Mary-Ellen ran over the girl. The poor girl; she’s belly-up on the freshly cured asphalt, which shimmers beautifully, is hot to the touch. You could fry an egg on it, and she’s seen the neighborhood kids try. This is a South Florida suburb. Scant evergreens to shield cloudless blue skies, mostly tall palm trees casting anorexic shadows. Curious thing—she isn’t bleeding, this girl. Not actively. Only a blood-stained tear at the knee of her pink tights. Knee scrapes: so common in children she likely acquired it before she was thrown over the white paint strip that separates stopping from going and Mary-Ellen had clearly not stopped soon enough. The girl looks less like she was hit by a car and more like she fell out of an ambitious pirouette with foolish hope in her heart before: screech. The anguished scream of a car breaking. Her black leotard is pristine. Mangled front wheel of the bicycle beside her bore the brunt of the bumper. Fuchsia handlebar streamers like tentacles in the breeze. A well-worn ballet shoe lay footless under the stop sign. She’s as context-less as a music-box ballerina ripped from its spring.
Mary-Ellen hovers over the girl at the intersection and stares at her serene, sun-beaten face. Beyond them, a tidy row of peach-colored houses with novelty mailboxes: pelican, alligator, flamingo, flamingo. She looks left. No mother running toward the girl in her floral housecoat and pink hair curlers. She looks right. No father running toward the girl in his stained undershirt and plaid boxer shorts. Why does she picture suburban couples this way? Her mind no more creative than Central Casting. The girl must have freedom, she thinks. Able to drift in and out of her parents’ line of vision like an eye floater. Let loose from the cul-de-sac, speed demon on a neon bicycle at large, free to carve out a little slice of existence for herself, invent the parameters of a blank summer day. Untethered, unruly. Dirty fingernails and, if Mary-Ellen were to pry her small mouth open, a popsicle-blue tongue. It’s how she might have raised her own child if she hadn’t chosen to remain childless. But to think, it was no choice: her life had been madly careening toward a child, this child, all along. God had parted the sky today, and said, “Woman, ambivalent vessel of life, a child will find you, even if you have to kill it.” The womb wants what it wants.
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Three hours earlier, Mary-Ellen was at the mall, slipping her foot in and out of shoes lined up neatly on the sale rack. There was something abject about them, ugly and yearning out of their boxes. She has a date tonight—also ugly, but she doesn’t mind. She’s fucked her share of hot men. She’s fucked her share of hot women. And now, at forty, she’s ready to sell those shares at a loss and diversify her portfolio. His name is Ray, not short for Raymond. Middle name: Of Sunshine. A third-generation fishmonger raised by hippy stoners.
She loves malls, the perfect smell of them, like pressing your face into a perfumed neck, and that cool whoosh of manufactured air upon entrance. They make her feel optimistic and alive—all this could be yours, malls say, and actually mean it—but also pleasurably dead. She can exit her life as soon as the automatic doors snap shut behind her. Mary-Ellen chose a pair of clean white canvas sneakers to wear with her silk wrap dress because she knows that juxtaposition makes you look interesting. After the cashier rang her up, she walked to the food court, bulky shopping bag banging against the side of a sunburnt leg. She ordered a smoothie and drank it so fast her tongue went numb. Ray called while she was relieving herself in the luxurious privacy of a handicap bathroom stall.
“Confirming six,” he said.
“Yeth,” she said.
“Cute lisp.”
“No, my tongue is frothen.”
“It’s sexy—I like it.”
Mary-Ellen hates when he calls instead of texts. He thinks it’s old school and that anything old school means gentlemanly and not potentially: misogynist, predator, rapist. Something about his voice teases out her New York snobbishness. He’s lazy with his Rs. Doesn’t pronounce the “g” in “ing” words. Maybe it’s a Florida thing. She hasn’t lived here long. Only three months in her late parents’ house, a little ranch-style three-bedroom fit for a young family. What they call a “starter home” on HGTV to stave off middle-class anxiety—as if to say, don’t worry, you’ll soon get richer or, at least, less middle-classer. Enough to buy a bigger house with kitchen appliances that disguise themselves behind custom cabinetry. In the meantime, you’ll have to endure the shameless nudity of your fridge in this cheap appetizer of a house. The domestic equivalent of a potato skins platter at TGI Friday’s.
Mary-Ellen said goodbye to Ray and flushed the toilet. She lifted up her dress and gazed at her pubis for a moment, trying to conjure it into sensuality. Dating, at least, has given her a reason to observe herself through the lens of someone else, which somehow dignifies her image, makes it more three-dimensional. She smiled big in the mirror to find her teeth speckled with blueberry bits from the smoothie. It looked like she had been making out with a pile of dirt.
When she exited the bathroom, a woman with a crusty-eyed baby in a striped onesie hanging off her hip was waiting.
“Are you handicapped?” the mother asked. Mary-Ellen locked eyes with the baby, and it was terrifying to be registered by a thing not yet conscious.
“Are you?”
“I have a baby.” The woman thrust the baby forward as if Mary-Ellen, unconvinced, needed further proof.
“Is your baby handicapped?” Mary-Ellen asked, which felt like the most wrong thing she had ever said.
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The Florida suburbs have an eerie stillness. This one’s far enough away from the ocean that barely a breeze ruffles the trees. The cars seem bolted to their driveways. Everything looks like a prop, even the odd duck, as if it was planted by the HOA to lend a little liveliness to the place, an air of authenticity. Every time a jogger rounds the bend, Mary-Ellen startles. But there have been no joggers between the time she exited the car—has it been a minute or an hour?—and arrived at this unfathomable girl. Where the hell is everyone in this goddamn neighborhood? Any witnesses? Oh, look, a chaos of teenage boys with the smooth tanned skin of popularity speed by on skateboards and BMX bikes. The kind of boys who grip your hair too tightly as you willingly unwillingly fellate them, lips pulled so tightly over your braces they bleed. Triggered is the word. Mary-Ellen on her knees in the backseat of a souped-up Honda Civic. These boys, the little sadists, are supposed to grow up to be murderers, not her. They pass her in a blur, hooting and hollering, either uncaring or oblivious, as if the girl is merely resting after an exhaustive ballet performance in the street.
Her life, she realizes, will soon be neatly demarcated by the before and after of a killing, and this nascent tidiness feels something like relief, her once shapeless trajectory given contours, meaning. She had lived on the Lower East Side of Manhattan for eighteen years, bopping from roommate to roommate to girlfriend to boyfriend to boyfriend to, finally, her own studio on the cusp of China Town. Dilapidated and sunless, but hers at thirty-eight—not as decrepit of an age in New York as it is in Florida, where the sun shines rudely on every wrinkle and dimple and stray facial hair that Edison bulb-lit city bars have the common decency to pretend they don’t see. A whole town committed to not letting you know that you have spinach in your teeth. Where you’re egged on to recklessly live out any delusion of your own making. Where by virtue of your residence you can claim to have something special to offer the world.
Mary-Ellen’s claim was that she was a foodie—and in a city that elevates mere sustenance to art, it wasn’t hard for her to convince herself that she was meaningfully contributing to culture. She can pinpoint a wine’s appellation in the first sip, uses words like “essence” and “undertones” and “airy” to describe whatever foam-dolloped foodstuff she consumes, her palate honed as a server at the Michelin-star restaurant where she took home almost five-hundred dollars a night. When her parents were still alive, she’d call home to brag about some celebrity she had just served. “Oh, wow, Mary-Ellen, that’s incredible,” they’d say. The proximity to luxury and power had given her a false sense of accomplishment. Single and childless, she could afford to splurge on uncomfortable shoes and impractical dresses that she wore to sneak into the discreet parties of a friend of a friend who knew someone New York-important, like a major gallerist or the daughter of a major gallerist. She had never considered that she wasn’t particularly successful until she found herself context-less, like the girl at her feet, in this garishly bright and dreary suburb.
On their first date at a frigid restaurant as cavernous as a department store, Ray asked, “So, you’re a waitress?”
“Not exactly,” Mary-Ellen said. “I worked at a Michelin-star restaurant. In New York.”
“Like the tires?”
“Yes, I’m a waitress,” she said, not interested in translating a foreign language. “But they’re called servers now.”
“Cool. The Carrabba’s on Okeechobee is hiring. My friend Mike is the manager.”
It then dawned on Mary-Ellen that Ray saw her as his equal—and, in what amounted to a cruel awakening, she understood that she was. No more compelling than a man who shucks oysters and extracts pin bones for a living. The only thing to make her special now would be the headline: monster, child murderess. But that, too, is a narcissistic thought experiment in her own importance. When she whittles herself down to the bone, she is an unemployed waitress who ran a stop sign and hit the kind of dull neighborhood debris you’d find in any nameless American suburb: neglected children, runaway dogs, stray cats, orange cones, mailboxes, a duck planted by the HOA. Etcetera, etcetera. Not even worth a blurb so far down on the page it risked being torn off and used to discard a wad of chewing gum.
Before the girl burst out of oblivion, she was on her way to meet Ray at a pier-side restaurant. Drink margaritas as the sun set, turning the sky orange, then pink. Whoop-de-doo. Get out your cameras, idiots. Now she’ll be late. She’ll be in jail. She’ll be hit over the head with a golf club by the father. She’ll be clawed to death by the mother’s acrylic nails. Who wants to witness the promise of a day plunge into the ocean anyway?
◆
She should call 9-11, of course. She should get back in her car and drive away until she disappears, of course. The first option ends in prison. The second option, if she’s caught, ends in longer prison. The choice seems simple yet the wrong one is holding a gun to her head. Unless, that is, this is a crime that a white woman can manipulate into forty hours of community service with a precise bob haircut and a convincing sob. What kind of outfit would her court-appointed lawyer instruct her to wear to elicit pity from a jury? What was the costume of the meek and mild woman these days? When she used to totter home drunk from the bars, the Bowery thinned out of people, she’d enter 9-1-1 into her phone, prepared to press call, which somehow felt as fool-proof as a weapon. Today, at last, she gets to press call, feeling like a child whose mother has finally allowed them to do an adult thing, like pour their own cereal milk, or hit the elevator button in a hotel.
Nine-one-one operator. What is your emergency?
Girl came out of nowhere. Limp in the road.
When the operator asks her what the girl is wearing, Mary-Ellen, for some reason, looks down at herself. Blood splattered on her brand-new sneakers. She searches her face for the source: her nose. The operator asks her to check the girl’s pulse but the operator might as well be asking her to desecrate the Eucharist, not that she’s religious, but it would be profane to taint this holy child with her unholy hands. Is it normal to ask a murderer to lick the wounds of its kill? But she does as she’s instructed. Kneels down on the gravel—ouch ouch hot hot—and places a finger beneath the girl’s jawline, her skin as soft as talcum powder. Predator, prey: a snake locking its jaws around the neck of a kitten. How easy it would be to drag her away. Put her in the trunk. Throw her in the Everglades.
◆
“I’m no good,” Mary-Ellen told her parents when they urged her to apply to grad school—“What about Yale?” her father said, and his starry-eyed belief in her broke her heart—to pursue her artistic talents. Something, anything, to deter her from polishing cutlery into middle-age. A fine illustrator, she had finished at the top of every local art contest in high school and went on to earn her BFA at the state college, where she learned she was a literalist with no aptitude for the kind of ambiguity or metaphor that makes a work interesting. Give Mary-Ellen a face and she’d draw the face exactly as the face and that was it. Her admission was not one of self-loathing but of deep knowing and fearlessness, to admit to herself and the world that she sucked and, in that acknowledgment of her sucking, she was somehow superior, as if she had unlocked the next level of human enlightenment—and see what she did there? To her, giving up was more dignified than continuing to strive, which felt worse than pointless but unseemly, beneath her. Best to cut her losses and wait it out, see if she might arrive at some glimmer of specialness by default or existence. But no. One simply cannot hide under the covers of a desire to be seen; it’s a virus of the soul, latent until it isn’t—and when it isn’t: death, destruction, chaos. So when she climbed the ranks of the restaurant—from hostess to food runner to server to big-name chef’s favorite server, which included fucking him in the broom closet, her bare ass bolstered by a plywood shelf of industrial cleaning supplies—she got all up in her head, developed vague dreams of opening her own little place. Maybe a sleek French-adjacent restaurant in an up-and-coming neighborhood. Then her mother died. Then her father. Then the girl. And, my God, is it not a gift to be finished off by anything other than your own failure?
It’s hard to tell the difference between her pulse and the girl’s. Mary-Ellen’s ears thrum and her vision blurs, as if her head is underwater, but she stills her senses long enough to monitor the girl’s birdlike torso, convex and breastless. It rises and falls ever so slightly, a slow ripple in a quiet lake. Alive, yes, she tells the operator, then hangs up. A braless tit slips out of her wrap dress and she stuffs it back inside. She looks at the girl’s face—road rash on her forehead, lips glistening in the sun—and has the urge to kiss her but instead lays down beside her; her tit slips out again, yearning toward the girl’s mouth. Now eyelevel with the grass beside them, she appreciates how uncity-like it is. So clean and uniform, like a Boy Scout’s fresh buzz cut. A pair of purple athletic shoes suddenly cut through the bright green and, as her eyes scan upward, they fix on the taut body of a woman she recognizes from her Yoga class, but she isn’t certain, because all these millennial suburban moms look alike, bland-faced and ponytailed, their lacey thongs always visible through black leggings in Downward-Facing Dog.
Her phone buzzes in her hand. It’s a text from Ray. “I don’t know you,” it says, an abrupt and unusual accusation, and then she realizes it’s not a statement on her unknowability but an answer to her previous text: “Where do you want to eat after?” But the comma-less version awakens something like faith in her, as if there is still more left to uncover about herself. She has spent months in that house, with its grimy glass-blocked showers and algae-filled pool, grieving her parents, trying to become the kind of person who knows misery well enough to emerge anew with compassion and insight, smiling and beautiful—who’s that sophisticated new woman on the block, the neighbors will say—although good qualities, no matter how hard won, never seem to stick. Then, as if jerked by some unseen hand, the girl stirs to life, revealing a sliver of watery eye, then another, and Mary-Ellen almost laughs. The woman runs toward them shouting, “Alice,” but her cries are soon muted by the cries of an ambulance.
Mary-Ellen plays dead, though she is very hot and thirsty, and nothing about her decision seems amiss, really, as if she’s a victim too, perhaps of a hit-and-run maniac who bolted from his car and left it abandoned in the street, because moving, she fears, will activate the plot of her life, dragging it kicking into the vague and murky after, her future indecipherable, again, as it had always been, when she’d rather just rest there a little while. “One more minute,” she would plead to her parents before bedtime, not to prolong the day but to keep the terror of a new one at bay. She stuffs her tit back inside her dress, tucks a loose wisp of hair behind the girl’s ear. The shouting Yoga woman looms over them, her body, mercifully, blocking the sun. Mary-Ellen is grateful for the shade. She closes her eyes, pretends she is the girl being saved.