She took the painting off the three-legged stand. Even if she could step on the stand, it wouldn’t be high enough. Again she listened at the door. They’d gone out to lunch, she decided, and Dee would bring back something for her. It had to be after lunchtime. As quietly as she could she pulled the table under the skylight. The stand just fit on top of it. The dressing gown made it hard for her to climb, and she knew it was going to get in her way if she got high enough to try to move the window. But it had pockets. She found a paint-smeared knife and a chisel, which she pocketed. She also took a hammer and tied it around her waist with the sash of the robe. She tried not to think of Danny, but in spite of herself she imagined him unlocking the door just as she stepped from the chair onto the table. She began to melt again with fear.
“No!” she cried aloud without meaning to. She waited. Nothing happened. She could not climb up on the stand. The ledge she wanted to step onto was too high. She pulled the chair up onto the table, but in doing it she nudged one of the legs of the stand and the whole thing clattered to the floor. Not a sound came from the other side of the door. This time, after she’d set up the stand and placed the chair beneath it, she boosted herself up without tumbling the works. She waited and listened. There were sounds she hadn’t heard before in the building, noise like heat coming up in the pipes, machinery sounds that might be the elevator. But it never seemed to arrive. Her heartbeat was too loud to hear much else. She made it safely up onto the chair. She could see the twin towers of the Board of Trade Buildings. She was in lower Manhattan. SoHo. Of course: where the artists were. She got one foot sidewise onto the ledge and tested to see if it would hold her. It seemed to, but when she tried to lift the other foot the stand wobbled and collapsed. She missed the chair and fell and, flailing, brought the chair down after her. Before she knew whether or not she was hurt, Dee threw open the door and came running to her. Juanita tried to pull the robe close around her.
“I wouldn’t’ve believed it! He was right, I shouldn’t’ve left you alone. Let me look at your face.” On her knees, Dee examined her face, touched her eyes, nose, lips. “Say ouch if it hurts.”
Juanita determined not to say ouch no matter how much it hurt. She managed to loosen the hammer and tie the sash around her. Dee felt down her arms and pulled the robe open to see her middle. Juanita closed it again. She knew there would be bruises where she’d hit the table, but she didn’t make a sound when Dee touched the sore spots.
Dee got to her feet and pulled the girl up. “You’re lucky in more ways than one, you little fool. Let’s put these things back where they were. I promise I won’t tell Danny if you promise to do what you’re told from now on. Promise me?” She gave the girl a shake.
Juanita was trying not to cry. She did hurt, but she forced a big smile and nodded what could be taken for a promise. She had lost the chisel on the way down, but she could feel the knife stuck deep in the pocket of the robe.
Julie stopped at the shop to see if any message had come through her service. Most of the calls pertained to business. She put them on hold. Several Women Against Pornography members had joined the neighborhood search. Mrs. Rodriguez had called twice. Julie ran upstairs. The woman had heard nothing. Her husband had gone to the police station to wait. There were a lot of Perdidas in her lamentation.
Julie walked the four blocks to Kevin Bourke’s electrical shop on Eighth Avenue. Mr. Bourke was one of the first people she’d met after moving into the shop. He loaned a friend of hers some lamps to help decorate it. He had lived in the neighborhood all his life, he attended St. Malachy’s where the Catholic actors went, supported the Irish Theater, and looked a bit like Sean O’Casey, whose plays he admired fervently. He had been in trouble when Julie met him, on the complaint of a boy who turned out later to have been a prostitute. Julie might not have been so direct if her mission had been less urgent.
Mr. Bourke looked at her sadly over the top of his rimless glasses. “I’ll not waste your time asking why it was me you came to. Do you know how many years I’ve been in therapy to amend that fall from grace?”
“I wouldn’t have come to you at all if I knew anyone else to go to.”
“You’re not alone, and I’d rather have you remember than most of those who do. Thank God, I’ll soon be an old man.”
Julie thought he already was.
“I wish I could help you, Julie, but I’ve not been hospitable to that kind of visitor for a long time.”
“I understand and I’m sorry I came, Mr. Bourke.”
Mercifully, a customer entered the shop and she could get away. She plunged out the door and almost collided with a street person who stepped back to admire the window he had cleaned of a car illegally parked at the curb. What could he see, she wondered, the windows all blacked out. She glanced back at the license plate-California. All that sunshine they wouldn’t let in the windows.
Juanita ate. Ordinarily she loved Chinese food, but now she could hardly swallow. She had a plan. It came out of the daydreams she often made up about Julie and herself. Dee, she could see, was getting nervous. She walked back and forth waiting for Juanita to finish eating. She stopped and threw a lot of clothes that were lying about into one of the suitcases. She listened for the elevator. She looked at her watch. She was waiting to change Juanita’s hairdo. The pompoms had come undone when she tumbled off the table. Danny didn’t want her to look like a geisha girl anyway. Dee wouldn’t tell her what a geisha girl was. She knew what an angel was, but she didn’t feel like one of them either.
Dee came close and looked at the plate. “Starved, weren’t you?”
“Dee, I don’t like Danny. Do you?”
The woman gave a surprised laugh. “Not always.”
“Are you married to him?”
“We’re partners. Does that answer your question?”
“You just live together, right?”
“Right. If you’ve had enough to eat, go sit in front of the mirror.” Dee took the plate to the sink and scraped and rinsed it.
Juanita sat on the bench at the dressing table and drew the robe tightly around her. She watched Dee approach, drying her hands on a dish towel. “Why don’t you split from him? I mean, everybody does it. My mother and father talk about it all the time.”
“Stop talking so much and go wash your face. You got some dirt on your cheek.”
The dirt was a sore spot. Juanita saw that her plan wasn’t going to work, but she had to try anyway. She didn’t have any other. “Dee, what if you and I ran away before he gets back? He’s mean to you, too. I’ll bet he beats up on you, right? Couldn’t we go someplace and make a real puppet show?”
Dee folded her arms and looked down at her for a long time. “Don’t you ever want to see your parents again?”
“Not really.” She gave her shoulders a shrug.
“You’re a conniving little bitch, Juanita. Did you think I’d fall for a line like that? Get up and take off the robe.”
“No.” The knife was in the pocket. “I don’t want to take it off, please.”
Dee came up behind her and tried to wrench the robe from her shoulders. Juanita clung to the lapels. But when she could hold on no longer, she wriggled round on the bench and swung at Dee with all her might. The red hair leaped off the woman’s head and plopped on the floor like a bird’s nest. Juanita jumped for the wig and ran with it to the front of the loft. She tried to get through the heavy curtains, but Dee was too close. She threw herself at the girl and brought her to the floor.