"Her heart was okay," Toby said in my ear. "It was her veins that were the problem."
Dolly tapped him on the shoulder and shook her head disapprovingly. Toby instantly arranged his features into a passable semblance of melancholy. It was like watching a Polaroid develop in a tenth of a second.
"Amber knew she was going to die," Tiny rumbled on. "She knew it a long time ago. I'm not being mystical. I don't mean she knew some bastard was going to beat her to death." He swallowed twice and then shook his head to clear it. He took a step back as though the stage had tilted suddenly beneath him.
"I'll tell them," Pepper said.
Tiny nodded and moved aside, staring at the wall opposite. Pepper, a seasoned performer, found the brightest light and then reached out a hand to Tiny. Slowly, he handed her the creased book. It had a unicorn on the cover.
"I guess a lot of you know that Amber stayed with me sometimes," Pepper said. Until that moment I'd only heard her shouting over the music in the club. Her voice now, in the silence, was unexpectedly musical. "When she didn't have any place to stay, or when one of her men treated her bad, she came to me. So she had a lot of stuff at my place, and one of the things she had there was her book."
She opened it and leafed through a couple of pages. "It's all here," she said. "Everything." Toby shifted from foot to foot, looking uneasy. "There are two pages here that are headed 'When I Die.' Not 'If I Die,' but 'When I Die.'
"She wanted you all to come here. 'I want my service to be at the club,' she wrote. 'My friends are at the club.' " Pepper's voice broke slightly. "Her friends. That's us. Her closest friends in the world." Tiny wiped at his nose with his sleeve. "Her wonderful friends," Pepper said.
She took a breath. "The things on the stage were hers. She's given them all to you. Every girl in the club gets something. It's all written down in the book. She even chose the music. It was her favorite song." She brushed her cheek with the back of her hand. "She was such a sap," she said. Her eyes were very bright. After a long moment she went on.
"Amber made four requests. The first was that you should come here. She'd be happy to see you all here now. The second was that we should give her things away. We're going to do that in a little while. The third had to do with the money she'd saved, and Tiny will tell you about that. These aren't in any order," she said suddenly. "I've gotten them all mixed up."
"She wouldn't care," a girl said from somewhere in the room. "She loved you, Pepper." It was Nana's voice. I turned and saw her standing next to the door. She was dressed all in black, and her eyes were puffy and red.
Pepper nodded. "I guess the fourth thing comes first. She wanted Tiny to read a page to you. It was something she wrote a couple of months ago. Tiny read it for the first time today."
She turned to him and held out the book. "Can you?" she asked. At first I thought he couldn't. He hesitated for a long time and then grasped it. It took an act of will for him to force his eyes down to the open page.
"This is really for the girls," he said. "The rest of you can listen, but this is for the girls." He put a finger on the margin, squinted at the words, and breathed heavily before he began to read.
" 'Wednesday, May 8. I don't know how to write this, but why should I? I don't know how to do anything anymore. I think I used to know how to do things.' "
The thick index finger moved down the edge of the page. It was shaking. " 'I don't even know how to go home,' " he read. " 'Where is home now? Where is the place that makes me feel safe? Nobody took it away from me, I can't blame anybody else. I must have thrown it away. How do I get it back? Everywhere I go I take the dragons with me. When I close the door they're already inside.
" 'Tiny tried to help. .' " His voice trembled. " 'But I wouldn't let him. Nana is good to me. Sarah-' " He looked up. "That's Pepper," he said. " 'Sarah is good to me. I have so many friends. But it's like they're on the other side of a window. I can see them, I can hear them, but I can't touch them. There's the window. And I'm outside looking in, and outside is nothing but me and the dark and the dragons.
" 'I know I should stop doing dope. I know the dope is killing me. I used to think life would come to a standstill without me. Now I don't. I lost my place in life a long time ago. I won't even be missed.' "
Someone snuffled. It sounded like Nana.
" 'I don't know where home is. I don't know how to get to my friends on the other side of the glass. My life is just someplace I lost the map to. And the one I lost was the only copy.' "
He looked up. There were tears streaming down his face. "She wanted you to hear that," he said. "She wanted you to hear that after she died. I guess maybe she thought some of us could learn something."
There was a long silence. The music had ended. Even Toby looked somber. I felt someone slip fingers under my arm and looked down at Nana. She pressed her forehead against my shoulder. She felt burning hot, even through my shirt and jacket.
In the silence, a few people began to whisper and then to talk. It was a kind of release, and it spread through the room. Someone even laughed.
"That's right," Pepper said, taking the book back. "She wanted you to hear it, she thought it might help you, but she didn't want to bum you out. Here are some presents. 'The boots are for Nana,' " she read, " 'who helped me buy them one day when I was too wasted to make up my mind. The T-shirts are for Saffron, who has more to fill them with.' " She turned a page. " 'Chili gets my belts because she's the only one they'll fit. Sarah,' " she stammered, " 'Sarah gets this book, with the love I tried to express on page forty-three.' " She looked up, on the verge of tears. "I'm not going to read that," she said.
One by one, the girls went up to the stage and took Amber's gifts. The litany went on until everything on the stage was gone. When it was over and the stage was empty, Tiny waved for silence.
"When Amber died, when she got killed, I mean, she had two hundred and eighty-four dollars in the bank. She left her bankbook inside her journal. Two hundred and eighty-four dollars isn't much after four years of stripping. But you know what happened. She gave money to some of you, and she spent the rest on dope. She spent too much on dope," the man who dealt loads said. There was no question that he meant it.
He seemed to regain his strength as he talked. "She didn't know how much she'd have when she died, but this is what she wrote: 'Please use fifty dollars to buy drinks for everyone. Real drinks, private stock, make sure Tiny knows that. No Cragmont Cola at my wake, Tiny.' " A couple of people laughed. Nana, with Amber's boots clenched in her hand, shook her head fiercely.
"That leaves two hundred and thirty-four dollars," Tiny said. "What Amber hoped is that the girls in the club would donate enough money to bring it up to the next hundred. That's three hundred bucks. She wanted that money given to an organization, and if anyone laughs, I'll kill you. She wanted it given to the Just Say No Foundation to keep little kids off drugs. Anybody think that's funny?"
Nobody even smiled. "I've got fifty bucks," Nana said.
"Me, too," said Pepper.
All around the room, the women dug into their purses and volunteered sums of money. Saffron put up a hundred. Women who probably hadn't had a straight day in months went to the stage and put their money down.
"That's six hundred and twenty-four dollars, counting Amber's," Tiny said after he counted it. "It'll be a bequest in her name. I'll put in a thousand for the club."
As he said it, he looked around. There must have been something in my face, because he paused as he looked at me, and a tiny line of concentration creased the skin between his eyebrows. Our eyes locked for a moment.