“Wayne Christopher,” the woman says. “You put that thing back where you got it.”
Baring his teeth at Olivia, the boy shoves the otter back onto its shelf, deep behind the other animals. His mother pulls him out of the store, scolding. Olivia goes to the shelf and digs through the animals until she’s found the otter, a glossy brown thing with deep, live-looking eyes. “I want him,” she says, holding the toy against her chest.
There’s no way Tessa can afford the otter. She’s sure it must cost fifteen dollars at least. But she doesn’t feel like arguing about it. What she wants is to get outside and put on her new flip-flops. She glances around the store and takes Olivia’s hand. Nothing is going to make her drop the otter. Tessa leads her toward the door, through a group of women in sun visors, past the racks of magnets and postcards, then out onto the sidewalk.
Olivia glances back over her shoulder toward the store. “Hey,” she says. “Stop.”
Tessa pulls her along. Without a word, they walk toward Pier 39, Tessa still barefoot, the new flip-flops in a plastic bag in her hand, the broken pumps forgotten somewhere inside the store. When they’ve gone two blocks, Tessa sits down on a bench and puts on the flip-flops. They feel so much better she wants to cry. Olivia looks down at the otter she’s still holding in her arms.
“You made me steal him,” she says.
“No, I didn’t,” Tessa says. “You stole him all by yourself.”
Olivia draws her eyebrows together. “You made me leave while I was holding him.”
“You could have dropped him,” Tessa says.
Olivia says nothing, looking down at the otter. Tessa feels a kind of triumph.
“It’s time to go now,” she says. “We have to go see the sea lions.”
“I have to put him back,” Olivia says.
“No, you don’t. You said you wanted him. Now you have him. Give him a name or something.” Tessa stands and puts a hand on the back of Olivia’s neck. “Let’s go,” she says.
“You’re pinching me,” Olivia says, squirming out of her grasp. She hides the otter under her jacket and holds it there as they make their way down the wharf.
The flip-flops do the trick. It’s crazy how much better Tessa feels. She could walk for miles, for hours. Olivia trots beside her, trying to keep up, the otter concealed beneath her jacket. She keeps glancing back in the direction of the store as if someone might still come after them. Tessa knows she should be worried about what Olivia will tell her mother, and what Gayle will believe. But she almost
wants
Olivia to tell her mother. It feels good to know she’s made Olivia do something her parents would punish her for. This is not right, she knows—not the way to take care of a six-year-old. There’s no time to think about it, though; the Devvie has filled her with shimmering urgency. They need to see the sea lions and think about lunch and maybe she should take a Sallie. There’s nothing quite like a Sallie after a Devvie, that lucent pink infusion that makes her almost come, every time. They’ve spent hours doing this, she and Kenji. At first it was just on Sundays in the Arboretum, but after they quit their jobs at Oracle they started doing it every day. One Devvie, then a Sallie, then another Sallie, and another Devvie. Then the feeling of each other’s bodies. It’s better than Ecstasy, cheaper than meth. She wasn’t going to do it today, not both, not even a Devvie, but now that she’s started maybe she should go ahead and take the Sallie.
Pier 39 is teeming with parents and children and teenagers and cops and vendors. There’s the smell of hot dogs, waffle cones, saltwater taffy. Above the accordion music and children’s shouts, Tessa can hear the frantic braying of sea lions. Olivia should be loving this. Instead she’s looking anxious and pinched, her hand cold in Tessa’s. They make their way down to the end of the pier, where families have gathered at the railing to watch the sea lions down in the bay. They lie on wooden floats in a protected cove, hundreds of them, molasses-brown, their glossy bodies heaped upon the floats and upon one another. They smell like elephants in the zoo. Fat with fish, they drowse in the sun or crow at the tourists, their faces small and canine. Spoiled, Tessa thinks. Tame. Hardly even animals anymore. Olivia sidles up to the railing, staring. Behind her there’s a free spot on a bench. Tessa sinks into it, stretching her legs out in the sun. It’s too hot for Kenji’s jacket now. She takes it off and holds it on her lap. She cannot close her eyes to feel the crescendo of her buzz, as much as she wants to. She has to watch Olivia.
The Devvie surges in her, flushing her cheeks, and she concentrates on the dark brush of her niece’s ponytail. Olivia’s sea-green ponytail holder matches the green edging of her socks. She is a child cared for in great detail. Tessa likes the sound of that in her mind:
cared for in great detail.
She wonders what Olivia would look like if she were
her
kid, if Tessa were the one responsible for raising her. Worse, maybe. No matching ponytail holder, no cute windbreaker. But she’d be happier, Tessa’s sure of that. She wouldn’t be worrying about everything she ate and everything she might step on and this rule and that rule. She’d be a girl, a little girl, not a tiny cramped adult.
Olivia seems completely absorbed in the sea lions now, ready to stand there at the railing for a long time. Long enough, maybe, for Tessa to do what she wants to do. She works a hand into the pocket of Kenji’s coat. There, like a promise, is the pillbox, the Sallies waiting inside. She flips the top and slides one out. The smoothness of it. The regularity of its six corners. She lays it on her tongue to taste the sweet coating before she swallows. Olivia crouches at the railing now, poking a finger through the wooden slats. Beside her, other children scream and laugh and point.
Tessa closes her eyes, letting the sun come down upon her. She can feel the waves of the Devvie still breaking over her, the flutter in her chest that means it’s working, and it’s lovely, and it’s making her lovely and gone. The Sallie will take a little while to work, but when it does work, what joy. She will sit here and wait. She will let her niece watch those braying dogs of the sea. But she can’t sit still or get comfortable, and she can’t help thinking about what they’ll have to do next, and after that, and after that, and she can’t help thinking about Gayle back at the hotel, her sister, who seems so far from her now.
She opens her eyes. Olivia’s pulling on her hand. “Stand up,” she says.
“What is it?”
“I have to go bathroom.”
“Right now?”
In answer, Olivia presses a hand between her legs.
“Okay, okay,” Tessa says. When she stands, her vision crowds with blue sparks. She steadies herself against the bench. “We’ll find one,” she says. “Come on.”
They weave through the tourists, looking. Olivia’s mouth is pursed with the effort of holding it in. Tessa keeps forgetting what they’re looking for—not ice cream, they’ve had that, not the sea lions, not souvenirs. She sees a line of girls and women extending from a door and suddenly she remembers, but this is not the bathroom, it’s a fudge shop. She looks for signs and finds none. She asks a small woman with a broom and dustpan, but the woman shrugs and says, “No speak.” Olivia is dancing now, making urgent noises in her throat. Finally, coming around a corner, they find it: the women’s bathroom, a blue door and then a long silver cavern of stalls. Olivia breaks away from Tessa and locks herself inside one of them.
Tessa takes a stall nearby and closes the door behind her. She leans against the door, trying to slow her breathing. She doesn’t have to pee. What she wants is to feel that Sallie. If she can get it, just the beginning of it, right here alone in the stall, it will be perfect. She will receive the shock of it in her groin, the tightening heat of it in her belly. She puts Kenji’s jacket on again, trying to think about being in bed with him when this day is over. Instead she imagines Henry with his hands on Gayle. His broad white face, his small damp mouth. The chalkdust smell of him. She imagines him panting and sweating, whispering equations to stave off his orgasm.
Tessa sits down on the toilet and puts her head in her hands. From all up and down the row of stalls comes the roar of flushing, the banging of metal against metal, the raised voices of mothers and children. What would her own mother think if she saw Tessa now? Sometimes it almost seems better that she died when she did, when Tessa was four. Tessa remembers her mother playing with her in a kiddie pool, holding her on her knees as Tessa splashed. She’s sure she remembers this, though Gayle always said she only
thought
she remembered it because they had a picture of it. It was one of the photographs they’d had in their secret closet altar, back in their room at home. They also had a pair of their mother’s dancing shoes, silver; an old pink plastic hairbrush with strands of her hair; an empty wallet with a broken snap; a pair of malachite earrings. For years they kept finding small things of hers around the house, and at night they’d sneak into the closet and add them to the altar. There, crouched in the dark, they’d talk about her in whispers and see who could remember more. Gayle always won, of course.
There were times when Tessa would go into the closet by herself and look at the photos, try on the shoes and earrings, feeling as if that might help her remember something. It was hopeless, though. Tessa could never catch up. And after a while it all began to seem beside the point. As Gayle grew older she seemed to think about their mother less and less. Instead of creeping into the closet with Tessa, she would stay up late with their father in his study. She’d brew weak tea, which Tessa wasn’t allowed to drink yet, and she’d sit on the leather ottoman and talk about what had happened at school or what she’d read in the newspaper that day. Their father would talk to Gayle almost as if she were another adult, asking her opinions and listening to her responses. A few times he even let Gayle come to the political science classes he taught at the university. When Tessa had finally asked him, a few years ago, why he’d never taken
her
to his classes, he’d looked at her with surprise and said he never knew she was interested.
Tessa can feel the Sallie beginning to come on, but it’s coming on wrong because she’s sitting here in a bathroom stall and thinking about the wrong things. The Sallie ices her veins and makes her toes cramp up. She needs some water. She needs money. Her skin prickles cold. Something is happening and she cannot make it stop.
From outside the stall Olivia calls something, words Tessa cannot make out.
Hold on,
she tries to say, but her voice is not working properly. A wave of shudders breaks over her, and then another, and then they keep on coming. She has to get her niece and get out of there. They need to go someplace quiet and alone. She is ready for that. She will open the door on three.
One.
Two.
Three.
But where is Olivia?
Not in the corridor between the line of stalls, and not in the open stalls, and not by the sinks washing her hands or by the dryers drying them. Not hiding under the Changin’ Station or in the utility closet. She must be outside, waiting by the entrance. That is where she has to be. Tessa steps into a blinding crush of sun, a cataract of men and women and children. She looks beside the restroom door, behind the trash can a few feet away, behind the planter with its tiny sick palm. She sits down on the bench beside the palm. Under the surge of the Sallie she can feel the rhythmic thwick of panic in her chest, the wingbeats of an insect. Maybe this is a game.
Ass me no more questions, tell me no more lies.
Tessa goes back into the restroom and makes her way up and down the row of stalls. Women are staring at her, she realizes, giving her looks of concern or fear, pulling their children away. They think she’s crazy, and why not? Her hair is a wind-nest, her jacket a bulky male thing, her shirt half untucked from her tweed skirt, her feet dirty in pink flip-flops.
“Olivia,” she screams. “This is not a joke!”
The noise and bustle of the restroom continue around her. She waits, but her niece does not appear.
She has to look outside again. She shoulders through the door and out into the wind. The fronds of the sick palm tree rustle like paper. What color jacket is Olivia wearing? Is it blue? Purple? Is that her, standing by the rail? No, a different child, an older child. The sea lions. She must have gone back to see them, to wait for Tessa there. How to get back to that place? She remembers a confusion, a frantic search for rest-rooms. Where did they end up? She can hear the sea lions’ sound, their fretful barking, and she follows it through a twist of shops and wooden staircases and restaurant patios, looking for that jacket all the while, the jacket that might have been light blue or lavender or pale green; something green, maybe the dress underneath. She should never have let Olivia go into a stall alone. How could she keep it straight, what you were and weren’t supposed to do? There are things she should be doing now, smart ways of trying to find Olivia. She has to think of what they are. If she could just lie down somewhere, in a cool dark room. But she cannot lie down.
Olivia is not standing by the rail watching the sea lions. Tessa leans forward over the rail, staring into the lapping water. A child, leaning out too far, could fall in. Would anyone notice? Would anyone notice if she, Tessa, dropped herself into that black-blue, if she let herself sink to the bottom?
What about the otter, that toy she made Olivia steal from the T-shirt shop? That must be where she is, in the shop, putting that thing back on the shelf. That can be the only place. She knows where it is. Back in the direction of the cable car. Olivia would have remembered. And Tessa can find it. It’s the only T-shirt shop in San Francisco that has her broken shoes. She slaps along the pier in the direction of the shop, her flipflops threatening to fly off her feet, the rubber thongs cutting into her skin. Get out of her way. She is a woman in a hurry, a person trying to beat fate. She scans the crowds for a glimpse of purple, for a head of tight dark curls, a ponytail, a sea-green ponytail holder. Her sister, sitting in a conference room in a hotel downtown, has no idea what is happening. Perhaps Olivia is headed there right now, running to tell her mother what Tessa’s done. Here’s what Tessa knows: No child of hers would run off into a crowd, lose herself in a strange city.