The Guy Not Taken (31 page)

“What’s a naysayer?” Dawn asked.

“A stick in the mud,” Amber said curtly. She turned to Dora. “Let’s ride.”

•   •   •

“Would you ladies care for anything from the bar?”

Dawn shook her head. “I’m not supposed to drink,” she said.

The waitress raised her eyebrows at Dora. “Oh, nothing for me,” Dora said hastily, and wrapped her arms around herself. Amber had requested a table on the deck, and she and her sister
seemed perfectly comfortable, but Dora was wishing desperately for a sweater.

“Three margaritas, and if none of you drink ’em, I will,” Amber said, and gave a shark-like grin. “I’m on vacation.” Dora held her breath, waiting for the request for ID, but the waitress just saluted the three of them with a tip of her order pad and vanished through the swinging doors into the restaurant. Dora cleared her throat twice before she could get the words to come out.

“I need to use the restroom,” she whispered.

“Oh, right, right,” Amber said, nodding. She’d pulled on her own shredded T-shirt dress, and seemed to be in a jolly mood, perhaps because she’d successfully hijacked Dora, perhaps because there was liquor on the way. “Old people pee all the time. Urinary incontinence,” she said, her voice a touch too loud for Dora’s comfort. “You go ahead.” Dora shot to her feet. She’d walk toward the bathroom, then slip into the kitchen and find a cook or a waitress . . .

“Dawn, you go with her,” Amber ordered.

Dora’s heart sank as Dawn pushed back her chair and slowly stood up.

“Don’t forget your purse,” Amber said, cutting her cold eyes at the item in question.

Dawn sighed, picked up the purse, and trailed Dora to a pair of doors that read “Buoys” and “Gulls.”

In the bathroom, Dora fumbled the lock into place and sank down onto the toilet. She could see Dawn’s pale calves and flipflops, standing motionless in front of one of the sinks. The girl’s voice floated through the thin wooden door.

“I’m sorry about this,” Dawn said.

“Not as sorry as I am,” Dora muttered.

When she opened the door, Dawn was staring at herself in
the mirror. The curved edge of the tattoo was still visible beneath the neckline of her T-shirt dress, and her hair gleamed under the bright bathroom lights as if it had been oiled. Her gaze met Dora’s in the mirror, then slid away.

“Can’t you get her to stop?” Dora asked. Her lips trembled, and she saw herself in the mirror, reflected under the unforgiving light, pale and frail and timid as a mouse. The very look you’d expect from a woman who’d lived forty years with a man in love with someone named Naomi, whose son was checking out of his marriage to dance for teenagers.

Dawn looked down and snapped the ponytail holder that was wrapped around her wrist. “It’ll just be for a few days,” she said. “I think.”

You think.
Dora washed her hands and the two of them returned to the table, where Amber was waiting and three lime-green drinks in salt-rimmed glasses were melting in the sun.

•   •   •

“No sofa bed?” Amber asked, scowling at Dora’s living room, taking in the couch that faced the windows, the small television set, the framed wedding picture of Sam and Kerri, as if she expected a pullout couch to materialize under her furious gaze. After lunch Amber had told Dora to drive them to Target, where the sisters loaded up a shopping cart with what Amber deemed “vacation necessities.” There were bottles of suntan oil, nail polish and nail polish remover, spray cheese and Pringles, three-packs of nylon bikini underwear, nightshirts, sanitary napkins, beach towels, a bicycle lock, a silver-and-blue boom box and half a dozen CDs, wide-brimmed straw hats, an inflatable reflective raft with cup holders built into the armrests, and a pair of hot pink hooded sweatshirts that read “Ventnor.” All of it had been paid for with the credit card Amber plucked from Dora’s wallet with a magician’s dexterity.

“Damn. We should’ve bought that air mattress, Dawn.”

“It’s okay,” Dawn said, setting a few of the shopping bags down on the coffee table. “We can sleep on the floor.” She looked at Dora hopefully. “Do you have sleeping bags? Or extra blankets or something?”

“Well, I’ll take a look, but . . .”

There was a knock at the door. Dora’s heart leapt. Salvation, she thought. Even if it was Jehovah’s Witnesses, or the condo association president inquiring about her dues . . . Two feet from the door, Amber’s voice hissed through the room. “You say anything and you’ll be sorry.”

Dora pulled the door open. Her next-door neighbor Florence Something, one of the Windrift’s few year-rounders, stood in front of her with a smile on her tanned face and a Saran-wrapped paper plate in her leathery hands.

“You’ve got company!” she burbled, peering over Dora’s shoulder to the living room, where the girls, still in their fringed T-shirt dresses, were lounging on the couch. Dawn had a copy of the AARP magazine open in her lap. Amber held the remote control, pointed at the television set sideways (like a gun, Dora’s mind babbled), and was flicking through the channels so rapidly they were a meaningless blur, but Dora could tell that she was listening to every word. “I was baking this weekend, so when I saw you all come out of the elevator, I thought to myself, I thought, Florence, I bet those girls would love some of my magic bars!”

“Thank you,” said Dora. Florence passed the plate into her hands. Dora looked at her, trying to send a message with her eyes.
Help me. I’m in trouble.

Florence just squinted over Dora’s shoulder. “Hello, girls!” she chirped at Amber and Dawn. “Your granddaughters?” she asked Dora.

“Long-lost stepchildren,” Amber drawled.

“What’s a magic bar?” Dawn called from the couch.

“Oh, they’re delicious! My grandkids’ favorite! You start with crushed graham crackers and melted butter . . .”

The telephone rang. Dora jerked toward the kitchen, but Amber was too fast. Uncoiling her skinny body from the couch, she crossed to the kitchen in three long strides, snatched the telephone, and raised it to her ear. “Hello? No, I’m sorry, she’s unavailable at the moment. May I ask who’s calling?”

Dora knew that it had to be Sam. He always called her toward the end of the month, to use up the minutes on his cell phone.

“I’m a friend of your mother’s.” Amber’s voice lifted flirtatiously, while Florence continued to discourse upon the making of magic bars. Dora leaned against the wall with her heart beating like a trapped and desperate animal. Amber tucked the telephone under her chin and flung herself back onto the couch, swinging her legs over the armrest, winking at Dora while she chatted. “No . . . no, a new friend. What?” She giggled. “No, not everyone who lives here’s an old lady.”

Florence made a noise like a cushion suddenly deflating—hmmph!—and shook her frosted-blond hair. She had on one of her matchy-matchy outfits: pale-pink clamdiggers with pink espadrilles and pink lipstick. Around one wrist, she wore a silver charm bracelet with tiny black-and-white photographs of each of her grandchildren. Dora found herself wondering whether Dawn and Amber would have picked her over Dora if they’d seen Florence first and, strangely, found herself feeling both relieved and resentful at the prospect.

“Where in New York? Do you go out a lot?” Amber was asking Sam. Dora gave Amber an impatient look and stretched out her hand for the phone, knowing the girl wouldn’t give it to
her. “Okay, well, nice chatting with ya. Yeah, I’ll tell her you called.” She hung up the phone and grinned indulgently. “Sit down, Dora. Take a load off. Have a magic bar. Rest up. Later, we’re gonna go to the beach.”

“Oh, it’s a perfect evening for that. You’ll get a lovely sunset. Such nice weather we’re having. Unseasonably warm!” Florence burbled.

“You and Dawn?” Dora asked faintly.

“And you, too.” She wrapped her arms around Dora’s shoulders and squeezed the flesh of her upper arm. Hard. “We wouldn’t go anywhere without you.”

•   •   •

It was two o’clock in the morning by the time they made it back to the apartment. Amber and Dawn had confiscated Dora’s cell phone, unplugged the telephone in her bedroom, and, after much debate, decided to line up four dining room chairs against her bedroom door, reasoning that she probably wouldn’t be able to open it, and that even if she did, the noise of the chairs falling would wake them. “Sweet dreams!” Amber called, and Dawn murmured something that sounded like
Sorry.
Dora leaned against the door and listened to the two of them bickering over how to inflate the air mattress that silly Florence had been only too happy to lend them, along with a set of sheets, a travel alarm clock, and another plateful of Magic Bars.

She staggered over to her bed on legs that felt like overstretched rubber bands and collapsed onto her back. The day had been filled with more activity than she normally had in a week: the lunch out, the shopping trip, the sunset on the beach. Then they’d gone back up to the apartment so the girls could take showers and apply frightening amounts of makeup and wriggle into miniskirts and tank tops, then out again, first to a restaurant Amber had found listed in her Zagat’s as having the
best crab cakes on the shore, then to a club, then a club inside of a casino, then an after-hours club, where Dora had sat on a shaky-legged barstool in her clamdiggers and graceless walking shoes, feeling the music pounding through her, burrowing into her bones.

Now that she was finally alone, she forced herself to breathe slowly and think. It seemed unlikely that the girls would kill her—not after Florence had seen both of them, and Amber had talked to Sam on the phone. Still, better safe than sorry. She flicked on the bedroom light and found pen and paper in her bedside table, wondering exactly how to begin. “To whom it may concern,” she finally decided. “I am being held hostage in my own home by teenage girls. Their names are Dawn and Amber. I don’t know their last names.” She listed every detail she could think of—Amber’s necklace, Dawn’s tattoos, their ages (she’d learned that Dawn was eighteen and her sister was nineteen, and that they both had fake IDs). She added her best guesses for height and weight and wrote that they lived in Queens, where Dawn was enrolled in cosmetology school and Amber did “this and that.” She added her name and telephone number beneath the notation “If you find this please call the police.” She made two copies of the note and left one beneath her bedside lamp, where whoever found her body would be sure to see it. There was an envelope that had once contained a power bill in the top drawer of her desk. She slipped the second copy of the letter inside, weighted it down with one of Sidney’s old watches, cracked open her bedroom window, and tossed it out into the night.

•   •   •

“Hey.”

Dora opened her eyes and looked down. She was in her own bed with the covers pulled up to her chin. The sun was shining through the curtains, and she could hear the wind and the waves
outside. It was another lovely September morning on the Jersey shore. Maybe the whole thing had been a bad dream.

“Hey.”

Dora propped herself up on her elbow and saw Amber standing in the doorway with her dingy white purse tucked under her arm. She had declined her sister’s offer of sunscreen the day before, and her cheeks and legs and forearms were a painful-looking orangey-pink.

“Yes?” Dora whispered.

“I can’t figure out your coffee machine,” Amber whispered back.

Dora felt that she was still enveloped in a dream fog as she pushed herself out of bed, walked to the kitchen, measured beans into the grinder, and flicked the machine on.

“Fancy,” Amber observed. Standing barefoot in a neon-green nightshirt, her stiff black hair flattened against one cheek, she smelled of cigarette smoke and liquor. Dawn was still sleeping. The indistinct lump of her body was curled on its side on the air mattress, underneath Florence’s comforter. “You got any creamer?” Amber asked through a yawn.

“Are you going to shoot me if I don’t?” Dora asked on her way to the refrigerator. Amber grinned.

“Nah, I’ll just rough you up a little.” She leaned back against the counter and drew in a hissing breath as she hoisted herself on top of it. “Sunburn.”

“Sorry.” Dora lifted the coffeepot and thought about what would happen if she threw it in Amber’s face and ran for the door. Too risky, she decided, looking into the girl’s eyes, which didn’t seem sleepy at all. She poured two cups of coffee instead.

Amber eased herself off the countertop and sat down on one of Dora’s dining room chairs, wincing as the backs of her legs came into contact with the upholstery. She wrapped both hands
around the blue ceramic mug. “Look,” she said. “If you want to know why we’re here, it’s for Dawn.” Amber’s accent turned “for Dawn” into something that sounded a lot like “fall down.”

She cut her eyes toward Dora’s living room, where her sister was still sleeping, then swallowed a mouthful of coffee, grimaced, and reached for the Wedgewood sugar bowl.

“We’d been planning this vacation for a long time, but then we had to use the money for something else.”

“For what?” Dora asked.

“Not drugs, if that’s what you’re thinking,” Amber said. Dora felt her face flush, because
drugs
had been exactly what she was thinking. “Dawn was pregnant. With Lester Spano,” Amber said, making a face to let Dora know exactly what she thought of Lester Spano. “She thought they were gonna get married or something. I said to her, ‘Dawn, Lester Spano is not who you want to have kids by and spend the rest of your life with.’ Shit, I wouldn’t even go to a movie with Lester Spano. But Dawn, she’s, you know.” Amber lifted her bony shoulders in a you-see-how-it-is shrug. “Romantic or something.”

Her New York accent thickened as she told the story. “So she’s buyin’ little baby booties, she’s knitting mittens, for God’s sake, and suddenly Lester Spano is nowhere to be found, and his cell’s disconnected and his mom says she doesn’t know where he went—she said this to Dawn, and then I went over there and she said it to me, so I knew she wasn’t lying.” Another shrug. “Five hundred dollars. And that was with the sliding scale, and with a bunch of freaks screaming at us. ‘Baby-killer, baby-killer.’ “ She smiled thinly. “You can just bet nobody was screaming at Lester Spano.” Another smile. “I gave ’em his address.” She twirled the sugar bowl in her hands, rattling the spoon against its rim. “So, no more Jersey Shore, except we’d already bought our bus tickets, so I thought, why not? I thought, maybe it would cheer
Dawn up to get out of town. And I knew I’d find us somewhere to stay.” She took another sip of coffee and nodded, satisfied. “I’m good at figuring things out.”