There was one night where a hundred and twenty coin was enough. This was the cost. Enough to pierce some membrane within her, some barrier she would’ve sworn could not be crossed; but it had been worn down over months and months of lean times. Worn so thin the right words could make it through.
The offer came from a customer she knew well enough, might have dated if they’d been sitting on the same side of the bar, if they’d been around any other bar, in any other place, at any other time. She would’ve had sex with him for nothing, the way a respectable woman does. Instead, she let him pay. And it wasn’t bad. He cared. Asked her if that felt okay. Did all the work. Didn’t hit her or spank her or ask if he could choke her a little. Pulled out and even cleaned her up with his shirt. She would’ve done it for free. Nearly told him so as he left stacks of coin on her dresser. Fragile, wobbly things, all that coin. Like the tall scrapers to the east.
And then he went back to the bar, and Rose sat and stared at the towers of coin on that dresser her husband had left her, and it was a different woman who walked out that door. She would survive, she realized. But it would be a different her. It would be someone else who did the surviving, who would drag memories of a former self along, a tiny echo of a woman somewhere deep in her skull, a small voice of who she used to be.
When Palmer had come asking for a little help the next day, it had felt different. He was fourteen back then, and Rose thought he could see. She thought he knew. She sure as hell did, and the same ten coin that he asked for and always got suddenly weighed the same as ten thousand. Palmer pocketed it too easily. Like it was the same coin. But it’d been too hard won for that. Not to slide away so easy. Not to just disappear. And here was when the gulf with her children opened. It opened not the day her legs had, but the day her palms did. It was the only way, she told herself. There was no other. She would earn her keep the only way she could. And the cost of dispensing that keep could only grow.
It was inevitable that her children would find out. Men don’t just talk, they brag. They brag about rented love, even. And children hear everything. They are echo chambers. And they take what they learn from their parents off to school more readily than they haul anything of merit home. A father’s boast becomes a way to torment a peer. And so the boys heard about her new line of work from the worst source possible.
No, not quite. Vic had heard about it from someone even worse than the boys. A client. A young man who made a flippant comparison, who thought it might be taken as a compliment, who had said in the heat of passion that the daughter was more expert than the mother.
Vic had already stopped coming around the Honey Hole, wouldn’t even approach the place. And after this, she wouldn’t agree to see Rose anywhere. Not for three long years. And so her children began to wither like the roof gardens did when showers and beer water took precedence. They began to die to her and she to them. Even as the small voice she carried deep within her soul relented now and then and dispensed with hard-fought coin. Even though some part of her left her pillow wet in the morning as it leaked out in quiet sobs. Leaked out, but never emptied.
All this and more, her husband had taken the day he’d run off. All this and more he had stolen. But she would survive. Rose told herself this as she studied the column of numbers where more was subtracted than added. There was a knock at the door. She checked her watch. It was her six o’clock.
Oh yes, she would survive.
38 • No Place for a Girl
The sun was up by the time the boys entered Springston and swung around the edge of the great wall. There was still shade in that part of town where people could afford to delay the rising sun and be sheltered from the creep of sand. And though it was early and a Sunday, Conner felt something was amiss. There was that nervous buzz about town like after a bomb had gone off—but bombs rarely went off so early in the day. The young men who caused violence were as lazy as any youth when it came to getting out of bed. And besides, there were no columns of smoke. No wailing mothers. Instead, there were the sails of sarfers spread out to the horizon. There was an empty marina with bare hitching posts jutting out of the ground and only the wind passing through. There were people in front of their homes, talking with neighbors, out and about, even though the markets had not yet opened.
“Head left here,” Conner told his brother. There was a doctor on the edge of Springston that sometimes took people in from Shantytown. He might help them. He might be trusted if he found out where the girl came from.
Where the girl came from. Conner chanced a look over his shoulder. She could be sleeping or dead. She could be someone who wandered into No Man’s Land with her family and turned back after two days of hiking. But she had spoken his name. Had mentioned his father. If she died, would anyone believe their account of things? Or would he become Old Man Joseph, standing at the intersection of the great dunes, holding a sign, screaming to frightened kids about No Man’s Land?
These were the thoughts swirling in his mind long before the sun came up. Conner couldn’t stop thinking of all the girl might know, might say, if she survived. Their father might still be alive. Twelve years of camping on the edge of No Man’s Land, twelve years of listening to the wind moan across the Bull’s gash, twelve years of Shantytown, of their mother selling herself, and their father might still be out there.
Conner outpulled Rob, his legs pumping as his thoughts raced. They rounded the corner and stopped outside Doc Welsh’s place—
“Closed,” Rob said.
There was a sign on the door. Half the stalls they had passed were closed, but a glance at the sun told him it was after nine. They’d been hiking for almost five hours. “What in the world is going on?” he asked. He dropped the line and went back to the girl on the tent. Rob was right about the wear on the canvas. Conner could see where it was tearing. He pulled his canteen out of his pack and knelt by the girl to give her more water.
“Is it a special Sunday?” Rob asked.
“Not that I know of.” Conner poured a capful there in the shade of the doctor’s office. “Bang on the door,” he said.
His brother did. A woman with a load balanced on her head hurried past. “Hey,” Conner called to her.
She slowed. The load wobbled as she turned her head.
“You know if Doc is out on a call?”
The lady looked at them both like they were from the northern wastes. She gave the girl lying still on the folded canvas a brief glance. “Probably out looking for Danvar,” she said. “Haven’t you heard?”
“Danvar?” Conner asked, quite certain he’d heard wrong.
The lady didn’t dare nod. “They found it,” she said. “Half the town’s out there now. The other half is scrambling for their coin. I’ve gotta go.”
She and her load turned and headed off.
“Wait!” Conner called out. “This girl needs help!”
“Good luck,” the lady called.
Conner turned and beseeched the next couple who hurried past, two men with dive tanks on their backs who made a concerted effort not to look his way, not to even glance at him for fear of the guilt they might suffer. Rob looked like he was on the verge of tears. The cap of water disappeared into the girl’s mouth, but she didn’t swallow. Conner tried to feel for a pulse, but he didn’t really know how. Maybe that was his own pulse in his thumb he was sensing.