PLAYER Page 2

  “Is your sister, okay?” Mom says, hunching forward.

  “Mom!”

  The conductor will see us and brake. He will see us and stop. But the train doesn’t slow and no one brakes. I glance around, panicking, panicking, but all I see is white. Snow surrounds us. Snow hushes us. Snow will bury us. Who will hear one creaky car? Who will hear the whir of an old engine over the rumble of an approaching train? Who will hear the screams of a 13-year-old girl?

  We rocket up the incline and slam under the gates. The little hairs on my arms stand straight up in my thick down winter coat and my lips burn like I’ve accidentally brush them against hot sauce, the kind Kyle likes with his taco chips when he watches football games.

  I squeeze my eyes shut as bad feelings, horrible feelings, surge inside me. Feelings that this is it. I will never get to dance in Ms. Portman’s ballet recital. I will never graduate middle school. I will never eat a sandwich in the high school lunchroom.

  We fly across the tracks and are airborne for a forever second. The car dips, front wheels slam onto the road with a thud that rattles my bones and the candy cane barriers crash across the flat hood. My eyes pop open, my head swivels, and I stare wide-eyed out the back window as the train thunders down the tracks behind us, sparks flying off its wheels.

  We bump, rattling fenders and thumpy old tires down the decline and rocket toward the line of cars queued on the highway’s opposite lane. Maybe Grandma Berlinger in Heaven said a prayer for us, because we escape. I am flooded with happiness and silly words pop out my mouth. “We can still make ballet!” But then I spot the Wolfe boys crossing the two-lane highway and my breath catches.

  Wyatt Wolfe and his older brother, Easton, wear headphones as they walk along the road a hundred or so yards in front of our speeding car. They are oblivious.

  Wyatt has floppy black hair, a wiry build. We sit together during lunch, play mobile games, and study at the library. Wyatt is my escape from crazy mom and I am his from his angry dad. Wyatt was my first kiss at last year’s mixer. It was a meeting of awkward mouths lasting fifteen or so seconds before we separated – me giggling and him smiling sheepishly, rolling his eyes. When I stare up at the glow stars on my ceiling at night before I fall asleep, I imagine that some day I will marry Wyatt Wolfe.

  Snow falls harder.

  Meaner.

  Wyatt wears a backpack, a thick winter coat, and galoshes that look just like mine. “I got those stupid boots you like,” he said in study hall last week, leaned back in his chair, and stuck his foot out in front of me.

  “We’re twinning!” I extended my leg, and indeed we were wearing the same fleece-lined galoshes. We laughed and shared a look as my heart bumped around in my chest in a weird way.

  Now the Wolfe brothers step out from across the path next to the tracks crossing the line of cars waiting for the train to pass and my heart falls into my boots. “Mom!”

  Easton is three years older than Wyatt, a high school junior, almost a man. He glances up, spots us barreling toward them, and panics, one arm flying in front of his face.

  But Mom doesn’t see because she’s absorbed in her phone.

  “Stop!” I reach between the seats and punch her arm but she doesn’t slow down so I punch her again, harder. “Look!”

  She finally glances up, her shoulders hitting her ears. “Fuck!” She hits the brakes.

  We skid across the snow toward the Wolfe brothers and I scream. We plow into them with a series of sickening, heart-breaking thuds. The brothers bounce off our car, and fly through the air like broken birds.

  “Goddamn!” Mom grimaces, the car screeching until we stop a dozen or so yards away, spinning out on an angle on the side of the road.

  Nausea consumes me.

  Nausea is me.

  I can’t feel my hands.

  I can’t feel my feet.

  I claw at my neck because my throat is trapped in there and I have to get it out or I will suffocate and die. I tear off my seat belt.

  Ruby, her lower lip quivering, points a shaky finger to the tablet on the floor of the car that had just flown out of her hands and smacked me above the eye. She bursts out crying and pukes, yellow liquid burbling out of her lips, spilling down her chin.

  I gag. I push the door open and crawl out, collapsing knees first onto the pavement, my heart bursting out of my thin chest.

  I am not a rickety shed.

  I will survive the storm that blows through.

  Using the car door I pull myself to standing, my legs like noodles beneath me. I stumble forward, my forehead throbbing.

  Easton is laying in a snow bank, cursing. His left leg and right arm splay out, his blood has sprayed random patterns, so red on the white snow. Sirens ring in the distance.

  “Evie?” He grunts. “Evie?”

  I’m clueless what to say, clueless what to do. I stagger past him – so cold, so mean – toward his brother, Wyatt, the floppy haired boy who I love. He lies half in and out of a ditch and I drop to my knees next to him. “Wyatt?”

  Sprawled on his back, his headphones on the ground, a thin, twisted trail of blood trickles out of his nose. He doesn’t answer. One leg lies twisted at an impossible angle, his twinning boot stuck in a snow bank a few yards away. I can’t tell if he’s breathing. I screw up my courage and place a gloved hand on his chest. “Wyatt?”

  He blinks his eyes open and stares up at me, his pupils round, his beautiful pale lips breathing thin, smoky puffs, barely visible in the frigid air.

  “Wyatt? Can you talk?”

  He does not answer.

  “It’s Evie. Can you hear me?” Drum. Drum. Drum. My heart beats so loudly in my ears.

  He blinks.

  I lean and stare into his heartbreakingly beautiful face. Black hair, white skin, full lips. My Wyatt has the face of an angel. “It’s going to be okay,” I lie.

  He blinks.

  Hot tears slide down my cheeks. I need to feel him—no—I need to save him.

  I know then and there that God, and Grandma Berlinger, and anything good in the world that just saved me from that train has put me in charge of saving Wyatt Wolfe. And I wonder, can I save Wyatt Wolfe if I touch him?

  Sirens shriek. People spill out of parked cars and race toward us. The crows circle the field, cawing.

  Hands shaking, I rip off my gloves. I unzip Wyatt’s jacket and place my bare, shaking hand on the soft v-shaped divet where his chest meets his neck. His breath ratchets up, his chest rising and falling unevenly under my palm. “Help’s on its way,” I say. “We can do this. Just like we twinned on the galoshes. Just like we aced history test.”

  His eyes meet mine. Our gazes lock. “You and me? We’ll always be together, Wyatt. We’ve got this.”

  A quirk of a sad smile tugs at the corner of his pale lips. But then his eyes glaze, his lips grow bluer.

  My stomach lurches. “No.”

  I cannot lose him now. We are laughter. We are hope. We are each other’s way out of mean dads and crazy moms. I will life back into him. My life.

  “Stay,” I command, staring into his pretty blue eyes, eyes that are so hazy. My blood warms, my face flushes, tingles zip down my spine. I take his hand in mine and squeeze it. Hard. Just as hard as my need, my want, my intention to make him stay here on this earth. “Stay, Wyatt. Please. Please. For me. For your friend, Evie.”

  But he ignores me. He’s slipping away. He’s leaving me.

  “Stay,” I command. Desperate. “You have to stay.”

  Beautiful, kind, lovely Wyatt Wolfe shouldn’t lose his life on this cold, snowy, mean winter day just by crossing a path. My hand grows cold, then colder, my warmth traveling from me into him.

  His breath billows. “Evie?” he rasps.

  It feels like Christmas and I smile. Healing is working. “Yes! We are doing this! Hold onto me.”

  He smiles. Just like he smiled after he kissed me. We’ve got this.

  Grandma’s owl spoon stomps into my brain.


  Wyatt shudders, and his eyes roll back in his head. His limbs twitch, muffled against the snow. Only now do I see the blood pouring out of the back of his skull, pouring into the snow, the red warmth staining the white cold in angry blotches.

  “No!”

  Paramedics pull me aside. Mom envelopes me. It’s too much. Too close. She pulls my face to her chest, suffocating me. “Don’t look, baby. Please Jesus, don’t look, baby.”

  I struggle to break free, throwing elbows, blindly striking out with fists. “I’m not a baby! Wyatt needs me.”

  “Evie! You’re thirteen. You can’t heal everybody. You can’t fix everything.”

  “You don’t know that!” I burst into tears. “You don’t know anything.”

  “Coding,” one paramedic says.

  They hustle my floppy dark-haired, broken boy to a gurney, then into an ambulance. A paramedic alternates between compressing his chest and breathing into his mouth. The van pulls off, the dull clump of tires on snow. The taillights flash red against the white.

  First responders transfer Easton, a thick brace secured around his neck into an ambulance. He has to pull through. He has to help Wyatt survive this disaster. “Easton, I’m so sorry. We didn’t—”

  “Fuck you,” Easton says as the paramedics slam the doors. The van spits chunks of snow from its back tires as it pulls away.

  A police officer approaches us. “Ma'am.”

  “Yes, Officer,” Mom says.

  I stand in the cold and the snow, blood staining my hands, my coat, my twinning boots.

  Ruby cries, still tucked securely in the car. I want to cry as well but I can’t find the air. Where has all the air gone? I hear a few ‘caws’ and stare at the sky. The crows stop circling the field and fly off for parts unknown.

  I am not a rickety shed.

  Will I survive the storm that blows through?

  2

  Healer

  HEALER

  * * *

  Thirteen years later

  I stand in front of the floor to ceiling windows on the 25th floor in the One Magnificent Mile office on Michigan Avenue, shiver from the chill of the air conditioning, and pull the thin cashmere sweater tighter across my chest. I stare out at the upscale bustling urban scene below me.

  Madame Germaine Marchand sits behind the Louis XIV antique desk in the corner office of Ma Maison Agency. She slides an elegant manicured hand over her short silver bob. “Did you figure out who’s been tampering with your mailbox?” she asks.

  “Not really. Maintenance is putting in another security camera. In the meantime, I rented one at the post office. Anyway, that’s the least of my worries right now. I talked to Mom’s shrink a few days ago. He thinks she’s stable enough to travel.” I stare out the window. To the right traffic is thick on Michigan Avenue, even more congested on Lake Shore Drive, brake lights more solid than flashing. To the left choppy, white-capped waves on Lake Michigan crest far below on this steamy, summer day. I love Chicago. It’s beautiful. It’s my home. And yet I’m ready to shake all the ‘city’ off, and blow out of here.

  “That’s terrific, Evelyn,” she says. “Check mom out of the clinic and take her someplace pretty for a weekend,” Madame says. “A quaint B&B filled with antiques. A parlor where they serve tea with homemade scones and fresh jam.”

  “I rented a lake house in Wisconsin for a month,” I say. “Her doctor said some down time in the country will help her brain reboot.”

  Madame Germaine frowns. “The timing’s not going to work. I have a new client for you.”

  “Time in Wisconsin will do my family good.” I say, hearing the irritation expertly contained in her voice; feel the manipulation in the thirsty vibes radiating off her. “Everyone needs to mix it up once in a while. Foliage. Farms. Even healers need healing. Vacation’s not a dirty word.”

  “Time off with your family sounds like the opposite of healing. Do you ever just take a real vacation?” Madame assesses me behind her expensive, tortoiseshell cat- eye glasses. “Fly off to Rome or Paris or Aruba for ‘me’ time?”

  “Wouldn’t that be a luxury?”

  I used to despise Madame but over the past two years I’ve learned to tolerate her. She’s cold and manipulative, but she’s pushier than usual today. I tune out the faint sound of traffic far below me, tune out Madame, and silently count backwards: Three. Two. One. I open to the intuitive layer that lies beneath the surface. The empathic layer. The layer where I access feelings that belong to other people and sense them in my own body.

  The first emotion I tune into is obvious: disapproval. Clouds of disapproval billow inside me but I know they’re not mine. Madame owns all of that. If I squint I can practically see disapproval roll off her shoulders like a miniature tank.

  She’s not thrilled I’m taking a break from work. And yet, master chess player that she is, she pinches out a smile. “Fall will be a terrific time to take a holiday. You’ll catch the changing colors.”

  “I’m not going in the fall,” I say. “I’m leaving next week. I don’t want to miss out on all the excitement of mosquito season.”

  “They’ll eat you up alive this time of year.” She is brilliant at bargaining. Quiet. Relentless. She could turn her talents to high stakes poker or chess, but chooses to be a madame instead. She has no biological kids that I know of and I suspect this is her way of mothering.

  “Re-think the timing on your vacation, Evie. The new client requesting your services has specific needs,” she says, clicking off her tablet. “His people are not looking for an average escort. We ran his profile through the software and the results indicated that he’d best be matched with someone like you. Someone who heals.”

  I cleared seven figures last year. I’m one of the highest paid escorts in Chicago. I’m twenty-six years old and on a good day I feel like I’m going on forty-six. I need a break before I explode in a million bloody pieces splattering everyone within splattering range.

  Madame Germaine purses her lips and lifts a white 8 X 10 envelope from her desk drawer. This is where she tries to talk me into doing something I don’t want to do. Something that will earn us both more money in a month than most people make in a year. She clears her throat, a tell before she hard sells. But the last two years working as an astronomically-priced escort with a rare expertise has turned me into a decent negotiator.

  “If they specifically requested a healer, Madam, a few other courtesans are excellent with that,” I say. “Scarlett is great with emotionally damaged men. Lily knows how to help those who are physically broken.”

  “Yes, yes. The three of you are a small but potent division within Ma Maison,” she says. “But this client specifically requested you. Sit.” She points to the chair assuming she has schooled me like an expensive, well trained dog. Funny, I could say the same about her.

  “Specialty. Ha,” I say, making my way toward her desk. “Teaching five-year-olds was a specialty.”

  A few years back I was a kindergarten teacher with a Master’s in Education. It didn’t matter how much insight I had into what made people tick—my education left me with staggering student loans and creditors crawling out of the woodwork like determined termites chewing their way through a rotting fence.

  I worked hard. I pulled a fifty-hour week, squeezed out the minimum loan payments every month, along with the last drops of soap from bottles, recycling them for cents on a dollar. I told myself that I was making a dent in my loans when the reality was 90 percent of that went to interest. I told myself I did it to save the environment, because plastic parts killed ocean animals. But the sad truth was I needed every nickel collected because the electric company had this sneaky habit of turning off the electricity on the exact date stamped on the pink notice.

  One day over pudding cups in the teacher’s lounge my new pal, Amelia, third grade teacher and best margarita maker ever, confided she’d started moonlighting as an escort. Not only was she paying her rent in a timely fashion, she was squaring off her c
redit card debt, and hacking away at student loans. “I’ll set you up with my agency, Evie,” she said. “It’s just like dating. You don’t even have to have sex with the guys.”

  “But they want to, right?”

  She licked the remainder of the butterscotch from a spoon. “What guy doesn’t want sex?”

  Being an escort sounded creepy. Tawdry. Dangerous. “Thanks, but I’m going to pass.”

  “I hear the judgment,” she said. “Come on. If you join, I’ll get a commission.”

  “Do I have to buy a three month supply of laundry soap too? No thanks. Everyone does whatever to make ends meet. No judgment. It’s just not for me.”

  But a month later Mom’s insurance company doubled her premiums, stopped paying for half her treatments and a chunk of her pricey prescription drugs. As her proxy, I argued with them over the phone and fired off letters. When none of that made a dent, I scheduled an appointment at their local branch office.

  I took half a day off work, and caught the bus downtown to plead Mom’s case. I wore my most sensible suit, fashioned my long hair in a neat bun, and waited an hour past my appointment time for the adjustor. He drummed his fingers on the particleboard desk and talked nonsensical bullshit for five minutes. He was just an innocent pawn in this difficult situation. He’d do what he could do, but please don’t be angry, he was only the messenger. We stood up and eyed each other.

  “Thanks,” I said. “Anything you can do, I appreciate it.”

  “You got it.” He passed me his card, but it slipped from his hand and fluttered to the floor. I bent to pick it up and upon arising discovered his dick had magically busted out of his zipper. He clutched it in his hand and yanked it to and fro in my direction, a ridiculous look on his turtle face.

  “Ugh.” I gagged, raced out of his office, and tried to delete the ‘squishing’ sound from my brain. I made it home without puking only to find an eviction notice plastered on my door.

  “Aw, fuck.” I peeled it off the threshold, pulling the paint along with it. Not only was I soon to be homeless, but my douche landlord would deduct the ‘property damage’ from my security deposit.