Michelle Hoover - Bottomland

I dropped my bag.

“Mrs. Keyes was at me again, complaining about the silver. I told her I’d never cleaned silver in my life. Ellen, she’s the one who does it. But Mrs. Keyes made me try three times over. ‘To learn it proper,’ she said.”

I shook my dress and apron off. Dust from my uniform filled the square of light. Slumped on the bed, I stretched my fingers, rough and red-crusted. I bunched them into fists and stretched them again until my knuckles went quiet.

“She’s terrible,” Myrle went on. “She never lets me stop, not for a minute.”

“Not even a minute?” I asked. Myrle had a look on her face, the kind I’d seen every night for weeks, that worry of hers back for good. There was meat to her now. Keyes must have given her more than the rest of us because she cleaned the house, every scrap.

“It’s not fair,” she said. “I never get out of this place. You’re off every day, working. Out with the other girls.”

“You’ve got Ellen.”

“Sometimes I don’t even know if it’s hot or cold outside.”

“Cold.” I pulled the magazine from her fingers. The pages had curled, but the smiles on those women were just as tight. What kind of Chicago they lived in, I couldn’t guess.

“Esther.” Myrle rested her head on my shoulder. Her smell in the room was larger than it’d ever been, that yeasty smell of bread. “I want to work the garments. I can run a sewer just fine.”

“You never learned.”

“I watched Mother dozens of times.”

“You wouldn’t make an hour.” I stretched my fingers again. Sometimes unbuttoning was too much trouble, and if Myrle was asleep, I lay in bed uniform and all.

Myrle dropped back against her pillow.

“We got a raise,” I said. “Twenty-five cents. So you don’t need to work in a place like that. We’ll have plenty.”

“It’s Mrs. Keyes.”

“Stay put. Every girl here wants your job. And garments, you’re too young unless you lied. Even if you tried it a week, Keyes would find another girl. Then how stuck would you be when you didn’t like it. The both of us?”

“But Esther. ”

“Just today, one of the girls went to the infirmary. Swung her hand and there was a needle. Sarah was her name. I don’t know if she’ll come back.”

Myrle gripped her hands. It happened once, if not today, so surely it wasn’t a lie. Preston liked to tell the story every chance he got. My sister had the best work in the house, the best this side of town, no matter how she whined. Girls could lose fingers too, I should have reminded Preston. And Myrle, she could lose plenty. The way a boy in the street stopped to lace her shoe. Men old as Ray, as Father even, turning to watch her. Always the same men, pretending to check their watches. I showed them what I thought with a thumb to my teeth.

Myrle groaned and I rested my hand on hers. A good inch longer my fingers had been, but not now with my hands so curled and Myrle’s fat enough to make that ring on her finger squeeze.

“I’ll send a letter for you anytime you want. Tomorrow even. That will give you something.”

“They never write back.”

“But they might.”

“But they don’t.”

She closed her eyes. I turned her hand over in mine, laying it palm to palm. Mrs. Keyes, Mrs. Keyes , she complained. From her, the name sounded like hissing. In the mornings, that look on her face. Sleep was all I wanted, a few slow hours. But I couldn’t stop thinking of letters. What she would have written. What I didn’t know about her if I couldn’t read what she sent. When finally her breathing went quiet, I stretched my arm to turn off the lamp, but with those fingers of mine, it took me three tries. Don’t go , that look of hers said. Don’t live. Not without me.

At dinner the next night, Myrle wasn’t in her chair. The girls sat over their plates with fists tucked between their knees, and Dolores didn’t say a word. Across the table, Abigail stared at Myrle’s place as if she’d gotten it wrong. Just an empty yellow plate between a crooked set of silverware, the striped padding on the chair’s back pulling loose from its pins. The chair had nothing to say to us. Charlotte squeezed my knee, but I didn’t look. Why was it my fault, where my sister was? Sick, I thought, and upstairs in the sheets. The way she’d always been.

Later in the front hall, Keyes stopped me. “Haven’t seen your sister, have you?” She stood by the door, peeking out. The noises of the city grew in that alley three times over and the cold leaked through every window. The house could never keep the city out. The hall was narrow, and Keyes stood thick with the smell of baby powder. Daughters by the dozen, she must have thought us, lined up room after room like a carton of eggs.

“She must be upstairs,” I said.

“When I knocked on your door, I didn’t hear a peep.” Keyes patted the pocket of her apron. She frowned and felt the pocket on the other side. Her hand swept over the table in the hall with its dish of lost things — barrettes, rubber bands, and pennies.

That’s when I felt it, the itch in my chest. “What are you looking for?”

“Nothing, nothing.” But it wasn’t nothing. Myrle had stolen the same before, right from Father’s ring. Keyes took hold of my chin between two knobby fingers, her eyes so gray I thought she could see right through me.

“Up the stairs with you,” she said. “I’ll be locking the door in ten minutes. Your sister better be in by then, or she’ll have trouble. Can’t imagine such a girl on those steps. But then I can’t imagine any of you.”

Upstairs, our bed was empty. I lay awake listening for the scrape of the door, the sound of my sister’s footsteps. Outside, the alley had gone quiet. March, when the city smelled of old snow and the October leaves had thawed and turned to mush. That mush stuck to our shoes. Hung in bits on our coattails. At home, they’d be clearing the barn. Oiling the tractor, the fields still frozen. Father would walk the place as if chasing something. It was Father a girl didn’t want to disappoint, though me, I always did. Myrle wasn’t in our bed, she wasn’t in our room. What would Father think?

I put out the lamp and turned my face to my pillow. The pipes banged. Like someone knocking at us from under the floorboards, she’d said. It used to be Myrle and me. Like twins, but different. One light, one dark. One pretty, one not. One shy as a bird and the one who made sure that bird never got hurt.

The doorknob rattled. In the dimness of the hall, Myrle stood in her coat, unwrapping her scarf.

“Where were you?”

She shuffled across the room and flipped off her boots. Under her coat, she wore one of my own dresses.

“I went out,” she said.

“Where?”

She shrugged. “You go out.”

“But you know where I am.”

“Not always.” She dropped her sleeping gown over her head, tugging my dress off from underneath.

“That’s not the same,” I said.

She crawled across me and turned to the wall. “I’m tired. Mrs. Keyes will have me up early again.” I stared at her back, the curve of her hip. The sheet puckered when she breathed in. Quick to sleep like a cat, she was, and never a word more. She was here, but it wasn’t any better. In the dark, I imagined her walking the streets in her boots and coat. She must have walked to the quietest part of the city, where the shore hit the lake. I didn’t know what the lake looked like at night, if it looked like anything at all, or if it was only sound, a salty smell. It was something I’d never gotten used to, that fish stink. It clung to the vents of the buildings. To people’s skin. If Myrle was lucky, the moon would come out, a tail of white on the water that went for miles. I imagined my sister following it, the way I would if I ever got the chance. But for Myrle, getting to that moon was easy. All she had to do was step onto the lake and walk.