Out in the hall, I hear a duo of drunk girls trying to find the bathroom. One of them opens the door to see us standing there, mouths an O of surprise, then closes it with a giggle. I get up to lock the door and return to sit by Tristan, who is taking his shoes off and making himself comfortable.
“See? I told you it would be easy,” Tristan says triumphantly, running a finger up and down my arm. “No one would ever suspect you.”
“It’s only because they’re wasted.” I look down at my outfit; ripped black jeans, black t-shirt, thick black down coat. Even my hair is so dark it’s almost black. The girls who not two seconds ago saw us in there were half glitter and one hundred percent fake tan. “I don’t exactly blend in.”
“Have you ever gotten a compliment before in your entire life? Jesus, girl,” Tristan laughs. “You did a good job.”
He starts to pull off my coat, the inside nearly stuck to my arms from sweat from the heat of the house. It doesn’t seem like he is in any hurry to leave. Since no one is out there chasing us down, I figure it’s okay. I’m also weirdly turned on by the whole endeavor, my adrenaline still spiking and causing my entire body to buzz. I roll on top of him and we start to make out. Having spent the last few nights on an acquaintance’s couch, Tristan and I haven’t exactly had any alone time together. I’m hoping this little escapade will give us enough money to get a hotel, or a temporary sublease for a room. Or a ticket out of Milwaukee. Anything.
“Do you think we got enough? Should we find a checkbook or something?” I ask Tristan, between kisses.
“We’re good.” He flips me around so that I’m under him in one seamless move. “You’re sexy when you talk like that.”
I let out a nervous giggle. “What was I before? Hideous?”
“No,” he says, taking off my pants. “I’ve been wanting to do that all day.”
It doesn’t take long for us to be fully undressed.
Afterward, we make a quick exit down the stairs. Sobering up from both the wine and the adrenaline, I can’t help but steal a glance at the purse I’d stolen from, and am relieved to find it hasn’t moved. That’s good. Whoever left it there, she won’t know yet that anything is gone. She probably won’t notice until morning, if she’s as drunk as everyone here looks. Because I’m feeling confident, I even grab one of the North Face coats on the table as I walk past so I won’t freeze on the way home. Now I focus on leaving. The kitchen is so packed with bodies the windows and glass patio doors are starting to steam. A boombox is playing a rap song I’ve never heard before. A large group of frat guys keep themselves busy tapping a keg in the middle of the room.
Tristan nods his head toward one of the guys near the keg, which I take to mean he’s going to swipe his wallet too, so I stop at the fridge and search inside for the rest of the wine bottle I’d started. I’ve only ever had boxed wine, so my standards may be low, but it’s the most amazing wine possibly ever made and I wouldn’t mind some more. Quickly, I grab the bottle and close the door. I’m in such a hurry I slam it too hard, and cause a note to fall from the fridge to the floor. I pick it up and try to put it back in place with a magnet. Then I notice the entire door is covered in sticky notes. In the middle of them all, there’s a big calendar of the month of December, with every Tuesday and Friday circled in red. The note beneath it says, “Don’t forget to feed Frida.” Below that, there’s a photo of a cat. And the numbers 1416.
Right as I get the note back in its place, Tristan pulls on my arm. “Time to go,” he says. He drags me forward and pushes me toward the door. Not the front door, where we first came in, but a side door that leads to a laundry room and then opens into the garage. From behind us, I am pretty sure I hear a woman shout: “Oh my goddddddd! Where’s my wallet!” Another voice shouts, “I bet it was that shady-looking elf!”
When I hear this, my knees become so weak I think I might fall over. But I don’t have time to fall over, because Tristan is pressing the garage door button and breaking into a run, still holding my hand. I follow him blindly, skirting the edge of the house back toward the bushes where we’d left our bikes. Just as we’re mounting the seats, three or four girls begin pouring out the front door, pointing in our direction. But they are drunk, and we are fast. We are already pedaling. Their shouts disintegrate into the cold winter air. We don’t slow down till we’ve biked several miles down Lake Drive, back into Milwaukee, where we belong.
ANNA
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CHAPTER THIRTY
It’s my idea to break into the mansion in Shorewood. Between the calendar and the notes I discovered on the fridge, I am pretty sure that the place is unoccupied, except for the two days a week that the only child of whoever owns the place arrives to feed the cat. Tristan thinks it’s too risky, but he says he is open to convincing. It takes me a few tries, but eventually, I persuade him to bike up to Shorewood with me and watch the place around midday so I can show him it’s okay. We park our bikes across the street, in the thick enclave of dead trees that line the other side of the road.
“What are we looking at?” he asks me.
“You’ll see,” I tell him. I lean my bike against a dead tree and sit down on a dry patch of leaves. “Sit down. It might be a while.”
“Okay, lady. You’re the boss.” Tristan sits and we both light cigarettes, watching the smoke blend into the clouds of air coming out of our mouths. It’s not as cold as the night we came for the party, but it’s not far above twenty degrees. “What’s going on with that half-sister of yours?” he asks. He puts sister in air quotes. “Have you heard from her?”
“Yeah. She keeps asking me to take that DNA test.”
“Are you going to?”
“I don’t see how it would help her or my dad,” I shrug. “It’s not enough to get her to Israel.”
“Hm.”
I poke him in the side. “What?”
“Nothing.”
“What, Tristan? Tell me.”
“I just… I can’t see her letting it go,” he says.
“Maybe not,” I admit. I take another long inhale. “It’s getting kind of annoying actually. Now that I don’t have a computer, I can only check my accounts at the desktop at Bremen, and it’s not like I have all the time in the world to go there.”
“So you’re ignoring her,” he says. He starts shaking his head. “I told you not to do that.”
“I have more pressing issues. Like where are we going to live?” A white van slows down in front of the house next to the mansion. I perk up. “There! Watch this!”
“I know you don’t believe me, but this girl is conning you,” Tristan says, keeping his gaze on the road.
I roll my eyes. “You think everyone is conning everyone.” I point ahead. “Are you seeing this?”
“Everyone is conning everyone. In some way or another,” Tristan says. But he follows my gaze across the street. Right as I’d suspected, the mail van skips the mansion and continues to the next building, another multi-level brick home with a balcony, and a matching large white fence wrapping around its lawn.
“What does that prove?” he asks me. We both watch as the postman sticks his hand out of his window and deposits a stack of papers into the box at the end of the driveway—I’m reminded again that we are no longer in the city, where the mailboxes are by the front door and require post office employees to walk through every kind of weather Wisconsin has to throw at them.
“They have a mail hold,” I explain. “It was the same thing yesterday.”