The Isle of Youth: Stories (17 page)

“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.

Here was what I made of the evidence: there had been no magic school. No cockatoo or hypnosis. My father had never been anyone’s protégé, had never been the Great Heraldo. He had not disappeared from a water-filled aquarium. His name was Derrick Gibson and he lived in North Miami Beach and he had been shot outside a Chinese takeout at midnight.

*   *   *

In the car, I tried to get my mother to answer my questions. Was the dead man really my father? Had he always lived in Florida? Had they ever even set foot inside a magic school? She held the steering wheel with both hands. The heat had turned the mascara into little black puddles under her eyes.

“We did meet in California,” she said as we turned back onto Ocean Drive. “Once we took a tour of a magic school in Hollywood. They had a theater filled with beautiful chandeliers and red silk draperies. I thought it was the most beautiful place I’d ever seen.”

“How did you get into magic if you didn’t go to the school?” It was close to dawn. The sky was pale with light.

“I took a free class once,” she said. “At a community center.” She had been trained by a woman who made a living doing tricks with cards and dollar bills at children’s birthday parties.

My eyes were watering. Merlin felt heavy on my lap. I was breathing, but not holding on to any air. “Why did you tell so many lies?”

For that, she had no answer.

She pulled over onto the side of the road and got out of the car. She left her door open and the engine running. I followed. Merlin stayed in the passenger seat. A part of me couldn’t help but admire the way he’d rejected our life choices, the way he had taken one look at us and known he didn’t want to be part of this act, of this family.

“Your father came to a show once.” She rolled up the sleeves of her tuxedo shirt. “About a year ago.” She’d glimpsed him in the back of the theater, but by the time she looked up from her next trick, he was gone. I wondered why I hadn’t known he was there, hadn’t felt something inside me shift. Why he had seen me onstage and decided not to stay.

“Why did you bother telling me any of this?” In the distance, I could hear waves coming and going. “Why didn’t you just keep lying?”

My mother said soon I would be eighteen, no longer a child, and she could see me daydreaming about magic and Hollywood.

“People have to be realistic about their options, Crystal.”

I asked if she was being realistic about her options when she decided to be a professional magician, the most impractical fucking job anyone had ever heard of? Or when she bought the five-hundred-dollar guillotine or the rabbit? Or when she didn’t like the way her life had turned out and decided to just make up a new one?

My mother told me it was time to go home.

“It won’t be our home for long,” I said.

She rattled the keys in her hand, then went back to the car.

At the apartment, she locked herself in the bathroom. I sat on my bed and tried to explain to Merlin what had happened. The more I told him, the angrier I became. Angry at her for wanting me to know the truth, but not telling me herself. Instead she had left the evidence in plain view, knowing I would put it all together. Angry at her for building us a life, a history, out of smoke and air. And angry at myself, because wasn’t I too old to believe in stories?

When I left the theater, it was six in the morning. I stepped around broken glass on the sidewalk and a woman sleeping on a bench in an overcoat, even though it was already ninety degrees. As I walked, I looked for Bill and imagined all the men I had ever robbed filling the dinner theater like ghosts.

At Coco Cabana, I did not have my briefcase. I was just hoping for some luck. Mr. Phillips wasn’t at the counter. I went to the back and wedged three mini-bottles under the waistband of my jeans. I should have stopped there, but then two little whiskeys went into my front pocket. Two more in my bra. I couldn’t keep myself from plucking bottles off the shelves.

I felt hands on my back, right as I was reaching for a miniature gin. I turned and found Phillips Jr. squeezing my shoulders. He wore pressed khakis and a white polo. He smelled of cheap cologne. His hair was combed in a center part. I tipped my head back and smiled.

“Don’t even try it,” he said. “My father has no business sense. And he thinks you’re cute, with that briefcase. That’s the only reason he’s let you get away with this for so long.” He let go of my shoulders. He stepped back and stared at the bulges in my jeans and under my shirt. “But even he would think this is ridiculous.”

Phillips Jr. took me behind the counter and told me to stay put. He dialed a number on his cell phone. Maybe the handcuffed man would still be at the police station and together we could wait for my mother to come. Maybe she would take me in her arms and apologize for all the lies. Or maybe she would decide I was just like my father and, in the years to come, tell people stories about her daughter, Crystal, who disappeared into thin air one night, in the middle of a show.

After he hung up, Phillips Jr. brought me coffee in a foam cup. For a moment, I thought he might be softening his position, but it was clear from the way he stood by the door, phone still in hand, that he thought it was time for me to learn about consequences.

“You don’t have any doughnuts, do you?” Suddenly I was starving. I hadn’t eaten since lunch the day before. “Like a bear claw?”

“What kind of question is that?” He shook his head. Wing-shaped sweat marks darkened the back of his polo. “This isn’t a Seven-Eleven.”

A small fan stood on the counter. I leaned into the breeze. Once, I took a poetry class in school and even though I hadn’t been very good at writing poems, some of my similes came rushing back: time is like a house on fire; time is like water draining from a tub. I heard faraway sirens and started to worry about Merlin. If I went to jail, who would take care of him?

The door jingled, but it wasn’t a police officer: it was Bill, slouching and bleary-eyed. He was wearing the same clothes from the last time I saw him. His hair clung to his scalp. His ring was gone. My father could have been a man like this, I kept thinking.

“Well,” he said, sauntering over to the counter. “Look who it is.”

“Do you know her?” Phillips Jr. asked.

He rocked back on his heels. “I’m sorry to say that I do.”

“We’re waiting on the police and she just asked for a snack. Can you believe it?”

“Nothing would surprise me.” Bill picked up a six-pack and paid in cash. He asked Phillips Jr. if he could hang around for a while. He said what was about to happen would be too good to miss.

“What’s your real name?” I asked Bill, who of course didn’t know that all this time I’d been thinking of him as Bill. “Why did you carry around a picture of that tree?”

“It looked alive,” he said.

“Of course it’s alive,” I said. “But why else?”

“Crystal,” he said, popping open a beer. “What are you doing with your life?”

Here was another story my mother told me: once, my father hypnotized her and walked her up to the top of their apartment building in Toluca Lake. When he brought her out, she was standing on the edge of the roof. She blinked, cupped a hand over her eyes. She saw Hollywood in the distance, the sidewalk below. She felt an unfamiliar breeze, the sensation of her stomach dropping.
What am I doing here?
she asked, stepping back toward safety.
Don’t worry
, he said.
I wouldn’t have let you fall.
For years, I had believed the story demonstrated the power of his magic.

In the 1800s, Robert-Houdin dazzled all of Paris by casting a spell over his son that made him float. William Lance Burton conjured doves from his sleeves that perched on the shoulders of audiences. If David Copperfield could vanish the Statue of Liberty, couldn’t I make just one of these bottles disappear?