“I had a family,” Bill said. “A wife and a daughter and a little dog and a goldfish.”
“Where did you come from, anyway?”
“Wisconsin.”
“Appleton?” It seemed unlikely this man could be from the same place as Houdini.
“Sturgeon Bay. But I like it here, in Hollywood. I think I might stay for a while.”
“Just because you like Hollywood doesn’t mean Hollywood likes you.”
Another man came into the bar, drunk and swaying and asking about the show. Am I too late for the magic? His shirt was untucked, his hair mussed. I sidled up to him and swiveled my hips and soon I was drinking old-fashioneds on his tab.
He was too drunk to be coy, to ask for a magic trick. After two cocktails, he was grabbing my ass and pulling me toward him. His wallet was one of the easiest. It was sitting at the top of his pocket and went straight up my bathrobe sleeve. There was a weird kind of intimacy to the whole thing, with Bill right there, and I’d had just enough to drink to feel invincible. No one else was around. What could he do but watch?
Quite a bit, it turned out.
“Thief!” Bill stood from his barstool. He pointed at me with the manatee pamphlet. “This woman is a thief!”
The drunk man clutched his pockets. Ricky looked up from restocking maraschino cherries and lime wedges. I slipped the wallet down my sleeve and slapped it on the bar.
“It was just a trick,” I said. “You know, magic.”
“Don’t believe her,” Bill said. “Don’t you believe her at all.”
“Thief!” the man slurred.
“Looks like the show’s over,” Ricky said.
A good performer always knows when it’s time to make her exit. I turned on my heels and ran. I went up the middle of the audience section, between the velvet curtains. The lights were off backstage. My heels clacked on the wood. I opened the trapdoor and climbed inside the space. I wedged my head between my knees and breathed in the cedar smell. I would stay there for as long as it took for everyone to go home.
* * *
As a child, I searched for my father. I would wander down to the beach, where I checked behind garbage cans and underneath picnic tables and white lifeguard stations. Once, a lifeguard found me questioning sunbathers about my father and made me promise to go straight home. I did as I was told, but came back the next day. It was summertime. I was ten. For my birthday, my mother had given me a map of Florida, which she said would keep me from getting lost. I would study the highways and the lakes and the dark swampland. Could he be in Lake Istokpoga? Weeki Wachee Springs? Gatorland? The map made Florida seem vast and mysterious. All these names I had never heard before, all these places I had never been. This was before I understood that my father had disappeared in California, that he’d probably never made it this far east. The thing I remembered most from those days was the shape of the map. I thought Florida looked like an upside-down L.
* * *
My mother and I were awoken by a call in the middle of the night. The phone was in the kitchen, but its ring was as shrill as an alarm. I found her facing the fire escape, wearing a sleeveless cotton nightgown. The phone was pressed against her ear. She was nodding and pulling at the cord. I touched her shoulder, but she didn’t seem to know I was there.
“Get dressed,” she said after hanging up. “We’re leaving in five minutes.”
“To go where?” It was three in the morning.
My mother went into her room without answering. I pulled on jeans and a T-shirt and gathered my hair into an elastic. I forgot to put on socks before lacing my sneakers. Late last night I’d collected Merlin from the dressing room and now he was asleep on my bed. I found the leash I’d made from red silk ribbon and looped it around his neck.
In my mother’s old Camaro, we drove north on Ocean Drive. The sky was dark and starless. The streetlights glowed phosphorescent white. We were heading toward Dania Beach, toward Fort Lauderdale. She rolled down the windows. Normally she listened to Donna Summer in the car, but this time the radio was silent. Merlin stood on his hind legs and sniffed the warm air.
“Will you fucking look at that?” She swerved a little when she saw him doing what we’d tried to get him to do for hours in the apartment. She hadn’t taken off her makeup; mascara was smudged under her eyes and there was a halo of red around her lips. She was still wearing her black pants and white tuxedo shirt.
“Where are you taking us?”
“To the police,” she said, which made me afraid to ask more questions. Had Bill reported me? Had Ricky? I slumped down in my seat and watched the buildings pass.
At the Hollywood police station, we trailed my mother through the glass doors. She asked for a Detective Swan. The station was quiet and bright and deliciously cool. Down the hall, a man was sitting on a bench, his hands cuffed behind his back.
Detective Swan was a woman, tall and broad-shouldered. Her blond hair was wrapped into a bun and stuck through with a pen. She wore a black pantsuit with a blue T-shirt underneath. She looked surprisingly alert for the hour.
“Is that a rabbit?” She pointed at Merlin.
“Does it look like a rabbit?” I held him in my arms, the leash wrapped around my hand.
My mother flicked my shoulder, her way of telling me to not be such a smart-ass.
Detective Swan led us deeper into the station. We passed the handcuffed man, who appeared to be asleep. At her desk, she pulled over two chairs and we all sat down, my mother and I side by side, the detective across from us.
“Is this your daughter?”
I felt her looking me and Merlin over. I wondered what she was seeing.
My mother nodded. “This is Crystal.”
I was more certain than ever that someone had reported me, that I had overestimated the silencing power of shame. Detective Swan handed my mother a manila file folder. She opened it and stared at the contents for a while. She blinked a few times, like she had something in her eye. She wiped her nose with the back of her hand.
“That’s him.” She gave the folder back to Detective Swan.
“Him who?” I said.
Detective Swan asked if my mother would be willing to identify the body.
“Mom,” I said, louder than I meant to. Merlin flinched in my lap. “What body?”
My mother and Detective Swan both stared at me.
“Do you want Crystal to come?” the detective asked. “We can’t have a rabbit back there.”
My mother leaned over and tucked my hair behind my ear. It was a tender gesture, but her eyes were not kind. “Stay here and watch that terrible rabbit. I’ll be right back.”
I stood when they stood. I wanted to tell them that I was old enough to make decisions for myself, but instead I just watched as they walked down the hall.
Detective Swan had left the folder on her desk. It contained a thin stack of paper and two photos: a mug shot of a man and another from the morgue. I had never seen a dead body before, not even a picture of one. His skin looked blue and rubbery. I balanced the open file on my knees and kept reading. Merlin nibbled the edge of the folder.
Knowledge is a curious thing. People talk about realizations coming in jolts and flashes, but this was more like a gradual creeping. I imagined a water stain on a ceiling, the way it darkens and swells before it starts spreading. The man’s face — the angular jaw, the sleek dark hair, the flared nose — was familiar because it was the face my mother had been describing for years. The face she claimed to have seen for the first time at magic school, in a conjuring class. She even drew it for me once, on a magic chalkboard that disappeared its drawings as soon as they were complete. Also: he had the same arch in the eyebrow, the same dimple in the cheek, that I saw in the mirror every morning and night.