the player. He’s in his midthirties and wearing a Mariners cap and jeans ten years out of date. He bets another fifty dollars and wins this time. The crowd’s bigger now, and pretty soon one of the local beat cops is going to break this up.

“You might be right,” Liam says.

“I totally am.”

“Why the confidence?”

“He was doing the same thing this morning.”

Liam gives me one of his deep belly laughs. “That’s my girl.”

I wish.

It took me almost a year to call the number Liam slipped me among the produce. I should’ve left with him that day at the farmers’ market like he asked, but I didn’t want to leave my cousin, Kiki, behind. So instead, I’d taken his number and promised I’d find a way to use it when I was ready.

It took a lot of planning. We didn’t have a phone in the Upper Camp, only a two-way radio for emergencies. The phone at the Gathering Place was closely guarded. Some said bugged by Todd. It was hard to know what was true at that point, which was one of the reasons it felt so dangerous to stay there. Then there was the way Todd kept looking at me. Kiki told me I was imagining it, but I saw how my mother looked the other way whenever he was near me.

Like a bargain had been struck and she had seller’s remorse.

By that time, I barely thought of her as my mother. She’d birthed me, but then she’d let me be led away from her and into the woods, my hand clasping Kiki’s like Hansel’s gripped Gretel’s. Even at five I knew she’d been given a choice, and I wasn’t it.

I was seventeen when I met Liam, though it wasn’t a birthday that was celebrated. When we turned eighteen, though, we got to come down the mountain and build our own house. Kiki and our friend Sarah were going to get to share a cabin, but not me.

Not me.

Two weeks before my eighteenth birthday, my aunt took me into town. My mother was supposed to do it—I heard her arguing with my father about it after the weekly assembly—but that was “too much to ask” apparently. Giving me up for whatever Todd had in mind could be borne, but buying what I now know, with the benefit of hindsight, was to be my “wedding dress” was a step too far.

I’ll never truly understand my mother. But she did give me the gift of anger.

It has a way of focusing you that forgiveness can’t.

Even though it’s after seven, none of my roommates are home from work. The benefit of living with two investment bankers and a lawyer: I have this place to myself most of the time. My room is the “maid’s room,” that quaint term for a tiny room that probably never housed a maid, though one of my roommates—Josh, the annoying, know-it-all lawyer—says he looked up the census data from a hundred years ago and it lists “maid” as one of the occupants. He’s always making shit like that up. Regardless, I’m most certainly not the maid of these slobs. They contribute to a weekly cleaning service, which was my one condition on moving in since we share a bathroom. They’d given each other a look that made me think I wasn’t the first woman to ask and agreed. The room is small, but it’s more personal space than I had in the Land of Todd. I’m debt-free, college all paid for, and had the comfort of knowing, until I crossed paths with Jessica Two, that if I were suddenly out of a job, I wouldn’t be out on the street.