The Best American Mystery Stories 2006

Karen E. Bender Theft

From Harvard Review

Ginger Klein held all the cash she owned, which came to nine hundred and thirty-four dollars and twenty-seven cents, in an envelope in her red velvet purse. As she waited in line for the first dinner seating on this cruise to Alaska, she fingered the muscular weight of the bills. The ship’s ballroom was a large, drab room, tricked into elegance with real silver set out on the linen, sprightly gold foil bows on the walls, white roses blooming briefly in stale water. The room was filled with couples, friends, tour groups, glittering in their sequins, intent on having a good time. The room roared as the guests greeted each other, their faces gilded by the chandeliers’ silver haze. Gripping her purse, Ginger watched them and tried to decide where to sit.

Until a few months before, Ginger had been living in a worn pink studio apartment on Van Nuys Boulevard, storing her cash in margarine containers in her refrigerator. She was eighty-two years old and for the last sixty years she had sometimes lived in better accommodations, sometimes worse; this was what she had ultimately earned. On good days she sat with a cup of coffee and the Los Angeles phone book, calling up strangers for contributions to the Fireman’s Ball, the Christian Children’s Fund, the United Veteran’s Relief. Her British accent was her best one; with it, she could keep confused strangers in Canoga Park, Woodland Hills, and Calabasas on the phone. “Congratulations for being the sort of person who will help our cause,” she told them, and heard their pleasure in their own generosity. She cashed the checks at different fast cash stores around the San Fernando Valley, presenting them with one of her bountiful collection of false IDs.

One day, she took the wrong bus home. She looked out the window and was staring at a beach that she had never seen before. The water was bright and wrinkled as a piece of blue foil. Surfers scrambled over the dark, glassy waves. The other passengers seemed to believe this was merely a beach, but Ginger felt her heart grow cold. She had succeeded for sixty-five years as a swindler because she always knew which bus to take.

She had actually intended to pay the doctor if the news had been good. The doctor asked her a few questions. He held up a pair of pliers and she had no idea what they were. She returned to the office twice and saw more doctors who wore pert, grim expressions. The diagnosis was a surprise. When he told her, it was one of the few times in her life she reacted as other people did: she covered her face and wept.

“You need to plan,” her doctor said. “You have relatives who can take care of you?”

“No,” she said.

“Children?”

“No.”

“Friends?”

His pained expression aggravated her. “I have many friends,” she said because she pitied him.

She listened to him describe the end of her life and what she should expect her friends to do for her. Then Ginger had to stop him. She told the secretary that her checkbook was in the car and left the office without paying the bill.

She tried to come up with a grand scheme that would pay for her future care, but her thoughts were not so ordered and each day she lost something: the word for lemons, the name of her street. Peering out her window at the lamplights that pierced the blue darkness in her apartment complex, she imagined befriending one of her neighbors, but her neighbors were flighty college dropouts, working odd hours, absent, uninterested in her. Ginger did not want to die in a hospital or an institution. Dying in this apartment would mean that she would not be discovered for days; the idea of her body lifeless, but worse, helpless, was intolerable to her.

She was watching television one evening when she saw an ad for a Carnival cruise. Many years ago, she had sat with a man in an airport bar. He had been left by his wife of thirty-six years and was joking about killing himself in a room on a cruise ship. “Someone finds you,” he said, on his third bourbon. “A maid, another passenger. Quickly. It’s more dignified. You don’t just rot.”

He was on his way to the Caribbean, desperately festive in his red vacation shirt, festooned with figures of tropical birds. “What an interesting idea,” she had said, lightly, deciding that it was time for a game of poker; she got out her rigged cards. When he stumbled off two hours later, she was $150 richer and certain she would never be that hopeless. But now his plan sounded useful to her.

Before she went on her cruise, she wanted to buy a beautiful purse with which to hold the last of her money. Three public buses roaring over the oily freeways led her to the accessories counter at Saks. The red purse sat on the counter like a glowing light. It was simple, a deep red with a rhinestone clasp; when she saw it, she felt her breath freeze in her throat. The salesgirl told her that it was on hold for someone.

“It’s mine,” said Ginger, her fingers pressing so hard on the glass counter they turned white.

Perhaps it was the hoarse pitch of her voice, or the pity of the salesgirl toward the elderly, but the salesgirl let her buy the purse. In it, Ginger put her cash and also two bottles of sleeping pills. The Caribbean was sold out this time of year, so she spent most of her remaining money on a cruise to Alaska.

She woke up early the first morning of the cruise, restless, trying to remember everything she had ever known. The facts of her life flurried in her head: names of hotel restaurants, the taste of barbecue in Texas versus Georgia, the aqua chiffon dress she had worn at a cocktail party in 1975. She sat at the table, scribbling notes on a pad: Fake furs on Hollywood Blvd., 1956, cloudy, blue fur hats from the rare Blue Hyena from Alaska, lemon meringue pie at the cafeteria on W. 37th St., New York, 1960s, the seagulls flying on the empty Santa Monica beach at dawn, how much money I made a year, $37,000 from Dr. Chamron in 1987—

Magnolia in Los Angeles, she wrote. She remembered the scent of magnolia as she and Evelyn had stepped off the train in Los Angeles when she was fifteen years old. She remembered her sister Evelyn’s walk, Evelyn just seventeen then, her walk her first successful con; stepping hard onto her feet, shoulders lifted, she tricked Ginger into believing that she knew what to do. It was 1921 and they walked off the train into Los Angeles, two girls alone, armed with an address for an aunt whom they would never meet.

Finally, Ginger’s hand ached and she put down her pen. Scribbling her room number on a paper, she put it in her purse and walked to dinner. She went carefully around the naked ice sculptures of David or Venus that rose, melting, out of bowls of orange punch. Table Sixteen was empty so she sat down, and a silver domed plate floated down in front of her.

She began to eat her salmon when a young woman slid into the seat across from her. Her hair hung down in long, straight sheets, as though flattened by the heat of her own thoughts.

“Darlene Horwitz,” she said, holding out her hand for Ginger to shake. She was young, ridiculously young, with the glossy, unmarked skin of a baby. “This is my first cruise.”

“Ginger Klein.”

“My parents sent me here,” said Darlene. “They had enough of my moaning.” She looked at Ginger. “I was — well, it’s an old story. Pathetic. Have you ever been on a cruise? Is it fun?”

“In the past,” said Ginger.

The girl unfolded her napkin onto her lap. “Are you retired? What did you do?” asked the girl.

Ginger leaned across the table and whispered to Darlene, “This is what I do. People have dreams that you want to be part of. I say I can make them come true. One gentleman expressed a desire to sample gelato in Italy. Then I just did it for him, but on his dime. That man was in the field of advertising. I thought of him sitting behind his desk, eating a bag lunch, a little sweaty, and I thought he’d be grateful that I could taste that gelato for him.”

This was Evelyn’s philosophy, really; she had believed that swindling was generous, as it allowed the suckers a moment to dream. Ginger pushed her seat back slightly. She unfolded her napkin and spread it on her lap.

“I don’t understand,” said Darlene.

Ginger coughed. Then she said, slowly, “I’m a swindler.”

“Oh,” said Darlene. She rubbed her face with her hands. Then she laughed. “Should I be hiding my purse? Are you going to steal money from people?”

“No,” said Ginger. “I don’t need to anymore.”

Darlene seemed to want to steer the discussion back to more familiar territory. “What does your family think of your job?” she asked, carefully.

“I haven’t talked to them in sixty years,” Ginger said. They had lost their parents suddenly, their mother to illness, their father to lust — when their mother had died of tuberculosis, their father left Brooklyn to pursue a stripper in Louisiana. He left a note with some train fare and an address for an aunt in Orange Hills, Los Angeles.

They tried the first phone booth on the street. When the number didn’t work there, they tried another. By the fourth phone booth, they realized that there was no neighborhood Orange Hills and there was no aunt. At the time, the girls had between them forty-three dollars.

“You want to know why I’m here?” Darlene asked. She looked dazed, as though she’d just seen something explode. “His name was Warren. One minute we were finishing each other’s sentences. The next minute he packed his bags. Now I am twenty-two years old and afraid I will never find the one.”

Waiters came out carrying ignited baked Alaskas. Sparklers on the desserts fizzled, and a faint smoky odor filled the air.

“I went to my parents’ house,” said Darlene “Big mistake, they packed me off to the glaciers to have fun—”

Ginger did not want to spend one moment of this week comforting someone else. She folded her napkin, stood up. “Well,” said Ginger, “I hope you have a grand time.” Then she turned and walked across the room. The ship was approaching the first glaciers. Sliding down the mountains the ice was rushed and utterly still. The glacial ice was pale blue and huge pieces drifted by, like the ruined bones of a giant. She watched the pale bones of ice float by her and wondered when she would forget her name.

Her awareness had been her great gift: of the best hour to meet the lonely, of the hairstyle that would make her look most innocent, of the raised eyebrow that indicated a person’s longing, and of course, the moment when she knew that what a person owned would belong to her. Sitting on a train, she would feel the money, a roll wrapped around her hip, ride the click of the train along the tracks. She sometimes tried to imagine what freedom could feel like, for in its place was an immediate, dangerous urge to chain herself to another. She wanted to be the imposters she claimed to be: the lost cousin, the secret aunt, the high school classmate, the one who had loved from afar. When she acted as these people, she conjured up the feelings she believed she would have; she enjoyed her suckers’ gratitude. They saw some goodness in her, and as the night deepened, she sometimes believed she saw their reflections in the dark train windows, sad, unholy ghosts in the glass.

There was a knock on her door at ten A.M. It was the girl from dinner. “Remember me?” she said. “I’m your seatmate. I wanted to go to the chocolate buffet.” She clutched her own hands fiercely. “Who wants to gorge on chocolate alone?”

It was the tyranny of the normal, the attempts of regular people to energize their lives. It was ten in the morning and she could hear the rapid footsteps of the other passengers as they rushed to fill their mouths with sweetness. The girl was insistent and Ginger found herself in the long, winding line. All of the passengers appeared to have risen for this experience. To maintain order, a waiter walked through the crowd, doling out, with silver tongs, chunks of milk chocolate to eager hands. Another waiter, dressed as a Kodiak bear, was offering cups of hot chocolate spiked with rum. Many of the passengers had dressed up — in loose-fitting sweatsuits, draping shirts — to celebrate the impending gluttony. There was a radiant excitement in the air.

Darlene was chatty. “After this I go on a diet,” the girl said. “A major one. Celery and water for weeks—”

Ginger knew, suddenly, that she herself would never go on another diet. She pressed her hands to her cheeks, her lips, feeling a terrible fierce love for her body. She wanted all the chocolate, fiercely. All. She moved quickly, placing truffles, chocolate-dipped potato chips, macaroons, chocolate torte, mousse, fudge on her tray. She was so hungry she was in pain.

When they sat down, she looked at the girl and she wanted to convince her of something; she wanted to shout into Darlene’s ear.

“I’ve had better than this,” she said. “1968. The Academy Awards party at the Sheraton. Truffles everywhere. I said I was a waitress. I said in my off-hours I was working for Montgomery Clift’s mother, who was dying of cancer, and could they please contribute to a cancer fund—” She paused. “They were a nice bunch. Generous. I actually have a high opinion of mankind—”

“Did anyone get mad at you?” asked Darlene.

“Mad?” asked Ginger.

“When they realized that you had taken their money—”

Ginger rose halfway in her seat. “Why would I care?” asked Ginger. “Look. You go to a regular job. They tell you what you’re worth. Or Warren. You love him and he leaves you and you feel like you’re nothing at all. Darling, I don’t have to tell my worth to anyone.”

Darlene looked down. The longing in the girl’s face was like a bright wound.

“What was so good about him anyway?” asked Ginger.

“He said my eyes were pretty,” Darlene said. “He also liked listening to the Cherry Tones. He liked to put his hands in my hair—”

This was the material of love? “So fool him into loving you.”

“How?” Darlene stared, desolate, at slices of chocolate cake so glossy they appeared to be ceramic.

“What did he want? Pretend to be it,” said Ginger.

“He wanted a million dollars.”

“So say you’ve won the lottery,” said Ginger. She bit into a truffle. “But I didn’t.”

“No one knows what they want until you show them.”

Darlene’s face was flushed, excited. “But I want him to love the real me—”

“Who do you think you are?” said Ginger. “No one. We all are. That’s what I do, notice no ones—”

“I’m not no one,” said Darlene, huffily. “I come from a nice suburb in San Diego. My father is a successful pediatrician—”

“So? That’s all temporary,” said Ginger. “But the noticing, that’s yours.”

She had never allowed herself weakness, never told anyone how it felt to walk into a new city, how she chose her new name just as the train slowed down. Everyone rushed by, gnarled and worn down by the burden of thwarted love; she was free of that, new. She would wash up in the station bathroom and walk out, erased of her secrets: the fact that everything she did with a man was faked, so the only way she could feel pleasure was to give it to herself; the fact that her broken right hand had healed crooked because she couldn’t afford to see a doctor to fix it; the fact that she often ate alone on holidays. In empty coffee shops on Thanksgiving, Ginger looked at the food on her plate, and she knew a strange, burning love for the things the world offered her, real and surprising, again and again.

Evelyn and Ginger rented a room in a Salvation Army and Evelyn began to weep. She curled up on the hard, stained mattress and cried so hard she screamed. Ginger sat beside her, a hand on her shoulder. Sometimes, she had an urge to laugh. Other moments, she wished she could put her hands around Evelyn’s throat and strangle her. She was shocked by the private nature of her emotions, and by the fact that Evelyn seemed to believe she was comforting her.

During the day, they walked down Hollywood Boulevard, trying to decide what to do. Their breath smelled, darkly, of bananas. In the light, Evelyn talked rapidly; they both listened with hope to the sound of her voice.

“We will be cigarette girls,” Evelyn announced one afternoon.

They walked into sixteen bars before they found one that had jobs for both of them. Every night the two of them strode in wearing black tights and rhinestone loafers, selling cigarettes to heavy, sad-looking men with liquored breath.

Once, Evelyn told Ginger that she tried not to be afraid for five minutes a day. She was impressed that Evelyn could identify when she was afraid, for her own fear floated just outside her skin, like a cloud; she experienced nothing but a heavy numbness. She watched her sister closely, trying to catch her in those precious five minutes when she was clearly not afraid. In those five minutes, Evelyn owned something mysterious, and even the claim of it made Ginger ache to have what she had.

At home, Evelyn’s grief metamorphosed into a bloodthirsty envy of the loved, the parented. She wanted their expensive possessions: the jeweled brooches, the feathered hats.

One night, she leaned close to a man clad in a velvet jacket and said, in a husky, unfamiliar voice, “I have a baby at home.”

Ginger, walking by with her tray, stopped.

“He is sick,” Evelyn said. “Bad stomach. He needs operation. Look. Please.” She brought out a wrinkled photo of some stranger’s baby. His mouth was open in anguish. “I need just ten more dollars — he cannot eat—”

“All right,” he said. He dug into his pocket and handed her a bill. His face was haughty with a perplexing pity, and Ginger stared at it, awed.

Later, she walked with Ginger down the sidewalk and smoothed the bill, like green velvet, in her hands. “I have a baby at home,” she said, laughing. She walked down the street, looking down the crowds of people walking down the street, lifted her hands and said, almost gently, “Fools.”

The next morning, Ginger sat in her cabin, looking through the nine photographs that she owned. They were souvenirs from fancy occasions, set in cardboard frames so old they felt like flannel. She had kept them because she liked the way she looked in them, as though she had been enjoying herself.

She heard a knock at the door. It was that girl. “I wondered if you wanted some company. Can I come in?” the girl asked.

Darlene was dressed in imitation of a wealthy person. She wore a sequin-trimmed cashmere sweater that Ginger believed she had seen in the cruise gift shop, a strand of pearls, and a pink velvet blazer. Her shoulders were thrust stiffly backward, giving her the posture of a rooster. The girl’s earnest quality shone through her garb like the glow of a light bulb through a lampshade.

“Who are you?” asked Ginger.

“I am his dream.”

“No,” said Ginger. “Don’t try so hard. Wear your usual and add an expensive piece of jewelry. Make him guess why.”

Darlene shrugged off her blazer and stepped forward too purposefully, like a salesgirl trying to close a deal.

“I can buy you a Rolls Royce,” she said, her voice too bright, to the air.

“No, no! Just hint that you went on a trip to — Paris. The four-star hotels have the best sheets. Nothing he can prove,” said Ginger.

Darlene looked at the photos laid out.

“So who are these people?” asked Darlene. “Fill me in.”

Ginger stood up and picked up a photo. “Here I am on New Year’s Eve, 1965,” said Ginger. “The presidential suite at the Century Plaza Hotel.” She still could see the way the pink shrimp sat on the ice beds, as though crawling through clean snow. “I lit Frank Sinatra’s cigarette,” said Ginger. “I lent my lipstick to Marilyn Monroe.” She remembered the weight of the sequined dress against her skin, the raucous laughter. “Don’t I look happy?” she asked.

“I would be happy,” said Darlene.

Ginger’s mind moved in her skull and she felt her legs crumble. She grabbed hold of a chair and clung to it.

“Whoa! Are you okay?”

She grasped Darlene’s hand and felt her body move thickly to the bed.

“What happened? Should I call a doctor?”

“No,” said Ginger sharply. “No.”

She let Darlene arrange her into a sitting position, her feet up on the bed. Her arms and legs fell open in the obedient posture of the ill. The girl got her a drink of water from the tap and Ginger sipped it. It was sweet.

“Thank you,” Ginger said.

They sat. Ginger picked up another photo. “This was when I met the vice president of MGM and had him convinced I was a duchess from Belgium—”

Darlene frowned. Ginger realized that it was the same picture she had just described. “They were all at the party,” she said, quickly, “Sinatra and Marilyn and duchesses. It was in Miami. Brazil. The moon was so white it looked blue—”

Darlene looked at her. “I wish I could have been there,” she said. She reached out and briefly touched Ginger’s hand.

Ginger looked down at the sight of Darlene’s hand on her own. At first, the gesture was so startling she viewed it as though it were a sculpture. Then she could not look at Darlene, for Ginger had tears in her eyes.

When Evelyn and Ginger began to lie, the world broke apart, revealing unearthly, beautiful things. They began with extravagant tales of woe: deformed babies, murdered husbands, terminal illnesses. They constructed Hair-Ray caps for bald men, yarmulkes with thin metal inside so that in the sunlight the men’s heads would get hot and they would think they were growing hair. They bought nuns’ habits at a costume shop and said they were collecting for the construction of a new church.

She remembered particularly one scam in which she wandered through the cavernous Los Angeles train station with a cardboard sign declaring: HELP. MUTE, HALF-BLIND. When strangers came up to her, she wrote on a chalkboard that had chalk attached to it on a string: HELP ME FIND MY SISTER OUTSIDE. She handed the stranger, usually an elderly lady, her purse, an open straw bag. She let the stranger guide her out the door and carefully fell forward so that an envelope inside the purse fell out. Ginger did not pick it up. Then there was Evelyn, running forward, yelling, “Violet!”

Evelyn looked in the purse and said, “Where’s your money?”

IN THE PURSE, Ginger wrote.

They looked at the kindly woman holding the purse. “Did you take my blind sister’s money?” Evelyn yelled; that was Ginger’s cue to weep.

“I didn’t,” the hapless stranger would protest, but there she was, holding the purse, with a blind mute weeping beside her; they could get ten, twenty, thirty dollars out of the stranger. When the sucker left, Evelyn would walk Ginger around the corner and hug her.

“Good, Violet,” she said.

“Thank you,” said Ginger, feeling the solidness of her sister’s arms around her, and she closed her eyes and let herself breathe.

When Ginger woke up from her nap the following afternoon, she did not know where she was. The dark afternoon light streamed through the mint blue curtains. She shivered and sat up. She flung open a drawer, looking for clues. The room felt as though it were moving. The room service indicated that they were on a ship. Where were they going? She flung open her curtains and saw mountains covered in ice. Her mind was a crumpled ball of paper. She stood up, abruptly, as though that would straighten her thoughts. The phone rang.

“How are you feeling? Do you want to go to the dinner tonight?”

Her heart slowed at the naturalness of the question, at the caller’s belief that Ginger would continue this conversation. She remembered that they were on a cruise to Alaska. She also remembered that the girl had said something kind to her.

The room was decorated to flatter the passengers into believing they were traveling in opulence. There were plaster Roman columns, painted gold, topped with bouquets of roses. The waiters’ jackets were adorned in rhinestones that said: Alaska ’03. Ginger kept thinking about what the girl had said the night before — that she had wanted to be at the party that Ginger had attended. Ginger wanted her to say more nice things about her life. Outside the large glass windows, the water and sky, black and clear, surrounded the ship.

Tonight, Darlene’s hair was slicked up into a topknot and shone, a metallic blond, in the light. Her eyelids gleamed blue, unearthly.

“How are you?” asked Ginger.

“I just want to say... I am someone,” said Darlene. She looked dazed. “I am going to graduate with a B average in communications.” She sat down. “Listen.” She closed her eyes. “I left a message on his answering machine. I said, I’ll do anything. Let me. I’ll change.”

“What?” Ginger asked, alarmed.

“I tried to do what you said,” she said. “I know how to fool him. I’ll keep calling him. I’ll be what you said, generous, you’re right, I have been selfish—”

“No,” said Ginger. “That’s not what I meant—”

The girl stared at her with her reptilian eyes. “Then what do I do?” she said, and her voice was hoarse. “Tell me, what do I do?”

Music exploded from a band gathered near the stage. The audience clapped along. “Let’s hear where everyone’s from, all at once!” the cruise director called. The room rang with hundreds of voices. Los Angeles. Palm Springs. Ottawa. Denver. Orlando. New York. ‘Welcome aboard!” the cruise director called. “Time to relax. Shake off those fancy duds. We want to make you all a deal. We need a pair of pants. Someone take off a pair! We’ll give you fifty dollars! Come on, you’ll never see these people again in your life!” Ginger did not know what to tell the girl, and the sorrow in her eyes was unnerving. Instead, Ginger turned her attention to the stage. She used to love crowds, the way the people in them became one roar, one sound. But now, for the first time, all the people appeared vulnerable to her. Passengers drifted onto the stage, performing various tricks: singing “God Bless America,” attempting to juggle, dancing the rumba. They wanted to take off their pants in front of each other or scream out the names of their home cities; they were confused about their place in the world, and they wanted to be told that they did not deserve it. They had everything in common with her.

Yet everyone on the stage also looked pleased to be up there, happy to be briefly bathed in light. They smiled at the sound of cheering, their faces simple in their hunger for recognition. She did not know what to tell Darlene, and suddenly she envied everyone on the stage. She wanted to be with the others, to have a talent, to simply stand in the clear white light.

Ginger raised her hand. The emcee called on her, and she made her way to the stage. The lights glared hard and white in her eyes. Clutching her purse, she felt the weight of her money in it. “Passengers,” she called. They stood like sad soldiers before their futures.

“My name is Ginger Klein and I’m going to make you rich. Give me a dollar,” she called. “Everyone. A dollar.”

They dug into their pockets and a few brought dollars out. She enjoyed watching them obey her. But what was the next step?

“Catch,” she called.

She reached into her purse and pulled out a handful of bills. She threw them into the spangled darkness. There were screams of disbelief, laughter. She dug in her purse and tossed out more. The passengers leapt from their seats and dove for the money. They were unhinged, thrilled, alive. Their screams of joy blossomed inside her. Her purse grew lighter and lighter.

After a while, the emcee strode onto the stage and gently moved her off the stage. “Thank you, Ginger Klein!” he yelled. “Best talent of the night, huh?” She paused, wanting to tell them something more, but did not know what it would be. Applause thundered in her chest; she had, somehow, been successful. She walked slowly down the stairs, looking for Darlene. “Darlene,” she said, softly, then louder. “I’m here.”

She did not see her. Ginger imagined how the girl would walk, carelessly, off the ship by herself at the end of the week. Darlene would join the living pouring toward the shore, clutching her souvenir ivory penguins and Eskimo dolls, going to her future boyfriends and houses and lawns and exercise classes and book clubs and golf games. “Darlene,” she said, wanting to walk down the ramp with her, shading her own eyes against the dazzling sunlight, gripping Darlene’s arm.

Sometimes, Ginger could hear Evelyn laughing in her sleep, a harsh, broken sound, and she touched her shoulder, trying to feel the joy that her sister could experience most fully in her dreams. During the day, Evelyn talked about ordinary people, the loved and loving, with too much scorn; Ginger knew that her sister wanted her life to be like theirs. She believed that Evelyn wanted to get rid of her.

One evening in the bar, Evelyn was talking to a man who claimed to work in the movie industry. His hands jabbed the air with the hard confidence of the insecure. He gazed at Evelyn as though he could see a precious light inside of her, and Ginger watched Evelyn’s shoulders tremble, delighted, under his gaze. She told him offhand, that she was an orphan. He leaned toward her and took her hands in his.

“I’ll take care of you,” he said.

Evelyn went home with him that night. The next day, she met Ginger at their room and said, “I am going to go live with him. He loves me and likes the fact that I have no family.” She paused; her face was relieved. “You will have to be a secret.”

Ginger looked into Evelyn’s eyes and saw that this was the most truthful statement she had made in her life. Her own response was the most deceitful. She nodded. “All right,” she said.

Evelyn packed her suitcase and was gone, leaving only a lipstick the color of a rose. Ginger waited. Each morning, she put on a new costume, applied Evelyn’s lipstick, and murmured the same false pleas to strangers. Ginger made more money without Evelyn. Strangers could see a new emptiness in her eyes that touched them. After two weeks, she tried, briefly, to find Evelyn. She stood outside the walls of the movie studios, waiting to see the man. Her search paralleled her fantasies of what Evelyn would desire; she waited outside of expensive restaurants, wandered through fancy clubs, but as she rushed past the crowded tables, the patrons’ faces bloomed up, monstrous, unknown.

It was three weeks before she saw Evelyn again, at the palisades overlooking the Santa Monica beach. Evelyn walked toward Ginger with a curious lightness in her step. She covered her mouth when she laughed. She flicked her wrist at the end of a sentence, as though trying to toss away her words.

“He loves my hair,” Evelyn said. “He loves my laugh. Listen.”

The sound made Ginger cold. It was difficult to stand straight; the ground was rising like slow, heavy waves.

“You look well. I have to go,” said Evelyn. She backed up, as though fearful that Ginger would grab onto her. Then she stopped and pulled a small red purse from her pocket. “Here,” said Evelyn. She thrust out a purse. “It has two hundred dollars.”

“No,” said Ginger, stepping back.

She felt her sister shove the purse into her hands and press her fingers around it. ‘Just take it. Here.”

Evelyn quickly ran toward the bus stop. Ginger understood that this would be the last time she saw her. It would be Ginger’s own decision to move and not tell her sister where she was going. She sat down for a long time after the bus had pulled off, eyes closed, imagining that the wide blue sky, the gray elephantine palms would be gone when she opened them. When she looked again, the world was still there; Ginger left the purse on the bench and started walking.

The next morning, when she woke up, she did not remember how the crowd had buffeted her like an ocean, how she had finally found a man in a maroon uniform who helped her find her room, but her legs were weak, as though she’d walked a great distance, and her mouth was dry from calling out Darlene’s name.

She was trembling, as though she were extremely hungry. She knew what she wanted to do. She wanted to buy a present for Darlene. She wanted to do this simple action: go into a store, select a gift for her, and buy it. That was all. Ginger stood up, wearing the same dress she had the night before, faint with the scent of smoke and alcohol, and walked slowly to the gift shop.

There she stood, surrounded by the store’s offerings: the butterfly-sequined blouses, the china statues of noble wildlife, the authentic replica Eskimo fur hats, the jars of glacier-blue rock candy.

“May I help you?” the girl at the counter asked.

Ginger selected a large opal brooch set in a gold snowflake. It was three hundred dollars.

“Beautiful taste,” the salesgirl said.

“Hey,” said a voice. It was Darlene. “I’ve been looking all over for you.”

The girl stood before her. Ginger put down the brooch.

“Are you all right?” asked Darlene. “Who’s that for?” she said, glancing at the brooch.

Ginger looked at her. “You,” she said.

“That will be three hundred and fifteen dollars and seventy-three cents,” said the salesgirl.

Ginger put her hand into her red velvet purse. There was nothing in it but the silk lining. She shook out her purse. Now she had one dollar and thirty-seven cents.

“I have no money,” she said, softly.

“Is it in your room?” the salesgirl asked.

“This is all I have,” Ginger said.

She pushed her hand deep into the purse, feeling its emptiness. Her coins fell onto the floor. “You don’t have to buy me anything,” said Darlene.

The lights were too bright, as though someone had turned them all on at once.

“I want to buy it,” said Ginger. “Don’t you understand? I want to.”

She stood, swaying a little, aggravated that Darlene did not recognize her goodness. Darlene squinted at her, as though Ginger had begun to disappear.

“What are you looking at?” she asked Darlene. She lurched toward her. “What?”

“Hold on,” said Darlene, looking at the salesgirl. “I’ll be right back.” She backed up and began to hurry down the hallway.

“Where is she going?” asked Ginger. She stepped toward the door. Then Ginger went into the hallway and began to follow her.

An elderly couple floated toward her. The woman wore a white brimmed sunhat and the man wore a camera around his neck. “Thief,” Ginger whispered. She passed the maid clutching armfuls of crumpled sheets. “Thief,” she said. The maid turned around. Ginger began to walk onto the deck, the sunlight brilliant and cold on her arms. She staggered through the crowd in their pale sweat suits. “Thief!” she yelled. She believed one side of her was becoming heavy. Her heart banged in her throat. Her voice was flat and loud. She heard the jingle of ice cubes in people’s drinks. “My money!” she yelled. Her voice was guttural, unrecognizable to her. “Give me my money! “

The girl was running up to her.

“Thief,” she yelled.

The girl blinked. “What?” she asked.

“Thief,” said Ginger. She wanted to say the word over and over. Ginger’s face was warm; she was exhilarated by the act of accusation. She had forgotten the girl’s name. It had simply disappeared from her. “I know who you are.” Her knees buckled. The girl grabbed her arm.

“Call a doctor!” the girl yelled. “Quick.”

The ocean was moving by very quickly, and Ginger stared, unblinking, at the bright water until she was unsure whether she was on the deck looking at the water or in the water looking up at the light.

The girl’s firm grip made her feel calmer. Ginger did not remember her name, did not know who this friend was, did not know who had loved her and whom she had loved. She leaned toward the glaring blue world, the water and ice and sky and she felt as though she were part of it.

“You’re not what you say,” murmured the girl. “I don’t believe you. You’re not a swindler. You’re a nice old lady. It was all a joke, wasn’t it—”

Ginger breathed more slowly and clutched the girl’s arm. She saw everything in that moment: saw the trees on the shore giving up their leaves to the aqua sky, the ocean shimmering into white cloud, and the passengers’ breath becoming rain. She felt the vibrations of the ship’s motor in her throat. She stood, with the other passengers, looking. Through the clear, chill water, the ship moved north.